A defense of Female Space Marines

[Battlehymn Republic]

Found here.

Um... okay. So does this have any merit? I wasn't aware that there was a controversy.

[fgalkin]

Found here.

Um... okay. So does this have any merit? I wasn't aware that there was a controversy.

No sense whatsoever. The organs that the marines are implanted with are incompatible with the female anatomy. That's the short answer. For a long answer check out this rebuttal.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Utsanomiko]

That whole website has about as much integrity and sensibility as the guy's painting skills.

The Space Marine zygote implants were designed to key in on hormonal development in the young male body. So not only do they need to be male, but around 10-16 years of age.

Basically in all cases, 'Female Marines' are for weirdos who won't play Sisters of Battle for whatever reason. They should stick to their Denise Masino collections.

[Gullible Jones]

Speaking as someone with very little knowledge if this franchise, it basically looks to me as though someone thought about it and came to the conclusion that female characters enhanced in the same way wouldn't be sexy enough to sell. Chances are that the augmentations only working on males is absolute canon.

(The unwritten rule of augmented female soldiers in popular franchises is that their augments can't make them look ugly... And let's face it, most of us would consider an eight-foot-tall woman with bulging muscles and reinforced skeletal structures to be pretty ugly.)

[Molyneux]

Speaking as someone with very little knowledge if this franchise, it basically looks to me as though someone thought about it and came to the conclusion that female characters enhanced in the same way wouldn't be sexy enough to sell. Chances are that the augmentations only working on males is absolute canon.

(The unwritten rule of augmented female soldiers in popular franchises is that their augments can't make them look ugly... And let's face it, most of us would consider an eight-foot-tall woman with bulging muscles and reinforced skeletal structures to be pretty ugly.)

Depends on just how she's built.
Remember, there's one power-suited woman almost eight feet tall who's
already a fan favorite.[/url]

[VF5SS]

I don't think Samus is a good example. She may be freakishly tall (apparently), but she doesn't look enhanced. She kinda waffles between sports catalog model and standard video game chick. Enhanced females are probably going to look like a kind of thing muscle growth fetishists jerk off to.

[Gullible Jones]

I don't think she quite fits, seeing as she's in a powered suit rather than having her body augmented AFAIK (much less augmented in a way that could be percieved as disfiguring, judging from what Wikipedia says about the character).

Depends on just how she's built.

That's basically what I'm saying...

Although I might have to revise that, seeing as female characters in this Warhammer 40K universe are apparently also always (or mostly) depicted in bulky body armor. Also, I'd heard previously that the modifications to Marines in the 40K universe were genetic, but if they're based on some kind of hormone therapy as suggested above it makes sense that they'd only work properly (or at least work much better) on males.

[Molyneux]

I don't think she quite fits, seeing as she's in a powered suit rather than having her body augmented AFAIK (much less augmented in a way that could be percieved as disfiguring, judging from what Wikipedia says about the character).

Okay...for a slightly more niche example, Fred Perry's characters seem to have no end of fans - at least two of them are close to seven feet tall, and they tend towards "inhumanly muscular".

[Stark]

Yeah, that chick is totally built like a space marine.

Oh wait she fucking isn't. Space marines are absurd rectangular people with no dicks, for fucks sake. To be equivalent, they'd have to look pretty much the same, ie 'space marines with funny looking heads', not 'giant tits and a six pack'.

[Vehrec]

The only female marines I could ever support would be CHAOS marines, who had been the sole survivors of maybe ten million girls who were implanted, and only these ones had stable mutation in the Zygotes to remake them as marines. Some twisted experiment of Fabious Bile, that might work. Anything else is just silly.

[Ford Prefect]

It has been noted in books that Space Marines look vaguely inhuman in comparison to other men, but not so much that they can't be unnattractive; however, this is primarily because they are made up of exaggerated masculine characteristics: they're tall, muscular, deep voiced and such. A female Space Marine *sigh* would be similar, and thus carry pretty much no feminine allure. They're not just going to be taller Sister of Battle.

[Gullible Jones]

Addendum: keep in mind that I'm basing what I say mostly off of other similar franchises I know of that include "augmented" humans; for example, X-Men, in which you'll find practically no female mutants who have a serious case of the uglies - even the ones with hideous banshee faces have bodies like models.

It's marketing: if you've got biologically or cybernetically modified characters and your audience is mostly male, you can be a lot more radical male characters' augmentations than with female characters'. Same reason you don't see ugly protagonists of either sex very often, just applied on a wider basis.

@VF5SS: Yeah, a better example would be Annie Glyph from M. John Harrison's recent novel Light - biologically modified rickshaw driver. The modifications result in her having enhanced musculature, masculine and/or androgynous characteristics (small breasts, deep voice, more obvious body hair), and certain anatomical features borrowed from draft animals.

[Gullible Jones]

Yeah, that chick is totally built like a space marine.

Oh wait she fucking isn't. Space marines are absurd rectangular people with no dicks, for fucks sake. To be equivalent, they'd have to look pretty much the same, ie 'space marines with funny looking heads', not 'giant tits and a six pack'.

