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'Are Female Space Marines Plausible?' -A Persuasive Essay.

Started by Lord Sotek, December 12, 2012, 08:32:36 PM

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Narric

#30
On a modelling pov, isn't it up to the hobbyist whether or not they want to include some female heads onto their marines?

I personally don't give a flying rats arse if GW is only using the fluff of the game as a marketing tool. I'm reading "False Gods" right now, and most of the ideas I have from it don't even required GW kits to do.

Are Female Space Marines plausable? YES!! And that very question was answered with a resoundingly loud YES in the OP. Are they something that MUST be added to the game? No, but that doesn't mean we are not allowed to do it ourselves.
Should people be more opened minded to Female Space Marines? Obviously, because IN REALITY we have several extremely dangerous vocations that in fact have exceptionally trained Female members, so why couldn't/wouldn't a woman become a Space Marine?



[edit]
Just remembered this video, which could be useful to the topic at hand
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/true-female-characters

Paradoxrifts

Quote from: Isaac Baraqiel on December 16, 2012, 06:30:42 AM
I assume you're griping about the ignorant smallmindedness of this, in which case I feel you. But once again, GW's lack of interest/the fanbase's collective ignorance doesn't really have a legitimate bearing on the fluff-soundness of an idea.

More of an observation really. I don't spend my life fighting other people's battles, but nevertheless it is what it is.

But neither do I think that any active malice was involved. It was likely the best the creative studio types could come up with when the marketing department called a meeting and told them that having a horrid death machine built around a set of female breasts and hips in the miniature range was making their jobs exceedingly difficult.

So far as the small-mindedness goes, I cannot fault people for not wanting to associate themselves with certain imagery.

A friend of mine recently acquired several large good-quality prints of fantasy artwork that uniformly depict sultry gothic women. The sort of late eighties/early nineties fantasy art that could once ubiquitously associated with weekend market stalls. This had been an unusual choice for him because his standard taste in decor usually runs towards dorky than Porky's, so I asked him about them. It turned out that they had once belonged to a female workmate of his. She had decided that they all had to go, but it was why she had reached this decision that intrigued me. She apparently didn't want people mistaking her for being lesbian anymore, which I have to admit having seen the artwork in question would've been my assumption had I walked into a woman's apartment and seen it hanging there.

Just about everything we choose to surround ourselves with dually functions as a social signifier.  Sometimes we are well aware of just how these signs are being interpreted by others, and just as often we are completely in the dark on how others are interpreting our signals based on their own individual experiences. If you understand this then you will understand what drives people to some pretty strange behaviours. Like going through every daemonette in their collection with greenstuff and making sure that every model has a pair of human breasts, or paint up an entire army of glitter pink Necrons  for no other reason than they're a girl, who likes pink and plays WH40K. Or even write about their own female space marines. :P

Quote from: Isaac Baraqiel on December 16, 2012, 06:30:42 AM
1. The hypothetical transsexual female marines in that branch of my theory are only that way because I have to work around the wording of the 'male-only' fluff idiocy that GW put into writing. GW doesn't need such convolutions because they're perfectly able to just retcon the obnoxious line out of the way, in which case non-y-chromsomal space amazons wearing power armor doesn't strike me has having too much of a marketability issue. I too doubt they'll ever do it , but it's just laziness on their part, not difficulty.

The WH40K aesthetic can be summed up thus, take an otherwise goofy far-fetched idea and then reinterpret that idea in the most realistic and grim way you can possibly think up. With that thought in mind I do think having female space marines that do not resemble hulking metal lockers filled with meat would be a betrayal of the game's core aesthetic. But the actual market for miniatures, artwork and writing depicting these beefy female soldiers is probably not worth the time and effort for Games Workshop to create it themselves.

This is a bit of a between a rock and hard place sort of situation. The game's own take on realism demands the sort of tough, masculine women that the majority of the predominately male player base is none too comfortable in purchasing for themselves.

Meanwhile women who don't understand just exactly what is wrong with women built like female tennis players but who hit like female bodybuilders, when the game already involves so much pulp comic weirdness, and by all reports they go off and play Warmachine.

Arguleon-veq

Quote from: Isaac Baraqiel on December 16, 2012, 06:30:42 AM

Quote from: Arguleon-veq on December 16, 2012, 12:41:54 AM
I think a big issue with all this is that if they did exist you just wouldnt actually be able to tell that its a female marine away.

The fact that becoming a marine actually changes facial features. That they would be recruiting before women fully developed were there isnt much difference between males and females anyway.

