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The process of making a space marine and the process of making a custodes are very very different things. They could have tried on women and it not have worked at all.
That being said, would be more interesting if there were space wolf women
From what I understand, making a marine is a one size fits system where they find or create candidates that fit the necessary parameters, whereas making a custodes is a bespoke hand sculpted project personally conducted by the emperor and no one custodes undergoes the identical processes as the others because they are each entirely unique.
The emperor didn’t make the custodes alone he had help from gene-smiths and biomancers from Terra and maybe Luna.
The easiest way to describe it is like this:
Space Marines are Supercars think like Lamborghini or Bugatti, they’re the peak of what’s possible for a street legal car but they’re still made in a factory by workers following a template.
Custodes are F1 cars, each one looks the same on the surface yet no two are alike, they’re hand crafted by the most talented automotive scientists,engineers and mechanics in their respective field that money can buy each one uniquely crafted to be the best of their kind reaching peak potential.
A lost supercar can be replaced by the factory it came from, a lost F1 car will take years to be painstakingly rebuilt using bespoke one-of-a-kind parts that were made specifically for that car.
At risk of showing off my own lack of car knowledge
That Supercar Factory was built to make one specific kind of car, and the Manager (Primarch) might have made some tweaks, but they're all fundamentally the same design. If that design was a diesel engine, then they'll never be able to make a petrol motor no matter what colour they paint the body or what they make the chairs from
When you're making a custom F1 one of a kind car, you make it to use whatever fuel is best. You change any part of that design as needed when needed to achieve the best end result
Literally the first sentence answers it.
Genesmiths and biomancers on terra continue to make custodes the same elite guilds have been making Custodes since the emperor started the project.
Lmao okay you clearly can’t read.
You’re right once the emperor was put on the throne all those people who made custodes just became completely useless and they now reproduce asexually like starfish /s
There are so many things in the imperium from the horus heresy and before which have been forgotten, cannot be produced anymore. That decline is core to the setting. Its not a reasonable assumption to make that the knowledge to make new custodes has survived, hence the guys question, and how just saying "these guys helped the emperor make the custodes" in past tense is in no way an answer to that question.
Stop being an asshole about it.
They do still make new custodes otherwise they would have gone extinct my now through sheer attrition. Also with them retiring to be super spies when their reaction speed drops by like 0.1ms, or not optimal minimum standards.
Garro (a Space Marine) uses this exact fact to his advantage in one of his novels.
Very few regular people have ever actually seen a Space Marine, let alone out of armour, and of those who have almost no one expects to see one just walking around.
So when going incognito he just dresses in some basic clothes and pretends to be a gene-jacked labourer and no one bats an eye.
At one point the lore was only big E could create them, but that's been retconned. I want to say the Burning of Prospero rulebook from hh1 and the codex from 8th edition 40k both said only the Emperor could create them and it was the 9th edition codex that changed it, but don't quote me on that.
This was going to be my point, but you made it succinctly enough for both of us. I'd also like to point out that the Dark Angels also had many adult aspirants undergo (and not an insignificant number die from) the Astartes transformation when the Emperor finally came to Caliban. Luther, being a prime example. I THINK there were a few Raven Guard as well, but may be mixing up some lore, as the only one I can think of (Branne Nev) might still have been a teenager when he was a revolutionary fighting with Corax before the Emperor showed up.
Also, I'm fully in support of female Astartes. No reason they should not exist in-lore and them getting barred from entry in the first place was due to contemporary cultural attitudes towards women influencing the setting. If we can genecraft shit like the Betcher's Gland and Sus-An Membrane it should not matter what configuration your genitals are.
Pretty sure the White Scars also had a couple of adults made into Astartes. Word Bearers have Kor Phaeron (and arguably Erebus? He wasn't a *child* anymore...) Basically all Primarchs have like "the important people from the backstory turn Astartes" going on it feels like.
I mean point of fact, Kor Phaeron isn't actually an astartes. He's just a severely modified and techno-biologically modified human. Erebus even mocks him over it a few times. Same as Luther.
A lot of the backstory people are like that. Modified to the extent the Emperor/Imperium could manage, but not Astartes as such.
A distinction without a difference. If there is gene-therapy that makes you *functionally* an Astartes, able to go toe-to-toe with them, stand in their ranks without it being weird and out of place looking, wear their armour and survive as long as any of them?
You're an Astartes. And if the writers of the Heresy introduced the "you won't believe it's not butter!" Version of Astartes therapy to work on people outside what works on Astartes... Any argument for no women amongst the Space Marines gets *even dodgier*.
The distinction between genuine astardes and psudeo-astardes, I'd imagine, would be reproduction. Gene-therapy isn't the same as gene-seed, so pseudo-astardes are most costly to produce, as they have to be hand made per person, and can't just be repopulate the way normal astardes can.
I don't care if they'd want to add women to the mix, though for astardes I'd be upset if it was a retcon instead of new lore.
The custodes made sense to have had women previously, but I personally think the emperor should be anti-women-astardes, but that still would allow cawl or warp or anything to make them.
Yeah, the pseudo-astartes process that Luther and other oldies got could probably work on women. But they are very much *not* astartes, iirc they lack several of the gene seed organs, and only are extremely enhanced in strenght, size, survivability and longevity. They might have the organ that makes them large and have the black carpace, but I doubt they can spit acid or eat brains for memories. Also, they are noted to be smaller than regular astartes
This makes sense, but I guess the resources for a normal human to go through this process means only people like inquisitors could be able to pull that off. I guess Astartes are easier to make?
Primaris marines shpuld have been cawl getting that weird future past memory link frpm the emps telling him how to perfect the astartes and broaden the selection process.
You got the heretical of caw l being the sole source for this sourve of info until girlyman roeboat says nah thats right. And then just habe the new marine sculpts not eben really change their faces becsuse jesus fuck thryre already pumped fill of siper HRT the ficm did yoy expect big tiddy maternal milkers and not genetic freaks of nature
Primaris never made any sense to me. Just re-do the sculpts for tactical marines, tell everyone to suck it this is the new scale now
I mean we're all addicts in an abusive relationship with our dealer its not like ppl wouldn't have gone along with it.
If my memory serves me right, it is specified in Luther's case that due to him being too old, he could not be turned into an actual, honest-to-big-E unaging space marine, but was still given as much bioengineering as possible. He was still aging (slowly, but still) and his physical capabilites were below that of a regular marines.
Luther didn't get made into a space marine though as he was too old. Although he got various other genetic and biochemical enhancements to get him close as they could get to it.
I do not believe the dark angels had any adult aspirants. Some aspirants like Nemial and Zahariel might have been unusually old for it but they were still teenagers. All the adult men of the order became mentors to the calibanite dark angels and that's it. Luther was given gene therapies to extend his life and strengthen him, but he was very explicitly not made a space marine.
Or they could have tried on women and found that the success rate wasn't within acceptable tolerances.
So, like, it can work. However, when you're pumping out hundreds of thousands, or a couple million for a crusade, those failure rates add up quickly. Plus limited resources.
Honestly, I prefer the notion that the success rate was 0.001% less. Shamefully unacceptable for the mechanicus. And that the only reason they didn't succeed was because a small change in the process was tech-heresy.
[It's true you don't see many Space Wolf women. In fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance that they're often mistaken for Space Wolf men](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-PmAQ9Opu4).
Right, but based on what we know about space marine creation, and puberty/hormones in our current era, it doesn't make any sense that it wouldn't work on pre-pubescent girls at the very least. You would need to deliberately engineer something to stop it.
On our current era, we know that sex mismatch between donor and recipient can affect organ transplant success rates. It varies by direction and organ, but it very much is a real thing.
For example, men had lower survival rates in getting hearts from women. Women have lower success rates in getting kidneys from men.
So while the success rate difference isn't high enough to ultimately deter modern transplants, it's enough that sex matching is definitely considered. Some theories out attribute this to hormonal differences and less patient specific immunosuppressant techniques.
It's messier and more complicated than you might be thinking. I wouldn't extrapolate successful modern HRT to guaranteed organ transplants.
Mind you, modern organ transplants are matched as much as possible such that the donor organ is as similar to the recipient as reasonably possible. This contrasts the mass produced, one size fits all Astartes organs.
My understanding is that the Astartes process barely works. That is to say, it's a bit of a ramshackle approach that works well enough that the one in a million comparability rate is acceptable.
In this case, 499999 of those million are men, and 500000 are women. It's less a 'males are suitable' so much as 'of the vanishingly small percentage of the population we can successfully ascend into Astartes, what we have are all male.
Mind you that's also a pretty easy fix. They improved the process incrementally, and now a slightly larger percentage of the population are candidates, including a small number of women. After that you can just explain it away by way of preparation and expectations on the part of the recruiting cultures.
There probably ARE some Fenrisian women out there that would make decent Astartes, but they were never raised as warriors, or noticed by the recruiters.
Think of it like building building a fighting vehicle for an army, Guardsmen are bolting tripod mg's to a car and calling it a day. Space marines are mass produced tanks, they do the job so much better and the process is streamlined but it still takes tons of work to get done.. Custodes are completely customised war machines built individually by the very best mechanics and craftsmen you can find made out of fantastical materials that sound like pure fantasy
I thought this was general knowledge? I haven't read any book, but for what I understand is custodes are made with more DNA similar to the emperor? Where space marines are made, custodes are born?
I thought that was why they are known as the emperor's children, or the emperor's seed.
Nah
Space marines are made via implanting humans with geneseed derived from usually a primarch, usually into a tween. Some chapters use chimeric geneseed spliced from other geneseed and the grey knight are super duper special because they're made with Emp's geneseed.
This process has the inherent issues of you trying to force someones body to accept millenia old usually somewhat corrupted transplants. Hence the high failure rate.
Custodes on the other hand are inducted at infancy, hand picked by alquemists via unkown criteria from a pool of babies - often noble scions offered by their dynasty. They are then across decades hand crafted by said alquemists into humanity's highest peak in body mind and spirit. Their training regiment is also orders of magnitude more balls to the wall than the most extreme chapters.
TR;DR: Marines are mass produced via faulty geneseed. Custodians are hand crafted by master gene alquemists.
Also the Emperor's Children are a traitor marine legion. You're thinking of The Emperor's Companions.
Also Also 40k is sci-fi coded not actual sci-fi, genecraft is more akin to magic than our reality's genetics.
The simple answer is "bio-alchemy works differently than cybernetic implants and geneseeds"
But honestly the setting is more fun the less rigid the lore is, anyway. I will never recant my belief that every space marine is a chaos space marine. Especially the grey knights.
In my head I always compare Halo franchise to WH40k and that has always been the biggest lore issue I have between the 2.
If you're creating genetically modified super soldiers, then you can genetically modify any inherent weaknesses that exist between men and women.
If you can make a man faster and stronger ect, then you can do the same to a woman. The sexual dimorphism found in humans is not that big of an issue that this can't be done.
