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 MajorWesJanson wrote:
While tradition has male pilots for the Knight households, there is nothing preventing female pilots like the Degree Passive does for Male Sororitas or Geneseed for female Astartes. It would be trivial to make a household where the firstborn daughter or firstborn of any gender become Knight pilots. And knights inducted fully into the mechanicus are also fair game I would assume- While we mostly see male members of the mechanicus, there is nothing stopping female magos, or female princeps (even in an Emperor titan, see Stormherald)

There are female Magos in Priests of Mars/Lords of Mars, and the Knights of the Imperium novella describes gender roles in Knightly Houses.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Stormherald? What's that?

An Imperator class Ttitan that is commanded by Princeps Majoris Zarha - she leads one third of Legio Invigilata in the defence of the Hive Helsreach (in the novel of the same name)

The novels in general have a lot more female characters than the Tabletop. Maybe GW's sculptors are simply allergic to making female models. (and as pointed out, Forgeworld has a female Necron in the fluff and even made a word for what you'd call a female Phaeron)

....not that they needed to have any gender differences for Knights. I can only assume they specified knights to be male because they're overdoing the whole "same thing as mideival knights" thing. That's one aspect of middle-ages knights that really did not need to be ported over, IMHO. But as stated, it's not like there's any LAW against it (just tradition) or any genetics/science against it so female knights could theretically exist (and in fact, canonically do according to the novella). They're likely just very rare and/or ostracized.

beast_gts wrote:
There are female Magos in Priests of Mars/Lords of Mars, and the Knights of the Imperium novella describes gender roles in Knightly Houses.

Yeah, and those gender roles suck.

TiamatRoar wrote:The novels in general have a lot more female characters than the Tabletop. Maybe GW's sculptors are simply allergic to making female models. (and as pointed out, Forgeworld has a female Necron in the fluff and even made a word for what you'd call a female Phaeron)

....not that they needed to have any gender differences for Knights. I can only assume they specified knights to be male because they're overdoing the whole "same thing as mideival knights" thing. That's one aspect of middle-ages knights that really did not need to be ported over, IMHO. But as stated, it's not like there's any LAW against it (just tradition) or any genetics/science against it so female knights could theretically exist (and in fact, canonically do according to the novella). They're likely just very rare and/or ostracized.

Something that they ported over because they're GW and have a massive need to try to pretend girls don't exist. Being rare and ostracised isn't okay either, as I said earlier -

Me wrote:
No, but that doesn't make it okay. Even if they did make a female-pilot House, it would still be

My caricature of GW wrote: "guys are the normal thing and girls are weird. Girls only get to pilot mechs in weird exceptional circumstances. Girls are weird. Cooties, or something"

Which is why I said that going the Mulan route still doesn't make it okay.

The only way to represent female pilots without getting this kind of a response is to make them a non-issue. Don't be lazy. Write the codex in a gender neutral fashion. Whether you do that by mauling the English language until it does what you want, or you do that by giving equal numbers of examples of both male and female pilots doesn't really matter.

The argument that English is less gender biased than, say, French is actually false, by the way. Yes, French has gendered words - however, especially in the case of nouns, the gender of the word is often completely opposite to the gender of the thing it describes. For example, personne is a feminine noun - but it is used to refer to men and women equally.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Ugavine wrote:
I really don't care about the cost of the model, the codex of just filler or miliking of the release, that's just business. Then I flicked through the store copy of the Codex.

:(

I really wanted to use an Imperial Knight. But my armies are Orks, Tyranids and Necrons. Forget about the whole, "it's your game do what you want," because it's not. The game involves other people and I want to play the game as close to RAW as possible.

GW have surely lost many sales with that stupid aliies matrix.

Use it as a Stompa? Mega dread?

Paint it Blue, Looted Stompa?

I just finished the knight novel that just came out. There was a mention of female knights.

That... just shows that the "boys only" club is even stupider, since apparently women are better at piloting knights and don't need all the fancy implants to do it...

