Concerning the changes in Warhammer 40,000 · 8:41am May 1st
In case you're a normie or know nothing about Warhammer 40,000, I'll catch you up. The Custodes, the personal bodyguards for the God-Emperor of Man, just recently released a new codex, a book that contains the rules and lore tidbits for the faction. In a single paragraph bit of fluff it tells the story of a female Custodes. I won't go all that deep into the lore and fluff of that story. I get it, their feelings are valid about this change that came completely out of seemingly nowhere. What I disagree with is people saying Warhammer has gone "woke".
Literally the paragraph says that a Custodes that happens to be a woman was participating in the Blood Games, a series trials and war games where the Custodes tests the security if the Imperial Palace in an attempt to get as close to the Emperor so they can see where the weakness in security so they can better protect the Emperor. She essentially gets the bright idea to teleport a live cyclonic torpedo, essentially a super-nuke that can crack a planet, into the sanctum where the Emperor has sat unmoving for the last 10,000+ years upon the Golden Throne. She ony gets found out because the captain of the ship she was on and several of the command crew snitches her out to the other Custodes, who teleport onto the bridge, ending the Blood Game. She wound up servitorizing the captain and several members of the command crew for disobeying her orders, and then moves the rest of the ship's crew to other ships in the Imperial Navy.
She didn't commend the ship's captain and the command crew for their loyalty to the Emperor and the Imperium, she subjected them to the worst punishment, having them lobotomized, having parts of their bodies cut away and replaced with machinery, and then serving out the rest of their days as essentially brain dead slaves.
Now I'm not seeing what is "woke" about this. She brutally punished those under her command for disobeying her orders by subjecting them to a fate worse than death.
I've had a little while to sit and think on this. I get people's feelings about it and recognize them as valid. A sudden change in lore like this can give you emotional whiplash, especially if you've devoted years of your life to being a fan. It gave me a bit of emotional whiplash, which is why I took a little time to think about my feelings and process. I feel the mistake GW did was putting out the tweet where they said there has always been female Custodes, that feels a little talking down-y to me. Several Black Library authors have put out tweets showing their rejected first, second and third drafts where they would have written in female Custodes as far back as 15 and 20 years ago, and even some rejected chapters showing female Custodes.
Something to remember from the lore is that the Custodes are not like the Astartes(space marines). The Astartes are taken as young boys to begin their training, and in early puberty they undergo the implantation process that will transform them into Astartes, baring catastrophic rejections and/or mutations that will kill them or unforeseen complications that stops the process. Custodes are taken as infants, put through genetic testing to see if they're fit to under go the process and then subjected to gene alchemy that transforms them on the cellular level, and those who survive the process become post-human, 10-foot tall, 2000 pound ulitimate warrior bodyguards that can easily take on anything short of a primarch, a greater daemon of chaos or a daemon prince of chaos.
The reason why I'm not all up in arms about this is because about 7 years ago I found a Warhammer subreddit where the question was asked is female custodes. After wading through that minefield, I found a single coherent, non-knee jerk answer. A single redditor said that there is nothing in the lore that expressly forbids infant girls from undergoing the process to become a Custodes, and unless you saw them without their pants, you'd never be able to tell them from the males as they wouldn't have any female secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics. Basically everyone who successfully undergoes the process to become a Custodes are essentially transformed into males, it's just that some of them wouldn't have a penis.
Luetin09 recently did a video talking about it. He said that even though the lore change is a bit abrupt, it doesn't appear to be narrative breaking. He also talked about that though the lore does state that only boys can go through the process to become Astartes, there's nothing stopping GW from changing the lore to where Arch Magos Belesarius Cawl, the creator of the Primaris Marines, could through his experimentations, be able to successfully implant young girls with the Astartes organs and that some of the space marines would be female. They wouldn't have breasts or broad hips or oval faces, because they'd essentially be functionally male.
There will be some people who will feel strongly about this and walk away from the hobby/fandom entirely, any time there are changes to anything that has established lore, some fans will just nope out. Some fans left with the fall of Cadia, the opening of the Great Rift that spit the galaxy in twain and the return of Roboutte Guileman, some fans left with the introduction of the Primaris, some fans left with the introduction of the black Ultramarine, some left with the introduction of Vashtorr the Arkefane and the Arcs or Omen, some left with the retun of Lion El'Johnson and redemption of several of the Fallen, some left with the reintroduction of the squats and them being called the Leagues of Votaan, some left with the retconing of Abaddon the Despoiler and the previous 12 Black Crusades being successes. But most fans stayed and many more new fans joined. Between 18-24 months is about how long it took for most fans to pull their collective undies out their butt cracks and embrace the changes. Yes it was sad to see many of the old fans leave(many, not all, we all know the type of fan I'm talking about here), and the majority of those who left did so without any drama or pomp.
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room, and no, it's not about the drama queens griping about the fake corporate "woke"-ness. Warhammer 40,000 is on the verge of going mainstream. That will bring about changes for the better and for the worse. Halo and Fallout went mainstream, for the better and for the worse. When a niche fandom hits the mainstream, they have to play down many of the less pleasant aspects of the lore and change other aspects of the lore, to appeal to the casuals and the normies. Now I know some of you will bring up Star Wars and Star Trek, but those were already mainstream long before the current changes. There are plenty of dark, disturbing and unpleasant aspects of the lore in 40k that just don't have mass appeal. The Imperium, the Craftworld Eldar, the Dark Eldar, the Necrons, the Tau, the Orks, the Tyranids, the Genesteal Cults and chaos all have things in their lore that makes them unappealing to a mainstream audience and if Amazon does go ahead with making the 40k show, things will have to get played down for the sake of mass appeal.
