If Warhammer cannot survive as a product without chuds, then it deserves to die.
Considering your definition of 'chud' seems to be 'wouldn't like femarines'? *eyeroll* Good luck with that.
Raising this question is like raising the question of where all the black Ku Klux Klan members are. If you're asking it then there's something you're not understanding.
Unrelated to anything but... Ron Stallworth. Also kinda Daryl Davis, though he never actually 'joined' so much as 'played music and talked with some of them'. The latter converted a few people away from the Klan.
To me, the question of female marines is "what's the hook?" Narratively it serves the Imperium far better to not allow women into its ultra-machismo, apex-fascist-police-state policing, warrior-monk religious orders. Space Marines aren't bystanders, they're THE biggest and more archetypal enforcer of the Imperium's vision especially as it comes to xenos, mutants and heretics. They're hulking brutes, on the surface level they seem barely men but on a more primal level they're the most men. The only thing they know how to do and the only thing they even understand to be possible is to enforce dominance via terrible, omnidirectional violence. They're the personification of the death cult.
'Allowing' women into this paradigm is the decision of a capitalist who wants to acquire more players for a faction which like, okay some people are upfront about this being their motivation. Still, I kind of just don't even remotely care about that logic? There's more to art than whether it is dementedly inclusive to the most people at once. The way to include more and new people into 40k is not by making the Imperium welcoming, because the Imperium should not be understood to be welcoming ever. If the Imperium is to be made 'welcoming' then it should only ever be in the sense that it has suborned gender, race, class, etc. unto itself. You aren't a female space marine because 'females' don't exist. You won't be wearing gendered clothing or wading into battle in pride colours. You are a Space Marine. You are His Angel of Death. You exist to stoically slaughter defiant populations of oppressed peoples. Your psycho-stimulant drugs and mandatory daily hours of brain conditioning remove all social thought from you completely. You are no longer a person having become a self-perpetuating tool of the system. You exist only to deal violence to those who, in another life, would have been your fiercest allies but can now only see as the subhuman other.
It does not even occur to you to mourn what you have lost. You do not feel for you will Know No Fear.
Congratulations, you are now represented.
If your response to all that baggage is "don't care want girl marine" then again, okay but why should I care that you don't care? I care. I care that 40k is ugly and want it to say that way. I want 40k to continue to be weird and offputting for the same reason that I want Everything Everywhere All At Once to continue to be weird and offputting. The progressive power of diversity doesn't come from making everyone into an equally straight white male in the current system. It comes from the melding and acknowledgement and retention of differences to create a new system that is not broken in the first place. Go read other sci-fi. Go play other wargames. 40k can crash and burn economically and it would be more authentic that way than introducing female marines. It's good for things to end, if that is the straw that breaks the camel's back then so be it. In fifty or a hundred years you can dredge it back up as Warhammer 40,000 and Female Space Marines (ala Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) if it still matters to you then, but I'm willing to bet that it won't.
It's not a problem that 40k is about bad people doing bad things to each other and I'm tired of pretending that it is. I'm tired of the cult of the mainstream that demands everything be for everybody.
Mostly agreed.
I don't think there's a problem with having an all-male faction in the first place, any more than having an all-female faction like the SoB (though the fact that the Sisters have male priest models is somewhat annoying). It's fiction, do what you want.
When creating a space marine, you essentially use a human being as a base to create a miniature clone of a primarch. Femarines would not be any different from the male marines in any meaningful way. Vulkan's geneseed would still turn you black and give you glowing red eyes. Corvus Corax's geneseed would still give you albinism. etc. Which means the model wouldn't be different, which means you'd have token diversity at best.
I also feel that just adding female space marines doesn't fix any of the *actual* problems 40k has as a game line. Namely: the minis are too expensive, there's not enough focus on non-marine factions (especially non-imperial), lore decisions are being made based on what sells (oh hello Custodians and/or Knights I didn't see you there) or are being ignored (look at the product line and tell me you know the Imperium's been split in half by the great rift)...
And I said this earlier, but if we really want women to get more invested in 40k, and we really think the best way to do that is to create more female models, can we give them something other than the mens' table scraps?
Orks are technically genderless asexual fungi so they are not actually "male"
While this is
technically true, I feel it's a little silly to argue that the faction of big green masculine warriors that all use 'he' pronouns and are referred to as 'da boyz' aren't a all/mostly male faction. It feels unfair to the 'we have too many all-male factions' argument to grab what is only technically correct. It's also why the tyranids are in 'indeterminate' despite being eusocial insects (and thus probably mostly infertile females).
Could you point me to where this cult is and how diversifying the roster makes any of these factions less atrocious?
Dude where have you been the last 20 years?
From where I'm sitting finding more ways to fit more people into the meat-grinder instead of less...feels well more 40k?
Like say I don't think the setting is enahanced in terms of grimarkness by the soft retcon of things like Necron Pariahs because now you have fewer ways for the necrons to be horrible. If genestealer cults were made more diverse with say a way of actually effectively preying on Orkoids, that wouldn't make the setting a nicer place to live in just by being more diverse. @_@
This isn't even me disagreeing with the stance that loyalist space marines should all be male. I can sort of sort of see it for CSM due to thousands of years of warp fuckery...but as for the meta-narrative hear more broadly I don't get it.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding the argument?
Space Marines are not something you can just "throw into the meat grinder" like guardsmen (hence why more female guardsmen would actually work). They're too difficult to create.
One of the arguments given for why we need femarines is to introduce more diversity to the product line to draw in a wider audience (i fucking hate that term so much) but in this case doing so comes at the cost of one of the things that Delirium feels makes the Space Marines grimdark: their nature as an exclusionary faction. I could be wrong but that seems to be what he's going for.
Pariahs aren't a thing because they don't fit into the new Necron paradigm, it has nothing to do with how horrible they are or they would've gotten rid of the Flayed Ones. The Daemonculabra is an example of a thing that isn't referenced because the writers realized they went too far into the grimderp side.
I feel like Orkoids could have females by having it being unlocked via some krork lite/like phenomenon and or /tyranid interactions like those that were once attributed to the creation of squigs.
It could be a measure to increase genetic variation in case something was otherwise hindering them like IDK having to run on the same genetic scrap for who knows how many millions of years at this point?
Modelwise just bring back really big mouthed/ long jawed orks and claim they are mouth brooders when reproducing sexually, boom done.
No?
There used to be female orks, apparently. Sometimes a Boy would get a weird feelin' and go off to 'find somefin'
