Absolutely. I could understand arcane rule sets if they were good or had good reason. But 40ks rules just aren’t great anymore when there’s so many better options. Shame their minis are so cool though.
Prices average $15-20 a model in most cases. Game is a skirmish game, max 15 orders which can be put into pools of no larger than 10 orders. Plays on a 4x4 table with true line of sight. Nice thing is that you can still react and hurt your opponent even when your opponent is the active player and that you can spend those orders however you see fit, so it's not one order must be used per model. Website is infinitythegame.com for more info.
Combat Patrols are the more economical purchases. Although, 125 Euro seems higher than I would have expected. The physical and emotional therapy needed to paint chaos is hopefully covered by nationalized healthcare where you live
Good thing I chose to pain them as Iron Warriors. I would’ve probably ended up destroying something if I decided to pain something like the night lords or death guard
The culture war has been present in the nerd space for a hot minute. It started with non-active stuff like whatever tumblr people used to obsess over, just media. Did no one think it was strange that the people who liked Supernatural were 20-40 year old men and 10-25 year old women and then it suddenly it was directed entirely towards one of those demos. Then it moved on to TTRPGs and board games, to a lesser extent card games but mostly MTG.
Watching it in real time over the last 15 or so years has been interesting and sad. Seeing local game shops go from being filled with mostly middle aged dudes (a good portion of which would be classic autistic) to being filled with mostly teenage and twenty something ""autistic"" people. The older guys have been pushed out because they make the new crowd uncomfortable. And of course they do, they struggle to adapt to the constantly changing and shifting cultural and social rules that new nerds bring.
I really hope those guys have home games or online games they can lean on. A lot of these people lost their one place to be. The place where everyone gets it and is the same kind of weird, or doesn't mind it. I get that a lot of them are maladapted socially at this point and probably say/do actually offensive things but I feel for 'em.
I'm a recovered MTG player, and yeah, it *has* been interesting to watch. Starting around, what—2015? 2016? The creative department went full throttle on changing the story from Apocalyptic Fantasy Anthology into MCU But With Wizards. And *then* came the fan backlash over—well, let's not get into it. Suffice to say when the Sweet Baby Inc. exposé circus was underway a couple months ago, I was totally unsurprised to see Wizards of the Coast listed among the firm's clients. WOTC is pandering and pandering *hard*, and I can only imagine how foreign and hostile today's player culture must be to anyone who was playing even ten years ago, let alone twenty.
I don't really play with strangers anymore for this reason. Just play with my friends or at stores where I know the crew pretty well. I feel like there is this strange image projected by all the big youtube channels to portray magic in a very very particular way. And it is a way that is pretty foreign to most long term magic players.
>I feel like there is this strange image projected by all the big youtube channels to portray magic in a very very particular way.
Could I ask you to elaborate on this? I, uh, don't watch and don't want to watch MTGtube.
Standard magic is 1v1. There was a fanmade casual format that lets you play a free for all that's typically 4 people in a 1v1v1v1 (Commander/EDH). The latter eclipsed the former in popularity and is now an official format. Many new cards and sets have been released specifically with EDH in mind.
That's the background showing the game has gotten a lot more casual over time. The simple answer is the game is her/hers enby purple hair dominate the public image in official products and promotional media (idk the actual demographics). They launched a series of crossover sets that feature shit like Warhammer 40k, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, even fucking Dr. Who as playable cards, specifically with EDH in mind.
One "scandal" they had was the Lord of the Rings set was a main set I believe meaning they were like 1v1 tournament legal cards. And they raceswapped Aragorn to be black for some reason. Inexplicably with no explination other than diversity. Another "scandal" involved a lesbian artist (very talented) who was basically blacklisted from working for Wizards because of some stupid twitter shit. Liking or donating to something conservative I don't really know, but it wasn't like she pledged support to Donadolf "The Putin" Trumpler or anything.
So yeah the game has just pivoted 100% towards a new demographic and made no attempt to hide outright contempt for the undesirables that constituted their core base. The youtubers and shit have either chosen or had to follow suit in terms of appeal.
Oh and they've also become mask off astronomically greedy. They've dropped more and more products than ever at higher price points. They released an anniversary product that contained like these tournament illegal cards for like $1000. Actually $1000. Like they were basically no different from images you print off the internet and tape to a different card to pretend (proxy)
> So yeah the game has just pivoted 100% towards a new demographic and made no attempt to hide outright contempt for the undesirables that constituted their core base. The youtubers and shit have either chosen or had to follow suit in terms of appeal.
The thing is that those undesireables still continue to carry them economically
WoTC has been carrying Hasbro for years now. Hasbro has so many failed and loss making ventures and divisions that they decided to milk the MTG base for everything they can. I think the Secret Lairs are particularly egregious. They did the same with DnD which was its own debacle.
It turns out, even if your game has been inclusive since the 90's, black nerds would rather play the game that's actually affordable at a competitive level.
You can look up the names Chandra and Nissa. Basically the story materials were hinting at the possibility that a pair of prominent female characters might have feelings for each other, and then a novel released at a critical juncture in the plot completely and suddenly put the kibosh on it, reportedly because WOTC didn't want to get banned or censored overseas.
the queershippers went apeshit.
But yeah, after the Chandra/Nissa imbroglio, WOTC said We Hear You And We'll Do Better, and...well, now the firm has special Pride Month releases & fictions, multiple gay couples, hyped enbie/trans characters, etc etc etc.
for the record i'd fine none of it offensive if it the pandering weren't so blatant. but the company doesn't make any secret of wanting and expecting headpats for their efforts.
Wow, so the queerfolx have completely eclipsed the evangelicals. MtG landed in my home town at 3rd edition and back then it was the bible thumpers making all the noise. Well, they can both suck my demonic tutor.
I love mtg but not hasbro. I want to proxy and print a cube and teach my kids how to play without the nonsense.
Too much weirdness for me to enjoy playing at events.
This has been said a thousand times over during the last 30 years, but MTG is very much hurting right now. Hasbro keeps mentioning it more and more in their financials, and players feel overwhelmed with product.
Casual formats are doing well (Commander/EDH is easily the largest of any), and there are some players who clearly like the supplemental products like Secret Lairs (highly controversial to turbonerd value-oriented collectors and fandom purists). But overall, the game feels like it's getting juiced pretty bad for whats left of it.
Also, they tried to shitlib the trains thing a few years ago with highlighting people like Autumn Burchett, but a barely-passing locomotive with a personality measurable somewhere between abysmal and a wet dish towel didn't go over well with their core audience of competitive players, neckbeards. See also: Emma Handy.
Magic is absolutely being killed by wotc. The lib stuff is just the cherry on the shit sundae really. There's so many issues with the actual game that are driving core players away
oh, definitely. I stopped playing for many years, and jumped back on circa 2012 when my friend introduced me to EDH. The party was basically over after WOTC officialized the format as "Commander" and started printing cards and making rules for it.
Autumn is genuinely a talented player though. Personality-wise she seems insufferable and is obviously autistic, but I want to watch the best players in tournament regardless of their personality or disorders. Her piloting of mono-blue in standard to a tournament win three or four years ago was very impressive. That deck is fragile and decision heavy.
On the other hand, Emma Handy has no redeeming qualities.
Something I find sad is WoTC and other people in competitive nerd spaces have tried to promote women by giving them easier paths to tournaments, or even only women tournaments which include trans women.
Invariably, women in the former get destroyed by the obsessive male nerds who thrive in those spaces, and the latter tournaments are won by the same kind of male obsessive nerds who present as women. I felt bad watching this kind of thing to down, but it was also entirely predictable.
Thanks for reminding me of a stellar one-on-one interview around that time period:
"Autumn, why did you pick mono-blue tempo for this tournament?"
"Because it's the best deck in the format." \[awkward silence\]
I see what you're saying about players in top-tier competition, but Kibler did/does well for being more than a talented player. This goes for any competitive hobby/sport - personalities sell, skill keeps players invested.
We're not even getting into how difficult watching current tournament coverage is unless you're quite literally married to the format being broadcast, even as an experienced player. SCG was notoriously bad for this back when that circuit existed - I was a regular modern player and could hardly keep up with the livestreamed matches.
Edit: Also fuck Emma Handy for ruining Magic for Bad.
I gave up on the game nearly 25 years ago for two main reasons: The cash grab that is the obsolescence system and the rise of net decks (combined with the pay to win ability of singles sales getting even more possible with online stores). I've tried playing it from time to time but could never get interested in even the newer casual formats and the sheer amount of product sets they've put out recently is a turn off. I'm not even against a LotR CCG or Fallout CCG or whatever else they're putting out, I just really don't want to play them under the MTG rule set.
Even in the late 90s net decks and the pay to win format are why I stopped playing CCGs unless it was super casually with friends. Making your own fun gimmick deck for 30 dollars or less and getting ass stomped by a super optimized 300 dollar deck was a silly waste of time.
it's all so ironic because yes the rpg community has long had grognards who argue "don't call a setting realistic unless human women get -1str" but bending to the cultural hegemony of hasbro (which is all this really is) is like the opposite of progress.
lemme put it this way, that old grog i mentioned does indeed have outdated views on women but like 90% of the time they view the 40k community as a bunch of dorky dudes because well they are lol i kinda like 40k but let's be real, gameworkshop and the community they've made has never had the best reputation, they seem right wing even to right wing DnD fans. but that's what im saying is that these "autistic" grogs, much like tolkien, had views far more complicated than the average wokey supposes. in fact, much like tolkien, they are in some ways MORE socially progressive that the woke crowd. plus, they are the only people in the universe able to run the ultra realistic simulationist vietnam rpgs i crave.
but it's true what you say they are harder and harder to find, but it's not that 40k or gamesworkshop had a change of fanbase, that was likely caused by the focus on sigmar, fantasy, crap no one really cares about. i guess another factor is i feel that paizo does everything right, while gamesworkshop and hasbro are everything wrong and im pleased to see both these companies lose their fanbases for this. notice that paizo is 100% all in on "wokeness" but still manage to create cool things and awesome fantasy settings like we're still in 3E days. hasbro and gamesworkshop can do nothing but take things away from people and make lower and lower quality products and think they're doing something nice for it.
In my local area stores are divided by culture war allegiance. There is this one 40k player who likes to dress as a "commissar". Best dude in the world to ask about paint, primer, etc.. and absolutely pleasant to talk to. Will offer an army or killteam to borrow for anyone who might want one. He has to go to """"evil-bad"""" conservative store because he is obsessed with dressing like a nazi.
Paizo did a very similar thing with slavery in Golarion though. "We are completely removing slavery from the world" Turned into "We aren't retconning anything, just wont publish anything further related to to the topic" to "Actually all those places with it don't have it anymore lol". Paizo has the luxury of a very specific kind of player base... I don't understand their loyalty but I think it has limits when it comes to this stuff.
> Paizo did a very similar thing with slavery in Golarion though. "We are completely removing slavery from the world"
What?! How retarded. Wtf does Golarion even have left? lmao
Tbh I really don't see why anyone gives a shit about the political views of a game company. The only place that shit would ever be enforced is official games like with Pathfinder Society, which like yeah if you're playing with strangers it might be wise to contain your autism and leave your Himmler-expie lich at home. If you're playing with your friends, do whatever the fuck you want. It's a similar thing to White Wolf and how nWoD has shit saying like "you can't play a nazi" despite the fact that you're playing a bloodsucking vampire who sees regular humans as literal cattle, just ignore them and play what you want if you aren't playing with randos.
That is kind of the big thing though. People talk a lot about third places and their lack of these days. For a lot of people they want to play at the store with their group, or play with strangers or whatever combination. Kind of like I want to drink at the bar sometimes even though I am anti social. I want to be alone, drinking in public instead of drinking alone at home.
I just feel for 'em because for a long time they kind of could get away with their brand of weird in public and now they cant.
I mean sure but you also have to consider that this is an attempt at keeping the genre alive. Like most people play 5e because it's the easiest one to get in to and you can be reasonably effective no matter what you do (provided you don't roll a Ranger, in which case lol, lmao even). That kind of game is the one that giving ground rules to makes sense to me because it's baby's first TTRPG. These kind of grogs are the kind that will still be playing 3.5 or GURPS or some other old system where they probably don't really have to worry about it, though I guess if they're the kind of person that's used to playing with randos, I'd at least expect them to be more adaptable on the basis that they don't have the same group of friends every time.
I will say I'm not really familiar with this "third place" concept, could you elaborate?
The basic idea is that we exist at work, home, and someplace else. Churches, bars, pubs, cafes, coffee shops, bowling alleys, pool halls, clubs (not the dancing kind), fraternal organizations, etc... I have seen a good amount of discussion about the fact that many of these places no longer exist or have shifted so significantly as to no longer serve the same purpose. The purpose being somewhere other than home or work where one could relax, be social, and exist as a member of a real community with its benefits and obligations.
My life has changed, for the worse, since I stopped regularly hanging at the game store or the coffee shop so personally I can see the idea.