Now we do have to be wary of too much studio meddling in the IP, because they can completely screw the pooch on it. That's why Rings of Power, Star Trek discovery, the first 2 seasons of Picard and a whole bunch of the Star Wars Disney canon is so bad. As fans, we must also be careful not to demand super hard that we get exactly what we want or we'll wind up with another Mass Effect Andromeda. The studio and/or the publisher also needs to be careful not to talk down to the fans or they'll drive them away en masse.
In closing, if something you're a fan of makes changes that makes you feel a certain way negatively, just wash your hands of it and walk away, no drama, no pomp, no slinging mud or poop, just throw away or give away or sell the physical stuff and leave. It will suck and it will hurt, but in the long run it will be better for you. I was a fan of Star Wars since I was 4 and the changes that Disney made made me feel very negatively, so I threw away or gave away or sold all of the movies, books and T-shirts, and walked away. I've heard Andor, Asoka and the Mandalorian are great, but I'm still a little too gun shy to take the plunge again. I came this close(I know you can't see my fingers, so imaging them being as close as possible without touching) to walking away from Star Trek after being a fan since I was 8, then I gave Below Decks a whirl, and said, "Sunuva Bitch! I'm back in!"
They are perfectly valid to voice their hate, and it's good to let people blow off steam. It's good to vent your hate, not just accept things. Most who wanted this change are not even fans of Warhammer. And by the way, I am not either, but I do have sympathy for their fandom.
I just wish a company somewhere would respond by doubling down on their problematic content and make it even more problematic just to spite them. I would buy their product in a heartbeat.
These were my first thoughts when I heard of this whole debacle. There must be some braindead morons thinking that there is going to be some giant human-like monster with enormous breasts and a thin waist (because that is kind of what the Sororitas look like...), when in reality she would look exactly as all the other Custodes around her. Especially inside their armor. Not to mention that their genitals are atrophied and their mind are barely even human anymore. People should not, while pretending to be the guardians of lore, forget what the Adepta (both the Custodes, the Astartes, and the Sororita) are. Is there even an official image of her?
I think that the discussion is more about something else and it is getting lost in the noise and confused bleating. People don't want 'the woke' to hit their favorite franchises because, 'the woke kills good things'. One argument I keep hearing is that nobody is trying to put a guy in the Adepta Sororitas. And they see this as an attack on a male-only organization and they see this as a sign of bad things to come. I watched a video by Endymion and that is basically the point he makes. His political stance aside, I think this is a good point that is being squandered in a discussion where it doesn't fit for the reasons explained in the first paragraph.
In the end, people are afraid of the hypocrisy that comes from this culture where it is abhorrent to objectify a woman's body, but it is a-okay to objectify a male's body. The best example I can think of as I type this is Amazon's Fallout series. The scene of the raider and Lucy after their marriage. The people that watched the series will understand. Of course, Disney's failure with the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which failed for reasons completely detached from that, have cemented into people's head the notion that 'go woke, go broke'. Which is another braindead take on the situation. Because the problem with Star Wars is not 'the woke' it is breaking lore, bad writing, and heavyhandedness. But because Disney is, contrary to popular belief, not full of idiots, they'll blame these loud morons complaining that there is an asian actress and shift attention to that, while 'ThEy FlY nOw' and the whole idiotic dagger sub-plot are ignored. This is politics 101. Misdirection. People have just not caught on to companies doing this. I mean.. they barely see their pet politician doing it anyway...
And this is what tires me in this whole discussion. The reason the female Custodes is a problem, is not the female Custodes herself, representation, or the mouth-footed response from GW. The problem is that it is a red flag of things to come, and that is what these people are trying to say, but they keep slipping on the social medial banana peels. And now, suddenly the problem isn't that GW doesn't respect their fans and the reason for their success, but the right-wing fascists that hate women and don't want them to have their female Custodes. And this is so stupid, because GW is not breaking their lore with the female Custodes! The whole thing about the Emperor's origin myth should have been more controversial than this! The changes made to the Tau should have been more controversial. Oh, but those are from a time before people divided between two flavors of stupid for everything in between to be lost in the noise.
What do I think? I don't care about the female Custodes. If GW comes up with a full female Adeptus Astartes chapter, and says they are faster stronger than the the original chapters, and that their primarch was the Emperor's sister and her armor had a giant purple dildo strapped to it just so she could make the guys insecure, then I will raise an eyebrow and wonder if there is something going on. But that is not what GW is doing and the histrionics are just feeding the narrative machine.
Most people don't care. Nobody ever started playing the tabletop, or reading the novels, playing the videogames, because of brotherly furor to fictional male-only institutions. They did because space monks and nuns with machine-rocket-launchers and chainswords are cool. I bet there are people that to this day never even noticed that all the Astartes were male. Even here on this site where the fandom is more connected to this kind of conversation, I bet nobody noticed there is a transgender loremaster in Fólkvangr. Because it is the same situation. There won't be a demon of chaos stopping to pay attention to what is on a Custodes crotch ever. It's a non-issue that only people with too much time on their hands are worrying about.
EDIT: Let me rephrase something. The Custodes are not recruited like the Astartes and my comment may have left that impression. What I meant is that the Custodes are still 'based' on a human template, even if they are made from scratch. I don't even know for sure what are the details, and I don't think that it has been explained anywhere. The point is that along the process the whole gender thing ceases to be important as it is in a genetic level. The point being, there may be very well be XX and XY Custodes and they would phenotypically look too similar for an untrained eye to notice the difference.
5778875
*Laughs in greater daemon of Slaanesh*
5778864
I just recently watched Brad Williams' newest comedy special and he said something similar.
I damn near pissed myself when he did the faux commercial for far right maxi pads.
5778919
The worst part is that you're right. lmao.