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Citing lore for why Space Marines can't be female is a super weak argument. There's zero reason GW couldn't come out tomorrow and say "Through Guilliman's efforts, the gene seed process has been refined to the point where any human can accept the implants and become an Astartes." The gender restriction is just a silly holdover from the bad old days.
Why can't robots be Jedi?
Actually, in the extended universe...
Sorry, Skippy is no longer canon since Disney wiped that all out.
He never was canon! Star Wars Tales were explicitly non-canon stories!
Bandying up lore as some retroactive valid reason for no female space marines is so frustrating. Let's just take a moment here and reflect on GW in the 80's. Small company of a bunch of British nerds just making things that they like. Heavy metal, power fantasies, some good ol' English counter-culture at the expense of the Iron Lady. That's all awesome. I was 13, and I like muscly orcs with mohawks too. In part of their lore, they throw in the lines "space marines/primarchs are genetic clone sons from the primarchs/emperor", not to say anything exclusive or satirical or political, but just because theyre dudes in the 80s and it sounds badass and epic and they just arent thinking about those things.
But then, anytime someone comes along and asks "hey, why are space marines this giant sausage fest?" the actual answer is: "Oh, this game was made by a bunch of white dudes in the 80s and they just weren't thinking about that. THATS why there's no female space marines." Which is totally fine! There's plenty of old stuff that people LOVE that has headscratching decisions when you look at it nowadays. People can understand the time and context that something was made in.
But no, instead, there's this massive neckbeard backlash that quotes the whole "space marines can only genetically be male!" thing as gospel instead of maybe trying to understand the context of the time it was made, and how maybe that's sort of different now.
Did GW write themselves into a corner 30 years ago? Totally, because they werent thinking 30 years into the future. Is it worth the fandom gripping onto this one little irrelevant snippit of throwaway lore because they fear change? Fucking no.
And that's just the retroactive stuff!
Q: "Why aren't there any -current- female space marines?"
A: "Because only awesome manparts can accept the geneseed and become the true protectors of mankind!"
Actual A: "Because the creators weren't considering these issues when they made them 30 years ago."
The question now, going forward was:
Q: "Boy, with all this NEW lore and progression moving forward, it should would be neato for GW to include NEW female gendered marines, and finally be able to break away 30 years of that stagnant lore that some people seem to want to use as a sexist flagpole!"
A: "Yes, representation is totally a reasonable thing to consider in 2017. This is a massive international entertainment company in the modern age. Large swaths of our potential playerbase feel alienated and totally uninterested in this hobby, and boy-howdy it would sure be nice to get some of their money!"
The lore implications are even more irrelevant now. Primarchs can come back, Cadia explodes, the goddamn Eldar can unite and birth a new chaos god, but noooooooooo, the concept of female space marines is just too outlandish!
Ok, then lets get to the satire angle, and how 40k is about white male fascists ruling the galaxy. Well... except it's not, really. It's certainly about fascist HUMANS ruling the galaxy, but pretty much everything in the imperium is satirized in a very specific light.
40k is a satire of classism, there's always this massively ridiculous gap between the haves and have-nots, pumped to an apocalyptic degree. Billy the indentured serf spends 23 hours a day sucking out toxic slime from clogged sewer pipes 20 miles under a hive city, while Madam Goldfanny sits on her giant throne made of gilded serf-skulls as she flies around the galaxy in a giant space cathedral. It's SO classist that it's hilarious.
40k is also a satire of xenophobia, and shares some blurry boundaries with fictional racism. Any thing not human is the absolute most evil thing is the universe and must be purged with no questions asked. period the end. Oh. Except psykers. and navigators. and some useful mutants and i guess some aliens sometimes. The joke is in the hypocrisy. Racism is dumb, wink wink.
The thing that 40k has never really been a satire of, is realworld racism and sexism. In general, its a unified humanity versus fictionalized 'others'. The Imperium doesnt give a shit if youre black, white, asian, male or female, as long as you love the Emperor and serve. Classism makes a difference, but never race or sex. At least on paper.
The problem comes in, because the creators DONT make it a point of satire or consideration, it ends up being ACTUAL racism or sexism. They're all white dudes, so they paint white dudes. Not to be malicious or anything, but that's just the 'default' for them. They arent making a satirical statement about "the imperium is a white fascist state, and only unbermensch rule the galaxy!". They just arent thinking about it, and so the default face becomes a muscly white guy. If someone says "hey, it's weird that theyre all white dudes", the correct response is to have a moment of inward reflection and self awareness, not to backpedal and try to somehow justify it after the fact.
