“When even Warhammer nerds leave the battlefield, isn’t it time the anti-woke mob laid down their arms?”, writes Jasper Jackson in the Guardian Observer. Mr Jackson starts by introducing himself as a Warhammer player. I shall likewise declare my interest by introducing myself as a former payer of mighty sums to buy Warhammer kits for a member of my family. I was aware enough of the game to smugly chide the Observer sub-editors for failing to distinguish between Warhammer 40K and proper Warhammer. (I was promptly de-smugged by the discovery that someone has gone and changed the Eldar into Aeldari without telling me. What brought that on, then, an attack of elite T’au copyright lawyers?)
I digress. Mr Jackson continues,
But in recent weeks the sprawling Warhammer fandom has been enveloped in a dramatic controversy – or at least you would think so, from some news headlines.
“It’s Wokehammer! Games Workshop engulfed in gender row with fans after it said Warhammer squadron that was previously thought of as men-only has ‘always had females’,” screamed one MailOnline headline. What had prompted these claims of outrage was Games Workshop introducing a new female character into one of its science fantasy games, Warhammer 40,000. The character in question was part of a group of genetically engineered warriors called Custodes, which had, so far, not had any women models in it – but, according to Games Workshop, had always been included in the weighty narrative “lore” of the game.
The Mail had seen a number of tweets complaining about it, such as one from a games designer saying that Games Workshop was “‘gender flipping’ characters for ‘woke points’”. This was portrayed as a widespread backlash from fans. But, as a fan who frequently browses message boards for tips on playing and painting, or to look at interesting bits of background dug up by people who have bothered to read the many books published about the various Warhammer universes, my experience has been quite different.
If you actually look at the online spaces where fans of the games discuss the hobby they love, most don’t seem very bothered.
I commend the Mr Jasper’s eschewal of sensationalism. But as a pitch for an Observer piece, “most don’t seem very bothered” has its limitations. Eight paragraphs to learn that Reddit slumbers. What, I started to wonder, is this article for? In the ninth paragraph, I found out:
But where once those getting angry about changes bringing greater inclusivity might have been the overwhelming majority, this time they seem at best a vocal minority. That this is the mood on Reddit is even more surprising, given that the social network was once one of the primary breeding grounds for Gamergate, the toxic online movement of 2014-15 that spewed hate towards women with the temerity to create, play, enjoy and critique video games.
Despite not being a Warhammerer myself, I do have an alternative hypothesis to offer Mr Jackson as to why Gamergate exploded and Custogate fizzled: it is that people react differently to things that are different.
BONUS OVERNIGHT MUSINGS: The reason why the Warhammer community finds the retconning of the Custodes order to include females to be, at most1, slightly annoying in a “Put a chick in it and make her gay” kind of way, is that “Custodian Calladyce Taurovalia Kesh” is just one new character in a sprawling fictional ‘verse. Warhammer clearly were jumping on a bandwagon in the Orwellian way that they intoned “Since the first of the Ten Thousand were created there have always been female Custodians” despite never having previously mentioned this in the 37 years since the game was released. In addition, as someone quoted in the Daily Mail article suggested, the Sisters of Battle have a right to feel slighted2, especially given their feminist origin story: the order was created to circumvent a rule that the Ecclesiarchy was not permitted to maintain any “men under arms”. But in the end, allowing for the two nitpicks I mentioned, Warhammer’s adverts offering the Calladyce product line for sale would get four stars on eBay for the honesty of their product description.
In contrast, the whole point about Gamergate was industry-wide dishonesty in product descriptions. Jasper Jackson, who seems a nice Guardian-reading boy, thinks Gamergate was about male gamers hating female gamers, and also thinks, not entirely logically, that male gamers who hate female gamers would also hate female fictional characters appearing in their games. With those assumptions it would make sense to be pleasantly surprised that the number of woman-hating male gamers had gone down since 2014-15. The problem with that line of thought is that conclusions drawn from wrong assumptions are worthless. This summary of Gamergate given by commenter “bobby b” in 2017 was rightly praised as being far more accurate than anything you’ll find on Wikipedia:
I still get a chuckle out of how it all started – one guy who, discovering that his game-designer girlfriend was spreading her charms widely, wrote a long blog post about it, letting out the secret that her paramours were writers in the game-critique industry who were giving games high ratings for factors unrelated to the actual games (wink wink).
