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I'm sure we can discuss this topic without calling anyone a bigot, or employing any other put-downs and personal attacks. Thanks!

I would really love to see the "Cadian Shock Troop" box redone - those sculpts have served faithfully for long enough and are overdue for retirement! Replacing that set would be the perfect opportunity to not only give the male IG figures more ... well, human ... proportions but also to think about putting two sprues in each box: one male and one female. It is now well enough established in the written, if not necessarily the visual, world of the game that there are plenty of female IG that it no longer makes sense to only make male IG figures.

 kronk wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:


Why did you cut out part of my post only to say the things I said as though they were your own contribution?

I was answering your statement "If GW's gonna put massive boobs on the torsos, I'd rather just skip them and stick with headswaps." with my own opinions.

Please show me where I kicked your dog and ate your doughnut.

The part where you cut out the following:

At least with Sisters of Battle you can kinda see there might be a point to them, since power amor is fairly thick so it's going to exaggerate the size anyways, and there is some benefit to the Sisters of Battle doing everything they reasonably can to appear 100% female since them being female is the only reason they're allowed to exist. But IG wouldn't feel the need to do so.

Eldar would require more than just heads to get some female Aspect Warriors going, since they wear form-fitting bodysuit armor and not bulky uniforms and flak vests. You'd 100% need torsos since those boobs are gonna show through no matter what you do. But in the Guardian kit the only difference between male and female Guardians IS the torso, so you could just do a torso swap and keep the helmeted heads. But that would require a revamp of Aspect Warriors since their models don't actually have separate torso pieces.

I bring up Eldar because just having two units with female models really isn't enough when the fluff says ALL their units should have at least some females to some degree. Those IG heads can be applied to every model in the range since they have common head sizes, but Eldar Aspect Warriors each have a unique aesthetic so you can't just add a Guardian or Banshee torso to a Dire Avenger or Striking Scorpion.

Not sure how you'd do a female Farseer and Warlock. Maybe just take the helmet off (wouldn't be unprecedented) and let people see an obviously-female face? Could even make the models as plastic character kits with the unhelmeted female head being one of two options, so you could still sell it as a male model to anyone. Their rune armor and robes destroy almost any sense of size of their torso so you wouldn't notice boobs.

From my post, then went on to talk about Sisters of Battle and Eldar.

I'm more confused than angry really. I'm legitimately asking why you cut out parts of my post that were relevant to the stuff you went on to say.

 Manchu wrote:
I'm sure we can discuss this topic without calling anyone a bigot, or employing any other put-downs and personal attacks. Thanks!

I would really love to see the "Cadian Shock Troop" box redone - those sculpts have served faithfully for long enough and are overdue for retirement! Replacing that set would be the perfect opportunity to not only give the male IG figures more ... well, human ... proportions but also to think about putting two sprues in each box: one male and one female. It is now well enough established in the written, if not necessarily the visual, world of the game that there are plenty of female IG that it no longer makes sense to only make male IG figures.

I really hope they do. the current Canadian shock troop box is really dated.
especially compared to the newer kits.

its probably just going to be like 3 in 10 on a single sprue though, i dont think they are going to be willing tool two whole sprues for that.

 Desubot wrote:

I really hope they do. the current Canadian shock troop box is really dated.

Eh?

Sorry auto corrects also i find it funny that it does that so i leave it

 Desubot wrote:
i dont think they are going to be willing tool two whole sprues for that.

It may actually make more sense to do just that, in terms of getting the most bang for their buck as far as pose and load out variety.

 Desubot wrote:
Sorry auto corrects also i find it funny that it does that so i leave it

I was considering expressing outrage that Canada was specifically excluded from even getting an updated kit.

 Manchu wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
i dont think they are going to be willing tool two whole sprues for that.

It may actually make more sense to do just that, in terms of getting the most bang for their buck as far as pose and load out variety.

Sorry meant two body sprues for say 50/50 men and women. looking at the density of new sprues its probably going to be a box of 2 sprues with one with torsos and 5 legs, and another 5 legs somewhere else with guns.

mind ya i figure its going to be more like 30/70 for female miniatures (ish) since i dont think GW will be super proactive about it. not saying i wouldn't want it.

i would also absolutely love female variants for all the support elements too. like commissars and psykers. even engineer even though you would never know if it was a man or woman

It seems to me that most costumers would be largely indifferent about a female IG sprue but of the (perhaps sizable) minority who would care, more customers would approve than disapprove and those who would approve would approve far more enthusiastically (both in terms of buying kits and praising GW) than the disapproving customers would disapprove. (I think the opposite would be true of female SM.)

