I’ve never played Warmhammer, never owned any of the books or models, and I only just today learned something surprising.
Numerous Warhammer players are cancelling their subscriptions and announcing a boycott of Games Workshop after the company retconned their Adeptus Custodes faction to add females.
The surprise is that they never had feeeeemale characters in their game before? What?
Following this retcon and the subsequent gaslighting from Games Workshop, numerous hobbyists, enthusiasts, and former customers have cancelled their subscriptions to Games Workshop’s subscription service Warhammer+ and have pledged to boycott the company going forward.
On April 14th, X user GrimmDark1 shared a screenshot of him canceling his subscription. He wrote, “Kiss my a** GW. Not another penny.”
He explained why he canceled and why he’s boycotting in a subsequent post, ‘For those asking “wut happen?’ GW disrespected their lore by changing decades old lore of the Custodies only taking males from the highborn families of Terra to become Custodies to ‘Nah women can be Custodies now too, and they’ve totally always been a thing since the beginning! Even though they’ve never been mentioned in any codex or BL book before. We totally aren’t doing this for ESG money from Blackrock and Vanguard!’.”
Uh, OK. They need to realize that it’s a game, and it’s already got a complicated and twisty lore, so adding one more twist is nothing that radical. But great, sure, stop playing, no one is forcing you to play, and in particular, no one says you have to play the one faction tainted with the imaginary scent of pretend womankind. Gamers are weird, man.
Is this part of the article a joke? Or are these people this delusional?
This boycott of Games Workshop and Warhammer due to its obvious embrace of feminist ideology can only be seen as a good thing because it means less people will be subjected to future propaganda that Games Workshop will inject into its games, books, and TV shows. It also means the demoralization that comes along with this propaganda will be blunted.
This demoralization was noted by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov who warned about it back in the 1980s. He shared that this demoralization campaign employed psychological warfare techniques to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite an abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their family, their community, and their country.”
He elaborated, “It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it’s divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy- exposed to the ideology of the enemy in other words Marxism, Leninism ideology is pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism. American patriotism.”
Speaking as a gamer, these nitwits are cray-cray. The game will be better without their involvement.
@1 Artor, agreed. I don’t like people presuming I’m a man-child because these weak losers can’t take a lady in space armor. I grew up with Metroid. Women in space armor are badass.
Games Workshop and the setting’s original creators has often stated that their grimdark universe was meant to lampoon and criticize fascistic and bigoted bullshit like this. However, much like “The Colbert Report,” Veerhoven’s “Starship Troopers ” and Homelander from “The Boys,” right wingers who love to appropriate media that attacks them out of spite, these goons think the brutal, totalitarian, and genocidal Imperium of Mankind is a model civilization. (It’s all part of “owning the libs.”.)
Just googgle “Trump Emperor of Mankind” to see artistic rendering of their messiah depicted as the Emperor from 40K.
By the way Rob, did you predict that post?
I call bullshit. Aficionados have no problem with Battle Sisters, since day dot.
“The Adepta Sororitas, colloquially called the “Sisterhood,” whose military arm is also known as the Sisters of Battle and formerly as the Daughters of the Emperor, are an all-female division of the Imperium of Man’s state church known as the Ecclesiarchy or, more formally, as the Adeptus Ministorum.”
(Also, the Officio Assassinorum is equal opportunity)
Bet these guys were crying when Pokémon added an option for playing as a girl…. 😑
[BTW, I’d not normally mention trivial shit like this, but… indications are multiple]
The repeated misspelling of ‘custodes’ is indicative of the level of erudition at play, and the quoted journalist (John Trent) is clearly aware of this, as he does not misspell it.
@3 Akira
I used to play toy soldiers and I have never met anyone who specifically loves the Warhammer games who likes women or freedom or democracy. I played along with them as long as among our gaming group other games got played. GW can say whatever they like but it is IMO disingenuous.
It was possible (barely) to suppose GW were joking. I created a troupe of space Marines to play with them that I painted in pinks with musical symbols, said the rule allowed women as #5 John M said and called them the D Flat Celestas. I did some figure modification with jeweler’s tools, fimo, and gap-filling superglue to make them look and pose very mildly (space marine armor is ludicrous) feminine. There was massive outrage! Not only among our group but also among other silicon valley geeksters who were using the same community room. This was thirty years ago.
What people do and what people say, they sometimes do not match. Perhaps you know people different from that but I never did.
