There is excitement around the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000. And at the forefront of the outraged is once again Twitch streamer Asmongold. He believes that Games Workshop is selling its paying customers a lie.
What is the reason for the excitement?
- The “Adeptus Custodes” are the Emperor’s bodyguards, something like super soldiers. In the previous lore, it was explicitly stated that they were only men.
- However, in a new issue, at least two women are now seen among the super soldiers (via warhammer).
- This is causing excitement.
“Warhammer becomes Wokehammer”
How was the reaction: An English site, Mail Online, turned this excitement into “It’s Wokehammer” – men are angry that the all-male brigade has now been changed.
Games Workshop responded on Twitter amidst all the anger: “Since the first ten thousand were created, there have always been female Custodians.”
But this caused even more anger. The tweet reached 3.5 million views.
Players feel lied to and deceived
This is how the dispute escalated: The statement “there have always been female Custodians” was taken the completely wrong way by Twitch streamer Asmongold.
He saw it as a blatant lie. Games Workshop does not take the fans seriously and lies to them just to be more politically correct. Until then, it had always been clear that there could only be men, he said.
How could they lie so obviously to such a clever community that cares so much about the lore?
For Asmongold, female super soldiers in Warhammer 40k are another sign of a game brand making unnecessary changes just to appear more politically correct. This is revisionist. If they had just addressed it openly, it would have been better.
People would have been angry then too, but at least Games Workshop would have been honest. With this bad lie, “they insult the intelligence of the customers.”
Why are they introducing women now? As PC Gamer explains, referencing an employee of the Warhammer company, there were women among the Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000 at the beginning, about 25%. However, this changed because in the 1980s there were complaints from the retail stores that customers would not buy the female models that were offered in packs at that time. They asked Games Workshop to only make male models.
So, they removed the women and then invented a backstory to justify that there were only male Marines.
Nowadays, there are also some women among the Warhammer players, and men are generally much more open-minded than they were 40 years ago and would also buy women, as PC Gamer knows. Ultimately, the lore of Warhammer 40,000 is just there to sell game figures, and if the buyers change, then so does the lore.
This is what it’s about: This seems to just be a misunderstanding. The statement from Games Workshop “There have always been women” was meant as “There have always been these female super soldiers in the world,” thus a “retcon”:
In the Warhammer world, nothing has changed, so there is no “in-game explanation” for why there are now women among the previously all-male super soldiers; rather, they are simply selling female game figures in the real world now, which they weren’t doing before.
However, the tweet was read as “You must think we are stupid”.
Here, Games Workshop should have better read the room, that people also wanted to be upset about this, and responded more precisely.
More about Asmongold:
Twitch streamer becomes a controversial figure on Twitter due to a clip seen by 19 million
