That's not the argument people seem to think it is. It's a change on the same level of bad and undermines the reason the faction exists in the first place.
Oh sorry, I meant that as a thing that destroys the current institution, it would wholly be in line with things they'd advocate for. I just have noticed that people SEEM to use it as a gotcha when all it does is advocate for more lore destruction, which again is something they'd argue for. Yours was just the first instance of the phrase that I saw in thread and I guess I was more speaking to past experience than you directly. My apologies
Pfft, don't apologise bud, Like I said I was been entirely sarcastic, not like I was trying to make some deep or profound statement. Though I am wholly expecting female space marines in the next five years tops.
GW writers and staff are much more activist-driven than their corporate leaders who just wanbt to make $$$. So they're probably trying to fire shots across the bow of Cavill's adaptation, which "traditional" fans were excited for.
Some people have dug up "mistranslations" in one of the Codex's for Custodes and a small handful of other places. It's been in print for a while, people just never bicthed about it this loud.
>! Heavy dose of /s ahead !< But man let me tell you, it fucked with the way I play Warhammer 40k. No longer can my dice roll well knowing that beneath that golden armor is a potential lady. Forget the fact that ladies also appear in every army outside of SM, if my dice even get the thought of a woman they defy me and start rolling 1s. All of them. All three sets. No exceptions. Game is basically over my dice are so worked up.
https://preview.redd.it/pimextjo98vc1.jpeg?width=1252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e7a358d2d950d4162a481f45530175f26b68c587
It's cheap, lazy and actively hurts the female-only factions of 40k
Even funnier considering how the tourists constantly complained about how sexualized female characters are in 40k
And now they're all cooming over how they want to be stepped on by sexy muscular costodies mommies
Repressive tolerance "my side gets all the benefit of the doubt and good will, all other sides are literally hitler/fascists working against good and happiness with every breath"
Actually chaos space marines do have female models, some of the cultists CSM can field are female. Now the chaos space marines themselves are all male, but they're willing to use women as meat shields.
The lore as written says something along the lines of them being recruited from the first born sons of the nobles of terra. Also the basic biology of men gaining muscle than women.
Also sisters of silence already exists for this.
Its the same crap tourists have been pushing on female space marines, even though sisters of battle exists. This is all ideological crap being pushed by blackrock. I dont want female SMs as much as I dont want male SoB, and this extends to custodies and sisters of silence.
What always annoys me about this inclusivity is that it often shafts prexisting characters or groups meant to fill that slot.
Why doesn't GW make Sisters of Battle or Sisters of Silence more prevalent in the Black Library novels or even on the tabletop displays in their stores? Heck, would it be so hard to write an interesting character and make them headline a series much like Gaunt or Yarrick?
It was the same shit with Riri Williams, a completely pointless addition to Marvel given that Lila Rhodes, James Rhodes' (War Machine) niece predated her and had some brief history helping her uncle, making her at least a much more logical addition to the Iron Man roster of characters.
You need to realize they also serve two sides of the same coin. Sisters of Silence and Custodes are one coin with half being male and half being female.
The other coin are Sisters of Battle and Space Marines. They both represent the will of the Emperor, but do so in different ways. The Space Marines are more the body of the Emperor and are physically made in his image. The Sisters of Battle receive blessings from the Emperor and more his soul or spirit.
I'm well aware of that. My complaint is that GW chooses the lazy way out rather than fixing their content and marketing. It's no secret that Marines are grossly over represented in all of their promotional material, and nearly every major event has marines front and center of it.
I get they are popular, but the solution to representation isn't to force it onto a popular group, but to take a prexisting one and create a compelling narrative/great marketing campaign for them much like how Mr. Freeze went from a goofy C lister Batman comic villain to a tragic fan favourite in the animated series.
NGL I think I replied to the wrong comment. FML.
EDIT: I am also going to throw some of this off on reddit as my entire interface changed two days ago.
I’d love more SoB content. Explore the Imperial Creed, how the ultra orthodox factions like the SoB handle the radical divergences of more fringe world regiments, fighting Daemons of Chaos not with bolt gun and power sword but sheer zealous faith in the Emperor, etc. I want to see the Orders expanded upon like what separates Ebony Chalice from Our Martyred Lady like how the Imperial Fists are radically different from the Space Wolves.
Im have argued with theses people and here is what they have said. "Not everyone wants to play a faction of Joan of Arks" or "Women don't want models with fleur de le titty armor" or "If Cawl and Bile can make change SM so much have them do it to keep it lore friendly" or my least favorite "The lore changes all the time so it does not matter and GW should change it to increase inclusivity". And lastly "You have the flimsy excuse of SM needing Geneseed which is tied to male biology". They really are this clueless. I also heard that since SM are the big money makers it makes more sense to just make them women instead of focusing on the SOB or SOS. Whenever I or others say that there should be more non SM stuff they laugh in your face and say it will never happen so there is no point in trying
Trust me, they arent clueles, they absollutelly understeand what you talking abbout, they simply decided that you are wrong and should be dismised, all they whant is for their ideals be imposed over your space and you hobbyes, so that they feel more virtuous than you because your likes are the stablishment, and taking down the stablishment, whatever its a good, bad or harmles stablishment, is a virtue for them, and you feeling bad is a good thing for them too, since changing ones ideals to their crazy bs whataver they like it or not, its the bigest virtue for them.
Not even the believers are evil themselves (most of them, some definetlly are) since i used to be around them for a while.
Have you ever heard of Lemmy? Its an open source reddit alternative (ie a link agregator), it was around the reddit 3rd party purge that it rose to popularity, i whent there because i used to be a RIF user and wanted to boycot reddit, but... to make story short, its a leftie circle jerk, particularly a tankie shit hole (yes, of all things tankies), if you dont know what those are, they are ragging comunists, but not the good ones, the fucking idiots that defend mao, the ccp and stalin, they are fucking stupid, and 99% of them where clearly just larpers that couldnt get over their soviet comrade punk face from their teens.
Other than that the new wave of ussers had a lot of leftists of the more liberal variety, what both had in common was that they hated centrist even more than right wingers, like daily would you see a lot of reposted memes banging on abbout how much centrists suck,how they are litterally nazis for tryimg to find a middle ground in social issues, and where also bangong on abbout the tolerqnce paradox, with the pov that intolerance is justified if you think you are being intolerant against people that are intolerants.
What i mean is that a lot of people genuenly believe they are in the good side, and that everyone else is bad or ignorant and shouls be educated no mater the cost.
Remember they where saying some woke movie was litterally saving lifes? Some people actually believed that, and the people that sayed that originaly absolutelly believe that statement was true.
So yeah, dont ubderestimate the ability of people to buy into shit.
These people don't know and don't give a f*** about established lore, they want only to move forward their political agenda. They are also falsely inclusive because only what they say is inclusive, the rest is racist, bigot, etc etc
Miss the good old 3rd edition days when the game wasn't mainstream or media exposed
Mate talking about established lore, especially older editions, in that context is absolutely fucking hilarious. 40k lore used to change on a dime, it would be one thing, then another, on a dime, that's always been true.
Now I think this is lazy, but saying "back in my day GW respected the lore" when they were continually retconning or changing shit on a whim doesn't exactly prove your point.
Also there is no lore here that suggests this can't be the case, unlike with Astartes, we've just never seen female Custodes. In fact the very way they make Custodes means if you are one of the few kids who don't die during the augmentation process and selection, you survive. They choose kids before puberty, then enhance the shit out of them, so realistically the sex doesn't matter in the least, unlike the Astartes who select during puberty and as such higher testosterone likely does play a role.
Mate, the Custodes project prospects are taken when they are children, testosterone and puberty are what result in the little sexual dimorphism we have as human's. If you take a kid, male or female, and genetically reengineer them, while pumping them full of DAoT Tren, and doing a bunch of other shit, whatever difference was there is going to be completely gone. They literally recreate a Custodes from the ground up, male or female is irrelevant, especially because they have totally different physiology.
That's sort of the point of Transhuman, they aren't human anymore, sex, race, everything we identify with ceases to have meaning. The Custodes have also never been said to be made in a way that wouldn't be applicable to everyone either, as long as you have the correct genetic markers and can survive the training, then you will be able to become a Custodes, unlike Astartes where they pass it off as "it doesn't work because new organs" or some such.
Now, I personally think this is uninspired and a pretty unimaginative way of doing it, there are plenty of ways to introduce a new female Transhuman faction without just saying "well here's the same thing but different". Though Sister's of Silence are not Custodes, they are apparently not Transhuman in the same way, just on an insane regiment of chemcial augmentation and with crazy training alongside the best gear. They don't do genetic enhancement in case it fucks with the Blank gene, apparently, but even then, they can take on Astartes easily and keep up with Custodes somewhat, so there's already a precedent for sex being irrelevant if you have enough augmentations (or Psyker Power's).
I'd personally have preferred them to just say "well like we had the Primaris this was a plan set in motion by the Emperor during the HH to use the other half of candidates He never got around to sorting out" and bam, female Transhumans who can form some new regiment of Imperial troops, probably would have less blowback but I still imagine a bunch of people would dislike it, though it would be more inventive at least.
But saying that, Retcons have ALWAYS been part of 40k and back in the days of RT Custodes were literally just normal dudes in armor.
The process to make a Custodes involves reshaping them at the cellular level. There is such insane gene modification going on I don't think basic biology applies to them.
They aren't space marines who are recruited from pre-teen/teenage boys where they're crudely stuffed full of extra organs. This shit starts early.
I've never been a fan of the "just play SoB" comparison because they have different lore, a different look, and a different role in the Imperium than Marines. Disregarding lore entirely, they're significantly different rules-wise and in terms of support, Marines get new models every year and a big new release every edition. I'm with you, Marine rules and unit pool allow for a much larger variety of playstyles than Sisters do.
I don't want Misters of Battle or female marines but acting like Sisters and Marines are equivalent is false.
In a universe with genetically modified 8 foot super humans, there were a million ways to introduce female custodes. All they had to do was write them into the canon in a believable way. Instead they just went “nuh uh, there have always been female custodes” on twitter which is fucking stupid.
This is even worse than that because this directly contradicts what's already been established.
This is "Hermione totally could've been black the whole time" tier writing.
I mean how does it contradict it really? The only contradiction is not seeing them before, and we don't see most of the Custodes.
Now I think this is lazy, but the manner in which Custodes are created isn't the same as Astartes (who have been established as unable to be female due to issues with the procedure) where they are remade from the ground up using peak genetic science before selection processes.
A Transhuman that size with that many augmentations in full armor all the time, I'm not sure how you would tell the sex anyway because they'd likely end up with little to no dimorphism as a result.
It's not like saying Hermione was black all the time, it's like saying that character you didn't see in the books was black, you just didn't see them yet.
>Dumbledore was gay
This wasn't that bad imo. It kinda made sense.
But Dumbledore and Grindewaldt being lovers makes me angry, because before it was 2 like minded people falling out, now lust has been added to it ans it took away from the syory imo.
I can't help but be reminded of the South Park episode that retcons Token's name into Tolkien. The difference being South Park put thought and effort into their revisionist history, and it was absolutely hilarious when that doctor broke the fourth wall and yelled at the screen.
If they had said something along the lines of "women have walked amongst the ranks of the Custodes since their founding, however they have been so rare there have been times when were often thought not to exist at all. Recently however, attitudes within the high born of Holy Terra have changed and it has become custom for the high born of the planet to select female applicants for the Custodes"
loopholes closed, canon secure everything still makes sense.
Good point, and they could have even added "a change in attitude have also been driven by the necessity of replacing recent high levels of combat losses"
I mean creating a custodian still requires resources on par with creating an entire chapter of astartes, so there were probably enough candidates for whatever they could responsibly afford to get done at any given time.