The sisters of battle are ALMOST a satire of patriarchal religion, but they never quite leaned in hard enough. It's always been the "faction for girls" because it has girls in it. No one -really- acknowledges that they're all brainwashed by this crazy creepy priesthood who are all dudes ordering around fetishized nuns in leather bodysuits. I mean, that's a good satirical point to make, in that they're arguably the MOST sexist faction, but everyone seems to totally miss that and just sort of handwaves away the whole priesthood part and focuses on the " but its got girls in it!".
Last point is the argument of "buh, female space marines would just look like male space marines, so why bother?". The point isnt to make tittied up space marines with flowing hair, the point is that excluding half the human population in your posterfacction 'just cuz' is fucking stupid.
Here's a bunch of stormtroopers from episode 7. They all look the exact same.
But, because elsewhere in the movie, they established that there ARE females serving in the first order (not talking about phasma, who was a swing and a miss) we know that even though theyre all the same faceless soldiers, there's some diversity and representation underneath. Fuck, having a black stormtrooper blew peoples goddamn mind. They're oppressive fascists, but they're ALL oppressive fascists.
You'd have to be pretty blind to ignore the fact that this sort of representation didnt have a positive effect on starwars and it's fandom.
There's a whole fucking lot of nerds out there, not just male Caucasian ones.
McGibs on
+9
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
Let's be clear here, I don't really care about female space marines, I don't think I've ever engaged with anyone over this issue before either. But every time this argument comes up, I only ever see the nay-sayers take the same two points:
1. That women in real life aren't generally as big, strong, or physically powerful as men. That is a terrible argument in science-fiction space opera fantasy where we're talking about biologically, chemically, and cybernetically augmented super soldiers fighting in power armor.
2. This circular argument that it can't be done because this little part of the lore says it can't be done, so it would be bad to change that.
Never do they explain how it would affect the Horus Heresy if the missing primarchs or some of the Emperor's Children were women, or what would have to change about the scenes between Caiaphas Cain & the Tech Marine who made his augmetic fingers and sparred with him a couple times if the latter had been female. I've yet to see someone make a credible argument that any part of the themes or characterization of Space Marines would need to be handled differently. Does it change your perspective on Graham McNeill's Ultramarines series about Uriel Ventris if some of the marines in the background were girls?
No, it's always just about how it can't be changed because the lore says it's so. Right, because all those other things GW has changed or retconned were totally okay, but somehow out of the millions of words that have been written about this setting, those couple sentences are sacred and untouchable.
A poster making this argument is making the same mistake as that guy in the G&T Overwatch thread who complained about how for the third time in a row, the post-launch character release was a woman. He talked about how he likes to roleplay and/or envision himself as the character he's playing, so he wants new guy characters. He made sure to stress that he didn't have a problem with girls playing, or girl characters, or even guys playing as girl characters. And in a vacuum that all sounds pretty reasonable...
But women are still less than half of Overwatch's playable cast, and it's a given that there will be other male characters eventually. But he could not perceive his privilege on this issue, or how intolerant he was being towards cisfemale players, m2f transgender players, parents who want their daughters to think of gaming as a safe and welcoming space, etc. So when people refused to just let it slide or stop trying to convince him to see their perspective, he dug his heels in and got increasingly angry. He did admit at one point that he was being selfish, but didn't follow that realization through to its inevitable conclusion before he got a mod warning to drop the argument.
This thread isn't nearly as active as the Overwatch one, and I suspect there probably aren't as many girls or parents here, so you won't get the same kind of backlash. But you cannot make this argument that 'wanting female space marines is stupid' without being intolerant and arguing from a position of privilege. Your intentions don't matter here, the effects/results do.
One reason for no-female-marines is because it feeds into the theme of the Imperium being an oppressive fascist state that terminates anyone that deviates from the norm. All-white all-male supersoldiers are kinda key to that aesthetic.
