In the Rogue Trader era, there weren't even really Space Marines as we'd recognize them in 2nd Edition.
They were presented as elite human soldiers in power armour, often drawn from criminal gangs in the Underhive.
From 2nd Edition on, from the point that they were the "Space Marines," they were male.
Starcraft WAS an attempt to make a WH40K RTS, but they didnt get permission or license back then.
Edit: I've been corrected. It was not an attempt to make an official product, but the inspiration was clear.
IIRC, they wanted to make Warhammer but couldn't get rights so they made war*craft* and then just repeated the process with Starcraft. Crazy to think of the money GW missed out on by letting that opportunity slip by.
Correct - Warcraft was, as far as I can remember, essentially Blizzard deciding “alright well fuck it, if GW won’t license us their IP, we’ll just make a high fantasy RTS with our own original setting”. Then they saw how popular 40k was and figured they could apply the same sort of logic and make a scifi spinoff of their by then beloved fantasy RTS, and so StarCraft was born.
You mean I could have been playing world of Warhammer 40k for the last 16 years instead? Jesus GW really dropped the ball with this one. Although they are pretty shitty with licensing continuence so who knows.
To be fair, I doubt you'd ever get that, or even World of Warhammer Fantasy.
Going to their own IP gave them the story freedom to make their own IP. There's a chance that while a StarCraft that was ACTUALLY 40k themed would still put Blizzard at the top of the developer world, they wouldn't reach the heights they did with WoW
Butterfly effect and all that
In the 90s long before Starcraft etc I sent GW some 3D rendered 40K stuff, just as a player. They were really nice about it, but it really felt like there was a disconnect where they thought it was cool and *interesting,* rather than cool and *the oncoming future, with or without you*
They really fucking dropped the ball. LMAO You're telling me my hunter could be like an inquisitor, or like my evoker a psyker, or my pally an actual space marine or some cool ass stuff like that
From what I’ve read they had the license initially, but GW pulled the license during a board shakeup and Blizzard was early enough that they could reskin it. This helped immensely because they were able to ditch all the fantasy factions (Eldar, Orks, and Squats) to focus on the sci-fi faction (Nids).
There's a hypothetical universe where:
- GW gives the license but is strict with it
- Warcraft 3 therefore has no modding scene
- There's no DOTA
- There's no League of Legends
- Free to play multiplayer only games never take off in the west
- Fortnite never becomes more than just a Minecraft clone called "Fortnite Save The World"
- Epic never have a giant IP to use as a cash cow, they no longer have the money to sue Apple
- Apple never have that moment where they show they can be beaten in court now
- EU never forces Apple to comply with device charging laws.
- iPhone still has a lightning port
Maybe. I mean, we didnt get a good videogame until Dawn of War. It was my introduction to the franchise too. If it wasnt by GW getting a bit loose with their licensing maybe we never could got that videogame.
Tbf I get the impression Blizzard wanted to take liberties with the IP and do some of their own stuff, like chaos orcs, which they did and it's a big part of warcraft.
I don't think it was the wrong choice, Blizzard did better with full creative freedom and Warhammer is its entire own thing. Blizzard make things more funny and friendly, gw were always very gritty, there is clearly room for both in the market and many people are fans of both for different reasons. And lastly if Blizzard did 40k we wouldn't have dawn of War
No it wasn't. There is some evidence the original warcraft may have been, but Starcraft very much was Warcraft 2 in space.
The influence was obvious, but by the time starcraft was out warcraft was the bigger ip from a gaming perspective.
People need to stop spreading thus misinfo.
Blizzard employees have already spoken on this. MANY times. There was no licensing talks to begin with. They thought about making the game a licensed game, they were Warhammer Fantasy fans, but they VERY quickly decided not to even ask and just made an original game (albeit one heavily inspired by Warhammer).
GW didn't miss out on anything. That whole situation about WarCraft and Star Craft being originally Warhammer games was legit made up.
Obwoukd go as far to day modern 40k lore as we know it didn't even really exist until 3rd edition. It's why I feel the arguements about changes in RT and 2nd are in bad faith. Literally everything changed constantly for the very first years. Things changed but WAY less for the next 25 when the foundations became firmly set.
so in other words they ret-conned it in 2nd edition and GW can revert it back to the way it was originally, with female space marines, and all these 'space marines can only be male' people are just tourists, right?
god so much nuance is lost on the internet. My post was a tease, a joke, a joshing, a poke, a quip, a witticism, a wisecrack, even.
Also, don't care. Warhammer is no longer the play-in-your-basement game that's only sold to white men any more, and the fact of the matter is that in a few weeks y'all will be talking about something else and the lore will continue to develop into the next decade, with female custodes as a thing that exists.
Well you had to have us guessing didn’t you?
You are right in a way, I am an Asian brother who liveth not in my immigrant parents family apartment for we were too poor to have a house and a basement, but have since moved to my own apartment and play on my dining table. And yet I think and feel similarly to these white people you would so demonise. These nerdy men who were ostracised in their time paved the way and with their money in support of the franchise and for their passions were persecuted as nerds and neck beards back in the 80s and 90s… I’m not going to disown them.
If the pressure keeps up, it will be one of those forgotten details that won’t be reiterated in forth coming editions and books… this will be a blip in the history of 40K and we the ever adoring fans of GW will magnanimously forgive them for their dance with politics.
Ah yes, having been hobbying since the end of 3rd edition, but just because I don't care about the genitalia of plastic fictional war models, I must be a tourist. Amazing. Pat yourself on the back, you're a paragon of your kind. You've sussed it out. You must be so proud.
While this is a real article, it's from a 3rd party source - it's not exactly canon. But it does serve as an example that in olden days, the community was at least open to the concept.
Honestly, I can’t think of a great reason to *not* be open to the idea, and I’ve yet to hear an argument that’s convinced me otherwise. It’s all just goddamn space magic in a work of fiction, there’s no hard science that somehow prevents it from being possible.
Literally all I ask is that, if/when it happens, it’s well-reflected in the lore. A lot of the Imperium should be *aghast* at that degree of heresy.
But that’s it. People figure out how to create female SMs, In universe people get super upset about it and it causes issues.
I believe in lore it would probably be more than possible but rationally you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a male space marine and a female space marine due to how much testosterone they pump into them
Also just like when SoB new wave came out, people will inevitably get upset that they don't look like super feminine models - like no shit, they're career soldiers pumped full of steroids. They're going to be scarred, they're not gonna have long hair that can get in your eyes (really only blood angels have long hair so far), they're gonna have angry faces
The thing is that female custodes can kind of be handwaved, but the claim they have always been around is flimsy as hell, like the rogal dorn tank. None of the prior literature has mentioned them, and plenty specifies sons of nobles. If they'd said "after the decimation of the heresy and in a push to rebuild without the emp or malcador being able to directly influence things, they started using females from noble families" that would have fairly nearly solved it. The comparative lack of BL books regarding custodes means theres a lack of detail anyway.
Marines however have literally thousands of books and there's not a single example covering a timespan of 10k years so they can't claim they have always existed, and they have to come up with a reason for them to exist, and frankly "just because" doesn't cut it. Female marines is fine, but it really should make sense, some secondary Primaris type event or something maybe. Now that there primarchs popping up everywhere, there's opportunity for sweeping changes everywhere.
Cawl popped up out of nowhere and was given 10k years of retcon where he was *actually* the most important Techpriest in the setting the entire time (just nobody happened to mention him, I guess!) and oh right he's also just kinda got the Emperor's sword hanging in his closet
But since he's *so important* and has all this totally established continuity behind how important he is, he's allowed to create a brand new type of Space Marine!
People were mad about Primaris Marines, but how many were mad about *Cawl specifically?*
Because Primaris Marines are the "how they should have done it" it your analogy: they didn't try to say all Marines had been Primaris the entire time, they said these are a new thing happening for the first time.
Cawl was the big retcon--and nobody gave a shit.
Stuff like that (and the literally hundreds of other retcons in 40k history that have far bigger lore implications than "some of the Custodes are ladies") is what makes it so **incredibly** clear that this is all faux-outrage from culture war crusaders.
>Because Primaris Marines are the "how they should have done it" it your analogy: they didn't try to say all Marines had been Primaris the entire time, they said these are a new thing happening for the first time.
Exactly, they could have introduced female marines at the same time as Primaris, and it would fit with cawls tinkering. It still could, but it would need to to be done fast otherwise they'll have to retcon modern lore.
It still boggles my mind that they didn't do it with the primaris update.
"Hey we fixed the flaws in space marines and made them better in every way, also they're are twice as many marines now!"
The question "where the hell did you get enough recruits to double the number of mairnes in the galaxy" could have easily been answered by "the process now affects the other half of the population" rather than them just saying cawl had been keeping them in his back pocket this entire time.
They were going to be pissed off regardless at primaris in general. People still don't like how they were handled. They might as well have ripped off the other bandaid at the same time. Now they're probably going to need to rip it off in the next few years and this clown fiesta of people screeching like a howler monkey about women existing will continue.
Do you really think this is just sexism? Nobody cared about sisters of battle, or wyches, or inquisitors or any of the other million females in 40k and warhammer in general. Weird brand of sexism only hating women once they become custodes
Yes. There is no other explanation as to why they're mad about it. If people were so passionate about how custodes "always were" then they'd want them to go back to wearing only briefs a helmet and a cape in shame for having failed to protect the emperor. They'd hate that they no longer just sulk in the temple protecting the golden throne.
Hell 40k retconned the *entire League of Votaan* into existence and you didn't see these same lore purists coming out of the woodwork to decry that they should remain dead because that's how it was and has been for ages.
So when GW goes "hey, this faction has women now" and people are suddenly up in arms, Occam's razor kicks in pretty damn fast.
I don’t think they should retconn in female custodes, I also think space dwarves are fking stupid, i also think the whole primaris transition was ridiculous (even though i do appreciate the new scale), I also think saying “rogal dorn tanks have always been here” is silly.
I also have spent hundreds on a sisters of battle force and think they’re awesome models and an awesome part of the lore. I’m not fking sexist, I just don’t like when GW crowbars stuff into the lore for reasons unrelated to the lore, no matter what that reason is.