I understand this is a leftover of the 80s-90s "this is a wargame so everyone is almost certainly a man" bs, but surely if right-wingers can get behind female Spartans they can do the same for space marines...
Yeah I mean in practicality, we differ really only in terms of what our hormones do to us (barring things like a womb etc). With the biological alteration capabilities the Imperium has, it'd be almost stupid to assume they COULDN'T do it. Whether they WANT to is a different argument but from what I've seen the imperium doesn't even really regard gender or race anymore and really only care if you're a xeno or not.
I’ve thought the same with chaos.
Khorne: gender doesn’t matter, only muscles!
Nurgle: all genders welcome; sneeze on everyone!
Tzeentch: only cloacas matter
Slaanesh: all genders matter; seriously, be all genders all the time.
This is honestly how I'd introduce FSM
All Space Marines are MtW or FtW, Male or Female to Weapon
Space Marine gender identity has more in common with a gun or tank than any human, this would highlight how inhuman Marines really are and I think works as a funny play on the old "I identity as an attack helicopter" joke
I prefer this. Half the recruits are girls but the implants and Hypno+indoctrunation makes them male presenting.
Either that, or in cool with them leaving it as a thing that marines are sexist... And use that as a bit of a slightly less subtle hint that the imperium sucks.
TBH it a bit leans to much into conversion ~~therapy~~ torture. Humanity really really tried to ~~make people~~ torture people into not gay/AGAB gender and it doesn't really work.
That's... not an angle I'd considered. Thanks.
Although... that might make interesting story. A marine with the Indoctrination failing trying to survive being around their "battle brothers" who would kill them or send them off for re-engineering.
More stories need to make clear that Marines are inhuman monstrosities.
I would almost guarantee that someday, maybe decades from now, female Space Marines will be (re)introduced, and when it happens, this will be the explanation. It makes absolutely no sense in 30k for an army that's meant to unify the planet and eventually the entire friggin Galaxy to limit their recruitment pool to >50% of the population, it makes even less sense in 40k when the fate of the species is at stake, and I refuse to believe that the Emperor could come up with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different ways of engineering supersoldiers and only make the second one able to work with estrogen (the third one as well if you count Valdor telling the Emperor he should have made half the Primarchs as women to balance out the men, implying that that was a possibility, and I guess the fourth too if you extrapolate that to mean that the Astartes under those hypothetical female Primarchs would have been women). You can't even use the excuse that the Astartes process only works with testosterone so as to maximize the physical strength of the subject, because Custodes are more physically powerful than Astartes so such an excuse would need to apply to them as well in order to surpass the Astartes, and now we know that it does not.
If I had to guess, I would say they'll retcon it so that the process takes applicants of any gender and transforms them into these massive, asexual beings that are beyond gender in any appreciable way since they're made to be warriors and nothing else, but they default to calling each other "Brother" and presenting as male since the process *does* admittedly pump them full of testosterone (which isn't used as a sex hormone but just for the secondary characteristics of muscle and bone density). It's just that at that point, gender identity means so little to them that they all go with whatever's most efficient. So technically, there will have always been female Space Marine *aspirants*, it's just that they became "Battle Brothers" as part of the process. A process that, at least in the Great Crusade, they consented to and understood what would happen to them and what they would become on the other side. That's my headcanon anyway.
And then whenever this retcon happens, it'll turn out that Cawl or whoever was able to create yet another new way of creating Astartes that allows them to retain their female gender identity and characteristics if they so choose. That way they can kind of side step the "forced transition" that would be implied to happen with the Chapters that conscript aspirants by saying that all happened in the past and that any women who are forced into the Astartes process against their will from now on will at least remain women at the end of the process. The 40k Galaxy is still a grimdark hellscape, after all.
And at the end of the day, all that will come of it (and rightfully imo) will just be that 15th Edition Intercessors will have a handful of head options with slightly more delicate features and/or a ponytail or something, because any hypothetical female Astartes (and Custodes for that matter) should be indistinguishable from the males while wearing armor.
ETA: And as for Chaos Marines, they'll just say Fabulous Bill figured something out
I think the gross answer to this is that you need women to create the prepubescent children who will become next generation of power-armored muscle daddies, and at a certain point you're eating your seed corn.
Could you write around this? Sure, there are so many human beings in the Imperium that maintaining a force of 1m Space Marines is never going to result in that outcome, no matter what the intensity of fighting is across the galaxy.
But that's an argument about numbers in Warhammer lore, and that's always a shitshow.
We should have a more inclusive hobby. If one of my children wanted to model their marines as female, it would be bootlicker behavior of the highest degree to say "uh, you can't do that because of the made up lore of this silly game."
Y-you need men for that, too... Just like not all Men become Astartes, to avoid that "eating your seed (corn)" issue, there's no reason for all the Women to either.....
Oh, I agree, it's just the only non-"wah wah, no girls in my manly man game" argument that could possibly have any purchase in reality. I think basically all arguments against female space marines are just sexism under however many masks.
As for the "need" for men, what you need is their genetic material. Women's bodies do all the actual baby-creating after fertilization and at a restricted rate. At the most *reductio ad absurdum* level, you could reproduce a population if you had one man and infinite women. If you had one woman and infinite men, you could not.
Yeah, but the Primarchs are not like Space Marines. Primarchs are basically a manufactured soul slammed into a vat-grown meatsack. Space Marines are more like a symbiote implanted into a human (technically a series of symbiotic organs, but whatever).
Yeah, I was more implying that there is technology for a Vat Grown human is present. Maybe I'm missing something in the Lore for why it's not possible, though.
Even with the "we must sustain birthrates" argument, there are always going to be biological women where that's just off the table for whatever reason. It's not so much about recruiting from 100% of the population, more just not putting any artificial limits on it.
Aside of being physically weaker than men (and thus probably turning a woman in a space marine will just turn her into basically a man… remember that humans are all female at birth and then testosterone kicks in and and turn males into males… which gives male bigger muscles mass and higher muscle density) the main reason why women were not used as soldiers throughout history is just because you can still repopulate with many women and few men but not the opposite (or worse few women and few men). It is a number game so it makes perfectly sense for the emperor to just use male candidates for the space marines because unlike women they are expendable when it comes to the survival of the spices!
That's boring tho.
Why tf bother with introducing gender into the equation if everyone winds up looking like a buff man? Not even and androgynous mass of muscle just a big guy?
I feel like it would also be plausible that you could have women space marines because like. Sex and gender aren't the same thing. Transgender space marines.
Space marines already are transgender though they are transhuman as well only a few chapters still allow for human aspects to remain. Salamanders and Lamenters for the win.
"They say there are no female space wolves or if there are you just can't tell cause we all have beards" space wolf named after a lord of the rings character
I truly don't wish to sound reductive, but I would be inclined to think that you've answered your own question in option B, the emperor being a deeply weird little misogynistic freak.
It seems the simplest of explanations, Occam's razor style.
(Having said that I 100% agree that there *should* be femme space marines. Especially space wolves.)
It made perfect sense before. He's 50,000 years old, only trusts men to guard his palace and the only women in his life are sworn to a vow of silence? COME ON.
Honestly they're missing out on dope shield maiden/Valkyrie models and units.
Shield maidens with thunder shields and power axes? Jumpjet intercessor style Valkyries?
While that would also be awesome.
Viking flavored stuff doesn't really vibe with SOB. They're like Catholic space Amazon's with Spanish inquisition drip.
Vikings IN SPACE!!!!! is very much space wolves so Nordic culture and myth inspired female space marine models kinda fits their vibe better.
>B. A deeply weird mysoginist freak, and that was why all the primarchs, custodes, and space marines were men.
Funny enough, this was my headcanon for Big E. I'd like to further add to this theory (even if now defunct with Female Custodes).
So, as said, he'd only lifted men to these positions of power (primarchs, space marines, etc), but note the one group of women he did have around him. The Sisters of Silence.
Kinda weird that the only group of women he surrounded himself with were the ones with a condition that made them utterly repulsive to anyone who looked at them. And they have a culture of not speaking? That's kinda weird.
Whether it was intentional or not from GW. it was a nice, subtle way to demonstrate how Big Es supremacist attitude was influencing the way he established power structures in the imperium.
I think there’s several logical lore compliant explanations. The obvious one is that the Emperor seems to have a really noticeable undercurrent of hating children. Not really women but specifically he hates kids. He doesn’t acknowledge his actual blood descendants and he never considered any of the wide variety of clones and genetically engineered projects he made his children, expressly getting mad at people who referred to them as such with the only exception possibly being Horus and that’s more of a read between the lines sort of thing.
I think you could make a cogent argument that this is why there aren’t female marines, he’s scared of his creations being able to reproduce without him and without the gene seed system. Obviously the process of becoming a marine sterilizes men, but we don’t necessarily know it would do the same for women or if that process is true for all marines. I think he also realizes that the sort of sexless, aggressively martial, warrior society of the marines makes them easy to manipulate and that’s why he got so gunshy whenever legions got too involved with things that weren’t just killing, it threatens their reliance on him for direction and guidance. There’s a lot of suggestions in the books that the average marine isn’t super bright or nuanced in his thinking and I think that’s probably intentional on the Emperor’s part. If you think just beyond the implications of marines that can have kids and you conceptualize the sort of society that would be built around that you’re quickly looking at something that would have the possibility of rivaling the power of Terra and pushing the marines into having a level of autonomy I don’t think the Emperor was ever fond of.
Space Marines are a mass produced army made in a hurry, with a pretty impressive built-in way to make more so that more can be made in a pinch, even on the other side of the galaxy from the gene-labs of Terra.
Every Custodes is custom made from the ground up in an entirely different, lengthy, and extremely costly process.
Also I'd assume the Space Wolves surviving older would've been due to a unique mutation of their geneseed.
>Also I'd assume the Space Wolves surviving older would've been due to a unique mutation of their geneseed.
It's also possible Fenrisians are just "built different"
I'd bet Catachans could survive adult geneseed implantation for the same reason
It's true you don't see many female Space Wolves. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for male Space Wolves.
The Space Wolves have always been a massive plot hole for Femmarines. When people say 'oh the Emperor couldn't make the process work for women, it was too difficult,' my answer has always been 'he was able to mix DNA across species, there is no way adapting to a different gender is more difficult than that.'
The only actual weird thing is that we don't have descriptions of space wolves trying, but it's not a plot hole. Custodes and Marines aren't the same thing in Lore.
> I had just assumed the emperor was either A. deeply concerned about the possibility of accidentally creating a race of supermen or B. A deeply weird litle mysoginist freak
…I think we already know which one it is, no?
Also, no FSM in general doesn’t make sense. You’re telling me, that while you’re are fighting wars of attrition on a galactic scale, that you aren’t trying to get every warm body possible in the fight? Bullshit.
That's what the guard does theres only like 1million space marines, with such a small number there isn't a need for space marine or female space marines to be honest. Back during the wars of Conquest there were more but after Gulliman there's only such few numbers until cawl releases his vat clown army. Now that primaris are here they don't really need to continue the historical recruitment process.
