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Fair, and I agree that they dropped the ball by NOT making Primaris equal-opportunity. It would have been a great way to discuss inclusion without "discussing inclusion," as the oldest boys club reconciles changing times. It's basically the best use of sci-fi as a genre. But what kicked this off was a photo of a paragraph from the new Heresy rulebook. Which isn't really the gotcha people seem to want it to be.
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Jun 20, 2022 13:11
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Comstar posted:GW's sexist or there would be female Imperial Guard AND Genestealer cult figures right the gently caress now. Currently we have 1 (future) General whose not out yet, and a commissar that costs as much as a platoon of WW2 28mm infantry. They have very carefully NOT show any female IG below general rank in the soon to be released range of IG figures, despite there being female guard in the books since the 90's. moths posted:I mean sure he calls himself the Father of Mankind, who created twenty demigod sons, and an all male bodyguard cadre. He relegated his most powerful psychic warrior women to a non-speaking order. His only trusted advisor is a man, and every protagonist voice in power is male. Covermeinsunshine posted:Yeah but I'm talking 40k here - there is no reason for Cawl to also follow big golden manbaby footsteps and not fix the mistake of excluding woman. I mean no female space marines and overall lack of female minis in empire range is just part of bigger problem with the setting as presented and gws lack of will to upset status quo. I'm not sure if this is corporate directive or is it on people writing the game (also might just be inertia)  in the HH book. I agree they should have said Primaris, explicitly identified as an improvement on the original Space Marines, could be any gender. Ditto CSMs, given Fabius Bile is a thing and he doesn't give one solitary poo poo about the Emperor's hangups. They're not marketing just to some grogs in the 80s anymore, and there's nothing really stopping them at this point. You literally just need some new heads and you're done. Ideally they really nail their colours to the mast and one of the returning primarchs comes out as Trans. Imagine the salt. Although I suppose that might raises questions about how to represent that sensitively - would who it is still go by their old name? I imagine chuds would just proxy the 30k version (and I'm sure GW would have no problem with someone spending a premium on the older model - compare the cost of 30k & 40k Guilliman, for instance), but I don't know how you'd handle that when someone plops it down on the other side of the table and insists on using the wrong pronouns.
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Jun 20, 2022 13:29
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more seriously, "female space marines" is a proxy for a bunch of different concerns on the part of different audiences, and while those concerns are absolutely relevant, it's not actually a good proxy for any of them. there are a million thematic statements you could make by including them or by excluding them, ways to illustrate the Imperium's backwardness or tendency to shoot itself in the foot or to signal "WH40k is a boys' club!", but ultimately the problem is that GW has no principles other than "don't make baby mad" and making female space marines wouldn't actually signify anything except that their marketing department crunched the numbers and thinks people who want it would spend more money than people who don't. same with the Guard, the ambiguity and the product being misaligned with the lore isn't an accident, it's deliberate cowardice. like it's not "the best use of sci-fi as a genre" it's just New Coke for plastic armymans. if you have a genuinely clever, forward-thinking, or insightful take on how it could be integrated into the setting, all it means is that GW's writing and direction are loving well beneath you. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 13:30
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My personal theory is a lot of it is also internal strife between writing teams - there’s a lot of evidence of internal change, with things like trans and non-binary Stormcast, one of the recent Ork novels starring a non-binary ork, etc, and then you get this, which feels a lot like a writer trying to put a regressive stake in the ground.
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Jun 20, 2022 13:35
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I think I agree with what Mors said above That sentence does not have to be there. Like you could completely omit it from that paragraph but some writer chose to put it there for some reason. On the other hand it is possible that instead of malicious it is just an example of being thoughtless and/or just lazy copy and paste from older fluff.
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Jun 20, 2022 13:44
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Mors Rattus posted:My personal theory is a lot of it is also internal strife between writing teams - there’s a lot of evidence of internal change, with things like trans and non-binary Stormcast, one of the recent Ork novels starring a non-binary ork, etc, and then you get this, which feels a lot like a writer trying to put a regressive stake in the ground. isn't HH made by a completely different set of people at ForgeWorld?