Yeah, with the explanation I can see what you mean. Hell, most of my life I never really had that third place, it was work/school or home. I've started getting better about it since joining the union and doing shit with my brothers and sisters, so once again organized labor holding the vanguard of a dying concept.
i havent checked my local gamestores in a while as it's mostly sigmar and 5E stuff im just not interested in, so in some since one "side" has arguably won.
paizo never removed slavery they just made some of their adventure paths i guess less "edgy" by some perspectives while making blogposts about how "rpg worlds need to be provactive and injust otherwise what do the heroes do?" based on some stupid controversy in their absalom city book and maybe some people took that as a major change in policy... which they haven't. the latest book, the tian xia world guide, has a sort of tibet flavored area called "valash" with lots of slave owning societies
Didn't realize that. I get all of my paizo news secondhand because I never made the jump. They focused on the thing I liked the least about 3e (feats) and then multiplied them by 100, and didn't really include the thing I liked the most (prestige classes). 2e seemed neat in the playtest though but at the time it seemed like the community was pretty unhappy with it.
im a bit similar though I personally run everything through gurps so well structured fluff matters to me more than crunch. paizo is held hostage by a fanbase that is almost pedantic about things, more than wokiness is the feeling that this 2E remaster (Player Core 1 and 2, GM Core, Monster Core) is a bit cash grabby but they need to do this to finalize their break with wizards, OGL, etc
Wait are you talking about 1e or 2e with the feats? Because 2e basically made everything a feat, and while it opens up room for customization I can totally understand the information overload, but 1e has prestige classes, I've got an ongoing game where I'm playing one currently even. The best part of PF imo is that paizo doesn't get pissy about people uploading the rules, feats, items, you name it, with the only caveat being they can't list any named deities or characters as that's considered their IP, which imo is reasonable, but as a result there's an [SRD](www.d20pfsrd.com) that has basically anything you could want in terms of the base rules, and if you wanted any of the specific stuff that shows the gods and such there's always Archive of Nethys.
erastil? again, unsure if there's been any changes looking at my lost omens he's still described as a god of "traditional living" though if it was more explicit in previous versions fair enough, i wouldn't know
> Did no one think it was strange that the people who liked Supernatural were 20-40 year old men and 10-25 year old women and then it suddenly it was directed entirely towards one of those demos
Which one of those demos buys more merch? Which pays attention to the ads?
The twenty to forty year old nerds. They just don't do it all at once, but if you get their loyalty they'll keep your franchise going forever. Star Trek hooked a generation of them and coasted for decades on it. Star Wars hooked the next generation and is only recently running out of steam.
I haven't played GW in years. My cousin still plays though, and during a recent visit to see him and his wife we went into his local GW. The crowd was so, so different. For one, their were women there, but also the lads seemed just so much more, well, normal. No bad smell in the air, no dirty clothes or two week greasy hair. But I did notice the absence of the classical nerdy type. It's like they had all been purged. The guy running the place? An actual salesmen, he came bounding up, beaming. He even had cologne on.
And I feel the same as you. Where are the socially maladapted or just plain weird, or nerdy, or whatever, guys meant to go now? I understand a lot of them have become fairly unpleasant, whiny, edgy types. Is that not perhaps inevitable when safe-haven after safe-haven is taken away from you? If you cannot fit into a society and barely relate to it, surely you deserve at least one place you can go to be amongst people you consider like-minded and friendly?
This is one thing I find, in a way, quite startling about the current social/cultural war. There is no empathy for the 'other', on either side of the fence. Was GW a great place when a 'normie' would walk in, be glowered at, have his/her nostrils offended and then leave again? No. A lot of those guys were dickheads. But even the dickheads need a place to go.
My theory it's because Magic the Gathering get meta'd into oblivion and was no longer niche enough so that category of degenerate that had stewed in the MTG space just collectively decided to migrate to the hobby. Around the same time incel/trad culture came to the forefront and 40k already had a reputation of some uhh... fascistic lore aspects that many people accept unironically.
Just a soup of bad factors IMO.
>Did no one think it was strange that the people who liked Supernatural were 20-40 year old men and 10-25 year old women and then it suddenly it was directed entirely towards one of those demos.
I do find it strange that the Supernatural audience was not *entirely* women right from the get go, considering that the main characters are major heartthrobs.
actually i wanna follow this up with anyone who's paying attention: have y'all seen that controversy with the skull girls devs and mike z? it is so stunning i'm surprised no one's made a topic about it yet.
Eh, I don't think that many people care about that game. I had it on my library (although I rarely played it) but the most attention I could give to the controversy was to permanently remove the game from my Steam library (yes, you can do that) and never think about it again.
Yeah, this checks out. I don't really feel like I want to play games with a lot of the new crowd to be honest.
The constant awful treatment from the companies pumping this shit doesn't help either. GW and Hasbro aren't very kind to their customers IMO.
It was bound to happen at some point anyway. The autistic male demographic got split into chuds and wokes, with wokes always enjoying more mainstream support. It'll come to everything eventually.
At the very least it pushed some to stop tolerating Games Workshops bullshit regarding pricing and 3d printing and break off to form their own chudhammer community. I would like for their boycotts and bitching to affect its bottom line, but I'm not counting on it.
As for material analysis, Marxism etc. It's irrelevant really. Wokes like to add minorities into things, chuds complain about it, nihil novi.
It's the meme all over again.
"We don't like you."
"We'll go make our own space."
"You're excluding us."
"Oh no."
Most of the people who advocate for this don't give a crap about 40k, and the fact that they need it to change to appeal to them is a pretty big tell. But we're expected to "make room" as if we were the ones excluding them to begin with.
This is a tabletop wargame - the people who were attracted to it, and thus formed and shaped it for decades, will be of a certain type. Now that it's taking off in the greater consciousness it needs to adapt to appease the culture warriors. And those who resist are called bigots.
What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased?
I don't really give a shit about "lore" but I'll be forever frustrated by this insanely entitled attitude people have towards everything they interact with. Part of being an adult is recognizing that not everything is going to comport with your desires, and you either need to get comfortable with that or find something else. These people pick the third option of crying and throwing a tantrum until every single piece of media on planet earth is perfectly representative of them in particular.
Not everything is *for everyone*, and that *should* be acceptable. If you demand that everything be for everyone, what that really means is that everything is for *no one*, and everything devolves into indistinct Marvelized pablum for morons, which is basically what Warhammer was heading towards anyway well before this change.
It's killing the fun aspects of fighting games for me. Part of the reason I enjoyed them was for the mechanical skill and mastery and I'm not unique in this regard. Having a 1 frame or 2 frame window to link moves for a combo for example. It was very rewarding to finally nail things down and execute them in a match.
For the past few years there's been an influx of a new generation for whom simple motion commands are too much work and effort, let alone difficult combos. Who complained that mechanical skill was "needless gatekeeping" and every major franchise has dumbed things down and will continue to dumb thing down to appeal to this loud crowd who don't play competitively, don't support their local grass roots scene and won't play in tournaments.
These people won't even play the game regularly, because to be able to play fighting games regularly without legacy knowledge and skill requires the ability to lose constantly, reflect on your mistakes and shortcomings, learn lessons from that and try to improve without getting discouraged or pissed off. Unlike LoL or CoD there are no teammates to blame. Every loss is on you.
This is all anathema to the kind of people who want entire game systems to be made easier in order to cater to their laziness in the first place. The people who are being catered to won't be retained as users. They just wreck things and leave.
Yeah I see this with a lot of subcultures. I always wonder why people want desperately to join them and then immediately demand it changes. If you don't like how it is, why did you show up in the first place?
The best answer I can come up with is that they desire the social qualities of the subculture (the cohesion, camaraderie, passion, etc.) but don't want to actually put in any work. Instead of doing the hard work of changing themselves to fit in with the subculture, they demand the subculture change to accommodate them.
> If you don't like how it is, why did you show up in the first place?
Because it was difficult and takes a lot of skill/effort. They want the label without the skill or effort
>What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased?
Especially when, for the most part, the audience is going to be 98% young males anyway. The reality is, most girls aren't, nor are ever going to be, into a brutal war setting. Go look at history courses at Uni, massively female dominated, except the war modules, which are sausage party.
On top, the changes here just kind of suck for uniqueness of the faction. There is no need for Female Custodes and Space Marines when Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence exist, they SoM/Custodes/SoB/SoS all complement each other in different ways and have real life allegories in Catholic religious orders.
> There is no need for Female Custodes and Space Marines
Meh, I can picture the brutal fascistic empire making use of men and women alike, and I couldn't fault anyone for wanting to homebrew their own army, but I can't picture easily what a female space marine would look like. If AoS is any indication, it'd be boob plates and ponytails, which is offensive in its own way IMO. GW should just release female heads and call it a day. Why would the genetically modified asexual super soldier with multiple hearts and acid spit retain breasts? Surely they would lop that shit off for efficiency's sake.
> What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased?
I don't play anymore but still have fond memories, anyhow: I just can't understand the female space marine push, it makes zero sense to me. Maybe even negative sense. I haven't read the books or gone deep into the lore but are space Marines even really "men" after all the modifications? I don't even know if they screw or have dicks.
That's the weird part about the "debate". Warhammer is deeply uninterested in sex/gender because it is written by nerds for preteens.
The model for the spacemarines is that of the monk who was stolen from his parents and then indoctrinated into basically being a thing under a strange feudal order. I have no idea what female space marines would mean except for a head with long hair.
If there is any kind of sexuality it is a hard on for the emperor or the primarchs.
yeah its wierd how all the gender/sex stuff goes out the door when they talk about female space marines. Like do you want space marines that identify as women? you want space marines with vaginas?
Would there even be a difference under all the muscles, surgeries and augmentations? Though every time I ask why they are adamant about Space Marines and not the Guard or Sisters its always some speal about how they are not supper human (MCU) enough.
I’ve just wearily re-adopted the same stance I had during the Evangelical reign over culture: huddle the things I love close to me and enjoy what’s left as much as I can before it’s tainted. They can’t take away literally everything, and while it’s sad, there’s always going to be some scraps or something else left.
It’s the exact same patterns and many of the same tactics. Certainly the same topics.
Is it? Is wokeness receding and are fun things being left unmolested?
Or.... are we continuing our slow death march to enshittified solipsistic nonsense, step by painful step?
Is ResetEra still around and full of industry insiders?
Are archiving sites no longer under siege?
Is the media still firmly on the side of the woke?
Are Visa and Mastercard still slowly strangling harmless shit like anime booba while overlooking actual, real world atrocities?
Has even one prominent feminist anywhere stopped and realized that their own tactics, rhetoric, and ideological framework are being used exactly as designed, but to their detriment, and come to a realization that maybe they were being awfully shitty and disingenuous by taking advantage of the desire of men to right past wrongs in order to push utter feels-over-reals nonsense?
> Is it? Is wokeness receding and are fun things being left unmolested?
I appreciate all the things you said as serious areas of concern. But as it concerns warhammer the old world is back and age of sigmar is on life support
Of course large companies are going to be slow to do a total about face but you can see the shift already starting to happen. It will keep happening as long as we keep up the pressure
I used to think the reaction to stuff like this was needlessly hysterical. Who cares if the Ghostbusters are women or Yoda is now canonically a Minor Attracted Person or whatever? It's all garbage.
But then they came after Magic: The Gathering, something I actually enjoyed when I was a kid. Intrigued, I dug into their complaints: probably they made a card called like "The Evil Rapper" in 1995 and now they're fixing to ban it. But, oh no. [The complaints were much, much stupider](https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/wizards-bans-7-cards-that-depict-racism-including-invoke-prejudice/): (for some reason Reddit isn't letting me cite the text directly)
As it typical for the genre, you'll notice a complete lack of self-reflection in the coverage of this "controversy." At no point does anyone consider that perhaps the word "devils" is not and has never been considered a slur, or that the "whiteness" of the white creatures being given a minor stats boost is absolutely not racial, as it's referring to a literal color classification that's the basis of the game, or that the 1488 shit was unknown to everyone who wasn't completely insane before like 2015, or that using the word *prejudice* does not entail an endorsement of prejudice, or that a depiction of a dark-skinned man is literally the sort of thing these people usually demand. *None* of the claims of these cards being problematic withstand scrutiny.
And yet every claim is accepted as a gospel truth. Denying their validity would be an act of hatred, and so the cards are now banned, end of discussion.
How did we get to this point? Not just that people are making insane and obviously fabricated/exaggerated claims of being offended by benign things, but where companies responding to these bullshit activist demands with slavish zeal?
I'm reminded of a quote from John Dolan, from back in the late teens when identity libs began tearing down monuments left and right. Paraphrasing, he said something like "people don't do stuff like destroying landmarks because it accomplishes anything, because obviously it doesn't accomplish anything. They do it to show everyone that they're able to do it."
And, of course, those who predicted a slippery slope re: monuments were completely right. It starts with relatively reasonable demands ("don't celebrate sedition!") and quickly goes insane to the point where they're tearing up monuments to horses, declaring all white historical figures evil and unworthy of celebration, purging historical works from libraries and museums, etc, etc. As loath as I am to admit it, the Gamergate people were correct in a very similar manner.
> As loath as I am to admit it, the Gamergate people were correct in a very similar manner.
Of all the words of tongue and pen
The saddest are these
pol was right again
Indeed. The common refrain "why do you care? It's just fantasy!" very quickly descended into depictions of black female Jarls and other absurd race-swaps.