Wait. So I've been trying to follow the thread for a while and not sure if I understand the problem.

So the Knight worlds are ruled by a feudal nobels over a poor and unarmed peasant class (It's against the law to have weapons, decreed by the feudal nobels).

This is all in a universe where genocide is synonymous with "diplomatic relations". Are people really upset that there is sexism as well?

Oh, so they came up with implants that only work on guys? Of course they did. It's enough that GW don't want to write female characters or whatever, but it's just not right that they're outright trying to exclude them from the setting itself. The way pretty much all of how 40k is structured as a setting is to benefit player creativity. If you want your own Space Marine Chapter/Hive Fleet/Craftworld/etc, you can have them. You can give them pointy helmets and your own colour scheme and your own characters and whatever you like. You can decide their personalities, their traditions and history - and it meshes with the setting just fine, because it's so vast that nobody can precisely account for everything. And yet, here they are, putting an arbitrary restriction on people who want female characters because they're GW and don't think girls are cool, or something.

What this basically means is that the women have to be much luckier and fight harder just to be equal to the men. Wow, there's a novel idea.

EDIT: It's not about in-universe treatment. If you wrote a story in Victorian England that featured racism, it'd be fine. It's different when you start structuring your setting to reflect your own personal racism as an author.

That doesn't make sense. So if the setting has sexism brought about by a male led noble class, that's fine. But if the author writes about characters in a setting that has sexism brought about by a male led noble class, then it's bad?

Here's an example. I'm writing a story centered around WW2 era Nazi Germany (cliche example, but I'll go with it anyways). So I want to have a story about a small town with a military base in it. Not just any military base, one led by a Transgendered Jewish Colonel. After all there is no reason why someone that's transgendered should be discriminated against. There is also no reason why a Jewish person can't hold a position of power they are capable of handling.

Do you think I'm doing a good job as a writer by forcing my own moral stand point into a situation where it simply does not belong?

TiamatRoar wrote:
The novels in general have a lot more female characters than the Tabletop. Maybe GW's sculptors are simply allergic to making female models. (and as pointed out, Forgeworld has a female Necron in the fluff and even made a word for what you'd call a female Phaeron)

Maybe it's marketing. Perhaps GW have some messed up idea that female characters / models will not sell. The largest demographic WH40K services (I think) is males, often quite young. I don't know that it's right if they do think this, and I'm not approving of such pandering even if it is, but possibly that's a reason. The novels may have a different demographic or the writers might simply have more freedom.

That's conjecture though, and I'm not even sure I believe it myself. I think they core GW game developers are just... I don't think female characters really occur to them. And on the odd occasions they do they're as likely fetishistic (DE) as not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Savageconvoy wrote:
Wait. So I've been trying to follow the thread for a while and not sure if I understand the problem.

So the Knight worlds are ruled by a feudal nobels over a poor and unarmed peasant class (It's against the law to have weapons, decreed by the feudal nobels).

This is all in a universe where genocide is synonymous with "diplomatic relations". Are people really upset that there is sexism as well?

Yes. The reason is pretty simple. The genocidal feudalism doesn't translate into the modern Western world very well for most people. Few readers will follow up by engaging in casual feudalism after finishing the latest codex. However, normalisation of sexism does influence people by, well, normalizing it. Along the same principle, lack of condemnation of genocidal feudalism isn't really a problem. It's expected that people know it is wrong. Sexism uncondemned is a little too close to real life, and thus feels like real sexism. And really, it is. The million worlds ruled by a corpse emperor is dark satire. The sexism and drought of female characters feels less like deliberate satire and more like the game developers actually don't have an awareness that there is any problem.

We tend to condemn satire a lot less than actual real problems.

And furthermore, we actually live in a world with more than one gender. It would be nice if approximately half the population didn't feel excluded from the hobby. We don't need to worry about orks not taking up the hobby because they're badly portrayed. But a woman picking up one of these books sees she has not been included. Of course any given woman can play just fine and relate to male characters just as well as a male player can. But it's undeniable that complete omission creates a boy's club atmosphere. Of course I'm sure DE wytches in bikini armour and poses a contortionist couldn't achieve balance that. Well, quite sure...