Well, it’s not real Warhammer, it’s the sci-fi spin off. Real Warhammer is the fantasy game. But the wayward cousin that is 40k has some merits too, albeit the original is the superior game and setting. Now we have the preliminaries out of the way, to business!
While I much appreciate the tears of the bigot crowd, I have to say that I find the idea that the Imperium of Man in 40k being so overtly equal opportunities a bit weird. This is a violent, theocratic, murderously xenophobic feudal empire. It is defended by brainwashed frankenstein’s monster super-soldiers belonging to archaic warrior brotherhoods, expendable human cannon fodder by the millions and crazed fanatics willing to die for the cult of a dead Emperor rotting on his golden throne. It is a horrible place where all hope and progress and high ideals have decayed into a sclerotic nightmare. It is the very epitome of dystopian.
Gender equality and equal opportunities, meanwhile, particularly in a military context, is a very modern, very progressive thing. The two do not go together. Indeed, my biggest criticism of the way 40k has been presented over the last couple of decades is that the dystopian horror of the Imperium has not been emphasised nearly as much as it should have been, and its defenders, particularly the Adeptus Astartes, have been allowed to be seen as somehow heroic, noble and virtuous. As good guys. They are not and never have been. At best they are tragic, misguided and lost, at worst monsters just as vile as anything threatening them. There may be sparks of the good, the noble and the virtuous within the corrupt and miserable mass of humanity at the end of the 41st Millennium, but it is utterly in spite of the institutions and establishment of their appalling authoritarian Imperium. So exquisitely horrible is the Imperium of Man in 40k that it is to the alien races one must look for any kind of light relief, who are only less horrible because they are alien, and thus do not represent the absolute failure of all the high and noble ideas we as humans hold. But somehow all this has been sidelined and forgotten, and Space Marines are somehow just heroic warriors with a brutalist, archaizing aesthetic.
Much the same, sadly, has happened to that other great product of early 80s British sci-fi dystopianism – Judge Dredd. Indeed, 40k and 2000AD share much of the same cultural DNA. Dredd is a brutalised monster in a horrendous authoritarian regime, an anti-hero steeped in counter-cultural, satirical gallows humour. He is not a model of ideal civic service (take note, US police departments).
On the other hand, I suppose, the slightly out of place modernity of overt gender equality is a drop in the ocean that doesn’t meaningfully compromise the horror that is 40k’s Imperium. The Custodes have a certain mythic resonance in their style not entirely out of keeping with an amazonian archetype, so a female Custos is not very jarring. Quite how you’re supposed to tell under all that armour is anyone’s guess.
Funnily enough, back in real Warhammer (the best one, see above), nobody is batting an eyelid when it comes to the recently introduced notion that there might be substantial numbers of female Bretonnian Knights in the kingdom’s past.
Wikipedia – Yuri Bezmenov
/r/AskHistorians – What do Historians make of the claims
Why couldn’t the game authors have just said “Everyone just assumed the Custodies were all men, no one could verify their sex by sight because they were all covered by such huge thick armor-suits, and of course the naughty-bits are the least relevant part of any soldier so heavily armed and armored — but recently it was revealed that quite a few women were serving in the same armor-suits…”
Seriously, they could have tossed a “Mulan” spitball into the works and had more fun with it…
seachange, #8
Well consider yourself to have met one in me then!
Indeed, most of the people I have met in the hobby seem about as far from these morons as it is possible to get. Mind you, there are bigots and morons in every subset of humanity. Admittedly the 40k crowd seems to be younger and less discerning, by and large, than the Warhammer fantasy crowd, but it is a shaky generalisation.
PS: Someone really ought to invent a whole new game titled “Wokehammer!” It could be either a 40K spinoff, or a Thor movie.
Could a “wokehammer” maybe involve something like a metaphorical cluebat being used on the priviledged thoughtless dozey ones i.e. the anvilicious application of arguments to the wake up the willfully ignorant?
Twenty-plus years ago, my wife was a volunteer doing -in-game help (back when that was a thing. aka possible) in Asheron’s Call. She played female characters and got all manner of astonished reactions when other gamers found out she was an actual living, breathing female playing the game. She was rather amused at being called a “girl” at the time, as she was in her 50s…but that led to other astonished reactions.