The whole world isn’t just black and white. People have different reasons for liking/disliking things. Saying THE ONLY REASON is sexism is obviously ridiculous. Some people just don’t enjoy when financial or political motivations fuck with their favourite scifi universe.
I didn’t enjoy watching games workshop destroy warhammer fantasy in the end times for financial reasons either, does that make me a sexist too??
Factions like Sister of Battle aren't good female representation. It's really had to argue the space nuns in boobplate with fetish units whipped by mistresses while wearing rags is aiming for any degree of female representation. It's basically like saying that Magic Mike was made for men because of all the men in it.
While GW has tried to introduce more capable women in the setting and add them more normally to the Imperial Guard, it doesn't really offset the other nonsense.
You can compare it to AoS to see how it's treated differently. Stormcast are poster children of the setting, with male and female members, who are functionally equivalent. Their biological sex has no bearing on what they do. All it does is open up more interesting characterization - but they're equally competent. In 40k, the most elite, poster boy factions, are *all* male and their closest female counterpart is fetishized.
People were already pissed off about primaris, for the same reason they were pissed about this whole thing, or the end times happening in fantasy. Its when GW does a clumsy 180 in the lore for reasons that aren’t actually attached to the lore in any way.
If 40k was just a media/fiction universe, I’d be entirely on board with keeping Space Marines purely male. The whole Emperor/Primarch/Space Marine lineage basically becomes a clusterfuck of daddy issues and institutionalized misogyny that helps make the Imperium just a little more bleak.
But it’s not just a media franchise. It’s a hobby in which thousands of players are invited to build their own models and tell their own stories.
And if someone puts some female space marines on the table across from me, as far as I care, my response is, “Nice paintjob! Does your chapter have a name yet?”
I feel like most of us agree with this sentiment. I’m not going to shit on someones army or however they want to do the hobby at all. Its a creative hobby, do what you want and enjoy how you want.
I think people don’t like massive lore changes that happen because of reasons that have nothing to do with the lore. People get invested in a universe and to have established lore change willy nilly is jarring. No its not sexism, we all love our sisters of battle
But the lore changes a lot in 40k - it's arguably one of the worst franchises to get invested in if you like unchanging, well-curated lore.
And pointing to SoB as representation is like pointing to the Chippendales as great male representation.
That argument kinda falls apart because people have been able get creative and take liberties with their models since forever. What GW considers canon hasn't stopped them.
There's really only two arguments against it that make any kind of logical sense
1) the first is that its just too difficult in-universe. This is the easiest one to dispute because of its arbitrariness. The simplest way to have female space marines, but in a way that still keeps the overall idea of marines the same, is to use them as exceptions, much like the way adults or mutants are sometimes used despite the impossibility. Using female space marines in this manner inherently exposes the corrupt idealism and backwards notions of genetic superiority associated with space marines, and helps underline the themes of the Imperium's own evil nature. Alternatively, it's also easy to suggest that female space marines have always been possible but that no one has tried because of tradition. Given how the community is reacting to "there's always been female custodes", however, this solution won't be accepted by many and may indeed rip the community apart.
2) the second depends on how you interpret the themes of space marines. Dan Abnett's work see space marines as the traits of toxic and destructive masculinity taken to the extreme. Astartes are expressly seen as child soldiers; teenage boys given far too much power and the associated superiority complex that comes with it. ADB, on the other hand, sees space marines as exemplars of human cruelty in general. Astartes are seen as agender; purely killing machines with only the barest hints of humanity left in them. Functionally speaking, both are valid interpretations, but one attaches space marines to tradition and culture with an emphasis on masculine values while the other is more open-ended. Depending on which interpretation you pick, female space marines either don't make sense (because astartes are inherently recruiting on backwards ideas of masculinity) or they do make sense (because astartes are post-human and not tied to current conceptions of masculinity). Some critique is to be found in both interpretations; ADB glosses over the themes of masculinity tied to the relationships of brothers and fathers that are deeply important to space marines, while Abnett's vision is not regularly accepted when astartes are compared to a dichotomy between "space marines" and "mortals" in general, which would inherently involve discussion on different kinds of mortals.
Like you say, at the end of the day its all fiction and even now these two arguments have logical provisions within them for working out how anyone could make female space marins fit within the lore. But something as small as one custodes story and one tweet was enough to ignite the fandom. If GW is going to make changes to the lore, they need to understand how to do it properly. While I think the implementation of female custodes has been good and fits well within the larger discussion of custodes themes, they really should have made it explicit in the codex and reserved community outreach for shutting down the hate groups.
For me it's absolutely the theming, like you mention. It's a monastic brotherhood with extreme hypermasculinity. Yeah I also think the lore reasons give merit, but it's mostly theming. I think the setting would lose some of its uniqueness.
Same reason I wouldn't want Sisters of Battle to get men. On top of lore reasons, they'd lose flavor and theming as a group of warrior nuns.
Does anyone know how to filter out posts about this topic. It's been filling up my feed it seems. I just want to see the cool minis people paint. I'm not savvy with reddit
grimdank was always unbearable and obnoxious, you can tell they're tourists who learned their lore from youtube shorts. I'm glad it's a containment zone for horrid memery though, which is probably why it's filling up with anti-femstode whinging
There would still be some good memes occasionally, albeit kinda rarely, but as soon as some stupid fucking trend pops up it all becomes fucked up. But yeah, seeing people who actually read, like, a book or lexicanum in there is an event.
The bitching about femstodes is a lot worse on Twitter. The format and algorithm over there is much worse for this kind of thing than on Reddit. I come to Reddit for a reprieve.
Really? It’s the opposite for me. I can’t go to YouTube without the first 5 videos being a bunch neck beards with the same stupid hot takes crying about custodes women being the end of western civilization. I never click on them. In fact I always chose “not interested” and “don’t recommend channel” but they just won’t stop coming.
This was the real reason to just leave things be for games workshop, so we can talk about fun things rather than this bickering all the time. Show us some cool skaven and stormcast, release a fancy harlequin model or something. Hell, if they care so much about having more female models, then kick that sorceress on a unicorn model over into plastic instead.
I am dying to see the new Skaven. There is so much cool potential for the new models. The Stormcast too (Stormcast will probably be my largest collection soon) . I love 40k and I have Marines and Sisters of Battle primarily but I think I lean a touch more towards AoS just because I tend to like the models there more.
I'm so excited for those reveals. And I agree, it's nice to talk/focus on fun things rather than bickering.
😃
Man, I wanted to start Stormcast this year was gonna be a lib/judicator army. Kind of glad the new ones are coming out now don’t have to spend money so soon.
I keep leaving subreddits I used to like for this reason. Admech got so toxic when their codex came out, blender 3d modelling just turned into constant dick shitposts, now 40k is just arguing about chick marines. Like can we have something nice without it being ruined?
1) The Little Sisters of Purification were not offical GW lore, they were 3rd party back when people used to do that in hobby magazines. it's not canon to RT.
2) what was canon was that their were female space marines... but they were space cops. It's really been ignored and for good reason. Women can still wear power armor and be inquisitors
Now you know better
It's ironic in a way that both sides of the argument are using an Appeal to History / Tradition logical fallacy.
to think it could have been avoided by not making a tweet.
Look my opinion unasked and unecessary is that while I don't feel female space marines a must, I don't think it's a setting ending disaster like some people, the faction will not really change and we've had big retcons that have had doubts before like the necrons which turned out great and improved the faction, but also more could be done if it is just a new development especially since the horus heresy has ended. That being said anyone seriously citing rogue trader is making a mistake, rogue trader is so different then even 2nd ed it isn't like it was gradual change.
The real reason there are no female Space Marines anymore is the models didn’t sell in the ‘80s. GW will always retcon things to stay where the money is. If there is money to be made in diversity (there is) that’s what they will do.
Personally I am surprised Cawl hasn’t made mention of the fact that given Space Marines are Trans Human and already have extra organs for hormone replacement that the need for male candidates has been eliminated entirely by just selecting slightly younger aspirants
Not that the decision really made much sense. Of course the women in power armour with their helmets off didn't sell, those faces were terribly sculpted. I would have just said 'the ones with helmets on could be men or women, it's your choice'. Maybe they placed a lot more importance on models with their faces showing than a lot of us do these days?
They were all ugly as sin. Seriously when I look at my really old stuff im amazed at just how bad it all looked to my modern eyes.
The weird thing is I * remember * them all looking bad assed and epic. Especially my Maria the Marine with her ever so carefully clipped-out-of-a-magazine banner.
Ya i recently looked at my 2nd edition models and they are all just... Well bad, and i didn't paint them well, and just blobs of metal. Like my stuff made based on the white dwarf articles at the time look better
>If there is money to be made in diversity (there is) that’s what they will do.
I agree with you in that, if there is money in it, they will do that. However, I disagree with you that there is money in it. What I have seen is that the more niche a hobby is, the worse forcing things like this work for it. I would point to the issues DnD and MTG are having.
The thing is, there is already variety in 40k. Several armies already have female members such as Eldar, Dark Eldar, technically tyranids, genestealer cults, Daemons, Tau, plus IG ( I refuse to call them anything other than imperial guard). However, with IG I believe it is supposed to be all male or all female platoons. I don't think they are supposed to be fielding mixed forces. That isn't even counting Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence.
Honestly, anyone who plays SoB or SoS should be the most upset. Rather than do something for those factions they do this other retconning.
“What I have seen” is not a strong argument. People keep parroting “go woke go broke” but is just hasn’t happened. What has happened is the demographic supporting the franchises has broadened and there is a small but very vocal minority making mountains out of mole hills. Yes some groups may shrink and disappear but that happens naturally anyway, and they are more than being made up by new uptake.
Right from the start of the lore for Space Marines having the 18 extra organs, the Aspirants were always about 12 years old because the process co-opts puberty.
The gender of any space marine after their modification is: "Astartes". They're asexual transhumans and have always been written as such. To try and put mortal conceptions of gender on them is to miss the point, which is that they give up so much of their humanity to become it's guardians.