Yes, but that's the point - this is not an isolated case, and it's fictional (and this is new fiction). 40k is a whole universe, and GW time and time again exclude women from it. What does this new instance of sexism achieve? It's not the focus of a story, or really relevant at all beyond "we don't want girls to have big mechs in our setting, so you can't have them either". Women are pretty much incapable of achieving anything in 40k, if they even get the grace from the gods to exist in the first place. The Sisters are getting more and more pushed away (a White Dwarf "Codex", then a digital-only release and no new minis? Seriously?). So, what's the reason for it, this time? Because the Houses are sexist? No (as if that were even a good excuse). It's "oooh implants". Where do they go, the penis? Are Knights controlled through the penis, is that it? Because there really isn't much else in a man's anatomy that makes him different to a woman. Cybernetics aren't sexist.

Your example is flawed because writing a story set in Nazi Germany comes with pre-requisites that you must abide by. That's the very nature of writing in a pre-existing setting, but this is new material. A really great example of this is the Sword of Truth novels. There are plenty of female characters - ambassadors, powerful magic-users, and a group of scary ninja commandos that everyone fears. But here's the problem; women in the Sword of Truth series pretty much exist to get raped, either repeatedly or to death, and generally dominated in every way imaginable by men (including psychic control). It's sickening. It's not anything to do with the setting, it's to do with the author inserting his messed-up self into it and turning what could be a decent fantasy series into a perverted fetish fanfiction - there's even a rape-monster that is necessary for initiation into the evil group of female magic-users (which has a barbed and spiked penis, by the way). They get psychically enslaved by this guy who enters their dreams and causes them incredible pain, causing them to hire a ship to take them to him (and, on his orders, they travel naked). The men on the ship are forbidden to look at them, but this is immediately turned around when they reach their master and he removes their powers and gives them to the ship crew (who, surprise surprise, rape them). The group of scary ninja commandos served an evil overlord who raped them all on a regular basis. There's a magic that allows control over a woman by cutting off her nipple. Literally the only female character who is exempt from this insanity is the main character's love interest, although not for lack of trying. All in all, we can surmise that Terry Goodkind (the author) is an enormous creep, especially when you see just how graphic a lot of this can get.

Obviously the Sword of Truth series is an extreme example, but it demonstrates my point quite effectively. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that 40k is that bad.

Furthermore, your example actually furthers my point - we're not talking about a fundamentally sexist setting, here, and it's not like there's anything established in 40k or in the real world that cybernetics don't work on women as well. So yeah, excluding women in this manner is actually quite similar to having an openly Transgender Jewish Colonel in the German Army in WW2.

Perhaps the most significant part is, as I said, how it goes against the intended methods of creating 40k lore and factions - keeping it open for fans to create their own material, without disturbing the existing material. You shouldn't have to actually ignore a piece of unnecessary fluff if you want to make a female Knight pilot. Ignoring fluff should be things like Eldar becoming Space Marines, not "girls get to do the same stuff too".

EDIT:

Knas Ser wrote:I don't think female characters really occur to them.

This would be okay. It'd be unfortunate, but whatever - I don't honestly expect anyone to be equal in any sense. However, imagine you were running a D&D campaign. All of your NPCs - with richly-detailed backstories and well-written, interesting personalities - are male. That doesn't mean you're sexist, and being all-white or all-elf or whatever doesn't make you racist, either. However, then, when detailing your setting to the players, you say "Oh, and all women in this world are all hideously deformed and used as slaves", it starts revealing things about you as an author. Writing a custom setting where one group is persecuted isn't bad, either - but when you, as an author, portray all of those characters as dirty, cheating, lying scumbags with bad teeth and body odour, well, it becomes telling.