 Manchu wrote:
It seems to me that most costumers would be largely indifferent about a female IG sprue but of the (perhaps sizable) minority who would care, more customers would approve than disapprove and those who would approve would approve far more enthusiastically (both in terms of buying kits and praising GW) than the disapproving customers would disapprove. (I think the opposite would be true of female SM.)

Well i certainly hope GW can see that.

it seems they are actually doing "research" and changing their ways. so anything is possible.

 Pouncey wrote:
Eldar would require more than just heads to get some female Aspect Warriors going, since they wear form-fitting bodysuit armor and not bulky uniforms and flak vests. You'd 100% need torsos since those boobs are gonna show through no matter what you do. But in the Guardian kit the only difference between male and female Guardians IS the torso, so you could just do a torso swap and keep the helmeted heads. But that would require a revamp of Aspect Warriors since their models don't actually have separate torso pieces.

I bring up Eldar because just having two units with female models really isn't enough when the fluff says ALL their units should have at least some females to some degree. Those IG heads can be applied to every model in the range since they have common head sizes, but Eldar Aspect Warriors each have a unique aesthetic so you can't just add a Guardian or Banshee torso to a Dire Avenger or Striking Scorpion.

I really hope that when GW gets around to remaking the awful resin Aspect Warriors into plastic, they include at least some female torsos (and some male torsos for Banshees). I mean, there are usually more torsos than there are sets of legs in plastic kits anyway. Why not make the extras female? Still, I am never-endingly grateful that GW does not participate in the garbage that is high-heeled armor.

Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

 Manchu wrote:
It seems to me that most costumers would be largely indifferent about a female IG sprue but of the (perhaps sizable) minority who would care, more customers would approve than disapprove and those who would approve would approve far more enthusiastically (both in terms of buying kits and praising GW) than the disapproving customers would disapprove. (I think the opposite would be true of female SM.)

If someone's going to get pissed off and quit because GW makes models that represent their lore to a decent degree in terms of the number of female soldiers present in that army... is that kind of person someone we even want to stay in the community?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Desubot wrote:
Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

I have heard that they are uncommon compared to females but do still exist in enough numbers their miniatures should exist.

In Eternal Crusade you can play a male Howling Banshee based on that bit of fluff, so if you want to see what it would look like you could probably find a video of someone playing a male Banshee in the Alpha on YouTube. Assuming they're in the game yet at all, I've been kind of ignoring it and waiting for launch since I don't much care about the testing phase at this point.

 Desubot wrote:
Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

Yes, but afaik they just wear the same armour as female banshees (boob plate and all).
The "boob plate" is just decoration (because realistically, females do not need "boob plates" on their armour, so it has to be decorative, like the sculpted muscles on BA armour) to give the aspect a female appearance in order to honour and resemble their Phoenix Lord (who is female).

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

Yes, but afaik they just wear the same armour as female banshees (boob plate and all).
The "boob plate" is just decoration (because realistically, females do not need "boob plates" on their armour, so it has to be decorative, like the sculpted muscles on BA armour) to give the aspect a female appearance in order to honour and resemble their Phoenix Lord (who is female).

Not in Eternal Crusade they don't. They look male there.

And no, the boob plate isn't decoration. Eldar armor is literally a form-fitting bodysuit and Eldar with breasts (i.e. the females) are going to have those breasts contoured to to the degree you can see them significantly.

Sorta like Samus Aran's Zero-Suit in terms of form-fittingness, but the material is much thicker and has thicker-yet plates attached to it at various points.

 Pouncey wrote:
If someone's going to get pissed off and quit because GW makes models that represent their lore to a decent degree in terms of the number of female soldiers present in that army... is that kind of person someone we even want to stay in the community?

I don't know that it profits anyone to single out "undesirables," one way or the other, that "we" would be happy to exclude from playing or even just liking 40k. I look at it as, you try to serve your broadest customer base without losing sight of brand/IP consistency. If you make a mistake, you should try to correct it. But when companies say, well we need to have less of X kind of person as a customer, I think they have gone off the rails, perhaps especially if "X kind of person" is down to some kind of ideological issue. I suppose I trend pretty conservative as far as how I would like to see the 40k IP develop going forward: I definitely do not want to ever see female Space Marines and I do want my beloved Sisters of Battle to keep their baroque, overtly feminine armor. But for the same reason, I also really would love to see female IG figs, including female command and female characters.

 Kriegspiel wrote:
Hey it's Space Opera and gaming with ass-kicking armored pauldron nor real life ... ask GW to be inspired by

for 40K.

No. Just... No.

So, you're happy to say this..

 Pouncey wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

I have heard that they are uncommon compared to females but do still exist in enough numbers their miniatures should exist.

