Why folks hate the Stormcast Eternals...

[Mr Mystery]

If we move away from the aesthetic (on account it's entirely subjective), lets instead dig into the background of the Stormcast Eternals.

I think they're rather interesting...

You see, the way I see it, they're what the Chaos Gods could make of their followers, if they showed care and planning in their gifts, rather than not being able to tell invulnerability from the form of an oscillating bollock faced Chicken, or vibrating Bumfaced Goat.

And that's not to say the Chaos Gods are feckless...they just genuinely cannot tell the difference.

But Sigmar? Really quite different approach. He's weighed up and assessed not only the gifts he wants to bestow, but what the human (for so far, they're all humans) form can take in the way of God Bestowed gifts.

This to me is a good foil to Chaos. The chance 'perfect mutation' given up in the name of stability and not seeing a promising follower turn into a blob of tentacles and insanity.

Further than that? It shows Sigmar, and by extension shows his fellow members of the Pantheon to be more of a match for the Dark Gods. This is a big change in Warhammer, where previously the 'good' deities were distant and aloof, possibly because they were trying to avoid direct personal conflict with the Four.

Going forward, I kind of hope each race gets its 'God Touched' forces, which I think we can reasonably predict to be a reflection of their Deities preferences. Think 'Gorkamorka's Extra 'Ard Ladz', and already hinted at Shadowy Elf Daemon things.

Personally I want to see that, because it would be cool, but perhaps not so much entire armies.

[Erik Setzer]

I *might* be tempted to take all these plastic Black Orcs I have (hey, Black Orcs are cool) and convert a bunch of them into Orc versions of Stormcasts, but they'd be something like "Morkkasts" or "Waaaghkasts." And then just use the SC rules for them, but express it like how Orcs would fight (i.e. not arriving in a bolt of thunder, but rather hurled from the "heavens" at their enemy by the hand of Gork/Mork).

Okay, actually, that sounds kind of fun. If there are still any people playing AoS locally, they'd even get a chance to see the battlefield.

[Mr Mystery]

Do eeeeet!

And for the Celestant Prime? MASSIVE BAT WINGED LOONY.

[Ray Rivers]

Agreed that they're Greco-Roman, rather than medieval. But, if you take that aesthetic and apply it to large, super-human warriors with over-sized pauldrons, doesn't the space marine comparison make just a little sense?

Sorry, but I don't see it. The similarity between the two starts and ends with large shoulder armor.

SM have cod pieces, Stormcast have loin cloths and leather skirts. SM have rounded chest armor while the Stormcast have muscled breast plates. SM have helmets with snots while the Stormcast have helmets with crests. Leg armor of the Stormcast is more exaggerated indicative of greaves and the "common soldier" carries a large decorated shield.

I'm not a fan of medieval warfare, which I think is why I never really got into 40K or Warhammer. But the unmistakable Greco-Roman influence of the Stormcast was so strong as to immediately grab my attention.

Even the Khorne Bloodbound give me an ancient vibe with their lack of armor, focus on large hand held weapons and those Nordic helmets.





The imagery I'm seeing hasn't anything to do with Space Marines and when they were first released it never even entered my mind...

[Kirsten]

no there is no real comparison with marines. they just happen to be dudes covered in full armour, that is it.

[Ray Rivers]

I don't mean this offensively, but honestly given your apparent optimism here... Are you completely new to the GW hobby?

Not really.

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I bought the first box of plastic beaky SM's a looonnng time (what 30 years?) ago. They were too tedious to put together so they ended up in the garbage.

But come on. Here you have an obvious break with the past; new miniatures, a new aesthetic, a new type of game (skirmish) which is much more in keeping with gamer's limited time, and all GW gets is crap. And, from what I understand even the painting of Khorne miniatures in a flesh tone other than Caucasian seems to be fairly indicative of a pretty radical change. So trying to predict future releases on past products is probably pointless.

