Got em gg ez

Jesus. That's super how'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful.

This is going to stick...

Ogryns have left the chat

Good as in Good Guys, or Good as in Quality Faction? Yes.

@@Questioningbasics Be a proper faction or gtfo

I honestly think it's less evil and more incompetent than this. At some point there was a directive from somewhere on high that 40k was getting a reputation as being a bit faschy, because the actual fascists were ignoring the satire and treating 40k like it was actually serious, and thus giving the IP a bad reputation. So the instruction was given to tone down the fascist satire and try to steer the IP more into a more conventional superhero narrative, to appeal to more "mainstream" audiences and de-toxify the IP in the process. But the people giving that direction were too stupid to realize that when you start to clean up what is an intentional satire on fascism, it starts to look pretty indistinguishable from being actually supportive of fascism. So they ended up in this awkward middle spot where they are trying to turn the Imperium into the good guys but that means turning an explicitly fascist satire into the good guys and you can't really do that without, well, making it look like the fascists are the good guys. So ironically in an effort to distance themselves from fascists they have actually produced something that is more fascist-friendly than the original satire was.

^This.

@@assistantref5084 That's extremely well put.

​@@assistantref5084 just play the Germans in Bolt Action and you don't have to worry about this entire issue😅

The Imperium is the most interesting when they are fascist and cause all their own problems. They are most boring when GW forgets this and tries to w*nk the Spess Mureens off endlessly.

Same.

Yep.

Damn

Damn so true bestie. 😉

For real bro has those 4am late night radio in 1974 tones

Sums it up great. 90% of my custodes army is fully armored and wears helmets. How am i supposed to know their gender?

"It's the beards"

What that heresy Valdor model do though 👀

literally how people should've taken it... i feel like i'm living in a bizarro world as someone who only came back to Warhammer for AOS

Yep. Character does horrible thing but actually is justified is a writing trope beaten to death by gw.

Yeah, the Imperium has really been rewritten almost completely over the last two decades. It's now a pretty clearly "good guy" faction. There are corrupt individuals and ineffective bureaucrats and anonymous far-away higher-ups like the High Lords of Terra engaging in very questionable behavior, but pretty much everybody who actually matters is a good guy doing good-guy things. Including the Emperor, who IMO they really screwed up drastically in the Horus Heresy books by making him far too much of a good guy. The extremely problematic nature of the Imperium was what originally made the setting so compelling, but that's almost all gone now. 40k has mostly gone from grimdark satire to superhero soap.

Early edition 40k and modern 40k are basically different things at this point.

@@assistantref5084 Absolutely, and it's not helped by what I have found to be the two broad types of imperial characters in 40k novels. There are the zealous true believers who the readers are obviously meant to see as blinded by their faith; but, then there are the more rational, world-weary, or "realist" characters who see the Imperium's flaws but deem it a "necessary evil". What most readers don't get is that both of these types of characters are factually wrong, the Imperium of Man sucks for basically everybody, and almost any system would be better than it. GW writers often make that second type of character seem to be correct, and anyone with legitimate grievances with the IoM is considered a "traitor" or "heretic".

I prefer to say that there are good people in the Imperium *despite* itself. It's a bad nation which conducts a lot of human evil, but within it are individuals who act heroically at great risk

I think you have interpreted the situation very wrong. For starters we are far beyond just adding women somewhere where they are excluded. There have been women in the lore for a long time throughout most branches of the imperium. Space Marines and the Custodes (considered a form of a space marine) are the only branches where they were truly "excluded", based on the lore reason that the augmentation in not compatible with a woman's physiology. Lately it has been revealed that the reason this lore was even introduced was that female models simply didn't and don't sell well according to some former GW employee. So basically you have capitalism to blame for that not the other way around. Now as I'm sure you know, in the Imperium there are branches of only women as well as branches of only men. To most people this is probably fine as long as the rules and reasons are well explained and consistent. So why would there be a need to suddenly and forcibly change the long standing and accepted rule of the universe? It's because of modern day politics. This is where we come to the real problem people have with this. I don't think most people even have a problem with female Custodes overall, they have a problem with shoving that lore in the way it was. And where does it lead? I think many of us 40k fans have seen franchizes crumble largely as a result of forcefull inclusion of todays politics into a fictional universe and basically taking precedent before everything else. And the fear rising with the notion of that happening to 40k is the result of the outrage. I certainly don't think anyone right in their mind is blaming women for this. That's just absurd.

As a friendly neighbourhood Word Bearer, i disagree. As it makes the emperor "super scientist extraordinaire" even more of an ass with a genetic process that either a. only works for xy chromosomes and couldn't do xx, or b. Process could do both, but for some reason he didn't want or apparently need to, Malcador implies it was E's choice or option c. The emperor saw the astartes as weapons first if nothing else. There will only be war, the legion and brotherhood. Till they are no longer required then who knows what? d. Worse still, no loyalist legion has ever questioned it, seemingly not even deus-ex-Belisarius Cawl with his child catching primaris programme...