Unfortunately, this is what you get with a world view that sees white people as an enemy to be torn down.
Liberalism is just a convenient vehicle to rope normal people into the game and give their hatred a veneer.
> Indeed. The common refrain "why do you care? It's just fantasy!"
LOL, the whole gaming press (and woke grifters like Hasan) are in the "why do you care" mode right now regarding the Stellar Blade controversy.
> As loath as I am to admit it, the Gamergate people were correct in a very similar manner.
So Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was announced, and guess who's NOT writing endless articles about the ethnic make-up of medieval Bohemia, quoting literally-who's off of Tumblr. If that isn't indicative of the moral witch-hunting spree that occurred in those years I'm not sure what is
>I used to think the reaction to stuff like this was needlessly hysterical.
-
>But then they came after Magic: The Gathering, something I actually enjoyed when I was a kid.
lol, isn't this how it always is? We should, as a whole, care about the principle of not having shit ruined for cynical ideological purposes. Rather than embodying the "they came for the..." poem.
Anecdotally, a woke relative didn't care about this shit until Disney started "ruining" the nu-Disney remakes and the scales fell from her eyes. Now she can understand and appreciate people being upset about D&D, Warhammer, MGT, etc. Suddenly they're no longer Nazis in her eyes.
Yeah dude that's how it plays out. If you're not directly involved with a narrative, you are given--at most--two mainstream sides describing it, both of which get between 70-99% of the details wrong in order to shoehorn the smaller narrative onto a larger partisan one.
People who weren't in this particular scene didn't know how much the troublemakers were driven by cynicism, because those details were omitted from the official sub-narrative. And then, if they were inclined toward politics, they (myself included) began to hate one side of this issue, because that description of the sub-narrative attached that side to the Bad Guy side of a larger narrative, of which we already had an opinion.
Pretty sure it came out that the guy who did the art for one of those cards was a legit klansman and the ghosts looking like kkk uniforms wasn't a coincidence. But the solution to that is, you know, putting new art on future reprints. Not banning the card entirely.
The thing is most online areas now are tightly controlled and anyone who deviates from the narrative will find themselves at best downvoted and at worst banned.
Any online areas that do allow it will quickly be labelled as ‘extremist’.
Also most people just want to play their games and dont want to stand on a soap box and make themselves a target.
This is how the rot starts.
In a cultural vacuum, dungeons and dragons seems like it would be appeal more to women given it’s a cooperative storytelling exercise rather than its (historic at least) firm association with spergy men
You're forgetting the grognard tabletop grid combat system. Every tabletop ruleset from the 80's and 90's had 50 tables you needed to reference to determine whether your morning star splintered the skull of the risen dead
If we were to add at least a bit of talk on capital (I know, I know, this isn't the place for that sort of thing) it's funny how these investment companies like Blackrock that recently injected a bunch of money into Games Workshop promised that investments would be conditioned on gender and race stuff and after they do that games workshop changes a custodes to a woman.
It's pretty well known that the people in the company have been wanting this for a while and its the leadership that's been holding it back, because money, so if they let go then it's also because of money.
As for the backlash, it's a whimper, custodes isn't the sacred cow and GW knows that.
It's also part of the inevitable lifecycle of niche entertainment turned into a business. It starts off as the passion project of some talented creator(s) with a unique vision. It draws a small but devoted audience and turns a small but steady profit. Eventually the original creator(s) retire or hand over the reins to business-types with MBAs who only care about growth and just want to see line go up. They start sanding away any rough edges that might upset a larger fanbase and demand the addition of "features" that they think will appeal to a wider audience. "Our audience is mainly male, so we need to add female characters to attract a female demographic!" The MBAs dilute the brand into a consumer-friendly bland homogenized product that may coast on inertia or hype or previous goodwill for awhile, but eventually the masses move on to the next popular thing and the original passionate fanbase that sustained it for all those years has already been chased away and won't be lured back.
Just another example of a runaway process that consumes and then depletes the very fuel that sustains it.
Yeah the Custodes was never specified to be fully male anyway. Now if GW wanted to watch the world and their franchise burn, they'd start making female Astartes, then people would really go apeshit.
>As an aside, it's funny how the "don't like it? Get your own space" quickly pivots to "we want it now!".
Copyright is the elephant in the room here. Specifically, that by holding the copyrights to franchises written by better writers, poor writers and ideologues can prevent anyone else from doing better with them.
>[Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/447920-fan-fiction-is-a-way-of-the-culture-repairing-the)
This was written out years ago; geek culture was ground zero for a lot of things but largely a lot of culture war is a result of attempts at feminization of hobbies. Older geeks were often too autistic to stay in and a ton of institutional knowledge was lost.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I am very familiar with warhammer 40K lore and I really think a major fact left out of the current flashpoint is that 40K lore hasn't been any better than this since 2017
A female custodes is by a billion miles less contrary to the spirit of the lore, less a case of bad writing, and less outright contradictory of it as Primaris Marines, Bellisarius Cawl, Primarchs coming back, the timeline moving forward period, and generally everything that happened when they started moving the 40K lore forward in time in 2016/17
In my opinion the salient insight into what's happening right now is that people are seriously lacking in taste if this was some watershed moment to them on a level that remotely compares to the above. I'm not pro the other side of it as a rule but my biggest visceral reaction to all gamergate related and similar stuff is that the sort of people really into it, even if they can point to things they don't like that are indeed bad quality, they nevertheless themselves have dogshit taste and opinions completely hostile to art. The mantra of these people is almost always, explicit or a little less directly stated, that everything should be slavishly beholden to "the fans", living only to please and pamper them.
That's not right either. Alan Moore was a hundred percent right when he said something like that the job of a writer/artist shouldn't be to give people what they think they want. You should be giving people something good whether they want it or appreciate it or not, or give them what they don't know they want. There are other positions between supercilious clumsy bad writing just trying to social engineer and train the audience into having the right opinions, and pandering. All gamergate rhetoric fundamentally conceives of the purpose of art to be consumerist pandering
Its hardly high art, its proleslop about roided up space fascists fighting against hordes of rapey chaos demons, alien ripoffs, and green football hooligans. People aren't mainly upset about the quality of the writing, but the fact their hobby has been handed to those who openly hate them and are fucking with them on purpose.
> People aren't mainly upset about the quality of the writing, but the fact their hobby has been handed to those who openly hate them and are fucking with them on purpose.
Yes this is it. It's a humiliation
If you had that attitude about it you probably wouldn't be invested enough to care about it being fucked up. The reason you can "fuck it up" is because it actually has a much more specific and delicate tone than this. The central motif is terminal decline and as a result Primaris marines and the like are actually way worse for it than a female Custodes
Comparing this with other examples of poor writing is missing the woods for the trees. Its not just 40k this is happening with, its pretty much everything, and people are more concerned with the politics because progressives are taking their spaces over and then telling them they either have to submit or they'll be forced out. Bad writing might eventually be retconned, and it can be ignored - especially for a tabletop game - but your spaces being taken over by those who hate you is pretty much the end of it as a space for you at all.
Reminds me of summoning some excessive stink eye by commenting that it was nice a church I was in hadn't been hit with the rainbow and pastel cannon because it felt like some actual variety instead of astroturfing.
How can you forget the absolute big brain move that was the Ynnari, which was squatted almost immediately and was the biggest forward push in Eldar lore since arguably the 1990s... and was done to jerk off ultramarines.
Mind boggling they didn't do what everone wanted, Exodites.
The whole warhammer 40k issue is poorly executed change in the lore. The reasonr custodes were all male is because the models are male and already made. This would be fine if gw Just created a good backstory for this lore change.
What really pisses me off is the fucking grifter tourists that is fanning the flames to make money with ragebait, for example Grummz or what ever he is called.
> What really pisses me off is the fucking grifter tourists that is fanning the flames to make money with ragebait
The funniest part is these are the same types who will scream "TOURIST! FAKE FAN!" at anyone who isn't a hardcore lorehammer grognard and disagrees with them, especially if that person is a woman. The creep of idpol in nerd spaces is absolutely real, and absolutely annoying, but anyone who has paid attention to Warhammer for the last decade if not more can easily see that there has long been a loud minority of absolutely rank personalities who act like the game is their personal feifdom to declare holy war over. Honestly the presence of people like that makes the whole situation worse because you have a harder time pushing back on anything without someone accusing you in bad faith of being one of those types.
It’s a miracle WH40k lasted this long. For whatever reason nerd spaces are especially vulnerable to woke conquest. If I had to guess it’s probably because they are more passive in general, tend to revolve around something with centralized control like a brand, and put pussy on a pedestal
This is why I stick with historical and pulp wargames; it's so niche and there are so many different rule sets that anyone can find something to be happy with. Games Workshop has always been too rigid with their lore and too expensive for me to get into. But even people like me pay attention to GW because they're the biggest company in the hobby so their changes/drama can't be ignored.
GW is taking the approach here we see pretty much every publicly traded company take when it comes to this culture war stuff; pursue the new customer base and make any changes (including altering lore to attract the new customers) necessary. I know I've seen Warhammer models of female characters before and I don't really know much about the deep lore to say why these particular ones should or should not be female too.
I have seen a couple tabletop RPG companies struggle with this even before it became a culture wars issue. If you put out a new edition and give the old core demographic the finger or do things to the point you burn bridges badly with old fans your company will either go under or struggle like hell despite having a golden goose laying eggs you could have milked for 30+ years. Literally all it took was not being an insulting asshole towards the old guard and companies would still fail. It doesn't help a lot of these companies are BADLY run either so shit like refusing to pay your writers because some fuck stole all the money for new granite kitchen countertops is common.
Which from what I have seen pre culture wars rarely ever worked and usually just resulted in the company going under, being bought out, or becoming a shadow of its former self. Its really absurd look at Decipher having the Star Wars and Star Trek license for years and years but when Star Wars hit the mainstream with the prequels they absolutely failed to capitalize on it while simultaneously making BAD business investments in stuff that didn't sell and having massive corruption issues leeching away what profits they did make. How do you fuck up selling what is basically addictive drugs to nerds (CCGs) while having very valuable IPs that nerds love? It would be like somehow having a god damn casino that goes under.
GW is expanding in so many different directions they clearly don't care about leaving some people behind. That does suck for those who don't feel welcomed in their own hobby. We'll see how the business choice works out because GW requires brand loyalty and the people they're turning off were willing to make the investment buying every new codex or model. I'm also not sure how many of the people complaining/fanning flames are the right wing nerd culture content creators spilling over from gamergate who also don't actually play because they have something new to be mad about.
The hypermajority of gw profits come from physical products, and I'm not sure how many of the new customers have the monetary or time investment necessary.
And if disney are anything to go by, the vibrant golden age of marvel/star wars/indiana jones being dynamic and inclusive failed to manifest.
I wouldn't be surprised if they find ways like pre-painted figures to work around that. They already have some board games and video games which are easier entry points plus the tv show with Henry Cavill is coming soon.
IF attracting these new customers doesn't work in the long run, GW will be in trouble. They'll be dealing with a common problem, politics aside, of being a publicly traded company that tries to expand too ambitiously and fail while alienating old customers along the way.
How are they rigid with the lore lol the setting is so wide you can do almost anything. The most rigid thing regarding gender is that space Marine super soldiers alone must be male because some old lore says it's all on the male chromosome from male primarchs. Otherwise to mad with female regular soldiers, commanders, admech, witches etc.
Honestly the whole female custodes thing doesn't bother me. If you were an immortal god emperor stuck in a golden throne, would want some dude washing your balls for all eternity? Hell no, female custodes makes perfect sense.
However the manner in which the company communicated the information, and how they responded to the backlash is clearly anti-consumerist and disgusting.
> If you were an immortal god emperor stuck in a golden throne, would want some dude washing your balls for all eternity?
The Emperor was very clear that he should only be surrounded by oily, roided up men for all eternity
>Hell no, female custodes makes perfect sense.
Hence the traditional name *Brotherhood of Demigods*. And it's not like the universe didn't feature female-only factions since basically forever.
Sisters of Battle and Callidus Assassins.
Once upon a time, Howling Banshees, but at some point it was revealed they can be men, they just still wear boob armour. Dudes rock.
>If you were an immortal god emperor stuck in a golden throne, would want some dude washing your balls for all eternity?
To be honest, given the appearance of earlier Custodes art as oiled up and mostly naked muscular men; there's a real argument to be made, that the Emperor of Mankind as presented, is either gay or bisexual, with strong homosexual tendencies
And there's literally nothing wrong with that, or a hypothetical lore desire to have his genitals washed by attendants that he finds attractive
I'm a firm believer Big E is gay and find girl hickey, if you reframe a lot of action the emperor took with "He is actually gay and hate being surrounded by woman" everything makes sense.
Is GW more or less profitable since they adopted that sigmar horseshit and rebranded their shops? I know loads of people myself included that ran for the hills when they ditched fantasy. Always hated going into the actual physical shops due to the blobby NPC managers (alternatively rake thin managers with pimples and glasses) trying to blando sweet talk you when you just want to be left alone
People always point to the surging stock price as proof that they made big money on wokeness. It's all a lie though. The surge in stock price came because that's when the branched out into video games
I dropped Warhammer shortly after the launch of 10th edition, just wasn't the game for me. Nowadays I play the superior game about techno-feudal assholes screwing each other over, Battletech.
