Last week I reported on the new Escher matriarch miniatures for Warhammer 40k spinoff Necromunda, which I described as “queer-coded warrior women”. This was met with some pushback from social media commentators, arguing that – because the Escher were based on the notoriously heterosexual punk aesthetics of the 1980s – it should be impossible to read any lesbian subtext at all into them at all. Fortunately for those commentators, this week’s new Goliath models are a group of red-blooded men with rippling muscles and no shirts which is about as heterosexual as it gets.
The new Goliath Forge Bosses set contains six miniatures. That’s broken down into two Goliaths with small bodies and a choice of weaponry; two larger Goliaths with various weapon options, probably the mini you’ll pick to lead your gang; and a pair of Sump Crocs, who are basically dogs and therefore Good Boys.
I described these models as men, but that’s not actually certain. The first expanded version of Goliath lore came in House of Chains, in which we learn that the Goliaths were originally created as an all-male vat-grown slave population, but that in the centuries since their creation (and after several revolutions to get control of the chems and tech they need to sustain their population) Goliath females have emerged, and there’s a small population of “nat-born” Goliaths conceived the old fashioned way. It’s possible that some of these bruisers could be women – perhaps the ones wearing breast plates?
The new Goliath minis will release alongside a short new supplement, ‘Underhive Journal: Goliath – House of Chains’. This won’t be a necessary purchase if you want to field a Goliath gang, but according to the WarCom website it will include rules for two variant gangs, the “Furnace Brutes, who are often deployed to forcefully claim territory from another house, and Unborn, which consist of those who, for whatever reason, have decided to become a Goliath artificially, with the help of a Doc”.
When I say that some of the models, images, stories, and texts that make up Necromunda are queer-coded, I don’t mean that you should interpret the setting as being full of queer characters. I mean that the media presents things which resonate with LGBTQ+ experiences, desires, ways of being, and so on. Many of those things overlap with heterosexual experiences – it is perfectly heterosexual to enjoy the greatest handshake in cinema, for example, but you might enjoy it for gay reasons as well.
The reason for looking at media through a specific lens – which could be a queer lens, but could be any viewpoint you care to think of – is not to try and prove that one way of seeing things is more true than any other. It’s because taking different viewpoints can highlight things you might find interesting, increase your enjoyment or appreciation of a piece of work, and helps practise empathy.
Take the Goliaths. Looking at them through a queer theory lens, I see that their hyper-masculine design also resembles the gay ‘muscle daddy’ beauty archetype: the fact that there’s no question that these guys are stone cold killers becomes a reminder that “gay” doesn’t mean “weak” or “feminine”. It’s a duality reminiscent of the gay steel mill workers from the classic Simpson’s episode ‘Homer’s Phobia’.
The closest real-world equivalent to the Goliath ‘Unborn’, who undergo medical treatment to become more muscular and more masculine is female to male gender transition: that parallel in turn complicates the idea that “gender transition” is fundamentally different in kind from other forms of bodily transformation.
Look at the Goliaths through a feminist lens and their reproduction becomes a major interest. The reality of reproduction shapes women’s experience of the entire world, from the political domain to the personal, but vat-growth technology could decouple reproduction from sex. That intersects hard with a marxist analysis (one that looks at material and economic conditions and how these feed into systems of control and processes of revolution) which emphasises how the Goliaths’ ability to reproduce organically, independent of vat cloning technology owned by their masters, is fundamental to their political emancipation.
These lenses aren’t answers and they’re not ways to win arguments, they’re ways to find questions that make the world (both fictional and real) more interesting, and make us better able to connect. You can do all of this and still enjoy all the Warhammer 40k factions on the basic level that they are badass dudes who are sick as hell.
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Source: Wargamer