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Jun 20, 2022 14:34
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Antivehicular posted:If it's anatomical... why? What part of this rig needs to attach to the genitals? load bearing (dry)balls
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Jun 20, 2022 14:36
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alg posted:isn't HH made by a completely different set of people at ForgeWorld? Used to be. It’s a core game now, so…it might still be? Or it might not. Certainly the head of Forge World has persistent rumors of being a chud, iirc
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Jun 20, 2022 14:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:
The best use of sci-fi as a genre is in generating discussion and understanding of social issues in the abstract. Re-contextualizing them as fiction lets you set aside prejudice and baggage. People who might have some real lovely ideas about class consciousness can sometimes tolerate (or even enjoy!) a story about the exploitation of robot labor. It's why every loving issue had a Harry Potter analogue in 2016. "These new Space Catholic Nazis don't look like us, but actually that's good" is... probably the closest you could get with 40k. While that isn't the height of Sci-fi, you're at least holding the best tool by the right end. It opens the door to discussing men's spaces and exclusivity in a relatable way that the nerd audience won't barf off as woke pandering.
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Jun 20, 2022 14:53
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i suspect i have a much lower opinion of didactic fiction than you do it would be one thing if it were effective propaganda, but to be effective propaganda generally needs to be omnipresent, continually reinforced, and as close as possible to invisible; not coincidentally, effective propaganda, even for a good cause, almost necessarily means bad fiction and if you just go full youth pastor mode you don't even get the benefit of the supposed trade-off e: like don't me wrong -- female space marines would still be a good change -- but it'd be good for reasons that basically amount to a) more girls getting to see themselves reflected in the hobby in a way that boys take for granted and b) who it draws in and who it alienates would have a small but overall positive effect on the atmosphere of gaming spaces, on average. representation can just be a win for its own sake, and probably should because measuring it in terms of higher meaning or ideological outreach is setting yourself up for disappointment Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 15:15
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I will forever remember how awkward Deathwatch's book was with 'look, um, I guess if you have someone in your group who wants to play as a woman, let them play someone who is mechanically massively worse at the main elements of the game (shooting people with giant guns and chainsaws) just so they can do that, we got nothing, GW is GW'. It wasn't even FFG's fault, I don't blame 'em for it.
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Jun 20, 2022 15:56
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Female space marines and transgender marines would piss off chuds and is thus worth it for that reason alone.
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Jun 20, 2022 15:59
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neaden posted:Female space marines and transgender marines would piss off chuds and is thus worth it for that reason alone. and perhaps more to the point than any of this: they're cool
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Jun 20, 2022 16:20
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They ever start making WFRP models or books again? The superior product, for the superior gamer, and yet somehow it manages to NOT have load-bearing sexism
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Jun 20, 2022 16:24
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Nessus posted:They ever start making WFRP models or books again? The superior product, for the superior gamer, and yet somehow it manages to NOT have load-bearing sexism what are you talking about, WFRP has Brettonian Knights, every single one of whom is a man. no women in the chivalric orders, not a single one
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Jun 20, 2022 16:28
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No, they replaced rules and a good setting with gold space marines.
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Jun 20, 2022 16:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:what are you talking about, WFRP has Brettonian Knights, every single one of whom is a man. no women in the chivalric orders, not a single one This may not accurately present the fluff, or may present one version's version and not the most typical version. e: it occurs to me I may have been  'd
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Jun 20, 2022 16:31
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FishFood posted:The "no female space marines" thing is so dumb and is also really boring, GW is abandoning so many cool storytelling opportunities by keeping the old lore. I think my favorite treatment is to treat Space Marines as only being one gender but that gender is Space Marine. Before they're frankensteined they could be "male" or "female" but once they've gone through an artificial super-science puberty and heavy indoctrination they become something else and have little in common with men or women in broader Imperial society. You could then explore what that means, why this third gender is so explicitly masculine in the pretty clearly patriarchal Imperium, stuff like that. Instead it's just "you can't be a member of our flagship faction if you aren't a boy" which is so limiting and boring. That's the premise of that (really good and interesting) short story about "I identify as an attack helicopter" that got wrapped up in controversy last year because it was based on an alt-right talking point. It was specifically about that idea: a future where people were conditioned to identify with their role in the military as their gender. That kind of poo poo opens so many really interesting areas to explore. It's probably too weird for modern GW, but I'd love to see them lean into the idea of what all the weird science and biotechnology means for the psychology of the imperium.
