Like, this take is entirely fair. Incels are gonna incel, no matter what GW does, but this wasn’t the way to change this.
GW has gradually been moving in this direction; IG regiments were originally all men, then they had gender-segregated regiments, then mixed regiments started becoming more and more common until they became the norm. And this is something I’m all for; a flashlight lasgun is gonna be equally effective in the hands of men or women.
But you shouldn’t retcon established lore (even if it is problematic) with a tweet.
Not quite correct, there were female models in power armour released with “rogue trader”, but very little lore and nothing specifically referenced female space marines. When they began actually writing 40K and 40K lore then they introduced the concept of the geneseed and it only working on males and they also introduced the sisters of battle who are indeed females in power armour but are not considered to be “female space marines” as such.
None of it was actually retconned, it just wasn’t explicit in “rogue trader” and later became so when the first actual 40K edition was released.
I’ve been playing 40k since the late 80s. I know the lore. I was there for it. I have watched it change over the decades. And sure, the female warriors weren’t explicitly labelled Space Marines, but they clearly were intended to be “the same” as the male models that would become Space Marines. The genestealers in Rogue Trader weren’t labelled tyranids either, but no one claims they weren’t by citing lack of specific lore at the time they were first published
The only reason those models didn’t continue to be made is because misogyny meant the models didn’t sell. So female space marines got written out of the lore, and the sisters, in all ways lesser than space marines, were introduced, so as to not offend the fan base of the time with equality.
Why is it only a problem when they retcon female protagonists in to things rather than out?
Please don’t put words in my mouth. The issue was with how suddenly they changed it and how they clarified it, not with the change itself.
Retcons suck. Going straight from “Women can’t be made into Custodes” to “Oh, there have always been female Custodes, you just didn’t see them in 30 years of lore, even though we explicitly said they couldn’t exist!” is just lazy and jarring, no matter the subject matter. Clarifying it with a tweet instead of just letting it speak for itself just poured gasoline on it.
This is a good thing GW tried to do, they just handled it poorly.
Like, this take is entirely fair. Incels are gonna incel, no matter what GW does, but this wasn’t the way to change this.
GW has gradually been moving in this direction; IG regiments were originally all men, then they had gender-segregated regiments, then mixed regiments started becoming more and more common until they became the norm. And this is something I’m all for; a
flashlightlasgun is gonna be equally effective in the hands of men or women.But you shouldn’t retcon established lore (even if it is problematic) with a tweet.
There were female space marines in the very first edition of 40k ever printed. That was retconned.
Why is it only a problem when they retcon female protagonists in to things rather than out?
Not quite correct, there were female models in power armour released with “rogue trader”, but very little lore and nothing specifically referenced female space marines. When they began actually writing 40K and 40K lore then they introduced the concept of the geneseed and it only working on males and they also introduced the sisters of battle who are indeed females in power armour but are not considered to be “female space marines” as such. None of it was actually retconned, it just wasn’t explicit in “rogue trader” and later became so when the first actual 40K edition was released.
I’ve been playing 40k since the late 80s. I know the lore. I was there for it. I have watched it change over the decades. And sure, the female warriors weren’t explicitly labelled Space Marines, but they clearly were intended to be “the same” as the male models that would become Space Marines. The genestealers in Rogue Trader weren’t labelled tyranids either, but no one claims they weren’t by citing lack of specific lore at the time they were first published
The only reason those models didn’t continue to be made is because misogyny meant the models didn’t sell. So female space marines got written out of the lore, and the sisters, in all ways lesser than space marines, were introduced, so as to not offend the fan base of the time with equality.
Please don’t put words in my mouth. The issue was with how suddenly they changed it and how they clarified it, not with the change itself.
Retcons suck. Going straight from “Women can’t be made into Custodes” to “Oh, there have always been female Custodes, you just didn’t see them in 30 years of lore, even though we explicitly said they couldn’t exist!” is just lazy and jarring, no matter the subject matter. Clarifying it with a tweet instead of just letting it speak for itself just poured gasoline on it.
This is a good thing GW tried to do, they just handled it poorly.
40k lore explicitly has an unreliable narrator and not unrelatedly, retcons that have “always been that way” is how the game has always been.
Necrons, female space marines, genestealers, the old ones, they all got the same treatment.
That is not what happened: The change was already in the last edition of the codex from last year. Per the article…
The tweet only highlighted a change that had already been made.
“Problematic?” The sexism is part of why the Empire are the bad guys. The setting contains nothing but bad guys.