And then he got piled on by people defending her right to lie to him and sleep around because she was a poor repressed woman, and then they got piled on by guys saying, no, she’s a whore and so are these game critics, and then the SJW types decided all gamer-guys were nerdy neanderthals who hated women, and the fun began.
1 Or not annoying at all. In the comments below, “Agammamon” puts forth a satisfying in-universe justification for the existence of female Custodes.
2It is not wise to slight a member of the Adepta Sororitas.
It’s yet another example of the self-centered nature of the leftist agenda: They can’t leave anyone or anything alone.
Doesn’t matter what it is, how petty the issue: If you enjoy walking your dog in the country, they’ll notice that, and find a way to ruin your joy. Because, that’s what they do.
My personal take on it is that this sort of thing is akin to the impulse driving a lot of the arseholes running Homeowners Associations here in the US. Best thing to be done with them? Identify who they are, and cull them. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a “control freak” gene complex associated with this sort of behavior, and that we’d do well by the species to remove anyone exhibiting it. It’d be a kindness; these are generally miserable people who’d really be a lot happier were they dead.
Kirk,
I’ve thought along similar lines myself, that an excessive interest in other people’s lives is a form of mental illness. In a mild form it is the fascination with the lives of celebrities, ramping up to the mouth foaming rage at the idea that someone, somewhere, is enjoying themselves. Culling might be a little extreme, but we should at least give it a name and get it in the the DSM.
Also, ‘Proper’ Warhammer is dead for several years now. WHFB shut down in 2010, shortly after the introduction of Age of Sigmar.
@Roue le Jour,
You want a rational species, you have to set the incentives properly.
I’m convinced, from both observation and study, that there is a significant part of our behavior that is both biological and heritable. As such, you need to keep that fact in mind when you set social policies: If you reward certain things, then you’ll get more of those things, reinforcing the behaviors.
If you want to live with Karens running your life, making you miserable? By all means, allow her kind to proliferate. If nothing else, her example and success at “getting away with it” will cue others to attempt similar behaviors.
If we all gathered around people that demonstrated these Karen-like behaviors, and then beat their asses into the ground…? Pretty soon, you’d have few people willing to behave like that.
The reason you see all the “wilding” going on around you? They’re modeling themselves on what they see on TikTok and WorldStar. If they start seeing people suffering actual negative consequences for that sort of behavior, it’ll stop. If nothing else, the educational example of seeing real-world results for doing these things will presumably make them more conscious about advertising what they’re doing.
I spend a lot of time on the 40k lore reddit and you know what’s interesting?
Players didn’t even notice. See, we had sort of already figured there were probably female Custodes, just GW never had mentioned them. There’s nothing in lore preventing it (unlike Astartes) and the way they are created (taking the first born from Terran nobility) sort of lends itself to that. Considering that the Custodes were created to be bodyguards *and companions* – they’re well-versed in martial and cultural things so they can fight, sing, debate, etc, all the things you’d want in an companion.
From what I see, its people on both sides of the culture war *that don’t actually play 40k* just using this as another battleground to fight their woke-v-based war. Now, I certainly have strong sympathies for the based faction (I’m nominally part of it) but people need to take a step back and look around.
At the end of the day, 40k players will definitely push back against Woke being pushed in where it can’t reasonably be accommodated, the Custodes is not the hill anyone in the hobby wants to fight over.
Is this journalism?
TWEETS!? Some randos on Twitter, probably with mental health issues, are not the mainstream.
This is indeed journalism in 2024, Agamammon.
Have you SEEN the people we’ve all been electing to run our worlds? I’d say the nuts are the mainstream, and the sane are the outliers.
@Kirk
It’s yet another example of the self-centered nature of the leftist agenda: They can’t leave anyone or anything alone.