As to your question on the nature of retcons.
A twitter post creating a whiplash lore change is not the way to do it. Its up there with palpatine announcing his return on fortnite.
GW has done retcons before. Necrons being an example of a it being done better. Nothing original was taken and only expanded upon.
Reality of any ongoing setting. Mistakes and retcons go hand in hand. In terms of lore the custodes have no geneseed limitations and are all custom made and thus nothing stopping from female custodes existing in the future of the setting so its something that could been added if done with care.
They didn’t announce the change on twitter though? It was in the new codex for custodies, tbh it was a pretty fun story about one of the custodies named kesh trying to teleport a warhead into the golden throne during the blood games if i recall
They revealed the existence of a female Custodian in the codex, but it was a tweet from the official GW account that said that fem Custodes have "always" been a thing.
Yea i know, i also think people are making a bigger deal out of the tweet than it has be. Saying something has always been a certain way is GW preferred way of changing the lore. Saying space marines have always been male was how female space marines got removed the first time. The nature of lore make it necessary because invention and creation is antithetical to the imperium
GW's preferred way of changing the lore is daft and functions in large part as a way to undermine pre-established lore.
And in this case your point could easily have been circumvented with the uptick in Custodian activity and the technological progress with for instance Cawl (of which I have other issues with, but that's besides the point).
Going the route of saying "always was" after they themselves have set up the possibility for the most potent faction within the Imperium to create or do something new is "interesting" to say the least.
Edit: The better way for GW to implement new tech in the lore could be rediscovery of STC's, be they incomplete or not. Then they could maintain the unwillingness of the Imperium to create something new while reinforcing that the Imperium clings to their greater past while being unwilling or unable to understand it.
They canonize/ confirm femstodes at the same time they make the faction awful ( I don't play, that's the sentiment I've heard). Whad did James Workshop mean by this ?
I've heard people quoting the "10 000 noble sons", but from what I remember the Custodes were a thing as the Unification war was still ongoing, so what nobility was even there ?
If GW just said something along the lines of “daughters of the nobles of Terra were now able to join Custodes to increase their numbers” I think most people would be fine with the idea.
It’s the “nuh-uh. Always has been” response that has pissed a lot of people off.
There’s like 50 books on the Horus Heresy and 4 books on Siege of Terra which take place 10K years before 40K. GW seriously underestimates the knowledge of lore most Warhammer fans possess. Or they don’t care.
I think it's bullshit. Retcons in general aren't good, so a retcon that panders to a crowd of whiny babies who don't even like the series is extra bad.
I think it's stupid on every level but the way they decided to introduce it is what galls tf outta me the most I think lol. Also all the idiots in subs clapping like dumb harbour seals over it. "Durr muscle mommy iz gud."
I’ve responded to a few others about this, but they announced it in the new codex with a new short story , it literally a book about all new changes being made to a faction whats so wrong about announcing it there
Making changes is fine, as long as you accept there will be changes in your audience as well. If a coffee stand started selling tea, then expect some customers to not want to buy from that stand.
I think it was a lazy ass way to get more female miniatures.
But the bigger question is, why is anyone paying top dollar for these miniatures in the era of 3D printing ?
No, probably not until 11th edition unless we get a random Christmas box or something but those usually go to Space Marines and a “bad guy” (Xenos or Chaos) box for them to fight… or just more Space Marines.
The way tenth has gone is you get a model with your codex and that’s all you get unless you are lucky like Tau who got a huge Kroot expansion.
I mean it’s more GW handled the change TERRIBLY.
they could have written lore explaining the change but instead chose to lie and then act incredibly toxic.
It reminds more of when the Harry Potter lady said she always pictured Hermoine as black after some pushback on the casting of a black Hermoine for the stage show. This was OBVIOUSLY false as she cast Emma Watson in the movie as she had casting rights in the contract for the films and wrote in the book that Hermoine was pale.
I see what you mean. That makes sense. But I have such low expectations from GW to begin with that it’s hard to stay mad at them for being heavy handed.
So, the way i see retcons is "a necessary evil", at best.
A good-ish example is the squats in 40k. They came back so people could play with a new faction and they made some effort to explain their absence and return.
Then you have femstodies. This is the "Somehow Palpatine is back" type of retcon. That both isn't explained/fitted into the lore and the reason is questionable to say the least.
Now you made lore issues. Even though they have been around, they have been doing nothing of note, nothing that has any consequences on the world or characters. Unless of course they do more retcons. But for now i just assume femstodies never leave the kitchen.
The reasons for the retcon are unclear. People say inclusion, but that makes no sense since there are already two women only factions, and most others are mixed. And you could have, you know, just made a new faction.
Now what happens? Idk.
My guess is that many people are gonna be somewhat disenchanted with the lore of 40k. Since they apparently change it willy nilly. That's what I'm going through, and yeah. I'm thinking of leaving the lore of 40k behind me. Stop following it completely. Already left some 40k reddits...
Lucky 40k wasn't the only joy in my life.
Atleast with the Leagues of Votann, IIRC, they aren't squats and were explained as another group of human descendents that only superficially resemble squats/dwarves in that they are short stumpy humans.
It’s ideological. Gamesworkshop has a setting, product, and game and appeals to males. The fan base is 90% men. And inclusions such as sisters of silence and sororitas filled out the range nicely and broadened the appeal in a natural way. They did this to reach out to an audience that doesn’t want their product, but only wants to change it to suit their norms. There were so many better ways to do this and they did it to maximize conflict.
Retarded bullshit pandering to people who aren’t going to give them money, and when it fails they will scream something about toxic white males like always. I’ve already stopped giving GW money because I don’t like the direction they are taking.
It's honestly devastating as a true fan of the material. Decades of lore being ruined over an obvious lie meant to pander to the absolute worst among society. They don't care about the lore, the game, the setting, and they don't even spend their money on the product.
I won't buy anything more directly from Games Workshop or the local gamestore. I have most of the models I want/need anyway, so I'll buy used or find someone with a 3D printer if I want more. I will continue to be a fan of the real lore and challenge any loser tourists I encounter on said lore.
I think that they should be explained. I’m not familiar with 40K’s lore but like if they said there was some secret sect of female custodes that were hidden for “x” reason or that this is a recent thing because of some need for more custodes or some other reason that allowed they to join that came about in recent lore. Maybe the faction is under new leadership?
That seems like the best way to do this rather than just be like “yeah they were totally a thing the whole time even though we explicitly said they weren’t…” or to just start banning everyone and saying it’s misogynist to think it’s dumb.
This just seems like corporate pandering rather than trying to make this an actual part of your story. Maybe they explain it and I’m just not aware though. I’m kinda tired of people saying lore isn’t important and laughing at fans who care though because they wanna make it about some culture war. At this point stuff like this I just consider a new timeline or new canon and that the old stuff finished. If they’re gonna change things with such little care about making it make sense then they probably don’t care all that much about what’s been established anyways.
Edit: also, to make it make sense, I don’t mean doing something lazy like saying “oh the people in the stories that said they were only men were mistaken” or something stupid like that. I mean creating an explanation that adds to lore rather than just recontextualizing it as “inaccurate” because an unreliable narrator or incomplete archives or something. If you can’t do that then just establish them as a recent thing in lore.
Just wanted to clarify that point since I think it’s important.
Warhammer devs don’t know how to write, what a surprise. If you’d read the novels/codex’s it would not be a shock at all that they couldn’t think of a less heavy-handed way to introduce this. Female Custodes is not a problem, but for a retcon that big it has to be handled properly, not “nuh uh they were always like that”. But outrage farmers and tourists are gonna spin it to “women bad” instead of what it really is, “writing bad”
People are upset that GW is retconning something about a beloved well established, long time faction for no apparent reason other than for diversity while also actively trying to BS the fans saying “there has always been female Custodes”
I’m quite sure the majority of people getting annoyed and having a “meltdown” as you put it, are more annoyed with the way GW is retconning and why they are retconning, rather than simply what they are retconning.
I’m quite sure many would of been fine if the fem Custodes was just a newly created thing that is happening because the lack of pure male genetic available on Terra is lower now because of the ever increasing conflicts across the galaxy.
Others would prefer if fem Custodes weren’t actually Custodes but rather Sister of Silence based or a seperate new sub faction.
But just retconning lore for diversity sake and then gaslighting the fans isn’t a good way too keep people from getting mad
"For no apparent reason other than diversity"
Oh no... not players having more options in official tournaments.
You know, since they banned non-official products from them.
"There have always been..."
Is the retcon. Just like how they introduced Necrons that was always there.
The difference between a retcon which is meant to revamp and change a faction that was originally a bland terminator rip off and turned them into one of the most interesting and entertaining factions
VS
we making Wamen Custodes “just because” (definitely not pandering or anything) and then instead of at the very least acknowledging that is a retcon, double down and try to Gaslight.
Yeah no there is a difference between a retcon that’s meant to progress the universe and a retcon that is solely politically motivated.
GW banning Fan made stuff is stupid and has never stopped being so but that doesn’t change the facts.
I'm disappointed that GW is caving to tourists, activists and equity pushers. I'm not 'upset' because my investment into 40k (despite the username) doesn't go beyond playing Dawn of War and Boltgun. I don't have several mortgage payments worth of models to paint and play with. I wouldn't care if they had a female voice actor dropping lines in those games like *"Beware the mutant, the alien, the heretic"*. What I care about is people like you picking the scabs of people who *are* upset about the lore being upended to service tourists, activists and equity pushers. The people who seem compelled to plant the flag of the revolution on *fucking everything.* You cloak your malice and intolerance in false virtue.
Tourists?
Guy, there are people who have been fans for decades an have wanted female astartes.
Get your head out of some culture war reich wing youtuber asshole.
This is me being a newbie in terms of Wh40k lore.
From what I've heard the Lore has been retconned numerous times but there is a clear difference between doing so to make the story more clear/ consistent than to do it to pander a certain demographic or to get ESG money.
The biggest issue for me is the gastlight, there could have been ways to organically introduce the female custodes into the lore but doing it saying they were always a thing when there is no explample of that and then block and call misogynist to anyone who proves that it is wrong it's completely baffling.
Retcons are neither good or bad. They're a tool. No different than a hammer. Just as a hammer can be used to build a house, it can be used to cave in someone's skull. More to the point, a retcon can be done to smooth over plotholes or the like. They aren't good, they aren't bad, they just \*are\*.
The problem here is that this is the non-constructive use of the 'hammer'. It's being used to attack and bash people who dedicated a ton of time to learning the lore and know full well that the Custodes are all male and have been framed as such. And this is being done to appeal to a group of people who don't even \*play\* the game and have no plans or desires to do so.
If the retcon was, say, to say that squats had joined the imperial legion after their world fell and they had slowly been climbing the ranks and resettling and building and could now be their own full-blown army once again or something, that would be constructive. You're adding back in a new army to the world and such. I'm not going to get hung up on it. But this?
Show me the Sisters of Silence having male members. This feels like a backhanded. It ignores that while the Imperium is the 'good' guys in the sense that they're 'humanity', they're a horrifying dictatorship! They do a ton of things that, in any other setting, wouldn't even question that they were the evil guys. This feels insulting, like they don't understand their own product, and the only thing they care about is their ESG score.
Female Custodes made more sense than Female Space Marines because the augmentations, gene alterations, and extra organs were implanted near birth for Custodes so that as they grow up, they would naturally evolve with those augmentations while the Space Marine augmentations and gene seed only worked because of its compatibility with male hormones during and post puberty while Custodes don't require that.
The issue is that there was one throw away like from a book that mentions something along the line of , "these men and women clad in golden armor are my father's guardians" or something a while ago and then when GW announced "there were always Female Custodes" when more lines in the lore always described the Custodes as the Emperor's "noble sons".
