Why is it only a problem when they retcon female protagonists in to things rather than out?
Please don’t put words in my mouth. The issue was with how suddenly they changed it and how they clarified it, not with the change itself.
Retcons suck. Going straight from “Women can’t be made into Custodes” to “Oh, there have always been female Custodes, you just didn’t see them in 30 years of lore, even though we explicitly said they couldn’t exist!” is just lazy and jarring, no matter the subject matter. Clarifying it with a tweet instead of just letting it speak for itself just poured gasoline on it.
This is a good thing GW tried to do, they just handled it poorly.
I’ve been playing 40k since the late 80s. I know the lore. I was there for it. I have watched it change over the decades. And sure, the female warriors weren’t explicitly labelled Space Marines, but they clearly were intended to be “the same” as the male models that would become Space Marines. The genestealers in Rogue Trader weren’t labelled tyranids either, but no one claims they weren’t by citing lack of specific lore at the time they were first published
The only reason those models didn’t continue to be made is because misogyny meant the models didn’t sell. So female space marines got written out of the lore, and the sisters, in all ways lesser than space marines, were introduced, so as to not offend the fan base of the time with equality.
There were female space marines in the very first edition of 40k ever printed. That was retconned.
Why is it only a problem when they retcon female protagonists in to things rather than out?
Please don’t put words in my mouth. The issue was with how suddenly they changed it and how they clarified it, not with the change itself.
Retcons suck. Going straight from “Women can’t be made into Custodes” to “Oh, there have always been female Custodes, you just didn’t see them in 30 years of lore, even though we explicitly said they couldn’t exist!” is just lazy and jarring, no matter the subject matter. Clarifying it with a tweet instead of just letting it speak for itself just poured gasoline on it.
This is a good thing GW tried to do, they just handled it poorly.
40k lore explicitly has an unreliable narrator and not unrelatedly, retcons that have “always been that way” is how the game has always been.
Necrons, female space marines, genestealers, the old ones, they all got the same treatment.
Removed by mod
I’ve been playing 40k since the late 80s. I know the lore. I was there for it. I have watched it change over the decades. And sure, the female warriors weren’t explicitly labelled Space Marines, but they clearly were intended to be “the same” as the male models that would become Space Marines. The genestealers in Rogue Trader weren’t labelled tyranids either, but no one claims they weren’t by citing lack of specific lore at the time they were first published
The only reason those models didn’t continue to be made is because misogyny meant the models didn’t sell. So female space marines got written out of the lore, and the sisters, in all ways lesser than space marines, were introduced, so as to not offend the fan base of the time with equality.
Removed by mod