The Emperor's He-Man Woman-Haters Club, or, the Perils of Complexity

 So I've seen passing reference on social media to a new iteration of that old debate about whether there can or should be female Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 setting. I think there have actually been good points made on both sides, and as always my answer is going to be something like "weeeeelll ... yes and no." But before we do that, let's just get a few predictable comments out of the way:

• Yes, the Sisters of Battle exist. No, they have nothing to do with this question. (And don't get me started on the Sister of Battle harem girl model; would one beefy, oiled Space Marine in a loincloth kneeling at a Dark Eldar's feet be too much to ask?)
• Yes, I know there were originally female Space Marines (check out the left column of the ad below -- even though they're not called Space Marines they clearly are. And yes, I know that one of them is wearing power-armour chaps). 
• Yes, GMs in individual campaigns are free to make up whatever they want; the bizarre thing is that so few people seem to think this. 

With those anticipated points out of the way, let's take a look at the discussion. 

Now, I'm sure that there's been a lot of writing about this I haven't seen, but the argument in favour of there being female Space Marines is simple and obvious: it would be fun to have opportunities for both male and female characters in this group, and it would be nice in general to see some female characters in the 40K universe, which has ... few.

(I'm speaking here, of course, about people who care about the "lore" or "fluff" of the setting; to many players, these are just figures on a table, whose genders or personalities are irrelevant.)

There have been a number of different responses, but the only interesting one that I've seen so far is that it would be thematically inappropriate for there to be female Space Marines, because Space Marines are a dark parody of masculinity. Huge, hyper-muscular and either stoic or brutal, they are what men would be like if they had no stereotypically "feminine" traits at all. Having women among their ranks would spoil that image. Further, this argument goes, they're not meant to be admirable -- they're the ruthless enforcers of a monstrous tyranny, dripping with imagery from the worst regimes in history. "Women, too, can be Space Fascists" isn't a message positive enough to mess with your canon to send.

And I think that argument has several good points. There is certainly art and fiction that presents the Space Marines as grotesque hypermasculine-but-asexual creatures, and certainly introducing a female character who was in any way different from her male counterparts might tend to push against that theme.

But ... and here's where I think this argument is incomplete ... it wouldn't mess with that theme nearly as much as the bazillions of words of fiction in which Space Marines are presented as noble, heroic warriors, maybe a little gruff and unsympathetic but ultimately good guys whose virtues of discipline, courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice are supposed to be admired. I'm not even talking about people who view playing Space Marine or Space-Marine-like characters as an excuse to be a tiresome, hard-charging, no-emotions-but-duty-and-wrath jerkoff, I'm talking about Marines presented as no less terrifying or unlikeable than the protagonists of a sepia shooter.

And ultimately that's the problem(?) with a corporate franchise like this one -- it consists of a huge variety of art, fiction, models, games and so on, all created by different people and all necessarily having different thematic and artistic approaches. That can be as obvious as a world that's supposed to contain both Shadows over Bogenhafen and Blood Bowl, or as subtle as the difference in portrayal of the rule of Chaos in the setting's cosmology between the work of different writers. And it's not just limited to Warhammer, of course -- both the avuncular boy-scout Batman and the grim avenger of the night are Batman and always will be.

So if Space Marines were always portrayed in a way that meant that "a grotesque exaggeration of typically masculine qualities" was central to their thematic role in the story, then it would be true that having female Marine characters wouldn't make a lot of sense (although you could still tell some interesting stories with that concept, couldn't you?). And furthermore, players of those games would probably be less likely to be interested in playing female characters. But they're not always portrayed that way -- they're portrayed in a wide range of different ways; in the original version of the game, they're clearly just hard-bitten Special Forces types with some weird rituals, in much of the second edition they're portrayed as basically superheroes, and in the Horus Heresy books they're often presented as quite flawed and human despite their superhuman powers. You just can't make that argument consistently across the franchise as a whole, although it's a very valid interpretation in itself.