Despite just yesterday I posted this

Banshees are almost exclusively female, a male one would be a notable rarity,

in a direct response to one of your posts, which is supported by this..

40K Lexicanum wrote:Unique to the Howling Banshees is the fact that they are almost always female, for the banshee of legend is itself a female spirit

You're going to keep insisting that somehow male Banshees need to be included?

Eldar culture is highly ritualistic. Their battle armor surely reflects this. It makes sense to me that, as posted above, a male Eldar who joined the Banshee Path would conceivably cross-dress, as it were, to honor Jain Zar.

Are we getting into discussions of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of gender and race?
Yeah, you will see differences when you get into the apex end of conditioning but at more "normal" levels it means little.
In most cases, a man or a woman pulling the trigger of a lasgun for the Imperial Guard I think makes no real difference.
As to race, it is all adaptation and the conditions that person's ancestors lived in.

With how the dark millennium is portrayed, it would be obvious that women would be employed in any capacity equally to men because the imperium does not care as long as what is required is carried out..
As to Xenos races... Orks appear to need to die to reproduce so they seem rather exempt but Eldar addressed this where it is mixed.
We have "Ab-humans" so it goes without saying diversity is out there (a certain marine chapter has coal-black skin).

Victoria Miniatures is a good place to go to get a more "realistic" mix to your armies.
Since with groups like the Imperial Guard and their various faces makes them seem like clone troopers, I think it is more cost and laziness GW has not added more diverse looking races or gender mixes.

I am still figuring out how I can design a "Jules Winnfield" Inquisitor, he would add an edge that would be awesome.

 Talizvar wrote:
Are we getting into discussions of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of gender and race?
Yeah, you will see differences when you get into the apex end of conditioning but at more "normal" levels it means little.
In most cases, a man or a woman pulling the trigger of a lasgun for the Imperial Guard I think makes no real difference.
As to race, it is all adaptation and the conditions that person's ancestors lived in.

I think we finally left that silliness behind.

 Talizvar wrote:
With how the dark millennium is portrayed, it would be obvious that women would be employed in any capacity equally to men because the imperium does not care as long as what is required is carried out..

Agreed, 100%.

 Manchu wrote:
Eldar culture is highly ritualistic. Their battle armor surely reflects this. It makes sense to me that, as posted above, a male Eldar who joined the Banshee Path would conceivably cross-dress, as it were, to honor Jain Zar.

I thought that is exactly what happened. I could go and look at my 2nd Edition Codex: Eldar, but it's allll the way over in my bookcase and I'm comfy.

The Banshees aside, however, I'm fairly certain that every other Aspect Path is open to all genders of Eldar, and therefore the Eldar kits really should come with female options - like the Dark Eldar, in fact.

 Manchu wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
If someone's going to get pissed off and quit because GW makes models that represent their lore to a decent degree in terms of the number of female soldiers present in that army... is that kind of person someone we even want to stay in the community?

I don't know that it profits anyone to single out "undesirables," one way or the other, that "we" would be happy to exclude from playing or even just liking 40k. I look at it as, you try to serve your broadest customer base without losing sight of brand/IP consistency. If you make a mistake, you should try to correct it. But when companies say, well we need to have less of X kind of person as a customer, I think they have gone off the rails, perhaps especially if "X kind of person" is down to some kind of ideological issue. I suppose I trend pretty conservative as far as how I would like to see the 40k IP develop going forward: I definitely do not want to ever see female Space Marines and I do want my beloved Sisters of Battle to keep their baroque, overtly feminine armor. But for the same reason, I also really would love to see female IG figs, including female command and female characters.

Sorry, I guess my attitude comes from World of Warcraft. Every change the developers of that game make to the game causes some people to be really excited for it and some people to just quit altogether, yet the number of active players still numbers in thee millions after 12 years of very frequent changes. In WoW, if someone were to quit over some NPCs in the game being female instead of male, or vice-versa, the community would probably mock them for quitting over such a minor change in general, instead of trying to find a way to make it work for them. Because WoW has the numbers of players needed to survive losing players over every change, and most members of the community have heard dozens upon dozens of "I quit" stories for a variety of reasons and have simply lost the ability to even care that someone's quiitting, since it happens so often.

But I forgot that this is WH40k, where every customer is worth holding onto and most of the community knows it, since the company making the game is taking huge financial losses in recent years and everyone who buys something instead of not helps keep their favorite game going just a little bit longer. So you're right, I shouldn't dismiss someone's concern as invalid. There are likely to be things I would quit over that seem equally insignificant to others, and if a small tweak to how things are done is able to keep someone in the game and happy, it's worth going for.

