Woke: That doesn’t even make sense, stop being weird
Bespoke: Space Marines can’t be feeeeeemale because they’re all gay for each other. It’s just a giant polycule. they ain’t talking about war when they call each other “battle brother”.
Woke: That doesn’t even make sense, stop being weird
Bespoke: Space Marines can’t be feeeeeemale because they’re all gay for each other. It’s just a giant polycule. they ain’t talking about war when they call each other “battle brother”.
I was actually thinking about it the other day and I can buy that it only worked on male subjects because the genetic technology was rushed and shitty. I would think there would be zero constraints on custodians because they’re supposedly each “custom edited” or whatever, and it would be very easy for them to be like “oh yeah, Belisarius Cawl fixed that shit in the Primarus Marines now.”
I know that the real reason is because the IP is created by turbo nerds on terf island in the late 70’s though, which makes me care basically nothing about maintaining that part of the continuity.
The text is of course inconsistent, but I get the impression that Big E gets way too much credit for being a super genius mad scientist and is instead just cribbing from dark age tech that he doesn’t fully understand. The Space Marine and Primarch program in particular gets a lot of pushback from other characters who are in positions of trust and power, with Malcador going so far as to asking “yo, why are they all dudes” and not getting a really satisfactory answer. The writers mostly play it straight, but the setting is ridiculous and reflective of sexism IRL.
Unironically one of my favorite lore tidbits
He definitely is a super genius mad scientist but he gets credit for omniscience that he absolutely doesn’t possess. In-lore you could say that he (or really his team) figured out how to do it for males first and since he was all gas no brakes he just sent it. Then if someone asks why your super incredible trans-human technology only works on half the people you either admit your shortcoming or you say “it’s because dudes rock obviously” and pretend you meant to do that.
Again though, the reality is that they thought it would be cooler that way and wrote themselves into a corner way before they realized anyone who doesn’t spend their weekends at the comic books store in the 80’s would ever see it.
The “rushed and shitty” explanation is literally canon. The Imperium was a oh-shit-oh-fuck moment by the Emperor to try and unite humanity to stave off total extinction by smashing the major threats to humanity’s survival while also collecting enough resources to breach the webway so that Old Night couldn’t happen again when the warp gets too fucky to traverse.
Of course the Emperor is also an idiot who failed to realize that Chaos would never allow such an outcome, so all of this blew up in his face and now everything is terrible forever.
Astartes are all male because Big E was both desperate enough and utilitarian enough to think that it’d be easier to make geneseed work for the sex that already starts off with more physicality and aggression by default for his rabid disposable shock troops than to try and make sure it all jives with any and all possible recruits (and is totally fine with ludicrous attrition from the implantation process even with those parameters, because they were never going to stick around long term in his vision anyway). Nobody’s fucked with that since because the original work is considered sacred beyond compare and the only people both smart enough and free spirited enough to fuck with it are either desperately trying to pump out even more Astartes to keep the Imperium crawling along longer and don’t have time to futz with the gender settings or are busy creating a new race of superhumans that does include all genders.