Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Re-reading my Necron Codex the other day, I was struck with a thought.

What happened to the Necrontyr women and children?

All bipedal Necrons I've seen have a distinctly male appearance (although it's hard to judge, as they're robot skeletons). If the Necrontyr were asexual, that could explain the lack of women....but what happened to their young? I've developed three theories:

1) The children were killed off systematically

2) The children were entombed within Warrior shells

3) We've never known the origin of Canoptek units....could they, possibly, be the children of the Necrontyr? I find this possibility uniquely horrifying, since, you know, child enslavement, but also because it's so distinctly Necron that it makes a lot of sense....

Please post your thoughts on the matter, and any other fluff mysteries with horrifiying implications.

Its probably number 2...

The conversion of the Necrontyr was "Hey, go stand in that device" and suddenly they're metal.

It's a consciousness placed within the shell. Why they were almost all made to be male warriors? Who knows. Maybe it was just what they had at hand.

They could be scarabs?

We don't have anything really to suggest that Scarabs, Tomb Spyders, and Wraiths have an actual "consciousness" and aren't just advanced artificial intelligences.

Doctor Who, Cybermen. Any more need to be said?

Lightcavalier wrote:Its probably number 2...

This. There's really no reason to build child sized frames.

They where all culled, the Necrontyr where not treated well when they all was reformed. So its most likly a mix of nr 1 & 2

Yeah, I'm going with #2: There's no real reason to build a different shell for women or children. The standard Necron frame is One Size Fits All Consciousnesses.

So far as the Warriors being 'male'... they're skeletons. They don't have any intrinsic gender. And we don't know how closely they resemble the original Necrontyr, nor how much variance there was between male and female Necrontyr (or even if there were male and female Necrontyr.).

It's also possible that there weren't any children to worry about. They were a race obsessed with immortality... they could quite possibly have turned all of their resources to prolonging life rather than reproducing it... which is a not too uncommon staple of similar sci-fi conceipts.

Its probably #2.
They are just skeletons after all.

But then again, who said there were women and children?
This is an alien race we are talking about. They could have bred via binary fission for all we know.

What makes the Necrons male, exactly? It's not like they have genitalia. Lack of boobs doesn't make them male.

I just assume that there are no women for one of two reasons

1. Necrons are extremely androgynous, men and women are almost identical, so Trazyn could be a woman for all we know, perhaps necrons don't naturally have male and female pronouns so they are all referred to as male.

2. Necrons are an extremely patriarchal society, men do all of the work the women stay at home doing nothing because necrons don't eat anymore, I guess they can be cleaning the tombs.

As for the children here are two possibilities

1. They were aged to adults, so perhaps some became warriors, but they are all adults now.

2. They are smaller child necrons that stay at home. This might be the most horrific idea since it would mean that the necron kids are literally children for the rest of eternity, not only never aging, but never being considered to be an adult regarding wisdom.

Personally my favourite thoughts and 1 and 1 just because they are the simplest solutions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Omegus wrote:What makes the Necrons male, exactly? It's not like they have genitalia. Lack of boobs doesn't make them male.

The fact that they were male before the change.

Some of the Black Library material introduces the idea that many Necrontyr were "stripped down" to become Necrons. Things like Warriors don't have fully realized minds, because as far as the Necron Lords are concerned, they don't need fully realized minds. They just need enough brain-power to operate their mechanical body. If you strip someone down that far, it doesn't matter if they are male or female, child or adult... hell, it doesn't matter if they're a warrior or a pacifist! They're brainwashed mindless killing machines. I imagine that the rank-and-file Necrons came from all walks of life. That said, I kind of like the idea that the Canoptek units - especially the scarabs! - are animated by the minds of children. It makes a certain horrible sense.

As for the more intelligent Necrons? I agree that the best way to think of them as that they are physically neither male nor female. While their minds would have retained gender identity (assuming the Necrontyr had boys and girls and attached cultural baggage to the concept) immediately after the change, they've lost all semblance of their original genders in the intervening millenia.

The majority of Necrons currently in existence... that would be the Warriors... are all but utterly mindless. They don't ever remember being alive, and they certainly have no sense of self, they're just a flicker of consciousness driving a mechanoid body that operates on combat programming.

The Lords and higher-ranking Necron nobles maintain some semblance of their original personalities, but this varies by what sort of body they were placed in and their relative worth in Necron society before biotransference. Also, given how the Necron race tore itself apart in civil war during the lead-up (and implementation) of biotransference, it's quite possible that no Necron children survived to be put into a Necrodermis shell.

The children became the batteries that power the Necrons' weapons.

No, no, its lasgun powercells! Theyre really just their eggs! No wonder theyre so mad

Why not just wait for the children to grow up before you toss them into new metal bodies? Spend ten years turning the adults into robots, then convert the newly grown up adults into robots.

At a certain point, the adults aren't going to be reproducing anymore, so the youngest generation will just grow up without children.

Its says somewhere in the Necron codex (warrior entry i think?) that the Necron women were put into standard unisex necron bodies.

As for the children....Necrons made the star gods their bitch. They could find a way to simulate psychological aging.

I ate them. Alien Babies gave me the stem cells I needed to mutate a third arm.