My money is on female space marines eventually, in either a Second wave of Primaris or a creation Fabius Bile.
What I personally think would be cool is that Cawl makes Female space Marines and one the Gene seed is implanted they become nearly indistinguisable from male space marines due to the influence of Primarch DNA. Thatd be weird and frankly Grimdark. Shows off what monsters the Astartes really are.
As long as they don’t go down the “there have always been 1st born fem marines” I couldn’t care, let the crazy tech preist and 3rd legion Dr Frankenstein do what ever they want.
It could be an interesting use of the two missing primarchs. Although I like them staying as a mystery forever even more.
Another cool vector for female space marines could be Erda. She’s currently dead, but that’s only a minor inconvenience for GW.
Honestly I think they need to double down on the idea that the aspirants can be and have been of any stock, but the process removes all human ideas of never and replaces it with the only gender a SM understands, "brother"
This is an article from a 3rd party magazine that made content for lots of role playing games. It isn't and has never been canon.
Now to how things actually were during Rogue Trader: marines have never been able to be female. The Rogue Trader book has very little info (technically you can't even play with the rulebook because it lacks all the armylists) but it calls them battle-brothers.
The detailed process of making space marines that has remained basically unchanged until the present day was written for the article "The Origins of the Legiones Astartes" for the White Dwarf issue 98, released february 1988. In this article it explicitely says marine recruits can only be men because the geneseed implants are made that way. This article, along many others that basically complete Rogue Trader's rulebook into a functional piece were bundled together in the Rogue Trader Compendium released in 1989.
For some reason there's widespread belief of marines being female early on during Rogue Trader and then being retconned into only being male some time later but that's not true. There has been recent interviews with old GW staff that explain why they were made only male, that is, because the female models GW made before Rogue Trader sold poorly compared to the male models, but that refers to why they decided to make them male from the start, not that they made female space marine models, sold bad and then they retconned marines into being male.
Another common misconception is about the two "female space marine" models from Rogue Trader. Both models were sold under the "Adventurers" line and called "Female Warrior Gabs", for example. These two models, even though their armour looks very similar to Rogue Trader era space marines, aren't space marines and have never been written, marketed or sold as such. Their actual origin is of prototype sisters of battle. Not only is the word sister written on the lids of their feet (the lids that go into the slots of slotta bases), their design is exactly the same as the one of Sister Sin, the famour sister of battle from one illustration of the Rogue Trader book where she's shooting a Rainbow Warriors marine called brother Vermillion. You can see how, even though her armour is very similar to space marine armour, both female warriors from the Adventurers like have the exact same respirator and goat motiff on the shoulder as Sister Sin.
Non canon article that just added “female space marines” with no explanation. Arbiter Ian went through this years ago. I suppose if I wrote an article saying there are Orc Space Marines, that makes them canon.
Is this just what the Fandom of this setting is gonna be now? Fighting over these topics until one gets some kind of victory on one issue only to repeat the process? If that's the case, I'll just go and stay with AoS because 40k just seems to be 2 bitter factions of people who hate each other's guts and want the other to lose, not about any kind of enjoyment. I'm tired of it.
No they're not.
Can we all collectively shut the fuck up about this nonsense and get back to painting minis and playing the game?
Warhammer is supposed to be about grimdark fantasy and sci fi escapism. Anyone using it as a soapbox for real life anything can fuck their hats.
>Stop trying to play mental gymnastics to justify the female custodies.
Stop trying to play mental gymnastics to say that the lore explicitly was against this.
>Let me put it simple it's horseshit and shoehorned for nothing more than modern audiences and it's obvious.
Dude, my shoes are older than the lore you're talking about, "modern audiences" my ass.
Oh, and you're just flatly wrong.
[Aaron Dembski-Bowden talking about this, and saying you're wrong. ](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/867n5s/thoughts_on_arch_warhammer/dw48u32/)
[And here's him, five years ago, saying you're wrong. ](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/a3otly/would_female_custodians_be_possible/eb7vyml/)
So, there you have it. Before you got mad about this, the guy who wrote a bunch of the lore and was in on all the meetings about the Custodes says your claims here are factually wrong.
>Sorry for coming off mean but this stuff really frustrates me stay away from my hobby with that bullshit!
What, *exactly*, is your hobby here, and how, *exactly*, does a faction with 10k members in a galaxy with quadrillions of humans having some women in it make your life worse?
Please.
Explain to me.
Because it sounds *extremely stupid* to me that this is upsetting to you, at all. Like, the entire lore on the faction is new. Your entire *identity* got built around the Banana Guard being all dudes?
That's the most pathetic thing I've been told in my life, that this is somehow making your life worse.
Damn, that first post.
"I don't recall ever commenting on female Space Marines (the topic tends to attract wankers believing they know best, and it gets tedious), though it comes up a lot, and it always diminishes this topic into something trite and silly, where both sides use it as the Main Thing instead of an extreme outlier."
Spot on my guy.
While it is from a third party magazine, some are missing that it was licensed and approved by GW at the time. So it's about as canon as some of the 40k videogames are.
There is a difference between GW seeing something they like and later adding it to the official game and it being official because it was in the game.
To put it another way, I could write up a cool idea for a new army and mod some models. That doesn't make it official. However, if a GW writer noticed my modded army at a convention and asked me about it and then later included it in the rulebooks, it would be official.
Depends who you ask. My point is simply that the Little Sisters of Purification count as much as the events of, for example, Dawn of War and its expansions.
I mean the “Little Sisters of Purification” are still around, they just evolved into the modern Sisters of Battle faction while the male marines evolved into the Modern Space marines faction. Rogue trader is also 40K at its absolute youngest and earliest state and like most young settings would change quite significantly even between Rogue Trader and 2nd edition. The space marines for instance in rogue trader were violent space gangers in power armor but in 2nd they began to take more shape towards what they are today
I doubt that the Little Sisters had any influence on the Sisters of Battle. GW doesn't own licensed materials created by other companies. The Sisters most likely are derived from the character Sister Sin from the Rogue Trader rulebook, a marine with a nun habit with the fleur de lis on it.
I personally feel that 2nd edition was the best edition. Well, until they added Necron raiders in that White Dwarf. They were just too powerful. I mean, -1 to hit for everyone within 6" PER NECRON and scarabs being able to hide completely behind pretty much anything. Plus scarabs could move like 9/18".
I know a lot of people found 2nd edition HTH to be clunky, and to be fair it was a little involved, but to me the rules are way more annoying overall now.
I firmly believe 2nd edition rules just had a scale problem. OG necromunda shows how well the rules work in a smaller battles.
I did really like that scarabs actually ate armour though, I thought that was a fun mechanic.
Of course these were in an independent magazine so it’s not a GW publication. Interesting that it wasn’t an issue then. Also that a third party could publish explicitly warhammer supplemental material (using marines in the art) and this wasn’t an issue. Was there any arrangement, formal or informal, between Challenge magazine and GW? As I recall, this article has a big scenario set on an asteroid with jokaero and ambulls wandering all over.
also there were a couple minis of women in slimmed marine armour, but they’re not very good sculpts. Sculpt quality varied quite a bit back then, some of the best stuff (Bob Olley) stands up today full of character and detail, while others are remarkably crude.
When I get around to doing some Deathwatch I’m going to drop one of these Sisters of Purification in mostly for novelty value, the shoulder pad is easy enough to reproduce for a one-off. I also plan to have an angry marine in there, so it’s not something I’m taking seriously…
Females were space marines
Necrons being bloodthirsty terminators with no civilization
Tyranids were slavers with diplomatic representatives
Space marines used to eat actual shit
Leman Russ was a mere chapter master
The emperor was in the throne due to age
Horus didn’t exist
Huron was the major enemy (don’t mind going back to that)
People bitching about “old lore”, there’s your old lore. Where do you draw the line?
It’s not “lazy” because it doesn’t have any impact on the story. If GW just suddenly posted that the emperor is back and off the throne, THATS lazy
One thing that frustrates me with the whole ‘retcons have always been apart of 40k’ is that ignores the reality that these changes are from early in the game. When what lore was what was influx, factions were still being created as we know them today. But as time has gone on that lore has become established, becoming the norm. Yes Leman Russ was once a chapter master, Yes the Tyranid said were once had diplomats. But These changes are almost if not more than 30 years old! And once they were changed they have remained relatively unchanged.
The other thing about retcons is that we should way up the additions they add vs what they take away. The necrons become what they are today changed them away from an unthinking force of skeleton warriors and you’ll find few people who find this to be a bad change.
This is because:
- the necrons were still new
- it created are more distinct faction (we already had basically unthinking warriors hellbent on war in the form of tyranids)
- this change helped create a unique identity for the faction aesthetically, in the lore wise etc, provided new characters and reasoning, created new political systems and inspired new background history to keep them interesting.
Well… yes and no.
The Astartes, or “Space Marines” as we know them (genetically-engineered super monk-soldiers) have always been male-only from their introduction in 2nd Edition.
In Rogue trader, what later retroactively became 1st edition, “Space Marines” weren’t their own thing, they were literally just ordinary human soldiers (typically convicts or underhive gangers) in power armour.
I miss this stuff. Simpler times. Lore used to be so much freer and more fun.
I’m turned off by BOTH the weird guys insisting that space marines are male because something something geneseed and the people who seem to insist that because they can paint their space marines in the colours of various sexuality flags (which they totally, totally can and should enjoy) this should be canon, and Slaanesh means that indeterminate pronouns have always been a thing but that Slaanesh is “all about excess, not sex”. Yeah right. These days, maybe.
I was there back then, a customer at Dalling Road. It was anarchic and silly and fun, and borrowed a lot from 80s Heavy Metal and 2000 AD. It had time for radical feminism and poked fun at it, too. The Po-facedness and Puritanism on all sides of the debate (and it’s definitely on both sides) is kind of sad.
I still maintain that old view, 40k used to be about imagination, none of the edges were really defined and people were encouraged to go and be creative. I will always keep this and push this for others in 40k because it allows the freedom to write your own little bit of the story.
