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2022/06/11 18:58:18
Subject: Female Skaven - options for conversions and proxies
I generally see the shoehorning of female characters into previously all-male storyworlds to be cancer, but in the Skaven's case their lore re. broodmothers seems (to me) to be such a misogynistic throwback to 1970s fantasy fiction (if not Gor, then perhaps James Herbert, who by 1993 also has a grotesque rat matriarch in 'The City' but I can't remember if she also appeared in his earlier Rats books) - wherever it came from it doesn't much resemble natural rats. I think natural female rats take misogyny and breeding-machine status in their stride and remain commendably lean and vicious. I'd subscribe to the idea that there is hardly any dimorphism and a male and a female clanrat wouldn't be noticeably different - except that most of the sculptures use such distinctly masculine figure-art, poses and clothing in the human elements that the artists carry over onto the rat. Any commercial vermin miniatures will have an eye to GW's lore, so I doubt anyone will have conveyed a gender-agnostic army through the models' musculature/posture/fashion - I'd like to find any models or parts of models, from any range, that have squared this circle and convert them into champions or characters.
And I generally see the shoehorning of female characters into previously all-male storyworlds to be cancer
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, what?
I just want any recommendations for suitable models. I wasn't wanting to be controversial - it's that I see that stuff to be tokenistic, and divisive-for-the-sake-of-it, and without usually achieving a jot of what it pretends to want.
But in the Skaven's case their lore had gone a tad further than unconscious bias, and the lack of dimorphism means there's an easier opportunity to rebalance without doing violence to the visual canon. It might even improve the overall look and visual interest-value of their swarms. Miniature sculptors have stuck rats' heads onto every muscle-man pose going. Sticking rats' heads onto some female figure-poses should be an easy win creatively, whilst being able to mix in almost unnoticed with other clanrats.
Like all talking-animals, Skaven should be using naturalistic study of rats to parody humanity's flaws - but what they came up with for the broodmothers in my view drew too strongly on hive-insects. I bet if we picked through James Herbert's Lair and Domain (assuming City was too late to have directly inspired the Skaven army book) we'd find there's a subtext around tokophobia, which ends up being lifted (lazily) into whatever tiny info box mentions the Skaven's broodmothers.
If talent and effort was applied to them, it should be possible to make naturalistic female rats grimmer, or more bitingly parodic, than broodmothers. They should be active parties in the rat-eat-rat Machiavellianism. It cuts a moral corner, and sanitizes, if our army's mothers are helpless, passive baby-factories. With real rats, in captivity, certain females always eat their first litter. One might think that's an evolved survival tactic (since the first litter is more prone to congenital deformities)... but it's been observed that if females from a colony that cannibalizes its first litters, are introduced into a colony that doesn't, they teach them: they proselytize.
And it's topical: appeals to motherhood have been a recurring background message of the Ukraine war.
Well, perhaps I should have simply said "are there any female ratkin/were-rat/vermen/etc minis I can use?", but I didn't feel that was specific enough.
Vulcan wrote: Without taking a close look at genitalia, I can't tell male and female rodents apart. So there's a hefty female contingent in my Skaven army across every unit. You just can't tell them from the males, that's all.
Now that that's dealt with, thus far your recovery work looks good. Looking forward to seeing more in the future.
I've contended though that it's not the rodent parts that gender nearly all the Skaven sculpts (at least the early ones that I've seen), but the specifically masculine figure art/posture/body language in their human component. The Heroquest clanrats - if we took off the head, the tail, and the weapon - would be doing that classic beefcake/bodybuilder pose that's been around since the 19th century. So much so that I suspect the sculptor might have been using it as a reference point from a magazine.
I'm finding that for some of the unit types that use poses from the stage (e.g. gutter runners) or which are entirely covered (e.g. plague monks), it's less noticeable. It's the clanrats I'd like to adapt.