So, they would have massive muscle mass. They would have their faces changed to be pretty similar to the rest of their chapter [or their primarch], they would have deep voices. They would act exactly the same as other marines thanks to mental conditioning. They probably wouldnt even have breasts or not any you could notice thanks to the age of recruitment and the muscle mass.

The only way you could actually tell it was a female marine is if they were naked. So you could have Marines in a Chapter that are female and even close observers wouldnt know as who gets to actually see a marine go to the loo?. In any combat situation they wont come out of their armour.

I've always imagined that female Astartes would be exceptionally masculine women, but that if you knew what you were looking for, you'd be able to pick up the subtle hints that they're female from the cast of their features, or perhaps a minutely more slender build than other marines.

Regardless, since the point of justifying female Astartes is distinctly not so that I can create superhumanly sized jiggly bits to admire, I don't see why it matters that female space marines wouldn't have triple F's, hourglass figures, or be likely to win Miss Galaxy 40,000.

Quote
So whats the point really? they look the same, they act the same, they have the same armour. What does it matter what gender they are?

So, say I'm rolling up a Dark Heresy character. A guardswoman. She's not very pretty or curvy, has a military crew cut because she's a soldier, her flak armor is just as uniform and featureless as any other Cadian's, and unless you were hunting around in her underwear drawer it wouldn't immediately jump out at you that she was female.

Would you really tell me therefore that you don't see the point in making my character female, since she looks largely like any other Guardsman, and I should just have made a male character? I rather doubt you would, because I wager you are quite aware it would be silly and smallminded, and serve no constructive purpose in the formation of a character. It would just be arbitrary and restrictive. I turn your question back to you; what does it matter what gender someone's Space Marines are?

Now, just make the jump from flak armor to power armor. Justifying, and wanting to justify, the potential for a female space marine isn't about creating amazonian wank material; it's about wanting to make characters, and chafing under a completely arbitrary, nonsensical, and honestly quite alienating constraint on that imaginative process.

Quote
The one place were I think it could be interesting is in fluff about aspirants passing the initial tests to be accepted into the chapter to actually be a marine. This even makes sense from a fluff standpoint as at the age humans complete tasks to get the notice of a chapter then boys and girls are not noticeably different in terms of physical ability. So young girls could easily outdo young boys.

Yeah, that's one of the points I mention- Not only to debunk the cavemen who still occasionally try to trot out "hurr durr women are physically inferior to men" as an argument against female marines, but because the prepubescent recruitment age actually directly means that the gender-exclusivity of the process has even less of a leg to stand on, because the biological gender differences in pre-adolescent children are so comparatively small.

The whole guardsman/woman comparison is rediculous. You yourself have been arguing against the whole 'Sisters are women Marines' arguement because Marines are NOT normal, they are barely even human. This is the same.

You seem seriously defensive and agressive about something I am actually agreeing with you on. You say you want female marines and argue that you dont want to make them very girly and that your just justifying it as possible but then when I point out that there would be no difference between a male and female marine you talk about how you dont want them having massive tits. Nobody is saying you want them like that.

I think there is some scope for it and lots of interesting fluff around why a chapter would have to resort to it and the whole recruitment process but I think thats were it ends because marines are not really human so a female marine would be no more a woman than a male is man. I dont think there would be anything remotely femenine in their look or attitude. They are not people anymore, they are space marines.

This is totally different to a guardswoman who is still a normal woman no matter what she looks like.

I dont think there would be anything wrong with having an RPG female marine character especially as you can do some really interesting back story on her but besides the back story it wouldnt make any difference at all in how they are during the actual RPG compared to a regular battle brother as they would look and act the same as any male marine. The marines themselves probably wouldnt even make a distinction, I think they would still be called battle brothers, that they would become just another space marine not a man or a woman.

In existing fluff its not like marines treat men any differently to women. To a Marine they are just human, they dont care if they men or women because they are not Marines. They just see them as human.

I think the fact that you get so defensive about it kind of points out that you do want your female marines to be pretty femenine. Which is far more implausible than actually having female marines.
X-Wing Tournaments;
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Narric

I'm going to try and add some outside of hobby opinion on this. Yes its from my GF, but that shouldn't really change much.

To her, the entire hobby is just a silly game played by men and Space Marines don't sound that appealing. I then asked her what she would think if Space Marines (previously stated in our convo as being exclusively male) included Female Marines. Her response was it sounded more plausable. Why should an army exclude an entire gender, especialy when the recruitment process already has a low output of battle ready astartes? What if a planet has a higher proportion of combat ready women. Would that planet be completely ignored by a recruitment vessel? She even went on to say that if the game setting was more male/female even, that she may even be interested in joining the hobby (though she still hates GW).

