These modern kids and there fussing and moaning - GW Space Marines

[ManicMan]

It seams 'lost of people' are up in arms because GW said that in 40K, Space Marines can be male or female..

I don't get it.. Even if we ignore the Sisters of Battle which were the only gender based faction that I'm aware of, What is this about? RT had Females in power armour for your Space Marines (Hell, AG posted his great paint job of Gabs from the original RT line), and if you don't do the very weird form fitting armour, power armour is bulky enough that you don't know the Gender underneath.. so.. this has never been an issue as far as I know.. Is there something newer then 3rd 40K which said they are all male for some reason? Since Cloning isn't really a thing (though I believe it is now cause ones like Gaskill has been killed and brought back via cloning and the likes sooo many times (as well as some space marines) that the Emperor is now a pointless character as.. He has a fatal wound so he has to be on this life support machine... but now you could easily bring him back via cloning or the likes, and they would keep any power like psykers do so.. what's the point there?

IF Cloning was a major thing, then I could see the race becoming genderless as gender exists purely for reproduction, and even then, some animals have found a way to get past there (mostly, only small simple things like cells can reproduce like that, but creatures like the Desert Whiptail Lizard is a race that only exist as females, It's interesting how they do it but not worth going into right now unless asked for). but either way... what the hell has Gender to do with anything and why is there meant to be a huge fuss? I don't get it..

 

[Eric]

I suspect it's more that people feel they have done it for the virtue signaling points rather than it "just being a thing" - which it may well have been back in the more wooly days of RT. From the established post RT ret-conned lore (ie ~3rd Ed onwards) that I'm familiar with I'd certainly got the impression that marines were male (Emperor's son's etc...), but it's not like I've read every GW book or have the codexes and so forth. So I think the moaning is more about the reason for doing than the doing itself. Well that's my tuppence on it.

 

[twisted moon]

eric is clearly more charitable than me, i'd say it's simple misogyny.

 

[ManicMan]

fair enough.

some bits in RT do say things like "'Battle-Brothers' or 'Battle-kin'" as a term but later just Brother, but I more take it as a term more then gendered.. Like how 'Lord' and 'Master' were terms for a rank, and then changed to gendered terms.. or how 'Man' and 'Mankind' was a term for the species more then gender based.. but fair enough ^_^

problem is, too many idiots are doing things for the sake of 'Oh, aren't we nice people now' or whatever the thing is for idiots like people who 'feel offended on behalf of people'.

anyway, yep.. makes sense people are moaning for both of your reasons ^_^ I'm just not really any good as an sociologist.. I just think most people are stupid.. It's just sometimes its kinda helpful to figure out why..

 

[Machen]

I'd heard that only custodes include women now. Is it all Space Marines?

One reason I'm an Oldhammerer is that I've long been disenchanted with what happened to GW creatively after they went publicly traded / corporate. I can't get very bent out of shape about the state of current lore. But if corporate GW is going to have female space marines (again,) all I'd ask is that they make that interesting, i.e. that they develop it in the lore and fiction, not just mention it in passing. A lot could be done with it.

 

[symphonicpoet]

Call me crazy, but the inclusion of women in comparatively practical clothing has long been something I admired. And it was so singular in the early days that I can't help but feel it was deliberate; that some of the early GW/Citadel guys might have been on a date or two and maybe wanted their sweethearts to play their little toy people games with them so they actually worked to include them and mayhap listened to what they wanted. (A friend of mine pointed out that it's basically playing dolls with a bit more testosterone and I've been running with that ever since. Was making literal doll house furniture purchased from the doll house department in a local hobby shop for my little toy people just a bit ago. I don't even plan to put skulls on it.)

Anyway . . . The whole monk/nun thing made the marines and their battle sister equivalents a bit more overtly sexed than other bits of the empire. Psykers have been both male and female from time immemorial. Also army grunts, elves, pirates, and adventurers. I personally want my marines to be more special forces and less warrior monk, which means they can have whatever parts they want under their armor, as long as their ballistic skills, intelligence, toughness, and other assorted stats meet the unit minimums. I think someone with a toughness of 1 would wash out of basic training, but maybe even someone with a 2 could be toughened up with a little adep-tation. (Since they only have to get to three.)

But yeah, I'm with Twisted Moon. There's a particular gamer funk to some of the complaints. (And a lack of the awareness that you can play your own game however you want. Just don't be surprised if your group seems rather monastic if you go the all male marines route.) And I'm inclined to think the GW folks were already pretty progressive way back when. The company forgot when it went corporate for a while. Shoved that aside as a threat to profits, most likely. But maybe they want a bigger audience now. Or they got married and had daughters. (Or . . . um . . . grand . . . um . . . never mind that last part.) And they want to share their dollhouse hobby with their friends and family. (Where ever did I get that idea?)

 

[Eric]

I don't even plan to put skulls on it.

Gotcha. Zombie heads it is, fair enough sometimes having the rotting flesh just adds that extra je ne sais quoi

I'd heard that only custodes include women now. Is it all Space Marines?