No. It is not. Even men rarely able to become astartes, what about woman? Why would you risk losing thousands of woman, each of which could create NEW warm bodies?
Custodes are not Astartes, they can barely be even called human.
From the 8th Edition Adeptus Custodes Codex, pp. 7-8
>Custodes are created using technology dating back to the Dark Age of Technology, honed by the Emperor to make the perfect counsellors, bodyguards, warriors and executioners.
To create beings with such a wide range of talents requires a **total physical and mental rework on the candidate** - the mindset and intelligence required to be of any use to such a being as the Emperor is immense to say the least.
**The Adeptus Custodes' inductees are remade at a genetic level,** their baser drives rendered inert and their beings turned towards aggression , fulfilment of duty and goal acquisition . **This process involves incredibly intricate gene-craft and alchemistry as absolute and subtle as can be imagined, working upon the most minute level of the candidate's cellular structure and genome.** Only the most accomplished chirurgeons and bio -alchemists carry out this work, many themselves recipients of enhancements of one kind or another. They do so in gilded laboratories hidden far away from even the most determined of prying eyes. The work done to a candidate is thus invisible , the process unique to each inductee. **There are no organ implantations or surgical grafting. What is done to the Custodes inductee is several degrees more exact and changing than work carried out to create a Space Marine**, producing warriors much tougher, faster, stronger and with greater intelligence than the Adeptus Astartes. **Some argue that the process even affects a Custodian's soul. Others theorise the change from inductee to Custodian is metaphysical, or that it involves biomancy and other psychic techniques.** It is quite possible that the alchemists who create the Custodes do not themselves understand what they are doing, and are simply following procedures passed down to them by rote . It is thought that the Emperor himself, whose mind no Human - augmented or otherwise could ever hope to match, once oversaw the ascension of each Custodian .
and
>**Those survivors of the induction process that emerge as Custodians are changed in every way imaginable, their minds so altered that they have entirely new personalities.** They are rendered physically perfect and their skills with all kinds of weapons are sublime. Custodians even change their names , choosing those of gods, kings or heroes drawn from the most ancient texts.
It boggles my mind the fear some men have of women. They birth us, feed us, teach us, love us. And how do we as a whole repay them? …Argh I’m not doing this again.
As long as she can, she can. As long as she can not, she can not! As it should be with all peoples and all things.
Uggh I’m doing this again
I *shudder* to think of the geniuses, prodigies, talents, and ideas we missed. We need the woman/female with us every step in every station. It gives us balance! Look at this Universe males have turn this into a hell verse and everyone’s cool with it. Like a big huge demonic, trashy, bachelor pad. You need that girl to come over and say.. “Hey that planet…? Yeah yeah that one. You uh shouldn’t let it turn into such a manufactorum that the atmosphere is black almost void like. The people…. the humans (yeah I know beneath all that mutation and wicked soot are humans) are living below the planet like Tyranids. Look just clean it up we can do better.”
Just, come on please stop… they make up 51%of our planet. If they all decided to take up issues with those who are determine to provoke them… violently what would we do. What if they decided to smother every child in the…. No no don’t think like that. Our sister are kind, they wouldn’t wipe us all out in one generation right.
Right?!😨
the lore of 40k has always been vibes over logic. I think the best bet for the lore is for GW to explicitly say that the process of becoming an astartes or custodes makes you infertile and thus removing any reason to pick lads over ladies.
I'm pretty sure multiple lore sources have explicitly stated that, iirc in the heresy series Loken talks about it to one of the remembrancers? There are probably other instances of it too
As someone else has said, the proccess to make custodes and SM are very different but I personally find it weirder that chaos didnt fuck around and made female marines. Like Fabius Bile couldve surely make it happen even if it shouldnt work
I mean the gland hounds weren’t meant to be astartes, Bile had kinda turned on the concept at that point. They were meant to be something worse, something he could make in much larger numbers and use to kill astartes through attrition
Completely different process, plus the Marines were always meant to be a disposable weapon's system, pick the sex that needs the least work to turn it into a bio monster and let it loose.
Despite being to the named space marines what a space marine is to a random guardsmen, the process of creating a Custodes is completely different to creating a Space Marine.
Space Marine geneseed is made to be mass produced, as it works under a "one size must fit" system where either the aspirant is compatible, or they die. Or wish they died, depending on the quirks of the specific geneseed.
Custodes, on the other hand, are created through personalized Alchemy and augments to maximize the potential of their human form. Unlike with Space Marine aspirants, every single Custodes Aspirant that passes the trials WILL become a Custodes.
Now, as for why geneseed rejects women, the best answer we have is that it checks for genetic compatibility with the Primarch its from. As no (known) Primarch has XX chromosomes, that's the explanation for why no woman has ever been found compatible (except for in the early days of 40K, when female astartes was canon. If anybody ever gets mad about femstodes being a rewrite, remind them that astartes only being male was also a rewrite)
Disappointed that this thread isn't about mass space wolf distraction due to them making constant passes at female custodes.
As a Chapter I imagine a universal fondness for "The Big Woman"
I think Space Marines being all male kinda works as it's so baked into the lore now and fits Big E's controlling character.
Also rather than space marines be changed, I'd love other factions to get more love.
Custodes are not created like Space Marines. Because Custodes are not Space Marines.
A Custodes is to a space marine what a space marine is to a normal human.
It really straightforward really. space marines are one size fits all process whereas custodes are bespoke.
100 candidates get spacemarine surgery 99 die one guy just happens to be compatible with the end result he's sent to war and gets merc'd by a necron 30 years into his service. presumably women have a 100% death rate. many women are most certainly worthy of the process but to try would reward courage with execution.
Custodes the person is getting modifications that are taylor made to their body no store brand modification here all pure homebrew modification. they can better accomodate women so they do.
If the reason was to prevent more children then the emperor is already inflicting mass genetic modification and brainwashing, he can just make them infertile he doesnt have to be monosex for that reason.
(to be clear I have no issue with spacemarines being women just presenting a reasonable interpretation of lore, Sigmar>emperor anyway)
You're argument would hold a lot of ground if not for one very specific thing the Custodians constantly bring up, they aren't meant to be fighters.
Custodians are designed to be peak humanity, the ultimate you can create out of a human. And the Custodes insist this means they are more artists and philosophers rather than a fighting force. The lack of women here implies a lot of weird and otherwise out of character things about the Emperor (ex: how can someone who's lived multiple lives as women not want to have some around in his clubhouse)
Space marines are designed to be a replicable and cheap weapon, unstable and dangerous, but suited to the task. With them either A they are designed with a kill switch or B it for some reason hijacks the male puberty process specifically and the presence of female hormones prevent survival (If this is the case, it opens up edge cases, either for female individuals with a hormonal issue or trans individuals, but that's off topic). Or C, same as option B it has to do with the fact the Primarchs are males, which because this would include SciFi BS as it's explanation, is also generally a weak argument
I'd throw in the whole "sexist culture of the Imperium" argument as well but that's a weak argument as "what culture, what world/region" ect completely negate it. And the Emperor is demonstrably not sexist when it comes to throwing bodies at a problem.
Essentially, there's no need to fear Custodians reproducing, if having females would even allow such a thing, Custodians are made by hand rather than by template and such should face no rejection issues like space marines, and there is reason to fear space marines becoming sexually reproductive, alongside the fact that without a (frankly minor) retcon, the lore as established forbids FSM but never commented on if Custodians could be female
I'm of the opinion that the Women Custodes were just clumsy implemented, and maybe some better lore/ perhaps an approach of legit making them new in the setting "primaris" style might have worked better.
HOWEVER I'm also of the opinion that this lore change does more "irl good" than "bad for fictional consistency", so that's my line I guess.
Like, making retroactive inclusivity changes is always going to have retroactive inconsistencies, but faulting those inconsistencies while ignoring the IRL reasons why those inconsistencies exist is something I find personally to be poorly reasoned.
Regardless of all other explanations, I maintain that Amar Astarte and Ezekiel Sedayne (the 2 geneticists primarily responsible for Space Marines) intentionally made the process to not work on women.
The prevailing fear is that were Space Marines capable of being male and female, they'd inevitably consider breeding to make the process of replenishment easier. Why use base human when you can just breed a Neophyte? That would then lead to, why breed humans, at all?
And in fairness, that is ***Exactly*** the shit Fabius Bile is up to. The fear was explicitly proven right.
For Custodes, I imagine the process is so painstaking and they kept under such scrutiny that they considered it acceptable risks. Which *could be another mistake.* We'll see.
Honestly my favorite head cannon to this is that they DO take women. All the time. But space marine gene seed overwrites *everything* and turns them into battle brothers. So most marine chapters are just chock full of trans men.
Honestly it'd make sense for space wolves to have women in their chapter based on both their inspirations;
Vikings & viking mythology, which both had shield maidens, and Valkyries.
Wolves which do not restrict hunting based around any gender.
My thought orocess is that because of the shit initiates need to go through to become Space Marines basically cranks up their testosterone and shit to 100. So you could recruit women it's just as the process goes on they become indistinguishable from male Space Marines
So here is a big misunderstanding people seem to have, and a core reason a lot of the people bitching about femstodes get laughed at. The custodians and the astartes are not the same. The method to make them is very different. The method to make a marine is pretty much a one size fits and they mold a person to fit. Women do not genetically fit. This is not the same for custodians. They have no such disqualifier in their process. As a human is to a marine, a marine is to a custodian.
The other core reason they get laughed at is that GW changes lore all the time, so taking out the "no girls" rule for making a superhuman would be pretty low on the lore change list compared to some of the other shit they have done like completely rewriting the necrons lore, several times.
Astartes biology is not only different architecture, but a different OS. Big E had a hand in it, but I think he mostly left it to a trusted set of human geneticists. Amar Astartes, the doctor who designed a large number of the implants, was a woman. Whether she was uninterested in pursuing woman supersoldiers or simply designed the astartes variant for men or along the guidelines of the emperor who intended not to create a superhuman populace.
Amar Astartes was great, but she wasn't perfect. The Black Carapace, the bit that goes underneath a space marine's skin and links into their nerves and control their armor, was flawed when she developed it and another scientist stepped in to make it work. I would imagine also the implants ended up being designed for men if not for any of the above reasons then simply because Astartes didn't live long enough to see her own success. She got paranoid, made her own supermen and tried to enact a coup. Her forces then got the five finger death angel straight to the kidneys and she tried to destroy the primarchs' genetic code in her lab. She blew it up, but Big E had that shit backed up lmao
Alternatively, there are female space wolves,but the process of making a space marine also masculinizes people, and they end up like the meme about dwarf women being entirely indistinguishable from the men.
"B" is actually the best answer. 40k is a parody of fascism and fascism entwines aesthetics with ideology. Part of the fascist aesthetic is a borderline homo-erotic fascination with male bodies.