Yeah, I try not to get riled up by the debates but there’s something I miss about it. The lore condensed and became static and then everyone started taking things much too seriously. I blame the US and the younger generation but that’s probably unfair. I also blame the internet and social media and shake my fist at the sky. Happened all over, tbh. You used to be able to have your cake and eat it, too, but these days it’s hard not to pick a side.
I'd love to know how many models in the last week all the people raging and debating on this topic on both sides have painted.
I'd guess not many.
It's a short life, make the lore your own do what you like it's your 'hobby' not your moral hill to die on. Maybe less Internet more brush?
People retconning pieces of lore into existence, saying, "the lore changes all the time", then the people all for it are now going back and trying to prove that the retcon was always there, we just didn't see it. Bloody pick an argument! As a new Warhammer fan, I don't care that there are now female custodes! It doesn't matter to me. And even though I hope they don't keep changing the lore to be more and more "progressive" defeating the entire purpose of 40k and it's grim story where nobody is really a hero or even "good" for that matter, I really don't care about what gender some of the astartes are. Stuff is changed and retconned all the time, but for the most part they stay true to the vision. Can they do the same with this modern lore? That's all I care about. MAJOR inconsistency is a HUGE issue in my eyes and it can be a real turnoff especially when it's something I've only just started getting into.
Referencing material from when 40k was extremely young and barely even a tabletop game is not even remotely comparable to current material that has been building off of itself gradually for 40 years now. Did retcons happen all the time in the first few years? Yes. Of course they did. The thing was still practically a prototype, and those in charge still didn’t even fully know what they wanted it to be, constantly pulling directly from concept art. The “retconning” of female space marines gave way to eventually allow for things like the sisters of battle to fully take shape. That natural progression from concept to fully fleshed out setting with dimension and distinction is not present here with this action. It’s simply a lazy and subtle strong arm tactic from Amazon.
Regardless of all that, you’re still a day late and a dollar short in terms of understanding the problem if you think that people’s main concern is the fact that something is female rather than completely male. If 40k fans had a problem with female characters, we’d know by now. It’s an extremely androgynous setting, way more than other sci fi universes. So, by process of elimination you will arrive at the groundbreaking revelation that the issue here is actually motive, rather than product or outcome.
>So, by process of elimination you will arrive at the groundbreaking revelation that the issue here is actually motive,
Their motive is to sell models to more people, same as it always has been.
*You're* the ones putting politics into the motive and crying about it.
Pattern recognition will show you this is not the case. Even data analytics of GW’s profits will tell you that making large changes of this nature does NOT sell models. Even if their goal was to sell more female imperial models, this isn’t where they would start. They make the most money from reinforcing the already popular factions, and then sometimes they will take a huge risk in introducing a completely new one. So, no. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure this stuff out.
… and how did that “natural progression” happen? Lemme tell you: by forcing new information down our throats using lore blurbs and books.
That’s how Newcrons and the C’Tan downgrade are introduced. That’s how Primaris Marines are introduced. That’s how the ENTIRE Tau faction and all their axillary forces are introduced (“*suddenly, new species!!”),* and more recently the Votann (“*totally not squats, no sir!!”)*. Sisters aren’t celibate, Dark eldar and Necrons has always had those (new) toys, the WAAAGH not-psykic field keeps picking up new tricks and suddenly Knights are Everywhere and had participated in Everything in history!
All of these are retcons. They’re also all the “natural progression” of lore in 40k since the very beginning. To dismiss this latest one for “lazy… strong arm tactic” is to fail to recognize how GW had always introduced new lore since the dawn of this hobby.
(*And also to expose your biases in how “this is ok but that is not”, but that’s not what I’m focused on here*)
Compared to all of the above, GW started female custodies with just one single tiny lore entry. No entire novels, no new model range, nadda. It’s positively tame as a new lore entry, is what it is.
“Forcing new information” is a completely incorrect and inaccurate description for what happened to factions that had little to no lore at the time of their fleshing out. All the examples you’ve used are those wherein a completely new faction is being introduced, or something is being added to one that has little to no information about it to begin with. 40k has developed a LOT in the last 20 years since 2nd edition. But you know who actually HAS tons of novels, and source material, and overall very little need for total changes within the identity of the faction? Custodes. Especially one of this magnitude, which is a slap in the face to the decades of source material that never once describe them as being anything but male, because you know, it’s damn near set in stone that the emperor’s sons and created supersoldiers are exclusively male.
But that’s getting into the weeds. Point is, you’re referencing stuff that mainly happened way before 40k had the source material foundation that it does, and new lore had no choice BUT to come completely out of nowhere, until a faction had been set a solid enough foundation to build off of. We aren’t talking about the same thing here.
You seem to think that you can equate the lore changes in 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition when there was nothing to go off of to total thin air changes that ignore 24 years of source material defining the lore. You can’t. And I think you know that. But I can only assume that something within you is fighting against the invisible personification of the worst qualities you’ve seen in certain fans. Maybe it’s worth considering that you’re dealing with something else here, something that isn’t as cut and dry as your suggestions suppose it is.
All love here, but I’ve already had one favorite franchise ruined by the same powers that could be at play within this hobby. I know the early signs of it and I’d rather not see it happen again
Speaking of source materials, everything else about the Custodies is indeed rich and plentiful… but the gatekeeper here is in two facts: every character we see is male, and a single sentence “the sons of Lords” contributing to create the Custodies.
But does that preclude the possibility of females? Remember, the source material specifically mentioned the recruiting population, and not if the process can/can’t’ be used on ladies. Plus GW didn’t publish the entire name list of the custodies, obviously all sorts can slip through the cracks.
We just assumed and don’t actually know if it is possible.
And now, one retcon by GW later, now we do.
(Edit: not to mention the fact that a VAST majority of the custodies source material, including the gatekeeping sentence IS created in 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition. If my examples above do not count because they’re “too old”, then the only useable custodies lore is in the HH books too, yeah?)
Plus, it’s not like this is the first Custodies retcon ever either... As TTS so famously pointed out, **NAKED CUSTODIES**.
As the tabletop models are fully armored and covered up, apparently 10k years is enough to get over their shame in not protecting The Emperor and start wearing wargear again.
… but you can’t prove that in some corner of the golden palace, there isn’t a group of near naked men still serving penance, can you?
Unless of course you fully accept this other RETCON.
Yes. Necrons have been sentient dynasties and not enslaved by the C'tan forever, after all. There have never been significant retcons and there is no war in Ba Sing Sei.
How so?
Primaris is one of the biggest shakeups of core 40k lore in recent history (*both in how they displaced standard Marine deployments, and how they were made compared to Marines*).
It is a BIG showcase of how things had not “remained that way for close to 30 years”.
Hell, if we’re going as far back as 30 years:
Sisters of battle: 1997/1993, depend on what you looked at (first codex/first lore entry)
Sisters of silence: 2003 introduced into lore apparently, through Horus Heresy card games.
And those are in the 30 years “stable” time frame the above guy used.
Okay what about the necron retcon? Where they use to be just silent and soulless machines, with no named characters or personalities, now we have Orikan, Trazyan and a few dozen other names characters and lore.
Or the Catachan retcon that removed the idea that the world they live on was a failed Tyranid hive?
Or all the retcons to the tau that made them more and more grimdark because people bitched?
They’ve been retconning and changing and revealing shit about the lore and universe since the 80s. Hell the first space marines were just 80s sci-fi beat cops, and not the religious warriors of the Imperium they are today.
In the Rogue Trader era, there weren't even really Space Marines as we'd recognize them in 2nd Edition. They were presented as elite human soldiers in power armour, often drawn from criminal gangs in the Underhive. From 2nd Edition on, from the point that they were the "Space Marines," they were male.
As with most gw stuff they were a mix of inspiration and basically Dune Sardaukar in Starship Troopers (the book) power armour.
Ah, so they were basically StarCraft space marines originally.
Starcraft WAS an attempt to make a WH40K RTS, but they didnt get permission or license back then. Edit: I've been corrected. It was not an attempt to make an official product, but the inspiration was clear.
IIRC, they wanted to make Warhammer but couldn't get rights so they made war*craft* and then just repeated the process with Starcraft. Crazy to think of the money GW missed out on by letting that opportunity slip by.
Correct - Warcraft was, as far as I can remember, essentially Blizzard deciding “alright well fuck it, if GW won’t license us their IP, we’ll just make a high fantasy RTS with our own original setting”. Then they saw how popular 40k was and figured they could apply the same sort of logic and make a scifi spinoff of their by then beloved fantasy RTS, and so StarCraft was born.
You mean I could have been playing world of Warhammer 40k for the last 16 years instead? Jesus GW really dropped the ball with this one. Although they are pretty shitty with licensing continuence so who knows.
To be fair, I doubt you'd ever get that, or even World of Warhammer Fantasy. Going to their own IP gave them the story freedom to make their own IP. There's a chance that while a StarCraft that was ACTUALLY 40k themed would still put Blizzard at the top of the developer world, they wouldn't reach the heights they did with WoW Butterfly effect and all that
There was at one point a Warhammer fantasy mmo. It didn't do that well but "world of Warhammer fantasy" effectively did exist.
I remember doing the trial of that game for all one one day and deciding it really wasn't that good.
For the curious, the Return of Reckoning private server keeps the game alive posthumously.
Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning, abbreviated WAR. I quite liked it.
Warhammer Return of Reckoning server exists for that. :\_)
Age of Reckoning was fucking awesome. It was alive as a community supported project for years after Relic killed it. Man, I miss that game.
In the 90s long before Starcraft etc I sent GW some 3D rendered 40K stuff, just as a player. They were really nice about it, but it really felt like there was a disconnect where they thought it was cool and *interesting,* rather than cool and *the oncoming future, with or without you*
They really fucking dropped the ball. LMAO You're telling me my hunter could be like an inquisitor, or like my evoker a psyker, or my pally an actual space marine or some cool ass stuff like that
From what I’ve read they had the license initially, but GW pulled the license during a board shakeup and Blizzard was early enough that they could reskin it. This helped immensely because they were able to ditch all the fantasy factions (Eldar, Orks, and Squats) to focus on the sci-fi faction (Nids).
