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No thank you.

As an Eldar / Slaaneshi Space Marine player, most of my strong male characters are either really effeminate (My Autarch as a great ass) or just plain sexually ambiguous, my Slaaneshi Lord is rather indescriminate with his love making. I would say that I personally have no issues with it.

But if I have learned anything, is that people are homophobic, and I am sure that some wargamers are not the most liberal people on the planet. So its not likely a move that GW would do.

Only if it wasn't the sole reason for them being there.

Too often sexuality is used as a way to show how progressive someone/some company is, but it in fact just shows how far behind the times and out-of-touch they really are.

 akaean wrote:
As an Eldar / Slaaneshi Space Marine player, most of my strong male characters are either really effeminate (My Autarch as a great ass) or just plain sexually ambiguous, my Slaaneshi Lord is rather indescriminate with his love making. I would say that I personally have no issues with it.

But if I have learned anything, is that people are homophobic, and I am sure that some wargamers are not the most liberal people on the planet. So its not likely a move that GW would do.

You can not want or appreciate homosexuality portrayed in games and not be homophobic.

My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

 4oursword wrote:
My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

That would be a great bit of information to throw out when playing a game.

"Alright, I'm all set. And by the way, my sternguard are all gay but don't worry it shouldn't come up much during the match."

To me it all depends on the level of sexuality.

Case in point, Torchwood. Jack Harkness is bi, sure no problem. Man lives for hundreds of thousands of years, I imagine things will get stale and he'll want to try new things out. Now... when the latest series turned into a season of gay softcore porn... well that just turned me off.

I don't enjoy man-man sex. I'm not homophobic, I just really dislike the sexual aspect of it, and don't wanna have anything to do with it. If the author of said character is going to focus excessively on that, then I'm not going to bother with it.

Explicit sexuality takes away from the badass-ness of characters (For me), so as long as the story wasn't shoving it into my face that they were gay or straight(Or anything else really), I couldn't care less.

That said, being an over-the-top flirt is always funny.

So yes to funny flirting, no to love-stories!

 4oursword wrote:
My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

I thought Space Marines were chemically castrated?

You could have an aggressively homosexual guardsman though!

First of all, let me say I can only talk about this topic in relation to WH40K. As many others have said, it's completely irrelevant to me, as long as it's a good story. In TT terms I very rarely use special characters anyway, but what matters there is whether they can bring something good to my list.

If anything, I don't like it when a gay character's sexuality is excessively dwelt upon (without adding anything to the story) to show what a nice accepting guy the author is when heterosexual characters escape said treatment. Obviously, if the story was about how being gay affects their life, that would be different.

In story terms Black Library novels are an example of SFF fluff where I can actually point to gay characters and say I think they're pretty well portrayed as the fact isn't shoved in your face like an "issue of the week" on a TV show. For example, Grifen and Magot in Sandy Mitchell's novels - they're obviously gay but nothing is made of it, you just work it out from the text and then they get back to shooting. Sure, it affects their relationship with each other, but we don't get a Very Special Episode about how you should accept LGBT people, kids - it's part of who they are, and that's it, and if you don't like it, tough.

Also, although this is only an incredibly brief passing mention, the bit in one of the Ravenor books where he psychically senses the people in the town around him and there are two gay blokes among them...there's no mention of Ravenor thinking this is either good or bad, or what his colleagues would think of it. It's just a fact. I quite like that way of handling it - if it's mentioned, it's just part of the background, some characters are and some aren't, and that's it. The overall impression I get of the Imperium is that everyone's too busy not dying to care about whether you prefer men or women, as long as you can hold a gun the right way round when the hive ships show up.

So if I regard sexuality in something like BL as just a fact of life for some people that doesn't affect their ability to fight Necrons, or whatever, but is simply part of their character you might ask, why do I even feel LGBT characters need to be included at all? After all, it's all just about guns and explosions, right? Well, I say: why not? It's a big setting, there are trillions of people in it, and it'd be rather dull if everyone was exactly the same (that's why I'd rather read about IG than Space Marines - I often find SM characters start to get a bit samey after a while).

 mattyrm wrote:

 4oursword wrote:
My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

I thought Space Marines were chemically castrated?

You could have an aggressively homosexual guardsman though!

Is that actually canonical, or is it assumed?
I've never been sure.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dentry wrote:

 4oursword wrote:
My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

That would be a great bit of information to throw out when playing a game.

"Alright, I'm all set. And by the way, my sternguard are all gay but don't worry it shouldn't come up much during the match."

I chuckled. Exalted.

I think its cannon, it makes sense as well.

Surely if you were getting rid of heaps of organs and gak to make quasi-humans better at fighting, such as adding a heart, making their ribcage solid, adding a belchers gland and doing all kinds of gak to their brain, you would want to remove their nuts, it hurts like hell if you take a shot in the pills!

And surely they wouldn't be able to breed with a woman? A horse cant breed with a zebra without making infertile offspring... and a hulking Space Marine is far less human than a horse is a zebra.

A fething 14 week old SM kid would kick straight through their mothers fething ribcage like the chestburster off alien.

"Oh I felt him kick..... AAARRRGGGGG!" /explosion of gore

Good points well made. Maybe they're all gay?

So in the grim darkness of the far future there is still Mills and Boon?

Seriously, how many people have got into the 40K universe in the hopes of reading some good romance, straight or homo?

As for astartes having children, if they could then the children would be relatively normal offspring produced from their balls with maybe a bit of something extra as a result of geneseed altering their dna.
The geneseed itself though, let alone the implanted organs, have no way of passing on their attributes to a child.
It's like saying someone with an organ implant or pacemaker is going to produce a kid with dna from the implanted organ or metal from the pacemaker.