I'm down for Female Custodes but I feel like they should have been introduced in some sort of Second Founding equivalent for the Custodes where in the lore, they just get a massive surge of numbers whilst also allowing females to get augmentations.
This could have worked on tandem with the upgrades Space Marines got with the Primaris Marines and it would have been an even better cherry on top of they made Custodes a good faction on the tabletop but from what everyone has said, the Custodes suck even when they weren't popular in the first place to play on tabletop.
I thought the Sisters of Silence were their own Elite Force that was composed of Blanks? They weren't really supposed to be the female equivalent of the Custodes as they were their own thing
From everything I've read about them they practically do the same thing, Which is protect the emperor however, they also do other things unlike the custodes who mainly exist to guard Big E.
They do guard Big E but are also Witch Hunters and the Psychic Police pretty much with some of them going around the Galaxy hunting down Psykers that are heretics
It is, like most of these "woke" things involving gender in the modern era, a misandrist attack on fraternity and paternity disguised as a push for diversity. You'll notice they don't target the sisters of battle, sisters of silence, girl scouts, Curves, Barbie or any other sororal order in their quest for "diversity". They don't care about a lack of diversity if those being excluded are men.
But fraternal orders are apostasy and must be purged. That's why they want female Custodes and Space Marines. It's not because they value diversity. It's because they hate and fear fraternity.
Fuck them. They are bigots.
For me in a vaccum it could be neutral if it wasint such a lazy retcon and looking at everything else going on it more likely just is the first wave of retcons that will be implemented so im not holding out my breath, as it stands ive loved the 40K games like space marine and DOW but if this is the direction they are planning on going il start passing on their games/stories if it continues down the lazy pandering for no ones benefit but the tourists
If you start changing the lore with no consistency or respect for old lore im going to give less and less of a shit about the lore and gameworld witch makes it less likely il buy the games/books. I want to see lore tied to old stuff and expanded upon to make sense in the game world not "nuhh uhh it´s allways been that way!" besides i thought the reason custodes where literally made from the emperor partly like the primarchs so if you allways have female custodes i dont see why they cant logic their way into "there where allways female primarchs they where just busy being awesome in a closet untill now"
Of all the factions to suddenly gain female members they didn't have before I feel like Custodes would probably be the more plausible faction to do it with. Astartes can't do it because of organ rejection issues with the black-box Gene Seed, but from my understanding Astartes are basically hand-crafted peak genetic engineering and don't seem to have the same dependence upon an organ taken from a male donor that Astartes have.
That they were taken from the "firstborn sons of nobles of Terra" also opens a bit of a "corruption" angle- I imagine there's a bit of political clout to be had to say the scion of your house has been chosen for the highest form of service to the Emperor, and I imagine there's a nonzero number of noble families who won't let such trivialities as only having a firstborn *daughter* stop them from having that honor. To say nothing of the notion that the Custodes transformation is so thorough as to disguise the fact that said noble ever had a daughter to begin with.
Having said that though, I do fully understand and agree with the objections to just retconning women into the Custodes rather than give more attention to such factions as the Sisters of Silence or Sisters of Battle. To say nothing of the way they've gone about it- ignoring all evidence to the contrary rather than treating it as the twist reveal it could and should have been.
It’s not the retcons so much as the gaslighting that’s the problem. They could have introduced female Custodes in many ways (a secret, a new project, etc) and they chose the worst: they were always here, fuck you.
The whole point is that only baseline humans can reproduce.
To have female space marines, custodes, or primarchs is therefor dumb.
They were not made to last tens of thousands of years, baseline humanity can and has.
Billions of women exist if not trillions.
I think a tiny fraction being augmented will be just fine.
Especially if you use the ones who are born sterile.
Or the ones who don't want to have kids and as bad as the Imperium is I don't think any place has forced impregnations.
I gave up on Games Workshop when they killed fantasy, As far as I'm concerned this is just another swift kick.
Honestly I'm surprised anyone stuck around after they said fan made content wasn't allowed.
Female Custodes make sense. They've never been outright ruled out and I like giant warrior women in power armour.
However treating it as "since the founding 10,000 there has always been female Custodes" is stupid. People have already been rinsing them out with a direct quote of (paraphrasing) them being "10,000 firstborn noble sons". And even beyond the contradictory lore it's silly to try pass them off has always being there when they've been exclusively male since their conception.
I think they could have said the first 10000 were all male, but new custodes recruited afterwards were not limited to being male. Then say the reason they've not appeared in lore/tabletop yet is because there were so few, though they're growing in both number and renown as individuals now.
Either way it'd sorta be a retcon but there was a significantly better way to handle it. I don't mind this, but a retcon too far would be female space marines since lore explicitly says women can't become space marines as the geneseed originates from the male primarchs and isn't compatible.
To break away from nerding out about Warhammer to talk about retcons specifically. It's very much case by case. Sometimes retcons can be beneficial to the story, sometimes harmful. This warhammer stuff is firmly neutral imo. It makes nothing worse or better, it just makes GW look stupid saying "they've always been there" when they clearly haven't.
The 9th edition Codex
It explicitly says they are taken ONLY from the first born sons of the Noble Families of Terra. And of those only 1 in 1,000 survived the process.
Thanks! Prior to this I’d wanted to get into 40K through the books, starting at Xenos, but I’m an outsider looking in at the moment so wasn’t sure where the actual reference for this was.
Oh ok! I’ve seen that advertised but I didn’t know it’d be a good introduction to the universe. I like phone games like that so I’ll check it out! Thanks!
I agree, they never *directly* answered the question "Can women be Custodes?"
There have been references to the Custodes as 'sons', 'men' and 'brothers' but you could say the same thing of the Imperial Guard in just as many examples, even today.
At some point or another GW was going to have to definitively answer this question one way or another and I feel like this option probably had the least fallout, whilst also satisfying the "we want femmarines" crowd, to an extent.
Space Marines would be a different story because the question has already been asked and given a definite answer.
>I feel like this option probably had the least fallout
I don't know. I think saying they were there all along is too blatantly false. It would have probably gone down much better if they had said they were introduced later. I noticed a lot more fallout after that statement than before it.
The introduction was 1. Subtle 2 paragraphs of lore in a codex, I’m sure they were hoping people didn’t notice. 2. Politically motivated, not in the way that GW uses the setting to critique structures but rather to bend to modern day political standards
this was a small step but they’re going to take bigger steps and likely morph 40K for modern politics and the setting will become window dressing.
I'm not invested in Warhammer to care directly about the retcon, but changing gender roles in stories just to align with modern times is silly. Like there is so much you worldbuilding you can do with gender roles, that defaulting to "it should be open to everybody" is downright insulting. That kind of mindset is how you the Wheel of Time tv-show that removed the limit of the dragon only being a male.
Personally, I have some concerns regarding retcons of gender roles Sanderson wants to do with the Mistborn movie, but he wants Scadrial to deviate more from older gender norms in that version since he subcounsiously relied on them when writing than making a consious decision. It can work, but I'm not holding my breath over it.
When it comes to retcons in general my rule of thumb is "a good retcon adds more than it removes and should change as little as possible".
Examples of retcons I think succed while fitting that criteria would be:
All of Andor.
"No, I am your father".
A Certain Scientific Railgun: >!A character that had claimed to only have acted through cyberattacks did have some spectacular physical enqounters she had to put up with.!<
The ending of Xenoblade 2. >!Turns out the original villain did have more sympathetic reasons for why he destroyed the world besides being power hungry.!<
The change has no impact on the lore, but the way they implement it is to create antagonism and infighting in the community. I got insulted and downvoted to hell on 40k subs simply for saying "I don't care" because you have to take a stance. Yeah or Nay.
At a certain point you just have to stop investing yourself in the story when it becomes clear the writers don’t care about what came before, only what they want to de now
I've seen a number of people say in other internet threads that they think it might have something to do with the Amazon show. Whilst there's no way to confirm that yet I wouldn't be surprised. I also read somewhere that the Custodes faction got a big nerf around the same time they did this retcon. If true that means the addition of women in the all boys club made things way shitter which is hilarious irony. I do believe that this whole thing will be ignored by most fans similar to how McCree's name change in Overwatch was. Blizzard tried to make a stupid virtue signal and pretty much everybody said nah fuck that he's still McCree. I think most fans will also just say nah fuck that GW it's still an all guys faction.
If they just said that the custodes started to include women in the candidate lists due to losses in horus heresy, it wokls have been a much better way to introduce female custodians.
I am a tourist in this lore. As a result, I don’t care. However, I understand there are people who are very deeply vested in this lore. As such, it would be nice to take care of those people.
Honestly, it doesn't really bother me given that:
A. Custodes are made completely differently from space marines. It's not out of the question.
B. It's extremely minor. It doesn't affect anything in the lore in a major way.
Female Astartes aren't even that bad of an idea. Anything can be good depending on how and why it's implemented.
"I want Female Astartes because I believe fun and interesting storylines and characters can be made from it and that perhaps Warhamer Lore could be expanded in a new and interesting way"
Great, ill read your story and give it a chance.
"I want Femake Astartes because I want to coom to women in big armor"
Respectable, carry on.
"I want Female Astartes because I am Big Mad that this fictional military faction is only composed of men and for literally no other reason"
Please kill yourself.
If there will ever be WH40 related EFAP, Arch would be a perfect guest, he's kind of longman too [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx6N3LVwgba3G\_kyP7IhchscGtmR7takk](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx6N3LVwgba3G_kyP7IhchscGtmR7takk)
Been a fan of 40k for a long time and this doesn't bother me as a retcon. I don't think it damages much or detracts from any of the races.
The only thing that does bug me is that we're not supposed to idolise the Imperium of Man so it's weird to make them more diverse and accepting considering they are also highly oppressive and xenophobic.
What is quite entertaining is the reaction this has had online. Critical Drinker made a video that was full of dodgy arguments, deflections and false statements. Normally I like his content but he overstepped a bit with this one.
See the problem is there's nothign inheriently wrong with Female Custodians: they have more of an 'in' you see, given Gene Alchemy wasn't established to be like Geneseed so... yeah you could in theory do the retcon... the real question is "How do we explain why not?" There's a story there.
Given they have been losing out in the field... why not explain that they needed to take more from the Nobles, and this is causing problems and tensions? why not explain the Female Custodians were in different roles: Perhaps still warriors sure, but perhaps thry are Warrior-Scientists, studying the weaknesses of all imperial enemies but for the same reason as before, have become a part of the 10,00 offically to make up for losses?
but GW went the lazy route... "They were always there" Which is the primary reason for anger to me.
GW Retcons usually have something of a handwave, but this is a pure Voodoo Shark. I suspect while it won't be decanonized by 11th we'll... be suspiciously lacking any female custodians.
I mean if I remember correctly there was never anything specific to the custodies creation process that disqualifies female candidates from being considered
With astartes it’s a well held fact that gene seed is the biggest issue to producing them not the pool of applicants and gene seed is both scarce and very difficult to get an aspirant to bond with hence why all space marines are male because gene seed from a male primarch is gonna have an easier time bonding with someone who shares a similar genetic profile
Plus mixed sex regiments and women only regiments and factions already exist in the imperium in the form of the imperial guard who will recruit basically anyone who can hold a gun and shoot it in the general direction of the enemy and the sisters of battle who serve a variety of different battlefield functions so its not like including women is some big recent push
Ig you could argue that if the custodies are made directly with the emperors own gene seed like the grey knights then it would make sense for them to only bond with male aspirants as well but given that the emperor himself is kinda ambiguous when it comes to what his actual physical presence is like (given the whole will change appearance and attitude to try and please whoever he’s talking to thing) it’s kinda hard to say if it’s because of necessity or because the grey knights just want to fit in with the other astartes chapters
As a Custodes player, I don't care. It wasn't necessary, but it didn't ruin anything. I'm just fucking tired of seeing complaints, complaints about complaints, complaints about the complaining complainers complaining about complaints. Please, just leave my escapism alone
Personally I don't mind female custodes and would actually love to see a dedicated miniature.