Don't like a female Marine miniature? Don't put one in your army; problem solved. Want to include female Marines in a Deathwatch game (which may even be suggested in the book, which I haven't read)? Go for it. Sadly, this probably doesn't extend to GW models, since they seldom make female humans, let alone Space Marines, and that seems unlikely to change, but I bet if you have a bit of a look around you can find some suitable conversion heads or Marine-alike models.

And this diversity of possible interpretations is a feature, not a bug. You're never going to nail a multi-creator, decades-long work down to a single interpretation, and that's OK. The inconsistencies and contradictions and changes create opportunities for varying recombinations of the source material, which is fun as heck. That's what Warhammer Sorta Thousand is all about.

Orcs, racism, form, content

One of the recurring debates within the world of fantasy gaming is: "are orcs racist?" Not are orcs, as a society, racist, but is the idea of having orcs in your game racist? In time-honoured fashion, I'm going to answer this with an over-thinking history of "othered" enemies in adventure fiction, but for those of you who are impatient I will summarise my position thus: on balance, I don't think they are, but I totally understand why people might think so.

So, first things first: for all that people talk about myth and legend, the inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons -- and, to some extent, for The Hobbit, which in turn inspires D&D -- is 19th- and early 20th-century adventure fiction. Dime novels, pulp magazines, all that kind of thing. I don't just mean fantasy and science fiction, but also historical adventure stories, westerns, and so on. You can easily see the tropes of adventure gaming in, I dunno, Treasure Island. And in this type of adventure fiction, humans of some kind -- often humans of a different skin colour from the protagonists -- appear in the story as disposable cannon fodder, just a sort of environmental hazard.

OK, now, I'm not gonna lie: this is pretty racist. It's part and parcel of the underlying cultural assumptions of its time, and I'm not here to pick on anyone from the past for holding hurtful beliefs that I only don't hold because of my very different upbringing. There but for the grace of God go I, and future generations will probably think I'm awful because of some thing I can't even perceive now. But, leaving aside the characters of the authors, I think that we can all agree that portraying your fellow people as bestial subhumans who can be butchered without moral consequence is pretty uncool, especially given that this reflected/influenced the contemporary view that they were, er, bestial subhumans who could be butchered without moral consequence.

Note, however, that this is very much a matter of narrative convention -- even war movies that do spend some time thinking about the morality of killing don't mind when their heroes mow down legions of enemy soldiers. We would all be a little uncomfortable about a movie about how good it is to kill The Germans, but no one minds killing Zee Chermans. In fact, Zee Chermans are just about the only human group it's still acceptable to portray as training dummies with shoes, but we're all agreed it's OK because they started it, I guess? I digress.

In short: some stories want to consider the humanity of the enemy and some don't. And the ones that don't are extra creepy when the enemy is, say, an indigenous population that your heroes were, in the real world, in the process of killing and dispossessing.

So orcs are in many ways a solution to this problem -- instead of treating human beings with complex lived experiences as primitive brutes worthy only of extermination, simply replace them with primitive brutes worthy only of extermination. What you want is to tell stories of adventure and battle without bringing in moral considerations about the value of that battle. So roll out the Native Americans and roll in, I dunno, Koopa Troopas.

Ah, the eternal struggle between good and evil.

Now, I'm OK with that! (Well, except that removing all the people of colour who are just there to be shot in the face sometimes results in removing all the people of colour full stop, which is a different but also bad thing.) But in general, I'm all for narrative conceits that allow a story to focus on what it's about. Take Batman, for instance: dispensing justice by swinging around the city on a rope and throwing boomerangs at people is not a good idea; I have very firm beliefs about the rule of law. But also in real life no one -- or almost no one -- is as ridiculously evil as the Joker, and even the ones that are aren't as terrifyingly capable as he seems to be. The story is created in order to facilitate rope-swinging and boomerang-throwing. So objections to this type of story as, I dunno, presenting a flawed model of criminal justice are based on a category error; they're attempting to apply real-world logic to a situation specifically created to avoid real-world logic.

