Creating Female Marines

[Ferrata]

Female Marines – A Prologue

 

We have all seen the threads dragged down into the fiery pit of doom just by the mention of Female Space Marines, if you have not then you are lucky. The debate itself is entombed within the walls of Librarium and can be found here. Now that the debate is over, we have turned our attention to something constructive, something to help others, something for the good of humanity (maybe a little exaggeration.) If you do not agree with female marines, this thread is not for you and you can stop reading right...about...now.

 

What the debate revealed is that if something done well it is more likely to be ‘accepted’ then something done without skill. Here we offer our advice on the different plot hooks commonly used by the community to create female space marines. First, we need to lay the groundwork for the project, the underlying assumptions we make to allow everything to run smoothly. The Index Astartes article ‘Creation of a Space Marine’ contains the following line;

'They [the recruit] must be male because zygotes are keyed to male hormones and tissue types.’

 

That is what you need to overcome to get your Space Marines of the female variety. There are two ways to nullify this statement, an in-universe one, and an out-of-universe one. Let us take the second one to begin with.

 

An outside of the (40K) universe decision that the above line is either out-dated and over-ruled by the line not being in the latest codex, that all fluff is meant to be fluid, propaganda and half-truths if you may, and it is quite likely that the above line is nothing but a lie, or finally just you taking the choice to ignore this piece of fluff, something you are entitled to do. Where does this leave you? Well, you can skip the whole section on making gene-seed female friendly and get right into the meat of the chapter creation. This method does require a small prelude to any article you produce, a simple ‘I know female marines are against the fluff but I’m ignoring it.’ Truth be told, nearly 98% of all people who dislike female marines will either stop reading there or give constructive feedback on your chapter ignoring the fact they are female. Unfortunately, there are always a few that will still yell and shout at you for it but you are going to have to live with that.

 

The first option is a lot more complicated, as you take the quoted line to be true, and thus require some background to be produced that makes female-okay gene-seed. A large portion of this article will be given over to such methods so I will not go into any detail here. The main problem with this approach is that you are about to walk over a minefield as many of the hooks have massive holes in them or are just damn difficult to do well. It is quite easy for your chapter to come across very cheesy, very forced and not enjoyable to read, the worst thing an article can be. We hope we can help here by pointing out the mines before you do the largest splits you have ever done.

 

Okay, I want female marines, how can I do it?

 

Lets hit the big one straight on the head from the start, chaos. This is a DIYers greatest get out of jail free card because it is impossible to argue against the how when you involve chaos as by its very nature it can do what it wants. This could be in the guise of several forms, from the operations of Fabious Bile who knows the most about gene-seed bar the Emperor and thus if he can’t make female marines no-one can, to the direct interfernce of the gods themselves. As a group of choices they all have the same failing, you cannot create loyalist female marines like this. The only possible way would to have a smurfette story line going when they are originally created evil but turn to the good side. The problem with this is the Imperium are not smurfs, the Imperium doesn’t forgive, forget or even allow any deviency from standard. At best this chapter could move away from its chaotic roots to follow their own destiny but they never would be excepted into the bossom of the Imperium.

 

Before moving onto the more free-flowing chaos ideas, lets focus on Bile. He probably, with a lot of effort and time, achieve the unachievable and create female marines. The main question here would be why? First off, Bile does all his work for the different Legions, supplying them all with new recruits. He doesn’t work for no half-wits, just Legion bosses so there is little wiggle room to allow someone to convince him to create a new chapter even of basic marines, never mind female ones. If you do take this route you will need to invest a lot of time into allowing the reader to understand Bile’s motivations and drives to create such a force as if you off-handedly suggest that he did it ‘for the hell of it’ your work is going to get a lot of bad reviews.

 

Now onto the more wishy-washy chaos ideas. Sorcerors, daemons, gods...chaos has all the answers. Any of the previous could turn either a male marine into a female marine or turn a normal female into something capable of excepting gene-seed. Tzeentch and Slaanesh are the two most likely gods to get involved in this kind of thing, I doubt Khorne cares or even knows about gender and Nurgle doesn’t seem the type to care either. Tzeentch would be answering the prayers of someone who wanted change whilst Slaanesh probably will not keep it PG rated. The main problem for these types of creations is they will hardly number in the hundreds, just a handful of marines here and there. Maybe they could be some gigantic spell, similar to the one which turned the Thousand Sons into dust, but that track will need careful treading.

 

Those two main groups really cover the chaos point of view for creatiing female marines, either mechanically via Bile or magically by any number of sources. It is important to remember that either one of these will probably be preluded by a good few blood and gut attempts which instead of leading to the promised land lead to a messy place filled with failure. Whilst you can have a little wiggle room with the chaos gods, as they do work in mysterious ways, the motivation behind whoever is responisble for the female marines will have to form a fair section of your chapter.

 

Yeah, Chaos Female Marines...but what about some loyal chicks?

 

Going on the gene-seed doesn’t work on female aspirants so you either need bring Muhammad to the mountain or take the mountain to Muhammad. In simplier words, either the gene-seed needs tweaking to work with females or the recruits need fixing so the gene-seed works with them. As the term used to reason why female aspirants don’t work isn’t strict science, ‘male tissue types’, your answer here can be a bit of jelly science.

 

One of the favourite answers to this question is to suggest that one of the two missing legions was led bya female primarch. This does overcome all questions to whether the gene-seed will work in females because this would be a female only seed. The major problem with this one is that it dabbles with the lost primarchs, something that should be done with the strictest of discipline. Like you’ve been taught all your life, two wrongs don’t make a right and going agaisnt two taboos doesn’t make your chapter special and unique. This approach really only replaces one problem with another; possibly an even greater one. You will need to explain why the chapter was expunged from Imperial records and how they’ve got back fighting for the Big E.