Exactly.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I recall one of the recent Horus books (the first, i believe) where this Imperial historian (i'm sorry, "rememberer") compared the face of a Space Marine to a horse basically. The language was more flowery than that but basically she said he looked vaguely like a horse about the face. She went on to muse about how he was, like, fucking gigantic. Like i get the idea she was both impressed and puzzled about the fact that he looked like some wierd muscle fetishists' drawing come to life.

So basically, a Female marine would probably look like Sara Silverman's head on the body of one of those freaky female bodybuilders that takes so much steroids they have voices deeper than Wesley Snipes, Brad Garret and Vin Diesel combined.

Now honestly...and dont give me some PC crap about beauty on the inside...honestly, would you even be able to tell that was a chick? I mean at that point the distinction would be academic at best.

[Gullible Jones]

Yeah, in the WH40K universe it's clear that such a distinction would be entirely arbitrary. It's hard not to notice the marketing side of things though, although that really seems to apply more to comic franchises than WH40K.

Still, I can just imagine a marketer running the scenario through in his head...

Manual: "Space Marine recruits can be of either sex, but they all end up looking like the musclebound elephant-sized men you know and love."

Teenaged WH40K fan: "Shit, some of these huge macho dudes are actually women? That is totally fucked up. Games Workshop must be full of trannies or something."

[loomer]

Tau are apparently the dead ringer of the Greys. That alone was enough to make me discount his opinion. Wrong headshape.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I dont know.

The Tau do strike me as distinctly Grey-like, both in appearance and in their high tech trappings, like the Asgard from SG1. Also their ships, some of them anyway, have a shape that can at aglance be mistaken for the Delta-shape UFOs that people see.

But they most certainly aren't Greys because the Greys are around now, and the Tau are only a few thousand years old as a spacefaring race, in the year 40,000 which means they're most likely two completely different groups.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Nah, Tau are the mecha and anime battlesuit army for the weeaboos who hate the rest of the game's gritty gothic setting but want to play it anyway.

Honestly though, the Tau don't remind me anything of the Gray archetype. Their look is much too off.

[NecronLord]

The sad thing is... There was an army of women who could achieve 5:1 kill ratios against marines¹. Specifically, the Sisters of Silence.

¹That's with the Custodes, mind, who one could say were doing more than their share on Prospero. But given the Thousand Sons' reliance on magic, that seems unlikely.

Of course, if you desperately want an egalitarian army of heroes, I suggest looking elsewhere.

[Adrian Laguna]

Yeah, that chick is totally built like a space marine.

Oh wait she fucking isn't. Space marines are absurd rectangular people with no dicks, for fucks sake. To be equivalent, they'd have to look pretty much the same, ie 'space marines with funny looking heads', not 'giant tits and a six pack'.

The Games Workshop article on the creation of Space Marines has pictures of them without their armour on. They do not, in fact, look like absurdly rectangular picture, I've seen body-builders with more musculature. I'd say the chick in the drawing only needs a (massive) boob reduction.

[Lazarus]

Out of interest, do Sisters of Battle have any augmentations? It seems to me that their battlefield performance is pretty high if their only advantage over footsloggers is training and power armour.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Out of interest, do Sisters of Battle have any augmentations? It seems to me that their battlefield performance is pretty high if their only advantage over footsloggers is training and power armour.

They may have the usual array of bionic implants and augmentations, possibly of higher quality than what you might see in the Guard, for instance, as well as things like juvenat treatments and other standard fare of Imperial medical science. But they're not superhuman or anything, if that's what you're asking.

Bear in mind they also have bolters as standard issue, and a lot of heavy weapons normally only seen in the hands of Marines.

[Molyneux]

Yeah, that chick is totally built like a space marine.

Oh wait she fucking isn't. Space marines are absurd rectangular people with no dicks, for fucks sake. To be equivalent, they'd have to look pretty much the same, ie 'space marines with funny looking heads', not 'giant tits and a six pack'.

Ah...never having played Warhammer, my brain just combined "absurdly muscular" with "trained to kick six kinds of shit out of people" with "female" and immediately jumped to Fred Perry.

So Space Marines are pretty much built like every orc unit in Warcraft 3?

[NecronLord]

The Games Workshop article on the creation of Space Marines has pictures of them without their armour on. They do not, in fact, look like absurdly rectangular picture, I've seen body-builders with more musculature. I'd say the chick in the drawing only needs a (massive) boob reduction.

Most of them are of adolescent scouts, not full grown Marines. This is a good reference for a near-complete marine. Even then, they do get bigger, and have some filling out to do. They've been known to get so titanically huge that they require elements of dreadnought armour to be salvaged in order to clad them.

That said, Space Marines don't necesserily need to look tremendously 'ripped.' They vary from 'big guy' (mostly Scouts) to huge monsters. This may be partly dependant on the age of implantation. Descent of Angels has adults being inducted, if not quite as space marines proper, and being heads shorter than all the other marines.

[Ryan Thunder]

Nah, Tau are the mecha and anime battlesuit army for the weeaboos who hate the rest of the game's gritty gothic setting but want to play it anyway.

Which is why their tanks kick more ass than equal points in Battlesuits any day, right?

Maybe somebody wanted to have a halfway intelligent shooty army, simply to be different from all these ridiculous melee-oriented armies, like Tyranids, Orks, etc.