 4oursword wrote:

 mattyrm wrote:

 4oursword wrote:
My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

I thought Space Marines were chemically castrated?

You could have an aggressively homosexual guardsman though!

Is that actually canonical, or is it assumed?
I've never been sure.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dentry wrote:

 4oursword wrote:
My Terminator Sergeant is gay. I decided it for no reason, and now he is.

Having gay friends and family, it's in no way an issue for me.

That would be a great bit of information to throw out when playing a game.

"Alright, I'm all set. And by the way, my sternguard are all gay but don't worry it shouldn't come up much during the match."

I chuckled. Exalted.

Yeah. I loved this response too. I am actually just sitting here in the Library at school grinning at both responces. I have homosexual freinds too. Its just a fact of life that we can either choose to accept, or we can rebel against (homophobia).

You mean every one of Dark Angels? No I will use the models for my own chapter, the big gay joke in their chapter story and primarch spoils the mood for me. Btw 40k is the exact place where "homophoby" (that's a bs word btw) is right in place.

I'll play with or against homosexual armies any time...as long as the player is comfortable to be around, and not annoying. I will not however under any circumstances be put in a position where I will have to control any unit that is noted as gay Just not my style.

Let's assume I am a religious person and I am offended by portrayal of religion in 40k. I want more reason, more humanitarian work, more unconditioned love, more shades of grey in the Imperium to accompany the negative things like religion-driven fanatism, hatred and xenophoby. I assume everyone that wants deeper stories and characters development would agree seeing how the portrayal of religion is overly one - dimensional.

Doesn't fit? Just like gay, tolerance, diversity, gender equality and plush mascots.

Each one of my characters I've ever played in RPGs has a little bit of me in them so no, I wouldn't. It's not that I have anything against homosexuals or lesbians I just can't play as a gay character since it's not in me to do so.

Plumbumbarum wrote:
Let's assume I am a religious person and I am offended by portrayal of religion in 40k. I want more reason, more humanitarian work, more unconditioned love, more shades of grey in the Imperium to accompany the negative things like religion-driven fanatism, hatred and xenophoby. I assume everyone that wants deeper stories and characters development would agree seeing how the portrayal of religion is overly one - dimensional.

This is why I love some of the Black Library's work. Dan Abnett has written some stories with amazingly positive themes of faith and loyalty. They're like reading stories out of Chicken Soup for the Imperial Guard's soul...where they get to kill demons! The Ciaphas Cain stories also portray the religion more varied, better fleshed-out but not necessarily more positive, as everything in those stories is just there to annoy Cain.

Also, I like to imagine the opening to Mechanicus as the inspiration for hundreds of Omnisiahmas carols during the Martian holidays.

Doesn't fit? Just like gay, tolerance, diversity, gender equality and plush mascots.

I'm not sure I follow.

Have a lesbian and a gay character in my current GURPS campaign, the sexuality of a character doesn't really bother me.

Why not? though, I do play Nids and DKok so there both asexual.

I'd be pretty interested to see how the Imperium handles homosexuality. I can't imagine it would be much akin to the diversity and tolerance approach of today; but the heavy Roman/Greek influence on the Imperium certainly leaves room for open homosexuality. If they weren't all asexual, I could definitely see Space Marines subscribing to the "sex with women is for poofs!" school of masculinity... ladies are for breeding, but only men are manly enough for loving!

40k novels used to have a load of gay sex in them back in the good old days, y'all need to read some Ian Watson, it's loaded with homoerotic content and bizarre fetish stuff like how the marines keep farting on each other all the time and the inquisitor nails a callidus after she's turned into an alien to "purify" her. Lots of slanneshi marines getting it on in there as well.

 scarletsquig wrote:
40k novels used to have a load of gay sex in them back in the good old days, y'all need to read some Ian Watson, it's loaded with homoerotic content and bizarre fetish stuff like how the marines keep farting on each other all the time and the inquisitor nails a callidus after she's turned into an alien to "purify" her. Lots of slanneshi marines getting it on in there as well.

Wut.

Actually, if I remember correctly, there were some homoerotic undertones in the relationship between the Navigator and the Astropath in Ian Watson's Inquisition War Trilogy. The whole series was pretty bizarre, even for 40K fiction, I should add.

^ Yeah, they climb up the legs of a titan and the exertion makes them fart in each others faces while they climb (this is just one example of a whole lot of marine-on-squat farting action throughout the books).. then they find the titan's crew dead so they eat their brains which grants them all of their memories.

I'd forgotten about the gay Astropath and Navigator. Pretty much everyone in the book was wanting to get it on with each other at some point, even in the pages that weren't entirely dedicated to the slanneshi marines and their mutant genitalia.

The 40k background was so much better back then.

Some gay characters may do the 40k universe good.
A bit less grimdark, a bit more rainbowbright!

Seriously though, I pretty much always just assumed Slaaneshi worshipers, elves, super space elves and the like are bisexual. The sexuality of a character makes absolutely no difference to me within a work of fiction. Good writing is good writing.

I secretly hope there's a Freddie Mercury Ork out there somewhere though, moustache, teeth, yellow jacket and all....

Don't remember the farting space marines but the inquisitor having sex with a callidus assassin after she feeling messed up by using polymorphine to turn into a genestealer, that is true.

GreySkull wrote:
Each one of my characters I've ever played in RPGs has a little bit of me in them so no, I wouldn't. It's not that I have anything against homosexuals or lesbians I just can't play as a gay character since it's not in me to do so.

Playing a character that is just like yourself is kind of against the point of playing an RPG, don't you think?