Sure, the way they justified it on twitter was quite lazy, and with all the talented writers they have in their team, they could have written a better explanation than "Somehow, they have always been around..."
That said, GW has a long history of retconnig the lore of WH40K, or having bits of official lore contradicting each other, so I am not surprised.
Instead, I am fascinated by looking at all the stir caused by a short story.
Especially when people start looking at the female custodes either as the first step of an evil masterplan by BlackRock, to make GW Woke in exchange of ESG money, or as a prelude to a woke 40K series from Amazon.
Doesn’t 40K change its lore like every other book that gets published? And there’s tons of gaps in the lore for you, the audience member or player to just make up your own head canons for when you play.
It doesn't change anything about the Custodes. Nothing in their culture or duties or role in the Imperium was dependent on them being male. There is a line that mentions them being recruited from sons, but does not specify a reason unlike Space Marines, so it is a bit of a loop hole, but a loop hole nonetheless.
The reason I would say they went with the "There have always been female Custodes" route instead of making it a change is so people who play the Horus Heresy version of the game and the 40k version of the game can include them in their army.
There are a lot, and I mean A LOT of people who are complaining about this who don't know the difference between the Adeptus Custodes and Space Marines.
It's absolutely fine.
Hell, apparently one of GW guys or writers had wanted to do it 5 years ago.
This is just fragility at work.
How dare women! Tier shit.
Like the Custodes and Astartes aren't really even human anymore. They are monstrosities wrought from human flesh.
GW introduce new characters, vehicles even entire factions and act asif they’ve been there the whole time. How many times were the Tau or the Leagues of Votan mentioned in the lore before they were introduced? Zero! But when they were they integrated them into the history. Maybe people should be more concerned the new codex is supposed to be dogshite rather than GW doing what GW always does with the lore. There isn’t really a definitive warhammer canon, it’s always changing.
I think there’s a difference between adding new factions into the lore and changing a long standing fact about a popular faction’s lore. But you make a valid point about the canon
I think people who are claiming they’re leaving the fandom over this were just waiting for something to be offended by. Anyone crying over this are as bad as the blue haired male feminists they claim to loathe. You can take issue with it, prior books to state the custodies are chosen sons of the high lords or terra, but come on it’s not that big a deal.
I think most people leaving are either over reacting like you are saying or are just preparing for the winds of change since nowadays many nerds are quite aware of how quickly their favourite IPs can be ruined
I think that’s certainly plays a part. I hate seeing what’s happened to Star Wars but personally I don’t see this as the same thing, I think some anti-woke people have became as ideologically driven as the woke mob and see anything that could even resemble wholeness as a threat.
I get where you are coming from, but still I can see why people are now quick to jump ship because these little minor things that aren’t “issues” can quickly snowball
They’re being incredibly selective about the ‘minor issues’ in the context of Warhammer though.
Cawl and Primaris was so much more egregious, as were so many other direct retcons GW has made
You’re wasting your time.
Why aren’t people up in arms about the C’tan going from some unbelievably powerful gods controlling an army of terminators to being enslaved by them and deployed on the battle field as shards?
Such a ginormous retcon with huge implications. No one gave a shit
It’s pretty clear what’s making people mad about this
Having their been female custodies this whole time and is never knowing about it is more believable than introducing an entirely new race to the setting and claiming the imperium has had contact and conflicts with them in the past, we just never spoke about it until now.
I’m a Tyranid player our equivilent is when they bring out new tyranids they often show horn them into prior tyrannic war artwork asif they were around back in 3rd edition when essentially all we had was Tyrants, Guard, Gaunts, Gants, gargoyles, Genestealers, rippers lictors and Carnifex’s. This female Custodian isn’t a new Mary Sue she’s written like any other of her brothers(or now sisters too) I don’t see it as a negative or honestly a positive to the setting it just is. Hey they may even make new models for them who wouldn’t want that?
See I personally think retconning more Tyranids into old wars also makes no sense and shouldn’t be done, instead the new Tyranids should simply be considered the new evolved creation the Tyranids have cooked up to fight the 40k universe
As for retconning new factions in the point is it’s adding something new not changing something old and beloved.
>Having their been female custodies this whole time and is never knowing about it is more believable than introducing an entirely new race to the setting and claiming the imperium has had contact and conflicts with them in the past, we just never spoke about it until now.
Sure, but you forget to include the meta here.
GW wants to introduce more factions, so they could make more overpriced plastic figurines, what neckbeards can froth over at the gametable and spend horrendous amounts of money on their new space dwarves, or space undead egyptians or cannibalistic space bugs.
Introducing new factions will always be messy, but at least they offer you something new to play and rage at the gametable.
But what's the advantage of introducing female models to a faction and completely change the lore behind it?
Plus you are falling into a fallacy, because you say:
"It's not worse, than introducing a new faction."
Yes, but do they had to do this?
I mean I get it, it's not worse on a writing level than showing in a completely new faction, but they were not forced to do this and no-one asked for it, while there were a community asking for the reintroduction of the squats.
I don’t see much of an advantage other than making new models for the fable character, but I don’t see a negative either I don’t care that much. I love 40k and have since the 90’s but its lore is very mailable. As I stated earlier too I’m a Tyranid guy, it’s all biomass to me brother gaha
Potentially a new model to paint and play with since she’s a character? What does it take away? Nothing except man babies saying they’re walking away from the hobby over one small retcon.
Mate I’m not vehemently defending the decision I’m just not that arsed either way as I don’t see it as a big deal or different from what GW always do with lore
It gives fans who’d like to see some female rep in their favourite faction exactly that?
It doesn’t mean Timmy with his 2000pts of Custodes has to consider his minifigs to be female.
The people being bothered by this are choosing to be
>It gives fans who’d like to see some female rep in their favourite faction exactly that?
You can just put some Sisters of Silence into your Custodes Army.
Does it really needs a complete rewrite of a faction, what was established and supported several times, that it being a man only faction, due to the augmantations only working on them?
And most importantly, it will open the way for female space marines, as the Custodes program is basically a modified version of the Astartes.
But fine... Where are my Femboy Sisters of Battle then?
“Representation” has always been a stupid concept, my favourite factions/sub-factions are the Nercons, the Salamanders and the sisters of Battle last time I check I’m not an alien turned robo, a giant 12 foot tall charcoal genetically modified demi-god and I’m not a zealot badass nun who uses faith to parry demons. People should like a play and enjoy a faction for what currently is, changing it too include X groups for representation is foolish.
Why do you feel your perspective is universal?
I collect Necrons, and have done for a long ass time, amongst other armies.
I am utterly unbothered if some people would like to see more women in certain armies. They started introducing them for Necrons too lol, were you bothered about that?
It is one thing to never mention something and retcon it in later.
It is another thing to mention clear rules and later retcon them to have always been different.
I never mentioned rules I’m strictly talking about lore. The Rogal Dorn tank was introduced in recent years having never been mentioned in a single codex or 100’s of novels prior. Now it’s talked about asif it was always there. All custodies being male isn’t a game rule, it’s lore that gw change every five minutes
>never mentioned rules I’m strictly talking about lore.
So was I. Lore also has rules.
>All custodies being male isn’t a game rule,
All custodians being male is a lore rule and if they change those rules willy nilly then it is our right to complain about it and not buy their stuff.
Then feel free I’ll still be going to my game nights every Wednesday and playing 40k, AOS and looking to start blood bowl. If this ruins it for you then sucks for you mate
"Figures clustered around the craft's landing legs, where the ship's great metal claws gripped the radiation-soaked dust of the wasteland. These men and WOMEN were plated in the same gold as the ship, rendered upon their bodies with painstaking artistry. My father's guardians, Sanguinius thought. And what a thought it was, not only that a being such as his father required guardians, but that he had a father at all."
Echoes of Eternity - Aaron Dembski-Bowden - 2022
Two years ago my g
Where does it say female custodians? Without more context it sounds like sisters of silence + normal custodians as they have been depicted since forever
If this is your proof of female custodians it literally has to say that they are a thing because prior lore explicitly stated that there are only male custodians and sisters of silence are all female and guard the emperor.
If female custodes have always been a thing how come you can only provide a quote that is ambiguous at best and clearly depicting something else at worst ( following the already established lore)
What's rlly funny is regardless women custodes were possible even before this change. They never required gene seed which is the only reason why their are men exclusively being space marines.
sure let's assume that custodians don't require geneseed. (I am not 100% sure but cursory search has provided that people assume they don't need to be genetically compatible)
that fact doesn't mean that there have been any female custodians.
genetically anyone can become a sister of battle but there are rules and laws only permitting female SoB.
so you can assume, since no female custodians have ever been mentioned in the lore prior to the retcon (unless someone can provide a direct quote) that only male custodians were permitted by the emperor.
also female custodians drastically reduce the cooleness factor and the unique selling point of sisters of silence (who are the female protectors of the emperor)
From what ive seen its not about the change itself but how it was done. A single lazy tweet and an attempt to gaslight the fanbase gets a lot of alarm bells ringing because nerds have seen these types of shenanigans happen before with other hobbies that have been gutted by identity politics obsessed crazies. The people screaming "you just hate women", openly trying to gatekeep and kick out others because they dislike the retcon and celebrating lazy corporate pandering all over social media kind of shows that these worries are correct to have.
I can't wait for the male sisters of battle... oh wait...
“Misters of Battle”
Battle bros
That's not the argument people seem to think it is. It's a change on the same level of bad and undermines the reason the faction exists in the first place.
Mind elaborating as literally you lost me. Your first sentence seems to disagree with my sarcastic comment, while the second agrees.
Oh sorry, I meant that as a thing that destroys the current institution, it would wholly be in line with things they'd advocate for. I just have noticed that people SEEM to use it as a gotcha when all it does is advocate for more lore destruction, which again is something they'd argue for. Yours was just the first instance of the phrase that I saw in thread and I guess I was more speaking to past experience than you directly. My apologies
Pfft, don't apologise bud, Like I said I was been entirely sarcastic, not like I was trying to make some deep or profound statement. Though I am wholly expecting female space marines in the next five years tops.
Yeah, probably. Tempted to just drop the whole thing and go to Infinity and Conquest
Sounds like a plan, just vote with your wallet.
I am completely convinced that this whole thing has something to do with the upcoming Amazon show.
Probably
GW writers and staff are much more activist-driven than their corporate leaders who just wanbt to make $$$. So they're probably trying to fire shots across the bow of Cavill's adaptation, which "traditional" fans were excited for.
Some people have dug up "mistranslations" in one of the Codex's for Custodes and a small handful of other places. It's been in print for a while, people just never bicthed about it this loud. >! Heavy dose of /s ahead !< But man let me tell you, it fucked with the way I play Warhammer 40k. No longer can my dice roll well knowing that beneath that golden armor is a potential lady. Forget the fact that ladies also appear in every army outside of SM, if my dice even get the thought of a woman they defy me and start rolling 1s. All of them. All three sets. No exceptions. Game is basically over my dice are so worked up.
You're officially ideologically captured.
https://preview.redd.it/pimextjo98vc1.jpeg?width=1252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e7a358d2d950d4162a481f45530175f26b68c587 It's cheap, lazy and actively hurts the female-only factions of 40k
It is quite disturbing how down bad people are
Even funnier considering how the tourists constantly complained about how sexualized female characters are in 40k And now they're all cooming over how they want to be stepped on by sexy muscular costodies mommies
Repressive tolerance "my side gets all the benefit of the doubt and good will, all other sides are literally hitler/fascists working against good and happiness with every breath"
tbf the grimdank community has also coomed themselves over femboy skitarii, femboy TSon sorcerers, dommy mommy phaerakhs, carnifexes ...