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Jun 20, 2022 16:35
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Notahippie posted:That's the premise of that (really good and interesting) short story about "I identify as an attack helicopter" that got wrapped up in controversy last year because it was based on an alt-right talking point. It was specifically about that idea: a future where people were conditioned to identify with their role in the military as their gender. That kind of poo poo opens so many really interesting areas to explore. It's probably too weird for modern GW, but I'd love to see them lean into the idea of what all the weird science and biotechnology means for the psychology of the imperium. "i am a man because i was remade in the Emperor's image and he is a man" is kind of horrifying and uncomfortable, and not necessarily great "representation" because treating it as a direct allegory for any real-life social phenomenon is a good way to stick your foot in your mouth, but it's certainly not boring
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Jun 20, 2022 16:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"i am a man because i was remade in the Emperor's image and he is a man" is kind of horrifying and uncomfortable, and not necessarily great "representation" because treating it as a direct allegory for any real-life social phenomenon is a good way to stick your foot in your mouth, but it's certainly not boring I took FishFood's point to be more like "My gender is Marine," where the average imperial reads that as male because it's so masculine-coded, but it's weirder than that. Like, there's a fundamental incompatibility between how a psychoconditioned marine understands themselves and how the lay person thinks about their gender. To me that idea heightens the weird future elements of 40k and the idea that marines are fundamentally *other* compared to the rest of the humanity. But yeah, as far as representation goes that's maybe not such a great look for gender issues.
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Jun 20, 2022 16:57
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To go back to L337, I love how the Auralnauts keep bringing that up. They had Lando betray Han to get her back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwsMYJdmutQ&t=618s
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Jun 20, 2022 17:07
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Notahippie posted:I took FishFood's point to be more like "My gender is Marine," where the average imperial reads that as male because it's so masculine-coded, but it's weirder than that. Like, there's a fundamental incompatibility between how a psychoconditioned marine understands themselves and how the lay person thinks about their gender. To me that idea heightens the weird future elements of 40k and the idea that marines are fundamentally *other* compared to the rest of the humanity. No "but" necessary, the point is less that that makes it a bad idea than that it illustrates the value of modes besides allegory. 
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Jun 20, 2022 17:11
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MonsieurChoc posted:To go back to L337, I love how the Auralnauts keep bringing that up. They had Lando betray Han to get her back. Everything about that subplot was bafflingly poorly done, when it could have been interesting, though of course the really interesting interpretation (Lando and Han fell out because Han insisted on ownership of the spaceship containing the brain of Lando's robot gf) makes Han look terrible which obviously was never in the cards.
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Jun 20, 2022 17:41
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Nessus posted:They ever start making WFRP models or books again? The superior product, for the superior gamer, and yet somehow it manages to NOT have load-bearing sexism There's a new edition out, which is apparently quite good (including on the representation front).
