I have way, way more than this done, but it seemed like a super funny situation and who knows; I'd love to see him go for it. Let's see him put his best foot forward on such a rich narrativo. I would definitely like to read a couple strips about that, maybe on some Cave of Tits type action, but then I would have to write it. Inconvenient!
Games Workshop, the makers of Warhammer stuff, announced a bunch of cool shit a few days ago along with a reiteration that there exist women among the ranks of the Adeptus Custodes - one of the game's many discrete factions. This is not new information in any way, shape, or form; Calladayce Taurovalia Kesh was in the faction's rulebook released in April of 2024. The incredible short The Tithes: Harvest introduced Tyrith Shiva Kyrus, a Custodes with a Custodes-Ass Name, about a year and a half ago.
I'm simply not in the places where people complain about "Femstodes," but it's surprising that they don't like them because the kits come with a bunch of little woman heads, just like the ones in their freezer. I'm sorry, that was impolite. Literally, I only see people talking about other people complaining. Let me try to enunciate what I perceive to be their position without any editorial content on my part.
"If lore can be changed at any time, its particulars don't actually matter. I'm not obligated to spend time or money on things that don't matter, and I've already spent a ton of both. Thus, arbitrary retroactive modifications to things that matter to me are quite obvious and it's gaslighting - that is to say, it's fucking rude - to pretend like it's not happening. If you want to say that something is more important than the story, then say that. But don't say that the story is bad or unimportant or satire so you can smuggle in whatever you want because it 'doesn't matter.' It clearly matters a lot to you."
Huh? Huh guys? Does that make up for the head thing?!
Games Workshop for their part preemptively responded the day all these announcements came out, reiterating that the Adeptus Astartes - i.e., Space Marines, Angels of Death, etc. - are a universally male fraternity of warrior-monks. Adeptus Custodes however are not Space Marines, a fact to which their terrifying statlines will attest. In the post I linked, GW suggests that they have some wiggle room here, and the elevated mystery of the "arcane genetic alchemy" that makes Custodes the shining fist of the Emperor's Will is not and has never been articulated fully in the way it has for their smaller cousins. I'm willing to grant that middle space if it means stuff like The Tithes: Harvest, which reveals an utterly imperious servant of He-On-Terra - what normies call The Emperor. I also think that the Imperium of Man can't really pick and choose where they find their one in a quadrillion candidate when there are only eight thousand of them left. The hour is too late. But if somebody wants to remain mad about that, you know, there isn't anything that can be done. The horse is out of the barn. The golden… the, like, golden space horse… woman… she's out of the barn, okay?!
The thing that is funny about all this, by which I mean dumb, is that Space Marines and the Adeptus Custodes aren't "human" as we would think of them. They have no concept of gender as a property of the self. They are each a unique species of bipedal transhuman weapons and they're relentlessly shaped by parallel processes designed to excise the frailty of their humanity. They don't even like each other. Do you have a friend who can't let shit go? The Custodes have had beef with Space Marines for ten thousand years and it ain't going fucking anywhere. They're like an older brother who feels like everything went to shit once you came along.
Many of the conversations around this are incredibly room temperature. I'm told that 40k is a "satire" of the hypermasculine. But satire is a form of analysis, which means it might reveal subconscious themes, ironies, and dangers. The best satire requires such detailed knowledge of the target that it often, inadvertently, becomes an exemplar of the thing being satirized. These interstellar soldiers are ultimately tragic figures, in my view. They are not aspirational to me in any way. But do I wish that I always had a clear sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, and the agency to embody the first, and honor the second? I mean… YOU KNOW. SOMETIMES.
The dynamics of mystical power in 40k are similar to Mages in Dragon Age or Sources in The Witcher. The Imperium, The Chantry, and The Order of the Flaming Rose are all represented as tyrannical, militaristic forces because of how they treat individuals who are conduits to these strange powers. And they are. Also: the people these tyrannical, militaristic forces suppress are walking, eldritch bombs with the power to doom worlds. How do you square it? It feels bad. That bad feeling is core to the setting. Fiction lets us think about these things, out here, at arm's length. I tend to keep a pretty close eye on people who try to police fiction, and there has never been a shortage.
(CW)TB out.