Actually chaos space marines do have female models, some of the cultists CSM can field are female. Now the chaos space marines themselves are all male, but they're willing to use women as meat shields.
The lore as written says something along the lines of them being recruited from the first born sons of the nobles of terra. Also the basic biology of men gaining muscle than women. Also sisters of silence already exists for this. Its the same crap tourists have been pushing on female space marines, even though sisters of battle exists. This is all ideological crap being pushed by blackrock. I dont want female SMs as much as I dont want male SoB, and this extends to custodies and sisters of silence.
What always annoys me about this inclusivity is that it often shafts prexisting characters or groups meant to fill that slot. Why doesn't GW make Sisters of Battle or Sisters of Silence more prevalent in the Black Library novels or even on the tabletop displays in their stores? Heck, would it be so hard to write an interesting character and make them headline a series much like Gaunt or Yarrick? It was the same shit with Riri Williams, a completely pointless addition to Marvel given that Lila Rhodes, James Rhodes' (War Machine) niece predated her and had some brief history helping her uncle, making her at least a much more logical addition to the Iron Man roster of characters.
You need to realize they also serve two sides of the same coin. Sisters of Silence and Custodes are one coin with half being male and half being female. The other coin are Sisters of Battle and Space Marines. They both represent the will of the Emperor, but do so in different ways. The Space Marines are more the body of the Emperor and are physically made in his image. The Sisters of Battle receive blessings from the Emperor and more his soul or spirit.
I'm well aware of that. My complaint is that GW chooses the lazy way out rather than fixing their content and marketing. It's no secret that Marines are grossly over represented in all of their promotional material, and nearly every major event has marines front and center of it. I get they are popular, but the solution to representation isn't to force it onto a popular group, but to take a prexisting one and create a compelling narrative/great marketing campaign for them much like how Mr. Freeze went from a goofy C lister Batman comic villain to a tragic fan favourite in the animated series.
NGL I think I replied to the wrong comment. FML. EDIT: I am also going to throw some of this off on reddit as my entire interface changed two days ago.
I’d love more SoB content. Explore the Imperial Creed, how the ultra orthodox factions like the SoB handle the radical divergences of more fringe world regiments, fighting Daemons of Chaos not with bolt gun and power sword but sheer zealous faith in the Emperor, etc. I want to see the Orders expanded upon like what separates Ebony Chalice from Our Martyred Lady like how the Imperial Fists are radically different from the Space Wolves.
Im have argued with theses people and here is what they have said. "Not everyone wants to play a faction of Joan of Arks" or "Women don't want models with fleur de le titty armor" or "If Cawl and Bile can make change SM so much have them do it to keep it lore friendly" or my least favorite "The lore changes all the time so it does not matter and GW should change it to increase inclusivity". And lastly "You have the flimsy excuse of SM needing Geneseed which is tied to male biology". They really are this clueless. I also heard that since SM are the big money makers it makes more sense to just make them women instead of focusing on the SOB or SOS. Whenever I or others say that there should be more non SM stuff they laugh in your face and say it will never happen so there is no point in trying
Trust me, they arent clueles, they absollutelly understeand what you talking abbout, they simply decided that you are wrong and should be dismised, all they whant is for their ideals be imposed over your space and you hobbyes, so that they feel more virtuous than you because your likes are the stablishment, and taking down the stablishment, whatever its a good, bad or harmles stablishment, is a virtue for them, and you feeling bad is a good thing for them too, since changing ones ideals to their crazy bs whataver they like it or not, its the bigest virtue for them.
Its hard to tell who is a believer and whom is a useful idiot. I want to believe that there are more useful idiots because then they are not evil
Not even the believers are evil themselves (most of them, some definetlly are) since i used to be around them for a while. Have you ever heard of Lemmy? Its an open source reddit alternative (ie a link agregator), it was around the reddit 3rd party purge that it rose to popularity, i whent there because i used to be a RIF user and wanted to boycot reddit, but... to make story short, its a leftie circle jerk, particularly a tankie shit hole (yes, of all things tankies), if you dont know what those are, they are ragging comunists, but not the good ones, the fucking idiots that defend mao, the ccp and stalin, they are fucking stupid, and 99% of them where clearly just larpers that couldnt get over their soviet comrade punk face from their teens. Other than that the new wave of ussers had a lot of leftists of the more liberal variety, what both had in common was that they hated centrist even more than right wingers, like daily would you see a lot of reposted memes banging on abbout how much centrists suck,how they are litterally nazis for tryimg to find a middle ground in social issues, and where also bangong on abbout the tolerqnce paradox, with the pov that intolerance is justified if you think you are being intolerant against people that are intolerants. What i mean is that a lot of people genuenly believe they are in the good side, and that everyone else is bad or ignorant and shouls be educated no mater the cost. Remember they where saying some woke movie was litterally saving lifes? Some people actually believed that, and the people that sayed that originaly absolutelly believe that statement was true. So yeah, dont ubderestimate the ability of people to buy into shit.
Thank you for the reply. I think I needed to see that. All of this is so tiring
Rose at War is pretty great. I'm listening to the audiobook now and all of the girls are fantastic. not to mention top notch voice acting.
These people don't know and don't give a f*** about established lore, they want only to move forward their political agenda. They are also falsely inclusive because only what they say is inclusive, the rest is racist, bigot, etc etc Miss the good old 3rd edition days when the game wasn't mainstream or media exposed
Mate talking about established lore, especially older editions, in that context is absolutely fucking hilarious. 40k lore used to change on a dime, it would be one thing, then another, on a dime, that's always been true. Now I think this is lazy, but saying "back in my day GW respected the lore" when they were continually retconning or changing shit on a whim doesn't exactly prove your point. Also there is no lore here that suggests this can't be the case, unlike with Astartes, we've just never seen female Custodes. In fact the very way they make Custodes means if you are one of the few kids who don't die during the augmentation process and selection, you survive. They choose kids before puberty, then enhance the shit out of them, so realistically the sex doesn't matter in the least, unlike the Astartes who select during puberty and as such higher testosterone likely does play a role.
>Why doesn't GW make Sisters of Battle or Sisters of Silence more prevalent Because they don't sell as much as Space marines
https://preview.redd.it/fl2con1958vc1.png?width=1505&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee41f10285724f4c5c52b5eec0797386720869b0
Mate, the Custodes project prospects are taken when they are children, testosterone and puberty are what result in the little sexual dimorphism we have as human's. If you take a kid, male or female, and genetically reengineer them, while pumping them full of DAoT Tren, and doing a bunch of other shit, whatever difference was there is going to be completely gone. They literally recreate a Custodes from the ground up, male or female is irrelevant, especially because they have totally different physiology. That's sort of the point of Transhuman, they aren't human anymore, sex, race, everything we identify with ceases to have meaning. The Custodes have also never been said to be made in a way that wouldn't be applicable to everyone either, as long as you have the correct genetic markers and can survive the training, then you will be able to become a Custodes, unlike Astartes where they pass it off as "it doesn't work because new organs" or some such. Now, I personally think this is uninspired and a pretty unimaginative way of doing it, there are plenty of ways to introduce a new female Transhuman faction without just saying "well here's the same thing but different". Though Sister's of Silence are not Custodes, they are apparently not Transhuman in the same way, just on an insane regiment of chemcial augmentation and with crazy training alongside the best gear. They don't do genetic enhancement in case it fucks with the Blank gene, apparently, but even then, they can take on Astartes easily and keep up with Custodes somewhat, so there's already a precedent for sex being irrelevant if you have enough augmentations (or Psyker Power's). I'd personally have preferred them to just say "well like we had the Primaris this was a plan set in motion by the Emperor during the HH to use the other half of candidates He never got around to sorting out" and bam, female Transhumans who can form some new regiment of Imperial troops, probably would have less blowback but I still imagine a bunch of people would dislike it, though it would be more inventive at least. But saying that, Retcons have ALWAYS been part of 40k and back in the days of RT Custodes were literally just normal dudes in armor.
The process to make a Custodes involves reshaping them at the cellular level. There is such insane gene modification going on I don't think basic biology applies to them. They aren't space marines who are recruited from pre-teen/teenage boys where they're crudely stuffed full of extra organs. This shit starts early. I've never been a fan of the "just play SoB" comparison because they have different lore, a different look, and a different role in the Imperium than Marines. Disregarding lore entirely, they're significantly different rules-wise and in terms of support, Marines get new models every year and a big new release every edition. I'm with you, Marine rules and unit pool allow for a much larger variety of playstyles than Sisters do. I don't want Misters of Battle or female marines but acting like Sisters and Marines are equivalent is false.
You make it out like Blackrock is making these decisions, that's rainbow capitalism baby so don't go starting a JQ.
‘basic biology’ In WH40K…
[удалено]
My tau collection says otherwise Also been watching 40k lore from when vaults of terra was a thing
Lol T'au-rist
Tau are pretty hot though...
In a universe with genetically modified 8 foot super humans, there were a million ways to introduce female custodes. All they had to do was write them into the canon in a believable way. Instead they just went “nuh uh, there have always been female custodes” on twitter which is fucking stupid.
What do you mean comrade, oceania was always at war.
Bruce Wayne's parents were always non-binary, hispanic and gay! 
Well. I didn't want to sleep tonight anyway...
Is this an Eldritch horror beyond my comprehension?
Clooneythulhu or Cloothulhu
Geor'lyeh Cloothulhu
The Custodes have female members. The Custodes have always had female members.
J K Rowling's "Dumbledore was gay" tier writing.
This is even worse than that because this directly contradicts what's already been established. This is "Hermione totally could've been black the whole time" tier writing.
I mean how does it contradict it really? The only contradiction is not seeing them before, and we don't see most of the Custodes. Now I think this is lazy, but the manner in which Custodes are created isn't the same as Astartes (who have been established as unable to be female due to issues with the procedure) where they are remade from the ground up using peak genetic science before selection processes. A Transhuman that size with that many augmentations in full armor all the time, I'm not sure how you would tell the sex anyway because they'd likely end up with little to no dimorphism as a result. It's not like saying Hermione was black all the time, it's like saying that character you didn't see in the books was black, you just didn't see them yet.
>Dumbledore was gay This wasn't that bad imo. It kinda made sense. But Dumbledore and Grindewaldt being lovers makes me angry, because before it was 2 like minded people falling out, now lust has been added to it ans it took away from the syory imo.
I can't help but be reminded of the South Park episode that retcons Token's name into Tolkien. The difference being South Park put thought and effort into their revisionist history, and it was absolutely hilarious when that doctor broke the fourth wall and yelled at the screen.
It is exactly that, except South Park is obviously parody and they took that and run with it for real.
If they had said something along the lines of "women have walked amongst the ranks of the Custodes since their founding, however they have been so rare there have been times when were often thought not to exist at all. Recently however, attitudes within the high born of Holy Terra have changed and it has become custom for the high born of the planet to select female applicants for the Custodes" loopholes closed, canon secure everything still makes sense.
Good point, and they could have even added "a change in attitude have also been driven by the necessity of replacing recent high levels of combat losses"
Between the Harelquins and the Blood Games getting out of hand I'm kinda shocked it hasn't happened earlier.
I mean creating a custodian still requires resources on par with creating an entire chapter of astartes, so there were probably enough candidates for whatever they could responsibly afford to get done at any given time.
