GamesStrategyWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40,000 has slightly more women in it now and the neckbeards aren’t happyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesStrategyWarhammer 40kWarhammer 40,000 has slightly more women in it now and the neckbeards aren’t happyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Games Workshop)
Since Warhammer 40,000’s 10th edition was released last year, each of the wargame’s factions has been getting the traditional rules refresh in the form of a new Codex book. The latest deals with the Adeptus Custodes, genetically engineered bodyguards of the Emperor so gigantic they make space marines look weedy. (They also happen to beHenry Cavill’s army of choice). There are 10,000 of them and in the past they’ve only ever been depicted as men. In this latest iteration, shock horror, at least two of the Custodes are women.
Is this a retcon? Yep, and it won’t be the last. Warhammer 40,000 has had fluid “lore” right from the start. The original Custodian Guards were depicted as shirtless hunks who never leave Earth—a long way from the heavily armored galaxy-spanning golden gods they became—to say nothing of tweaks to the 40K canon like ditching half-eldar space marines and rewriting the Horus Heresy from a short story a handful of pages long into aseries of 60+ novels.
The Adeptus Custodes aren’t 40K’s only genetically engineered supersoldiers, of course. The setting’s flagship faction are the space marines, who are created differently—where Custodes are enhanced via a unique process begun when they’re infants, space marines begin being grafted with a “gene-seed” when they’re on the verge of puberty. And while the explanation that space marine gene-seeds are “keyed to male hormones and tissue types” goesback a way, it’s not the real reason Games Workshop made a whole army of dudes who are men.
And the same was true of the Adeptus Custodes, until it wasn’t. Though the customers at the average Warhammer shop are mostly men, these days there are usually one or two women as well. And the men are a lot less likely to throw a hissy-fit about having women in their armies than gamers in the 1980s, despite what Reddit and Twitter might suggest. All of 40K’s lore and storytelling exists to provide context for selling toy soldiers to people, and as the customer base changes so too will that lore.
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