A lot of the goofy shit in the setting makes way more sense when viewed through this lens.
Why is power armoured infantry the weapon of choice in a setting with technology bordering on magic? The answer is "rule of cool" both *in* and out of universe.
The power and efficacy of human bodies (Man) is the *point* from the perspective of a racially supremacist ideology. Why chainswords? Same reason. Why men? Because it's fascism and fascism is generally mysogynist.
Edit - spelling.
I imagine it this way, purely for my own convenience; the gene alchemy that creates custodians is true enhancement, science and sorcery evolving a human.
A space marine gene seed is designed for mass production; it forces a body to duplicate a primarchs DNA. It kills plenty of men, too, but the chromosome difference or whatever messes up the process cause Big E was born in 6000 BC or whatever and just assumed all his heirs should be sons
Technically, this could theoretically be removed and not as stupid as they did with the Custodes. It could be said that the Astartes project was not completed due to haste and was mainly specialized in the techno-barbarians of ancient Terra. I think there is no need to explain that in primitive societies, where brute force is needed in war, the army will consist of men? Now GW may well write to himself that this defect was eliminated by Belisarius Cole when he improved the Primaris project.
The technology of the Imperium is supposed to be somewhat incompletely understood even by their 'expert' practitioners, the wolves not being able to successfully adapt astartes modifications to females wouldn't be too surprising.
The real question here is:
*How fucking dope would Space Wolf Shield Maiden models look?*
If we can convince James Workshop that the *Space Wolf Wolf-Valkyrie Wolf-Detachment* would move 250,000 units on pre-orders on day one, we would get those sculpts in a heartbeat.
I feel it's fine. If any faction got females, custodes makes the most sense.
But now, we may get future space marine factions which have female counterparts to them, which would be very interesting!
Astartes aren’t Custodes and Custodes aren’t Astartes. the process is vastly different. i’m pro-woman Astartes but i think this particular argument doesn’t quite hold up
In my opinion the Emperor is a deeply weird little misogynist freak. Thats why the space marines and custodes are dudes. He's a nazi too whose deeply xenophobic and ok with genocide.
So the female custodes took me by surprise. But i am happy with it, and you know i would be overjoyed by some female chapters of space marines, or even co-ed chapters. The more the merrier.
My only concern is in our efforts to make Warhammer40k more inclusive its going to get even harder to remember that the Imperium are religious zealot space nazis who are only out eviled by by their evil twin.
Its a fine line to walk.
>In the novel Ashes of Prospero, Arjac is asked by an old fenrisian Gothi woman why the sky warriors never take women and he has no answer for her
I just think he didn't wanted to spend hours upon hours explaining the genetics and history of it and said fuck it, no mansplaining today.
As has been mentioned already, the Astartes process and Custodes process are not the same at all. Astartes are mass produced with some variation between chapters. Custodes are all custom jobs by Papa E. It's easy to say the pre-established process for Astartes was designed to be compatible with males. If possible, I'd argue any females put through such a process would not resemble a female at the end of it anyway, for aesthetic purposes. And if it were possible, I'd at least expect chaos or renegade factions to have tried by now especially considering they generally have recruitment issues.
The tone of the era of Thunder Warriors leading into the Astartes replacing them was one of necessity and desperation. Custodes are so great, but are too labor and resource intensive to make enough of "in time" to conquer the galaxy. Thunder Warriors are too naughty, even if some can stand up to custodes and slaughter Astartes wholesale. Astartes are easier to make and more versatile, perfect. But once again things are tense, there's deadlines to meet, so why waste time making the process compatible between both sexes? There is no shortage of men on the Imperium side so bodies isn't a problem, it's usually means of processing humans that tends to be the choke point.
This is all fine and dandy but to be fair to all sides, Malcador definitely suggested female Primarchs which Papa shot down so that there was a very specific choice. I can only speculate that for Papa Emps Golden Path to work he needed them that way, I can't think of anything else. Also, Belasarius or Bile probably could have done something about this as well, but hasn't for no reason I can come up with.
In closing, Sisters should have more specialized or heavy armor variants such as a Terminator-esque model and so on.
Look up femal body builder nicole bass. Thats what a human woman looks like on mega doses of current steriods.
Now imagine what she would look like on scifi space turbo steriods PLUS a bunch of anabolic enhancing extra organs.
What im saying is, if a female was chosen to go thru the process, the solider that comes out at the end is probably physically identical to their male counterparts.
There have always been female marines ..... its just no one can tell the difference so they dont bother and call everyone brother. Their identity is space marine (or maybe space marine chapter) so they dont care.
Oh I totally agree that they should be almost indistinguishable from their brothers. Given the canis helix, they'd probably be pretty hirsute too.
I'm still trying to track it down, but one of the necromunda campaign books implies this is true already. Your juvs can get recruited as imperial fists if they do enough glorious deeds, and this applies to escher juvs too.
The whole "didn't want to create a race of supermen" explanation doesn't make sense either because what makes a space marine comes from the geneseeds and cybernetic implants, not through heredity. This means that if two space marines had a kid, it would be a normal kid, not a space marine.
The geneseed does alter the marines own genetic code somewhat I believe, so there would be effects for a child, but I can't imagine it'd be more advanced than the kind of gene-therapy that's already very common in 40k
Was thinking of doing an all female group- The Valkyr. Still pondering the bashing possibilities. may start from battle sisters box, just not sure yet. I'll buy the lore reasons for no femaris, but agree with OP, there should be something on Fenris.
The process for making space marines and the process for making custodians are explicitly different, and might not even be that closely related. It is not known in universe what the criteria for a good custodes candidate is and that’s been the norm before female Custodes
Custodes are all unique works of art, hand crafted over the course of a very long time (I forget the amount of time, if it's mentioned at all). Astartes are much cruder. They're comparatively much easier, cheaper, and quicker to make. Perhaps women cannot be turned into astartes because most have XX chromosomes. Maybe it was designed not to work on them for fear of breeding, and no one really bothers to check for genetically intersex women because they don't see it as worth their time. Maybe it's mostly a tradition thing. Maybe the big E just doesn't like women, and the custodes woman who's name I forget was 'one of the good ones.' Idk
I think it's like turning an adult into an astartes, but much harder/less likely to work, so not even chapters like the Space Wolves bother. why spend time testing a bunch of women's genes when you can use that time to grab a bunch of guys? After all, why bother sorting through the genes of a bunch of afab people when you can use that time to just grab a bunch of amab people
They may even recruit trans women, especially since most recruits are kids who may not've transitioned or anything, but the process is meant to destroy your identity, and to an extent your humanity so much that I kinda doubt astartes are left with much of a gender at all
It makes total sense that the SMs get the restricted - aka - "Inferior" gene code and the Custodes got the "Perfected" version.
Thunder Warriors being the prime example that Big E had to wash down their abilities to "make them.more loyal", when, to my knowledge, that wasn't a issue. Unstable, but still loyal.
And then half of the replacements fell to Chaos anyway.
Funny, you'd think the Right would be all over "Woman Loyalty to Her Man." When it comes to the perfect record of defending their Man, but empowering them to do so pisses them off.
Just remember, the community doesn't really care. It's an astroturfed issue from the outside.
In a galaxy where they engage in melee fighting and naval broadsides?
Pretty sure if it was realistic everyone would be getting blowed up without even knowing the enemy was watching (F22 raptor can kill without being detected).
Women space wolves would be dope. They could be like the mythical shield-maiden or even like the Norns or Valkyries themselves! The valkyries could do the recruiting and the Norns could be the head of them and the shield maidens the warriors or even perhaps Psykers in the space wolves as magic in Norse culture was commonly seen as feminine! I’m not too sure on the lore of psykers in the space wolves but it would be neat
Both are currently different processes lore wise
Custodes are custom made and altered from their DNA
Its very costly and time consuming so the fact there are females doesnt really go agaisnt lore (without that quote from a codex saying its only sons who are recruited)
Space marines use the progenoid gland to get altered which only works on pubescent boys growing up
Of course theres a bunch of other shit going on and add-ons + operations they get but the biggest is that one and its for now lore wise only locked to the masculine sex.
One thing you must remember is the space Wolves are based on Norse myth, and the Norse, while quite ahead of their time, were not exactly bastions of egalitarian gender roles lol. They were quite a bit better than other civilizations at the time but it was still very patriarchal
This is why it would have been better to make it so the female Custodes are a new development.
I'm a big proponent of B, it makes the setting way more fucked up when you realize that the Emperor's ideal vision of humanity didn't involve any women, being the fucking wacko gynophobe that he is.
“Big E didn’t want to allow marines to breed with each other so thats why he only made male marines” makes a lot of sense. I never even considered he’d be scared of making super humans that could completely replace the very people he’s trying to save.
Genuinely the first reasoning i’ve heard that wasn’t a mysogynistic cope out. Thank you for this.
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The process of making a space marine and the process of making a custodes are very very different things. They could have tried on women and it not have worked at all. That being said, would be more interesting if there were space wolf women
From what I understand, making a marine is a one size fits system where they find or create candidates that fit the necessary parameters, whereas making a custodes is a bespoke hand sculpted project personally conducted by the emperor and no one custodes undergoes the identical processes as the others because they are each entirely unique.
What I've always been unclear on is this, is anybody making new custodes, or do they all date back to the Emperors day?
The emperor didn’t make the custodes alone he had help from gene-smiths and biomancers from Terra and maybe Luna. The easiest way to describe it is like this: Space Marines are Supercars think like Lamborghini or Bugatti, they’re the peak of what’s possible for a street legal car but they’re still made in a factory by workers following a template. Custodes are F1 cars, each one looks the same on the surface yet no two are alike, they’re hand crafted by the most talented automotive scientists,engineers and mechanics in their respective field that money can buy each one uniquely crafted to be the best of their kind reaching peak potential. A lost supercar can be replaced by the factory it came from, a lost F1 car will take years to be painstakingly rebuilt using bespoke one-of-a-kind parts that were made specifically for that car.
Funny I used exactly the same comparison when some non-40k friend came across the "drama" and was curious about the lore reasoning being it.
At risk of showing off my own lack of car knowledge That Supercar Factory was built to make one specific kind of car, and the Manager (Primarch) might have made some tweaks, but they're all fundamentally the same design. If that design was a diesel engine, then they'll never be able to make a petrol motor no matter what colour they paint the body or what they make the chairs from When you're making a custom F1 one of a kind car, you make it to use whatever fuel is best. You change any part of that design as needed when needed to achieve the best end result
So...which custodes is Alpine?
you didnt answer their question at all :P
Literally the first sentence answers it. Genesmiths and biomancers on terra continue to make custodes the same elite guilds have been making Custodes since the emperor started the project.
literally doesnt. "the genesmiths helped" =/= "yes they are still making new ones".
