There’s excitement surrounding the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000. And in the front line of those outraged is once again Twitch streamer Asmongold. He believes Games Workshop is taking its paying customers for fools.
What’s the reason for the excitement?
Asmongold’s career and life in 3 minutes – what defines him?
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“Warhammer becomes Wokehammer”
What was the reaction: An English site, the Mail Online, turned this excitement into a “It’s Wokehammer” – men are angry that the all-male brigade has now been changed.
Games Workshop responded to all the anger on Twitter: “There have always been female custodians since the first ten thousand were created.”
But that caused even more trouble. The tweet reached 3.5 million views.
Players feel lied to and taken for a fool
So the argument escalated: The statement “there have always been female custodians” was taken completely the wrong way by Twitch streamer Asmongold, among others.
He saw that as a blatant lie. Games Workshop doesn’t take fans seriously and lies to them just to be more politically correct. Until then it was clear that it could only be men, he said.
How could they so blatantly lie to such a clever community that cares so much about the lore.
For Asmongold, female super soldiers in Warhammer 40k are another sign of a brand making unnecessary changes just to appear more politically correct. That is revisionist. If they had just been open about it, it would have been better.
People would have been mad even then, but at least Games Workshop would have been honest. This bad lie “insults the intelligence of customers.”
Why are they introducing women now? As PC Gamer explains with reference to an employee of the Warhammer company, the Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000 were women at the beginning, around 25%. But that changed because in the 1980s there were complaints from retail stores that customers weren’t buying the female models that were offered in the packs at the time. Games Workshop was asked to only make male models.
So they took out the women and then made up a backstory to justify having only male Marines.
Nowadays there are also one or two women among Warhammer players and men are generally much more open-minded than 40 years ago and would also buy women, as PC Gamer knows. Ultimately, the lore of Warhammer 40,000 only exists to sell game figures and if the buyers change, then so does the lore.
This is what lies behind it: This just seems to be a misunderstanding. Games Workshop’s statement “There have always been women” was meant as “There have always been these female super soldiers in the world”, i.e. a “retcon”:
Nothing had changed in the world of Warhammer, so there is no “in-game explanation” for the fact that there are now women among the previously all-male super soldiers, but they are now simply selling female game figures in the real world, which was not done before has.
But the tweet was read as “You probably think we’re stupid.”
Games Workshop probably should have read the room better here, that people wanted to be upset about it, and answered more precisely.
More about Asmongold:
Twitch streamer becomes a popular figure on Twitter thanks to a clip that 19 million see