EDIT2: If the cybernetics thing is true (that girls physically cannot pilot Knights because they can't get the required augmentations), then it's sending a pretty clear message from GW that girls are fundamentally wrong because of their bodies. All they need to do now is say that female Eldar are incapable of developing enough psychic potential to become Farseers and it'll be complete.

I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. The setting is controlled by simple minded, xenophobic, dogmatic, and just other wise unpleasant people. I'm not sure about fluff before hand, but I thought it was established that Knights were piloted by men because simple minded, xenophobic, dogmatic, and just otherwise unpleasant people were in charge of the feudal worlds.

Remember, these people are perfectly fine with slaying the mutant and not permitting the witch to live. Afflictions brought about by birth. Why not be upset at 40K for promoting such abhorrent behavior such as making the death penalty the ultimate answer for the crime of being born different?

Of course nobody will, because that's not the setting. These people don't make moral sense by our standards because the constant state of war and all the horrors the Imperium of Man has faced has driven them to be irrational as a necessity to be able to face the horrors that they will face the next day.

Is there a reason why women can't pilot mechs? Yes, the ones that rule things are looney. Is it a good reason? Not at all, but in the setting it fits. It's not that I wouldn't mind seeing female Knight houses, it's just that I don't understand why people would expect a bunch of dogmatic and xenophobic mass murderers to be progressive about gender equality. Isn't everything in the setting based on class systems? You really expect people that believe nobility is a birth right and puts them above the peasants are going to be all for tearing down the walls of discrimination?

All in all, we can surmise that Terry Goodkind (the author) is an enormous creep, especially when you see just how graphic a lot of this can get.

Worse. He's an Objectivist Libertarian.

Why not be upset at 40K for promoting such abhorrent behavior such as making the death penalty the ultimate answer for the crime of being born different?

Because, in the setting, the psyker and the mutant is not just "someone born different", they represent very real, very clear and very present dangers.

Women are not these things.

Is there a reason why women can't pilot mechs? Yes, the ones that rule things are looney. Is it a good reason? Not at all, but in the setting it fits. It's not that I wouldn't mind seeing female Knight houses, it's just that I don't understand why people would expect a bunch of dogmatic and xenophobic mass murderers to be progressive about gender equality. Isn't everything in the setting based on class systems? You really expect people that believe nobility is a birth right and puts them above the peasants are going to be all for tearing down the walls of discrimination?

No and no. While some Knight Worlds might be male-centric feudal worlds, in an Imperium of a million worlds, there is absolutely no reason for *all* of them to be this way. On many worlds, the Imperial Guard regiments they raise are gender integrated. The world doesn't care whether you're X or Y chromosomed, as long as you can pass the basic training course and use a lasrifle... they have a tithe to meet, by the Throne, and they are damned sure going to meet it! Some worlds have male-only IG regiments... some worlds have female-only regiments. The Imperium, as a body, does not practice gender politics. It doesn't care. Male, female, doesn't matter... you got the chops to be an Inquisitor? Great! Here's your rosette, go burn some heretics, mutants or aliens.

 Savageconvoy wrote:
Why not be upset at 40K for promoting such abhorrent behavior such as making the death penalty the ultimate answer for the crime of being born different?

I feel I just answered that. Because when the creators of 40K created a setting of Religious Fanatic Fascist Racial Purists we trust that they were being satirical. When the current developers casually role-cast women entirely and it seemingly never occurs to them to create female special characters, we consider that the result of them actually being sexist. Satire lampoons the thing it portrays. The sexism component does not feel like satire. I've pretty much said all this the first time you asked the question.

Just read the last page of this thread and am wondering what the hell it has to do with...

"I have the knight titan codex. Ask away"

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
Oh, so they came up with implants that only work on guys? Of course they did. It's enough that GW don't want to write female characters or whatever, but it's just not right that they're outright trying to exclude them from the setting itself. The way pretty much all of how 40k is structured as a setting is to benefit player creativity. If you want your own Space Marine Chapter/Hive Fleet/Craftworld/etc, you can have them. You can give them pointy helmets and your own colour scheme and your own characters and whatever you like. You can decide their personalities, their traditions and history - and it meshes with the setting just fine, because it's so vast that nobody can precisely account for everything. And yet, here they are, putting an arbitrary restriction on people who want female characters because they're GW and don't think girls are cool, or something.