The Left, almost as a definition, believe that the State should intervene in everything. They believe in Interventionism because someone, somewhere, has feelings that they have been left out or ‘oppressed’ – or that opponents display wrongthink. How are you going to get to Utopia if you allow unequal outcomes and wrongthoughts?
I’m a swivel-eyed culture warrior, bemedaled veteran of the glorious GamerGate campaign (& always eager to stick the boot in yet again), & a Warhammer40k afficionado quite literally from the start… but this is sounds & fury signifying nothing, not even worth a tweet, which is why it has been largely greeted with a collective shrug.
Note: A lot of Warhammer refugees heading for Battletech nowadays, given the terrible way Games Workshop treats their players, changing up the rules every few months to force them to spend more money. Nothing with wokeism, though that may have been a factor in GW trying to expand their target demographic.
Btech itself has had some controversy internally when some woke players wanted more LGBTQ+ representation, and in the end the community generally felt that it’s up to them however they wanted it, as long as they didn’t force their agenda down on the rest of us and didn’t plug their message 24/7, which could get tiresome.
And even then, we could just tune them out if we didn’t like what they were saying. As long as the game designers and management stuck to the core tenets of the setting, we’re good.
The problem, as I see it, is that to many of the Warhammer players, the sudden inclusion of the new products smacked of sheer opportunism and revisionism. If they have some major plot developments that forced factions to open up in desperation, or put the Sisters more in the spotlight, it would have gone down a lot better.
The thing that cracks me up about the whole LGBTWTFBBQ crew projecting themselves into the various futures is that they really, truly do not have much of a future.
What do you suppose happens when we figure out what “makes” someone sexually aberrant? D’you think that parents are going to opt to screen out those issues, or are they going to opt for making their kids miserable and unable to fit in anywhere?
So, the issues that are genetic and prenatal are going to get corrected, and we’re going to see what amounts to what they’re doing to the deaf community with cochlear implants: A genocide by solving the problems of that community.
Not to mention, what happens when you’ve achieved the ability to edit genes and so forth on the fly, coupling that with “correcting” the issues of “wrong sex”? Let’s say we could truly do transitions between sexes, right down to the genes and making sure that the physical expression of their bodies was appropriate. At that point, what do you suppose happens? Do we decide, after someone “tries out” being a girl, discovers that they don’t really like it, and goes back to “factory original”, that they’re really just mentally ill and then try to cure that?
I suspect that the current era of confusion is an artifact of the transitory state we’re in; better medicine and medical technology will come along, and you’ll likely have prenatal fetal monitoring through implants that will obviate all the messy issues of a pregnancy that likely create some of these problems with sexual identity. If the fetus is kept on a steady state of hormones appropriate to its sexual development, then will we see the same sort of homosexual behaviors at the same rates?
I don’t think we’re going to have LGBTWTFBBQ types in the future, to be quite honest. They’ll be eliminated the same way we’re eliminating the deaf and blind, by solving the problems that produce them in the first damn place.
I really don’t think the activists have thought this through. The existence of future LGBTWTFBBQ populations is highly questionable; why would we keep them around? Their fashion sense? Can you imagine some set of parents being told that they have to have a gay kid, because we need miserable fashion designers?
I don’t disagree that a homogenous population of sexually unconfused people might not be as creative and “vibrant”, but do you think parents would actually choose to have kids that won’t fit in, or not do the things they need to do in order to ensure that they will be healthy, and stable personalities?
I mean, once the factors are identified that make people “that way”, what parent is going to chose to implement those in their children? You’d have to be nuts and abusive, to do that.
Hell, I can see a point in the future where it’ll be considered child abuse if you fail to have your embryos gene-screened and cleaned up, as well as have some sort of prenatal implant monitoring the pregnancy as it progresses, making sure that the proper development is going on. If you don’t do that, your kids will likely be able to sue you for “wrongful birth” and irresponsibility.