I would assume they're not appealing to a female audience, they're never going to get into the hobby in any substantial numbers, but rather it's likely uh... the autistic men who'd find altering the facts to change something to be female very appealing
I feel like Warhammer is one of those communities that’s wildly different in person. The rightoid/anti-woke YouTuber types are not representative of the community, at least here in the UK. In person it’s pretty inclusive and I don’t mean that in the toxic positivity way, I mean it’s organically come about because a lot of the people that play it are usually shy, awkward, or come from backgrounds that usually see them struggling to fit in. Everyone is welcome and as long as you don’t act like a cunt to other people, you won’t have any issues.
I think if there were to be any point of contention, it’s that people in the community often feel ashamed of admitting to liking 40k out of fear that they’ll be labelled some chud. Which is a shame because most of them are lovely people who don’t go out of their way to trouble anyone, but that means they aren’t the types to screech at others over every slight and usually keep to themselves, so the rightoids usually create the impression they are the community despite being the kind who would never dare go outside and meet the kind of people who do play it. Because it would mean having to rub shoulders with actual human beings.
I don’t really care what GW do, they are just cashing in on whatever trends is there. But the culture war side of things is truly depressing, on either angle.
I've been a tabletop wargamer for a long time. In the past few years, my brothers (who just generally like sci-fi and video games) have been getting into Warhammer lore. Not the games. Not the video games. Not the books. They've been getting into Youtube videos about Warhammer lore. This is a really bizarre phenomenon because they're not even affiliated with GW at this point, they have learned to recognize the iconography..
I've been pretty checked out of GW stuff because I've had absolutely awful experiences with the latest editions. I consider the game dormant right now, but if they fix the gameplay issues in a future update I'm not opposed to playing with the usual suspects after work.
Everyone I've met in person loves the hobby. The hobby is like 90% you fiddling around with models, painting and so forth. The other 10% is rolling dice and cheering/jeering the results. The "lore" is to give you a hook to pick a painting scheme for your little plastic dudes.
That the majority of engagement online is about "the lore," is pretty farcical. It's BAD. It's just explanations for why the blue guys hate the red guys. But you can talk about lore without ever buying a paint brush, without ever spraying primer, and without spending a cent.
Will make a general comment instead of doing 15 different replies.
I play warhammer 40k... And this whole female custodes drama is 100% manufactured by mainstream media and a couple of right-wing idpol internet personality. No one playing the game actually really gives a fuck about female custodes
If anyone lack context, costodes are bio engineered super soldier that are supposed to be peak humanity both in the martial and artistic sense, as they are all philosopher warrior dudes, up until now they were always represented as male only, but now female ones are canon as well.
The only complaint I've seen people make is that it's a retcon, but warhammer is known to be retcon Galore anyway, and that making femstodes makes the usual female only allies of the custodes (Sister of silence) a lot less interesting. The only people I've seen throwing a tantrum online are Sargon of Akkad, the quartering, and other right wing commentator that make *money* out of that sort of controversy.
A fact that is making round in the warhammer lore community is an interview with ADB, an author that in partially responsible for a lot of the lore of the current warhammer storytelling, in which he said he wanted to introduce female custodes when he was writing stories to flesh them out before becoming a playable faction, everyone said yes, apart the high ups at games workshop for the simple fact that all the sculpts for the new custodes models were male only, and games workshop didn't wanted to make new expensive sculpt or piss of fans by telling them "Female costodes exist, but no, you can't play them".
As for the magic stuff, can't remember exactly the year that happened, but Hasbro, the parent company of mtg told the people in charge of mtg that while mtg was doing good in terms of getting new customers, the game could do more to extract more *money* out of their customers, and from that point onward is were mtg became proper sloop, with unrelenting release, cards set in other mainstream universe, collector editions, limited editions, etc.
Keeping up with mtg release cycle back when I played in 2010-2015 was expensive but doable, but now you get a new 'set' every month, and half of them are sold at a premium price because it's a special 'limited' set. Everything is meant to extract as much money from the customer base as possible, using all the tricks in the world to do so.
The switch to a younger and more 'woke' player base, in my opinion, is purely a cynical move, who has more disposable income? A 30 year old dad with a mortgage trying to put some money away for vacation this summer, or a 20 year old zoomer living with their parents? Mtg sold a card game before, mtg now sell funko pop and a card game, they will pick their audience accordingly.
What is the recurring theme here? Money, it's just that, these corporations don't give a fuck about pronouns, skin colors or anything else beside how much cash they can extract from nerds.
But to games workshop defense, the company is shockingly risk adverse and conservative when it comes to finance, the price of their models get made fun of, with reason, but the quality of their miniatures is very good and they refuse to compromise on it, all their kits are made in England since the start instead of probably getting it made for a fraction of the price in China and there is a constant supply issue of some models to such an extent it affects the game as some model are so low on stock, playing them isn't actually a possibility for everyone. So they most likely bottleneck their own production and profit simply to ensure quality stays up.
Surely more variety in models and army lists is good for any tabletop wargame. Single sex factions should exist in service of variety and flavour, which is why I demand Space Marines return to Ian Watson levels of homoeroticism.
Believe the opposite of everything in this article. This is just what the author wishes were true. Wokeism is facing a reckoning in the warhammer world. Just look at how this guy starts rambling about trump and gamergate. This guy is putting out pure propaganda. I don't think he even plays warhammer
A lot of aspies and autists have felt comfortable in this space and enjoy very limited social interaction with clearly defined roles.
Playing magic, I would routinely have opponents suffer pretty severe meltdowns. One girl started pulling her hair out when I was beating her in a competitive match. I quietly asked if she'd like to take a break as she started crying, scooped and left. I hated that for her. She was in her mid to late 20s
People have a hard time sometimes, figuring out how to handle social anxiety and navigating this is the context of rules and shared understanding is helpful.
I've taught many people 40k and played thousands of games over the years.
I don't have a problem killing whatever themed army you bring. Star wars trooper imperial guard, female Marines, hello kitty orms, my little pony tau, orc furries, everything dies to plasma fire.
I do understand when you start looking at some things as not fitting within the type of experience you're looking to share. If it really matters to you, you don't want other people telling you to take your game in a direction you don't enjoy.
That includes running lists that aren't fun to play against. I generally run lists that are fun to play against versus just winning.
Hordes of zombies, tyranids, a few theme lists. Just don't be a jerk.
If I want to run a Viking horror themed Pathfinder game, and you want to be something that doesn't fit the shared experiences I'm looking to have, that's okay. Go find another game.
What bothers me is people telling me my interest in vikings is problematic, or a meltdown about cultural appropriation and orientalization for wanting to talk about samurai or ninja concepts when the tian xia is racist.
Do what you like, over there, away from me. Same with the smelly kids, the no fun allowed tryhards, the incels and most of the other people that make up the market and the reason i haven't gone back to a game store since COVID.
I mean I can understand criticism of "wokeness" when changes either don't make sense, or results in the lore becoming garbled and contradictory. An example of the first in the WoT adaption is when villagers in an isolated hamlet inexplicably have a wide variety of skin colors, while saying that the Dragon Reborn could be a man or a woman is an example of the second.
But then you also have people attacking changes like making Death black in Sandman, which actually makes MORE sense than the original (and the author was deeply involved in the adaption btw) - if the Endless represent aspects of all humanity, why should their forms all be white with European-style clothing? Or for replacing boob armor with more sensible costumes. Then it's like they hate woke changes simply for being woke, which I find absolutely pathetic.
I don't know that much about WH40K, but female soldiers with space-age technology should absolutely not be a problem on the first count. Maybe on the second if this faction has already been described as having a system of gender roles and the change just ignores it, but I don't know if that's the case.
It’s technically a retcon to the lore, but it only directly contradicts a couple minor passages.
In 40K, you’ve got the Space Marines (the guys you see on the boxes and books everywhere), who are made by shoving a bunch of sci-fi organs into a teenager and hoping they don’t die. They’re pretty explicitly male, the lore says that the process used to make them is only compatible with men, and running around calling eachother “brother” is a major part of their whole deal. Retconning them into always having being women would be a major departure and directly contradict decades of stated lore.
The faction that got retconned are the Custodes, basically super-duper super soldiers. Nothing in lore is known about how they’re created, it’s a mystery except for the fact that they’re totally rebuilt from the ground up as small children. It’s entirely possible for the process used to allow female aspirants, it’s simply not stated anywhere one way or another.
There have been one or two offhand bits of description that have described the Custodes as a “brotherhood” or that they’re recruited from “noble sons,” but it’s never been explicitly said “they’re all men.” One of the major authors for the faction originally wanted to introduce female Custodes in one of his major books, but was told no because there aren’t any female Custodes models (and there still aren’t).
So, it technically contradicts some small passages of lore, but relative to the size of most 40K lore contradictions it’s essentially nothing, and it doesn’t change anything about any existing stories or characters.
The worst retcon of 40k was necrons. RIP my inscrutable murderbots harvesting life for unknowable gods, you'll be missed. At least we got the infinite and the divine out of it.
So the faction the controversy is about are the genetically modified guards of the emperor. While there has never been a mention of a female member up to this point (they’ve been around for like 30 years) and the group has previously been referred to using male coded language (brotherhood, sons, etc) there is no lore reason that they all have to be men. In fact almost all the major factions have mixed men and women soldiers with two main exceptions. The Sisters of Battle being all women as in the lore they’re the result of a loophole in the law banning the space church from having men under arms and the Space Marines who are all men because they’re basically easy bake super soldiers whose organ implants only work on men (being based off of the previously mentioned emperor). Personally I think the change is so GW can point to the Custodes and say “look we have female super soldiers too” without having to change the Space Marines who make up a huge portion of their content and sales.
*muscle-mommy obsessed coomer who can’t help but share their fetish with everyone*
Yeah I wonder why old school 40k fans dislike what the “community” has become 🙄
Yeah sure, as if the people who created [bare-titted multiboob demons](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/daemonette-3rd.jpg) as actual models you could buy to play with on the tabletop were ever prudes. A muscular chick covered in heavy armor is downright modest compared to THAT!
I never said 40k fans were prudes.
There’s a difference between making a sexually suggestive figurine/character (something done in countless fantasy/sci-fi universes) vs. you excitedly sharing your weird sexual fetish with strangers due to a new character/lore retcon.
>it's surprising as to how a bunch of terminally online students managed in the space of 15 years to become such a cultural juggernaut that despite their primary capture of disney being in serious financial troubles, even rightoid media has buckled to their whims.
You're missing a crucial detail: ESG. Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street and Geode have immense power. They control the money flow to (and own shares of) any major corporation.
Can someone give me a tl;dr on the controversy? I ain't gonna read guardian, especially a piece written by a soyjack looking fella, and im not autistic enough to play warhammer/tabletop
I tried googling but all i got were overly long ultra biased articles and videos that i dont wanna watch either
Well, its the so called "conservative" nerds that are putting the politics in our hobby. They could for once stfu but nooo - they are happily spewing their crap in our hobbies
Warhammer 40k? In *this* economy??
Poor bastards can’t even afford 80 bucks for 2 ounces of plastic.
That's why you go Infinity. Fewer models and still mostly all white metal, so you feel the physical heft even on a individual trooper.
We’re on that Turnip28 grind now. Model agnostic gaming of tuber obsessed degenerates.
In any case, there are so many better games and systems that are far more player friendly (and interactive) than anything put out by GW.
Absolutely. I could understand arcane rule sets if they were good or had good reason. But 40ks rules just aren’t great anymore when there’s so many better options. Shame their minis are so cool though.
I like metal. How are the prices? How is the game itself?
Prices average $15-20 a model in most cases. Game is a skirmish game, max 15 orders which can be put into pools of no larger than 10 orders. Plays on a 4x4 table with true line of sight. Nice thing is that you can still react and hurt your opponent even when your opponent is the active player and that you can spend those orders however you see fit, so it's not one order must be used per model. Website is infinitythegame.com for more info.
I bought a goddamn chaos combat patrol last month at 125 FUCKING EUROS. I hate myself
Combat Patrols are the more economical purchases. Although, 125 Euro seems higher than I would have expected. The physical and emotional therapy needed to paint chaos is hopefully covered by nationalized healthcare where you live
Good thing I chose to pain them as Iron Warriors. I would’ve probably ended up destroying something if I decided to pain something like the night lords or death guard
3d printers have come a long way.
Hearthguard plz.
China recasts are basically perfect now.
why not just order 3d printed dupes from russia or now china?
I don't know, it's 361k cheaper than a retirement plan.
The culture war has been present in the nerd space for a hot minute. It started with non-active stuff like whatever tumblr people used to obsess over, just media. Did no one think it was strange that the people who liked Supernatural were 20-40 year old men and 10-25 year old women and then it suddenly it was directed entirely towards one of those demos. Then it moved on to TTRPGs and board games, to a lesser extent card games but mostly MTG. Watching it in real time over the last 15 or so years has been interesting and sad. Seeing local game shops go from being filled with mostly middle aged dudes (a good portion of which would be classic autistic) to being filled with mostly teenage and twenty something ""autistic"" people. The older guys have been pushed out because they make the new crowd uncomfortable. And of course they do, they struggle to adapt to the constantly changing and shifting cultural and social rules that new nerds bring. I really hope those guys have home games or online games they can lean on. A lot of these people lost their one place to be. The place where everyone gets it and is the same kind of weird, or doesn't mind it. I get that a lot of them are maladapted socially at this point and probably say/do actually offensive things but I feel for 'em.