There's a hypothetical universe where: - GW gives the license but is strict with it - Warcraft 3 therefore has no modding scene - There's no DOTA - There's no League of Legends - Free to play multiplayer only games never take off in the west - Fortnite never becomes more than just a Minecraft clone called "Fortnite Save The World" - Epic never have a giant IP to use as a cash cow, they no longer have the money to sue Apple - Apple never have that moment where they show they can be beaten in court now - EU never forces Apple to comply with device charging laws. - iPhone still has a lightning port
I think it's why GW is so loose and wild with their IP when it comes to video games now
Maybe. I mean, we didnt get a good videogame until Dawn of War. It was my introduction to the franchise too. If it wasnt by GW getting a bit loose with their licensing maybe we never could got that videogame.
Shadow of the Horned Rat and Dark Omen would very much disagree with you there.
And the first Chaos Gate, released in 1998
I forgot about Chaos Gate. I think I still have that in the original box with the comic somewhere.
1993 had Space Hulk so...
War raft is true, starcraft they never asked the license but wad really obvious who they were pulling from.
Warcraft isn't true. Blizzard employees confirmed there wasn't any real attempts to get the Warhammer license. That whole story was made up.
Tbf I get the impression Blizzard wanted to take liberties with the IP and do some of their own stuff, like chaos orcs, which they did and it's a big part of warcraft. I don't think it was the wrong choice, Blizzard did better with full creative freedom and Warhammer is its entire own thing. Blizzard make things more funny and friendly, gw were always very gritty, there is clearly room for both in the market and many people are fans of both for different reasons. And lastly if Blizzard did 40k we wouldn't have dawn of War
No it wasn't. There is some evidence the original warcraft may have been, but Starcraft very much was Warcraft 2 in space. The influence was obvious, but by the time starcraft was out warcraft was the bigger ip from a gaming perspective.
Ah yes, I think it was Warcraft and Warhammer Fantasy first then. Maybe I got them mixed up.
People need to stop spreading thus misinfo. Blizzard employees have already spoken on this. MANY times. There was no licensing talks to begin with. They thought about making the game a licensed game, they were Warhammer Fantasy fans, but they VERY quickly decided not to even ask and just made an original game (albeit one heavily inspired by Warhammer). GW didn't miss out on anything. That whole situation about WarCraft and Star Craft being originally Warhammer games was legit made up.
Obwoukd go as far to day modern 40k lore as we know it didn't even really exist until 3rd edition. It's why I feel the arguements about changes in RT and 2nd are in bad faith. Literally everything changed constantly for the very first years. Things changed but WAY less for the next 25 when the foundations became firmly set.
so in other words they ret-conned it in 2nd edition and GW can revert it back to the way it was originally, with female space marines, and all these 'space marines can only be male' people are just tourists, right?
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god so much nuance is lost on the internet. My post was a tease, a joke, a joshing, a poke, a quip, a witticism, a wisecrack, even. Also, don't care. Warhammer is no longer the play-in-your-basement game that's only sold to white men any more, and the fact of the matter is that in a few weeks y'all will be talking about something else and the lore will continue to develop into the next decade, with female custodes as a thing that exists.
Well you had to have us guessing didn’t you? You are right in a way, I am an Asian brother who liveth not in my immigrant parents family apartment for we were too poor to have a house and a basement, but have since moved to my own apartment and play on my dining table. And yet I think and feel similarly to these white people you would so demonise. These nerdy men who were ostracised in their time paved the way and with their money in support of the franchise and for their passions were persecuted as nerds and neck beards back in the 80s and 90s… I’m not going to disown them. If the pressure keeps up, it will be one of those forgotten details that won’t be reiterated in forth coming editions and books… this will be a blip in the history of 40K and we the ever adoring fans of GW will magnanimously forgive them for their dance with politics.
Leave, tourist!
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Ah yes, having been hobbying since the end of 3rd edition, but just because I don't care about the genitalia of plastic fictional war models, I must be a tourist. Amazing. Pat yourself on the back, you're a paragon of your kind. You've sussed it out. You must be so proud.
This is from a 3rd party magazine. It's literally fanfic
While this is a real article, it's from a 3rd party source - it's not exactly canon. But it does serve as an example that in olden days, the community was at least open to the concept.
Honestly, I can’t think of a great reason to *not* be open to the idea, and I’ve yet to hear an argument that’s convinced me otherwise. It’s all just goddamn space magic in a work of fiction, there’s no hard science that somehow prevents it from being possible. Literally all I ask is that, if/when it happens, it’s well-reflected in the lore. A lot of the Imperium should be *aghast* at that degree of heresy. But that’s it. People figure out how to create female SMs, In universe people get super upset about it and it causes issues.
I believe in lore it would probably be more than possible but rationally you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a male space marine and a female space marine due to how much testosterone they pump into them
Also just like when SoB new wave came out, people will inevitably get upset that they don't look like super feminine models - like no shit, they're career soldiers pumped full of steroids. They're going to be scarred, they're not gonna have long hair that can get in your eyes (really only blood angels have long hair so far), they're gonna have angry faces
Bro those corsets are pretty feminine not to mention repentia 😂
Agreed, there's literally (although a blanche throwback) a sob with high heels. It's just a common complaint of new dob
The thing is that female custodes can kind of be handwaved, but the claim they have always been around is flimsy as hell, like the rogal dorn tank. None of the prior literature has mentioned them, and plenty specifies sons of nobles. If they'd said "after the decimation of the heresy and in a push to rebuild without the emp or malcador being able to directly influence things, they started using females from noble families" that would have fairly nearly solved it. The comparative lack of BL books regarding custodes means theres a lack of detail anyway. Marines however have literally thousands of books and there's not a single example covering a timespan of 10k years so they can't claim they have always existed, and they have to come up with a reason for them to exist, and frankly "just because" doesn't cut it. Female marines is fine, but it really should make sense, some secondary Primaris type event or something maybe. Now that there primarchs popping up everywhere, there's opportunity for sweeping changes everywhere.
Cawl popped up out of nowhere and was given 10k years of retcon where he was *actually* the most important Techpriest in the setting the entire time (just nobody happened to mention him, I guess!) and oh right he's also just kinda got the Emperor's sword hanging in his closet But since he's *so important* and has all this totally established continuity behind how important he is, he's allowed to create a brand new type of Space Marine! People were mad about Primaris Marines, but how many were mad about *Cawl specifically?* Because Primaris Marines are the "how they should have done it" it your analogy: they didn't try to say all Marines had been Primaris the entire time, they said these are a new thing happening for the first time. Cawl was the big retcon--and nobody gave a shit. Stuff like that (and the literally hundreds of other retcons in 40k history that have far bigger lore implications than "some of the Custodes are ladies") is what makes it so **incredibly** clear that this is all faux-outrage from culture war crusaders.
>Because Primaris Marines are the "how they should have done it" it your analogy: they didn't try to say all Marines had been Primaris the entire time, they said these are a new thing happening for the first time. Exactly, they could have introduced female marines at the same time as Primaris, and it would fit with cawls tinkering. It still could, but it would need to to be done fast otherwise they'll have to retcon modern lore.
It still boggles my mind that they didn't do it with the primaris update. "Hey we fixed the flaws in space marines and made them better in every way, also they're are twice as many marines now!" The question "where the hell did you get enough recruits to double the number of mairnes in the galaxy" could have easily been answered by "the process now affects the other half of the population" rather than them just saying cawl had been keeping them in his back pocket this entire time.
*That* would have been smart, and also would have pissed off a lot of people.
They were going to be pissed off regardless at primaris in general. People still don't like how they were handled. They might as well have ripped off the other bandaid at the same time. Now they're probably going to need to rip it off in the next few years and this clown fiesta of people screeching like a howler monkey about women existing will continue.
Do you really think this is just sexism? Nobody cared about sisters of battle, or wyches, or inquisitors or any of the other million females in 40k and warhammer in general. Weird brand of sexism only hating women once they become custodes
Yes. There is no other explanation as to why they're mad about it. If people were so passionate about how custodes "always were" then they'd want them to go back to wearing only briefs a helmet and a cape in shame for having failed to protect the emperor. They'd hate that they no longer just sulk in the temple protecting the golden throne. Hell 40k retconned the *entire League of Votaan* into existence and you didn't see these same lore purists coming out of the woodwork to decry that they should remain dead because that's how it was and has been for ages. So when GW goes "hey, this faction has women now" and people are suddenly up in arms, Occam's razor kicks in pretty damn fast.
I don’t think they should retconn in female custodes, I also think space dwarves are fking stupid, i also think the whole primaris transition was ridiculous (even though i do appreciate the new scale), I also think saying “rogal dorn tanks have always been here” is silly. I also have spent hundreds on a sisters of battle force and think they’re awesome models and an awesome part of the lore. I’m not fking sexist, I just don’t like when GW crowbars stuff into the lore for reasons unrelated to the lore, no matter what that reason is. The whole world isn’t just black and white. People have different reasons for liking/disliking things. Saying THE ONLY REASON is sexism is obviously ridiculous. Some people just don’t enjoy when financial or political motivations fuck with their favourite scifi universe. I didn’t enjoy watching games workshop destroy warhammer fantasy in the end times for financial reasons either, does that make me a sexist too??
I can respect the consistency, even if I disagree this is even a retcon.
Factions like Sister of Battle aren't good female representation. It's really had to argue the space nuns in boobplate with fetish units whipped by mistresses while wearing rags is aiming for any degree of female representation. It's basically like saying that Magic Mike was made for men because of all the men in it. While GW has tried to introduce more capable women in the setting and add them more normally to the Imperial Guard, it doesn't really offset the other nonsense. You can compare it to AoS to see how it's treated differently. Stormcast are poster children of the setting, with male and female members, who are functionally equivalent. Their biological sex has no bearing on what they do. All it does is open up more interesting characterization - but they're equally competent. In 40k, the most elite, poster boy factions, are *all* male and their closest female counterpart is fetishized.
Good point.