But that's kind of a moot point when not only did the Emperor have a female command of supersoldiers (the Sisters of Silence), but that there's females in every other rank and position in the Imperium (as pointed out by @SmokeStacks above). Like, any degree of worldbuilding that could be accomplished by that detail is completely negated by how they've built the rest of the setting. And does female space marines magically negate all the other terrible aspects of the Imperium? It's small potatoes, like how Data's not saying contradictions makes him seem more inhuman, but would be an insignificant change in how people perceive his story if they were to drop it.
The entirety of the Horus heresy was a result of GW being a poor newbie company that couldn't afford to make too many different models so they decided their space marine figures would fight each other in a civil war and lower costs. The No Girls thing was probably throwaway lore so they wouldnt have to put female heads on the sprue and save 50 cents per casting.
Back in the Rogue Trader days there were female Space Marines.
How would female Space Marine heads on a sprue differ from male ones considering 99% of them wear helmets?
Right, so why do you care if they were already there at one point? Why fight this argument when it would matter so little?
I'd like some more female representation amongst the human factions that are already canonically mixed-gender too please. Third party bitz are all well and good but come on.
This would be an excellent way to support the modern "inclusiveness" crusade without having to rewrite entire sections of currently existing lore simply to tick some progressive? y/n checkbox.
What is your problem with people wanting such a minor change? The hostility in your tone has a lot of unfortunate subtext, and I'm not sure you realize how you come across. It's nice that you at least acknowledge the issue and support it in other respects, but I'm struggling to think of a non-confrontational way to describe the clear derision you're expressing.
you know better female representation when it comes to the hobby (come on GW just release sisters of battle).
Anecdotal anecdotal lol but in my gaming group the guys (mainly the longer term players) are the ones who are bitching the most about sisters being so hard to build an army for. The three women in the group could care less (two play Tyranids, one plays GSC and Tau). Two of them think the female Space Marine argument is stupid, one of them I don't know her thoughts on the matter because I don't play her because she is one of the worst That Guy-s I have ever seen.
And here comes the standard "I know a couple members of [group] and they're on my side" argument. This is at about the same level of discourse as "I have friends who are black, I can't be racist" in terms of its irrelevance to the bigger picture. Pick any group of people, like, say male-to-female transgenders, and there will be members who express views that are harmful and self-defeating, or supporting figures or organizations that act against the groups' better interests (like Caitlyn Jenner). That does not discount the many people who feel differently.
Damnit knuckles, you took the hot wind out of my SJW sails by posting 10 seconds after me!
+1
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
Hah, sorry. Thought of this as I was getting up this morning and wanted to get it out before I lost the wording. I added responses to the relevant comments upthread as I was typing, but I guess I forgot to do a final thread-check before posting and missed yours as a result.
I'd really like to hear your thoughts as to why you think race and privileged were brought up in this conversation.
Like, really take a second and try to think about WHY we'd bring those things up.
McGibs on
+1
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
What does the Overwatch thread, "privilege", or Caitlyn Jenner have to do with this conversation?
I explained it all right there in the post you silly goose. If you refuse to actually spend a few moments mentally processing the comparisons/analogies made, or you don't even understand the meaning of the sociological concept of privilege, then we're done here. I'm not repeating myself to a brick wall.
I will do the new thread. Will straight Copy and Paste OP because I have to go do things and update it with sexy Gathering storm shenanigans later.
I put models on Instagram now: asher_paints
+1
ManOHokutoKnight of the Bloody FistRegistered Userregular
I need to learn more about green stuff and sculpting in general. I'd like to make a shield maiden inspired space wolf kill team or maybe a pack of she-wulfen or something.
Posts
He never was canon! Star Wars Tales were explicitly non-canon stories!
Bandying up lore as some retroactive valid reason for no female space marines is so frustrating. Let's just take a moment here and reflect on GW in the 80's. Small company of a bunch of British nerds just making things that they like. Heavy metal, power fantasies, some good ol' English counter-culture at the expense of the Iron Lady. That's all awesome. I was 13, and I like muscly orcs with mohawks too. In part of their lore, they throw in the lines "space marines/primarchs are genetic clone sons from the primarchs/emperor", not to say anything exclusive or satirical or political, but just because theyre dudes in the 80s and it sounds badass and epic and they just arent thinking about those things.
But then, anytime someone comes along and asks "hey, why are space marines this giant sausage fest?" the actual answer is: "Oh, this game was made by a bunch of white dudes in the 80s and they just weren't thinking about that. THATS why there's no female space marines." Which is totally fine! There's plenty of old stuff that people LOVE that has headscratching decisions when you look at it nowadays. People can understand the time and context that something was made in.