What this basically means is that the women have to be much luckier and fight harder just to be equal to the men. Wow, there's a novel idea.

EDIT: It's not about in-universe treatment. If you wrote a story in Victorian England that featured racism, it'd be fine. It's different when you start structuring your setting to reflect your own personal racism as an author.

they never said the implants don't work on guys, the girl simply didn't HAVE them, because it's not normal for women to be Knights. as such the girl basicly had to jam the interfaces into ehr without any connection ports (there's nothing that says this is something guys only need, it's simply going to be a lot cleaner and less painful then basicly shoving a probe into your spine) she then had to come to terms with the Knights.... "spirit". there's proably nothing in the Knights hard code that stops women from piloting them, however when someone bonds with a knight, even long after they die an aspect of their... personality and person remains in the Machine. as such if the culture views female knights as taboo, the Machine is apt to rebel against a female pilot, and thus you'd need to basicly "Tame" it

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
The Sisters are getting more and more pushed away (a White Dwarf "Codex", then a digital-only release and no new minis? Seriously?)

To be fair, that's just because they're having to wait for the sculptors to work through supposed modelling issues. If those were made, we'd likely see a proper update. I don't really think that sexism is the cause of that.

Think you're right-on with the rest of that post, though. It is somewhat troubling to see this restriction built into the Knight fluff.

BrianDavion wrote:
because it's not normal for women to be Knights.

The thing is, this was something that GW could have entirely avoided, but they still wrote it in.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Just read the last page of this thread and am wondering what the hell it has to do with...

"I have the knight titan codex. Ask away"

this, do we have to have every thread run off topic on your pet topic whenever women are mentioned?

Just sayin.

Why is a discussion on the specific background of the Codex (merits and flaws) less important than the rules (broken / not broken) ?

 Mr Morden wrote:
Why is a discussion on the specific background of the Codex (merits and flaws) less important than the rules (broken / not broken) ?

Because some people aren't as concerned about the game than the fluff or hobby side of things.

 A GumyBear wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Why is a discussion on the specific background of the Codex (merits and flaws) less important than the rules (broken / not broken) ?

Because some people aren't as concerned about the game than the fluff or hobby side of things.

Does that not that work both ways?

 Mr Morden wrote:

 A GumyBear wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Why is a discussion on the specific background of the Codex (merits and flaws) less important than the rules (broken / not broken) ?

Because some people aren't as concerned about the game than the fluff or hobby side of things.

Does that not that work both ways?

More to the point I think, is there a conflict between the two? I'm not seeing a barrage of rules questions. I mean the rules come to about two pages, I think and most of it was already printed in White Dwarf and / or the online preview. 98% of the book is fluff, isn't it? So whilst I appreciate both sides, I'm not sure that the discussion about the fluff is actually holding up rules discussion. And speaking personally I'm interested in both anyway.

BrianDavion wrote:
they never said the implants don't work on guys, the girl simply didn't HAVE them, because it's not normal for women to be Knights.

Ah, that's good. I just really wouldn't be surprised with GW.

wowsmash wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Just read the last page of this thread and am wondering what the hell it has to do with...

"I have the knight titan codex. Ask away"

this, do we have to have every thread run off topic on your pet topic whenever women are mentioned?

Just sayin.

This is hardly off-topic.

Troike wrote:

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
The Sisters are getting more and more pushed away (a White Dwarf "Codex", then a digital-only release and no new minis? Seriously?)

To be fair, that's just because they're having to wait for the sculptors to work through supposed modelling issues. If those were made, we'd likely see a proper update. I don't really think that sexism is the cause of that.

Think you're right-on with the rest of that post, though. It is somewhat troubling to see this restriction built into the Knight fluff.