 

Another great cover-up of Imperial history is the Cursed Founding, the founding that lets you play. Around the time of the Age of Apostasy someone decided that it would be a good idea to attempt to alter the gene-seed of chapters to improve on the basic Astartes design. In short, it failed. However it did make a nice place to hide all these dirty and naughty experiments that must have gone to create a gene-seed that works on females. A lot of stumbling about in the dark, many failed attempts and hundreds of executed samples later you a female Astartes finally walks out the door. Again, motivation for the behind the scenes worker is going to be a big problem as you’ll see later there isn’t many reasons to force someone to such extreme actions. The chapter will probably share the fate that its brother chapters fell to, some persecussion by the Imperium as accepting female marines made during this dark time might not be the easiest pill to swallow.

 

Finally, probably the weakest but sanest approach to making female gene-seed, a random mutation. The good thing about this is it doesn’t require any motivation on the behalf of some evil conspirator just some plain dumb luck. Any half-knowledged biologist will tell you that the possibility of multiple productive mutations working in unison on mass is quite slim, but then again they have anti-grav machines, aliens and teleportation...science has already taken a hit. You will need to go into the reactions of the Imperium who discover one of their precious brotherhood of warriors is now female and how they were accepted.

 

Getting your female recruits to work with standard gene-seed is just as founded in jelly science than the other way around. Your basic approach here is something happened to the genetics of the populace to bring the female tissue types closer to, or indeed, identical to that of males along with a higher balance of male hormones. Both of these could happen due to a number of reasons and the possible effects on the women because of these changes are long and frankly pointless as you can ignore them, jelly science for the win. So what is going to get you this altered female genetics? Random mutation is the big one here, but xenos or ruinous taint is always a possibility. Unfortunately this is all about that can be said on this subject as it is just down to random chance and there is nothing that will generally cause it. You could suggest that the male tissue type is an occurrence of a male dominated society and if females dominated it would be them with this tissue type, but that isn’t really founded with any real science though none of this really is.

 

The one last option available to the DIYer is a separate technology centre way from the Imperium, who even though isolated from the big machine of the Empire of Man has managed to remember the techniques of creating Marines that they learnt during the Great Crusade. When the Emperor was still walking about, any male could be turned into a Marine, usually they were prisoners and criminals, so it is not a massive leap to suggest that females could undergo similar treatment. This does leave you with non-Imperial Female Marines again that are not going to be accepted into the Imperium, but at least their father was not chaos.

 

Why?

 

This is an equally big question to the how. Why would anyone who has the power to do this decide to put gene-seed in a female? To quote myself (as I love to do) ‘The Empire of Man is deprived of many things but one thing it has by the bucket loads is manpower’ and that much is true. The Imperium will never run out of men to turn into marines until its last few dying days, and unless you want to create a female Space Marine chapter that is fighting in the end of time, you are going to need a good reason why.

 

Again, Chaos and Imperial split ways. Chaos can have any number of deep reasons or very shallow reasons, to list them would be a waste of time, and my finger ends. Bile plays a little different to the mystical ways of gods and sorcerers, but even he boils down to the basic human urge for greed. If someone could give him enough power to convince him to go out on a limb and create female marines then he probably would. On the magical side, you have reasons from a major mix-up which randomly (an article favourite word) lead to XXers or someone truly wanting to become female and getting their wish (or punishment).

 

The Imperium is a little harder to justify as I don’t think sexism plays a major role in the Imperium, neither do many other prejudices which prey on our world, instead they hate xenos and mutants...and understandably to. That rules out a feminist action group forcing a female chapter into creation. You will find the best reason is someone did it, unfortunately, either for the hell of it or by mistake. Something went wrong, some bad paper work, and some poor slave girl gets a gene-seed slammed into her. You could have a devious mind at work, but I cannot quite fathom the masterful character who thinks it is an evil ploy to create a female marine chapter.

 

We now approach our final call of this article, the conclusion. I hope that you have found this article insightful, a guide to the female marine question. Whilst we can argue all day long whether you can create them within the strict limits of the fluff, we have shown that with a little bit of jelly science, some random occurrences, and a whole load of words, you can create female marines.

[sgtNACHO]

So this topic is to find out how to properly make female marines? I'm not exactly 100% on what the point of this is. Are we trying to improve the original post? or do something similar to what I am doing with Ghostlegion in his What not to do with a DIY chapter, where we are actually going to make a Female chapter?

[Ferrata]

No, we are not going to make a female chapter just an article about them.

[Ferrata]

Updated.

[Doctor Thunder]

Excellent work Ferrata. :eek

 

Are you going to include a bit about an isolated human group unaffiliated with the Imperium that still understand their tech?

[Ferrata]

Thats the next stage, just got a little distracted.

[Silber]

++didn't belong here++

[Ferrata]

Completed. Comments?

[Philip S]

Origins, creation of... how is this different from Female Marines Article Discussion?

 

All the ideas in that thread hold true in this one.

 

As a simple rule of thumb: add 'a faction of' to the front of the introductory sentence and you are pretty much covered.

 

Philip

[Ferrata]

Origins, creation of... how is this different from Female Marines Article Discussion?

 

All the ideas in that thread hold true in this one.

Someone didn't have their wheatabix this morning. That thread and this thread are one, this is just the article from that discussion. As you can see from the Intro being posted in their first, and the numerous edits by myself saying 'scratch' to remind me that I had done them already. So in short, one is the ideas thread and the other is the article