A More Inclusive Space Fascist
What do we want? Female Space Marines! When do we want it? Since their inception in the 1980's you sexist pieces of shit!
Back in 1987 Space Marines entered the world of fiction as shock troops of a fascist galactic empire. Many of you have read that sentence, and immediately refused to read this following one, and I don’t blame you, but trust that I’m going somewhere with this. Rick Priestly created them, intending them to be satirical:
“To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic,” he said.
“The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes within Games Workshop always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There’s no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft.
“It’s got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles, and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten.”
The problem with Priestly’s original vision is that he made a terrible mistake when designing the Space Marines. He made them cool as fuck. Yes, they were horrible space fascists that’ll handle differences of opinion by screaming, “Heretic!” then destroying the entire planet that the said heretic was on, but their design was incredible, and when they were fighting space demons, space orks, and space bioharvesting aliens, it was easy to miss that their politics was difficult to empathise with. It was easy to miss that the dead emperor on the throne eats the souls of one thousand people per day.
The Space Marines have been established as male for a long time now. It's become part of the lore. Now, many years ago there were female Space Marines, well before all the lore around them was established. They were discontinued because they didn't sell well, and looked pretty awful to boot.
There's now a call to return female Space Marines to the Warhammer 40,000 community. Some people are arguing for the space fascists to be more inclusive. It seems they've missed the satire of space fascism.
Take this article, for example. I’ve read it, so you don’t have to be inflicted with it. Within the entirety of the thing she fails to mention that the Imperium of Man are horrible space fascists. Instead her argument comes down to this:
So yes, female Space Marines are impossible because Emperor sucked at genetics, fine. But then again, gender is not biological. It’s a social construct.
So, the entire crux of the argument is that gender is a social construct. Some of you may agree with that. Some of you won’t. The fact that amongst the people reading this there will be disagreement rolls around to the most compelling fallacy of the argument.
Why would a fascist space empire called The Imperium of Man believe that gender is a social construct? The whole point of Space Marines is that they’re fascist space bastards, so the idea that they should take the most progressive view on gender politics is perplexing. It’s like someone has made a movie about the Nazis only to be criticised that there’s no trans representation amongst the SS.
The arguments that the Imperium should have an accepting attitude towards women are varied, but ultimately all of them miss the point that Space Marines are coded as horrible, puritanical fascists to begin with. Opposite arguments sometimes miss this point, also, with people arguing that the biological process of creating a Space Marine would be incapable of working on female physiology. Arguing for the purity of a fictional biological process seems very odd. If people want a fictional process to support the fiction that gender has no biological aspects whatsoever, they can do that. This is a world in which Orks are a fungal infection that create their own psychic energy, which can be vomited on their enemies. It’s not exactly hard science.
The real question should be what is gained by having the Imperium take a more loving and accepting stance towards gender politics? People have argued that it would make them more effective by increasing the number of people fighting for mankind, but that’s not really the point of the satire. The point is that they’re blindly devoted to ideology, and they’ll sacrifice anything in order to maintain it, be it combat effectiveness, lives, planets, or credibility. If people don’t agree with the ideology, the Space Marines just purge them, because Space Marines are dick heads… and having written that I guess I can see why people are arguing for the Imperium to be more accepting of gender politics.
When Space Marines were originally created in the 80’s, the most incomprehensibly dogmatic people on the planet were the religious. The Catholics were doing all sorts of horrible things whilst hiding behind their dogma. The Pentecostals in the US were preaching all sorts of hate whilst hiding behind Jesus’s love. Christianity was the bedrock of Western society, and it made less and less sense as to why that should be by those of a progressive mindset.
Today, religion has largely taken a back seat after being utterly crushed by people thinking for themselves. It turned out that if you didn’t have religion you wouldn’t immediately transform into a slavering rapist that murders anyone that they felt like. In fact, society as a whole became more accepting rather than less so. Things got better for gay people, for minorities, for those of a lower socio-economic setting. By and large life kept getting better for people, and it was largely because religion no longer got in the way of things.
I should point out that I’m largely speaking about organised religion. There are plenty of religious people that have been instrumental in moving society forward, because they believed in the principles of the religion they believed in rather than what they were told to believe by institutions that purported to be the sole conduit between humanity and God.
So, seeing as the inspiration for the Space Marines' horrid behaviour has been largely defeated, we’re left with an Imperium that represents a society clinging to ideologies that those born from 2000 onwards never really had to grapple with.
This, in turn, leads to an interesting thought experiment. If the Space Marines were created today as a satire of a group that blindly enforces an ideology that they don’t really understand, whom would they be a satire of?
Ideologies of all sorts are blindly followed today, but few have the societal power that the extreme progressives have. To say, in any context, that a man can never be a woman can get you fired in this day and age, which is bananas as the statement is literally true from a physiological perspective. To say that someone’s race isn’t the core of their disenfranchisement if they happen to be something other than white is heresy, regardless of the circumstances. And, if someone gets shot by the police, to suggest that the person that got shot may have been instrumental in facilitating the circumstances of their shooting may as well have been spoken by Lucifer himself. There’s a lot of debate on many of these topics, and there are many people that are more than happy to engage in them, but the most extreme adherents to the progressive creed are unlikely to do so. To them, suggesting anything other than blind adherence to their worldview is to out yourself as someone that’s basically goose stepping down the street whilst looking for minorities to punch.
And, in that, the Imperium of Man has a delightful opportunity to evolve.
Bring in female Space Marines. Come up with some reason as to why it’s possible in the world, then spark a civil war within the Imperium of Man itself. The Imperium is always removing sections of its history when they find it to be troublesome to remember, so just have them say, “There were always female Space Marines!” and purge anyone that dares to question it. Have them eradicate entire planets for simply saying, “Hey, this is new.”
This has multiple benefits:
Women that like to play Warhammer 40,000 will have female Space Marines to enjoy, which is something they have been lacking. Anything that expands the hobby is worth doing.
Sexist neckbeards will be upset, which is always lovely.
Space Marines will remain as relevant satire.
Many ultra progressives will love the Imperium of Man, completely losing sight of the fact that they’re the ones being satirised.
So, having written this initially with the goal of showing how ridiculous the debate is, I’m not firmly on the side of a more progressive space fascist, because nothing represents our current times more than that.