Slop.

And there's always some 40k tidbit you can find adapting those stories to fit every setting, franchise, or whatever you can think of because fluff exists solely to explain why your toys are battling against my toys. These very serious man children who are very concerned about the very serious """"lore"""" are so deeply unserious.

Like Necromunda is just Judge Dredd mixed with Mad Max. Alan "Fuck the police I'm an actual wizard" Moore wrote for Judge Dredd and it's reflected in Necromunda. But subtlety is for cowards, I guess.

"Games Wokeslop"

Once again, reactionaries are incapable of original ideas and just repurpose whatever they hear the left using.

I think the funniest interpretation of the lore is the If the Emperor Had a TTS Device version where the Emperor is just a very obviously gay man who's uncomfortable around women and just wants to hang out with his large adult sons while enacting his inscrutable 50,000 year plan.

Roman haircuts and sometimes ponytails

Baldness. Astartes pattern baldness is one of the older 40k memes because of how many of them are bald. They even made sisters of silence wear topknots which is just baldness with extra steps.

: “You gave the plastic COOTIES!”

This is an actual political belief. These MFs won the culture wars. Enough people saw these fuckasses and thought they were cool.

Common sense isn’t really so common.

Yeah I really stopped giving a shit with Primaris being an obvious money grab to convince players to buy their Space Marine armies a second time. Or how Horus Heresy for some reason has like 60+ books with awful prose, zero editing, and turned something mythical into something bland while shitting up the rest of the franchise. Then I realized I hit grog status because a lot of the older players when I started 20-something years ago felt the same way with the shift from Rogue Trader to 3rd. or the wave of secondaries flooding in from Dawn of War.

It's all made up and the story doesn't matter. No one is going to force you to buy and paint stuff you don't like nor are they going to take away your models.

And that's aside from the fact most of the inane super-nerd lore is largely fleshed out by the TTRPGs like WFRP and Dark Heresy that were 100% created by the kind of "woke" people they're so heated about.

I’m proof!

They aren't even action figures, they are just toy soldiers.

Custodes are each engineered on an individual level and drawn from earth's noble houses. Each one is uniquely modified to turn them into supersoldiers. There's some speculation they may have been the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife when the Men of Stone (regular humans) fought the Men of Iron (rogue AI). Or they share some part of that process. Regardless, the Emperor used parts of his own genetic material in their creation. Custodes can be men, women, or nonbinary, etc. because their creation process involves custom built organs, gene editing, and so on.

Space Marines were designed to replace Thinder Warriors and use the genetic material of their primarchs, who were made from the Emperor's genetic material. Primarchs were likely also made using warp fuckery the Emperor stole from the Chaos Gods. Organ transplants, hormone treatments, and geneseed are used to turn usually children into Space Marines. Some chapters draw from adult populations, though the failure rate is higher. The creation of marines is a brutal process. Often, candidates die from their bodies rejecting organs, go insane from geneseed, and so on.

Custodes take much longer to make with technology kept so secret it's only known to the Custodes back on Terra. However, the failure rate is much, much lower than marines because it uses such an involved process and because it's using scientific genetic engineering without the use of space magic from literal hell. Thus, turning an adult woman into Custodes is "easier" than turning boys into basic marines. It wouldn't matter anyway because the process of making marines would leave them male-presenting.

Anywho, that's the wishy-washy fluff reason why there are female Custodes but only male Space Marines. Personally, I don't think Custodes should be a playable faction in 40k because Space Marines are already super rare. And there are already super, duper rare special Space Marines. Custodes as a faction outside of Horus Heresy are like "But I have an invisible force field!" level of super, duper, uber rare Space Marine.

Modern GW is too chickenshit to come out and say "Yes, the Imperium are patriarchal, the Emperor was just a sexist incel, and no, chuds still aren't allowed take your money elsewhere." Some former GW staff went on to make Trench Crusade and have stated this opinion loudly and clearly, so it's not like this is something new being injected into modern 40k.

There were female space marines in the first book, they got pruned as part of the franchise's long march away from satire and towards marketability.

Having the space Nazis employ women fash supersoldiers is like an even worse version of the "more women drone pilots" school of inclusivity.

Granted, there are lots of good reasons to depict fascists that way (idk, look at The Boys or something) and I have no idea if that's what GW is going for, but I don't think this is really what inclusivity is or should be.

40k was way too big of a series for me to even try to understand what it was trying to do with the story

It's basically just a giant shitpost setting riffing on a bunch of different properties and tropes that a ton of different authors have written stories in, some of which have dropped the "this is a shitpost" tone in favor of trying to make the setting work in a coherent way.

with a surface level reading you can immediately see how fucked up nearly every faction is

I'm pretty sure that's What It Was Trying To Do With The Story

they're still overpriced but joytoy has 40k figures that have movable limbs

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