So yea, I can easily see female miniatures interjected into AoS. Hell, if they put out a box of female Bloodreavers they probably couldn't keep them in stock!

[Kirsten]

I am very much looking forward to seeing what they do next. it is a brave new world.

[Erik Setzer]

Not really.

Then you should know that all your hoping is for nothing.

If you want female miniatures, buy from someone else. Other people make them (most of them not being ridiculous jokes, either), and they're great models. Sure, you can't use them in a GW store, but, well... having played outside a GW store, I never realized how much they're like playing in a prison. (Mind you, that's with a manager who was a really cool guy and pretty lax at times. But he did have to keep certain rules going.)

You say you've played since the start. Cool. Welcome to that club! So you know it's moot to hope. Just because a couple of Khorne guys have almost-African skin tones doesn't mark a sudden shift. We used to have models like that in the game, then they disappeared. Eventually they'll go back to whitewashing the game. They might do a female model somewhere so someone can enjoy sculpting an over-sexualized piece to appeal to their demographic (which isn't accurate, but whatever, market research is for amateurs, right?), but that's about it. And they're also already pretty much shut the door on female Stormcasts. (Once again, I have to say, if we're supposed to pretend that there's female warriors being forced to go to battle looking like men because "women aren't scary enough" or some BS like that, it's even more insulting than not having any.)

This is just one of those things you accept with GW. Kind of like how they retconned out female Orks and Orcs, just to make it even more of an "All Boys Club."

[nsc]

I don't think female bloodreavers would counteract the argument of "pinup-mostly-nude-eye-candy-female-male-fantasy"

I would probably buy a box to mix in with my dude-reavers though, I do like variance after all.

I think that, at least for the empire and bretonians, the lack of females stem from how they're grounded in historical armies, crusaders, renaissance-era/early horse and musket, and these armies are depicted without female rank and file troops. Whether this is revisionist history or not is at your discretion to decide as I'm not going to argue about erasure and what not, merely remarking at the state of things, or how they seem.

As far as the space marines in fantasy argument goes, yeah they are space marines, sort of. They're easy to paint, they're about hulking heroes and giant hammers. They're larger than human.

Is this a bad thing? No. Elite "humans" have always been a topic in historical warfare. British longbowmen, crusader knights, Spartans, royal guard of XYZ, immortals, grenadiers. Elite, larger than life, almost mythological units and troops have always been a thing and the stormcast being an entire army of elite, outnumbered, heroic troops, is a style that was missing from the good guys in whfb.

Edit:
"All boys club," is GW making it that? Are we as a community making it that? The fact of the mater is the sisters of battle don't sell and female wargamers are very few in number. You claim that the market would support female models but GW has always and will always try to make money. If Sisters of Battle were popular and sold models they wouldn't be web-order. They would be on shelves (or off shelves as people bought 'em) and you wouldn't be lamenting how "evil gw" doesn't make female models.

Looking for female dwarf models is a headache, it's not only GW who avoids female sculpts, they are few and far between. The only solution to increasing the visibility of women in wargaming is by buying female models, emailing customer support about whether they're over sexualized and converting them when they are over sexualized. If you have a beautiful army with female models in it, that are sensible and clothed and look awesome, they're the best advertisement to encourage other people to put in the work to get their own female minis and support your vision of equal representation.

[Mr Mystery]

Sisters aren't a great example duder.

They're cash expensive for middling points - so there are far more cost effective options out there.

Me? I'm on good money, and can afford pretty much any army I want. Yet I baulk at the price of Sisters of Battle as an army.

This has impacted on their appeal more than anything. When they first came out, they were pretty popular - released as they were in what, 1996ish? Most armies were metal. But they've not moved beyond that.

Put them in plastic, make them more cost effective (£50 for a ten strong squad is mad) and they will sell.

Sadly, for female wargamers? It's us smelly nerds that are the problem.... Go into a store, get letched at and perved over, have socially maladjusted oiks be really awkward around you....