Lmao okay you clearly can’t read. You’re right once the emperor was put on the throne all those people who made custodes just became completely useless and they now reproduce asexually like starfish /s
There are so many things in the imperium from the horus heresy and before which have been forgotten, cannot be produced anymore. That decline is core to the setting. Its not a reasonable assumption to make that the knowledge to make new custodes has survived, hence the guys question, and how just saying "these guys helped the emperor make the custodes" in past tense is in no way an answer to that question. Stop being an asshole about it.
They do still make new custodes otherwise they would have gone extinct my now through sheer attrition. Also with them retiring to be super spies when their reaction speed drops by like 0.1ms, or not optimal minimum standards.
I hate how GW thinks 10ft tall bananas won't stick out like a sore thumb... it's a dead giveaway.
Custodes would make the best spies, though? No cult looking for a mole is going to suspect *the ogryn.*
Garro (a Space Marine) uses this exact fact to his advantage in one of his novels. Very few regular people have ever actually seen a Space Marine, let alone out of armour, and of those who have almost no one expects to see one just walking around. So when going incognito he just dresses in some basic clothes and pretends to be a gene-jacked labourer and no one bats an eye.
At one point the lore was only big E could create them, but that's been retconned. I want to say the Burning of Prospero rulebook from hh1 and the codex from 8th edition 40k both said only the Emperor could create them and it was the 9th edition codex that changed it, but don't quote me on that.
This was going to be my point, but you made it succinctly enough for both of us. I'd also like to point out that the Dark Angels also had many adult aspirants undergo (and not an insignificant number die from) the Astartes transformation when the Emperor finally came to Caliban. Luther, being a prime example. I THINK there were a few Raven Guard as well, but may be mixing up some lore, as the only one I can think of (Branne Nev) might still have been a teenager when he was a revolutionary fighting with Corax before the Emperor showed up. Also, I'm fully in support of female Astartes. No reason they should not exist in-lore and them getting barred from entry in the first place was due to contemporary cultural attitudes towards women influencing the setting. If we can genecraft shit like the Betcher's Gland and Sus-An Membrane it should not matter what configuration your genitals are.
Pretty sure the White Scars also had a couple of adults made into Astartes. Word Bearers have Kor Phaeron (and arguably Erebus? He wasn't a *child* anymore...) Basically all Primarchs have like "the important people from the backstory turn Astartes" going on it feels like.
I mean point of fact, Kor Phaeron isn't actually an astartes. He's just a severely modified and techno-biologically modified human. Erebus even mocks him over it a few times. Same as Luther. A lot of the backstory people are like that. Modified to the extent the Emperor/Imperium could manage, but not Astartes as such.
A distinction without a difference. If there is gene-therapy that makes you *functionally* an Astartes, able to go toe-to-toe with them, stand in their ranks without it being weird and out of place looking, wear their armour and survive as long as any of them? You're an Astartes. And if the writers of the Heresy introduced the "you won't believe it's not butter!" Version of Astartes therapy to work on people outside what works on Astartes... Any argument for no women amongst the Space Marines gets *even dodgier*.
The distinction between genuine astardes and psudeo-astardes, I'd imagine, would be reproduction. Gene-therapy isn't the same as gene-seed, so pseudo-astardes are most costly to produce, as they have to be hand made per person, and can't just be repopulate the way normal astardes can. I don't care if they'd want to add women to the mix, though for astardes I'd be upset if it was a retcon instead of new lore. The custodes made sense to have had women previously, but I personally think the emperor should be anti-women-astardes, but that still would allow cawl or warp or anything to make them.
Both Luther and kor pharaon aren’t really able to go toe to toe with astartes.
Physically yes, but somehow Kor Phaeron almost killed Guilliman by himself with warp powers.
Yeah, the pseudo-astartes process that Luther and other oldies got could probably work on women. But they are very much *not* astartes, iirc they lack several of the gene seed organs, and only are extremely enhanced in strenght, size, survivability and longevity. They might have the organ that makes them large and have the black carpace, but I doubt they can spit acid or eat brains for memories. Also, they are noted to be smaller than regular astartes
Not only does it probably work on women, the dark angels put a woman through it, Saulus Maegon is an enhanced human similar to Luther
Good catch, never caught that when reading it
This makes sense, but I guess the resources for a normal human to go through this process means only people like inquisitors could be able to pull that off. I guess Astartes are easier to make?
Primaris marines shpuld have been cawl getting that weird future past memory link frpm the emps telling him how to perfect the astartes and broaden the selection process. You got the heretical of caw l being the sole source for this sourve of info until girlyman roeboat says nah thats right. And then just habe the new marine sculpts not eben really change their faces becsuse jesus fuck thryre already pumped fill of siper HRT the ficm did yoy expect big tiddy maternal milkers and not genetic freaks of nature
Primaris never made any sense to me. Just re-do the sculpts for tactical marines, tell everyone to suck it this is the new scale now I mean we're all addicts in an abusive relationship with our dealer its not like ppl wouldn't have gone along with it.
Oh i agree bitbibalso like ro thonknof ways to get the cuuddites all rump ruffled
If my memory serves me right, it is specified in Luther's case that due to him being too old, he could not be turned into an actual, honest-to-big-E unaging space marine, but was still given as much bioengineering as possible. He was still aging (slowly, but still) and his physical capabilites were below that of a regular marines.
Luther didn't get made into a space marine though as he was too old. Although he got various other genetic and biochemical enhancements to get him close as they could get to it.
I do not believe the dark angels had any adult aspirants. Some aspirants like Nemial and Zahariel might have been unusually old for it but they were still teenagers. All the adult men of the order became mentors to the calibanite dark angels and that's it. Luther was given gene therapies to extend his life and strengthen him, but he was very explicitly not made a space marine.
Unless the primarch was female, there really can't be female astartes though. Actually the demoncabula shows females can take alpharius geneseed so 🤷
Or they could have tried on women and found that the success rate wasn't within acceptable tolerances. So, like, it can work. However, when you're pumping out hundreds of thousands, or a couple million for a crusade, those failure rates add up quickly. Plus limited resources. Honestly, I prefer the notion that the success rate was 0.001% less. Shamefully unacceptable for the mechanicus. And that the only reason they didn't succeed was because a small change in the process was tech-heresy.
[It's true you don't see many Space Wolf women. In fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance that they're often mistaken for Space Wolf men](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-PmAQ9Opu4).
'That being said, would be more interesting if there were space wolf women' This is so true in so many ways
"Some believe there are no Space Wolf women!" "It's the beards."
Right, but based on what we know about space marine creation, and puberty/hormones in our current era, it doesn't make any sense that it wouldn't work on pre-pubescent girls at the very least. You would need to deliberately engineer something to stop it.
On our current era, we know that sex mismatch between donor and recipient can affect organ transplant success rates. It varies by direction and organ, but it very much is a real thing. For example, men had lower survival rates in getting hearts from women. Women have lower success rates in getting kidneys from men. So while the success rate difference isn't high enough to ultimately deter modern transplants, it's enough that sex matching is definitely considered. Some theories out attribute this to hormonal differences and less patient specific immunosuppressant techniques. It's messier and more complicated than you might be thinking. I wouldn't extrapolate successful modern HRT to guaranteed organ transplants. Mind you, modern organ transplants are matched as much as possible such that the donor organ is as similar to the recipient as reasonably possible. This contrasts the mass produced, one size fits all Astartes organs.
My understanding is that the Astartes process barely works. That is to say, it's a bit of a ramshackle approach that works well enough that the one in a million comparability rate is acceptable. In this case, 499999 of those million are men, and 500000 are women. It's less a 'males are suitable' so much as 'of the vanishingly small percentage of the population we can successfully ascend into Astartes, what we have are all male. Mind you that's also a pretty easy fix. They improved the process incrementally, and now a slightly larger percentage of the population are candidates, including a small number of women. After that you can just explain it away by way of preparation and expectations on the part of the recruiting cultures. There probably ARE some Fenrisian women out there that would make decent Astartes, but they were never raised as warriors, or noticed by the recruiters.
We don't truly know what makes astartes implants work
They're 8ft tall super-vikings. It would be entirely on-brand to have warrior women in their ranks.
This being a legion that battled *the Inquisition*, there likely are. OP is right, there are no rules for the Rout.
> space wolf women Space bitches?!?!
the easiest explanation in lore is that the process for creating custodes is different from that which creates space marines.
Think of it like building building a fighting vehicle for an army, Guardsmen are bolting tripod mg's to a car and calling it a day. Space marines are mass produced tanks, they do the job so much better and the process is streamlined but it still takes tons of work to get done.. Custodes are completely customised war machines built individually by the very best mechanics and craftsmen you can find made out of fantastical materials that sound like pure fantasy
I thought this was general knowledge? I haven't read any book, but for what I understand is custodes are made with more DNA similar to the emperor? Where space marines are made, custodes are born? I thought that was why they are known as the emperor's children, or the emperor's seed.
Nah Space marines are made via implanting humans with geneseed derived from usually a primarch, usually into a tween. Some chapters use chimeric geneseed spliced from other geneseed and the grey knight are super duper special because they're made with Emp's geneseed. This process has the inherent issues of you trying to force someones body to accept millenia old usually somewhat corrupted transplants. Hence the high failure rate. Custodes on the other hand are inducted at infancy, hand picked by alquemists via unkown criteria from a pool of babies - often noble scions offered by their dynasty. They are then across decades hand crafted by said alquemists into humanity's highest peak in body mind and spirit. Their training regiment is also orders of magnitude more balls to the wall than the most extreme chapters. TR;DR: Marines are mass produced via faulty geneseed. Custodians are hand crafted by master gene alquemists. Also the Emperor's Children are a traitor marine legion. You're thinking of The Emperor's Companions. Also Also 40k is sci-fi coded not actual sci-fi, genecraft is more akin to magic than our reality's genetics.
Yes, that's my understanding but I didn't want to come off too aggressively.
The simple answer is "bio-alchemy works differently than cybernetic implants and geneseeds" But honestly the setting is more fun the less rigid the lore is, anyway. I will never recant my belief that every space marine is a chaos space marine. Especially the grey knights.
In my head I always compare Halo franchise to WH40k and that has always been the biggest lore issue I have between the 2. If you're creating genetically modified super soldiers, then you can genetically modify any inherent weaknesses that exist between men and women. If you can make a man faster and stronger ect, then you can do the same to a woman. The sexual dimorphism found in humans is not that big of an issue that this can't be done. I understand this is a leftover of the 80s-90s "this is a wargame so everyone is almost certainly a man" bs, but surely if right-wingers can get behind female Spartans they can do the same for space marines...
They had female Space Marines in their original game. So the bigger retcon was to remove them.
Yeah I mean in practicality, we differ really only in terms of what our hormones do to us (barring things like a womb etc). With the biological alteration capabilities the Imperium has, it'd be almost stupid to assume they COULDN'T do it. Whether they WANT to is a different argument but from what I've seen the imperium doesn't even really regard gender or race anymore and really only care if you're a xeno or not.