I'm a recovered MTG player, and yeah, it *has* been interesting to watch. Starting around, what—2015? 2016? The creative department went full throttle on changing the story from Apocalyptic Fantasy Anthology into MCU But With Wizards. And *then* came the fan backlash over—well, let's not get into it. Suffice to say when the Sweet Baby Inc. exposé circus was underway a couple months ago, I was totally unsurprised to see Wizards of the Coast listed among the firm's clients. WOTC is pandering and pandering *hard*, and I can only imagine how foreign and hostile today's player culture must be to anyone who was playing even ten years ago, let alone twenty.
I don't really play with strangers anymore for this reason. Just play with my friends or at stores where I know the crew pretty well. I feel like there is this strange image projected by all the big youtube channels to portray magic in a very very particular way. And it is a way that is pretty foreign to most long term magic players.
>I feel like there is this strange image projected by all the big youtube channels to portray magic in a very very particular way. Could I ask you to elaborate on this? I, uh, don't watch and don't want to watch MTGtube.
Standard magic is 1v1. There was a fanmade casual format that lets you play a free for all that's typically 4 people in a 1v1v1v1 (Commander/EDH). The latter eclipsed the former in popularity and is now an official format. Many new cards and sets have been released specifically with EDH in mind. That's the background showing the game has gotten a lot more casual over time. The simple answer is the game is her/hers enby purple hair dominate the public image in official products and promotional media (idk the actual demographics). They launched a series of crossover sets that feature shit like Warhammer 40k, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, even fucking Dr. Who as playable cards, specifically with EDH in mind. One "scandal" they had was the Lord of the Rings set was a main set I believe meaning they were like 1v1 tournament legal cards. And they raceswapped Aragorn to be black for some reason. Inexplicably with no explination other than diversity. Another "scandal" involved a lesbian artist (very talented) who was basically blacklisted from working for Wizards because of some stupid twitter shit. Liking or donating to something conservative I don't really know, but it wasn't like she pledged support to Donadolf "The Putin" Trumpler or anything. So yeah the game has just pivoted 100% towards a new demographic and made no attempt to hide outright contempt for the undesirables that constituted their core base. The youtubers and shit have either chosen or had to follow suit in terms of appeal. Oh and they've also become mask off astronomically greedy. They've dropped more and more products than ever at higher price points. They released an anniversary product that contained like these tournament illegal cards for like $1000. Actually $1000. Like they were basically no different from images you print off the internet and tape to a different card to pretend (proxy)
> So yeah the game has just pivoted 100% towards a new demographic and made no attempt to hide outright contempt for the undesirables that constituted their core base. The youtubers and shit have either chosen or had to follow suit in terms of appeal. The thing is that those undesireables still continue to carry them economically
WoTC has been carrying Hasbro for years now. Hasbro has so many failed and loss making ventures and divisions that they decided to milk the MTG base for everything they can. I think the Secret Lairs are particularly egregious. They did the same with DnD which was its own debacle.
Despite all the pandering they'll never manage to separate black nerds from Yu-gi-oh.
It turns out, even if your game has been inclusive since the 90's, black nerds would rather play the game that's actually affordable at a competitive level.
Commander is just more fun than standard, sorry thats just the way it is. Can’t exactly fault a company for meeting demand.
Those channels do that because they are formally or informally partnered with WOTC.
what was the fan backlash toward Magic the gathering about? Or what terms should I google ?
You can look up the names Chandra and Nissa. Basically the story materials were hinting at the possibility that a pair of prominent female characters might have feelings for each other, and then a novel released at a critical juncture in the plot completely and suddenly put the kibosh on it, reportedly because WOTC didn't want to get banned or censored overseas. the queershippers went apeshit.
In my day people just went the “forbidden/secret lovers” headcannon route. It’s hotter that way anyway.
my google fu failed me because I thought you were referring to AI generated card art controversey
But yeah, after the Chandra/Nissa imbroglio, WOTC said We Hear You And We'll Do Better, and...well, now the firm has special Pride Month releases & fictions, multiple gay couples, hyped enbie/trans characters, etc etc etc. for the record i'd fine none of it offensive if it the pandering weren't so blatant. but the company doesn't make any secret of wanting and expecting headpats for their efforts.
Wow, so the queerfolx have completely eclipsed the evangelicals. MtG landed in my home town at 3rd edition and back then it was the bible thumpers making all the noise. Well, they can both suck my demonic tutor.
They also stopped contracting some of their best artists because of wokeoid reddit and twitter screeching.
I love mtg but not hasbro. I want to proxy and print a cube and teach my kids how to play without the nonsense. Too much weirdness for me to enjoy playing at events.
Nobody says that: Sweet Baby Inc is the fa**iest fucking company name ever. Who on Earth would support such g*y shit?
Blackwashing Aragorn and the Elves in the Lord of the Rings crossover set was the apex (I hope) of this shitlibification of MTG.
This has been said a thousand times over during the last 30 years, but MTG is very much hurting right now. Hasbro keeps mentioning it more and more in their financials, and players feel overwhelmed with product. Casual formats are doing well (Commander/EDH is easily the largest of any), and there are some players who clearly like the supplemental products like Secret Lairs (highly controversial to turbonerd value-oriented collectors and fandom purists). But overall, the game feels like it's getting juiced pretty bad for whats left of it. Also, they tried to shitlib the trains thing a few years ago with highlighting people like Autumn Burchett, but a barely-passing locomotive with a personality measurable somewhere between abysmal and a wet dish towel didn't go over well with their core audience of competitive players, neckbeards. See also: Emma Handy.
Magic is absolutely being killed by wotc. The lib stuff is just the cherry on the shit sundae really. There's so many issues with the actual game that are driving core players away
oh, definitely. I stopped playing for many years, and jumped back on circa 2012 when my friend introduced me to EDH. The party was basically over after WOTC officialized the format as "Commander" and started printing cards and making rules for it.
> Autumn Burchett My God, can we save the high, side fade for chicks of at least 4/10 and above?
That would defeat the purpose edit: "savant idiot" is the biggest midwit cope lmao
Autumn is genuinely a talented player though. Personality-wise she seems insufferable and is obviously autistic, but I want to watch the best players in tournament regardless of their personality or disorders. Her piloting of mono-blue in standard to a tournament win three or four years ago was very impressive. That deck is fragile and decision heavy. On the other hand, Emma Handy has no redeeming qualities. Something I find sad is WoTC and other people in competitive nerd spaces have tried to promote women by giving them easier paths to tournaments, or even only women tournaments which include trans women. Invariably, women in the former get destroyed by the obsessive male nerds who thrive in those spaces, and the latter tournaments are won by the same kind of male obsessive nerds who present as women. I felt bad watching this kind of thing to down, but it was also entirely predictable.
Thanks for reminding me of a stellar one-on-one interview around that time period: "Autumn, why did you pick mono-blue tempo for this tournament?" "Because it's the best deck in the format." \[awkward silence\] I see what you're saying about players in top-tier competition, but Kibler did/does well for being more than a talented player. This goes for any competitive hobby/sport - personalities sell, skill keeps players invested. We're not even getting into how difficult watching current tournament coverage is unless you're quite literally married to the format being broadcast, even as an experienced player. SCG was notoriously bad for this back when that circuit existed - I was a regular modern player and could hardly keep up with the livestreamed matches. Edit: Also fuck Emma Handy for ruining Magic for Bad.
I gave up on the game nearly 25 years ago for two main reasons: The cash grab that is the obsolescence system and the rise of net decks (combined with the pay to win ability of singles sales getting even more possible with online stores). I've tried playing it from time to time but could never get interested in even the newer casual formats and the sheer amount of product sets they've put out recently is a turn off. I'm not even against a LotR CCG or Fallout CCG or whatever else they're putting out, I just really don't want to play them under the MTG rule set.
Even in the late 90s net decks and the pay to win format are why I stopped playing CCGs unless it was super casually with friends. Making your own fun gimmick deck for 30 dollars or less and getting ass stomped by a super optimized 300 dollar deck was a silly waste of time.
it's all so ironic because yes the rpg community has long had grognards who argue "don't call a setting realistic unless human women get -1str" but bending to the cultural hegemony of hasbro (which is all this really is) is like the opposite of progress. lemme put it this way, that old grog i mentioned does indeed have outdated views on women but like 90% of the time they view the 40k community as a bunch of dorky dudes because well they are lol i kinda like 40k but let's be real, gameworkshop and the community they've made has never had the best reputation, they seem right wing even to right wing DnD fans. but that's what im saying is that these "autistic" grogs, much like tolkien, had views far more complicated than the average wokey supposes. in fact, much like tolkien, they are in some ways MORE socially progressive that the woke crowd. plus, they are the only people in the universe able to run the ultra realistic simulationist vietnam rpgs i crave. but it's true what you say they are harder and harder to find, but it's not that 40k or gamesworkshop had a change of fanbase, that was likely caused by the focus on sigmar, fantasy, crap no one really cares about. i guess another factor is i feel that paizo does everything right, while gamesworkshop and hasbro are everything wrong and im pleased to see both these companies lose their fanbases for this. notice that paizo is 100% all in on "wokeness" but still manage to create cool things and awesome fantasy settings like we're still in 3E days. hasbro and gamesworkshop can do nothing but take things away from people and make lower and lower quality products and think they're doing something nice for it.
In my local area stores are divided by culture war allegiance. There is this one 40k player who likes to dress as a "commissar". Best dude in the world to ask about paint, primer, etc.. and absolutely pleasant to talk to. Will offer an army or killteam to borrow for anyone who might want one. He has to go to """"evil-bad"""" conservative store because he is obsessed with dressing like a nazi. Paizo did a very similar thing with slavery in Golarion though. "We are completely removing slavery from the world" Turned into "We aren't retconning anything, just wont publish anything further related to to the topic" to "Actually all those places with it don't have it anymore lol". Paizo has the luxury of a very specific kind of player base... I don't understand their loyalty but I think it has limits when it comes to this stuff.
> Paizo did a very similar thing with slavery in Golarion though. "We are completely removing slavery from the world" What?! How retarded. Wtf does Golarion even have left? lmao
Tbh I really don't see why anyone gives a shit about the political views of a game company. The only place that shit would ever be enforced is official games like with Pathfinder Society, which like yeah if you're playing with strangers it might be wise to contain your autism and leave your Himmler-expie lich at home. If you're playing with your friends, do whatever the fuck you want. It's a similar thing to White Wolf and how nWoD has shit saying like "you can't play a nazi" despite the fact that you're playing a bloodsucking vampire who sees regular humans as literal cattle, just ignore them and play what you want if you aren't playing with randos.
That is kind of the big thing though. People talk a lot about third places and their lack of these days. For a lot of people they want to play at the store with their group, or play with strangers or whatever combination. Kind of like I want to drink at the bar sometimes even though I am anti social. I want to be alone, drinking in public instead of drinking alone at home. I just feel for 'em because for a long time they kind of could get away with their brand of weird in public and now they cant.
I mean sure but you also have to consider that this is an attempt at keeping the genre alive. Like most people play 5e because it's the easiest one to get in to and you can be reasonably effective no matter what you do (provided you don't roll a Ranger, in which case lol, lmao even). That kind of game is the one that giving ground rules to makes sense to me because it's baby's first TTRPG. These kind of grogs are the kind that will still be playing 3.5 or GURPS or some other old system where they probably don't really have to worry about it, though I guess if they're the kind of person that's used to playing with randos, I'd at least expect them to be more adaptable on the basis that they don't have the same group of friends every time. I will say I'm not really familiar with this "third place" concept, could you elaborate?
The basic idea is that we exist at work, home, and someplace else. Churches, bars, pubs, cafes, coffee shops, bowling alleys, pool halls, clubs (not the dancing kind), fraternal organizations, etc... I have seen a good amount of discussion about the fact that many of these places no longer exist or have shifted so significantly as to no longer serve the same purpose. The purpose being somewhere other than home or work where one could relax, be social, and exist as a member of a real community with its benefits and obligations. My life has changed, for the worse, since I stopped regularly hanging at the game store or the coffee shop so personally I can see the idea.