I then continued the convo, explaining reasons why people look down on the idea, and she did agree on some points. If you want a strong army, men usually are a better option, but then I countered with points about the recruitment process, and how the differences between young girls and boys, means choosing one over the other is pointless, as they're very close physically, and depending on which planet you recruit, close in terms of skill and ability.

Her opinion on the modeling side, is that yes the torso of the Power Armour would need to be modified, but not to the extant of needing breasts as part of the armour.

Discussing the stance on Marketing, it could actually prove BENEFICIAL to GW if they did include Female Space Marines, as they near out-right double their target audience. Some women already play Warhammer, why not advertise to interst more?

To continue saying that Space Marines should be exclusively male, is simply round-about way of saying Men are better then women, which I hope Society has the good sense to see as a foolish idea.

Paradoxrifts

#34
That's code for she still won't play your silly game, but she'll think slightly less of it. Just so you know, Narric. :P

::EDIT:: Here's an example.. "Honey, you know I'd love to go along with you to your back-to-back Twilight Saga marathon and sit through all five movies, but you know I just can't tolerate how Stephanie Meyers misrepresents European folklore."



Scout Sergeant Mkoll

Two things that I don't think have been covered really:

1) Introducing females Astartes would require changes to the recruitment and development procedures of the Astartes. The Imperium doesn't like changing things unless it has no other option. So what forced this change?

2) The creation of the Astartes is a process 10 millennia old, created by the Emperor himself, and even he didn't get it entirely right, in some cases he got it horribly wrong. Any change to that process could, and almost certainly would, have horrifying ramifications for the candidates.
Mkoll's Awesome Card Counter: +8

May the brave be remembered forever. Farewell our friends.

Quote from: Mabbz on June 03, 2011, 10:43:53 AM
Mkoll wins.

Quote from: LordDemon
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to catch you.

[img]http

Narric

Quote from: Warmaster Russ on December 16, 2012, 03:31:16 PM
Two things that I don't think have been covered really:

1) Introducing females Astartes would require changes to the recruitment and development procedures of the Astartes. The Imperium doesn't like changing things unless it has no other option. So what forced this change?

2) The creation of the Astartes is a process 10 millennia old, created by the Emperor himself, and even he didn't get it entirely right, in some cases he got it horribly wrong. Any change to that process could, and almost certainly would, have horrifying ramifications for the candidates.
I have one response to both points.

Why are we assuming that the system needs changing? As has been stated, GW can change fluff to meet their own requirements (Grey Knights anyone?) and what is there to say that Female Marines haven't already occured?

Reading the OP, you would see that the transformation process only needs a small amount of tweaking, rather then a complete overhaul.

I also don't believe that every single variant of Land Raider, Baneblade, Rhino Chassis'd or Chimera chassis'd, was born 100% out of necessity. Some may have been experimentations that found a niche use on the battle. Can we really say that the vehicles that we can field in our games are even 10% of what the Imperium even has at disposal? But that is getting off-topic.

Scout Sergeant Mkoll

Quote from: Narric of 4th Sphere on December 16, 2012, 03:42:35 PM
Why are we assuming that the system needs changing? As has been stated, GW can change fluff to meet their own requirements (Grey Knights anyone?) and what is there to say that Female Marines haven't already occured?

Reading the OP, you would see that the transformation process only needs a small amount of tweaking, rather then a complete overhaul.

I also don't believe that every single variant of Land Raider, Baneblade, Rhino Chassis'd or Chimera chassis'd, was born 100% out of necessity. Some may have been experimentations that found a niche use on the battle. Can we really say that the vehicles that we can field in our games are even 10% of what the Imperium even has at disposal? But that is getting off-topic.
1) Because if they existed already, they'd be mentioned somewhere. Even if they were shunned afterwards, or claimed to never have existed, there would be mention of them. Also, even "minor tweaks" to such a delicate process could prove catastrophic. the process wasn't changed from the first Legions, but there were still some fairly serious issues there for some Legions.

2) Most, if not all, of those which deviate from the STC would have been made from necessity, from someone desperately trying to survive and packing whatever weapons they had onto the nearest tank. A couple may not be born from this, but hey, Forgeworld has to have some overpowered vehicles to release, otherwise how else could they make bucketloads of money? :P
Mkoll's Awesome Card Counter: +8

May the brave be remembered forever. Farewell our friends.

Quote from: Mabbz on June 03, 2011, 10:43:53 AM
Mkoll wins.

Quote from: LordDemon
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to catch you.

