Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Warhammer Finally Goes Woke

April 15, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:20

Warhammer Finally Goes Woke

We all knew this was coming. Politics of 40k: https://www.lotuseaters.com/the-politics-of-warhammer-40-000-or-deep-think-v-21-04-22

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	It was inevitable, even if it was a long time coming, Warhammer has finally gone woke.
	In the current year, saying something has gone woke is a bit of a lame sentence, as almost everything is woke now, but Warhammer 40,000 was an outlier because it was such an intransigently right-wing setting that it seemed almost impossible to make it fully woke without destroying it from the inside.
	As I documented in my Politics of Warhammer 40,000 article, link in the description, it isn't that the forces of the left haven't been desperately trying to debauch 40K for years now.
	They of course have.
	The problem was that the internal logic of the setting made it very difficult.
	This doesn't mean that Games Workshop, the company who makes 40K, isn't woke, however.
	They of course are, and they've been telling us this for a long time.
	In response to the death of George Floyd in 2020, Games Workshop, for some reason, decided that they ought to put out a statement telling us that Warhammer was for everyone, and if you didn't like it, you wouldn't be missed.
	The important part here, though, is that they threatened to continue to diversify the characters in 40k, so that, quote, everyone can find representation and heroes they relate to.
	Which is an odd thing to write, because the fun part of the grim dark universe of Warhammer is that one explicitly does not find oneself represented by the enormous genetically modified space racists whose sole mission is to exterminate all alien and divergent mutant life in the galaxy.
	Imagine the kind of person that must feel represented by the core faction of this universe.
	Many of the factions are not even human.
	One might ask if Games Workshop even understands why people play Tyrannids or demons or orcs.
	The fun of the setting does not come in seeing oneself in the factions, but instead getting to simulate an experience that lies outside of normal human endeavour.
	Anyway, the point is that Games Workshop as a company desperately wants to be woke, but has been saddled with a pre-woke inheritance that is decidedly anti-woke, and this issue always reared its head in the question of, can there be female Space Marines?
	To which the answer was always a resounding and firm no from Games Workshop, even if they really, really wanted there to be.
	For intricate reasons of law, which I won't bore you with here, it was canonically decided decades ago that Space Marines were male.
	Nobody cared about this for years, until the rise of inclusivity as a moral standard overtook everything and left Games Workshop looking embarrassed in the eyes of their progressive peers.
	Every other company was able to virtue signal about their products, but poor old GW was left making money off a bunch of male-only space racists, which must have looked very bad at the shareholder meetings with BlackRock.
	One could imagine the BlackRock representative saying something like, well, that's all well and good, Games Workshop, but we really need female space racists as well, you know?
	To which Games Workshop must have responded, well, we really want female space racists, but we simply can't, you see.
	They're male-only space racists.
	We're really sorry.
	However, profits are up.
	But it does seem that Games Workshop have discovered a way to scratch that progressive itch and make female space racists after all.
	In the setting, there are many kinds of space racists who defend humanity from the ravening alien hordes, and one faction of these are called the Adeptus Custodes.
	Where the Space Marines are huge, genetically modified space racists, these are even bigger, even more genetically modified space racists, in golden armour, whose job it is to guard the Emperor of mankind himself.
	News broke recently of the latest rules book that is to be released for this faction, in which it has been revealed that there are now female Adeptus custodes.
	These books contain a mixture of rules combined with world-building short stories, and the new Adeptus Custodis Codex has a short story about a custodian called Calidace Tarilovia, pronouns she-her.
	This is new, because until now, 40k law had stated, just like with the Space Marines, that the custodies were exclusively male.
	Previous editions simply just said the custodians were the infant sons recruited from the nobility who are then put through the process of genetic modification.
	Someone on Twitter obviously noticed that this was new and seems to fly in the face of the rules already established in the setting.
	So why was it done?
	And to this, the official Warhammer Twitter account simply replied, Since the first of the 10,000 were created, there have always been female custodians.
	I see.
	Instead of attempting to impose their new moral philosophy through subversive interpretations of pre-existing law, Games Workshop have decided to just start lying about it instead.
	In any normal time and place, this would be considered utterly insane, but we are here and now, and so this is entirely unsurprising.
	Either way, the question must be asked, what is driving this company to lie to their consumers about their product?
	I mean, needless to say, this was not well received, and Twitter suddenly filled up with die-hard long-term fans of 40k cancelling their subscriptions and vowing that they would no longer spend money on the hobby.