"Supposed" is the key word, there. How long does it take to work through these issues, seriously? I find it very hard to believe that GW - the self-titled "makers of the best model soldiers in the world" - are incapable of getting through any possible production issues, or that they somehow are incapable of sculpting feminine-looking female faces (which is the reason they gave last, I think). Looking at some of their most recent female miniatures, it doesn't seem to be something they actually care about. Besides, nobody said that Sisters were required to have faces. If they were having so much trouble as to hold off on updating them for this long, you'd think they'd just give them all helmets. Sisters really don't deserve to be made even more insignificant than the copy-paste-from-Grey-Knights "Codex: Inquisition" (less significant because the Inquisition thing is Force Org-breaking and so on).

Mr Morden wrote:Why is a discussion on the specific background of the Codex (merits and flaws) less important than the rules (broken / not broken) ?

Because there are barely any rules in the Codex. There's the Imperial Knight itself, the rapid-fire battle cannon, the thermal cannon, and one random table. All of those things have been thoroughly discussed in this thread.

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
"Supposed" is the key word, there. How long does it take to work through these issues, seriously? I find it very hard to believe that GW - the self-titled "makers of the best model soldiers in the world" - are incapable of getting through any possible production issues, or that they somehow are incapable of sculpting feminine-looking female faces (which is the reason they gave last, I think). Looking at some of their most recent female miniatures, it doesn't seem to be something they actually care about. Besides, nobody said that Sisters were required to have faces. If they were having so much trouble as to hold off on updating them for this long, you'd think they'd just give them all helmets.

The faces weren't what was cited as the problem, that would be the robes and hair (you can read an interview with Jes Goodwin where he discusses it here, if you're interested). We also know from some additional dev comments that GW have attempted to make SoB plastics before, so obviously they're willing to do the Sisters a full release and all that. The problem seems to be with the sculptors, whom could be variously unsatisfied with their previous efforts (as interviews have seemed to imply), busy on other projects or even just waiting for an appropriate time for a release. Could they have concentrated more effort into getting the Sisters ready? Maybe, but neither do they seem to have abandoned the Sisters altogether, as their recent release of a standalone SoB codex certainly seems to imply a desire to keep them around.

Anyway, I do agree with most of what you said earlier. While I think that GW has certainly gotten some stuff right in regards to female characters in 40K, they can also certainly be criticised on a few points. But I don't view the absence of new SoB models as caused by sexism on GW's part.

How many years have we've been hearing about "They worked on plastic sisters, but had a problem?" It's been several years. If they really wanted to do plastic sisters, they could have.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
That... just shows that the "boys only" club is even stupider, since apparently women are better at piloting knights and don't need all the fancy implants to do it...

Well seeing as she was also avenging her house it's safe to say she was pissed right off and it's well established that nothing (not even in 40k) is scarier than a woman who is that pissed off.

It's why Sisters are so effective (in the fluff).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MWHistorian wrote:
How many years have we've been hearing about "They worked on plastic sisters, but had a problem?" It's been several years. If they really wanted to do plastic sisters, they could have.

Debatable. We only know through rumors that there were issues, we don't know what kind or to what extent.

Now of course they could have redesigned them completely to make molding easier but there is a strong chance that people on the Dev team were against such a drastic shift in their visual style.

 MWHistorian wrote:
How many years have we've been hearing about "They worked on plastic sisters, but had a problem?" It's been several years. If they really wanted to do plastic sisters, they could have.

That's basically my thought as well. GW have been producing some pretty good plastics for several years now, I find it hard that they haven't yet figured out a way to do SoB's yet.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:
How many years have we've been hearing about "They worked on plastic sisters, but had a problem?" It's been several years. If they really wanted to do plastic sisters, they could have.

That's basically my thought as well. GW have been producing some pretty good plastics for several years now, I find it hard that they haven't yet figured out a way to do SoB's yet.

I wonder if the current delay is more from them trying to expand the army. That's just an alternate possibility for what is delaying a full release for them this edition.

Either way, I have a feeling that when they drop we'll see a two month release for them.