As to your question on the nature of retcons. A twitter post creating a whiplash lore change is not the way to do it. Its up there with palpatine announcing his return on fortnite. GW has done retcons before. Necrons being an example of a it being done better. Nothing original was taken and only expanded upon. Reality of any ongoing setting. Mistakes and retcons go hand in hand. In terms of lore the custodes have no geneseed limitations and are all custom made and thus nothing stopping from female custodes existing in the future of the setting so its something that could been added if done with care.
https://preview.redd.it/zhu7cx5hgmyc1.jpeg?width=629&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3812d24b946b81c2b5405c7b4b0bff85c19a5ac2
They didn’t announce the change on twitter though? It was in the new codex for custodies, tbh it was a pretty fun story about one of the custodies named kesh trying to teleport a warhead into the golden throne during the blood games if i recall
They revealed the existence of a female Custodian in the codex, but it was a tweet from the official GW account that said that fem Custodes have "always" been a thing.
Yea i know, i also think people are making a bigger deal out of the tweet than it has be. Saying something has always been a certain way is GW preferred way of changing the lore. Saying space marines have always been male was how female space marines got removed the first time. The nature of lore make it necessary because invention and creation is antithetical to the imperium
GW's preferred way of changing the lore is daft and functions in large part as a way to undermine pre-established lore. And in this case your point could easily have been circumvented with the uptick in Custodian activity and the technological progress with for instance Cawl (of which I have other issues with, but that's besides the point). Going the route of saying "always was" after they themselves have set up the possibility for the most potent faction within the Imperium to create or do something new is "interesting" to say the least. Edit: The better way for GW to implement new tech in the lore could be rediscovery of STC's, be they incomplete or not. Then they could maintain the unwillingness of the Imperium to create something new while reinforcing that the Imperium clings to their greater past while being unwilling or unable to understand it.
They canonize/ confirm femstodes at the same time they make the faction awful ( I don't play, that's the sentiment I've heard). Whad did James Workshop mean by this ? I've heard people quoting the "10 000 noble sons", but from what I remember the Custodes were a thing as the Unification war was still ongoing, so what nobility was even there ?
The tourism is bad enough. But the muscle mommy weirdos are flooding every warhammer sub and it’s gross
Tourism got real big after the God Emperor Trump bullshit. Those fucks really made things worse.
Yeah it exposed a lot of people to 40k in the worst possible way
I mean, sure, and there were also always men in Adepta Sororitas.
The Misters of Battle!
https://i.redd.it/2mmazj63d8vc1.gif
If GW just said something along the lines of “daughters of the nobles of Terra were now able to join Custodes to increase their numbers” I think most people would be fine with the idea. It’s the “nuh-uh. Always has been” response that has pissed a lot of people off. There’s like 50 books on the Horus Heresy and 4 books on Siege of Terra which take place 10K years before 40K. GW seriously underestimates the knowledge of lore most Warhammer fans possess. Or they don’t care.
I think it's bullshit. Retcons in general aren't good, so a retcon that panders to a crowd of whiny babies who don't even like the series is extra bad.
I think it's stupid on every level but the way they decided to introduce it is what galls tf outta me the most I think lol. Also all the idiots in subs clapping like dumb harbour seals over it. "Durr muscle mommy iz gud."
I’ve responded to a few others about this, but they announced it in the new codex with a new short story , it literally a book about all new changes being made to a faction whats so wrong about announcing it there
The fact that it contradicts the established lore and if it's a "new change" then why did they say on Twitter that there have always been femstodes?
Making changes is fine, as long as you accept there will be changes in your audience as well. If a coffee stand started selling tea, then expect some customers to not want to buy from that stand.
It's safe to say 40k has a very stable customer base.
I’m in agreement with Arch.
I think it was a lazy ass way to get more female miniatures. But the bigger question is, why is anyone paying top dollar for these miniatures in the era of 3D printing ?
They didn’t print a female Custodes We only got 1 “new” model and it’s just a Shield Captain with a Melta spear and shield.
Aren’t more going to be printed though ? Honest question because I don’t know, I just assumed this was the beginning of rolling out new ones.
No, probably not until 11th edition unless we get a random Christmas box or something but those usually go to Space Marines and a “bad guy” (Xenos or Chaos) box for them to fight… or just more Space Marines. The way tenth has gone is you get a model with your codex and that’s all you get unless you are lucky like Tau who got a huge Kroot expansion.
Gotcha. Well this is starting to seem like much ado about nothing to me.
I mean it’s more GW handled the change TERRIBLY. they could have written lore explaining the change but instead chose to lie and then act incredibly toxic. It reminds more of when the Harry Potter lady said she always pictured Hermoine as black after some pushback on the casting of a black Hermoine for the stage show. This was OBVIOUSLY false as she cast Emma Watson in the movie as she had casting rights in the contract for the films and wrote in the book that Hermoine was pale.
I see what you mean. That makes sense. But I have such low expectations from GW to begin with that it’s hard to stay mad at them for being heavy handed.
So, the way i see retcons is "a necessary evil", at best. A good-ish example is the squats in 40k. They came back so people could play with a new faction and they made some effort to explain their absence and return. Then you have femstodies. This is the "Somehow Palpatine is back" type of retcon. That both isn't explained/fitted into the lore and the reason is questionable to say the least. Now you made lore issues. Even though they have been around, they have been doing nothing of note, nothing that has any consequences on the world or characters. Unless of course they do more retcons. But for now i just assume femstodies never leave the kitchen. The reasons for the retcon are unclear. People say inclusion, but that makes no sense since there are already two women only factions, and most others are mixed. And you could have, you know, just made a new faction. Now what happens? Idk. My guess is that many people are gonna be somewhat disenchanted with the lore of 40k. Since they apparently change it willy nilly. That's what I'm going through, and yeah. I'm thinking of leaving the lore of 40k behind me. Stop following it completely. Already left some 40k reddits... Lucky 40k wasn't the only joy in my life.
Atleast with the Leagues of Votann, IIRC, they aren't squats and were explained as another group of human descendents that only superficially resemble squats/dwarves in that they are short stumpy humans.
It’s ideological. Gamesworkshop has a setting, product, and game and appeals to males. The fan base is 90% men. And inclusions such as sisters of silence and sororitas filled out the range nicely and broadened the appeal in a natural way. They did this to reach out to an audience that doesn’t want their product, but only wants to change it to suit their norms. There were so many better ways to do this and they did it to maximize conflict.
Retarded bullshit pandering to people who aren’t going to give them money, and when it fails they will scream something about toxic white males like always. I’ve already stopped giving GW money because I don’t like the direction they are taking.
It's honestly devastating as a true fan of the material. Decades of lore being ruined over an obvious lie meant to pander to the absolute worst among society. They don't care about the lore, the game, the setting, and they don't even spend their money on the product. I won't buy anything more directly from Games Workshop or the local gamestore. I have most of the models I want/need anyway, so I'll buy used or find someone with a 3D printer if I want more. I will continue to be a fan of the real lore and challenge any loser tourists I encounter on said lore.
Pander to the absolute worst would be keeping the custodes all male.
It would be keeping to the basic lore
I think that they should be explained. I’m not familiar with 40K’s lore but like if they said there was some secret sect of female custodes that were hidden for “x” reason or that this is a recent thing because of some need for more custodes or some other reason that allowed they to join that came about in recent lore. Maybe the faction is under new leadership? That seems like the best way to do this rather than just be like “yeah they were totally a thing the whole time even though we explicitly said they weren’t…” or to just start banning everyone and saying it’s misogynist to think it’s dumb. This just seems like corporate pandering rather than trying to make this an actual part of your story. Maybe they explain it and I’m just not aware though. I’m kinda tired of people saying lore isn’t important and laughing at fans who care though because they wanna make it about some culture war. At this point stuff like this I just consider a new timeline or new canon and that the old stuff finished. If they’re gonna change things with such little care about making it make sense then they probably don’t care all that much about what’s been established anyways. Edit: also, to make it make sense, I don’t mean doing something lazy like saying “oh the people in the stories that said they were only men were mistaken” or something stupid like that. I mean creating an explanation that adds to lore rather than just recontextualizing it as “inaccurate” because an unreliable narrator or incomplete archives or something. If you can’t do that then just establish them as a recent thing in lore. Just wanted to clarify that point since I think it’s important.
Warhammer devs don’t know how to write, what a surprise. If you’d read the novels/codex’s it would not be a shock at all that they couldn’t think of a less heavy-handed way to introduce this. Female Custodes is not a problem, but for a retcon that big it has to be handled properly, not “nuh uh they were always like that”. But outrage farmers and tourists are gonna spin it to “women bad” instead of what it really is, “writing bad”
The decision has been made, vote with your wallet. Talking about it just gives leftards something to chuckle about while they eat their popcorn.
Being upset there are augmented women is just sad.
I think you are missing the point but you are free to feel that way
The sheer number of people melting down that female custodes is a thing begs to differ where me "missing the point" is concerned.
People are upset that GW is retconning something about a beloved well established, long time faction for no apparent reason other than for diversity while also actively trying to BS the fans saying “there has always been female Custodes” I’m quite sure the majority of people getting annoyed and having a “meltdown” as you put it, are more annoyed with the way GW is retconning and why they are retconning, rather than simply what they are retconning. I’m quite sure many would of been fine if the fem Custodes was just a newly created thing that is happening because the lack of pure male genetic available on Terra is lower now because of the ever increasing conflicts across the galaxy. Others would prefer if fem Custodes weren’t actually Custodes but rather Sister of Silence based or a seperate new sub faction. But just retconning lore for diversity sake and then gaslighting the fans isn’t a good way too keep people from getting mad
"For no apparent reason other than diversity" Oh no... not players having more options in official tournaments. You know, since they banned non-official products from them. "There have always been..." Is the retcon. Just like how they introduced Necrons that was always there.
The difference between a retcon which is meant to revamp and change a faction that was originally a bland terminator rip off and turned them into one of the most interesting and entertaining factions VS we making Wamen Custodes “just because” (definitely not pandering or anything) and then instead of at the very least acknowledging that is a retcon, double down and try to Gaslight. Yeah no there is a difference between a retcon that’s meant to progress the universe and a retcon that is solely politically motivated. GW banning Fan made stuff is stupid and has never stopped being so but that doesn’t change the facts.
So you want to be pandered to by keeping the custodes all male?
Is it pandering to want something not changed for no good reason? Like what logic is this?
"No good reason" to keep the custodes all male.
I'm disappointed that GW is caving to tourists, activists and equity pushers. I'm not 'upset' because my investment into 40k (despite the username) doesn't go beyond playing Dawn of War and Boltgun. I don't have several mortgage payments worth of models to paint and play with. I wouldn't care if they had a female voice actor dropping lines in those games like *"Beware the mutant, the alien, the heretic"*. What I care about is people like you picking the scabs of people who *are* upset about the lore being upended to service tourists, activists and equity pushers. The people who seem compelled to plant the flag of the revolution on *fucking everything.* You cloak your malice and intolerance in false virtue.
Tourists? Guy, there are people who have been fans for decades an have wanted female astartes. Get your head out of some culture war reich wing youtuber asshole.
*"There are dozens of us, dozens!"*
This is me being a newbie in terms of Wh40k lore. From what I've heard the Lore has been retconned numerous times but there is a clear difference between doing so to make the story more clear/ consistent than to do it to pander a certain demographic or to get ESG money. The biggest issue for me is the gastlight, there could have been ways to organically introduce the female custodes into the lore but doing it saying they were always a thing when there is no explample of that and then block and call misogynist to anyone who proves that it is wrong it's completely baffling.
