The Men Thousand

A book of BETRAYAL?

More like Games Wokeshop, am I right?

It's a lazy Sunday, I just finished the draft of a new essay for the first Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations book, and I'm in that rare situation of not having to spend my weekend working. So clearly, there's nothing for it but to wade into this month's Games Workshop controversy. After all, if the Daily Mail feels compelled to take a position on the arrival of female Custodes, surely anyone can.

Besides, as best as I can tell, literally everyone with an opinion on this is wrong, and we all know the value of correcting people on the internet.

Future History

A primer for the uninitiated. Warhammer 40,000 (40K) is both a game and a setting (which then contains other games). It was released in the 80s, but the modern iteration is a very different space-beast. It's not exactly unrecognisable from its beginnings, but so changed in form it might as well be considered a distinct entity, like a sapling in its first summer and a millennia-old oak tree.

40K is set in the forty-first millennium (hence the name), a time in which the galaxy is putatively controlled by a human civilisation known as the Imperium, a million-world empire more or less incapable of running itself effectively, under attack from all directions (including from within), and kept going only by barely-understood weapons from the distant past, and the sheer amount of fresh meat for the battlefield that seething trillions of people can allow for. Prime among the defenders of humankind are the Space Marines, troops chosen from the finest warrior cultures in the galaxy, and then genetically altered to become terrifying avatars of battle. Given the number of high-quality murder-makers that are selected to become Space Marines, only to fail the myriad trials involved in actually being handed a bolter (their signature weapon) and unleashed upon the galaxy, we can safely call Space Marines the best of the best, according to the important metric of "who will bisect the most people we dislike?".

The best of the best of the best, though, are the Adeptus Custodes. These are the Space Marines who guard the Imperial Palace on Terra, which houses the Emperor, without whom the Imperium cannot function (we'll skip over the ins and outs of that). Given this uniquely grave charge, the Adeptus get the best aspirants and the best gene-code trickery available, so as to keep Big Daddy Human (as it would be punishable by death to call him) safe from the various forms of nastiness which stalk the stars.

Space Marines have been around basically as long as 40K itself, though like the broader setting, there's very little to link their original conception to what we have today (see below). The Custodes have gone through an even greater change over the years, and it's worth noting that, unlike the Space Marines, it was quite some time before they were considered as anything beyond a footnote in the setting. Think of how Trek's Gorn change between "Arena" and Strange New Worlds, and you get a sense of how much you could just consider them two totally different concepts, which happen to have the same name.

1986

Nowish

Right. History lesson over, almost. The current furore is rooted in the fact that, for the whole of the setting's forty-odd year history, every single Custodes (as well as every single Space Marine) has been male. This is about to stop being the case.

This has made an awful lot of people unhappy, and that unhappiness has made an awful lot of other people unhappy.

As I say, pretty much all of them are wrong.

Squid Gets Cancelled

Let's kick off with the position that will most annoy the people I usually agree with. To make use of an old meme, my most right-wing opinion is that not liking changes to the canon of your favourite franchises is perfectly reasonable, even when those changes are correcting damaging missteps. People care about the fictional worlds they're invested in, and that's entirely fine, actually. Every time some franchise announces some big shake-up in the canon, there's a cadre of smug trolls that takes to the internet to yell "NONE OF IT IS REAL", as though everyone upset thought they'd been watching a documentary on time travelling face-swappers, or whatever. We can talk about what changes are worth getting het up over, and which aren't (this one is clearly the latter). We can discuss the importance of canon consistency when compared to other considerations (say, for example, choosing to actively challenge the misogynistic gate-keeping that has made Games Workshop fans a by-word for sexism for almost half a century). But the central idea that fictional coherence isn't automatically worthless is pretty much unassailable, even if you're the type of person who finds it of no value to themselves.

That's if such people even exist. I have my doubts. If they do, there's a hair's breadth between them, and those who respond to every complaint about lazy writing or inconstant characterisation in genre fiction can't matter, because "you're watching a show with aliens/dragons/vampires in it!". Which is to say, it's a ridiculous idea, based entirely on pretending subjective preferences can be subject to objective metrics, which only the people disagreeing with you are failing to use. No thanks.

And this is all by way of saying that the claim that bigotry is the only reason this latest change might bug someone is a ridiculous overstatement, of the kind that just makes actually figuring out where someone is going wrong in their thinking all the tougher to pin down. There are any number of rest stops between the end-points of "You immediately embrace this change or you're a bigot" and "Thank the God Emperor the Daily Mail is calling out this wokerati nonsense", and I'm more interested in exploring that scale than I am squatting at the end closer to my own position.

Happily, this position in itself is only a few minutes drive down the highway to the Daily Mail Island Ferry Crossing. I'll just keep going a little longer before I start calling down the bombs in the direction I'm facing. A weaker form of the "you must be a bigot" argument is that, if you're upset by this change, but perfectly fine with all the others within the setting (and there have been so, so many over the decades), that suggests you're just using concerns about consistency as camouflage for being a misogynist.

Now, it's important we note that this argument is, in fact, absolutely true. What it isn't, is all that useful, because it's damn hard to actually find anyone without a significant corpus of publicly available writing on 40K that you can level it against. Such people do exist, and some of them are absolutely fucking awful, but in general, it's impossible to tell whether you're reading a given person's complaints about all of this because they're uniquely wound up by no longer excluding women, or because this particular gripe is being deliberately amplified by those determined to keep public focus on the culture war, rather than the incoming collapse of civilisation*. 