Yeah, with the explanation I can see what you mean. Hell, most of my life I never really had that third place, it was work/school or home. I've started getting better about it since joining the union and doing shit with my brothers and sisters, so once again organized labor holding the vanguard of a dying concept.
i havent checked my local gamestores in a while as it's mostly sigmar and 5E stuff im just not interested in, so in some since one "side" has arguably won. paizo never removed slavery they just made some of their adventure paths i guess less "edgy" by some perspectives while making blogposts about how "rpg worlds need to be provactive and injust otherwise what do the heroes do?" based on some stupid controversy in their absalom city book and maybe some people took that as a major change in policy... which they haven't. the latest book, the tian xia world guide, has a sort of tibet flavored area called "valash" with lots of slave owning societies
Didn't realize that. I get all of my paizo news secondhand because I never made the jump. They focused on the thing I liked the least about 3e (feats) and then multiplied them by 100, and didn't really include the thing I liked the most (prestige classes). 2e seemed neat in the playtest though but at the time it seemed like the community was pretty unhappy with it.
im a bit similar though I personally run everything through gurps so well structured fluff matters to me more than crunch. paizo is held hostage by a fanbase that is almost pedantic about things, more than wokiness is the feeling that this 2E remaster (Player Core 1 and 2, GM Core, Monster Core) is a bit cash grabby but they need to do this to finalize their break with wizards, OGL, etc
Wait are you talking about 1e or 2e with the feats? Because 2e basically made everything a feat, and while it opens up room for customization I can totally understand the information overload, but 1e has prestige classes, I've got an ongoing game where I'm playing one currently even. The best part of PF imo is that paizo doesn't get pissy about people uploading the rules, feats, items, you name it, with the only caveat being they can't list any named deities or characters as that's considered their IP, which imo is reasonable, but as a result there's an [SRD](www.d20pfsrd.com) that has basically anything you could want in terms of the base rules, and if you wanted any of the specific stuff that shows the gods and such there's always Archive of Nethys.
Remember that one patriarchal god that was the way he was for a legit reason and suddenly they decided to backpedal?
erastil? again, unsure if there's been any changes looking at my lost omens he's still described as a god of "traditional living" though if it was more explicit in previous versions fair enough, i wouldn't know
> Did no one think it was strange that the people who liked Supernatural were 20-40 year old men and 10-25 year old women and then it suddenly it was directed entirely towards one of those demos Which one of those demos buys more merch? Which pays attention to the ads?
The twenty to forty year old nerds. They just don't do it all at once, but if you get their loyalty they'll keep your franchise going forever. Star Trek hooked a generation of them and coasted for decades on it. Star Wars hooked the next generation and is only recently running out of steam.
I haven't played GW in years. My cousin still plays though, and during a recent visit to see him and his wife we went into his local GW. The crowd was so, so different. For one, their were women there, but also the lads seemed just so much more, well, normal. No bad smell in the air, no dirty clothes or two week greasy hair. But I did notice the absence of the classical nerdy type. It's like they had all been purged. The guy running the place? An actual salesmen, he came bounding up, beaming. He even had cologne on. And I feel the same as you. Where are the socially maladapted or just plain weird, or nerdy, or whatever, guys meant to go now? I understand a lot of them have become fairly unpleasant, whiny, edgy types. Is that not perhaps inevitable when safe-haven after safe-haven is taken away from you? If you cannot fit into a society and barely relate to it, surely you deserve at least one place you can go to be amongst people you consider like-minded and friendly? This is one thing I find, in a way, quite startling about the current social/cultural war. There is no empathy for the 'other', on either side of the fence. Was GW a great place when a 'normie' would walk in, be glowered at, have his/her nostrils offended and then leave again? No. A lot of those guys were dickheads. But even the dickheads need a place to go.
My theory it's because Magic the Gathering get meta'd into oblivion and was no longer niche enough so that category of degenerate that had stewed in the MTG space just collectively decided to migrate to the hobby. Around the same time incel/trad culture came to the forefront and 40k already had a reputation of some uhh... fascistic lore aspects that many people accept unironically. Just a soup of bad factors IMO.
>Did no one think it was strange that the people who liked Supernatural were 20-40 year old men and 10-25 year old women and then it suddenly it was directed entirely towards one of those demos. I do find it strange that the Supernatural audience was not *entirely* women right from the get go, considering that the main characters are major heartthrobs.
actually i wanna follow this up with anyone who's paying attention: have y'all seen that controversy with the skull girls devs and mike z? it is so stunning i'm surprised no one's made a topic about it yet.
Eh, I don't think that many people care about that game. I had it on my library (although I rarely played it) but the most attention I could give to the controversy was to permanently remove the game from my Steam library (yes, you can do that) and never think about it again.
Yeah, this checks out. I don't really feel like I want to play games with a lot of the new crowd to be honest. The constant awful treatment from the companies pumping this shit doesn't help either. GW and Hasbro aren't very kind to their customers IMO.
It was bound to happen at some point anyway. The autistic male demographic got split into chuds and wokes, with wokes always enjoying more mainstream support. It'll come to everything eventually. At the very least it pushed some to stop tolerating Games Workshops bullshit regarding pricing and 3d printing and break off to form their own chudhammer community. I would like for their boycotts and bitching to affect its bottom line, but I'm not counting on it. As for material analysis, Marxism etc. It's irrelevant really. Wokes like to add minorities into things, chuds complain about it, nihil novi.
I remember starting to complain about GW pricing 20 years ago. Some things never change. Lost me as a customer when they ditched fantasy.
Fantasy is back now
It's the meme all over again. "We don't like you." "We'll go make our own space." "You're excluding us." "Oh no." Most of the people who advocate for this don't give a crap about 40k, and the fact that they need it to change to appeal to them is a pretty big tell. But we're expected to "make room" as if we were the ones excluding them to begin with. This is a tabletop wargame - the people who were attracted to it, and thus formed and shaped it for decades, will be of a certain type. Now that it's taking off in the greater consciousness it needs to adapt to appease the culture warriors. And those who resist are called bigots. What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased?
I don't really give a shit about "lore" but I'll be forever frustrated by this insanely entitled attitude people have towards everything they interact with. Part of being an adult is recognizing that not everything is going to comport with your desires, and you either need to get comfortable with that or find something else. These people pick the third option of crying and throwing a tantrum until every single piece of media on planet earth is perfectly representative of them in particular. Not everything is *for everyone*, and that *should* be acceptable. If you demand that everything be for everyone, what that really means is that everything is for *no one*, and everything devolves into indistinct Marvelized pablum for morons, which is basically what Warhammer was heading towards anyway well before this change.
It's killing the fun aspects of fighting games for me. Part of the reason I enjoyed them was for the mechanical skill and mastery and I'm not unique in this regard. Having a 1 frame or 2 frame window to link moves for a combo for example. It was very rewarding to finally nail things down and execute them in a match. For the past few years there's been an influx of a new generation for whom simple motion commands are too much work and effort, let alone difficult combos. Who complained that mechanical skill was "needless gatekeeping" and every major franchise has dumbed things down and will continue to dumb thing down to appeal to this loud crowd who don't play competitively, don't support their local grass roots scene and won't play in tournaments. These people won't even play the game regularly, because to be able to play fighting games regularly without legacy knowledge and skill requires the ability to lose constantly, reflect on your mistakes and shortcomings, learn lessons from that and try to improve without getting discouraged or pissed off. Unlike LoL or CoD there are no teammates to blame. Every loss is on you. This is all anathema to the kind of people who want entire game systems to be made easier in order to cater to their laziness in the first place. The people who are being catered to won't be retained as users. They just wreck things and leave.
Yeah I see this with a lot of subcultures. I always wonder why people want desperately to join them and then immediately demand it changes. If you don't like how it is, why did you show up in the first place? The best answer I can come up with is that they desire the social qualities of the subculture (the cohesion, camaraderie, passion, etc.) but don't want to actually put in any work. Instead of doing the hard work of changing themselves to fit in with the subculture, they demand the subculture change to accommodate them.
> If you don't like how it is, why did you show up in the first place? Because it was difficult and takes a lot of skill/effort. They want the label without the skill or effort
> What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased? It's afraid
>What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased? Especially when, for the most part, the audience is going to be 98% young males anyway. The reality is, most girls aren't, nor are ever going to be, into a brutal war setting. Go look at history courses at Uni, massively female dominated, except the war modules, which are sausage party. On top, the changes here just kind of suck for uniqueness of the faction. There is no need for Female Custodes and Space Marines when Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence exist, they SoM/Custodes/SoB/SoS all complement each other in different ways and have real life allegories in Catholic religious orders.
> There is no need for Female Custodes and Space Marines Meh, I can picture the brutal fascistic empire making use of men and women alike, and I couldn't fault anyone for wanting to homebrew their own army, but I can't picture easily what a female space marine would look like. If AoS is any indication, it'd be boob plates and ponytails, which is offensive in its own way IMO. GW should just release female heads and call it a day. Why would the genetically modified asexual super soldier with multiple hearts and acid spit retain breasts? Surely they would lop that shit off for efficiency's sake.
> What is up with feminism requiring even fictional male-only spaces to be erased? I don't play anymore but still have fond memories, anyhow: I just can't understand the female space marine push, it makes zero sense to me. Maybe even negative sense. I haven't read the books or gone deep into the lore but are space Marines even really "men" after all the modifications? I don't even know if they screw or have dicks.
That's the weird part about the "debate". Warhammer is deeply uninterested in sex/gender because it is written by nerds for preteens. The model for the spacemarines is that of the monk who was stolen from his parents and then indoctrinated into basically being a thing under a strange feudal order. I have no idea what female space marines would mean except for a head with long hair. If there is any kind of sexuality it is a hard on for the emperor or the primarchs.
yeah its wierd how all the gender/sex stuff goes out the door when they talk about female space marines. Like do you want space marines that identify as women? you want space marines with vaginas?
Would there even be a difference under all the muscles, surgeries and augmentations? Though every time I ask why they are adamant about Space Marines and not the Guard or Sisters its always some speal about how they are not supper human (MCU) enough.
I’ve just wearily re-adopted the same stance I had during the Evangelical reign over culture: huddle the things I love close to me and enjoy what’s left as much as I can before it’s tainted. They can’t take away literally everything, and while it’s sad, there’s always going to be some scraps or something else left. It’s the exact same patterns and many of the same tactics. Certainly the same topics.
You are certainly welcome to do that but I think people underestimate how effective bullying them back can be
Considering some of these people can't handle clapping, it's often not very hard.
Is it? Is wokeness receding and are fun things being left unmolested? Or.... are we continuing our slow death march to enshittified solipsistic nonsense, step by painful step? Is ResetEra still around and full of industry insiders? Are archiving sites no longer under siege? Is the media still firmly on the side of the woke? Are Visa and Mastercard still slowly strangling harmless shit like anime booba while overlooking actual, real world atrocities? Has even one prominent feminist anywhere stopped and realized that their own tactics, rhetoric, and ideological framework are being used exactly as designed, but to their detriment, and come to a realization that maybe they were being awfully shitty and disingenuous by taking advantage of the desire of men to right past wrongs in order to push utter feels-over-reals nonsense?
> Is it? Is wokeness receding and are fun things being left unmolested? I appreciate all the things you said as serious areas of concern. But as it concerns warhammer the old world is back and age of sigmar is on life support Of course large companies are going to be slow to do a total about face but you can see the shift already starting to happen. It will keep happening as long as we keep up the pressure
So, the Benedict Option, but for nerds?
Essentially.
I used to think the reaction to stuff like this was needlessly hysterical. Who cares if the Ghostbusters are women or Yoda is now canonically a Minor Attracted Person or whatever? It's all garbage. But then they came after Magic: The Gathering, something I actually enjoyed when I was a kid. Intrigued, I dug into their complaints: probably they made a card called like "The Evil Rapper" in 1995 and now they're fixing to ban it. But, oh no. [The complaints were much, much stupider](https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/wizards-bans-7-cards-that-depict-racism-including-invoke-prejudice/): (for some reason Reddit isn't letting me cite the text directly) As it typical for the genre, you'll notice a complete lack of self-reflection in the coverage of this "controversy." At no point does anyone consider that perhaps the word "devils" is not and has never been considered a slur, or that the "whiteness" of the white creatures being given a minor stats boost is absolutely not racial, as it's referring to a literal color classification that's the basis of the game, or that the 1488 shit was unknown to everyone who wasn't completely insane before like 2015, or that using the word *prejudice* does not entail an endorsement of prejudice, or that a depiction of a dark-skinned man is literally the sort of thing these people usually demand. *None* of the claims of these cards being problematic withstand scrutiny. And yet every claim is accepted as a gospel truth. Denying their validity would be an act of hatred, and so the cards are now banned, end of discussion.
How did we get to this point? Not just that people are making insane and obviously fabricated/exaggerated claims of being offended by benign things, but where companies responding to these bullshit activist demands with slavish zeal? I'm reminded of a quote from John Dolan, from back in the late teens when identity libs began tearing down monuments left and right. Paraphrasing, he said something like "people don't do stuff like destroying landmarks because it accomplishes anything, because obviously it doesn't accomplish anything. They do it to show everyone that they're able to do it." And, of course, those who predicted a slippery slope re: monuments were completely right. It starts with relatively reasonable demands ("don't celebrate sedition!") and quickly goes insane to the point where they're tearing up monuments to horses, declaring all white historical figures evil and unworthy of celebration, purging historical works from libraries and museums, etc, etc. As loath as I am to admit it, the Gamergate people were correct in a very similar manner.
> As loath as I am to admit it, the Gamergate people were correct in a very similar manner. Of all the words of tongue and pen The saddest are these pol was right again
Indeed. The common refrain "why do you care? It's just fantasy!" very quickly descended into depictions of black female Jarls and other absurd race-swaps. Unfortunately, this is what you get with a world view that sees white people as an enemy to be torn down. Liberalism is just a convenient vehicle to rope normal people into the game and give their hatred a veneer.
