Female Space Marines

This article contains PROMOTIONS! Don't say we didn't warn you.

Guaranteed to garner at least 100 replies.

There is no tactic more effective for enraging a die-hard SPESS MEHREENS fanboy than discussing/drawing their Rule 63 companion, Female Space Marines. Not to be confused with Sisters of Battle, the canonical equivalent to Space Marines and also armed with bolters and chainswords, but Space Marine Space Marines of the Adeptus Astartes, you know, the hypermuscular ones with Pauldrons. According to Games Workshop canon, the procedures that are used to create a Space Marine only work properly on male subjects, rendering female Marines impossible; however, masturbators on the internet have not allowed this to deter them. Sometimes it is pointed out that back in the Rogue Trader days, Games Workshop did briefly produce two power-armoured female models, but they were changed to "Female Adventurers in Power Armour" and were never meant to represent female Marines. Considering this is from Games Workshop, who routinely violates their own canon in subsequent editions, fanbase be damned, take this as you will.

It's worth noting, though, that Games Workshop hasn't deterred /tg/ (or indeed, the Black Library writers) from coming up with ways to potentially allow for them, even with Space Marines being exclusively male being one of the rare things they've kept consistent. This is because, as was brought up in previous articles, little gets between a man and his fapbait.

The canon part

According to fluff, the Space Marine process only works on males because "the zygotes are keyed to male hormones and tissue types" (and presumably also Big Boss' superior dominant genes). This essentially just means the process was designed with males in mind, and won't work on females because actually figuring out how technology works and using it to make other kinds of technology isn't how the Imperium rolls anymore.

More specifically; they're meant to be the sons of the Emperor, who was a bloke. [HERESY!!!!] Which is a fucking weak reason to not have female space marines, as obviously a father can have sons AND daughters. Furthermore, if GW wanted, they COULD have written the setting with the gene-seed working on women as well BUT THEY CHOSE NOT TO. WHY!? Maybe they are sexist. Or maybe the reason they didn't was due to their target audience's (the western world's) society having an aversion to seeing violence happening to women; while men can be slaughtered by the truckload and it's just "business as usual" (sexism cuts both ways). Perhaps it's to further the relationship of canon to classical and medieval myth, where you'd rarely see a woman, and certainly not among the knightly orders that the marines resemble. Best shown with Sisters of Battle getting killed by Grey Knights. The other reason is GW much like Activation has been open about the ideal that female models don't sell (tell that to everyone who plays Eldar and Dark Eldar in 40K).

From a canon standpoint, it seems likely the Emprah (dick that he was) subscribed to this particular brand of chivalric sexism while engineering the primarchs and decided the grand defenders of humanity could only do a competent job if they were male. Something that Konrad Curze implies, as the only Primarchs who have a foster mother were Roboute Guilliman and Leman Russ. Or he lost his bucket of X chromosomes and just had to make do. Meaning Tech Priest finding how to make female space marine would fit with the Imperium's other theme of doing what the Emperor didn't want them to do. Or maybe the fact that they're a pseudo-christian monastic order of genetically engineered super-soldiers has something to do with it.

In canon terms, the closest female equivalent to a Space Marine would be the Sisters of Battle, although they're not exactly as powerful as a marine and they're basically a -4str, Rule 63 version.

But if we're being pedantic...

If we're being pedantic, Space Marines aren't male humans, they're post-human beings built using the bodies of human males. A male Astartes is not the same as a male human. Strictly speaking, they aren't male Astartes because the post-human race does not have a relevant sexual function (probably; Games Workshop has never really bothered detailing it).

But that doesn't stop stylish multimasturbators for looking for pseudo-scientific reason to indulge both their muscle girl fetishes and fondness for sci-fi toys. There is a certain intersex condition that allows a genetically male individual to be born as a hormonal female. It is called "Complete Androgene Insensitivity Syndrome" (CAIS). A person that is born with CAIS has XY Chromosomes, therefore they are genetically males. But since their cells are insensitive to androgenes they are born with female features, and develop as females. Such girls have testes in place of ovaries, therefore they produce testosterone instead of estrogen.

So according to above statements it is theoretically possible to have -4 str Marines, if not in a way that would actually happen in-universe, and in a way that technically means they're male anyway. (This ignores the fact that Astartes are based on their Primarchs, on none of them are described as having CAIS. Meh, details.)

Of course if we really ARE then the majority of human psykers around should be female, as most of the males are being used up to make Grey Knights (it takes a million to make one Knight), yet they're not.

Another thing is that with the current view points of having more Gender balance in the storyline and the Space Marines are more or less the main characters its really only a matter of time before GW's retcons things, or even if they keep the Emperor design the gene-seed to work on men only. Its possible that somewhere down the line some Tech-priest was messing around the gene-seed to fix some errors and removed whatever it is that prevents the gene-seed form working on woman.