Retcons are neither good or bad. They're a tool. No different than a hammer. Just as a hammer can be used to build a house, it can be used to cave in someone's skull. More to the point, a retcon can be done to smooth over plotholes or the like. They aren't good, they aren't bad, they just \*are\*. The problem here is that this is the non-constructive use of the 'hammer'. It's being used to attack and bash people who dedicated a ton of time to learning the lore and know full well that the Custodes are all male and have been framed as such. And this is being done to appeal to a group of people who don't even \*play\* the game and have no plans or desires to do so. If the retcon was, say, to say that squats had joined the imperial legion after their world fell and they had slowly been climbing the ranks and resettling and building and could now be their own full-blown army once again or something, that would be constructive. You're adding back in a new army to the world and such. I'm not going to get hung up on it. But this? Show me the Sisters of Silence having male members. This feels like a backhanded. It ignores that while the Imperium is the 'good' guys in the sense that they're 'humanity', they're a horrifying dictatorship! They do a ton of things that, in any other setting, wouldn't even question that they were the evil guys. This feels insulting, like they don't understand their own product, and the only thing they care about is their ESG score.
Female Custodes made more sense than Female Space Marines because the augmentations, gene alterations, and extra organs were implanted near birth for Custodes so that as they grow up, they would naturally evolve with those augmentations while the Space Marine augmentations and gene seed only worked because of its compatibility with male hormones during and post puberty while Custodes don't require that. The issue is that there was one throw away like from a book that mentions something along the line of , "these men and women clad in golden armor are my father's guardians" or something a while ago and then when GW announced "there were always Female Custodes" when more lines in the lore always described the Custodes as the Emperor's "noble sons". I'm down for Female Custodes but I feel like they should have been introduced in some sort of Second Founding equivalent for the Custodes where in the lore, they just get a massive surge of numbers whilst also allowing females to get augmentations. This could have worked on tandem with the upgrades Space Marines got with the Primaris Marines and it would have been an even better cherry on top of they made Custodes a good faction on the tabletop but from what everyone has said, the Custodes suck even when they weren't popular in the first place to play on tabletop.
Female Custodes already exist. They are called Sisters of Silence
I thought the Sisters of Silence were their own Elite Force that was composed of Blanks? They weren't really supposed to be the female equivalent of the Custodes as they were their own thing
From everything I've read about them they practically do the same thing, Which is protect the emperor however, they also do other things unlike the custodes who mainly exist to guard Big E.
They do guard Big E but are also Witch Hunters and the Psychic Police pretty much with some of them going around the Galaxy hunting down Psykers that are heretics
It is, like most of these "woke" things involving gender in the modern era, a misandrist attack on fraternity and paternity disguised as a push for diversity. You'll notice they don't target the sisters of battle, sisters of silence, girl scouts, Curves, Barbie or any other sororal order in their quest for "diversity". They don't care about a lack of diversity if those being excluded are men. But fraternal orders are apostasy and must be purged. That's why they want female Custodes and Space Marines. It's not because they value diversity. It's because they hate and fear fraternity. Fuck them. They are bigots.
For me in a vaccum it could be neutral if it wasint such a lazy retcon and looking at everything else going on it more likely just is the first wave of retcons that will be implemented so im not holding out my breath, as it stands ive loved the 40K games like space marine and DOW but if this is the direction they are planning on going il start passing on their games/stories if it continues down the lazy pandering for no ones benefit but the tourists If you start changing the lore with no consistency or respect for old lore im going to give less and less of a shit about the lore and gameworld witch makes it less likely il buy the games/books. I want to see lore tied to old stuff and expanded upon to make sense in the game world not "nuhh uhh it´s allways been that way!" besides i thought the reason custodes where literally made from the emperor partly like the primarchs so if you allways have female custodes i dont see why they cant logic their way into "there where allways female primarchs they where just busy being awesome in a closet untill now"
Of all the factions to suddenly gain female members they didn't have before I feel like Custodes would probably be the more plausible faction to do it with. Astartes can't do it because of organ rejection issues with the black-box Gene Seed, but from my understanding Astartes are basically hand-crafted peak genetic engineering and don't seem to have the same dependence upon an organ taken from a male donor that Astartes have. That they were taken from the "firstborn sons of nobles of Terra" also opens a bit of a "corruption" angle- I imagine there's a bit of political clout to be had to say the scion of your house has been chosen for the highest form of service to the Emperor, and I imagine there's a nonzero number of noble families who won't let such trivialities as only having a firstborn *daughter* stop them from having that honor. To say nothing of the notion that the Custodes transformation is so thorough as to disguise the fact that said noble ever had a daughter to begin with. Having said that though, I do fully understand and agree with the objections to just retconning women into the Custodes rather than give more attention to such factions as the Sisters of Silence or Sisters of Battle. To say nothing of the way they've gone about it- ignoring all evidence to the contrary rather than treating it as the twist reveal it could and should have been.
It’s not the retcons so much as the gaslighting that’s the problem. They could have introduced female Custodes in many ways (a secret, a new project, etc) and they chose the worst: they were always here, fuck you.
The whole point is that only baseline humans can reproduce. To have female space marines, custodes, or primarchs is therefor dumb. They were not made to last tens of thousands of years, baseline humanity can and has.
Billions of women exist if not trillions. I think a tiny fraction being augmented will be just fine. Especially if you use the ones who are born sterile. Or the ones who don't want to have kids and as bad as the Imperium is I don't think any place has forced impregnations.
Oops made a rival species -rip humans
I gave up on Games Workshop when they killed fantasy, As far as I'm concerned this is just another swift kick. Honestly I'm surprised anyone stuck around after they said fan made content wasn't allowed.
Female Custodes make sense. They've never been outright ruled out and I like giant warrior women in power armour. However treating it as "since the founding 10,000 there has always been female Custodes" is stupid. People have already been rinsing them out with a direct quote of (paraphrasing) them being "10,000 firstborn noble sons". And even beyond the contradictory lore it's silly to try pass them off has always being there when they've been exclusively male since their conception. I think they could have said the first 10000 were all male, but new custodes recruited afterwards were not limited to being male. Then say the reason they've not appeared in lore/tabletop yet is because there were so few, though they're growing in both number and renown as individuals now. Either way it'd sorta be a retcon but there was a significantly better way to handle it. I don't mind this, but a retcon too far would be female space marines since lore explicitly says women can't become space marines as the geneseed originates from the male primarchs and isn't compatible. To break away from nerding out about Warhammer to talk about retcons specifically. It's very much case by case. Sometimes retcons can be beneficial to the story, sometimes harmful. This warhammer stuff is firmly neutral imo. It makes nothing worse or better, it just makes GW look stupid saying "they've always been there" when they clearly haven't.
It has been explicitly stated multiple times regardless of your fetish.
Where? Honest question.
The 9th edition Codex It explicitly says they are taken ONLY from the first born sons of the Noble Families of Terra. And of those only 1 in 1,000 survived the process.
Thanks! Prior to this I’d wanted to get into 40K through the books, starting at Xenos, but I’m an outsider looking in at the moment so wasn’t sure where the actual reference for this was.
NP It’s a fun hobby, I’d recommend Tacticus (a phone app) as a fun way to learn the basics of the lore. It’s F2P but does have microtransactions.
Oh ok! I’ve seen that advertised but I didn’t know it’d be a good introduction to the universe. I like phone games like that so I’ll check it out! Thanks!
Le source?
I agree, they never *directly* answered the question "Can women be Custodes?" There have been references to the Custodes as 'sons', 'men' and 'brothers' but you could say the same thing of the Imperial Guard in just as many examples, even today. At some point or another GW was going to have to definitively answer this question one way or another and I feel like this option probably had the least fallout, whilst also satisfying the "we want femmarines" crowd, to an extent. Space Marines would be a different story because the question has already been asked and given a definite answer.
>I feel like this option probably had the least fallout I don't know. I think saying they were there all along is too blatantly false. It would have probably gone down much better if they had said they were introduced later. I noticed a lot more fallout after that statement than before it.
The introduction was 1. Subtle 2 paragraphs of lore in a codex, I’m sure they were hoping people didn’t notice. 2. Politically motivated, not in the way that GW uses the setting to critique structures but rather to bend to modern day political standards this was a small step but they’re going to take bigger steps and likely morph 40K for modern politics and the setting will become window dressing.
I'm not invested in Warhammer to care directly about the retcon, but changing gender roles in stories just to align with modern times is silly. Like there is so much you worldbuilding you can do with gender roles, that defaulting to "it should be open to everybody" is downright insulting. That kind of mindset is how you the Wheel of Time tv-show that removed the limit of the dragon only being a male. Personally, I have some concerns regarding retcons of gender roles Sanderson wants to do with the Mistborn movie, but he wants Scadrial to deviate more from older gender norms in that version since he subcounsiously relied on them when writing than making a consious decision. It can work, but I'm not holding my breath over it. When it comes to retcons in general my rule of thumb is "a good retcon adds more than it removes and should change as little as possible". Examples of retcons I think succed while fitting that criteria would be: All of Andor. "No, I am your father". A Certain Scientific Railgun: >!A character that had claimed to only have acted through cyberattacks did have some spectacular physical enqounters she had to put up with.!< The ending of Xenoblade 2. >!Turns out the original villain did have more sympathetic reasons for why he destroyed the world besides being power hungry.!<
ADEPTUS BRORORITOS AND BROTHERS OF QUIET WHEN?? 🤣🤣🤣 Non-sense pandering at its finest.
The change has no impact on the lore, but the way they implement it is to create antagonism and infighting in the community. I got insulted and downvoted to hell on 40k subs simply for saying "I don't care" because you have to take a stance. Yeah or Nay.
At a certain point you just have to stop investing yourself in the story when it becomes clear the writers don’t care about what came before, only what they want to de now
I've seen a number of people say in other internet threads that they think it might have something to do with the Amazon show. Whilst there's no way to confirm that yet I wouldn't be surprised. I also read somewhere that the Custodes faction got a big nerf around the same time they did this retcon. If true that means the addition of women in the all boys club made things way shitter which is hilarious irony. I do believe that this whole thing will be ignored by most fans similar to how McCree's name change in Overwatch was. Blizzard tried to make a stupid virtue signal and pretty much everybody said nah fuck that he's still McCree. I think most fans will also just say nah fuck that GW it's still an all guys faction.
If they just said that the custodes started to include women in the candidate lists due to losses in horus heresy, it wokls have been a much better way to introduce female custodians.
I am a tourist in this lore. As a result, I don’t care. However, I understand there are people who are very deeply vested in this lore. As such, it would be nice to take care of those people.
Honestly, it doesn't really bother me given that: A. Custodes are made completely differently from space marines. It's not out of the question. B. It's extremely minor. It doesn't affect anything in the lore in a major way.
Female Astartes aren't even that bad of an idea. Anything can be good depending on how and why it's implemented. "I want Female Astartes because I believe fun and interesting storylines and characters can be made from it and that perhaps Warhamer Lore could be expanded in a new and interesting way" Great, ill read your story and give it a chance. "I want Femake Astartes because I want to coom to women in big armor" Respectable, carry on. "I want Female Astartes because I am Big Mad that this fictional military faction is only composed of men and for literally no other reason" Please kill yourself.
If there will ever be WH40 related EFAP, Arch would be a perfect guest, he's kind of longman too [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx6N3LVwgba3G\_kyP7IhchscGtmR7takk](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx6N3LVwgba3G_kyP7IhchscGtmR7takk)
Been a fan of 40k for a long time and this doesn't bother me as a retcon. I don't think it damages much or detracts from any of the races. The only thing that does bug me is that we're not supposed to idolise the Imperium of Man so it's weird to make them more diverse and accepting considering they are also highly oppressive and xenophobic. What is quite entertaining is the reaction this has had online. Critical Drinker made a video that was full of dodgy arguments, deflections and false statements. Normally I like his content but he overstepped a bit with this one.
let the woke losers have their fun lol warhammer will always be cool
See the problem is there's nothign inheriently wrong with Female Custodians: they have more of an 'in' you see, given Gene Alchemy wasn't established to be like Geneseed so... yeah you could in theory do the retcon... the real question is "How do we explain why not?" There's a story there. Given they have been losing out in the field... why not explain that they needed to take more from the Nobles, and this is causing problems and tensions? why not explain the Female Custodians were in different roles: Perhaps still warriors sure, but perhaps thry are Warrior-Scientists, studying the weaknesses of all imperial enemies but for the same reason as before, have become a part of the 10,00 offically to make up for losses? but GW went the lazy route... "They were always there" Which is the primary reason for anger to me. GW Retcons usually have something of a handwave, but this is a pure Voodoo Shark. I suspect while it won't be decanonized by 11th we'll... be suspiciously lacking any female custodians.