However, my comment about whether we want someone to quit wasn't quite as malicious as it appeared. I wasn't suggesting that the company or players should start driving people off on purpose. I was assuming that the kind of person who would have an issue with their new IG coming with some female bits instead of all male bits, despite the lore of the game saying that should be the case, strongly enough to quit, would have some serious issues with women, either in general or when they intrude on the hobby. I was assuming that those issues would make things more difficult during the inevitable time when tabletop wargaming becomes less of a boys' club like video gaming has and there are only going to be more and more women playing games with that guy, until having a female opponent for an average pickup game is roughly as common as having a male opponent. And in online games, I've heard women talk about their experiences with guys who have serious issues with women. Those experiences are usually the reason that some women create a personal policy of never getting on voice chat (very important for real-time video games where you're supposed to cooperate with allies) whatsoever unless they know all the people who are going to be in the channel. There's a trope in World of Warcraft where women roll male characters a lot specifically because they don't want creepy guys hitting on them in manners that gets creepier and creepier. There are men who play WoW who've openly stated that theybelieve every male WoW player garnishes attention and kindness and gifts upon every female character they come in contact with, and refer to the idea as "female privilege" while ignoring the dozens upon dozens of men and women who've played female characters for years and have gotten no favorable treatment, no gifts, and only some excessively creepy guys doing creepy things to their characters with emotes.

And I've even heard of guys like that who exist in the tabletop community already driving off the few women who express an interest. I've read stories about the following actually happening in real life: a woman comes into a gaming store filled with men, looks around with interest, and seems like she was about to give the whole thing a good shot, most of the people there don't actually care that she's a woman, but then that ONE guy, with the GUO personal hygiene, shoddy clothes, who's an utter creep, saunters up to her and immediately starts hitting on her very crudely. And then she immediately leaves and has no intentions about coming back. At which point, a guy who's got serious issues with women just drove a customer away from the game for good, all on his own. And side note, when a woman walks into a gaming club filled with men who drop everything they're doing to collectively stare at her, while each of those men is more like a deer caught in the headlights wondering what they can do to help her give the hobby a good shot because the game needs more women, the actual fact is that there is an entire building full of men just staring at her without saying a thing. And that, in human body language, is not saying, "Welcome to the hobby!" it's saying, "Why are you even here? Leave, now. We don't want you here."

But that is what I assumed. I assumed that a person would only reject female options for miniatures where that makes sense on the grounds they have an issue with women. That may not actually be the case, and I should not have assumed that everyone who has an issue with their models coming with female parts has an issue with women. A legitimate reason I could see for it is that their vision for their personal Imperial Guard regiment is all-male, and now they have to buy tons of extra stuff to actually make it all male, and it's too expensive or they don't want to deal with it. Which is totally fine. The lore that supports a 100% female Guard regiment existing purely through chance equally supports a 100% male Guard regiment existing for the same reason.

So, since female parts are more of a niche for the game at this point, maybe we shouldn't really be including them with the standard kits, and focus more on either an entirely separate kit with fully-female models, or conversion kits. Both would not only allow the male-only armies to not receive a price hike, but make it easier to control exactly how much of your Imperial Guard are female and how much are male. You want more female? Buy more female kits or headswaps. You want less female? Buy fewer female kits and headswaps. With the female models and the male models in the same kit, you only make it more expensive for literally everyone who does not want the exact ratio in the kit. So maybe that's just a bad idea in general to have both male parts and female parts in the same kit, unless you could create the kit as fully either gender without needing to buy anything else..

 Azreal13 wrote:
So, you're happy to say this..

 Pouncey wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

I have heard that they are uncommon compared to females but do still exist in enough numbers their miniatures should exist.

Despite just yesterday I posted this

Banshees are almost exclusively female, a male one would be a notable rarity,

in a direct response to one of your posts, which is supported by this..

40K Lexicanum wrote:Unique to the Howling Banshees is the fact that they are almost always female, for the banshee of legend is itself a female spirit

You're going to keep insisting that somehow male Banshees need to be included?

The CWE codex has it that male banshees take on a female personality while serving as one. They'd probably just take the boob plate. I mean, it's hardly pressing against anything.

 Talizvar wrote:
With how the dark millennium is portrayed, it would be obvious that women would be employed in any capacity equally to men because the imperium does not care as long as what is required is carried out..