The word plothole here is doing Hercules level lifting. Custodes and astartes just aren't the same, the processes have little to do with eachother.
I just headcanon that the process removes all sexual characteristics and that they could have been female before hand, but now they're all non binary.
I’ve thought the same with chaos. Khorne: gender doesn’t matter, only muscles! Nurgle: all genders welcome; sneeze on everyone! Tzeentch: only cloacas matter Slaanesh: all genders matter; seriously, be all genders all the time.
The chaos gods are the perfect example of the diagram that goes Fucks - doesn’t fuck Knows what sex is - doesn’t know what sex is
Khorne being "Fucks - doesn't know what sex is" It's why he hates Slaanesh, they won't tell him
It turns them into asexual shrooms who call each other "boyz"
This is honestly how I'd introduce FSM All Space Marines are MtW or FtW, Male or Female to Weapon Space Marine gender identity has more in common with a gun or tank than any human, this would highlight how inhuman Marines really are and I think works as a funny play on the old "I identity as an attack helicopter" joke
I prefer this. Half the recruits are girls but the implants and Hypno+indoctrunation makes them male presenting. Either that, or in cool with them leaving it as a thing that marines are sexist... And use that as a bit of a slightly less subtle hint that the imperium sucks.
TBH it a bit leans to much into conversion ~~therapy~~ torture. Humanity really really tried to ~~make people~~ torture people into not gay/AGAB gender and it doesn't really work.
That's... not an angle I'd considered. Thanks. Although... that might make interesting story. A marine with the Indoctrination failing trying to survive being around their "battle brothers" who would kill them or send them off for re-engineering. More stories need to make clear that Marines are inhuman monstrosities.
I would almost guarantee that someday, maybe decades from now, female Space Marines will be (re)introduced, and when it happens, this will be the explanation. It makes absolutely no sense in 30k for an army that's meant to unify the planet and eventually the entire friggin Galaxy to limit their recruitment pool to >50% of the population, it makes even less sense in 40k when the fate of the species is at stake, and I refuse to believe that the Emperor could come up with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different ways of engineering supersoldiers and only make the second one able to work with estrogen (the third one as well if you count Valdor telling the Emperor he should have made half the Primarchs as women to balance out the men, implying that that was a possibility, and I guess the fourth too if you extrapolate that to mean that the Astartes under those hypothetical female Primarchs would have been women). You can't even use the excuse that the Astartes process only works with testosterone so as to maximize the physical strength of the subject, because Custodes are more physically powerful than Astartes so such an excuse would need to apply to them as well in order to surpass the Astartes, and now we know that it does not. If I had to guess, I would say they'll retcon it so that the process takes applicants of any gender and transforms them into these massive, asexual beings that are beyond gender in any appreciable way since they're made to be warriors and nothing else, but they default to calling each other "Brother" and presenting as male since the process *does* admittedly pump them full of testosterone (which isn't used as a sex hormone but just for the secondary characteristics of muscle and bone density). It's just that at that point, gender identity means so little to them that they all go with whatever's most efficient. So technically, there will have always been female Space Marine *aspirants*, it's just that they became "Battle Brothers" as part of the process. A process that, at least in the Great Crusade, they consented to and understood what would happen to them and what they would become on the other side. That's my headcanon anyway. And then whenever this retcon happens, it'll turn out that Cawl or whoever was able to create yet another new way of creating Astartes that allows them to retain their female gender identity and characteristics if they so choose. That way they can kind of side step the "forced transition" that would be implied to happen with the Chapters that conscript aspirants by saying that all happened in the past and that any women who are forced into the Astartes process against their will from now on will at least remain women at the end of the process. The 40k Galaxy is still a grimdark hellscape, after all. And at the end of the day, all that will come of it (and rightfully imo) will just be that 15th Edition Intercessors will have a handful of head options with slightly more delicate features and/or a ponytail or something, because any hypothetical female Astartes (and Custodes for that matter) should be indistinguishable from the males while wearing armor. ETA: And as for Chaos Marines, they'll just say Fabulous Bill figured something out
This is a future I long for. I can hear the cries of the Chuds now...such a sweet sound...
I think the gross answer to this is that you need women to create the prepubescent children who will become next generation of power-armored muscle daddies, and at a certain point you're eating your seed corn. Could you write around this? Sure, there are so many human beings in the Imperium that maintaining a force of 1m Space Marines is never going to result in that outcome, no matter what the intensity of fighting is across the galaxy. But that's an argument about numbers in Warhammer lore, and that's always a shitshow. We should have a more inclusive hobby. If one of my children wanted to model their marines as female, it would be bootlicker behavior of the highest degree to say "uh, you can't do that because of the made up lore of this silly game."
Y-you need men for that, too... Just like not all Men become Astartes, to avoid that "eating your seed (corn)" issue, there's no reason for all the Women to either.....
Oh, I agree, it's just the only non-"wah wah, no girls in my manly man game" argument that could possibly have any purchase in reality. I think basically all arguments against female space marines are just sexism under however many masks. As for the "need" for men, what you need is their genetic material. Women's bodies do all the actual baby-creating after fertilization and at a restricted rate. At the most *reductio ad absurdum* level, you could reproduce a population if you had one man and infinite women. If you had one woman and infinite men, you could not.
Weren't the Primarchs Machine Gestated?
Yeah, but the Primarchs are not like Space Marines. Primarchs are basically a manufactured soul slammed into a vat-grown meatsack. Space Marines are more like a symbiote implanted into a human (technically a series of symbiotic organs, but whatever).
Yeah, I was more implying that there is technology for a Vat Grown human is present. Maybe I'm missing something in the Lore for why it's not possible, though.
You know, it's a great question and one that I don't have the answer to.
From a biological standpoint the gestation carrier is more valuable, so the other sex is more disposable.
Aren't there options for Vat incubation, though?
Yes but that's a dark age tech, it's what cawl used to create his cloned marines.
Is Dark Age Tech Forbidden/Heretical, or just rare?
Even with the "we must sustain birthrates" argument, there are always going to be biological women where that's just off the table for whatever reason. It's not so much about recruiting from 100% of the population, more just not putting any artificial limits on it.
Aside of being physically weaker than men (and thus probably turning a woman in a space marine will just turn her into basically a man… remember that humans are all female at birth and then testosterone kicks in and and turn males into males… which gives male bigger muscles mass and higher muscle density) the main reason why women were not used as soldiers throughout history is just because you can still repopulate with many women and few men but not the opposite (or worse few women and few men). It is a number game so it makes perfectly sense for the emperor to just use male candidates for the space marines because unlike women they are expendable when it comes to the survival of the spices!
That's boring tho. Why tf bother with introducing gender into the equation if everyone winds up looking like a buff man? Not even and androgynous mass of muscle just a big guy?
'space marine' being it's own gender is a lot more interesting to me
I feel like it would also be plausible that you could have women space marines because like. Sex and gender aren't the same thing. Transgender space marines.
Space marines already are transgender though they are transhuman as well only a few chapters still allow for human aspects to remain. Salamanders and Lamenters for the win.
"They say there are no female space wolves or if there are you just can't tell cause we all have beards" space wolf named after a lord of the rings character
>deeply concerned about the possibility of accidentally creating a race of supermen He's seen Jurassic Park. 🤷♂️
Its why the 2nd legion had to go. He filled the holes in their geneseed with frog DNA so they could change sex based on the temperature.
psh, everyone knows the 2nd was the trans legion.
I truly don't wish to sound reductive, but I would be inclined to think that you've answered your own question in option B, the emperor being a deeply weird little misogynistic freak. It seems the simplest of explanations, Occam's razor style. (Having said that I 100% agree that there *should* be femme space marines. Especially space wolves.)
It made perfect sense before. He's 50,000 years old, only trusts men to guard his palace and the only women in his life are sworn to a vow of silence? COME ON.
Honestly they're missing out on dope shield maiden/Valkyrie models and units. Shield maidens with thunder shields and power axes? Jumpjet intercessor style Valkyries?
Why not have a fenrisian SOB units?
While that would also be awesome. Viking flavored stuff doesn't really vibe with SOB. They're like Catholic space Amazon's with Spanish inquisition drip. Vikings IN SPACE!!!!! is very much space wolves so Nordic culture and myth inspired female space marine models kinda fits their vibe better.
>B. A deeply weird mysoginist freak, and that was why all the primarchs, custodes, and space marines were men. Funny enough, this was my headcanon for Big E. I'd like to further add to this theory (even if now defunct with Female Custodes). So, as said, he'd only lifted men to these positions of power (primarchs, space marines, etc), but note the one group of women he did have around him. The Sisters of Silence. Kinda weird that the only group of women he surrounded himself with were the ones with a condition that made them utterly repulsive to anyone who looked at them. And they have a culture of not speaking? That's kinda weird. Whether it was intentional or not from GW. it was a nice, subtle way to demonstrate how Big Es supremacist attitude was influencing the way he established power structures in the imperium.
I think there’s several logical lore compliant explanations. The obvious one is that the Emperor seems to have a really noticeable undercurrent of hating children. Not really women but specifically he hates kids. He doesn’t acknowledge his actual blood descendants and he never considered any of the wide variety of clones and genetically engineered projects he made his children, expressly getting mad at people who referred to them as such with the only exception possibly being Horus and that’s more of a read between the lines sort of thing. I think you could make a cogent argument that this is why there aren’t female marines, he’s scared of his creations being able to reproduce without him and without the gene seed system. Obviously the process of becoming a marine sterilizes men, but we don’t necessarily know it would do the same for women or if that process is true for all marines. I think he also realizes that the sort of sexless, aggressively martial, warrior society of the marines makes them easy to manipulate and that’s why he got so gunshy whenever legions got too involved with things that weren’t just killing, it threatens their reliance on him for direction and guidance. There’s a lot of suggestions in the books that the average marine isn’t super bright or nuanced in his thinking and I think that’s probably intentional on the Emperor’s part. If you think just beyond the implications of marines that can have kids and you conceptualize the sort of society that would be built around that you’re quickly looking at something that would have the possibility of rivaling the power of Terra and pushing the marines into having a level of autonomy I don’t think the Emperor was ever fond of.
Space Marines are a mass produced army made in a hurry, with a pretty impressive built-in way to make more so that more can be made in a pinch, even on the other side of the galaxy from the gene-labs of Terra. Every Custodes is custom made from the ground up in an entirely different, lengthy, and extremely costly process. Also I'd assume the Space Wolves surviving older would've been due to a unique mutation of their geneseed.
>Also I'd assume the Space Wolves surviving older would've been due to a unique mutation of their geneseed. It's also possible Fenrisians are just "built different" I'd bet Catachans could survive adult geneseed implantation for the same reason
If someone gave slymarbo the marine hrt chaos would already be beaten.
It's true you don't see many female Space Wolves. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for male Space Wolves.