Though this video is over six months old, I feel Steph’s take on this is as relevant as ever.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwiRnxSnknM?si=NtW7l8P2BcBkGHuZ&w=560&h=315%5D
I’d also, like so many others, point out Sisters of Silence, sisters of Battle, innumerable Commissars, Inquisitors, and guardswomen. I should feel sorry for guys who freak out over pronouns, as they all suffer from fragile Y syndrome.
I mean if a primarch was retconned as a woman, I might be upset. Though if it was Alpharius I’d believe it.
I would be cautious about interpreting this story. The link is to an ideologically anti-woke website that collected a small number of ex-Twitter comments from disgruntled gamergatebros and republished them with zero balancing comments from anyone not upset with the change, gleefully conflates retconning with gaslighting, ignores the long, long history of retconning in GW games (which is common to all long-standing media franchises; it’s called adapting to the marketplace), and did not bother trying to talk to GW about their reasons.
I’d also note that the ‘Numerous’ in the headline remains undetermined. I would not be surprised if the outrage was shared by dozens of gamers. Dozens!
Reminds me of the part of the Doctor Who fandom who spew a constant stream of outrage ever since Jody Whittaker’s casting was announced (’cause she’s a woman) and now continue with Ncuti Gatwa (’cause he’s black ).
Its pretty much the same rhetoric, the franchise is ruined, the World Wide Woke conspiracy is taking over…
Let’s see how this actually influences Doctor Who’s viewing figures and the sale of Warhammer stuff.
And it’s people like myself who are accused of “cancel culture” and being “snowflakes”?
Irony cannot exist in the “conservative” universe: it’s too small. And closed.
“Numerous”? Just how numerous? Are we sure this isn’t just a small minority of shouty arseholes?
Mind you, the WH40K fandom is notorious for being a bunch of whiny crybabies who throw their toy soldiers out of the pram at the least provocation. So much so, in fact, that my favourite Warhammer YouTuber recently did a very thoughtful video on the topic: Why do People LOVE to HATE Primaris Marines? And why RAGEBAIT is so common in Warhammer. (It’s not as clickbaity as the title implies, that’s a deliberate nod to the topic.)
He’s also done a number of vids on related topics in the past, such as:
The Case for Female Space Marines
How Do You Solve A Problem Like THE IMPERIUM? Taking 40k Lore back from the far-right
cartomancer, @ #9:
As far as the Imperium is concerned, people are just meat for the grinder. Absent a specific reason, the gender of that meat is irrelevant.
@OP:
There’s loads of female characters in the game, and many of them are terrifyingly bad-ass. There just haven’t been any explicitly female characters in this specific faction before – although it’s worth noting that the Custodes have only really been fleshed out as a full faction relatively recently.
Meh. Big monopolistic company breaks things to make more money. News at 11.
The fans are kind of correct to complain about breaking the lore.
I agree with what @cartomancer said at #9: it would have been better if they kept the misogyny and instead pushed hard on showing the dystopia.
But they won’t, because what they are selling is a power fantasy, and regardless of what they say, GW has an interest to cast it in a positive light.
Games Workshop: “Space Marines can be women.”
The worst assholes in tabletop wargaming: “I’m never playing Warhammer 40k again!”
Everybody: sounds of partying
Seriously, any move which makes less of these shitheads play games can only be good for the hobby and its communities.
As a long time lurker and a member of the Warhammer 40k community for over 20 years I thought I should delurk and throw in my 2 pence.
Firstly the actual people complaining are a major minority, but sadly a loud one. The vast majority of people I have talked to have either been indifferent to the change or supported it – and the only person I was able to find who didn’t like the change had no problem with Women among the Custodes and instead was upset at how “hamfisted” he felt the lore change was.
Secondly the whole furore has obscured the fact the Custodian in question is an absolute mad woman and the story is brilliant. Since all of the complaints have skipped elaborating I will give a brief summary of the new lore. Our “heroine” in question is selected to take part in the annual Blood Games – the Custodes serve as the Emperors personal guard and the Blood Games are an event where one Custodian is selected to attempt to “fake” assassinate the Emperor in order to test the defences of the palace. She decides the best course of action is to steal a literal world ending device from the Imperial Vaults and commandeer a patrol ship in orbit and use it to teleport the world ending weapon into the Emperors lap. She comes within a hair of winning the games and is only stopped when the Radio operator on the ship questions the odd orders the demigod (Custodians are 10ft tall giants in golden armour) who has commandeered the ship and notifies the palace of what is transpiring. The Custodian is praised for her ingenuity and is promoted to Shield Captain, the Crew of the ship minus the Radio Operator are sentenced to be used for hard labour and the Radio Operator is promoted to Captain.