I hesitate to go any further down this path but ... just as a matter of logic, women are much more valuable than men if what the state needs is a growing/sustainable population in order to, for example, replenish the ranks of a military formation during wartime. And what could be darker, in terms of sheer misogynistic objectification, than to reduce the worth of female persons to their capacity for reproduction? Still, even in those terms, given what I am sure are widespread issues of undernourishment, environmental poisoning, and other such factors, not a few women would be barren and therefore be simply objectified by the Imperium in the same way that it objectifies its male subjects; i.e., as trigger squeezers/bullet absorbers. I suppose in a truly dystopian setting, barren women would be "demoted" (at least in terms of how the state values them) to canon fodder, the traditional role of men. Of course, in that role, they might have a chance to rise through the ranks of their units. A good example of this would be Furiosa from Mad Max Fury Road.

 Selym wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
So, you're happy to say this..

 Pouncey wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
Are there male banshees? is that a thing? is it a choice they can actually make?

(my eldar lore is pretty lacking)

I have heard that they are uncommon compared to females but do still exist in enough numbers their miniatures should exist.

Despite just yesterday I posted this

Banshees are almost exclusively female, a male one would be a notable rarity,

in a direct response to one of your posts, which is supported by this..

40K Lexicanum wrote:Unique to the Howling Banshees is the fact that they are almost always female, for the banshee of legend is itself a female spirit

You're going to keep insisting that somehow male Banshees need to be included?

The CWE codex has it that male banshees take on a female personality while serving as one. They'd probably just take the boob plate. I mean, it's hardly pressing against anything.

Where does it say that?

 Manchu wrote:
Eldar culture is highly ritualistic. Their battle armor surely reflects this. It makes sense to me that, as posted above, a male Eldar who joined the Banshee Path would conceivably cross-dress, as it were, to honor Jain Zar.

They could probably do it. They'd probably even have an official prosthetic for the Eldar men who do so.

Eldar need to be redone completely to make them less human; giving them more human breasts just makes them more human. They should have three eyes, beaks, long prehensile necks and be covered in crystalline spines. All their warriors should be female as the males are too small for any use on the battlefield as they only evolved to be the size of a dildo as befits their sole purpose in eldar society. Also no breasts at all, for Darwin's sake, Eldar are egg layers!

 Manchu wrote:

 Talizvar wrote:
With how the dark millennium is portrayed, it would be obvious that women would be employed in any capacity equally to men because the imperium does not care as long as what is required is carried out..

I hesitate to go any further down this path but ... just as a matter of logic, women are much more valuable than men if what the state needs is a growing/sustainable population in order to, for example, replenish the ranks of a military formation during wartime. And what could be darker, in terms of sheer misogynistic objectification, than to reduce the worth of female persons to their capacity for reproduction? Still, even in those terms, given what I am sure are widespread issues of undernourishment, environmental poisoning, and other such factors, not a few women would be barren and therefore be simply objectified by the Imperium in the same way that it objectifies its male subjects; i.e., as trigger squeezers/bullet absorbers. I suppose in a truly dystopian setting, barren women would be "demoted" (at least in terms of how the state values them) to canon fodder, the traditional role of men. Of course, in that role, they might have a chance to rise through the ranks of their units. A good example of this would be Furiosa from Mad Max Fury Road.

People who are concerned about the Imperial Guard casualties being able to be replenished, resulting in a need for fewer women on the battlefield, simply have never done the math about the Imperium.

If you work out the official data on the Imperium's planets and their populations, you come to the conclusion that the Imperium probably has more than 20 quadrillion people living in it.

To demonstrate how many people that is, if you take every human being on Earth right now, and clone each of them one billion times, you will not end up with as many people as even half of the population of the Imperium of Man.

And of those 20 quadrillion, only 200 billion at most actually serve in the Imperial Guard. One in every one hundred thousand humans becomes an Imperial Guardsman. No more.

Replenishing casualties is NOT. A. PROBLEM. Regardless of what gender your Guardsmen are. You could have ALL of your Guardsmen being female, across the entire Imperium, for the past 10,000 years, and it would not significantly slow down how quickly your population is replenished.

And even more to the point, female Guardswomen becoming pregnant while in the field and giving birth is one of the intended ways to reinforce an Imperial Guard regiment. Because IG regiments are essentially never going home again. Those children will grow up and be trained and eventually become members of their parents' regiments. This is not only allowed by the Imperium, but they've developed special command structures for those children to be trained under.

 SolarCross wrote:
Eldar need to be redone completely to make them less human; giving them more human breasts just makes them more human. They should have three eyes, beaks, long prehensile necks and be covered in crystalline spines. All their warriors should be female as the males are too small for any use on the battlefield as they only evolved to be the size of a dildo as befits their sole purpose in eldar society. Also no breasts at all, for Darwin's sake, Eldar are egg layers!

Well to be fair, in lore the humans are the ones that look more like eldar