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Spoiler:
Most of the miniature companies I'd heard of have some ratman figures, and I've been looking through their old catalogues on the one hand, and new 3d-printed designs on the other.
http://www.coolminiornot.com/111829 I presume this is a conversion rather than an original sculpture. I think succeeds on its own terms, but it makes her gender into something remarkable, marking out a character model. Taking the top two breasts from the human source and the bottom four from the rat source is a commendable experiment, but I think it highlights the anatomical incompatibility.
https://cdn2.myminifactory.com/assets/object-assets/6015450d14ee1/images/720X720-addon16.jpg Perhaps interesting to compare: Punga miniatures do a ratmen fantasy football cheerleader with 8 breasts This works as a joke, but the sculpture I think hides the clash between the rat and human elements, including by giving her an unapologetic facial expression, and getting a rats' legs into a human, female-coded pose.
https://www.reapermini.com/search/rats/latest/04074 Having a wider variety of postures in units is good for this. And dramatic poses, like these stealthy ones, aren't gendered. If on the stage, we can imagine Lady Macbeth standing like the wererat on the left, carrying two bloody knives to frame Duncan's servants - then maybe it's right.
https://www.manticgames.com/games/new/ratkin-birthing-daughter/ Kings of War have a 'birthing daughter' character. I guess the approach is similar to what I want, and I guess the pose is softer (channelling Princess Leia possibly). Buying a bunch of them to convert into clanrats could be prohibitively expensive though.
I don't think I'd be able to convert anything I've seen so far: the pose nearly always codes the figure. And the standard approach to the figure-art on ratmen is to expose enough of the physique for the fur and tail to be seen. Just the arms and/or legs being exposed is enough to make the pose informative to the viewer: even a lot of the plastic arms are male, in the language of sculpture.
Rats swarming is more of a human cultural imposition than something they naturally do. But in the context of talking-animals and vermin-armies, I'd suggest the point is "wouldn't it be horrible if the rats made a horde: like us humans do?" Yes talking-animals are fantasy, but they're an extremely old form of it which works by blending human and animal characteristics together through art and using the natural animal to remind us of something about our nature. When elements from termites start to come into the mix, that complicates things and the question (for me) is does GW's lore do anything with the broodmothers that justifies the liberty they take with the ancient genre-convention?
The Aliens(TM) hive mother (1986) works as a comparison of human and insect motherhood. What did Skaven broodmothers bring to the table, given they had the benefit of ~7 years' hindsight? Or might they be an artefact of relying on James Herbert? Or was it a fluff reason to avoid sculpting loads more figures?
The sculpture - on my view - should be using the ratmen to respond to today's substance abuse, dwarf-hate, slavery, body dysmorphia - and misogyny (or whatever else the artists feel can be revealed in a rat-comparison). The Skaven's broodmothers strike me as the misogyny of the 1970s - they were retrograde at the time. Bonuses versus dwarfs we can take those rules out (GW might already have for all I know), and the models holding whips we don't have to buy. My answer to the lack of female clanrats is to discreetly bring in some from another range. Failing that, to find a simple, replicable way to convert some. Or failing that to commission some stls.
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Automatically Appended Next Post: 1. Avatar of Andrevas from Resin Warfare
This is the best thing I've found so far. I've got it magnetized with the weapon options now and ready to start painting.
Problems: revealing clothing; girlboss
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2. Wererat Shaman from Reaper Bones
The head on the original model isn't very Skaven-y, or even ratlike. And the hands are 4-fingered. So I replaced those with common parts.
Problems: revealing clothing; girlboss
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3. Rat Ninja from Printed Obsession
Problems: unique pose. Wrong proportions but I'd need to see a 28mm version next to a GW Skaven to see how noticeable it is. Have ordered one.
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4. MTG: Ink Eyes - Betrayers of Kamigawa
Problems: revealing clothing; wrong scale (although there seems to have been a pirate stl of it at some point)
Separately from the (no longer available) pirate stl, there is another stl derivative on Etsy with a more anime-style head. And there is a 3d artist with one in his portfolio but not selling it (https://renderu.com/en/gallery/artwork/186434) - might even be the original artist, idk I've ignored all 4 options as the pose and proportions don't fit at all.