The whole story really emphasises how mad the Custodes are and how ridiculous the whole situation is…
That reminds me, DragonForce have a song about the Primaris Space Marines on their latest album. It’s very manly:
My atomic blaster is bigger than yours
(His atomic blaster is bigger than yours!)
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
(He’ll show you his if you show yours!)
I often wonder if some Metal bands actually take their song texts seriously. I’m pretty sure DragonForce don’t.
They’ve been “breaking” (i.e. changing) the lore pretty much constantly since the original release of Rogue Trader way back in 1987 – so much so that there’s an entire collection of tropes justifying it. (“Everything is canon, not everything is true”, “All narrators are unreliable”, and so on…) If you get upset about that sort of thing, 40K is probably not for you.
For example, lots of people have remarked on how it’s impossible to tell what gender somebody is under all that armour – but I’m old enough to remember when the Adeptus Custodes were a bunch of bare-chested guys in leather pants (who looked remarkably like some characters from 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock, which GM also had a license for at the time).
Talking about ‘cancel culture’… 🙄
What a bunch of snowflakes. Not every gamer is a white guy. Oh, and there were women who were full Viking warriors. So, it’s not a stretch.
Dunc, #22
Oh, it is perfectly justifiable on a number of grounds within the fiction, it just seems mildly jarring on an aesthetic level to me. And Warhammer is all about arresting aesthetics. Rick Priestly, its creator, tells a story of how one of his fellow games developers came to him with a query about how the economy of the Imperium was supposed to work, to which his response was “what makes you think it works?”
Mind you, I am very aware that as one of those faulty prototype millenials born in the early 80s my appreciation of the 40k setting will be different from those who first came to it it in a later, different state. I have my personal criticisms of how it developed in many ways, primarily the degree to which an Imperial perspective, and the ubiquity of the Space Marines in particular, came to dominate everything. Back in the early 90s they were one faction among many, now everything else has been forced to the sidelines, and the least interesting faction – the Imperium – is everywhere. Where Warhammer fantasy is a real ensemble piece, where all the armies get pretty much equal billing, 40k is The Imperium Show now. Combined with this is the aforementioned creeping tendency to present Imperial soldiers as more uncomplicatedly heroic, virtuous and likeable.. The result, as I see it, is that the unpleasant fascists are now everywhere, and we are being invited to sympathise with them (albeit in spite of their fascistic ideals, not because of them). This does not sit quite right with me, and I can see how it would appeal to real-world fascist sympathisers.
Now, I am fairly certain this was not the intention of the design studio. Space Marines sell well, have always been favoured in terms of new releases, and thus have taken up increasingly more resources and screen time for basically commercial reasons. And if people like them then the designers will want to make them somewhat likeable, simply because they are the humans and the default point of view characters. But where an aficionado of the Orks, say, will know that their Orks are a brutal but humorous bunch of monsters, or a Dark Eldar fan will be under no illusion that their murderous sophisticates are anything but pure evil, somehow there is a grey area with the Imperium that has allowed some people to overlook the fundamental nastiness of it all. I think this is a problem and needs addressing.
cartomancer, @ #30: I entirely agree. The video I linked above (“How Do You Solve A Problem Like THE IMPERIUM?”) deals with exactly those sorts of criticisms. (Seriously, it’s good, as is everything else that chap does – I think you’ll like him.)
It’s a fundamental problem you see in a lot of this kind of satire (and WH40K was definitely originally intended as satire) – the people who are most in need of it just don’t get it, and end up adopting the satire without actually realising what it is. I tend to call this “the Rorschach effect”, after the character in Watchmen who is definitely not supposed to be sympathetic, admirable, or even likeable, and yet has ended up being the most popular. See also Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, amonst many others.
Funnily enough, this is exactly why I don’t think there should be female Space Marines – SMs are supposed to be a send-up of a very specifically male adolescent power fantasy. Unfortunately, the satire seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way…
A lof of people need to take their toy soldiers way less seriously.
As a 40k player and collector, can I point out that there were originally female space marines (just look at the art in the 80’s), but the models hardly sold in 1st and 2nd, so they retired the optional sprues. That’s the reason there’s no women. The lore was added later.
@ 8
I was speaking of the creators, not the players. cartomancer @ 9 beat me to the punch, 40K grow out of Thatcher-era British dystopian sci-fi like Judge Dredd.