But as a person irl, i agree its real stupid! Looking forward to seeing/adding aos fem and nb lookin stormcast heads on my shiny palace guard faction minis

@@danielo9141 I'll concede that. I think making the Emperor just obviously be Immorten Joe levels dumb would have been the way to go for the Horus Heresy.

They literally got bored of sitting around being useless for 11,000 years, and decided they were technically outranking Lords of Terra, and could use some exercise/PTO to ensure their skills were sharp. Also, their posthuman arrogance got high enough they decided they'd go tell the little degenerates running the Imperium exactly what they thought, since they knew the Emperor personally and can vouch what shit he would or would not have put up with in his name. All of which is technically a dereliction of duty.

It's not only the Emperor who knows how to create Custodes, it's just extremely secretive and time consuming. It's been 10 thousand years, I don't think people realise quite how long that is. It's almost twice as long as human civilization has existed. It's more than enough time to replenish a force of 10 thousand.

Maybe, only time will tell I suppose. If you're correct I don't have a problem with it, so I better just hope for the best!

didn't they just get new ones

@chakradarrat8832 They got a new Character. Nothing else.

his view on this is mostly wrong 40k stopped being satire or silly by 4th . and yes the imperium are the goods because they are fight mankinds survuval . but are in a universe thta hard choices have to be made.and his understand on custodes being different from space marines is also wrong .because they are based on the same science and tech .instead of using gene seed the custodes use DNA from the Emperor . and being a work of art is just poetic speech the steps in making one are the same just carefully control and adjusted for each custode and more steps the easiest way to understand it is one is gourmet food the other is burger king . on top of all that the Emperor would not waste his time making a inferior weapon .

being an author isn't hereditary, that's for sure.

People like to say space marines are like monks but. No they fucking aren't! The sisters of battle are obviously metal nuns with bdsm undertones, they are visually and thematically built around evoking religious iconography. Space marines are big guys in suits- if they had more visual ties, more actual satire, them being all male would make sense to be- but they don't. Wheras design wise the rest of the imperium evokes crumbling empires of history and religious fervor, space marines are stupid bad G1 Joe ass looking mfers, theres nothing funny or really even grimdark about the space marines. The setting would be a million times better without them, but if you have to keep the dumb power fantasy superheros atleast throw in some woman.

Heck yeah, agreed

40K was never satire, Rick Priestly himself said it.

this. the only time i ever saw the aos fanbase complain was with the recent armies that were removed and even then, most of the overreactions were from creators who did not play or cover aos and just wanted to drama farm. AoS fans took it like "oh that's a bummer. The time and money i spent on my guys is now wasted" when we've seen literal meltdowns and the burning of armies in other GW games. point is, aos is super chill

wrong. Read the book again. He was indeed refering to the Custodes and Sisters

Path to Redemption by Mike Brooks actually has a really good instance of that kind of skewed tolerance. The main character is an ex-Redemptionist who was in a gay relationship with another Redemptionist until he was find out. Their sexuality is treated as a complete non-issue though because the Redemptionists were more concerned with their real sin - intimacy of any kind in the first place. Well worth reading if you want a story focusing on the Imperium's twisted and warped religious beliefs.

I always thought 40k to tackle the nuanced differences between genders in a smart and respectful manner. We see the universe from the perspective of the imperium, it makes the setting at least partially grounded in our reality. Humans are different, therefore a masculine body lends itself better to the sort of crude combat enhancements prrimarch/custodes/astartes get? Cool, makes sense, adds nuance to the factions. On the other side of the spectrum can you have athletic build eldar waifu kill one of those chunks of ceramite and meat in melee combat? Sure. Space genetics and alien technology beyond our understanding. Makes sense to me. I also take no issue with female stormcasts standing side by side by their male counterparts - it's literal gods magic. But imperium in 40k is very much based on science fiction/fantasy, outdated, primitive tech that "just about works" for its purpose. It made sense for things to be how they were up to this point. But the biggest concern I have is that this sort of thing shafts excellent factions like sisters of battle and (what could be one if given proper care and attention) sisters of silence. There is so much to work with here already and I don't want them to become "custodes but worse in every way imaginable".

The Imperium has enough external threats and legitimate internal threats that they don't need to invent new ones to maintain power as real life fascist governments tend to do. Which is kind of a problem for the sake of the setting's satirical elements. This is the reason why, despite being a big fan of 40k, I enjoy it because of... basically everything except for the Imperium. Chaos and all of the Xenos species are a lot of fun and don't have any elements which make me kind of uncomfortable since they're so totally divorced from reality. Except for the T'au, but the fanbase has no problem telling you how the T'au aren't actually good guys, so it's fine.

Not true. In the early age of Aos, Underworld season 1 dropped. In it, was a Stormcast Eternal female with a pretty badass armor.

@@ARCHANGEvideo Shadespire was like 2 years after the launch of AoS

We only know a handful Custodes by name, the number of books on Custodes is pretty low. Their impact on the 41st millenium even lower with the exception of two, maybe three characters. There should be enough wiggle room to just let it slide.