[img]http

LinnScarlett

Quote from: Warmaster Russ on December 16, 2012, 03:31:16 PM
Two things that I don't think have been covered really:

1) Introducing females Astartes would require changes to the recruitment and development procedures of the Astartes. The Imperium doesn't like changing things unless it has no other option. So what forced this change?

2) The creation of the Astartes is a process 10 millennia old, created by the Emperor himself, and even he didn't get it entirely right, in some cases he got it horribly wrong. Any change to that process could, and almost certainly would, have horrifying ramifications for the candidates.

1. The Imperium as a whole advocates by majority a status quo, because its the Emperor's empire and we all like to think how it is now is how he meant it so we cling to keeping it that way. Meanwhile, in the books and other fluff 'in-universe' situations forces the black and white ideals of the Imperium in all sorts of shapes and wrinkles in order to win/makeitwork/survive etc.
My Ultrawolves chapter wound up having a minority of biologically female Space Marines among them (long story short) due to desperate recruitment alternatives. Their homeworld is gone, they're fleet based and always on the move. They take anyone who survives the process, because they don't have the luxury to be picky about it and discard 50% of potential recruits out of hand. :) In-universe, the whole 'no change' is mildly self-dilusional, I think. Take a look at the Inquisition's opinion on maintaining the status quo alone! :P

2. Trial and error, my friend, trial and error. Including female aspirants is, on a win-lose level, in the end pure gain. It doesn't increase the fail rate of male ones, just the gain of getting an extra noviate out of there every once in a while. That, and if you have no choice, you have no choice. That or chapter extinction? Hm. :)
I need more time to do the Emperor's work!

You can read my stuff on 2S's Fluff and Stories.

Or, you can come visit my author page on Archive of Our Own. WARNING: NC-17

Homew1963

Quote from: Lord Sotek on December 16, 2012, 06:30:42 AM
Quote from: Paradoxrifts on December 15, 2012, 09:18:22 AM
There will never be any official miniatures, so there will never be any official artwork, and so there will never be any emphasis on changing the status quo from where it is now. The idea itself is measurably less silly than failed Space Wolf aspirants mutating into giant wolves. But werewolves, even science fiction werewolves are at least marketable, whereas transsexuals have never been marketable to the same audience that Games Workshop markets WH40K towards.

1. The hypothetical transsexual female marines in that branch of my theory are only that way because I have to work around the wording of the 'male-only' fluff idiocy that GW put into writing. GW doesn't need such convolutions because they're perfectly able to just retcon the obnoxious line out of the way, in which case non-y-chromsomal space amazons wearing power armor doesn't strike me has having too much of a marketability issue. I too doubt they'll ever do it , but it's just laziness on their part, not difficulty.

2. 40k's universe and lore are patently more than just a market scheme. That may be all that the schmucks up at GW HQ care about its existence these days, but 40k exists as a framework for telling stories and exercising one's imagination as well. I dare you to tell me with a straight face that you believe Dan Abnet, Bill King, or Aaron Dempski-Bowden are just in it for the money. And even if they were, we fans are certainly not, and we have thus collectively made 40k a Setting and a Universe and a Hobby beyond merely shelling out cash for overpriced tiny plastic men.

You say GW will never produce official material or products with female space marines as if this means something; but Games Workshop will never make officially sanctioned 40k material about my Bright Lords, either. Or for any other DIY marine armies, for that matter. I doubt you would say that means we should all just pack up our homebrew chapters and chuck them in the dustbin.

Quote
Just take a good hard look at the current line of Slaanesh Daemons. They've moved on from replacing everything on a female body that isn't tits and dyi with something that is capable of disemboweling you, and now they're selling transsexualism as horror.

I assume you're griping about the ignorant smallmindedness of this, in which case I feel you. But once again, GW's lack of interest/the fanbase's collective ignorance doesn't really have a legitimate bearing on the fluff-soundness of an idea.





@ Linn: Right on, Battle-Brotherette. ;)
You should PM/IM me about your DIY chapter sometime. I love reading about and discussing custom chapters, and would love to hear some new tales and offer feedback. Maybe I can swap stories about my Bright Lords, or the Adepta Astartes in Wargamer's Supernovas chapter, in repayment. Meanwhile, have a doodle I drew of one of the female marines in Wargamer's chapter.

My favorite things about the female marine I posted are the following:
*She's not remotely sexualized. She's a space marine with a look of iron determination, a clear aura of "I am about to kick Heretic dyi," and clearly geared and armored for all out war. She is a fighting machine and not a model exhibiting titillatingly-cut power armor themed cheap lingeries

*She's feminine enough to tell that she's female... If you already knew to look for it. Yet despite this, if one simply showed the image with no context, I wager there's a fair chance the viewer would think it's a male space marine who maybe looks a bit girly with his long hair.





