My headcanon was always that there have always been female Astartes, but they're just so roided up from a young age, it's impossible to tell a male Space Marine from a female one without seeing their genitals, so they all just present male and refer to each other as brothers. They've also been so indoctrinated in their cultiness from a young age that they don't even have a concept of gender identity. They consider their genitals to be a personal matter you just don't talk about.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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The closest to a good faction 40k has are the Tau, even after the decision to give them a caste system and some vague notion that the ethereals are using pheromones or some shit to rule over their society.
There were traces of that from the beginning, but it was also implied that it was actually nothing and the Imperium was seeing things that weren't there because they're ideologically incapable of conceiving of a functioning society, but we know how media literate people who treat lore like encyclopedia facts tend to be.
I've only recently gotten a bit into WH through lore videos while I'm going to sleep so my knowledge is pretty superficial.
The Tau are hopebright and good and everything bad about this is Imperial propaganda and the Smurf players can just cope and seethe about it. For the greater good!
The grimdark part of the Tau empire is that despite being very morally good, they'd still be completely wiped out if any of the other factions considered them a threat.
Also, while this is less confirmed, it's also implied that the Tau's belief in The Greater Good could eventually wind up creating a new warp god leading to the destruction of their civilization. The tau are the equivalent of a squadron of fresh recruits surrounded by entire armies of people who hate them. That's why they still fit in the grimdark universe. They're the plucky, good civilization with no real shot of surviving.
They're practically nulls, how the heck would that work?
Yeah, but the humans and other races they seek to integrate into their society aren't. They'd either have to do some necron-tier shit and destroy the souls of their citizens or they'd be at risk of humans creating a new chaos god.
Another option is they may decide that warp-sensitive races are too much of a risk to the galaxy and adopt a genocidal attitude for the greater good. That would be thematically appropriate for Warhammer 40k. A bad encounter with the effects of the warp leading to them abandoning their previous principles. Kinda like how the Horus Heresy affected the Imperium of Man.
What kind of chaos god would they make? I wouldn't be terribly opposed to a lord of altruism or comradery, though I don't know too much about the Tau.
I wouldn't be terribly opposed to a lord of altruism or comradery,
You fundamentally misunderstand the Tau. They're not altruistic, they're just the least-worst civilization. They're closer to a space Roman Empire than they are to communism. They'll conquer you, put you in a pseudo-slave caste, and collect taxes. They can only claim to be a lesser evil because every other civilization's default response is genocide.
What kind of chaos god would they make?
Probably something to do with absolute control. The Greater Good is an authoritarian philosophy in which individual citizens don't really have any rights. They have certain cultural freedoms of course, but no right to self-determination. For warp-sensitive races that believe in this philosophy, it would show up as a desire to dissolve the ego into the whole. This could create a god which seeks to create a galaxy wide hive-mind of sorts. A sort of warp based Tyranid empire composed of multiple races which would subject entire planets to experimentation for the greater good.
Ah yeah, that makes more sense. Fits the setting much better.
Even then they colonize planets and give the choice of "join or die". And if you join, you start at the bottom of their caste system at just a barely teeny tiny step above slavery.
The only good faction in 40k is Chaos, because they are hell bent on destroying the entire universe, and the entire universe clearly fucking needs to be destroyed because there's no good anywhere in it.
Actually the Necrons are kinda good too, kinda sorta ish.
Smh, of course you liberals wouldn't support the based Genestealer Cults and their AES (Actively Embodying Snackrifice)
Still wanna do a story where a Genestealer cult wins, but in the last battle with the Imperial forces their Patriarchy gets slagged and they somehow figure out what the Tyrannids really are, and now have to figure out what the fuck to do about the onrushing hive fleet that's going to eat the revolution they worked so hard to win.
Have a small collection of GSC and that's basically my army's lore
It's become easier to excuse since my dog ate my patriarch model 
Genestealers always be tryin' to steal my toothbrush though so I don't see how they're the good guys
Pff ofc you'd take issue with that. One of the foundational tenets of Communism is sharing of the toothbrush. Plus, have you seem how many teeth our gene-comrades have? To each according to their needs!
Now face the biomass dissolving pool please.
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This is just posadism
Yeah the original concept was supposed to be a utopian communist society and then they remembered its a grim dark setting and made them neolibs.
Utopian communists with a caste system...
I think that was something that was added later in their conceptualization before they decided to do away with the idealist and equitable society part, I assume because most Warhammer fans would have shit themselves in rage at the thought.
Nah, Necrons are horrible.
Oh no the fascist empire isn't sexist enough!