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5. Halfling Chess Rat Queen by Crosslances
Problems: clothing style; girlboss; not easy to order separately
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6. Cheerleader by Punga
Problems: revealing clothing; face style; pose; expensive to import to the UK; wrong scale (32mm)
Some of the models so far register as pin-ups despite wearing more - in sculpture I would say the posture is over 50% of whether a figure seems sexualized. On the one hand, I like this figure because it parodies that - and on the other if the head and pom-poms were switched out she might register as more business-like and sensibly-attired than a lot of fantasy warrior-women.
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7. Rat Woman Player by Punga
Problems: expensive; expensive to import to the UK; wrong scale (32mm)
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8. Rat Tavern Girl by Punga
Problems: looks hard to convert; expensive to import to the UK; wrong scale (32mm)
I wonder if this one could become a female plague monk: barrel full of Nurgle's Rot, staff instead of beer stein; hood to cover the head being a slightly different style
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9. Ratfolk Broodmother by Archvillain Games
Problems: as already mentioned I don't like the canonical, slightly incel-y, Skaven lore but this ticks those boxes
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10. Broodmother - Kingdom of the Rats Kickstarter
Problems: It's a Russian Kickstarter. Same as 9 above but I like this one better. If nothing else, 9+10 are bringing the female Skaven into the game. 9 gives her agency and makes her formidable but takes a grotesque approach. 10 I don't like the chains, but the posture almost suggests she's happy being brought food and adored.
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11. Various characters - Printed Obsession (thanks to @Overread!)
Problems: Proportions. Revealing clothing. Interesting that they put these idealized female forms beside grotesque male forms - it may show how jarring some of the others on this list could end up being next to Skaven.
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12. Trash Ratus - TT Combat (Rumbleslam)
Problems: pose. hair. expensive. revealing clothing. not certain scale is 28mm but one shop lists it as such But still. A wrestling diva. Who'd've thought it.
Problems: revealing clothing (and this versus a WW1 aesthetic that invokes blistering agents). Tails too thick. Expensive/not available separately from the £25 team.
These models are supplied unassembled - if the tails happen to be a separate part this might be able to mix back in with the Poison Wind Globadiers that (presumably) inspired it. It might also be possible to hack the tails out of the resin and put some Skaven-y ones in, but I'm not buying a £25 kit for science.
Problems: these have the usual problem but I bought them because they are rank-and-file miniatures. I was disappointed with the sculpture - I might have been able to reduce the breasts and the weapons but there are more fundamental problems. To my eye, they seem to have been assembled by starting with a stock human figure and pasting on feet and other rat-features over the top. And I think sometimes the pasted-on features don't line up with the original's (imaginary) bones. The postures on some of the figures even seemed like they might have been done by transforming the 3d model rather than going back to the skeleton and working outward. But I don't have the expertise to put my finger on what looks off. I'm not the only one saying this: the creator on Patreon mentioned struggling with the proportions and probably I've picked these up in the middle of them revising and improving.
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21. White Werewolf Tavern - Rat Female Assassins - Sept 2023 release
Problems: proportions are more like D&D were-rats than Skaven. Aesthetic is clean/uniform. Couldn't recognize much study of actual rat anatomy (smooth tails?). But I like the heads.
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I'd be most grateful for more suggestions. I'll put any others I find myself into this post rather than adding on to the end though.
So far, I see the problem to be one of women needing to be placed on either a sexual pedestal (as pin-ups), or an official one (as leaders), or denigrated (as breeding machines) if they are brought into a male space. There isn't anything yet approaching the egalitarianism of (e.g.) Jes Goodwin's Drukhari models. But it's better than nothing. 1 is a perfectly good Verminlord. 3 could stand as an Assassin. And I think 7 might convert into a Stormvermin with a little work.
This message was edited 40 times. Last update was at 2023/09/13 21:31:08
I think you've found many of the Skaven out there right now are either going to copy-cat GW or they are likely following the pin-up style as those are both very popular themes at the present.
I'm sure as time passes there will be more ideas, Claybeast Creation, for example, has been doing some ghost skaven.
/https://files.cults3d.com/uploaders/15608750/illustration-file/65308abb-d525-42ee-bd5e-801c1e383c91/Skrat-the-Mercenary1.jpg)