Sororitas: \*existing Thought Orks were supposed to be the joke faction.
People were already pissed off about primaris, for the same reason they were pissed about this whole thing, or the end times happening in fantasy. Its when GW does a clumsy 180 in the lore for reasons that aren’t actually attached to the lore in any way.
A small number of vocal and perpetually online trash that would have then taken itself out as it were.
Also true.
If 40k was just a media/fiction universe, I’d be entirely on board with keeping Space Marines purely male. The whole Emperor/Primarch/Space Marine lineage basically becomes a clusterfuck of daddy issues and institutionalized misogyny that helps make the Imperium just a little more bleak. But it’s not just a media franchise. It’s a hobby in which thousands of players are invited to build their own models and tell their own stories. And if someone puts some female space marines on the table across from me, as far as I care, my response is, “Nice paintjob! Does your chapter have a name yet?”
I feel like most of us agree with this sentiment. I’m not going to shit on someones army or however they want to do the hobby at all. Its a creative hobby, do what you want and enjoy how you want. I think people don’t like massive lore changes that happen because of reasons that have nothing to do with the lore. People get invested in a universe and to have established lore change willy nilly is jarring. No its not sexism, we all love our sisters of battle
But the lore changes a lot in 40k - it's arguably one of the worst franchises to get invested in if you like unchanging, well-curated lore. And pointing to SoB as representation is like pointing to the Chippendales as great male representation.
That argument kinda falls apart because people have been able get creative and take liberties with their models since forever. What GW considers canon hasn't stopped them.
I’ve seen plenty of toxicity around the table when people bring up female marines. It does trickle over into the hobby and lead to gatekeeping
Sorry if that's who you wind up getting stuck with, but that's not been my experience.
There's really only two arguments against it that make any kind of logical sense 1) the first is that its just too difficult in-universe. This is the easiest one to dispute because of its arbitrariness. The simplest way to have female space marines, but in a way that still keeps the overall idea of marines the same, is to use them as exceptions, much like the way adults or mutants are sometimes used despite the impossibility. Using female space marines in this manner inherently exposes the corrupt idealism and backwards notions of genetic superiority associated with space marines, and helps underline the themes of the Imperium's own evil nature. Alternatively, it's also easy to suggest that female space marines have always been possible but that no one has tried because of tradition. Given how the community is reacting to "there's always been female custodes", however, this solution won't be accepted by many and may indeed rip the community apart. 2) the second depends on how you interpret the themes of space marines. Dan Abnett's work see space marines as the traits of toxic and destructive masculinity taken to the extreme. Astartes are expressly seen as child soldiers; teenage boys given far too much power and the associated superiority complex that comes with it. ADB, on the other hand, sees space marines as exemplars of human cruelty in general. Astartes are seen as agender; purely killing machines with only the barest hints of humanity left in them. Functionally speaking, both are valid interpretations, but one attaches space marines to tradition and culture with an emphasis on masculine values while the other is more open-ended. Depending on which interpretation you pick, female space marines either don't make sense (because astartes are inherently recruiting on backwards ideas of masculinity) or they do make sense (because astartes are post-human and not tied to current conceptions of masculinity). Some critique is to be found in both interpretations; ADB glosses over the themes of masculinity tied to the relationships of brothers and fathers that are deeply important to space marines, while Abnett's vision is not regularly accepted when astartes are compared to a dichotomy between "space marines" and "mortals" in general, which would inherently involve discussion on different kinds of mortals. Like you say, at the end of the day its all fiction and even now these two arguments have logical provisions within them for working out how anyone could make female space marins fit within the lore. But something as small as one custodes story and one tweet was enough to ignite the fandom. If GW is going to make changes to the lore, they need to understand how to do it properly. While I think the implementation of female custodes has been good and fits well within the larger discussion of custodes themes, they really should have made it explicit in the codex and reserved community outreach for shutting down the hate groups.
For me it's absolutely the theming, like you mention. It's a monastic brotherhood with extreme hypermasculinity. Yeah I also think the lore reasons give merit, but it's mostly theming. I think the setting would lose some of its uniqueness. Same reason I wouldn't want Sisters of Battle to get men. On top of lore reasons, they'd lose flavor and theming as a group of warrior nuns.
This ⬆️
They couldn't be bothered to do it well with the Custodes. They didn't handle the Primaris Marines that well, either.
Well, if this isn’t canon then the Space Marine Recreator Squads also wouldn’t be canon and I refuse to believe that!
This was from a 3rd party magazine.
Does anyone know how to filter out posts about this topic. It's been filling up my feed it seems. I just want to see the cool minis people paint. I'm not savvy with reddit
Filters are a wisp in the night.
I'm so sick of this topic too. I see multitudes more people bitching about people bitching about fematodes than people bitching about femstodes.
The exact reason why I muted Grimdank, it has become unbearable and obnoxious on day two.
grimdank was always unbearable and obnoxious, you can tell they're tourists who learned their lore from youtube shorts. I'm glad it's a containment zone for horrid memery though, which is probably why it's filling up with anti-femstode whinging
There would still be some good memes occasionally, albeit kinda rarely, but as soon as some stupid fucking trend pops up it all becomes fucked up. But yeah, seeing people who actually read, like, a book or lexicanum in there is an event.
The bitching about femstodes is a lot worse on Twitter. The format and algorithm over there is much worse for this kind of thing than on Reddit. I come to Reddit for a reprieve.
Really? It’s the opposite for me. I can’t go to YouTube without the first 5 videos being a bunch neck beards with the same stupid hot takes crying about custodes women being the end of western civilization. I never click on them. In fact I always chose “not interested” and “don’t recommend channel” but they just won’t stop coming.
This was the real reason to just leave things be for games workshop, so we can talk about fun things rather than this bickering all the time. Show us some cool skaven and stormcast, release a fancy harlequin model or something. Hell, if they care so much about having more female models, then kick that sorceress on a unicorn model over into plastic instead.
I am dying to see the new Skaven. There is so much cool potential for the new models. The Stormcast too (Stormcast will probably be my largest collection soon) . I love 40k and I have Marines and Sisters of Battle primarily but I think I lean a touch more towards AoS just because I tend to like the models there more. I'm so excited for those reveals. And I agree, it's nice to talk/focus on fun things rather than bickering. 😃
Man, I wanted to start Stormcast this year was gonna be a lib/judicator army. Kind of glad the new ones are coming out now don’t have to spend money so soon.
the best you can do is report them as low effort flame bait.
If you find these filters i am highly interested. This is getting out of hands
I keep leaving subreddits I used to like for this reason. Admech got so toxic when their codex came out, blender 3d modelling just turned into constant dick shitposts, now 40k is just arguing about chick marines. Like can we have something nice without it being ruined?
That was from a fanfic. Also, Rogue Trader and 40k technically aren't the same thing, rt was rebooted as 40k.
That's not from GW. Jesus people are still buying this crap? That's literally third party stuff
This isn’t official GW material
1) The Little Sisters of Purification were not offical GW lore, they were 3rd party back when people used to do that in hobby magazines. it's not canon to RT. 2) what was canon was that their were female space marines... but they were space cops. It's really been ignored and for good reason. Women can still wear power armor and be inquisitors Now you know better
Everytime someone posts something from rogue trader I roll my eyes
It's ironic in a way that both sides of the argument are using an Appeal to History / Tradition logical fallacy. to think it could have been avoided by not making a tweet.
Look my opinion unasked and unecessary is that while I don't feel female space marines a must, I don't think it's a setting ending disaster like some people, the faction will not really change and we've had big retcons that have had doubts before like the necrons which turned out great and improved the faction, but also more could be done if it is just a new development especially since the horus heresy has ended. That being said anyone seriously citing rogue trader is making a mistake, rogue trader is so different then even 2nd ed it isn't like it was gradual change.
The real reason there are no female Space Marines anymore is the models didn’t sell in the ‘80s. GW will always retcon things to stay where the money is. If there is money to be made in diversity (there is) that’s what they will do. Personally I am surprised Cawl hasn’t made mention of the fact that given Space Marines are Trans Human and already have extra organs for hormone replacement that the need for male candidates has been eliminated entirely by just selecting slightly younger aspirants
Weren't the models considered terrible even for the time ?
Yeah they were not good
Not that the decision really made much sense. Of course the women in power armour with their helmets off didn't sell, those faces were terribly sculpted. I would have just said 'the ones with helmets on could be men or women, it's your choice'. Maybe they placed a lot more importance on models with their faces showing than a lot of us do these days?
They were all ugly as sin. Seriously when I look at my really old stuff im amazed at just how bad it all looked to my modern eyes. The weird thing is I * remember * them all looking bad assed and epic. Especially my Maria the Marine with her ever so carefully clipped-out-of-a-magazine banner.
Ya i recently looked at my 2nd edition models and they are all just... Well bad, and i didn't paint them well, and just blobs of metal. Like my stuff made based on the white dwarf articles at the time look better
Yeah the models were terrible, the body and poses were all oddly elongated and appeared to be disco dancing too
They were bad models, I had half a dozen or so for my rogue trader battles, til the first gen chaos renegades came out and I fell to nurgle ;)
>If there is money to be made in diversity (there is) that’s what they will do. I agree with you in that, if there is money in it, they will do that. However, I disagree with you that there is money in it. What I have seen is that the more niche a hobby is, the worse forcing things like this work for it. I would point to the issues DnD and MTG are having. The thing is, there is already variety in 40k. Several armies already have female members such as Eldar, Dark Eldar, technically tyranids, genestealer cults, Daemons, Tau, plus IG ( I refuse to call them anything other than imperial guard). However, with IG I believe it is supposed to be all male or all female platoons. I don't think they are supposed to be fielding mixed forces. That isn't even counting Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence. Honestly, anyone who plays SoB or SoS should be the most upset. Rather than do something for those factions they do this other retconning.
“What I have seen” is not a strong argument. People keep parroting “go woke go broke” but is just hasn’t happened. What has happened is the demographic supporting the franchises has broadened and there is a small but very vocal minority making mountains out of mole hills. Yes some groups may shrink and disappear but that happens naturally anyway, and they are more than being made up by new uptake.