What would a female Space Marine look like?

Tina likes long walks on the beach and slaying the Emperor's foes.

Obviously, in the land of Rule 63 they are amazingly hot (and would totally do you), but in dark and gritty fluff-land where they would be optimised for combat rather than jacking off, they would probably have almost no recognisably female features left following surgery and genetic fuckery; they'd have the same big, bulky figures as males, further made unrecognisable by thick plate armour. A female Space Marine with her helmet on would look like a regular Space Marine.

This means all Space Marines with their helmets on might be female right now and you wouldn't even know.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU-

SSSSSIIIIIINNNNNNDDDDRRRRRRIIIII!!

Unexpected salvation - there are indeed (99.46% possible) Female Space Marines!...in The Eye Of Terror. Well out of it too - see, due to the nature of Chaos, mutations are often a fact of life. Some desired, some not. What if one hulked out, burning, warped Chaos Space Marine secretly wishes he was the cute little girl who got flowers? Who smiled with joy? Who was so sweet?

What if his gods are listening? If the nature of Chaos is what it is to any extent, there is a chance his deity will bestow him with what he has always wanted. Though of course, he could just as easily get an extra tentacle arm, or get mutated into that which must never be named - such is the nature of Chaos. Slaanesh especially grants this as a matter of routine, and its a safe bet to make that quite a lot of the Emperor's Children men are actually now women, or rather hermaphs. Such is the will of Slaanesh.

This was confirmed in one of the earlier Chapter Approved articles - one that re-introduced mounted Daemonettes - in which a Governer-Militant fighting a Slaanesh warband mused that there were (apparently female) creatures that were once Space Marines, but no longer. Considering Chaos can cause that which must never be named, is anyone surprised by this?

A more recent one comes form the Warzone Danmos which mentions refugee's of Danmos has produced a few Sons and Daughters that have become Ultramarines (in fact one full scout squad) while you could say the girls just joined their serfs, it also mentions they fought when the Ultramarines reclaimed the world which is something serfs don't do (unless you're an Excoriator serf). And yes the Adults who joined the Ultramar PDF to help aren't the same.

So yes, Smurfs might have them.

Honsou, You Sick Fuck

We know that you among the fans, despite all our attempts to dissaude you, want cute FEMALE SPHESS MAHREENS! And there is good news - technically, there ARE Female Space Marines IN OFFICIAL LORE. The catch? Yes there is a catch. And this one is the worst.

Your FSM is a bloated, twisted, undying, insane, mutated pregnant mother-slave only alive because she's in the Eye of Terror.

You see, Honsou of the Iron Warriors, in an effort to squeeze new MAHREENS into the ranks without having to pay that other sick fuck Fabius Bile for clones, created a system of hideousness and sadness that pushes grimdark to a whole new level. He invented the Daemonculaba, a system whereby a woman is chained and fed stuff which will morph her and her womb into something that was never meant to be. A boy is then (yes, a child), jammed, shoved or cut INTO the vagina and stays there for a while. When his time is ready, he, now XBAWKS HUEG and STRONG, will have to rip, tear, or otherwise push his way out of his adoptive mother's womb/vagina. When he emerges, he will either be a fleshless mutant abomination, or will emerge as a fleshless, fully functional Chaos Space Marine in a fraction of the time, with all his growth stages and bionics and gene-seed already taken care of. How? It's fucking science.

This goes back to our Female Space Marine - you see, while she was being morphed and changed, Dark Mechanicus Biologos hereteks worked on her body, implanting gene-seed and making her physically a Female Space Marine, even if the form is rather off. Thus, her womb can turn children as well into Space Marines by having her womb 'grow' the required orgrans and stages directly into their bodies in a fraction of the time, days and weeks instead of years. Thankfully for the entire universe, this horror was destroyed before Honsou realized he could stick girls in there as well, and get double the recruits, and stumble upon the secret to true Female Space Marines.

WAIT A SECOND!

Now we're talking about Honsou, there WAS another case of CANON FEMALE SPACE MARINE (sort of). Yea, I'm serious. Not a bloated and twisted parody of the birthing, but a full fledged female space marine (without the organs and gene-seed, so more like a Sister of Battle but daemon-possessed and with bigger armor, but no one is perfect). The "bad" thing is it was briefly... and a Khornate Aspiring Champion.

Let's start the story. Just before Honsou become the badass Warsmith he is now, he was a captain in the very warband he would lead afterwards. He was not alone, of course. There were two other in there: a bored (and boring) terminator champion called Forrix and a badass Khornate champion called Kroeger. In the assault to Hydra Cordatus (ya know, the one Honsou seized control over the warband), this Kroeger took Captain Larana Utorian, an Imperial Guardswoman, as a slave. Initially only to polish his armor and maintain his weapons, but I do not disagree with the idea of he used her to polish other things or maintain his "sword".

