Setting the news A-Gender

The Mail, in reporting on the latest Warhammer ‘controversy’, know exactly what they

are doing.

I’ve deliberately tried very hard to refrain from commenting on the latest hot topic that’s doing

the rounds on my various hobby groups and among my friends. Games Workshop, self-

professed purveyor of the ‘world’s finest miniatures’ and occasional producer of actual

games, has caused a stir with a bit of ‘colour’ text in one of its latest codexes (books which

provide the rules with which to use an army of models on the tabletop).

This particular codex relates to the faction Adeptus Custodes – the even more massive,

even more ridiculously overpowered cousins to the flagship Space Marine line. The text in

question, which has had such incendiary impact on the tabletop gaming community that the

Daily Mail has reported on this, essentially mentions in passing that one of the Custodes is a

woman, with the implication that this is a perfectly normal, in-universe thing.

You might think this is not really something worth noting. Female characters, we like to tell

ourselves, are now much more normalised and common in genre entertainment. But as a

member of the tabletop gaming community, I am afraid I must admit that much as I would

love it to be a naturally inclusive environment, it is in fact in many ways conservative to the

point of regressive. Angry nerds ‘defend’ their ‘territory’ fiercely, and nothing gets them more

seethingly incensed than ‘messing with the canon’. As far as they are concerned, thanks to a

random aside mentioned decades ago which said that space marines couldn’t be women

(something that has been explicitly explained as down to nothing more than sales figures in

the deeply sexist landscape of the 80s by a former senior employee of GW), women simply

aren’t allowed to be in any faction other than the ones specifically created for them (the

Sisters of Battle and the unfortunately unironically named Sisters of Silence).

In the current ‘culture wars’ environment of the world, things like this latest harmless bit of

background text are viewed as ‘wokeness run riot’ as ‘lefties’ try to ‘infiltrate the hobby’ and

‘ruin everything’ and so predictably, the usual places on the internet have become a sewer of

misogynistic gibberish masquerading as ‘concern for the background’.

The Mail, having sniffed a controversy it can manipulate to its own ends, has waded in with

characteristic gusto, and has immediately and deliberately set about framing the debate in a

very specific way. ‘Games Workshop engulfed in gender row with Warhammer squadron

fans’, screeches the headline.

'A ‘woke’ gender row has broken out among Games Workshop fantasy fans after women

were added to an army squadron for the first time.’ Thus opens an article written by Aidan

Radnedge, a person I guarantee has never paid the slightest attention to Warhammer before

now. Custodes are not a ‘squadron’, and to put down angry internet whining as the company

being ‘engulfed in a row’ would necessitate a view that they were permanently engulfed in

rows – it’s the nature of the beast.

More importantly, the specific choice of language here is telling – ‘gender row’ recalls the

current media obsession with trans people and the ongoing ‘debate’ as to gender. Casting

this as a company giving in to ‘wokeness’ by ‘gender flipping’ a faction serves to stir up that

part of the Mail’s readership who believe other nonsense like pupils in schools identifying as

cats and being given litter boxes. It isn’t a ‘gender row’ in the sense that the Mail would like

to frame it with this language, it’s simply an angry mob of reactionaries losing their minds at

a small adjustment to the backstory behind their toy soldiers.

For example, the Mail article also quotes former World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern,

who tweeted:

The issue with @warhammer and Custodes is the lie.

They could have changed it all they wanted. But they decided to lie and pretend it was that

way all along.

That lie is part of an insidious malignant ideology that throws away all reason and fact. That

is the part that is dangerous.

The article quotes ‘another enthusiast’ as having said ‘That’s all it is. Many don’t care about

female Custodes. They are upset with lack of respect, upset with the disregard being

shown.’

To reiterate – this is a minor tweak to the background of a game set 40,000 years in the

future. To put it as bluntly as possible, this is made up stories created to justify the collecting,

painting and shunting around tabletops while rolling dice of small plastic models. I myself

indulge in this hobby, I love it and I have a lot of fun with it, but I don’t pretend that it’s some

massively serious thing and I absolutely do not give one single solitary shit if it suddenly

emerges that there are women in a faction.

As to the reference to ‘pretending it has always been this way’ – this is standard practice in

40k, a setting which has narratively been in amber for decades, the clock always sat at one

minute to midnight. When the company wants to release new things, it simply pretends

narratively that they were always there. The Horus Heresy setting – a game which takes

place 10,000 years prior to the ‘present’ 40k one, is especially notable for this, with new

vehicles, troop types and even factions being introduced to enrich the setting and enhance

the company’s profits and yet somehow when that latest unit that was never mentioned in

the previous 30 years appears in that setting, GW is not ‘engulfed in a row’ worthy of

comment outside some random reddit thread or Facebook post.

For that matter, if we are talking about the sanctity of The Canon, which must never be

altered, characters like Obi Wan Clouseau the Inquisitor from the old, Rogue Trader (early

40K days) would like a word. Or perhaps the half-eldar (space elves) Space Marine

Librarian. Warhammer 40,000 has always had a lore which is stuck chronologically, but

extremely malleable in every other way, and to pretend otherwise is to demonstrate that you

are nowhere near as knowledgeable as you claim about the canon to which you claim to be

so attached.

So, sorry fellow leftists, I am afraid that Games Workshop is not the shining light of social

justice allyship the Mail might be desperately trying to portray – they said absolutely nothing

during the entirety of Pride month, for example. 

And also sorry frothing Right Wingers, the ‘wokerati’ haven’t taken over the Wardollies hobby with their militant brainwashing. GW has done what it often does – cynically made the tiniest possible change in a way designed to be a sop to people who largely feel excluded from its fandom (women, anyone on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and anyone non-white) while not being anywhere near ‘revolutionary’ enough to actually upset the genuinely reactionary portion of its fanbase. 

The Mail might have got its headline, and provoked another round of gibbering about the ‘woke left’ and ‘gender ideology’, but in the grand scheme of things, this is literally nothing more than a

warp-storm in a teacup.