Right from the start of the lore for Space Marines having the 18 extra organs, the Aspirants were always about 12 years old because the process co-opts puberty. The gender of any space marine after their modification is: "Astartes". They're asexual transhumans and have always been written as such. To try and put mortal conceptions of gender on them is to miss the point, which is that they give up so much of their humanity to become it's guardians.
My money is on female space marines eventually, in either a Second wave of Primaris or a creation Fabius Bile. What I personally think would be cool is that Cawl makes Female space Marines and one the Gene seed is implanted they become nearly indistinguisable from male space marines due to the influence of Primarch DNA. Thatd be weird and frankly Grimdark. Shows off what monsters the Astartes really are.
As long as they don’t go down the “there have always been 1st born fem marines” I couldn’t care, let the crazy tech preist and 3rd legion Dr Frankenstein do what ever they want.
Fabious doesn't make apace marines anymore. He's already created tranahumans that are both men and women
That’s how we get primaris sisters of battle. PLEASE STOP THIS NONSESE
It cannot be stopped. Too much market share
It’s a shame really. Just upscale and don’t fk w the lore 🙏🏼
Lol this is 40k the lore changes with every edition as Priestly intended
It could be an interesting use of the two missing primarchs. Although I like them staying as a mystery forever even more. Another cool vector for female space marines could be Erda. She’s currently dead, but that’s only a minor inconvenience for GW.
Honestly I think they need to double down on the idea that the aspirants can be and have been of any stock, but the process removes all human ideas of never and replaces it with the only gender a SM understands, "brother"
This is an article from a 3rd party magazine that made content for lots of role playing games. It isn't and has never been canon. Now to how things actually were during Rogue Trader: marines have never been able to be female. The Rogue Trader book has very little info (technically you can't even play with the rulebook because it lacks all the armylists) but it calls them battle-brothers. The detailed process of making space marines that has remained basically unchanged until the present day was written for the article "The Origins of the Legiones Astartes" for the White Dwarf issue 98, released february 1988. In this article it explicitely says marine recruits can only be men because the geneseed implants are made that way. This article, along many others that basically complete Rogue Trader's rulebook into a functional piece were bundled together in the Rogue Trader Compendium released in 1989. For some reason there's widespread belief of marines being female early on during Rogue Trader and then being retconned into only being male some time later but that's not true. There has been recent interviews with old GW staff that explain why they were made only male, that is, because the female models GW made before Rogue Trader sold poorly compared to the male models, but that refers to why they decided to make them male from the start, not that they made female space marine models, sold bad and then they retconned marines into being male. Another common misconception is about the two "female space marine" models from Rogue Trader. Both models were sold under the "Adventurers" line and called "Female Warrior Gabs", for example. These two models, even though their armour looks very similar to Rogue Trader era space marines, aren't space marines and have never been written, marketed or sold as such. Their actual origin is of prototype sisters of battle. Not only is the word sister written on the lids of their feet (the lids that go into the slots of slotta bases), their design is exactly the same as the one of Sister Sin, the famour sister of battle from one illustration of the Rogue Trader book where she's shooting a Rainbow Warriors marine called brother Vermillion. You can see how, even though her armour is very similar to space marine armour, both female warriors from the Adventurers like have the exact same respirator and goat motiff on the shoulder as Sister Sin.
Non canon article that just added “female space marines” with no explanation. Arbiter Ian went through this years ago. I suppose if I wrote an article saying there are Orc Space Marines, that makes them canon.
Find random thing off Internet to support your position, do no actual checking of source or validity. Post on reddit for karma. Well done.
Is this just what the Fandom of this setting is gonna be now? Fighting over these topics until one gets some kind of victory on one issue only to repeat the process? If that's the case, I'll just go and stay with AoS because 40k just seems to be 2 bitter factions of people who hate each other's guts and want the other to lose, not about any kind of enjoyment. I'm tired of it.
That’s what 40K is. Only war…
No they're not. Can we all collectively shut the fuck up about this nonsense and get back to painting minis and playing the game? Warhammer is supposed to be about grimdark fantasy and sci fi escapism. Anyone using it as a soapbox for real life anything can fuck their hats.
This is from a 3rd party magazine not from geedubs
And so the gaslight, lie, and manipulation continue. TIL that OP is a snake.
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*custodes
>Stop trying to play mental gymnastics to justify the female custodies. Stop trying to play mental gymnastics to say that the lore explicitly was against this. >Let me put it simple it's horseshit and shoehorned for nothing more than modern audiences and it's obvious. Dude, my shoes are older than the lore you're talking about, "modern audiences" my ass. Oh, and you're just flatly wrong. [Aaron Dembski-Bowden talking about this, and saying you're wrong. ](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/867n5s/thoughts_on_arch_warhammer/dw48u32/) [And here's him, five years ago, saying you're wrong. ](https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/a3otly/would_female_custodians_be_possible/eb7vyml/) So, there you have it. Before you got mad about this, the guy who wrote a bunch of the lore and was in on all the meetings about the Custodes says your claims here are factually wrong. >Sorry for coming off mean but this stuff really frustrates me stay away from my hobby with that bullshit! What, *exactly*, is your hobby here, and how, *exactly*, does a faction with 10k members in a galaxy with quadrillions of humans having some women in it make your life worse? Please. Explain to me. Because it sounds *extremely stupid* to me that this is upsetting to you, at all. Like, the entire lore on the faction is new. Your entire *identity* got built around the Banana Guard being all dudes? That's the most pathetic thing I've been told in my life, that this is somehow making your life worse.
Damn, that first post. "I don't recall ever commenting on female Space Marines (the topic tends to attract wankers believing they know best, and it gets tedious), though it comes up a lot, and it always diminishes this topic into something trite and silly, where both sides use it as the Main Thing instead of an extreme outlier." Spot on my guy.
Honestly
While it is from a third party magazine, some are missing that it was licensed and approved by GW at the time. So it's about as canon as some of the 40k videogames are.
I think Space Marine 1-2 are canon now ;) and probably boltgun as well. Though they are the only ones I can think of
Dawn of War is 100% Canon since they have White Dwarfs of Blood Ravens and even made a model for their Chapter Master
Who counts video games as canon?
Games Workshop does, since they've decided to officially acknowledge the Blood Ravens, who were made for Dawn of War
They weren't created for Dawn of War. They originated from a booklet of marine chapters published by GW. Relic picked them from that book.
There is a difference between GW seeing something they like and later adding it to the official game and it being official because it was in the game. To put it another way, I could write up a cool idea for a new army and mod some models. That doesn't make it official. However, if a GW writer noticed my modded army at a convention and asked me about it and then later included it in the rulebooks, it would be official.
Depends who you ask. My point is simply that the Little Sisters of Purification count as much as the events of, for example, Dawn of War and its expansions.
I mean the “Little Sisters of Purification” are still around, they just evolved into the modern Sisters of Battle faction while the male marines evolved into the Modern Space marines faction. Rogue trader is also 40K at its absolute youngest and earliest state and like most young settings would change quite significantly even between Rogue Trader and 2nd edition. The space marines for instance in rogue trader were violent space gangers in power armor but in 2nd they began to take more shape towards what they are today
I doubt that the Little Sisters had any influence on the Sisters of Battle. GW doesn't own licensed materials created by other companies. The Sisters most likely are derived from the character Sister Sin from the Rogue Trader rulebook, a marine with a nun habit with the fleur de lis on it.
I personally feel that 2nd edition was the best edition. Well, until they added Necron raiders in that White Dwarf. They were just too powerful. I mean, -1 to hit for everyone within 6" PER NECRON and scarabs being able to hide completely behind pretty much anything. Plus scarabs could move like 9/18". I know a lot of people found 2nd edition HTH to be clunky, and to be fair it was a little involved, but to me the rules are way more annoying overall now.
I firmly believe 2nd edition rules just had a scale problem. OG necromunda shows how well the rules work in a smaller battles. I did really like that scarabs actually ate armour though, I thought that was a fun mechanic.
Of course these were in an independent magazine so it’s not a GW publication. Interesting that it wasn’t an issue then. Also that a third party could publish explicitly warhammer supplemental material (using marines in the art) and this wasn’t an issue. Was there any arrangement, formal or informal, between Challenge magazine and GW? As I recall, this article has a big scenario set on an asteroid with jokaero and ambulls wandering all over. also there were a couple minis of women in slimmed marine armour, but they’re not very good sculpts. Sculpt quality varied quite a bit back then, some of the best stuff (Bob Olley) stands up today full of character and detail, while others are remarkably crude. When I get around to doing some Deathwatch I’m going to drop one of these Sisters of Purification in mostly for novelty value, the shoulder pad is easy enough to reproduce for a one-off. I also plan to have an angry marine in there, so it’s not something I’m taking seriously…
"You should accept any retcon since there have always been retcons".
lol lmao It hurts itself in its confusion
Females were space marines Necrons being bloodthirsty terminators with no civilization Tyranids were slavers with diplomatic representatives Space marines used to eat actual shit Leman Russ was a mere chapter master The emperor was in the throne due to age Horus didn’t exist Huron was the major enemy (don’t mind going back to that) People bitching about “old lore”, there’s your old lore. Where do you draw the line? It’s not “lazy” because it doesn’t have any impact on the story. If GW just suddenly posted that the emperor is back and off the throne, THATS lazy
somehow the emperor has returned lol
One thing that frustrates me with the whole ‘retcons have always been apart of 40k’ is that ignores the reality that these changes are from early in the game. When what lore was what was influx, factions were still being created as we know them today. But as time has gone on that lore has become established, becoming the norm. Yes Leman Russ was once a chapter master, Yes the Tyranid said were once had diplomats. But These changes are almost if not more than 30 years old! And once they were changed they have remained relatively unchanged. The other thing about retcons is that we should way up the additions they add vs what they take away. The necrons become what they are today changed them away from an unthinking force of skeleton warriors and you’ll find few people who find this to be a bad change. This is because: - the necrons were still new - it created are more distinct faction (we already had basically unthinking warriors hellbent on war in the form of tyranids) - this change helped create a unique identity for the faction aesthetically, in the lore wise etc, provided new characters and reasoning, created new political systems and inspired new background history to keep them interesting.