But no, instead, there's this massive neckbeard backlash that quotes the whole "space marines can only genetically be male!" thing as gospel instead of maybe trying to understand the context of the time it was made, and how maybe that's sort of different now.
Did GW write themselves into a corner 30 years ago? Totally, because they werent thinking 30 years into the future. Is it worth the fandom gripping onto this one little irrelevant snippit of throwaway lore because they fear change? Fucking no.
And that's just the retroactive stuff!
Q: "Why aren't there any -current- female space marines?"
A: "Because only awesome manparts can accept the geneseed and become the true protectors of mankind!"
Actual A: "Because the creators weren't considering these issues when they made them 30 years ago."
The question now, going forward was:
Q: "Boy, with all this NEW lore and progression moving forward, it should would be neato for GW to include NEW female gendered marines, and finally be able to break away 30 years of that stagnant lore that some people seem to want to use as a sexist flagpole!"
A: "Yes, representation is totally a reasonable thing to consider in 2017. This is a massive international entertainment company in the modern age. Large swaths of our potential playerbase feel alienated and totally uninterested in this hobby, and boy-howdy it would sure be nice to get some of their money!"
The lore implications are even more irrelevant now. Primarchs can come back, Cadia explodes, the goddamn Eldar can unite and birth a new chaos god, but noooooooooo, the concept of female space marines is just too outlandish!
Ok, then lets get to the satire angle, and how 40k is about white male fascists ruling the galaxy. Well... except it's not, really. It's certainly about fascist HUMANS ruling the galaxy, but pretty much everything in the imperium is satirized in a very specific light.
40k is a satire of classism, there's always this massively ridiculous gap between the haves and have-nots, pumped to an apocalyptic degree. Billy the indentured serf spends 23 hours a day sucking out toxic slime from clogged sewer pipes 20 miles under a hive city, while Madam Goldfanny sits on her giant throne made of gilded serf-skulls as she flies around the galaxy in a giant space cathedral. It's SO classist that it's hilarious.
40k is also a satire of xenophobia, and shares some blurry boundaries with fictional racism. Any thing not human is the absolute most evil thing is the universe and must be purged with no questions asked. period the end. Oh. Except psykers. and navigators. and some useful mutants and i guess some aliens sometimes. The joke is in the hypocrisy. Racism is dumb, wink wink.
The thing that 40k has never really been a satire of, is realworld racism and sexism. In general, its a unified humanity versus fictionalized 'others'. The Imperium doesnt give a shit if youre black, white, asian, male or female, as long as you love the Emperor and serve. Classism makes a difference, but never race or sex. At least on paper.
The problem comes in, because the creators DONT make it a point of satire or consideration, it ends up being ACTUAL racism or sexism. They're all white dudes, so they paint white dudes. Not to be malicious or anything, but that's just the 'default' for them. They arent making a satirical statement about "the imperium is a white fascist state, and only unbermensch rule the galaxy!". They just arent thinking about it, and so the default face becomes a muscly white guy. If someone says "hey, it's weird that theyre all white dudes", the correct response is to have a moment of inward reflection and self awareness, not to backpedal and try to somehow justify it after the fact.
The sisters of battle are ALMOST a satire of patriarchal religion, but they never quite leaned in hard enough. It's always been the "faction for girls" because it has girls in it. No one -really- acknowledges that they're all brainwashed by this crazy creepy priesthood who are all dudes ordering around fetishized nuns in leather bodysuits. I mean, that's a good satirical point to make, in that they're arguably the MOST sexist faction, but everyone seems to totally miss that and just sort of handwaves away the whole priesthood part and focuses on the " but its got girls in it!".
Last point is the argument of "buh, female space marines would just look like male space marines, so why bother?". The point isnt to make tittied up space marines with flowing hair, the point is that excluding half the human population in your posterfacction 'just cuz' is fucking stupid.
Here's a bunch of stormtroopers from episode 7. They all look the exact same.
But, because elsewhere in the movie, they established that there ARE females serving in the first order (not talking about phasma, who was a swing and a miss) we know that even though theyre all the same faceless soldiers, there's some diversity and representation underneath. Fuck, having a black stormtrooper blew peoples goddamn mind. They're oppressive fascists, but they're ALL oppressive fascists.
