Warhammer 40K: Only Bigots Hate Female Adeptus Custodes

Oh No! Women are coming to ruin 40K!  The bigots need to get over themselves about female Adeptus Custodes.

GW has been promising for years to have better representation in it’s settings. Warhammer 40,000, perhaps the most intricate and entrenched of these settings has long been male-dominated. This is not to say that no women have been in the lore, but by and large it is a setting filled with men, or over-the-top caricatures of men. It’s hardly a wonder that the player base has traditionally been largely male. All of that has started to shift it more recent years, with the role of women in the setting getting a lot more attention. This week GW has taken another step down that path with the introduction of female Custodian Guard.  Lets take a look at what that means and how everyone is being super nice and supportive of it.

Wait- So What Happened?

The short of it all is that in the new Custodies Codex a short story reveals the presence of female Adeptus Custodes. Up until this point it was widely thought that the Custodes, like the Space Marines, were all male. However that is not the case, and while we don’t know how many there are, there are women among the ranks of the Emperor’s Guardians. A post from the GW Facebook page confirmed that this has always been the case. 

So there you have it. Female Custodians are a thing and always have been. Does it change the game one iota? No. Is it a major impact on the lore… well also no, it doesn’t really change a thing. But it is nice, and it makes sense. It’s a good step forward for representation and ties into a recent trend.

The Role Of Women

Recent 40K lore has done a lot of good in expanding on the role of women in the setting. While it has done this broadly, there is one particular area that we can see a very interesting trend in: the creation of the Space Marines. Traditionally, they were seen as an all-male group created by a man, the Emperor. Maybe with the help of some other men like Malcador. However, it’s been shown repeatedly that, if anything, it was women who really made the Space Marines. Erda, Amar Astarte and the Selenar all were instrumental in the creation of not just the Space Marines but the Primarchs themselves. Heck, as the Emperor is pretty genderfluid you could even say that They were another woman that worked on the project!

All in all it’s clear woman had a major, and still being explored, role in the creation of the Space Marines. The same is most likely true of the Adeptus Custodes. All of this means its pretty logical for the clearly superior genecrafted Custodes to also have women among its ranks.

Adeptus Custodes Are Better

When talking about female Space Marines a lot of people bring up the idea that something in process of becoming a Marine only works on men. This is why they say there can only be male Marines, and that’s it. Even if that is true, a hotly-debated topic and one that could change, there has never been a reason that should apply to Adeptus Custodes. Custodes are created via a completely different, much more complex and more esoteric process than Marines. They are superior to Space Marines in every way, designed most likely to outlast Space Marines, and perhaps “retire” them like the Thunder Warriors of old, when the Space Marines are no longer needed by the Imperium. The inclusion of women among the ranks of the “quality-first, quantity second” Custodian Guard simply confirms how superior they are to the throw-away, mass-produced Marines. Overall, it’s a great little addition to the lore. Women get more inclusion in the 40K universe, and every is happy. Right? Right?

The Bigots Are Mad

As seems to happen every time GW takes  a step to be more inclusive, to get more people into the hobby, some bigots on the internet are mad. In a number of online spaces, including comments on our website, people have come out to protest this update. In general, they position themselves as guardians of the lore. Maybe even a few people reading this are in this position. You might be about to tell me how you’re not a bigot at all, you simply really care about 40K lore and its sanctity.

But you know what? Save yourself the breath and take a seat. The truth is that 40K has never cared one bit about the internal consistancy of it’s own lore. There have been countless retcons and changes galore from the very first days of 40K. Indeed 40K is specifically written so that there is no truth, imperfect narrators are the norm, and that everything can, and often does change at any moment. And yet people still get mad about only a small subsection of these things.

Take A Closer Look At What the Bigots Are Always Mad About

The arguments about caring about the lore fall apart pretty quickly when you look at what people seem to be mad about. Because it always seems to be when women get introduced, that you see anger popping up on the internet. Female Custodians? People care about the “lore” all of a sudden. The Primarchs have a mother? “Protect the lore!” Amar Astarte was a women? “My lore!” GW makes a major retcon to the entire setting changing the timeline and lengthening the Indomitus Crusade? Not a peep. For that last one, GW even went back and rewrote parts of novels to correct the lore. They’ve never done anything like that before. An actual eraser of past lore. And yet strangely… no one really cared, threatened to burn their armies in protest, or quit the hobby. Hmmm.

Until the 9th Edition Imperial Guard codex we’d never heard of the Rogal Dorn tank, and then suddenly it was there and always was there. Just like with countless other units and tanks before. No one cared about that. But do the exact same thing with a women, we’d never heard of female Custodians before, but now they exist and always have, and a set of people gets riled up. The same thing happened mere months ago with the similar introduction of female Bretonnian Knights. When the same people only seem to get upset about “the lore” when the role of women and other minorities is getting expanded, and never at any other points – it’s crystal clear what these people’s agenda really is, and who they really are: bigots to be ignored.

The Shining Future

GW made the right move in including female Custodians. It enriches the lore, and adds new options. It gives us more and better representation. Very little of the past is changed by this information, but it’s still a move in the correct direct. Hopefully it’s expanded on with some awesome miniatures, and more stories and exploration of them. It continues a positive trend of expanding the role of women in the game and that is only a net positive.

Those protesting the change should be ignored, and in short order, will not be missed. Let’s hope we see more along these lines from Games Workshop.

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