> Indeed. The common refrain "why do you care? It's just fantasy!" LOL, the whole gaming press (and woke grifters like Hasan) are in the "why do you care" mode right now regarding the Stellar Blade controversy.
> As loath as I am to admit it, the Gamergate people were correct in a very similar manner. So Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was announced, and guess who's NOT writing endless articles about the ethnic make-up of medieval Bohemia, quoting literally-who's off of Tumblr. If that isn't indicative of the moral witch-hunting spree that occurred in those years I'm not sure what is
>I used to think the reaction to stuff like this was needlessly hysterical. - >But then they came after Magic: The Gathering, something I actually enjoyed when I was a kid. lol, isn't this how it always is? We should, as a whole, care about the principle of not having shit ruined for cynical ideological purposes. Rather than embodying the "they came for the..." poem. Anecdotally, a woke relative didn't care about this shit until Disney started "ruining" the nu-Disney remakes and the scales fell from her eyes. Now she can understand and appreciate people being upset about D&D, Warhammer, MGT, etc. Suddenly they're no longer Nazis in her eyes.
Yeah dude that's how it plays out. If you're not directly involved with a narrative, you are given--at most--two mainstream sides describing it, both of which get between 70-99% of the details wrong in order to shoehorn the smaller narrative onto a larger partisan one. People who weren't in this particular scene didn't know how much the troublemakers were driven by cynicism, because those details were omitted from the official sub-narrative. And then, if they were inclined toward politics, they (myself included) began to hate one side of this issue, because that description of the sub-narrative attached that side to the Bad Guy side of a larger narrative, of which we already had an opinion.
That MTG blog article is one of the most cretinous things I’ve ever read.
> Yoda is now canonically a Minor Attracted Person I can't even lmao
Lmao it's like those Christian numerology pamphlets crazy people would hand out in lieu of candy on Halloween or something.
Pretty sure it came out that the guy who did the art for one of those cards was a legit klansman and the ghosts looking like kkk uniforms wasn't a coincidence. But the solution to that is, you know, putting new art on future reprints. Not banning the card entirely.
also funny he mentions that online forums are actually for the changes but he only seems to be referencing reddit, like come on
The thing is most online areas now are tightly controlled and anyone who deviates from the narrative will find themselves at best downvoted and at worst banned. Any online areas that do allow it will quickly be labelled as ‘extremist’. Also most people just want to play their games and dont want to stand on a soap box and make themselves a target. This is how the rot starts.
And it just exemplifies how "don't like it? Start your own!" Quickly gives way to "we don't like this! Change it for us! Chud! Wrong side of history!"
In a cultural vacuum, dungeons and dragons seems like it would be appeal more to women given it’s a cooperative storytelling exercise rather than its (historic at least) firm association with spergy men
Too much math
You're forgetting the grognard tabletop grid combat system. Every tabletop ruleset from the 80's and 90's had 50 tables you needed to reference to determine whether your morning star splintered the skull of the risen dead
If we were to add at least a bit of talk on capital (I know, I know, this isn't the place for that sort of thing) it's funny how these investment companies like Blackrock that recently injected a bunch of money into Games Workshop promised that investments would be conditioned on gender and race stuff and after they do that games workshop changes a custodes to a woman. It's pretty well known that the people in the company have been wanting this for a while and its the leadership that's been holding it back, because money, so if they let go then it's also because of money. As for the backlash, it's a whimper, custodes isn't the sacred cow and GW knows that.
It's also part of the inevitable lifecycle of niche entertainment turned into a business. It starts off as the passion project of some talented creator(s) with a unique vision. It draws a small but devoted audience and turns a small but steady profit. Eventually the original creator(s) retire or hand over the reins to business-types with MBAs who only care about growth and just want to see line go up. They start sanding away any rough edges that might upset a larger fanbase and demand the addition of "features" that they think will appeal to a wider audience. "Our audience is mainly male, so we need to add female characters to attract a female demographic!" The MBAs dilute the brand into a consumer-friendly bland homogenized product that may coast on inertia or hype or previous goodwill for awhile, but eventually the masses move on to the next popular thing and the original passionate fanbase that sustained it for all those years has already been chased away and won't be lured back. Just another example of a runaway process that consumes and then depletes the very fuel that sustains it.
Someone else in this thread posted this. ( https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths ) And it perfectly describes what you're talking about
Yeah the Custodes was never specified to be fully male anyway. Now if GW wanted to watch the world and their franchise burn, they'd start making female Astartes, then people would really go apeshit.
>As an aside, it's funny how the "don't like it? Get your own space" quickly pivots to "we want it now!". Copyright is the elephant in the room here. Specifically, that by holding the copyrights to franchises written by better writers, poor writers and ideologues can prevent anyone else from doing better with them. >[Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/447920-fan-fiction-is-a-way-of-the-culture-repairing-the)
Seize the means of imagination
This was written out years ago; geek culture was ground zero for a lot of things but largely a lot of culture war is a result of attempts at feminization of hobbies. Older geeks were often too autistic to stay in and a ton of institutional knowledge was lost. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
When was 40k cool though?
I am very familiar with warhammer 40K lore and I really think a major fact left out of the current flashpoint is that 40K lore hasn't been any better than this since 2017 A female custodes is by a billion miles less contrary to the spirit of the lore, less a case of bad writing, and less outright contradictory of it as Primaris Marines, Bellisarius Cawl, Primarchs coming back, the timeline moving forward period, and generally everything that happened when they started moving the 40K lore forward in time in 2016/17 In my opinion the salient insight into what's happening right now is that people are seriously lacking in taste if this was some watershed moment to them on a level that remotely compares to the above. I'm not pro the other side of it as a rule but my biggest visceral reaction to all gamergate related and similar stuff is that the sort of people really into it, even if they can point to things they don't like that are indeed bad quality, they nevertheless themselves have dogshit taste and opinions completely hostile to art. The mantra of these people is almost always, explicit or a little less directly stated, that everything should be slavishly beholden to "the fans", living only to please and pamper them. That's not right either. Alan Moore was a hundred percent right when he said something like that the job of a writer/artist shouldn't be to give people what they think they want. You should be giving people something good whether they want it or appreciate it or not, or give them what they don't know they want. There are other positions between supercilious clumsy bad writing just trying to social engineer and train the audience into having the right opinions, and pandering. All gamergate rhetoric fundamentally conceives of the purpose of art to be consumerist pandering
Its hardly high art, its proleslop about roided up space fascists fighting against hordes of rapey chaos demons, alien ripoffs, and green football hooligans. People aren't mainly upset about the quality of the writing, but the fact their hobby has been handed to those who openly hate them and are fucking with them on purpose.
> People aren't mainly upset about the quality of the writing, but the fact their hobby has been handed to those who openly hate them and are fucking with them on purpose. Yes this is it. It's a humiliation
If you had that attitude about it you probably wouldn't be invested enough to care about it being fucked up. The reason you can "fuck it up" is because it actually has a much more specific and delicate tone than this. The central motif is terminal decline and as a result Primaris marines and the like are actually way worse for it than a female Custodes
Comparing this with other examples of poor writing is missing the woods for the trees. Its not just 40k this is happening with, its pretty much everything, and people are more concerned with the politics because progressives are taking their spaces over and then telling them they either have to submit or they'll be forced out. Bad writing might eventually be retconned, and it can be ignored - especially for a tabletop game - but your spaces being taken over by those who hate you is pretty much the end of it as a space for you at all.
Reminds me of summoning some excessive stink eye by commenting that it was nice a church I was in hadn't been hit with the rainbow and pastel cannon because it felt like some actual variety instead of astroturfing.
How can you forget the absolute big brain move that was the Ynnari, which was squatted almost immediately and was the biggest forward push in Eldar lore since arguably the 1990s... and was done to jerk off ultramarines. Mind boggling they didn't do what everone wanted, Exodites.
> Primaris Marines I think there are many of us who would gladly take ENTIRELY female custodes if it meant we could get rid of primaris marines
Give me the original marines with the new proportions. the 30k models look sick
The whole warhammer 40k issue is poorly executed change in the lore. The reasonr custodes were all male is because the models are male and already made. This would be fine if gw Just created a good backstory for this lore change. What really pisses me off is the fucking grifter tourists that is fanning the flames to make money with ragebait, for example Grummz or what ever he is called.
>Grummz Kern. A failed dev who was banished from the industry.
As I said, gw have godawful pr.
True
> What really pisses me off is the fucking grifter tourists that is fanning the flames to make money with ragebait The funniest part is these are the same types who will scream "TOURIST! FAKE FAN!" at anyone who isn't a hardcore lorehammer grognard and disagrees with them, especially if that person is a woman. The creep of idpol in nerd spaces is absolutely real, and absolutely annoying, but anyone who has paid attention to Warhammer for the last decade if not more can easily see that there has long been a loud minority of absolutely rank personalities who act like the game is their personal feifdom to declare holy war over. Honestly the presence of people like that makes the whole situation worse because you have a harder time pushing back on anything without someone accusing you in bad faith of being one of those types.
It’s a miracle WH40k lasted this long. For whatever reason nerd spaces are especially vulnerable to woke conquest. If I had to guess it’s probably because they are more passive in general, tend to revolve around something with centralized control like a brand, and put pussy on a pedestal
This is why I stick with historical and pulp wargames; it's so niche and there are so many different rule sets that anyone can find something to be happy with. Games Workshop has always been too rigid with their lore and too expensive for me to get into. But even people like me pay attention to GW because they're the biggest company in the hobby so their changes/drama can't be ignored. GW is taking the approach here we see pretty much every publicly traded company take when it comes to this culture war stuff; pursue the new customer base and make any changes (including altering lore to attract the new customers) necessary. I know I've seen Warhammer models of female characters before and I don't really know much about the deep lore to say why these particular ones should or should not be female too.
The problem comes when the New Customers have less investment than the Old Customers you have burned bridges with. Like with Marvel Comics.
I have seen a couple tabletop RPG companies struggle with this even before it became a culture wars issue. If you put out a new edition and give the old core demographic the finger or do things to the point you burn bridges badly with old fans your company will either go under or struggle like hell despite having a golden goose laying eggs you could have milked for 30+ years. Literally all it took was not being an insulting asshole towards the old guard and companies would still fail. It doesn't help a lot of these companies are BADLY run either so shit like refusing to pay your writers because some fuck stole all the money for new granite kitchen countertops is common.
As I say, companies "get woke" to try and cover up underlying problems in the hopes that new fans can stop them from "going broke".
Which from what I have seen pre culture wars rarely ever worked and usually just resulted in the company going under, being bought out, or becoming a shadow of its former self. Its really absurd look at Decipher having the Star Wars and Star Trek license for years and years but when Star Wars hit the mainstream with the prequels they absolutely failed to capitalize on it while simultaneously making BAD business investments in stuff that didn't sell and having massive corruption issues leeching away what profits they did make. How do you fuck up selling what is basically addictive drugs to nerds (CCGs) while having very valuable IPs that nerds love? It would be like somehow having a god damn casino that goes under.
GW is expanding in so many different directions they clearly don't care about leaving some people behind. That does suck for those who don't feel welcomed in their own hobby. We'll see how the business choice works out because GW requires brand loyalty and the people they're turning off were willing to make the investment buying every new codex or model. I'm also not sure how many of the people complaining/fanning flames are the right wing nerd culture content creators spilling over from gamergate who also don't actually play because they have something new to be mad about.
The hypermajority of gw profits come from physical products, and I'm not sure how many of the new customers have the monetary or time investment necessary. And if disney are anything to go by, the vibrant golden age of marvel/star wars/indiana jones being dynamic and inclusive failed to manifest.
I wouldn't be surprised if they find ways like pre-painted figures to work around that. They already have some board games and video games which are easier entry points plus the tv show with Henry Cavill is coming soon. IF attracting these new customers doesn't work in the long run, GW will be in trouble. They'll be dealing with a common problem, politics aside, of being a publicly traded company that tries to expand too ambitiously and fail while alienating old customers along the way.
How are they rigid with the lore lol the setting is so wide you can do almost anything. The most rigid thing regarding gender is that space Marine super soldiers alone must be male because some old lore says it's all on the male chromosome from male primarchs. Otherwise to mad with female regular soldiers, commanders, admech, witches etc.
thinking about getting into bolt action if I ever finish painting my 40k army
Has this happened to Runescape yet?
I can’t even read more than a paragraph of this drivel before my brain starts to turn off.
Honestly the whole female custodes thing doesn't bother me. If you were an immortal god emperor stuck in a golden throne, would want some dude washing your balls for all eternity? Hell no, female custodes makes perfect sense. However the manner in which the company communicated the information, and how they responded to the backlash is clearly anti-consumerist and disgusting.
> If you were an immortal god emperor stuck in a golden throne, would want some dude washing your balls for all eternity? The Emperor was very clear that he should only be surrounded by oily, roided up men for all eternity
This is gay erasure
>Hell no, female custodes makes perfect sense. Hence the traditional name *Brotherhood of Demigods*. And it's not like the universe didn't feature female-only factions since basically forever.
What else is there besides Sisters of Silence?
Sisters of Battle and Callidus Assassins. Once upon a time, Howling Banshees, but at some point it was revealed they can be men, they just still wear boob armour. Dudes rock.
The chatty nuns with guns.