You'd have to be pretty blind to ignore the fact that this sort of representation didnt have a positive effect on starwars and it's fandom.
There's a whole fucking lot of nerds out there, not just male Caucasian ones.
1. That women in real life aren't generally as big, strong, or physically powerful as men. That is a terrible argument in science-fiction space opera fantasy where we're talking about biologically, chemically, and cybernetically augmented super soldiers fighting in power armor.
2. This circular argument that it can't be done because this little part of the lore says it can't be done, so it would be bad to change that.
Never do they explain how it would affect the Horus Heresy if the missing primarchs or some of the Emperor's Children were women, or what would have to change about the scenes between Caiaphas Cain & the Tech Marine who made his augmetic fingers and sparred with him a couple times if the latter had been female. I've yet to see someone make a credible argument that any part of the themes or characterization of Space Marines would need to be handled differently. Does it change your perspective on Graham McNeill's Ultramarines series about Uriel Ventris if some of the marines in the background were girls?
No, it's always just about how it can't be changed because the lore says it's so. Right, because all those other things GW has changed or retconned were totally okay, but somehow out of the millions of words that have been written about this setting, those couple sentences are sacred and untouchable.
A poster making this argument is making the same mistake as that guy in the G&T Overwatch thread who complained about how for the third time in a row, the post-launch character release was a woman. He talked about how he likes to roleplay and/or envision himself as the character he's playing, so he wants new guy characters. He made sure to stress that he didn't have a problem with girls playing, or girl characters, or even guys playing as girl characters. And in a vacuum that all sounds pretty reasonable...
But women are still less than half of Overwatch's playable cast, and it's a given that there will be other male characters eventually. But he could not perceive his privilege on this issue, or how intolerant he was being towards cisfemale players, m2f transgender players, parents who want their daughters to think of gaming as a safe and welcoming space, etc. So when people refused to just let it slide or stop trying to convince him to see their perspective, he dug his heels in and got increasingly angry. He did admit at one point that he was being selfish, but didn't follow that realization through to its inevitable conclusion before he got a mod warning to drop the argument.
This thread isn't nearly as active as the Overwatch one, and I suspect there probably aren't as many girls or parents here, so you won't get the same kind of backlash. But you cannot make this argument that 'wanting female space marines is stupid' without being intolerant and arguing from a position of privilege. Your intentions don't matter here, the effects/results do.
But that's kind of a moot point when not only did the Emperor have a female command of supersoldiers (the Sisters of Silence), but that there's females in every other rank and position in the Imperium (as pointed out by @SmokeStacks above). Like, any degree of worldbuilding that could be accomplished by that detail is completely negated by how they've built the rest of the setting. And does female space marines magically negate all the other terrible aspects of the Imperium? It's small potatoes, like how Data's not saying contradictions makes him seem more inhuman, but would be an insignificant change in how people perceive his story if they were to drop it.
Right, so why do you care if they were already there at one point? Why fight this argument when it would matter so little?
What is your problem with people wanting such a minor change? The hostility in your tone has a lot of unfortunate subtext, and I'm not sure you realize how you come across. It's nice that you at least acknowledge the issue and support it in other respects, but I'm struggling to think of a non-confrontational way to describe the clear derision you're expressing.
And here comes the standard "I know a couple members of [group] and they're on my side" argument. This is at about the same level of discourse as "I have friends who are black, I can't be racist" in terms of its irrelevance to the bigger picture. Pick any group of people, like, say male-to-female transgenders, and there will be members who express views that are harmful and self-defeating, or supporting figures or organizations that act against the groups' better interests (like Caitlyn Jenner). That does not discount the many people who feel differently.
What does race have to do with any of this? Why are you trying to shoehorn race into this conversation?
What does the Overwatch thread, "privilege", or Caitlyn Jenner have to do with this conversation?
Sexism it definitely is, internalised sexism from a young age, but that's my instant reaction
Like, really take a second and try to think about WHY we'd bring those things up.
I explained it all right there in the post you silly goose. If you refuse to actually spend a few moments mentally processing the comparisons/analogies made, or you don't even understand the meaning of the sociological concept of privilege, then we're done here. I'm not repeating myself to a brick wall.
to hell with biotruthy arguments this just looks rad.