And at a first glance, that's what I think people who subscribe to the "orcs are a racist idea" argument are doing -- they're looking at the general outline of the situation ("a group are being portrayed as a malevolent horde") and not at the specifics ("that group consists of actual monstrous brutes.")

I suspect that that is why, much over the objections of Tolkien purists, Warhammer orcs went green in the mid-80s and became goofier and goofier. Their over-the-top caricature tells people that this is pew-pew funtimes and not a story where moral concerns have much room to breathe.

However, there are two problems with my line of thought, one pointing in each direction:

First, roleplayers love to explore settings. And I don't just mean see what's over the next hill -- I mean they love to dig around in the details. Where do orcs live? How is their society structured? What are their cultural norms? Can we communicate with them? And so on and so on and so on. And the more that happens, the more likely you are to create an orc society that is an analogue of some kind of human society and therefore either a) portray your orcs as moral actors, harming their narrative function, or b) portray some human society as valueless slaughter-mobs, which takes us back to square one.

Not that there's anything wrong with a) above. I love Glorantha. But not every game is in Glorantha, and it wouldn't be suitable for every game to be. But as soon as you start thinking about how those societies work, you humanise or at least alien (as opposed to monster) -ise them and then, yeah, it's kind of weird to say "we can kill these guys and fuck thinking about the moral content ever." I don't know if it's racist per se, but it's weird. And so certain types of play get closed off. The enemy in Glorantha, when not literal demons or whatever, tend to be just soldiers on the other side, the killing of whom is seldom pew-pew funtimes unless properly managed.

The other is that maybe imagining conflicts in which the enemy are nothing but ambulatory targets does incline people to that kind of thinking, and that's bad because racism and militarism and so on. I'm not convinced by this argument; I think people demonise outgroup members just fine all by themselves. I would have reservations playing Ganghedge or whatever (don't ask) but largely that's a moot question because it doesn't sound like my thing in general. Playing F.A.T.A.L doesn't make you a racist, but being a racist might make you willing to put up with it.

Anyway, to summarise: I can see why people might think the whole lots-of-1HD-humanoids-to-butcher setting has connections to historical racism, but I think that to identify it as racist is looking at it from the wrong perspective. This is tied to a larger point about violence and morality in RPGs which I will talk about one of these days.

Then you get the women

Friend Tim of The Responsible One's Wargaming Blog recently retweeted some comments by Twitter user The Dice Bag Lady which I thought raised a familiar but interesting point:

I wonder if any miniatures company has had the "far out" idea yet to sculpt female models that aren't purely sex objects #controversial ;-)

Imagine if you just wanted a regular space marine, but they literally only come in assless chaps. (Ref previous tweet)

Now, this is true for the most part: representation of female characters, particularly in your more war-y type of wargame, is ... well, it isn't great. And specifically what you so seldom get is perfectly ordinary infantry rank-and-file troopers. Now, sometimes the banner of "realism" is flown in this respect. After all, historically militaries have been mainly (though far from exclusively) male.

But then that wouldn't explain things like the old GW female commissar, who has apparently decided to enter battle wearing ... er ... some kind of corset. In general, I think Dice Bag Lady's point is right: there are a lot of models of "fighting pinups," the kind of sexualised women in uniform drag that you get in airplane nose art, recruiting posters and so on. Otherwise, it's mostly all dudes -- there are few ordinary women just going about their business.

That's not to say that there are no such models in 40K -- there are a couple of female Imperial Guard figures, including, I think, one of the Last Chancers, one of the Ghosts and a couple of Catachans. In the case of the Ghosts, of course, that's a regiment described in the fiction as integrated, with female troops, female officers, and so on.

There were also some female warriors in the early Rogue Trader run, including what's pretty clearly a female Space Marine or two.

