Monday Open Thread – Not Warhammer but still cromulent!

Note: Warhammer40k and all Warhammer properties, ideas, pictures, and fiction all belong to Games Workshop.

I was going to do a write up of the Chaos Titans of the Dark Mechanicum, which I will definitely do in the future, but I started looking to see if Slannesh had any in their forces.  That got weird quickly and as I was using a work laptop (off work hours) I dropped out of that rabbit hole real quickly.  So no real time to do that topic any justice, so Titanic Abominations will be in the future.

I thing I do want to talk about is the current brouhaha going on about the addition of female Custodes.  The Custodes are basically the highest form of space marine.  Custodes protect the Emperor as he sits on his throne/life support system, constantly wargaming and testing the defenses of the Palace.  Recruited from the families of the Imperial Nobility, the Custodes are expected to be the best of the best.  Whelp, there are now women in the Custodes.  Somehow, they survived the transformation process which was designed explicitly for males.  As you can imagine, the majority of my pasty white, middle aged, and (probably) obese fellow Warhammer enthusiasts welcomed this with open arms (to hold the giant buckets of shit they are dumping on GW).   If you want to retcon over 40 years of lore, sure, but have a better reason than inclusivity and saying that their were women in the Custodes all along, when they couldn’t have been.  If this were a different setting I could understand, but remember that this is already a Patriarchal society, little more than a feudal government set up.  And, as mentioned previously, the average man and woman are treated exactly the same – like shit, so no issues there.  I do like the lack of racism in 40k, all of that human hate is focused at the xenos who, to be honest, don’t look like humans and ARE trying to kill humans.

Sorry got carried away.  So basically GW added women to an all boys club and the club members are not happy.  Not really because of the fact that women were added to the Custodes, but that the lore has not been respected.  I think a lot of the arguments about changes to existing franchises can be viewed through that lens.  Maybe they are actually trans, born male but want to be female.  Everything solved!  Trans-representation and Space Marines are still biologically male!

Sports – some are on, I think the NBA is in the 2nd trimester of the playoffs, lots of baseball that means little, some playoff hockey – Go Vichy Whalers!, check you usual channels.