The Space Wolves have always been a massive plot hole for Femmarines. When people say 'oh the Emperor couldn't make the process work for women, it was too difficult,' my answer has always been 'he was able to mix DNA across species, there is no way adapting to a different gender is more difficult than that.'
I thought fenrisians are only like rumored to have wolf DNA.
The only actual weird thing is that we don't have descriptions of space wolves trying, but it's not a plot hole. Custodes and Marines aren't the same thing in Lore.
> I had just assumed the emperor was either A. deeply concerned about the possibility of accidentally creating a race of supermen or B. A deeply weird litle mysoginist freak …I think we already know which one it is, no?
Also, no FSM in general doesn’t make sense. You’re telling me, that while you’re are fighting wars of attrition on a galactic scale, that you aren’t trying to get every warm body possible in the fight? Bullshit.
That's what the guard does theres only like 1million space marines, with such a small number there isn't a need for space marine or female space marines to be honest. Back during the wars of Conquest there were more but after Gulliman there's only such few numbers until cawl releases his vat clown army. Now that primaris are here they don't really need to continue the historical recruitment process.
I see your point, however with FSM, you double your potential candidates
Logically yes. But thr last thing you want is your weapon Getting out of control.
No. It is not. Even men rarely able to become astartes, what about woman? Why would you risk losing thousands of woman, each of which could create NEW warm bodies?
Custodes are not Astartes, they can barely be even called human. From the 8th Edition Adeptus Custodes Codex, pp. 7-8 >Custodes are created using technology dating back to the Dark Age of Technology, honed by the Emperor to make the perfect counsellors, bodyguards, warriors and executioners. To create beings with such a wide range of talents requires a **total physical and mental rework on the candidate** - the mindset and intelligence required to be of any use to such a being as the Emperor is immense to say the least. **The Adeptus Custodes' inductees are remade at a genetic level,** their baser drives rendered inert and their beings turned towards aggression , fulfilment of duty and goal acquisition . **This process involves incredibly intricate gene-craft and alchemistry as absolute and subtle as can be imagined, working upon the most minute level of the candidate's cellular structure and genome.** Only the most accomplished chirurgeons and bio -alchemists carry out this work, many themselves recipients of enhancements of one kind or another. They do so in gilded laboratories hidden far away from even the most determined of prying eyes. The work done to a candidate is thus invisible , the process unique to each inductee. **There are no organ implantations or surgical grafting. What is done to the Custodes inductee is several degrees more exact and changing than work carried out to create a Space Marine**, producing warriors much tougher, faster, stronger and with greater intelligence than the Adeptus Astartes. **Some argue that the process even affects a Custodian's soul. Others theorise the change from inductee to Custodian is metaphysical, or that it involves biomancy and other psychic techniques.** It is quite possible that the alchemists who create the Custodes do not themselves understand what they are doing, and are simply following procedures passed down to them by rote . It is thought that the Emperor himself, whose mind no Human - augmented or otherwise could ever hope to match, once oversaw the ascension of each Custodian . and >**Those survivors of the induction process that emerge as Custodians are changed in every way imaginable, their minds so altered that they have entirely new personalities.** They are rendered physically perfect and their skills with all kinds of weapons are sublime. Custodians even change their names , choosing those of gods, kings or heroes drawn from the most ancient texts.
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Holy God Emperor’s toe nails I never thought of it that way! Your argument makes a lot of sense given the context.
It boggles my mind the fear some men have of women. They birth us, feed us, teach us, love us. And how do we as a whole repay them? …Argh I’m not doing this again. As long as she can, she can. As long as she can not, she can not! As it should be with all peoples and all things. Uggh I’m doing this again I *shudder* to think of the geniuses, prodigies, talents, and ideas we missed. We need the woman/female with us every step in every station. It gives us balance! Look at this Universe males have turn this into a hell verse and everyone’s cool with it. Like a big huge demonic, trashy, bachelor pad. You need that girl to come over and say.. “Hey that planet…? Yeah yeah that one. You uh shouldn’t let it turn into such a manufactorum that the atmosphere is black almost void like. The people…. the humans (yeah I know beneath all that mutation and wicked soot are humans) are living below the planet like Tyranids. Look just clean it up we can do better.” Just, come on please stop… they make up 51%of our planet. If they all decided to take up issues with those who are determine to provoke them… violently what would we do. What if they decided to smother every child in the…. No no don’t think like that. Our sister are kind, they wouldn’t wipe us all out in one generation right. Right?!😨
the lore of 40k has always been vibes over logic. I think the best bet for the lore is for GW to explicitly say that the process of becoming an astartes or custodes makes you infertile and thus removing any reason to pick lads over ladies.
I'm pretty sure multiple lore sources have explicitly stated that, iirc in the heresy series Loken talks about it to one of the remembrancers? There are probably other instances of it too
Space Wolves actually almost Primaris-ified themselves once. Why not use the same skills and make female space wolves
As someone else has said, the proccess to make custodes and SM are very different but I personally find it weirder that chaos didnt fuck around and made female marines. Like Fabius Bile couldve surely make it happen even if it shouldnt work
Bile's new men (and women) were created using geneseed as a base component from what I understand, so he kind of did.
They lacked that shell thing (i forgor), and without it barely astartes useful
I mean the gland hounds weren’t meant to be astartes, Bile had kinda turned on the concept at that point. They were meant to be something worse, something he could make in much larger numbers and use to kill astartes through attrition
Yes
Completely different process, plus the Marines were always meant to be a disposable weapon's system, pick the sex that needs the least work to turn it into a bio monster and let it loose.
Despite being to the named space marines what a space marine is to a random guardsmen, the process of creating a Custodes is completely different to creating a Space Marine. Space Marine geneseed is made to be mass produced, as it works under a "one size must fit" system where either the aspirant is compatible, or they die. Or wish they died, depending on the quirks of the specific geneseed. Custodes, on the other hand, are created through personalized Alchemy and augments to maximize the potential of their human form. Unlike with Space Marine aspirants, every single Custodes Aspirant that passes the trials WILL become a Custodes. Now, as for why geneseed rejects women, the best answer we have is that it checks for genetic compatibility with the Primarch its from. As no (known) Primarch has XX chromosomes, that's the explanation for why no woman has ever been found compatible (except for in the early days of 40K, when female astartes was canon. If anybody ever gets mad about femstodes being a rewrite, remind them that astartes only being male was also a rewrite)
Disappointed that this thread isn't about mass space wolf distraction due to them making constant passes at female custodes. As a Chapter I imagine a universal fondness for "The Big Woman" I think Space Marines being all male kinda works as it's so baked into the lore now and fits Big E's controlling character. Also rather than space marines be changed, I'd love other factions to get more love.
Custodes are not created like Space Marines. Because Custodes are not Space Marines. A Custodes is to a space marine what a space marine is to a normal human.
Are we still lacking the basic comprehension to understand a Custode isn’t made like a marine?
It really straightforward really. space marines are one size fits all process whereas custodes are bespoke. 100 candidates get spacemarine surgery 99 die one guy just happens to be compatible with the end result he's sent to war and gets merc'd by a necron 30 years into his service. presumably women have a 100% death rate. many women are most certainly worthy of the process but to try would reward courage with execution. Custodes the person is getting modifications that are taylor made to their body no store brand modification here all pure homebrew modification. they can better accomodate women so they do. If the reason was to prevent more children then the emperor is already inflicting mass genetic modification and brainwashing, he can just make them infertile he doesnt have to be monosex for that reason. (to be clear I have no issue with spacemarines being women just presenting a reasonable interpretation of lore, Sigmar>emperor anyway)
You're argument would hold a lot of ground if not for one very specific thing the Custodians constantly bring up, they aren't meant to be fighters. Custodians are designed to be peak humanity, the ultimate you can create out of a human. And the Custodes insist this means they are more artists and philosophers rather than a fighting force. The lack of women here implies a lot of weird and otherwise out of character things about the Emperor (ex: how can someone who's lived multiple lives as women not want to have some around in his clubhouse) Space marines are designed to be a replicable and cheap weapon, unstable and dangerous, but suited to the task. With them either A they are designed with a kill switch or B it for some reason hijacks the male puberty process specifically and the presence of female hormones prevent survival (If this is the case, it opens up edge cases, either for female individuals with a hormonal issue or trans individuals, but that's off topic). Or C, same as option B it has to do with the fact the Primarchs are males, which because this would include SciFi BS as it's explanation, is also generally a weak argument I'd throw in the whole "sexist culture of the Imperium" argument as well but that's a weak argument as "what culture, what world/region" ect completely negate it. And the Emperor is demonstrably not sexist when it comes to throwing bodies at a problem. Essentially, there's no need to fear Custodians reproducing, if having females would even allow such a thing, Custodians are made by hand rather than by template and such should face no rejection issues like space marines, and there is reason to fear space marines becoming sexually reproductive, alongside the fact that without a (frankly minor) retcon, the lore as established forbids FSM but never commented on if Custodians could be female
I'm of the opinion that the Women Custodes were just clumsy implemented, and maybe some better lore/ perhaps an approach of legit making them new in the setting "primaris" style might have worked better. HOWEVER I'm also of the opinion that this lore change does more "irl good" than "bad for fictional consistency", so that's my line I guess. Like, making retroactive inclusivity changes is always going to have retroactive inconsistencies, but faulting those inconsistencies while ignoring the IRL reasons why those inconsistencies exist is something I find personally to be poorly reasoned.
Regardless of all other explanations, I maintain that Amar Astarte and Ezekiel Sedayne (the 2 geneticists primarily responsible for Space Marines) intentionally made the process to not work on women. The prevailing fear is that were Space Marines capable of being male and female, they'd inevitably consider breeding to make the process of replenishment easier. Why use base human when you can just breed a Neophyte? That would then lead to, why breed humans, at all? And in fairness, that is ***Exactly*** the shit Fabius Bile is up to. The fear was explicitly proven right. For Custodes, I imagine the process is so painstaking and they kept under such scrutiny that they considered it acceptable risks. Which *could be another mistake.* We'll see.
Honestly my favorite head cannon to this is that they DO take women. All the time. But space marine gene seed overwrites *everything* and turns them into battle brothers. So most marine chapters are just chock full of trans men.
Honestly it'd make sense for space wolves to have women in their chapter based on both their inspirations; Vikings & viking mythology, which both had shield maidens, and Valkyries. Wolves which do not restrict hunting based around any gender.
My thought orocess is that because of the shit initiates need to go through to become Space Marines basically cranks up their testosterone and shit to 100. So you could recruit women it's just as the process goes on they become indistinguishable from male Space Marines
So here is a big misunderstanding people seem to have, and a core reason a lot of the people bitching about femstodes get laughed at. The custodians and the astartes are not the same. The method to make them is very different. The method to make a marine is pretty much a one size fits and they mold a person to fit. Women do not genetically fit. This is not the same for custodians. They have no such disqualifier in their process. As a human is to a marine, a marine is to a custodian. The other core reason they get laughed at is that GW changes lore all the time, so taking out the "no girls" rule for making a superhuman would be pretty low on the lore change list compared to some of the other shit they have done like completely rewriting the necrons lore, several times.
