While just about every Warhammer 40k fan I’ve ever met in real life has been affable and well balanced, you wouldn’t believe that if all you’d seen of the fandom was the online discourse around new female characters, and particularly, the hypothetical existence of female Space Marines. The thing I find most strange about the whole argument – aside from the antisocial venom it draws out of people – is that, to me, it seems pretty obvious that female Space Marines are simply not on the cards.
Games Workshop is quite secretive, but I’ve come to a few conclusions about the firm after decades following Warhammer 40k as a fan, plus a couple of years as a professional muckraker. GW seeks out long term profitability, not short term profits. It has two successful strategies for increasing its annual turnover, creating new product offers to access new markets, and licensing its IP to other firms. It values its intellectual property as a resource. So given those axioms, is there even a reason for GW to make female Space Marines?
Certainly there is: people would pay money for them. Contributor Gab Hernandez wrote a good feature explaining why some 40k fans want female Space Marines. Space Marines are the title characters in most Warhammer 40k books and just about every Warhammer 40k game, have vastly more models than any other faction, and they’re just cool.
Since people tend to like media they see themselves represented in, it’s a safe assumption that releasing female Space Marines would make Warhammer 40k more attractive to potential female customers. With the ongoing trend for more and more women to be interested in tabletop games, that’s a long-term growth market.
But weighed against this is Games Workshop’s caution when it comes to handling the goose that lays the golden eggs: the Warhammer IP. There’s real money in that IP: the Warhammer 40k gaming chair sells for an extra $100 over the base unit because the IP has cultural cachet. And the idea of the Space Marine is the cornerstone of the entire Warhammer 40k brand.
With the insertion of Primaris Space Marines in 2017 the firm has shown it is willing to experiment with them, at least a little. The design was made slightly more mass-market friendly, with some rounded edges, losing the Darth Vader face mask. It was also made more anatomically realistic, with better limb proportions and more unarmored sections to allow joints to articulate. The changes to joints makes licensed toys, animation, and live action adaptations easier.
It’s a fundamentally conservative update to the design, not much more than an upscaling. Yet just about every Black Library novel about Space Marines released since then deals with the fallout of the Primaris Marines being to the setting. Never mind the fandom response: a big chunk of the Imperium of Man considers the Primaris Space Marines heresy. Adding female Space Marines would be bigger, in the lore and in the fandom, because people do care – whether or not the amount they care is healthy.
And GW has other ways to make its product line more appealing to the people that female Space Marines might appeal to: it can make more female miniatures, and more named women, for every Warhammer 40k faction that canonically does or could feature them. And there’s good evidence that that is exactly what the firm is doing.
While the Sisters of Battle will feel like they’ve always been around to newer 40k players, their 2019 Codex and plastic kits were totally unexpected, arriving after decades of neglect, and came with a considerably larger model range than they had ever had before. That range has since received further expansion.
Updated Imperial Guard kits now include female guardsmen: dying for the Emperor is every citizen’s highest duty, regardless of what they keep in their undergarments (munitorum issue, one size fits all, grey).
Replacing master general Ursarkar E. Creed after his heroic death with his daughter Ursula was an inspired choice. In a world of giant supersoldiers and flesh-eating aliens where regular humans of every gender are equally squishy, physical prowess means nothing – Ursula is at the top because she’s an iron-willed Cadian.
And then there’s the female Adeptus Custodes. Hernandez points out in her article that some people want female Space Marines because they want female super soldiers in 40k – you don’t get much more super than the Custodes. GW’s writers chose to expand a narrow gap in the canon to make this happen: while female Adeptus Custodes were never explicitly excluded by the lore, the faction was only ever described as being made up of men prior to their 10th edition Codex.
But whereas the Space Marines are deeply entangled with ideas of monastic orders, warrior knights, and other brotherhoods, the Custodes are a recent faction with only vaguely defined lore. And as the recent Warhammer TV animation Harvest shows, the Custodes are so hyper focused on their duty and role that their gender is utterly irrelevant.
Adding more female characters to other factions won’t replicate all the specific ways that Space Marines are great. One great strength of the Space Marines is that they are internally varied – it’s hard to see how new subfactions of Adepta Sororitas could ever be as distinctive and contrasting as the Space Wolves and Black Templars, as they are explicitly all religious fanatics. There’s no way to imbue new releases with the decades and decades of development, stories, and fan culture that surround the Space Marines.
But GW’s goal isn’t to please everyone: it aims to make and sell what it considers to be the best fantasy miniatures in the world, at a profit, for ever. And until female Space Marines are the lowest risk, highest reward way to do that, they’re not coming.
If you’re hoping for official female Space Marines, I don’t think you’ll get them, but I expect you will see a lot of cool stuff that you like in the years to come, and plenty more female fighters. If you think female Space Marines are the herald of the woke apocalypse, stop worrying, and please just leave the people who make female Space Marine conversions to enjoy themselves.
Having written the words “Space Marines” about a million times in this article, I’m going to go and play Space Marine 2 PVP multiplayer, which it turns out is really good. You can check out my Space Marine 2 review for thoughts on the main campaign and PVE mode.
Source: Wargamer