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Jun 20, 2022 17:57
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I really think it's worth pointing out that all the 'egalitarian' stuff about WH40k is either in fluff that's easy to miss, ignore, or discount or in the video games which are explicitly more mass-marketable and tone down the grimdark a whole bunch. The mini lines don't reflect this 'egalitarian' mindset at all, and that's honestly a bit damning for me. It's purely tell-don't-show, an excuse to fall back on when people point out that hey, why is almost every model they make a dude? Why is the most representation of women in the model lines titty witches of various flavors? It feels super disingenuous to be like, "See, they wrote some words at one point saying that the Imperium accepts women, job's done, women don't need any more representation than that for something to be egalitarian"
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Jun 20, 2022 18:17
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Yvonmukluk posted:There's a new edition out, which is apparently quite good (including on the representation front). Are you referring to Age of Sigmar? It's not the same, it uses (some) of the same models but just about everything else is completely different.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:00
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Darwinism posted:I really think it's worth pointing out that all the 'egalitarian' stuff about WH40k is either in fluff that's easy to miss, ignore, or discount or in the video games which are explicitly more mass-marketable and tone down the grimdark a whole bunch. The mini lines don't reflect this 'egalitarian' mindset at all, and that's honestly a bit damning for me. It's purely tell-don't-show, an excuse to fall back on when people point out that hey, why is almost every model they make a dude? Why is the most representation of women in the model lines titty witches of various flavors? This is one of those situations where I can see why they're doing it, even if I think it's wrong: Whales buy a lot of minis. Calculating if losing some whales in favor of picking up new customers will balance out financially is difficult. Printing tons of plastic that might not sell is a dangerous proposition to investors, when they could instead keep doing the same thing which has been demonstrated to make money. Translating "People on Twitter are mad at us" into "We made them happy, so they purchased our products" is extraordinarily difficult. It's the same thing with anime gacha games: the company knows the rich guys who spend the most money on the product spend a lot to roll big tiddy anime girls, so they'll keep putting more of them into the game, even if it turns off players who might enjoy and spend money on the game if it had bishoujo dudes instead, because the latter are not necessarily a reliable revenue stream, while the former are demonstrably so. Why rock the boat and potentially lose money? In conclusion, gently caress capitalism for providing perverse incentives to continue exclusionary and offensive behaviors to protect financial gains.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:20
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Are you referring to Age of Sigmar? It's not the same, it uses (some) of the same models but just about everything else is completely different. No, they mean Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The team who does it, Cubicle7, currently does all of GW's rpg systems, including AoS' (Soulbound) and what they've been able to salvage of 40k's (Wrath and Glory). Now, Warhammer Fantasy Battles? That's pretty much down to Total War: Warhammer now. And I doubt we'll ever see it back on tabletops. The Bee fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 19:33
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The Bee posted:No, they mean Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The team who does it, Cubicle7, currently does all of GW's rpg systems, including AoS' (Soulbound) and what they've been able to salvage of 40k's (Wrath and Glory). They're doing something with it at some point. They just haven't put out much information.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:41
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Whatever Old World is, it doesn't seem like it'll be EFHB. It takes place in a completely different time period, and so far seems more human focused (I think Empire, Kislev, and Cathay?) instead of everything WHFB had going on. But it is also way too little info to tell beyond that.
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Jun 20, 2022 20:12
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Darwinism posted:I really think it's worth pointing out that all the 'egalitarian' stuff about WH40k is either in fluff that's easy to miss, ignore, or discount or in the video games which are explicitly more mass-marketable and tone down the grimdark a whole bunch. The mini lines don't reflect this 'egalitarian' mindset at all, and that's honestly a bit damning for me. It's purely tell-don't-show, an excuse to fall back on when people point out that hey, why is almost every model they make a dude? Why is the most representation of women in the model lines titty witches of various flavors? One of the important phenomena around any Games Workshop product is that a lot of their own fans tone the fluff down without entirely noticing (a group that arguably includes a good chunk of GW's own writing stable). Canon 40K is measurably darker, more misogynistic, and firmly more fascist than RPG 40K (written by Fantasy Flight and other third-party authors, who have to consider social contract issues and table dynamics) and the "meme 40K" that a lot of geeks keep in their heads. Meme 40K has the psychic comedy Orks who believe their own weapons work. Canon 40K has the Grey Knights slaughtering Sisters of Battle and bathing in their blood so the purity rubs off. Meme 40K genuinely could be egalitarian or make storyline points about space marines' masculinity...but it's not actually real and GW does not actually support it. Canon 40K is half the setting's factions relying on fascist iconography and the Nazi part of Catholic Space Nazis. A lot of geeks who draw their personal line at Meme 40K (and genuinely love the setting they've created) can end up quite shocked by discovering the reality of just what they're defending. That's exactly what's happened here. Loxbourne fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 20:16
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E:ignore me
Improbable Lobster fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 20:51
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The Bee posted:No, they mean Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The team who does it, Cubicle7, currently does all of GW's rpg systems, including AoS' (Soulbound) and what they've been able to salvage of 40k's (Wrath and Glory). derp. yeah dont know why I read "WFRP" as WHFB" but yeah I've ran WFRP. It was pretty good, ran the first 1/5 of the big campaign and then decided to not pursue it ffurther since another player REALLY wants to run the One Ring so we've moved onto that one.