Same-same with regards to artificial wombs; once those get good enough, the predictable and consistent prenatal environment will likely be seen as superior to having Mom lugging around a baby and exposing it to risk, along with the essentially random nature of things that could go wrong with a “body-birth”. I am projecting that there’d likely be some stigma associated with such a thing, and that it would be seen as atavistic and primitive…
In other words, the future ain’t gay or transgender. Likely won’t be bisexual, either, because of many of the same factors. Parents are going to want their kids to be the best they can be, and that’s not going to include sexual confusion. I mean, hell… If you can program your kids for success and happiness, why wouldn’t you? You want grandchildren? Make sure you’ll get some…
Kirk (demonstrating that decades of lies and misdirection have influenced even libertarians and conservatives):
What do you suppose happens when we figure out what “makes” someone sexually aberrant?
—————————————
We already know definitively that homosexuality, transgenderism, and other philias are not genetic or biological.
We mapped the human genome at the start of this century and nothing was found.
These are dysfunctional, compulsive behaviors, not identities, not biological realities. The “Born that Way” myth was deployed to shift the language used for these behaviors from maladaptation and dysfunction to the more glowing – and useful to the Left – rhetoric of a civil rights movement.
And the causes of these behaviors – developmental disruption, unstable family dynamics, isolation, depression, emotional trauma and sexual abuse – are not going to go away, and have increased. In fact, the Left’s weakening of the traditional family is part of a nasty game of percentages that increases the chances of kids being derailed into these philias.
@Ben David, who said:
I beg to disagree. Apparently, you’ve never been around large groups of kids, and/or talked to primary school teachers. Most of whom can point out which kids are going to have gender-role issues and do so long before the kids themselves ever even realize they’ve got issues… My Mom’s teaching career is replete with examples of this stuff, and where it comes from? No damn idea, but I’ll suggest that there’s actually something to that whole “stress in pregnancy” thing causing hormone imbalances. There are studies which identified the stresses of WWII as having led to a higher rate of homosexuality in the generation born during and just after the war in Germany. The thinking is that this is a genetic/behavioral adaptation at work, in that it is better for the males in a conquered society not to reproduce, allowing the females to pull a ju-jitsu move on the conquerors.
There’s enough work out there to be able to say that while none of it is definitively proven, the evidence is that there are those who’re predisposed by biology for demonstrating the behavior and that it’s actually a reasonably good bet that it’s also a behavioral genetic adaptation that has the effect of enabling more successful males to come in and rapidly replace the former males in the band/society.
Wish I could remember the cites on that, but the research does exist and it points towards your thesis of it all being “choice” as a bit of wishful thinking.
Observationally, I’ve noted that there are several “types” of the LGBT community. Some are what I’d term “naturals”, just like everyone else, whose sexuality is inherently at odds with the norm. These are the people you’re left going “Huh… Fred’s gay? I had no idea… Worked with him for years, the issue never came up, that I can remember…”
Then, there’s the other sorts, who’re either gay due to being perpetually pissed off at the world, and who’re getting back at it via transgression. I believe those are the sort you’re thinking of, as being “gay by choice”. Along with the transgressives, you also have the “performative” types, who’re gay because it’s socially “the thing” for them to do; they’re trying to fit in, and adopting the gay lifestyle is how they’ve chosen to do it. Some of this sort are like a friend of mine from my high school years, who I’m morally certain I watched “talk himself into it” because he basically overthought everything. I remember what I suspect was the exact moment he started down that path, the day that we both mistook a nice firm ass and some long blond hair as being female. When the gentleman turned around, and exposed a beard, about all I did was go “Huh… I guess there are dudes who look like ladies…”, and my friend started doubting his sexuality, thinking and verbalizing (later on, not on the scene) that if he thought that guy looked good, then he must be gay… I’m like, no… I made the same mistake, and there’s no damn way I’m switching sides because of bad eyesight and androgyny…
I strongly suspect that there’s a lot more that is heritable in terms of genetic behavioral programming and epigenetic/biological causation for the behavior than we believe, meaning that it is definitely something that will be edited out in the future.
