With the first preview in 2026, Games Workshop has introduced a whole load of new models and rules for Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar and Blood Bowl. A brief scene is currently circulating among fans: the model of an Adeptus Custodes with a female head. For part of the community, this is a reason for loud outrage – for others, it’s entertaining popcorn cinema.
Here are the new models:
- During a little over an hour, there were new models for various armies from the worlds of Warhammer showcased at the New Year Preview. You can catch up on the entire preview on Twitch.
- About halfway through the show, the new Adeptus Custodes for the Horus Heresy were presented, meaning for the backstory of Warhammer 40,000. The Horus Heresy is the current set with new and sometimes even more absurd models than what Warhammer already has.
- The Custodes come fully equipped with foot soldiers and bolter-spears (which are exactly what they sound like), their own versions of the still-in-death-serving cybots, and versatile tanks. They can be used for both the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000.
What is the problem with the new Custodes? Some of the models were shown on stream without helmets, which is already rare for Custodes. These specific minis also had female faces.
At the beginning of 2024, Games Workshop casually mentioned that female Custodes exist – back then a huge scandal, because the Adeptus Custodes were originally a purely male order. According to older rules, they consist of the “sons of the noble houses.”
Even with the Space Marines, there are no women and with the Custodes, this had also been the case until this point. Fans felt they were being sold out in favor of “woker” politics in Warhammer.
Over the following months, there were memes, but the discussion has died down because simply not much has happened in this direction. Until now.
“With this, I must say adieu”
Although a ton of new models were presented in the preview, including for the armies of Age of Sigmar and very stylish minis for Blood Bowl, the “Femstodes” are the absolute biggest topic on Reddit and other platforms with dozens of threads and discussions.
The majority of posts are merely memes about the “Nerd Outburst,” meaning the “core meltdown” that the biggest lore fans are now experiencing (for example, on Reddit). For many users, it is simply entertaining to see how others can get upset over such a seemingly trivial matter. They tend to brush off female Custodes with a shrug.
However, there are some hardcore fans who threatened to sell their armies. In one thread, a user even warned:
Stop buying new [models]. Get old rule books, codices, buy second-hand or take STL files. Do not finance this monster. Don’t even watch the Cavill series, not even to mock it. They track the views, even on pirate websites. Let the galaxy burn.
The discussions, however, go significantly beyond the lore, which has been retroactively adjusted and about which one can be upset or not, and critique the manner in which Games Workshop has approached this.
Some users believe that merely adding female Custodes will not draw more people to play the army, and it undermines the integrity of genuinely female organizations, which are no longer as special as they are now:
- Space Marines have the Adepta Sororitas as the female counterpart with nearly the same powers, which many fans compare with “Space Monks” and “Space Nuns.”
- The Custodes, on the other hand, had as a purely female counterpart the Sisters of Silence, one of the most dangerous organizations of the Imperium consisting of women who can nullify any psyker.
Logically, along with the female Custodes, the “Mute Misters” would have to come as well. Instead of desperately trying to breed female supersoldiers, Games Workshop should rather think about how to better highlight the peculiarities of the world. Everyone would benefit from that.
That Warhammer overall, however, leans heavily on a very masculine aesthetic and hyper-masculinity is quite obvious and has been for a long time – although rather rarely an issue. There are even fan projects that take advantage of this situation to create parodies: Web series mocks the hyper-masculine Space Marines from Warhammer 40,000, the latest episode has over 3 million views in 5 days.