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Jun 20, 2022 21:08
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Notahippie posted:I took FishFood's point to be more like "My gender is Marine," where the average imperial reads that as male because it's so masculine-coded, but it's weirder than that. Like, there's a fundamental incompatibility between how a psychoconditioned marine understands themselves and how the lay person thinks about their gender. To me that idea heightens the weird future elements of 40k and the idea that marines are fundamentally *other* compared to the rest of the humanity. Yeah, that's really what I'm getting at. The difference between marines and the rest of humanity is a huge part of 40k fiction and emphasized in a lot of space marine stories and I think gender would be a cool lens to use in exploring that. Marines in this view are a lot like Orks in that they're coded masculine but don't really map on to the idea of a "man". There's a couple of ways GW could explore this and change the "no girls allowed" lore that would be really interesting: they could say that girls/women/afab people could become astartes but the process pretty much turns everyone into the same roided-up marine-gendered warrior, given the insane hormones involved. They wouldn't even have to make new models and would fit great with the rest of the lore! Instead they just keep the boring chud-soothing old stuff.
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Jun 20, 2022 21:09
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Terrible Opinions posted:If it's in setting propoganda why not let non-imperial factions make lady marines? Both chaos and non-chaos rebels just making bootleg space marines without any of the religiousity to it. Or even certain loyalist marine chapters like the Bloody Magpies that aren't always doctrinare. I'm now thinking of a 40k knockoff of Monstrous Regiment.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:01
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FishFood posted:Yeah, that's really what I'm getting at. The difference between marines and the rest of humanity is a huge part of 40k fiction and emphasized in a lot of space marine stories and I think gender would be a cool lens to use in exploring that. Marines in this view are a lot like Orks in that they're coded masculine but don't really map on to the idea of a "man". They even amped up the "distance from baseline humanity" thing with the double marines. Missed perfect opportunity.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:32
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People always bring up the lack of women in 40k but even as a kid what stood out to me was how overwhelmingly white it is. Every piece of GW artwork is a bunch of white people murdering the other. The only time you get non-white people is when you have Ethnic Stereotype people from Ethnic Stereotype planet. There's not even a lore excuse for it, Marines are supposed to be able to change skin colour at will but they are conspicuously pretty much always depicted as the whitest motherfuckers imaginable.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:55
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Mors Rattus posted:My personal theory is a lot of it is also internal strife between writing teams - there’s a lot of evidence of internal change, with things like trans and non-binary Stormcast, one of the recent Ork novels starring a non-binary ork, etc, and then you get this, which feels a lot like a writer trying to put a regressive stake in the ground. Which novel has the non-binary ork? I am curious about reading that now.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:03
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the lack of female marines was a really stupid idea and it does come off as kind of a cop out that now they're framing it as more of a lore thing where the dumbass emperor was just tone deaf as hell like the marines are sterile and basically sexless apart from the stupid bardcore furries so its not even a situation of being worried the astartes would just wholly supplant humanity as a species if they could breed true. they coulda just released a few extra heads for the marines and been like 'bam female marines' it did at least get us the sisters of battle, who kind of do the marines thing better than the marines do when they aren't just being used as t&a
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Jun 21, 2022 02:06
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Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!, the non-binary ork is his buddy narrating it to the Inquisition.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:06
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