As well, with constant monitoring coming into play? I’ll wager you that a lot of the pedophilic behavior that goes into creating gays in later life is going to get damped down. You’re already seeing a lot of the pervs getting caught because “Nanny Cam”, and that’s only going to tighten up. Odds are excellent that the abusive aberrant behavior is going to get harder and harder to hide, reducing the prevalence.
I had an interesting conversation with a gay acquaintance of mine, who confessed that he thought he was gay largely because of childhood sex abuse in the foster care system, and we were sorta speculating on how the whole thing would eventually go down, if the abuse was eliminated. Would the gay community be like the deaf community, actively discouraging things like the cochlear implant…? Would they demand the right to “create more gays” by abusing kids…?
It was an interesting and thought-provoking conversation. He wasn’t a fan of the gay lifestyle or most gays; the way he saw it, most of them were either consciously or unconsciously pedophilic, what with the fascination most have with really young partners, the “twink” phenomenon. He did not think that most gay relationships he’d been in or witnessed were at all between equals; nearly all of his relationships when young were much older partners who were attracted to his youth, and it had been a harsh blow when he realized he’d aged out of being attractive to them… Which was also about the time he recognized what had been going on for most of those years. He was not a happy camper with the whole thing, and I think that if he’d been able to, he’d have happily murdered a lot of people that he recognized at that point as having been his abusers.
I think the evidence is there for “gay” being caused by multiple factors, to include “choice”. Some, however, had rather less choice in the matter than others…
Kirk – google “non-falsifiable hypothesis”
You are quoting pseudo-scientific handwaving – the same type of waffle used to conjure up Global Warming “science” and other nonsense.
The Left loves to present their agenda as the inevitable voice of Progress – remember how these loonies branded themselves the “reality-based community”? Now they are inventing genders…
In the early 70s the Gay Men’s Health Crisis published a study in which gay men interviewed a large pool of other gay men… without the filters and fears of non-gay questioners, the results were very clear. The following elements factored into most gay men’s histories years:
-Perceived estrangement/mismatched personalities with father
-Emotional enmeshment with a dependent mother
(those 1st two came together often enough to be labeled “the family triangle”)
-Premature sexualization aka molestation (about 1/3 directly admitted they were molested, other respondents had “romanticized” attention/entraption by adults or older youth… just like the “mentors” now being allowed into schools)
-Divorce, abuse or abandonment by a parent – especially father
-Peer rejection in adolescence
There were 2 clear missed developmental inflection points at which homosexuality was likely to enter, either as a coping mechanism or via extenal influence/molestation:
-2-4 years, when boys separate from mother and identify with father. (This additional developmental hurdle is one explanation why there are so many more gay men than lesbians.)
-Adolescence, when sexuality awakens and peer approval is very important. Going into adolescence without a stable family (and especially without a father) is disastrous for kids on many fronts… see statistics on teen pregnancy and drug use when there is no father.
The GMHC thought that this survey would cement the PR campaign to drum up sympathy for the Gay Rights agenda – but the initial response was to view the data as confirming that these were dysfunctional responses to developmental issues or trauma…. which was what Freud, Rogers and other major lights of psychology thought as well.
So in the true Leftie spirit of dishonesty – they pulled the report out of circulation.
The propaganda bombardment of the following decades included theories on birth order and all the other pseudo-scientific garbage you are citing.
On the rare instances when political correctness did not cloud the research – the findings largely confirmed the GMHC study. For example, the Dutch Ministry of Health study that revealed most new AIDS cases were occurring in “married” couples…
Nobody is born gay, just like nobody is born in the wrong body.
Homosexuality is a sexualized reponse to developmental issues and/or trauma
Other children can experience the same trauma without it being sexualized, in which case they may adopt other coping behaviors.
The evidence strongly suggests that you’re wrong.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296090/
Read that, and then try to square what you’re saying with the results of this study. There are many more out there, and if you’d bothered to read everything available instead of that which confirmed your own bias, you’d likely know better than to try to make the assertions you’ve made here.