Anyway, Larana one day she started to hear voices coming from the armor and axe. Not strange, if we take the point that it were daemon equipment. The Daemon said that it has grown tired of Kroeger's petty slaughtering and wanted a new master. With the flow of the days and the war, the chick finally succumbed to the voices and wore the armor herself. Don't know how, but the daemons modified Larana's body to fit in the armor. Here you go: your pissed off Khornate female Chaos Space Marine Champion.

When Kroeger returned, he saw her in this attire. He was not pleased, of course, but little thing he could do. Before he can even touch her, she ripped off his head in a single blow. After that, she joined the final assault to the imperial stronghold against her former regiment as a proper Khornate. No one noted the difference. Only Forrix noted something, but were minor changes in fighting style. In the middle of the battle, Larana disappeared in a warp portal after killing a space marine librarian.

-4 str? Fuck that, she's Khornate, as Valkia shows in a daily basis.

She returned some time after in Medrengard, when ex Ultrasmurf captain Uriel Ventris and his merry band of renegades were fucking the shit up in the fortress of Honsou, but only to return to her former self and hand the armour and the axe to their rightful owner: a Bloodthirster chained in the core of the fortress, the called "Heart of Blood". After that she sacrificed herself with the remnants of her regiment (2 men), to cause critical damage to the fortress' structure and killing as many iron warriors as she could. Badass to the end, Larana showed that the standard-issue balls of steel and manliness are not male-only.

RAEG

RAGE is generated by the tactic in two distinct ways; either the neckbeard(s) assume that the creator of the work in question is unaware of the Space Marine fluff, and rage about his or her ignorance; failing that, it becomes clear that they are well aware of the fluff regarding these matters and willingly chose to disregard it, sending the poor neckbeards into fits of spastic rage that anyone would dare deliberately defile the sacrosanct canon of Games Workshop's masterpiece with the foul taint of cooties.

Still, the afromentioned creator will just ignore him.

A slightly more reasonable answer

The problem really is one of terminology. Women can wear power armour, certainly. Women can, through steroids, incessant bodybuilding, high protein diet, and a little genetic modding, be as buff and rocking as a space marine. But what really makes a space marine a space marine is all of the extra genetically-engineered organs and DNA and whatnot cloned from the Primarchs and implanted in the right way. With a little Fabius Bile magic, there's some vague possibility that you could put that stuff into a woman, but if its Fabius Bile doing it then its kinda more likely that he'd make you a dude with titties and a weird demon vagina than an actual female space marine. Because he's a swell guy like that. And even if he did make you a female space marine for reals, she still wouldn't be a space marine, just a weird, mutilated, chaos infused thing that approximates a space marine but can never truely be one.

Worth noting, however, that given that Bile's experimented on damn-near everything (including the entire civilian populations of several planets) at some point or another for his attempts to duplicate the methods for creating new space marines, there's ample evidence to suggest that he's tried it at least once. Fucking Slaanesh.

Summary

For the most part, the neckbeards on /tg/ fear anything with two X chromosomes. For the most part, anyone who actually makes an army of female Space Marines does it to garner the most ire from the most diehard fans. Like playing a Tau army, it's all about drinking the rage-induced tears of sexually stunted men.

See Also

• Golden Aquilas: /tg/ homebrew chapter, designed to cause as much RAEG and accusations of derp as possible.
• Space Marines: Rule 63 equivalent of female space...Wait.
• Sisters of Battle: the warrior nuns of the Imperium that typically are actually armed with bolters and chainswords and whom might be construed to some reasonable extent as being the 'female space marines' of Warhammer 40,000
• Samus: How about a female Primarch?

Gallery

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  And if you think this is bad, once a month they all gain Frenzy.

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  Lol. Why u mad though?

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  Brother-sister Igpay Atinlay boldly distracts the Tyranid foe.

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  Not in fact Horo.

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  She'd be even scarier if she took off that mask

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  DYKE OUTTA FUCKING NOWHERE!

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  Your eyes should start bleeding right about now.

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  PMS BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

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  Not Just as planned. and now you know why Tzeentch doesn't invite Slaanesh to his birthday parties anymore. Just as planned

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  The Emperor made the Primarchs to be the greatest human warriors of all time, but even they were not immune to Rule 63.

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  She was not amused by this development.

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  Don't piss off Mama Smurf. Trust me your genitals will not survive. Shouldn't she be with the dark angels?

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  Somehow still less of a failure than the real Abaddon.