	In response, the new brand ambassadors that Games Workshop had courted for their products began telling people to leave, which is great marketing.
	But the question that underpins all of this is why are Games Workshop so desperate to create female versions of their traditionally all-male space racists, a move which they knew would incense the fanbase and damage their reputation.
	There is no financial incentive to do this.
	In fact, there's probably a massive financial disincentive to do this.
	However, still, the compulsion to drive their property to this place remains, and they cannot simply ignore it.
	They must somehow find a way of creating female Space Marines, and it seems that lying has just become an acceptable means of stepping over the problem, if that's what it takes.
	The answer is, of course, that they think this is what makes them good people.
	The people who run Games Workshop are not moral philosophers.
	They are plastic toy makers.
	And when it comes to making plastic toys, they are the undisputed best.
	Having been a fan of Games Workshop's work for over 30 years, I can attest that they truly are the masters.
	However, moral philosophy has come a long way since the old everyone can do as they choose as long as they aren't hurting others phase of the 80s, 90s and 2000s.
	Now we have the intersectional philosophy of inclusion and representation, which we summarise for brevity as woke.
	In the pre-woke paradigm, to be a good person was to do the right thing, for the right reason, to achieve the right result.
	It required you to take action, with good intention to achieve a good consequence.
	For example, I will carry this old lady's groceries because she's not strong enough herself to get them home.
	Tangible action, a positive spirit, and good works were all core and intrinsic components of being a good person.
	However, the philosophy of inclusion and representation does not care about such things at all.
	It cares about systemic systems of structural structures and does not have any interest in the intrinsic moral worth of an act, but instead calculates right and wrong through the lens of power.
	It is in the power to act that wokeness finds moral worth to lie, in the ability to privilege one and exclude the other.
	Exclusion implies a lack of power over a certain domain, which renders the excluded as being denied access to right and wrong, and the excluders themselves as immoral because it is access to power which is the very source of the substance of morality.
	This is the moral calculus, which not only provides the constant impulse towards inclusion, but also makes it acceptable to lie in the pursuit of that goal.
	What they do is disconnected from the consequence they seek because they have established a greater moral law that holds that righteousness is located not in an individual, but in the system itself.
	You may well be a good person, but that is a secondary consideration to the true locus of morality, which is the system itself as the true moral agent which is really capable of acts of right and wrong.
	And while it gives unto some and withholds from others, the system judges itself to be bad.
	The metaphysical existence of this greater standard of morality transcends petty moral concerns such as lying, looting or murder, and is why its advocates literally go to bat for people who do all of those things.
	It's not that they are bad people, they are the victims of a system which prevented them from the opportunity to be good people in the first place because they were excluded from it.
	In the case of Games Workshop, this quest for righteousness resolves itself into a common question which the philosophy of inclusion and representation always kicks up whether it is acceptable to have single sex spaces or not.
	Warhammer had always been a very male-dominated game, made for men, purchased by men, and so naturally it reflected that.
	This, however, is not inclusive, it is exclusive, and even though exclusivity is the root of excellence, the people in Games Workshop are recent converts to the cult of inclusivity, and so now they are disgusted with their own accomplishments.
	It is not sufficient to have equal representation of male and female spaces either.
	It is not good enough to have female-only factions and male-only factions because they are both exclusive and at the very core of the issue, it is the exclusivity that is the problem as it presents a barrier to the choice of the people who have been excluded and are therefore rendered victims by definition.
	Things that are exclusive put some people outside of the system, outside of power, and therefore outside of morality itself.
	Games Workshop looks at this situation, as every woke person must, as so fundamentally immoral that they have the same reaction to it as a Christian would finding a statue of Baphomet in a cathedral.
	It boils down to the following.
	Good people have mixed sex spaces, and bad people have single sex spaces.
	It's the same reason that made J.K. Rowling the great boogie woman of the progressive movement.
	Warhammer has single sex spaces, making Games Workshop as a company and the people who run it bad people by their own standard.
	Naturally, anyone who feels like a bad person has an irrepressible desire to mend their ways and become a good person.
	And so Games Workshop have decided that flat out lying and pretending that they've always been an inclusive company with mixed sex spaces is an acceptable price to pay to achieve the moral rectitude that being inclusive apparently brings.
	None of their peers will judge them for this, they will instead judge them for having male-only space racists, when they could have mixed sex space racists.

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