I take the view that there are a fairly wide range of things contributing to behavior, and this is just one of them. There are likely epigenetic switches that get “thrown” due to stress during pregnancy, which would make sense from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. It would behoove a conquered population to have more females and to suppress male births, which would enable that subject population to genetically overwhelm their conquerors.
The science is out there, and while the science can be biased, it does point to your assertions of it all being solely by choice.
I do question why you’re so invested in that explanation for the behavior, however. It seems an odd hill to choose to die on.
From your “study” – a house-of-cards “overview” article with no new data:
It is hard to get information on hormone levels in developing humans.
—–
It does not matter how many garbage papers are published – it’s non-falsifianle hypothesis and politically slanted conjecture all the way down.
It’s impossible to test this “theory” – impossible to map adult gay outcomes to actually measured prenatal hormone levels.
https://www.stjude.org/research/progress/2018/hypothesis-must-be-falsifiable.html#:~:text=A%20hypothesis%20or%20model%20is,obtained%2C%20would%20disprove%20the%20hypothesis.
Certainly behavior results from basic persona traits meeting life experience. There is no simple 1 to 1 correlation of cause and effect for dysfunctional behaviors. And of course traumatized children did not “choose” to be gay – but they – and their molesters – weren’t born that way, either.
Kirk asks:
I do question why you’re so invested in that explanation for the behavior
—–
1. “born that way” is the core of every attack on Western humanism and morality. The Left applies pop-scientific “born that way” claims to a range of behaviors in a concerted attack on Western notions of free will and personal responsibility. It often comes together with the argument that acting morally is somehow less “natural” or “authentic” than acting on base instinct and emotion.
This debasing rhetoric in front and center in the current culture wars, and must be challenged.
2. The truth matters to some of us at least – and these particular LGBT lies close like a shackle on many young people. So compassion also demands that they be challenged and rolled back
BlackRock, and the other entities who manage the shares of the pension funds and so on, demand this DEI-EDI agenda.
And there is also an Amazon link (they are busy supposedly creating a Warhammer film with Henry Cavill) – when told that the Sisters of Battle were the Warhammer elite female warriors, Amazon rejected the Sisters of Battle as “too religious” (religion is the point of the Sisters of Battle – their faith defines them).
The “Woke” (Critical Theory Marxist) agenda demands female Space Marines (yes they are interested even in Warhammer – “Reactionaries” must have every last thing taken from them) – so what customers want does-not-matter.
Big Business “Critical Theory” (funded by endless Credit Money) has nothing but hatred for customers or for Real Savings – it is “capitalism” without real capital (it has Credit Money instead).
The funny thing is, that I other nerd friends of mine, who have something of a minor relationship with WH40, as in we don’t play the tabletop game due to it being very expensive and simply preferring other stuff, but still play the occasional WH40 computer game and enjoy WH40 fanart, etc actually consider the Adepta Sororitas to be more badass than the Space Marines.
Precisely because they are not genetically enhanced supersoldiers. They are “just” highly trained elite forces in power armour wielding all sorts of powerful equipment, yet still baseline humans instead of possessing some cheat-like advantage. And they go face all the enemies the Space Marines do anyway.
Calico.
The Adepta Sororitas, the Sisters of Battle, are not acceptable to the “Woke” (Critical Theory Marxist) Corporate elite – because the Sisters of Battle are defined by their religious faith.
As for Corporations such as Amazon (which is supposedly making the Warhammer film) pushing the agenda of the left (the agenda of evil) – well Mr Jeff Bezos (I am told) does NOT believe the Marxist stuff himself, but thinks if he allows his Corporate bureaucrats (hired from the “best”, i.e. worst, universities) to push it (via, for example, the despicable Washington Post, which he owns, and via the vile “Rings of Power” which he spent a Billion Dollars on), the left will not hurt him.
Mr Bezos is sadly mistaken – no matter how much he allows Amazon to push the “Critical Theory” agenda the left will still rob-and-murder him (when they can) anyway.
Trying to “live and let live” with evil Chaos Cults does not work – not in Warhammer, and not in our world either.
For brevity, could we just call the LG+ people ‘Elgiees’?