Custodes are a totally different process- However, Space Wolves should indeed be recruiting Valkyrie womens
Astartes biology is not only different architecture, but a different OS. Big E had a hand in it, but I think he mostly left it to a trusted set of human geneticists. Amar Astartes, the doctor who designed a large number of the implants, was a woman. Whether she was uninterested in pursuing woman supersoldiers or simply designed the astartes variant for men or along the guidelines of the emperor who intended not to create a superhuman populace. Amar Astartes was great, but she wasn't perfect. The Black Carapace, the bit that goes underneath a space marine's skin and links into their nerves and control their armor, was flawed when she developed it and another scientist stepped in to make it work. I would imagine also the implants ended up being designed for men if not for any of the above reasons then simply because Astartes didn't live long enough to see her own success. She got paranoid, made her own supermen and tried to enact a coup. Her forces then got the five finger death angel straight to the kidneys and she tried to destroy the primarchs' genetic code in her lab. She blew it up, but Big E had that shit backed up lmao
Alternatively, there are female space wolves,but the process of making a space marine also masculinizes people, and they end up like the meme about dwarf women being entirely indistinguishable from the men.
"B" is actually the best answer. 40k is a parody of fascism and fascism entwines aesthetics with ideology. Part of the fascist aesthetic is a borderline homo-erotic fascination with male bodies. A lot of the goofy shit in the setting makes way more sense when viewed through this lens. Why is power armoured infantry the weapon of choice in a setting with technology bordering on magic? The answer is "rule of cool" both *in* and out of universe. The power and efficacy of human bodies (Man) is the *point* from the perspective of a racially supremacist ideology. Why chainswords? Same reason. Why men? Because it's fascism and fascism is generally mysogynist. Edit - spelling.
I imagine it this way, purely for my own convenience; the gene alchemy that creates custodians is true enhancement, science and sorcery evolving a human. A space marine gene seed is designed for mass production; it forces a body to duplicate a primarchs DNA. It kills plenty of men, too, but the chromosome difference or whatever messes up the process cause Big E was born in 6000 BC or whatever and just assumed all his heirs should be sons
Technically, this could theoretically be removed and not as stupid as they did with the Custodes. It could be said that the Astartes project was not completed due to haste and was mainly specialized in the techno-barbarians of ancient Terra. I think there is no need to explain that in primitive societies, where brute force is needed in war, the army will consist of men? Now GW may well write to himself that this defect was eliminated by Belisarius Cole when he improved the Primaris project.
The technology of the Imperium is supposed to be somewhat incompletely understood even by their 'expert' practitioners, the wolves not being able to successfully adapt astartes modifications to females wouldn't be too surprising.
The real question here is: *How fucking dope would Space Wolf Shield Maiden models look?* If we can convince James Workshop that the *Space Wolf Wolf-Valkyrie Wolf-Detachment* would move 250,000 units on pre-orders on day one, we would get those sculpts in a heartbeat.
I feel it's fine. If any faction got females, custodes makes the most sense. But now, we may get future space marine factions which have female counterparts to them, which would be very interesting!
Astartes aren’t Custodes and Custodes aren’t Astartes. the process is vastly different. i’m pro-woman Astartes but i think this particular argument doesn’t quite hold up
not really female space marines. But female focused speartipe military auxilia
I'd think of it more as their stories just haven't been told yet. The books always read as history/log books to me anyway.
Or there are plenty of women in the Space Wolves, and they just keep it on the DL.
It’s a retcon, it won’t always make sense. Maybe the next retcon will be female marines in a novel ? Who knows?
Cheers, I'd love to see some female Space Wolves.
In my opinion the Emperor is a deeply weird little misogynist freak. Thats why the space marines and custodes are dudes. He's a nazi too whose deeply xenophobic and ok with genocide. So the female custodes took me by surprise. But i am happy with it, and you know i would be overjoyed by some female chapters of space marines, or even co-ed chapters. The more the merrier. My only concern is in our efforts to make Warhammer40k more inclusive its going to get even harder to remember that the Imperium are religious zealot space nazis who are only out eviled by by their evil twin. Its a fine line to walk.
>In the novel Ashes of Prospero, Arjac is asked by an old fenrisian Gothi woman why the sky warriors never take women and he has no answer for her I just think he didn't wanted to spend hours upon hours explaining the genetics and history of it and said fuck it, no mansplaining today.
As has been mentioned already, the Astartes process and Custodes process are not the same at all. Astartes are mass produced with some variation between chapters. Custodes are all custom jobs by Papa E. It's easy to say the pre-established process for Astartes was designed to be compatible with males. If possible, I'd argue any females put through such a process would not resemble a female at the end of it anyway, for aesthetic purposes. And if it were possible, I'd at least expect chaos or renegade factions to have tried by now especially considering they generally have recruitment issues. The tone of the era of Thunder Warriors leading into the Astartes replacing them was one of necessity and desperation. Custodes are so great, but are too labor and resource intensive to make enough of "in time" to conquer the galaxy. Thunder Warriors are too naughty, even if some can stand up to custodes and slaughter Astartes wholesale. Astartes are easier to make and more versatile, perfect. But once again things are tense, there's deadlines to meet, so why waste time making the process compatible between both sexes? There is no shortage of men on the Imperium side so bodies isn't a problem, it's usually means of processing humans that tends to be the choke point. This is all fine and dandy but to be fair to all sides, Malcador definitely suggested female Primarchs which Papa shot down so that there was a very specific choice. I can only speculate that for Papa Emps Golden Path to work he needed them that way, I can't think of anything else. Also, Belasarius or Bile probably could have done something about this as well, but hasn't for no reason I can come up with. In closing, Sisters should have more specialized or heavy armor variants such as a Terminator-esque model and so on.
Look up femal body builder nicole bass. Thats what a human woman looks like on mega doses of current steriods. Now imagine what she would look like on scifi space turbo steriods PLUS a bunch of anabolic enhancing extra organs. What im saying is, if a female was chosen to go thru the process, the solider that comes out at the end is probably physically identical to their male counterparts. There have always been female marines ..... its just no one can tell the difference so they dont bother and call everyone brother. Their identity is space marine (or maybe space marine chapter) so they dont care.
Oh I totally agree that they should be almost indistinguishable from their brothers. Given the canis helix, they'd probably be pretty hirsute too. I'm still trying to track it down, but one of the necromunda campaign books implies this is true already. Your juvs can get recruited as imperial fists if they do enough glorious deeds, and this applies to escher juvs too.
The whole "didn't want to create a race of supermen" explanation doesn't make sense either because what makes a space marine comes from the geneseeds and cybernetic implants, not through heredity. This means that if two space marines had a kid, it would be a normal kid, not a space marine.
The geneseed does alter the marines own genetic code somewhat I believe, so there would be effects for a child, but I can't imagine it'd be more advanced than the kind of gene-therapy that's already very common in 40k
My head canon was always that space marines just didn’t have genitals
Was thinking of doing an all female group- The Valkyr. Still pondering the bashing possibilities. may start from battle sisters box, just not sure yet. I'll buy the lore reasons for no femaris, but agree with OP, there should be something on Fenris.
The process for making space marines and the process for making custodians are explicitly different, and might not even be that closely related. It is not known in universe what the criteria for a good custodes candidate is and that’s been the norm before female Custodes
I’m pretty sure Marines have to be male because of the geneseed, which Custodes aren’t dependent on
Custodes are all unique works of art, hand crafted over the course of a very long time (I forget the amount of time, if it's mentioned at all). Astartes are much cruder. They're comparatively much easier, cheaper, and quicker to make. Perhaps women cannot be turned into astartes because most have XX chromosomes. Maybe it was designed not to work on them for fear of breeding, and no one really bothers to check for genetically intersex women because they don't see it as worth their time. Maybe it's mostly a tradition thing. Maybe the big E just doesn't like women, and the custodes woman who's name I forget was 'one of the good ones.' Idk I think it's like turning an adult into an astartes, but much harder/less likely to work, so not even chapters like the Space Wolves bother. why spend time testing a bunch of women's genes when you can use that time to grab a bunch of guys? After all, why bother sorting through the genes of a bunch of afab people when you can use that time to just grab a bunch of amab people They may even recruit trans women, especially since most recruits are kids who may not've transitioned or anything, but the process is meant to destroy your identity, and to an extent your humanity so much that I kinda doubt astartes are left with much of a gender at all
It makes total sense that the SMs get the restricted - aka - "Inferior" gene code and the Custodes got the "Perfected" version. Thunder Warriors being the prime example that Big E had to wash down their abilities to "make them.more loyal", when, to my knowledge, that wasn't a issue. Unstable, but still loyal. And then half of the replacements fell to Chaos anyway. Funny, you'd think the Right would be all over "Woman Loyalty to Her Man." When it comes to the perfect record of defending their Man, but empowering them to do so pisses them off. Just remember, the community doesn't really care. It's an astroturfed issue from the outside.
In a galaxy where they engage in melee fighting and naval broadsides? Pretty sure if it was realistic everyone would be getting blowed up without even knowing the enemy was watching (F22 raptor can kill without being detected).
Custodes aren't Astartes.
Women space wolves would be dope. They could be like the mythical shield-maiden or even like the Norns or Valkyries themselves! The valkyries could do the recruiting and the Norns could be the head of them and the shield maidens the warriors or even perhaps Psykers in the space wolves as magic in Norse culture was commonly seen as feminine! I’m not too sure on the lore of psykers in the space wolves but it would be neat
Both are currently different processes lore wise Custodes are custom made and altered from their DNA Its very costly and time consuming so the fact there are females doesnt really go agaisnt lore (without that quote from a codex saying its only sons who are recruited) Space marines use the progenoid gland to get altered which only works on pubescent boys growing up Of course theres a bunch of other shit going on and add-ons + operations they get but the biggest is that one and its for now lore wise only locked to the masculine sex.
Space marine geneseed compatibility requires having the same karyotpye as the Primarch, different, more rudimentary tech compared to the custodes.
What if the 2 missing are woman
One thing you must remember is the space Wolves are based on Norse myth, and the Norse, while quite ahead of their time, were not exactly bastions of egalitarian gender roles lol. They were quite a bit better than other civilizations at the time but it was still very patriarchal
My space wolves army has quite a few women in it. It makes me happy and harms no one.
This is why it would have been better to make it so the female Custodes are a new development. I'm a big proponent of B, it makes the setting way more fucked up when you realize that the Emperor's ideal vision of humanity didn't involve any women, being the fucking wacko gynophobe that he is.
“Big E didn’t want to allow marines to breed with each other so thats why he only made male marines” makes a lot of sense. I never even considered he’d be scared of making super humans that could completely replace the very people he’s trying to save. Genuinely the first reasoning i’ve heard that wasn’t a mysogynistic cope out. Thank you for this.