Exterminatus, Rightward

Phew. That was uncomfortable. Back to my standard beat of beating the right. All the previous section adds up to, really, is an argument it's not super-useful to blame people for their internal feelings on canon change. What we can and should hold people responsible for how the internal is allowed out. Because yes, actually complaining about female Custodes genuinely is a shitty thing to do. The flip-side of it being unreasonable to berate someone for how they feel is that a distinction must exist between what we feel, and what we say about what we feel. No matter how much worst-faith trolls insist objecting to what they say is indistinguishable from policing what they think, there are any number of positions it's not worth caring that people might hold, so long as they keep them to themselves.

No, not liking the idea of female Custodes is not, in itself, evidence of any deep-seated prejudice against women. Choosing to express that dissatisfaction is another matter entirely, though. Doing that means making the conscious decision to lend support to an organised mob of quite astonishingly awful people, who are dedicated make this country even worse for anyone not a wealthy cis-het white man to live in, and you're doing it because you can't keep your opinions to yourself (he says, writing a couple of thousand words on a Sunday about what he thinks about what other people think about what other other people think). Regardless of why you don't like the idea of female Custodes, the decision to air that opinion is not a politically neutral act. We're in a war here, and it's solipsistic in the extreme to not recognise the fact that, if you're giving rhetorical support to someone's enemy, they can and will judge you for that.

Secondly, while I'm all for arguing that everyone gets to decide for themselves which changes bother them, it shouldn't be ignored that female Custodes aren't some great betrayal of previously encoded lore; it's just an expansion into negative space. Yes, we haven't heard of a female Custodes before. So what? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You might have assumed the fact we never saw a female Custodes means such a thing is impossible, but again, that's your problem, and people are right to call you out over it.

Some objectors, presumably having figured out how tenuous their textual case is, have tried to get around this by decrying the concept of female Custodes being ridiculous in itself. "Space Marines are the strongest humans, and men are stronger than women!" First of all, fuck all TERFs and their biological essentialism bullshit. The idea that no group of aspiring Space Marines could ever contain a woman capable of holding her own strength-wise is, if not obviously false, certainly not obviously true,  not to the point where insisting it must be so doesn't mark you out as an arsehole. There are around a million Marines in the galaxy at any one time, and it's been that way for ten millennia. You want me to believe zero women ever had the biceps to qualify for service? Please.

Second, the people who get tapped on the shoulder to get themselves on the space-roids aren't the strongest warriors; they're the best ones.  It should be inescapably clear that the two are not equivalent. Speed, endurance, strategy, instinct, temperament all have to figure into the equation for finding your superior stabbers, too. For God's sake, even the Orks** recognise that you can't just win through being brutal; you got to have yourself some cunnin' too, which makes the argument that Space Marine=strongest less nuanced than the philosophy of a species invented to parody drunken 80s football hooligans. Kudos.

(There's also the fact that most aspirants are chosen while still teenagers, or even slightly younger. This raises all sorts of questions I don't think we should start poking at, but it certainly means physical strength cannot possibly be the only, or even dominant, consideration in play.)

Thirdly, and most importantly, there's the Primaris issue. Again, as a primer for newcomers to all this, seven years ago the fictional 40K world saw the arrival of a brand new and significantly better process for genegineering Space Marines. The new marines were called "Primaris", the old retrospectively named "Firstborn". Out in the real, this was pretty clearly done to bring the Space Marine line into, well, line with all the others. The move from metal to plastic as the most common miniature material had allowed every other army in the range to supersize their models, which rather muted the visual impact of the still-dinky Space Marines; not what you want for your army of towering supermen. 

What's important from our perspective, though, is that any lore-based justifications for a lack of female Space Marines (and the article I link to above suggest they did exist) could now be swept away. Female Space Marines were now fully possible in a way no-one could claim "broke the rules" (they could say the new rules were rubbish, of course, but people say that literally every time GW does anything, and so far they've weathered each tsunami of dissatisfaction).

And GW whiffed. The new Marines were just as much an all-boys club as those that went before, for what seems to have been no other reason beyond cowardice. This move toward female Custodes, then, is properly viewed as an attempt to rectify that mistake, using an army that's less popular than the Space Marines, and therefore will cost the company less if the existence of women really does drive away a host of punters***.

Cowards, as I say. But what this means is that the actual battlefield this controversy is being fought on isn't canon versus diversity. It's the fact GW had the option to serve both those considerations at the same time, and didn't, because it was too chickenshit to risk its golden goose.

That's the actual question at the heart of all this. Not "does the lore allow for female Custodes"?  While watching GW take a hyper-prudent and milquetoast approach to diversity by violating an extremely minor point of canon, rather than doing better for both diversity and canon by actually giving us women Primaris marines, which part of that bothers you more?

Because yes, I'm not going to call you names if both bits bum you out. If disrespecting lore annoys you more than disrespecting ladies, though? Maybe bigotry really was your problem all along.

* The similarity between shitrags like the Mail and 40Ks own brand of fact-impervious McCarthyist propagandists, dealing with the slow death of their ever-shrinking realm by insisting people just need to hate those different from them a bit harder, should not go unnoticed here.

**A 40K alien race that cares only about getting into the largest fights possible as often as possible, and which actually get stronger and bigger the more fights they win.

*** Actually, there are women in the Custodes army already. They're just not allowed to be super-strong, instead being mutants of a kind described in the lore as "soulless", and who each take a vow of silence. It's not hard to see why this hasn't been considered sensitive or sufficient female representation.