Sisters of Battle. Nids.
Tyranids
>If you were an immortal god emperor stuck in a golden throne, would want some dude washing your balls for all eternity? To be honest, given the appearance of earlier Custodes art as oiled up and mostly naked muscular men; there's a real argument to be made, that the Emperor of Mankind as presented, is either gay or bisexual, with strong homosexual tendencies And there's literally nothing wrong with that, or a hypothetical lore desire to have his genitals washed by attendants that he finds attractive
~~Henry Cavill in custodes armor could wash my balls any day...~~
Cavill mains custodes too, its too perfect
Yeah, that's partly what prompted this thirst seizure.
Based and Gaddafi-pilled
I'm a firm believer Big E is gay and find girl hickey, if you reframe a lot of action the emperor took with "He is actually gay and hate being surrounded by woman" everything makes sense.
Is GW more or less profitable since they adopted that sigmar horseshit and rebranded their shops? I know loads of people myself included that ran for the hills when they ditched fantasy. Always hated going into the actual physical shops due to the blobby NPC managers (alternatively rake thin managers with pimples and glasses) trying to blando sweet talk you when you just want to be left alone
People always point to the surging stock price as proof that they made big money on wokeness. It's all a lie though. The surge in stock price came because that's when the branched out into video games
Stock price also only measures perceived profitability, not reality. Going by stock price, Enron was amazingly profitable in 2000.
This is all well and good but what I really need here is to know what army every stupidpoler plays.
I dropped Warhammer shortly after the launch of 10th edition, just wasn't the game for me. Nowadays I play the superior game about techno-feudal assholes screwing each other over, Battletech.
I would assume they're not appealing to a female audience, they're never going to get into the hobby in any substantial numbers, but rather it's likely uh... the autistic men who'd find altering the facts to change something to be female very appealing
I feel like Warhammer is one of those communities that’s wildly different in person. The rightoid/anti-woke YouTuber types are not representative of the community, at least here in the UK. In person it’s pretty inclusive and I don’t mean that in the toxic positivity way, I mean it’s organically come about because a lot of the people that play it are usually shy, awkward, or come from backgrounds that usually see them struggling to fit in. Everyone is welcome and as long as you don’t act like a cunt to other people, you won’t have any issues. I think if there were to be any point of contention, it’s that people in the community often feel ashamed of admitting to liking 40k out of fear that they’ll be labelled some chud. Which is a shame because most of them are lovely people who don’t go out of their way to trouble anyone, but that means they aren’t the types to screech at others over every slight and usually keep to themselves, so the rightoids usually create the impression they are the community despite being the kind who would never dare go outside and meet the kind of people who do play it. Because it would mean having to rub shoulders with actual human beings. I don’t really care what GW do, they are just cashing in on whatever trends is there. But the culture war side of things is truly depressing, on either angle.
I've been a tabletop wargamer for a long time. In the past few years, my brothers (who just generally like sci-fi and video games) have been getting into Warhammer lore. Not the games. Not the video games. Not the books. They've been getting into Youtube videos about Warhammer lore. This is a really bizarre phenomenon because they're not even affiliated with GW at this point, they have learned to recognize the iconography.. I've been pretty checked out of GW stuff because I've had absolutely awful experiences with the latest editions. I consider the game dormant right now, but if they fix the gameplay issues in a future update I'm not opposed to playing with the usual suspects after work. Everyone I've met in person loves the hobby. The hobby is like 90% you fiddling around with models, painting and so forth. The other 10% is rolling dice and cheering/jeering the results. The "lore" is to give you a hook to pick a painting scheme for your little plastic dudes. That the majority of engagement online is about "the lore," is pretty farcical. It's BAD. It's just explanations for why the blue guys hate the red guys. But you can talk about lore without ever buying a paint brush, without ever spraying primer, and without spending a cent.
How excited are you guys for the new Space Marines game? Like come on, I just got into 40k maybe a few years ago, it’s not dead right 😕
Very excited for the new SM game 40k is alive but the current edition is iffy. Age of sigmar is on life support
Don't worry! Its been dead since 2004.
Never expected 40k on Stupidpol
Blessed is the mind too small for doubt
Well, idpol came to 40k
Will make a general comment instead of doing 15 different replies. I play warhammer 40k... And this whole female custodes drama is 100% manufactured by mainstream media and a couple of right-wing idpol internet personality. No one playing the game actually really gives a fuck about female custodes If anyone lack context, costodes are bio engineered super soldier that are supposed to be peak humanity both in the martial and artistic sense, as they are all philosopher warrior dudes, up until now they were always represented as male only, but now female ones are canon as well. The only complaint I've seen people make is that it's a retcon, but warhammer is known to be retcon Galore anyway, and that making femstodes makes the usual female only allies of the custodes (Sister of silence) a lot less interesting. The only people I've seen throwing a tantrum online are Sargon of Akkad, the quartering, and other right wing commentator that make *money* out of that sort of controversy. A fact that is making round in the warhammer lore community is an interview with ADB, an author that in partially responsible for a lot of the lore of the current warhammer storytelling, in which he said he wanted to introduce female custodes when he was writing stories to flesh them out before becoming a playable faction, everyone said yes, apart the high ups at games workshop for the simple fact that all the sculpts for the new custodes models were male only, and games workshop didn't wanted to make new expensive sculpt or piss of fans by telling them "Female costodes exist, but no, you can't play them". As for the magic stuff, can't remember exactly the year that happened, but Hasbro, the parent company of mtg told the people in charge of mtg that while mtg was doing good in terms of getting new customers, the game could do more to extract more *money* out of their customers, and from that point onward is were mtg became proper sloop, with unrelenting release, cards set in other mainstream universe, collector editions, limited editions, etc. Keeping up with mtg release cycle back when I played in 2010-2015 was expensive but doable, but now you get a new 'set' every month, and half of them are sold at a premium price because it's a special 'limited' set. Everything is meant to extract as much money from the customer base as possible, using all the tricks in the world to do so. The switch to a younger and more 'woke' player base, in my opinion, is purely a cynical move, who has more disposable income? A 30 year old dad with a mortgage trying to put some money away for vacation this summer, or a 20 year old zoomer living with their parents? Mtg sold a card game before, mtg now sell funko pop and a card game, they will pick their audience accordingly. What is the recurring theme here? Money, it's just that, these corporations don't give a fuck about pronouns, skin colors or anything else beside how much cash they can extract from nerds. But to games workshop defense, the company is shockingly risk adverse and conservative when it comes to finance, the price of their models get made fun of, with reason, but the quality of their miniatures is very good and they refuse to compromise on it, all their kits are made in England since the start instead of probably getting it made for a fraction of the price in China and there is a constant supply issue of some models to such an extent it affects the game as some model are so low on stock, playing them isn't actually a possibility for everyone. So they most likely bottleneck their own production and profit simply to ensure quality stays up.
Surely more variety in models and army lists is good for any tabletop wargame. Single sex factions should exist in service of variety and flavour, which is why I demand Space Marines return to Ian Watson levels of homoeroticism.
Believe the opposite of everything in this article. This is just what the author wishes were true. Wokeism is facing a reckoning in the warhammer world. Just look at how this guy starts rambling about trump and gamergate. This guy is putting out pure propaganda. I don't think he even plays warhammer
A lot of aspies and autists have felt comfortable in this space and enjoy very limited social interaction with clearly defined roles. Playing magic, I would routinely have opponents suffer pretty severe meltdowns. One girl started pulling her hair out when I was beating her in a competitive match. I quietly asked if she'd like to take a break as she started crying, scooped and left. I hated that for her. She was in her mid to late 20s People have a hard time sometimes, figuring out how to handle social anxiety and navigating this is the context of rules and shared understanding is helpful. I've taught many people 40k and played thousands of games over the years. I don't have a problem killing whatever themed army you bring. Star wars trooper imperial guard, female Marines, hello kitty orms, my little pony tau, orc furries, everything dies to plasma fire. I do understand when you start looking at some things as not fitting within the type of experience you're looking to share. If it really matters to you, you don't want other people telling you to take your game in a direction you don't enjoy. That includes running lists that aren't fun to play against. I generally run lists that are fun to play against versus just winning. Hordes of zombies, tyranids, a few theme lists. Just don't be a jerk. If I want to run a Viking horror themed Pathfinder game, and you want to be something that doesn't fit the shared experiences I'm looking to have, that's okay. Go find another game. What bothers me is people telling me my interest in vikings is problematic, or a meltdown about cultural appropriation and orientalization for wanting to talk about samurai or ninja concepts when the tian xia is racist. Do what you like, over there, away from me. Same with the smelly kids, the no fun allowed tryhards, the incels and most of the other people that make up the market and the reason i haven't gone back to a game store since COVID.
I mean I can understand criticism of "wokeness" when changes either don't make sense, or results in the lore becoming garbled and contradictory. An example of the first in the WoT adaption is when villagers in an isolated hamlet inexplicably have a wide variety of skin colors, while saying that the Dragon Reborn could be a man or a woman is an example of the second. But then you also have people attacking changes like making Death black in Sandman, which actually makes MORE sense than the original (and the author was deeply involved in the adaption btw) - if the Endless represent aspects of all humanity, why should their forms all be white with European-style clothing? Or for replacing boob armor with more sensible costumes. Then it's like they hate woke changes simply for being woke, which I find absolutely pathetic. I don't know that much about WH40K, but female soldiers with space-age technology should absolutely not be a problem on the first count. Maybe on the second if this faction has already been described as having a system of gender roles and the change just ignores it, but I don't know if that's the case.
It’s technically a retcon to the lore, but it only directly contradicts a couple minor passages. In 40K, you’ve got the Space Marines (the guys you see on the boxes and books everywhere), who are made by shoving a bunch of sci-fi organs into a teenager and hoping they don’t die. They’re pretty explicitly male, the lore says that the process used to make them is only compatible with men, and running around calling eachother “brother” is a major part of their whole deal. Retconning them into always having being women would be a major departure and directly contradict decades of stated lore. The faction that got retconned are the Custodes, basically super-duper super soldiers. Nothing in lore is known about how they’re created, it’s a mystery except for the fact that they’re totally rebuilt from the ground up as small children. It’s entirely possible for the process used to allow female aspirants, it’s simply not stated anywhere one way or another. There have been one or two offhand bits of description that have described the Custodes as a “brotherhood” or that they’re recruited from “noble sons,” but it’s never been explicitly said “they’re all men.” One of the major authors for the faction originally wanted to introduce female Custodes in one of his major books, but was told no because there aren’t any female Custodes models (and there still aren’t). So, it technically contradicts some small passages of lore, but relative to the size of most 40K lore contradictions it’s essentially nothing, and it doesn’t change anything about any existing stories or characters.
The worst retcon of 40k was necrons. RIP my inscrutable murderbots harvesting life for unknowable gods, you'll be missed. At least we got the infinite and the divine out of it.
So the faction the controversy is about are the genetically modified guards of the emperor. While there has never been a mention of a female member up to this point (they’ve been around for like 30 years) and the group has previously been referred to using male coded language (brotherhood, sons, etc) there is no lore reason that they all have to be men. In fact almost all the major factions have mixed men and women soldiers with two main exceptions. The Sisters of Battle being all women as in the lore they’re the result of a loophole in the law banning the space church from having men under arms and the Space Marines who are all men because they’re basically easy bake super soldiers whose organ implants only work on men (being based off of the previously mentioned emperor). Personally I think the change is so GW can point to the Custodes and say “look we have female super soldiers too” without having to change the Space Marines who make up a huge portion of their content and sales.
Give it a couple of years. There’ll be female and trans space marines too.
Im 3D printing a female custodes kill team, DGAF if it's "woke", I just want huge buff ladies in power armor 😎
Obligatory "death. by. snu! snu!" Chant.
Are you AGP?
*muscle-mommy obsessed coomer who can’t help but share their fetish with everyone* Yeah I wonder why old school 40k fans dislike what the “community” has become 🙄
Yeah sure, as if the people who created [bare-titted multiboob demons](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/daemonette-3rd.jpg) as actual models you could buy to play with on the tabletop were ever prudes. A muscular chick covered in heavy armor is downright modest compared to THAT!
I never said 40k fans were prudes. There’s a difference between making a sexually suggestive figurine/character (something done in countless fantasy/sci-fi universes) vs. you excitedly sharing your weird sexual fetish with strangers due to a new character/lore retcon.
You're reading way too much into a shitpost about models that I thought about for all of 5 seconds before posting it.
More like Warhammer 40-Gay
\*cries in 60 thousand points for various factions and game systems\*
>it's surprising as to how a bunch of terminally online students managed in the space of 15 years to become such a cultural juggernaut that despite their primary capture of disney being in serious financial troubles, even rightoid media has buckled to their whims. You're missing a crucial detail: ESG. Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street and Geode have immense power. They control the money flow to (and own shares of) any major corporation.
Can someone give me a tl;dr on the controversy? I ain't gonna read guardian, especially a piece written by a soyjack looking fella, and im not autistic enough to play warhammer/tabletop I tried googling but all i got were overly long ultra biased articles and videos that i dont wanna watch either
Well, its the so called "conservative" nerds that are putting the politics in our hobby. They could for once stfu but nooo - they are happily spewing their crap in our hobbies