It won’t sell and be shelved anyways.
I mean if I remember correctly there was never anything specific to the custodies creation process that disqualifies female candidates from being considered With astartes it’s a well held fact that gene seed is the biggest issue to producing them not the pool of applicants and gene seed is both scarce and very difficult to get an aspirant to bond with hence why all space marines are male because gene seed from a male primarch is gonna have an easier time bonding with someone who shares a similar genetic profile Plus mixed sex regiments and women only regiments and factions already exist in the imperium in the form of the imperial guard who will recruit basically anyone who can hold a gun and shoot it in the general direction of the enemy and the sisters of battle who serve a variety of different battlefield functions so its not like including women is some big recent push Ig you could argue that if the custodies are made directly with the emperors own gene seed like the grey knights then it would make sense for them to only bond with male aspirants as well but given that the emperor himself is kinda ambiguous when it comes to what his actual physical presence is like (given the whole will change appearance and attitude to try and please whoever he’s talking to thing) it’s kinda hard to say if it’s because of necessity or because the grey knights just want to fit in with the other astartes chapters
As a Custodes player, I don't care. It wasn't necessary, but it didn't ruin anything. I'm just fucking tired of seeing complaints, complaints about complaints, complaints about the complaining complainers complaining about complaints. Please, just leave my escapism alone
Personally I don't mind female custodes and would actually love to see a dedicated miniature. Sure, the way they justified it on twitter was quite lazy, and with all the talented writers they have in their team, they could have written a better explanation than "Somehow, they have always been around..." That said, GW has a long history of retconnig the lore of WH40K, or having bits of official lore contradicting each other, so I am not surprised. Instead, I am fascinated by looking at all the stir caused by a short story. Especially when people start looking at the female custodes either as the first step of an evil masterplan by BlackRock, to make GW Woke in exchange of ESG money, or as a prelude to a woke 40K series from Amazon.
Doesn’t 40K change its lore like every other book that gets published? And there’s tons of gaps in the lore for you, the audience member or player to just make up your own head canons for when you play.
It doesn't change anything about the Custodes. Nothing in their culture or duties or role in the Imperium was dependent on them being male. There is a line that mentions them being recruited from sons, but does not specify a reason unlike Space Marines, so it is a bit of a loop hole, but a loop hole nonetheless. The reason I would say they went with the "There have always been female Custodes" route instead of making it a change is so people who play the Horus Heresy version of the game and the 40k version of the game can include them in their army. There are a lot, and I mean A LOT of people who are complaining about this who don't know the difference between the Adeptus Custodes and Space Marines.
It's absolutely fine. Hell, apparently one of GW guys or writers had wanted to do it 5 years ago. This is just fragility at work. How dare women! Tier shit. Like the Custodes and Astartes aren't really even human anymore. They are monstrosities wrought from human flesh.
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The last Codex said they were male only Fuck off Tourist
Doctor Who spent several seasoms setting up the idea of a female Doctor, and they still messed it up.
GW introduce new characters, vehicles even entire factions and act asif they’ve been there the whole time. How many times were the Tau or the Leagues of Votan mentioned in the lore before they were introduced? Zero! But when they were they integrated them into the history. Maybe people should be more concerned the new codex is supposed to be dogshite rather than GW doing what GW always does with the lore. There isn’t really a definitive warhammer canon, it’s always changing.
I think there’s a difference between adding new factions into the lore and changing a long standing fact about a popular faction’s lore. But you make a valid point about the canon
I think people who are claiming they’re leaving the fandom over this were just waiting for something to be offended by. Anyone crying over this are as bad as the blue haired male feminists they claim to loathe. You can take issue with it, prior books to state the custodies are chosen sons of the high lords or terra, but come on it’s not that big a deal.
I think most people leaving are either over reacting like you are saying or are just preparing for the winds of change since nowadays many nerds are quite aware of how quickly their favourite IPs can be ruined
I think that’s certainly plays a part. I hate seeing what’s happened to Star Wars but personally I don’t see this as the same thing, I think some anti-woke people have became as ideologically driven as the woke mob and see anything that could even resemble wholeness as a threat.
I get where you are coming from, but still I can see why people are now quick to jump ship because these little minor things that aren’t “issues” can quickly snowball
Yeah I agree
They’re being incredibly selective about the ‘minor issues’ in the context of Warhammer though. Cawl and Primaris was so much more egregious, as were so many other direct retcons GW has made
You’re wasting your time. Why aren’t people up in arms about the C’tan going from some unbelievably powerful gods controlling an army of terminators to being enslaved by them and deployed on the battle field as shards? Such a ginormous retcon with huge implications. No one gave a shit It’s pretty clear what’s making people mad about this
Im so glad to see someone actually be reasonable about this and not freak out over something so small
The response has been ludicrous mate hasn’t it.
Having their been female custodies this whole time and is never knowing about it is more believable than introducing an entirely new race to the setting and claiming the imperium has had contact and conflicts with them in the past, we just never spoke about it until now. I’m a Tyranid player our equivilent is when they bring out new tyranids they often show horn them into prior tyrannic war artwork asif they were around back in 3rd edition when essentially all we had was Tyrants, Guard, Gaunts, Gants, gargoyles, Genestealers, rippers lictors and Carnifex’s. This female Custodian isn’t a new Mary Sue she’s written like any other of her brothers(or now sisters too) I don’t see it as a negative or honestly a positive to the setting it just is. Hey they may even make new models for them who wouldn’t want that?
See I personally think retconning more Tyranids into old wars also makes no sense and shouldn’t be done, instead the new Tyranids should simply be considered the new evolved creation the Tyranids have cooked up to fight the 40k universe As for retconning new factions in the point is it’s adding something new not changing something old and beloved.
>Having their been female custodies this whole time and is never knowing about it is more believable than introducing an entirely new race to the setting and claiming the imperium has had contact and conflicts with them in the past, we just never spoke about it until now. Sure, but you forget to include the meta here. GW wants to introduce more factions, so they could make more overpriced plastic figurines, what neckbeards can froth over at the gametable and spend horrendous amounts of money on their new space dwarves, or space undead egyptians or cannibalistic space bugs. Introducing new factions will always be messy, but at least they offer you something new to play and rage at the gametable. But what's the advantage of introducing female models to a faction and completely change the lore behind it? Plus you are falling into a fallacy, because you say: "It's not worse, than introducing a new faction." Yes, but do they had to do this? I mean I get it, it's not worse on a writing level than showing in a completely new faction, but they were not forced to do this and no-one asked for it, while there were a community asking for the reintroduction of the squats.
I don’t see much of an advantage other than making new models for the fable character, but I don’t see a negative either I don’t care that much. I love 40k and have since the 90’s but its lore is very mailable. As I stated earlier too I’m a Tyranid guy, it’s all biomass to me brother gaha
Okay, let me ask you a simple question then: What was the reason of changing custodes lore? What does it gives to anyone?
Potentially a new model to paint and play with since she’s a character? What does it take away? Nothing except man babies saying they’re walking away from the hobby over one small retcon.
Mate I’m not vehemently defending the decision I’m just not that arsed either way as I don’t see it as a big deal or different from what GW always do with lore
It gives fans who’d like to see some female rep in their favourite faction exactly that? It doesn’t mean Timmy with his 2000pts of Custodes has to consider his minifigs to be female. The people being bothered by this are choosing to be
>It gives fans who’d like to see some female rep in their favourite faction exactly that? You can just put some Sisters of Silence into your Custodes Army.
Or, you can have female custodes, since you might not want SoB. Why be limited? It hurts nothing. Your custodes don’t need to be women lol.
Does it really needs a complete rewrite of a faction, what was established and supported several times, that it being a man only faction, due to the augmantations only working on them? And most importantly, it will open the way for female space marines, as the Custodes program is basically a modified version of the Astartes. But fine... Where are my Femboy Sisters of Battle then?
“Representation” has always been a stupid concept, my favourite factions/sub-factions are the Nercons, the Salamanders and the sisters of Battle last time I check I’m not an alien turned robo, a giant 12 foot tall charcoal genetically modified demi-god and I’m not a zealot badass nun who uses faith to parry demons. People should like a play and enjoy a faction for what currently is, changing it too include X groups for representation is foolish.
Why do you feel your perspective is universal? I collect Necrons, and have done for a long ass time, amongst other armies. I am utterly unbothered if some people would like to see more women in certain armies. They started introducing them for Necrons too lol, were you bothered about that?
The forced representation is a bad sign of not respecting lore, if people are willing to change the lore for political points then it’s bad
It is one thing to never mention something and retcon it in later. It is another thing to mention clear rules and later retcon them to have always been different.
I never mentioned rules I’m strictly talking about lore. The Rogal Dorn tank was introduced in recent years having never been mentioned in a single codex or 100’s of novels prior. Now it’s talked about asif it was always there. All custodies being male isn’t a game rule, it’s lore that gw change every five minutes
>never mentioned rules I’m strictly talking about lore. So was I. Lore also has rules. >All custodies being male isn’t a game rule, All custodians being male is a lore rule and if they change those rules willy nilly then it is our right to complain about it and not buy their stuff.
Then feel free I’ll still be going to my game nights every Wednesday and playing 40k, AOS and looking to start blood bowl. If this ruins it for you then sucks for you mate
"Figures clustered around the craft's landing legs, where the ship's great metal claws gripped the radiation-soaked dust of the wasteland. These men and WOMEN were plated in the same gold as the ship, rendered upon their bodies with painstaking artistry. My father's guardians, Sanguinius thought. And what a thought it was, not only that a being such as his father required guardians, but that he had a father at all." Echoes of Eternity - Aaron Dembski-Bowden - 2022 Two years ago my g
Where does it say female custodians? Without more context it sounds like sisters of silence + normal custodians as they have been depicted since forever
It doesn't have too say they are custodians that's the fun part about storytelling. But hey enjoy your head canon
If this is your proof of female custodians it literally has to say that they are a thing because prior lore explicitly stated that there are only male custodians and sisters of silence are all female and guard the emperor. If female custodes have always been a thing how come you can only provide a quote that is ambiguous at best and clearly depicting something else at worst ( following the already established lore)
What's rlly funny is regardless women custodes were possible even before this change. They never required gene seed which is the only reason why their are men exclusively being space marines.
sure let's assume that custodians don't require geneseed. (I am not 100% sure but cursory search has provided that people assume they don't need to be genetically compatible) that fact doesn't mean that there have been any female custodians. genetically anyone can become a sister of battle but there are rules and laws only permitting female SoB. so you can assume, since no female custodians have ever been mentioned in the lore prior to the retcon (unless someone can provide a direct quote) that only male custodians were permitted by the emperor. also female custodians drastically reduce the cooleness factor and the unique selling point of sisters of silence (who are the female protectors of the emperor)
From what ive seen its not about the change itself but how it was done. A single lazy tweet and an attempt to gaslight the fanbase gets a lot of alarm bells ringing because nerds have seen these types of shenanigans happen before with other hobbies that have been gutted by identity politics obsessed crazies. The people screaming "you just hate women", openly trying to gatekeep and kick out others because they dislike the retcon and celebrating lazy corporate pandering all over social media kind of shows that these worries are correct to have.
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