Games Workshop doubled down on injecting woke feminism into the game’s lore by announcing new female Adeptus Custodes tabletop figures.
In a blog post on its Warhammer Community website, Games Workshop shared new information about its new Legio Custodes miniatures.
Specifically, the company revealed a female Shield Captain miniature noting she’s the bestest evar, “All Custodians are incredible warriors, but the greatest among them are raised to the rank of the Shield Captain. These warriors stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the greatest fighters in the Imperium, and the new Shield Captain miniature is worthy of such an accolade – just check out the level of detail!”
The detail shows a miniature that looks like a grandma.
On top of this, the company also published a Q&A to answer questions about the Custodes and confirmed that “some of those awesome new Custodes miniatures are female.”
When asked if it’s a “new thing,” the company answers, “Well, yes and no. Up until this point, those few Legio and Adeptus Custodes miniatures we’ve seen without helmets have been obviously male, and the rest have been so armoured that it’s hard to tell. The new range has a mix of both male and female Custodes.”
Then it posits if the company has changed its lore. Specifically, it asks, “Have you changed the lore? I thought all Space Marines and Custodes were male?”
The company answers, “Space Marines, yes. Lore wise, Space Marines are made from human males, willing aspirants or unwilling conscripts on the cusp of adolescence. They are subjected to a series of horrific trials, and the strongest emerge as remorseless killers, their humanity stripped away so they can serve as living weapons in the Emperor’s armies. There are no female Adeptus Astartes.”
“Custodes are not Space Marines,” it adds. “Other than the obvious point that they are both towering, gene-enhanced warriors, the similarities pretty much stop there.”
“Custodes are taken as infants and recrafted by ancient science.The process is arcane and bespoke to each individual. The Emperor himself retained oversight of the process (at least until that whole “Horus Heresy” thing went down),” it concluded.
This is an outright lie as the company retconned its lore surrounding Custodes back in April 2024 when it introduced its first female custodian in Adeptus Custodes. The company then posted to its X account, “Since the first of the Ten Thousand were created, there have always been female Custodians.”
An excerpt from the 1987 Rogue Trader rules makes it abundantly clear that Custodes are male and have always been male.
It states, “The Adeptus Custodes is the Emperor’s inner guard, the members of which are privileged in being permitted to serve upon the Emperor, attending to his needs, receiving and recording his directions. These men never leave Earth and only rarely leave the Imperial Palace – an endless, black hive of forbidden technology and subterranean passages delving deep within the bowels of the planet.”
This was retconned in a blog post where it removed the fact that the Custodes are recruited from the sons of nobles.
“Potential Custodians are taken in at a very young age to better survive the rigours of their transformation – no older than late infancy – for the fundamental changes that will be wrought upon their flesh, minds and souls are tantamount to apotheosis. It is considered a great honour for those of Terran noble houses to submit a child.”
In September 2024, in a blog post, Games Workshop continued to push this woke ideology introducing an animated short focusing on a female Custodian. The company declared, “Tyrith Shiva Kyrus (the first three of a long list of honorific names earned fighting for the Emperor) has the privilege of being our first portrayal of a female Custodian Guard since the recent revelation that Custodians can be any gender.”
The company added, “This fact came as a real surprise to many, since it wasn’t something previously explored. That, in and of itself, isn’t a particularly unusual thing for Warhammer 40,000 and its lore; there are simply loads of things the Warhammer Studios have never expressly stated, whether that’s ruling them in or out.”
It then attempted to justify this change by claiming adding females allows them to be more distinct from the Space Marines, “A significant advantage to this portrayal is that it helps us to address a common misconception – that the Custodes are just bigger, better Space Marines. They aren’t. Space Marines were made through industrialised ritual to be mass-produced, brute-force weapons of conquest. And even 10,000 years after their creation, draped in self-assigned glory, that’s still true of them at their core. Each Custodian, on the other hand, is unique. Painstakingly made through peerless craft and arcane artifice, their physique, their psyche, their very soul, is a bespoke instrument of the Emperor they unquestioningly serve.”
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