My headcannon has always been that the Imperium is too concerned with high tech, enlightened forms of bigotry we could barely comprehend to worry about paltry shit like gender and race. They don't give a shit what your skin color is, unless it's more than 3 standards of deviation from normal, in which case they shoot you for being a mutant.
the OG space marines are all men not because of in universe sexism but because they are intended by the Emperor to be ultimately disposeable biological war machines, with tightly controlled 'production' dependent on 'baseline humanity'. even the potential to reproduce, or edit themselves to be able to reproduce, would be contrary to this plan. only the Primarchs are meant to lead humanity in any capacity, and even they are meant to fade into obscurity and be disposed of once humanity is in a good position and doesn't need genetically engineered killing machines to protect them from aliens and living emotion monsters.
that being said, after pulling the primaris space marines out of a hat (secret bunker on mars) they could just be like 'wow this machine cult protagonist guy figured out how to make female space marines and due to the recent big warp storm the government can't be bothered to care'
custodes are a different thing however, they are meant to be the emperor's personal companions and unlike the space marines are not meant to be killing machines (even though they are far more formidable in combat than a space marine), they are meant to be intellectuals and philosophers also. they have a lore counterpart in the Sisters of Silence, who are all women but cannot speak due to their anti-psychic abilities being so powerful that their voice would shatter a mortal person's mind (kinda misogynist to make them all silent but they are at least the intellectual equals of custodes and can write/read afaik) but since the custodes and sisters are such personal projects of the emperor (who had a woman scientist help him with all this genetic engineering afaik) they could easily contain among them unique and exceptional individuals.
in conclusion basically the entire point of the 40k setting is that it is so implicitly huge and diverse and detailed that you can plausibly fit a lot of headcanon or new lore into it, there's no real diegetic reason for GW not to introduce female or gender nonconforming space marines or custodes. the emperor is basically dead so he can't stop them, Guilliman is back and allowed Cawl to make the new primaris space marines (such heresy!), and the galaxy and therefore the Imperium is split down the middle by a huge chaos storm with each half led by different guys. Its like the perfect time to introduce non-male space marines and custodes, in fact it would be nice to have non-male models for other factions like the imperial guard, who canonically recruit men and women and even mutants, even the relatively good-guy coded Tau only have the single woman character (Shadowsun) as an actual model you can get.
Sisters of Battle do already exist but they literally have spiky boob-shaped breastplates so idk if i can give them any feminist credit for that.
though given all the crotch-mounted skills and breast spikes in the setting i can only assume that the Imperium isn't as much misogynist as it is entirely sex-negative (it can summon demons due to chaos if you feel too many emotions too strongly)
I love the Sisters of Battle, since they're just regular people. Their faith is just overzealous enough to make up for a lack of genetic engineering, psychic mumbo-jumbo, or excessive cybernetics.
their faith kind of is psychic mumbo jumbo, they can turn into saints (basically 'greater demons' of The Emperor) and have all kinds of specifically psychic/magical weaponry like a tank that has a pipe organ that kills demons instead of a turret. they also have cyborgs, cowardly sisters who flee in battle get strapped into a killing robo-suit and sent to the frontlines until they die, if they are lucky they leave the pilot unarmored, otherwise they put them into an iron maiden-style pod on the mech. also i think they still have Arco-Flagellants, prisoners who have their limbs replaced with electro-whips and have their forebrains replaced with combat drug dispensers and control mechanisms.
also afaik they do have power armor by default, its not as good as a space marine since the sisters lack the implants that allow space marines to directly control the armor with nerve impulses like their own body, but its about as good as you get as a 'normal person' without being an Inquisitor
It really doesn't help that even out of the chunk of 40k fans that aren't raging misogynists a decent number of them only like "female representation" because 
Imperium as a whole don't care but 95% of it is backwater theocratic shitworlds (with the theocratic part immensely resembling the christian realism) based verbatim on various stages of development of real world Earth and i'm absolutely sure they managed to cramp mysogyny in addition to the "everyone is suitable to die in combat and be ground into food for the starving populace." And indeed in the books there is plenty of that, just usually not in the very front of PoV, but in background.
Frankly, I've always figured the Imperium didn't care about gender or race because everyone is suitable to die in combat and be ground into food for the starving populace.
That's because you actually pay attention to the lore instead of playing out fascist fantasies with overpriced plastic
My only problem with femstodes is that they did not appeared earlier. Not a single mention in the HH. The addition is good, but that way it feels cheaply slapped on.
Thought this was going to be about the balance dataslate lol. Yeah, anyone defending the imperium is, at best, a fascist who doesn't know it yet. Sadly GW want money and so aren't going to make the poster boy faction look bad.
I don't think I will ever know or understand what warhammer is