Also, I’m sorry you had to put up with that shit. I’m not a 40K player myself–my wargaming interests lie in smaller, lesser known games–but your army would have been more than welcome at my table.
@ 32
Ah, the Rouge Trader era. Back when you were encouraged to make grab tanks out of a used under-arm deodorant container.
No! Really! Google it!
Gah, sorry;
EDIT: “Ah! the Rogue Trader era…”
If it was “Rouge” that would really set off the fashy fanboys, wouldn’t it?
Apparently those sexist nitwits never played Metroid at all or any other games with female characters as main protagonists in them.
Crashlands took advantage of my assumptions and I found out the character I play as is a she. I’m fine.
Akira, #34/5
“Rouge Trader” was a common running joke in the late 90s era Citadel Journals if I remember correctly (as in the disreputable interstellar merchant princes were clearly just shifting cargoes of face makeup). Alongside, of course, referring to the game as Warhamster.
One can find all kinds of jokes in early Warhammer products that reveal its origins in 80s counter-Thatcherite ideals. From the early Warhammer campaign pack The Tragedy of McDeath pitting the leader of the Dwarf miners Arka Zargul against the creepy sorcerer Een McWrecker to the accession of the Empress Magritta in Imperial Year 1979 marking the lowest point of the disastrous Age of Three Emperors, to even the devastatingly brutal Ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka’s epithet (in full his name is Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, which I am reliably informed is an orkified version of Brutal Killer Margaret Thatcher).
I am now wondering what the internet nazis would think of the coven of transgender sorceresses leading my Dark Elf army. It gives me a warm feeling inside.
Oh boy, “boob armor” powered armor.
Never heard of Yuri Bezmenov before, and he sounds like he was a relatively minor defector. I’m surprised they didn’t use Viktor Suvorov, real name Vladimir Rezun, who was one of the best known Soviet intelligence defectors. Under the Suvorov penname he wrote numerous books. And as often seems to be the case with defectors his stories got more “interesting” as the years went on, like his claim that Stalin intended to attack Nazi Germany, a claim most historians say is wrong.
PS: Someone really ought to invent a whole new game titled “Wokehammer!” It could be either a 40K spinoff, or a Thor movie.
… or Chuck Tingle’s latest smash hit!
This is kind of a thing with gaming. Some people who don’t socialize well get into gaming because even for the types that involve other people, there’s an activity to share with some structure to it. You know what’s required. And that’s nice if you have a hard time dealing with other people.
But once into a game, there are options about how to look at it. They can either use it to prop up their socializing and then it’s just a bit like a crutch in that it’s not great to need it but it helps with getting around easier. The other option is to dive in and let that be your comfortable safe space. You know it’s a story but you’re invested in it. And then because there’s not much else to do in there they identify with part of the story. Add maybe a few rounds of this as their focus narrows and they imagine the characters they like think like them and it all gets farther from reality. Until one day you suddenly have a person willing to argue that an author doesn’t understand the story they wrote and some particular fictional detail is objectively wrong.
The only real question is whether the initial fiction they got into was Warhammer 40k and they pulled conservative fictions into it or if they were mostly into conservative fictions and pulled Warhammer 40k stories in.
You’ve seen the Adepta Sororitas, right?
Funny that something as mundane as THIS is what’s driving people away instead of the other shit GW pulled like price gouging, going after 3rd party companies, 3D model printers, etc. Sometimes we forget that the right-wingers still have economic power and their own boycotts can damage a company.
So, I don’t know much about Warhammer, but I’m pretty sure this is associated with the whole “gamergate 2.0” thing going on right now.
There’s a harassment campaign surrounding Sweet Baby Inc, a narrative consulting group that nobody had ever heard of before, but apparently they’re destroying the games industry by inserting wokeness into games, even games they never actually worked on, making all the video game ladies ugly, etc. etc. I don’t think the Warhammer thing is meaningfully associated with all that, outside of it being “woke”–but I think it’s the same group of people that are making hay about it. You can see some cross-pollination, for example, one of the arguments that “gamergate 2.0” likes to make is that game developers are inserting wokeness to satisfy ESG investors such as Blackrock and Vanguard.
I’m sorry my description is unclear, but it’s all a bit too ridiculous to really follow closely. But there are some youtube channels that are ranting for hours on end about this stuff, and Warhammer is one of their new topics. I believe the current strategy is to laugh them out of the room.