I think from skimming the swamp it's just Custodies (this time round). That would actually seem to fit a bit better as I rather got the impression from the various Heresy books that the Custodies in the the newer lore were a bit more experimental and a bit of a "one off" so doesn't seem like a stretch to assume their generic engineering started with both male and female human subjects. Still other than enjoying a few audio-books as time permits I can't say I'm up on the current lore.

... And a lack of the awareness that you can play your own game however you want ...

Yep. I have (or had) exercise books filled with our own rules and background to various races planets and so forth. It was just what everyone did. Maybe because there was a bit more emphasis on a Games Master role back then it make the world building more of "a thing"? Perhaps that has gone by the wayside a bit these days? Or maybe you live long enough to see enough ret-conning that you don't worry so much about it. For instance I'd say I preferred the original Dark Angels from Deathwing over the later monster hunting forest knights, but I'm not loosing sleep over it!

 

[ManicMan]

reminds me of how the retconned the Angels of Death name.. Originally that was the nickname of the Space Marines in general, but I think it was changed to be a part of the Dark Angels (or Blood Angels.. I can't remember who that Chaplin is..) with that 'Angels of Death' codex.. no clue what it is now.. the lore was okay for set up stuff to get a theme but I think alot of it just seams stupid now.. but then, I think most of the modern figures are stupid

 

[AranaszarSzuur]

It seams 'lost of people' are up in arms because GW said that in 40K, Space Marines can be male or female..

I don't get it.. Even if we ignore the Sisters of Battle which were the only gender based faction that I'm aware of, What is this about? RT had Females in power armour for your Space Marines (Hell, AG posted his great paint job of Gabs from the original RT line), and if you don't do the very weird form fitting armour, power armour is bulky enough that you don't know the Gender underneath.. so.. this has never been an issue as far as I know.. Is there something newer then 3rd 40K which said they are all male for some reason?

Space Marines being all male for geneseed/organ compatibility reasons was established in early 1st edition - in the WD98 article The Origins of the Legiones Astartes by Rick Priestley.
It was pretty much set in stone by keeping it that way in 3rd edition and with hundreds of Space Marine novels where Space Marines are all male coming out.

The women in power armour were Sisters of Battle, they have Sisters of Battle marking (the critter skull on shoulder pad)

GW Space Marines are still all male. It's Custodes that were retconned. I think they were experimenting with rebooting the setting after Horus Heresy novel series has ended and didn't decide to continue with Space Marines because of the backlash.

I think the main reason they tried it is that importance of Black Library has drastically declined. I was looking at amount of ratings of 40k novels on Goodreads and they peaked at the start of Horus Heresy series and then declined.
Dark Imperium has 10x less ratings on Goodreads than Horus Rising which had 27k. Horus Heresy series sank below 10k ratings with 8th book and never recovered. Last book in the series with more than 5k ratings was 19th out of 54. Last book with more than 3k ratings was book 27, The Unremembered Empire - so halfway through the series it lost vast majority of readers. First book of Siege of Terra has 10x less ratings than Horus Rising. So, there's a clear decline here. It seems that book 21 - Fear to Tread was the last New York Times bestseller - that was 2012 - over a decade ago.

I think that at some point someone at GW decided that Wh40k fiction is unimportant for the business. Like for example looking at Astartes and how many views it had. 18 Millions. 2020 Wh40k cinematic trailer has like 6 million views. It seems all they need to do is to make a spectacular animation and new fans will come. Somehow I doubt even Horus Rising had more than 1/10 of the views of the trailer in readers.

So, I guess they expected people to not care.

 

[ManicMan]

never really understood what the Black Library was.. I know now of course but... Wasn't much of a thing for me.. Didn't really notice much said about it and I can't remember a single warhammer Novel in any shop or anything I looked in. So never seen one in the flesh and, well, the odd mentions in WD didn't mean much to me.. Looks like it mostly started 5th Edition (WFB) where I was kinda drifting out of GW stuff..

 

[AranaszarSzuur]

never really understood what the Black Library was.. I know now of course but... Wasn't much of a thing for me.. Didn't really notice much said about it and I can't remember a single warhammer Novel in any shop or anything I looked in. So never seen one in the flesh and, well, the odd mentions in WD didn't mean much to me.. Looks like it mostly started 5th Edition (WFB) where I was kinda drifting out of GW stuff..

Yeah, there was a big pause in GW fiction. They first tried with internal publishing - with illustrated novels in late 80s. Then through Boxtree. The last Wh40k novel published through it was Chaos Child in 1995.
Black Library started out in 1997 with Inferno Magazine which published short stories. First Wh40k novels they published were Eye of Terror, First & Only and Space Wolf in 1999 so it was already in 3rd edition 40k era.
I encountered my first 40k novel - First & Only in 2000, I think, in supermarket in a mall.

 

[ManicMan]

Run down Backwater town ^_^ only local gaming shop was getting iffy by that point and they didn't do related stuff like books.
nearest GW shop was.. some distance.