Quote from: Arguleon-veq on December 16, 2012, 12:41:54 AM
I think a big issue with all this is that if they did exist you just wouldnt actually be able to tell that its a female marine away.

The fact that becoming a marine actually changes facial features. That they would be recruiting before women fully developed were there isnt much difference between males and females anyway.

So, they would have massive muscle mass. They would have their faces changed to be pretty similar to the rest of their chapter [or their primarch], they would have deep voices. They would act exactly the same as other marines thanks to mental conditioning. They probably wouldnt even have breasts or not any you could notice thanks to the age of recruitment and the muscle mass.

The only way you could actually tell it was a female marine is if they were naked. So you could have Marines in a Chapter that are female and even close observers wouldnt know as who gets to actually see a marine go to the loo?. In any combat situation they wont come out of their armour.

I've always imagined that female Astartes would be exceptionally masculine women, but that if you knew what you were looking for, you'd be able to pick up the subtle hints that they're female from the cast of their features, or perhaps a minutely more slender build than other marines.

Regardless, since the point of justifying female Astartes is distinctly not so that I can create superhumanly sized jiggly bits to admire, I don't see why it matters that female space marines wouldn't have triple F's, hourglass figures, or be likely to win Miss Galaxy 40,000.

Quote
So whats the point really? they look the same, they act the same, they have the same armour. What does it matter what gender they are?

So, say I'm rolling up a Dark Heresy character. A guardswoman. She's not very pretty or curvy, has a military crew cut because she's a soldier, her flak armor is just as uniform and featureless as any other Cadian's, and unless you were hunting around in her underwear drawer it wouldn't immediately jump out at you that she was female.

Would you really tell me therefore that you don't see the point in making my character female, since she looks largely like any other Guardsman, and I should just have made a male character? I rather doubt you would, because I wager you are quite aware it would be silly and smallminded, and serve no constructive purpose in the formation of a character. It would just be arbitrary and restrictive. I turn your question back to you; what does it matter what gender someone's Space Marines are?

Now, just make the jump from flak armor to power armor. Justifying, and wanting to justify, the potential for a female space marine isn't about creating amazonian wank material; it's about wanting to make characters, and chafing under a completely arbitrary, nonsensical, and honestly quite alienating constraint on that imaginative process.

Quote
The one place were I think it could be interesting is in fluff about aspirants passing the initial tests to be accepted into the chapter to actually be a marine. This even makes sense from a fluff standpoint as at the age humans complete tasks to get the notice of a chapter then boys and girls are not noticeably different in terms of physical ability. So young girls could easily outdo young boys.

Yeah, that's one of the points I mention- Not only to debunk the cavemen who still occasionally try to trot out "hurr durr women are physically inferior to men" as an argument against female marines, but because the prepubescent recruitment age actually directly means that the gender-exclusivity of the process has even less of a leg to stand on, because the biological gender differences in pre-adolescent children are so comparatively small.


This is quite well discussed matter and have learned something interesting form here.

Mabbz

Quote from: Homew1963 on April 23, 2013, 09:47:23 PM
This is quite well discussed matter and have learned something interesting form here.
First of all, welcome to the forums :). While not compulsory, I reccommend you introduce yourself here.

Secondly though, while I am glad to hear you found this discussion interesting, I believe it is against the forum rules to post on a thread that is more than a couple of months old unless you have something new to add. I highly doubt you'll get into trouble for it (this is only your first post, after all), but it's something to bear in mind for future reference. The forum rules are here; I advise you take a quick look at them to avoid accidentally breaking them again ;).

Farewell.

LinnScarlett

But... but Mabbz! Our amazing dissection of the material! ;)

However, if we actually start discussing again, and adding more arguments, that WOULD be allowed, wouldn't it?
I need more time to do the Emperor's work!

You can read my stuff on 2S's Fluff and Stories.

Or, you can come visit my author page on Archive of Our Own. WARNING: NC-17

Mabbz

Quote from: LinnScarlett on May 03, 2013, 11:24:52 PM
But... but Mabbz! Our amazing dissection of the material! ;)

However, if we actually start discussing again, and adding more arguments, that WOULD be allowed, wouldn't it?
Here's the rule:
QuotePlease don't bump up old threads - if they're over a month old (for example, although that timing isn't set in stone) then it's generally frowned upon to bump up the thread - we call this 'threadomancy' (thread necromancy). Only do this if you have something really very useful to add to the thread.
In other words, yes I'm fairly sure that would be allowed.