Adding some context to the above #46: Part of what makes the Vanguard/Blackrock argument weird, is that they are not in fact ESG investors. They’re investment management companies. They have some limited power because when I put money into Vanguard, I cede stockholders’ voting rights to them; but it’s not like they have control over which stocks I invest in. They’ve made some public comments signalling commitment to ESG, but it’s not a very convincing signal–and even if it were, the effectiveness of ESG investment strategies is very dubious to begin with.
It’s not about sexism, it’s about ethics in gaming lore.
Siggy, #46:
The best kind of unclarity: technically correct!
#47:
Yep. Some of it just looks like superstition piled on top of more superstition, to put it mildly.
Eh, Bounding Into Comics. If they said the sun was up at noon, I’d go outside to check.
Further to Soggy @ #47: AFAIK, ESG rating criteria are all about how companies operate, not the details of the content they produce. Plus, there’s been quite a lot of movement in recent years to weaken them to the point of meaninglessness, so investment managers can include a wider range of more profitable stuff in their funds whilst retaining the ESG label.
Sounds like these arseholes have just glommed onto it as a new catch-all term for “stuff I don’t like” and to explain why the invisible hand of the free market keeps giving them the finger.
Siggy, damn it. Sorry.
40K fan here. The Custodes are one of my favourite factions, and I think female members of it is an awesome expansion of the lore. Without boring anyone too much with the details, the Custodes are essentially an army of elite, transhuman supersoldiers who have been so extensively genetically modified that they can barely even relate to the “ordinary” human race anymore. There is nothing at all in the lore which would prevent them from being female – sex or gender are simply not relevant qualifiers for who can be turned into a Custodian – they start the process almost from infancy.
It is sad that the usual toxic peanut gallery get to take up so much space regarding this. From listening to the community, I am fairly sure they are a very loud minority though. Most community criticisms I have heard of this change has nothing to do with female Custodians per se (again, nothing in the lore prevents that), rather it is how clumsy and lazy the introduction was. GW could have given us a worthy fleshing out of Custodian lore expanding on their recruitment, creation process and structure, where female members could naturally have been a part. Instead, GW just gives us a short story which basically just says “oh, they were always here, we just never bothered to mention them”.
Well GW, that may very well be so, but it is way too little, too late when all your previous lore has more or less explicitly excluded female Custodians altogether. The Custodes were until recently referred to as a “brotherhood”, their previous codexes stated that they were recruited as infants from “the sons of Terra”, etc etc. If the female members were always there, then they deserve a way better reveal than this.
I really hope this will happen in forthcoming books from the Black Library. Regardless, the screaming about “wokehammer” will die down and people will happily be painting their 11th Edition female Custodes armies when they come – they will be absolutely fucking awesome.
@6
I was on Nintendo forums in 2005 and 2006. There were many men who were outraged that Nintendo was releasing Super Princess Peach, a game that would force them to play as a girl (Metroid didn’t count for some reason).
My favorite part was seeing the outlandish rationalizations they came up with for why they were angry without saying they just hated women. The best one was the “appeal to realism.” The gamer bros argued that the Mario franchise was always known for having rich stories with perfectly consistent world-building and verisimilitude. They asserted that by making Peach a hero when she was previously a helpless damsel-in-distress, Nintendo was ruining the verisimilitude which had made Mario popular.
The common response to this claim was “Huh? What verisimilitude?” The Mario franchise has never had verisimilitude or consistent world-building. Most Mario games have very little story. There are a handful of spinoffs that do have more of a plot, but it’s usually a tongue-in-cheek plot with (probably deliberate) plot-holes big enough to fly a Koopaling Airship through.
For the record, I cannot recommend this commentary on this change enough (the title is clickbait):
@54 I’m sure they had plenty of excuses for why Super Mario RPG – a well-loved game where both Peach and Bowser are playable/in-party protagonists who participate in combat – doesn’t count somehow, despite being one of the Mario games that does have an involved story. According to them, that would qualify for both the “woman not allowed to be a playable protagonist” and “antagonist being good guy is against lore” infractions against verisimilitude.
Hell, even the Mario Kart games let them both be racers, along with characters who usually do virtually nothing or are glorified item dispensers in most of the main series (Toad).
I suspect the change is related to the upcoming 40K production that Henry Cavil is attached to. It needs to be less of a sausage fest to translate to the screen.