In many games, when you do tend to get female models, they're often in all-female factions. Consider Necromunda, where House Escher are all-female, but none of the other houses appear to have any female fighters at all, or Mordheim, where the Sisters of Sigmar are all-female, but there are hardly any female models in the other factions (there is quite a nice female Middenheim youngblood, but they're very rare).

A particularly weird example of this was in Warzone, where the character Valerie Duval was originally introduced as a member of the Etoiles Mortants, an elite military unit.

I could be misremembering, but I don't think that it was ever suggested originally that the unit was all-female. But by the time the models were being produced, that was certainly the case:

I wonder if the trend toward multi-part plastic models hasn't actually moved against the representation of female troopers in these types of games, at least of female soldiers in mixed units. After all, when all of your models are unique sculpts, it's easier to have quite a lot of variation. When their parts are supposed to be interchangeable, they need to be all much the same size and shape.

Some manufacturers have got around this problem -- consider Wargames Factory, who have a male and female zombie set and a male and female apocalypse survivor set, allowing interchangeability. But in general, I wonder if the trend toward standardisation hasn't been a problem for the portrayal of female characters (which, of course, assumes that they're somehow less desirable in the first place, which I don't agree with but which attitude I think is reflected by the availability of models out there).

I don't think you can place the blame on just technical problems, of course. The fact of the matter is that you're looking to represent a female character of any kind with a miniature, your odds are immeasurably better if she is a dominatrix, a nun, or some kind of prostitute.

Some people get mad, claiming that people who don't like these minis are trying to censor them or something like that. I don't think that's the case, though. It's just that the balance is really tilted in one direction. Just at a guess, it seems like minis lines are, in descending order of likelihood:

1. Worlds in which women aren't represented, or barely present. 
2. Worlds in which women primarily exist to be sexy sexy. 
3. Worlds in which women are portrayed diversely. 

That may be customer demand; I dunno. I don't think most companies have thought about it. It's like the way non-European cultures are portrayed in Warhammer. It's super-duper racist, but I don't think that was anyone's intention. It's just the result of an unconscious reflex that reveals a broader social problem.

I don't propose to explore this problem here. I will take it for granted that the portrayal of more types of female characters -- heck, of characters in general -- is a good thing.  If you like them, you can buy them and if you don't it's no skin off your ass.  If you want to collect pinup models you should knock yourself out, and if people draw a conclusion based on that, that's life. Representation of women in geek culture is a problem, but, ya know.  One thing at a time.

So what do you do if you do want to have regular old female models? Happily, there are some examples of companies that don't follow the general trend. I think Mark Copplestone is an interesting case in point. The old models he sculpted for Grenadier, and the obviously related line he sells through his own company, show an interesting mixture of cheesecake and regular old female soldiers. Consider that the modern Copplestone line includes not only "Bodyguards in Bikinis":

... but also "Babes with Guns," not all of whom are too ridiculous.

But these are not the only female models in the line. There's the Female Troopers pack, who are mainly just, y'know, female troopers.

And if you buy the Trooper Officers blister, you'll see that one of the officers is a woman.

As are some of the cops.

The same is true of the old Grenadier line, now available through em-4 miniatures and Forlorn Hope. A couple of the troopers are female; one isn't wearing her body armour, but then the same is true for some of the male troopers, and neither of them are particularly overtly sexualised.

One of the really positive results of this conversation has been that people have popped up recommending companies that sell the kind of figures Dice Bag Lady is looking for -- these female Vikings from Bronze Age miniatures are only one example.

In terms of fantasy characters,  Reaper have some good stuff and some not so good, but variety is what we care about,  right? However, they are individual characters, on the whole, which is good for me but less so for the original question.

If you have examples of good, not too boobed-up female models, from any period or setting, why not leave a comment? I and my players will thank you.

One final note: not to quibble, but there's no such thing as "assless chaps." Or rather,  all chaps only cover the front of the legs.  You are supposed to wear trousers under them.