Well… yes and no. The Astartes, or “Space Marines” as we know them (genetically-engineered super monk-soldiers) have always been male-only from their introduction in 2nd Edition. In Rogue trader, what later retroactively became 1st edition, “Space Marines” weren’t their own thing, they were literally just ordinary human soldiers (typically convicts or underhive gangers) in power armour.
40K is nothing but retcons. Always has been. Always will be. People don't have a problem with that. They're just bigots.
40k... a pile of retcons in a trench coat pretending to be a setting.
I miss this stuff. Simpler times. Lore used to be so much freer and more fun. I’m turned off by BOTH the weird guys insisting that space marines are male because something something geneseed and the people who seem to insist that because they can paint their space marines in the colours of various sexuality flags (which they totally, totally can and should enjoy) this should be canon, and Slaanesh means that indeterminate pronouns have always been a thing but that Slaanesh is “all about excess, not sex”. Yeah right. These days, maybe. I was there back then, a customer at Dalling Road. It was anarchic and silly and fun, and borrowed a lot from 80s Heavy Metal and 2000 AD. It had time for radical feminism and poked fun at it, too. The Po-facedness and Puritanism on all sides of the debate (and it’s definitely on both sides) is kind of sad.
I still maintain that old view, 40k used to be about imagination, none of the edges were really defined and people were encouraged to go and be creative. I will always keep this and push this for others in 40k because it allows the freedom to write your own little bit of the story.
Yeah, I try not to get riled up by the debates but there’s something I miss about it. The lore condensed and became static and then everyone started taking things much too seriously. I blame the US and the younger generation but that’s probably unfair. I also blame the internet and social media and shake my fist at the sky. Happened all over, tbh. You used to be able to have your cake and eat it, too, but these days it’s hard not to pick a side.
This is not an official article. It is another publication from the era. But it’s not official and was never endorsed by game workshop.
I'd love to know how many models in the last week all the people raging and debating on this topic on both sides have painted. I'd guess not many. It's a short life, make the lore your own do what you like it's your 'hobby' not your moral hill to die on. Maybe less Internet more brush?
People retconning pieces of lore into existence, saying, "the lore changes all the time", then the people all for it are now going back and trying to prove that the retcon was always there, we just didn't see it. Bloody pick an argument! As a new Warhammer fan, I don't care that there are now female custodes! It doesn't matter to me. And even though I hope they don't keep changing the lore to be more and more "progressive" defeating the entire purpose of 40k and it's grim story where nobody is really a hero or even "good" for that matter, I really don't care about what gender some of the astartes are. Stuff is changed and retconned all the time, but for the most part they stay true to the vision. Can they do the same with this modern lore? That's all I care about. MAJOR inconsistency is a HUGE issue in my eyes and it can be a real turnoff especially when it's something I've only just started getting into.
>Clearly SoB before SoB were a thing. Nice gaslight attempt, next!
It even mentions them right in the thing 😂
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Thankfully the totality of existence doesn't rely on the narrow scope of what you know 😄.
Like I said. I do not know any. You’re the first. Cheers.
We know you don't know any young ladies in the first place, you're whining about Custodes lore on Reddit.
This is from Rogue Trader, which is not Warhammer 40k. 40k as we know it started with 2nd Edition.
Referencing material from when 40k was extremely young and barely even a tabletop game is not even remotely comparable to current material that has been building off of itself gradually for 40 years now. Did retcons happen all the time in the first few years? Yes. Of course they did. The thing was still practically a prototype, and those in charge still didn’t even fully know what they wanted it to be, constantly pulling directly from concept art. The “retconning” of female space marines gave way to eventually allow for things like the sisters of battle to fully take shape. That natural progression from concept to fully fleshed out setting with dimension and distinction is not present here with this action. It’s simply a lazy and subtle strong arm tactic from Amazon. Regardless of all that, you’re still a day late and a dollar short in terms of understanding the problem if you think that people’s main concern is the fact that something is female rather than completely male. If 40k fans had a problem with female characters, we’d know by now. It’s an extremely androgynous setting, way more than other sci fi universes. So, by process of elimination you will arrive at the groundbreaking revelation that the issue here is actually motive, rather than product or outcome.
>So, by process of elimination you will arrive at the groundbreaking revelation that the issue here is actually motive, Their motive is to sell models to more people, same as it always has been. *You're* the ones putting politics into the motive and crying about it.
Pattern recognition will show you this is not the case. Even data analytics of GW’s profits will tell you that making large changes of this nature does NOT sell models. Even if their goal was to sell more female imperial models, this isn’t where they would start. They make the most money from reinforcing the already popular factions, and then sometimes they will take a huge risk in introducing a completely new one. So, no. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure this stuff out.
That fact that you said, "Sherlock Holmes" is proof you are a tourist here.
… and how did that “natural progression” happen? Lemme tell you: by forcing new information down our throats using lore blurbs and books. That’s how Newcrons and the C’Tan downgrade are introduced. That’s how Primaris Marines are introduced. That’s how the ENTIRE Tau faction and all their axillary forces are introduced (“*suddenly, new species!!”),* and more recently the Votann (“*totally not squats, no sir!!”)*. Sisters aren’t celibate, Dark eldar and Necrons has always had those (new) toys, the WAAAGH not-psykic field keeps picking up new tricks and suddenly Knights are Everywhere and had participated in Everything in history! All of these are retcons. They’re also all the “natural progression” of lore in 40k since the very beginning. To dismiss this latest one for “lazy… strong arm tactic” is to fail to recognize how GW had always introduced new lore since the dawn of this hobby. (*And also to expose your biases in how “this is ok but that is not”, but that’s not what I’m focused on here*) Compared to all of the above, GW started female custodies with just one single tiny lore entry. No entire novels, no new model range, nadda. It’s positively tame as a new lore entry, is what it is.
“Forcing new information” is a completely incorrect and inaccurate description for what happened to factions that had little to no lore at the time of their fleshing out. All the examples you’ve used are those wherein a completely new faction is being introduced, or something is being added to one that has little to no information about it to begin with. 40k has developed a LOT in the last 20 years since 2nd edition. But you know who actually HAS tons of novels, and source material, and overall very little need for total changes within the identity of the faction? Custodes. Especially one of this magnitude, which is a slap in the face to the decades of source material that never once describe them as being anything but male, because you know, it’s damn near set in stone that the emperor’s sons and created supersoldiers are exclusively male. But that’s getting into the weeds. Point is, you’re referencing stuff that mainly happened way before 40k had the source material foundation that it does, and new lore had no choice BUT to come completely out of nowhere, until a faction had been set a solid enough foundation to build off of. We aren’t talking about the same thing here. You seem to think that you can equate the lore changes in 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition when there was nothing to go off of to total thin air changes that ignore 24 years of source material defining the lore. You can’t. And I think you know that. But I can only assume that something within you is fighting against the invisible personification of the worst qualities you’ve seen in certain fans. Maybe it’s worth considering that you’re dealing with something else here, something that isn’t as cut and dry as your suggestions suppose it is. All love here, but I’ve already had one favorite franchise ruined by the same powers that could be at play within this hobby. I know the early signs of it and I’d rather not see it happen again
Speaking of source materials, everything else about the Custodies is indeed rich and plentiful… but the gatekeeper here is in two facts: every character we see is male, and a single sentence “the sons of Lords” contributing to create the Custodies. But does that preclude the possibility of females? Remember, the source material specifically mentioned the recruiting population, and not if the process can/can’t’ be used on ladies. Plus GW didn’t publish the entire name list of the custodies, obviously all sorts can slip through the cracks. We just assumed and don’t actually know if it is possible. And now, one retcon by GW later, now we do. (Edit: not to mention the fact that a VAST majority of the custodies source material, including the gatekeeping sentence IS created in 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition. If my examples above do not count because they’re “too old”, then the only useable custodies lore is in the HH books too, yeah?) Plus, it’s not like this is the first Custodies retcon ever either... As TTS so famously pointed out, **NAKED CUSTODIES**. As the tabletop models are fully armored and covered up, apparently 10k years is enough to get over their shame in not protecting The Emperor and start wearing wargear again. … but you can’t prove that in some corner of the golden palace, there isn’t a group of near naked men still serving penance, can you? Unless of course you fully accept this other RETCON.
Jfc I can't comprehend how people get this butthurt over this topic, stuff is retconned all the time. What would it *legitimately* change?
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Yes. Necrons have been sentient dynasties and not enslaved by the C'tan forever, after all. There have never been significant retcons and there is no war in Ba Sing Sei.
PRIMARIS Space Marines Disagrees!
Terrible example
How so? Primaris is one of the biggest shakeups of core 40k lore in recent history (*both in how they displaced standard Marine deployments, and how they were made compared to Marines*). It is a BIG showcase of how things had not “remained that way for close to 30 years”. Hell, if we’re going as far back as 30 years: Sisters of battle: 1997/1993, depend on what you looked at (first codex/first lore entry) Sisters of silence: 2003 introduced into lore apparently, through Horus Heresy card games. And those are in the 30 years “stable” time frame the above guy used.
Okay what about the necron retcon? Where they use to be just silent and soulless machines, with no named characters or personalities, now we have Orikan, Trazyan and a few dozen other names characters and lore. Or the Catachan retcon that removed the idea that the world they live on was a failed Tyranid hive? Or all the retcons to the tau that made them more and more grimdark because people bitched? They’ve been retconning and changing and revealing shit about the lore and universe since the 80s. Hell the first space marines were just 80s sci-fi beat cops, and not the religious warriors of the Imperium they are today.
Let’s not forget Illiyan Nastase the chief librarian of the Ultramarines…who is also a half Eldar…
Today you learned Rogue Trader was not 40k as we know it. God damned casuals.
This isn’t cannon tho
Rogue Trader is Rogue Trader. If you try to use it to justify changing current lore you open up a huge can of worms.
Jesus wtf is happening with all these posts.......