Female Space Marine Models

[Chris Copeland]

There's a difference between visually interesting and idiotic. I find Space Marine armor to be plenty visually interesting, it has a good style going for it. Sisters of Battle armor does, too, until you look at the torso. At which point it becomes stupid.

I'm sure you do love how they are "clearly female" (IE that the models scream "hey look at my tits I'm a girl"), and the dominatrix crap that doesn't fit in with the holy warrior concept, and whatever else. However, I insist on the FACT that they don't have to be dressed like whores in order to be obviously female. While I'd understand it if the armor had the chest bulge and wasn't so blatant and stupid about it, there's more to being female then having a pair of tits (some men have those, too).

Wow, Melissia, I think you are being rude. Are there forum rules about this? Do we have moderators? I'm new here so I don't know yet.

You disagree with me so you have to use words like "idiotic," "stupid" and "crap." You must be a BLAST to play with at your local game store! Is the phrase,"hey look at my tits I'm a girl" truly appropriate or necessary? Must you refer to goth inspired designs as being "dressed like whores"?

Like I said, I'm new here. I don't know all the ins and outs of this board yet. Does BoLs have a troll problem? My basic tactic with trolls (folks who are always purposefully spiteful and who post back begatively about EVERYTHING just to get a reaction is "Never feed the trolls." Once you stop feeding the trolls they go away. Are you using spiteful words with me, Melissia, just to get a reaction? If so, please let me know ASAP so I can adjust my behavior accordingly.

Back on topic: after careful consideration I think that the Goth-inspired, corset wearing, Betty Page-haircut, big bosomed awesomeness that is the SoBs is the way to go. Female Space Marines would be cool. However, the SoBs mostly fill that role in this universe. It would be problematic to thin down the waists of 30+ models AND and breast plates to them... so I'll go with the Dominatrix-inspired Sisters who already have bosoms and are already clearly female... no conversion required... cheers... chris

[Sangre]

Wow, Melissia, I think you are being rude. Are there forum rules about this? Do we have moderators? I'm new here so I don't know yet.

You disagree with me so you have to use words like "idiotic," "stupid" and "crap." You must be a BLAST to play with at your local game store! Is the phrase,"hey look at my tits I'm a girl" truly appropriate or necessary? Must you refer to goth inspired designs as being "dressed like whores"?

Like I said, I'm new here. I don't know all the ins and outs of this board yet. Does BoLs have a troll problem? My basic tactic with trolls (folks who are always purposefully spiteful and who post back begatively about EVERYTHING just to get a reaction is "Never feed the trolls." Once you stop feeding the trolls they go away. Are you using spiteful words with me, Melissia, just to get a reaction? If so, please let me know ASAP so I can adjust my behavior accordingly.

Welcome to the lounge. Don't worry about Melissia. She's harmless if you learn how to push the right buttons.

[Nabterayl]

Wow, Melissia, I think you are being rude. Are there forum rules about this? Do we have moderators? I'm new here so I don't know yet.

You disagree with me so you have to use words like "idiotic," "stupid" and "crap." You must be a BLAST to play with at your local game store! Is the phrase,"hey look at my tits I'm a girl" truly appropriate or necessary? Must you refer to goth inspired designs as being "dressed like whores"?

Like I said, I'm new here. I don't know all the ins and outs of this board yet. Does BoLs have a troll problem? My basic tactic with trolls (folks who are always purposefully spiteful and who post back begatively about EVERYTHING just to get a reaction is "Never feed the trolls." Once you stop feeding the trolls they go away. Are you using spiteful words with me, Melissia, just to get a reaction? If so, please let me know ASAP so I can adjust my behavior accordingly.

Hey Chris - I'd like to respond to this, if you can pardon me for derailing the thread yet again, for the greater good of the community. To make it clear where I'm coming from, I say this as somebody who's been reasonably involved in the 40K part of the Lounge, particularly the SoB discussions, and as somebody who values Mel's contributions to the boards. What I'm about to say is my opinion only, and I haven't discussed it with anybody else.

With that in mind, I wouldn't say that BoLS has a troll problem so much as that BoLS has a clash-of-approaches problem. Some folks on the board, like me, like relatively writing long posts that try to be as precise as possible, even if that means we end up writing five paragraphs about a point that is really a sidebar. In general, I'd say Mel falls into this category. Other folks on the board seem to write much shorter posts that focus on their main point and leave it at that. I've observed a number of threads that, to my mind, have devolved into heated discussions not because one person is trolling but because you have one person from approach A talking to another from approach B. Most of the problems I've seen folks have with Mel boil down to that, in my opinion - Mel will post something reasonably precise about a point that is ultimately a footnote to the discussion, somebody else will respond to it in a way that misses, misconstrues, or simply ignores some aspect of its precision, Mel gets frustrated and/or offended at the misconstruction and posts a more forceful version of what she originally posted, the other person gets frustrated and/or offended, and so on. Oftentimes, "more forceful" with Mel means "less precise." For instance, "I don't like [the Sisters' breastplates]" and "I still want it done tastefully" - both statements about her personal opinion - become "the torso ... becomes stupid," which is phrased as (but not, I wager, intended to be) a statement of fact, and thus about your opinion.

I find that she isn't a rude forum denizen unless she's worked up about something, which personally lets me ignore the rudeness that frequently creeps into her colloquies (and when she's worked up about something, she is frequently rude). I chalk it up to the heat of the moment, rather than her considered intentions. When Mel associates corsets with whoring without qualifying the statement as her opinion, I think she's being needlessly parochial, but I feel reasonably confident assuming that what she means to say is

"I associate corsets with kink, which is a component of my opinion that the current Sister of Battle aesthetic sexualizes them in a way that is at odds with and detracts from the rest of their fluff,"

rather than

"Nab, your wife is a whore because she owns expensive well-fitting corsets for period and contemporary dress, and furthermore, you personally are an idiot for not thinking that corsets are inherently tied to whoring."

I wouldn't feel so confident about certain other people I've met on the internet.

[Commissar Lewis]

(some men have those, too).

From what I've seen at my local GW store, indeed they do. And not nice ones, either. Man-boobs never live up to the awesomeness of chick ones...

Though I remember seeing a man on TV that got some implants on a bet.

[Commissar Lewis]

Personally I quite enjoy reading Mel's posts. A far cry better than 97% of all the people on the CE board over at gamefaqs.

[gorepants]

No, gloomy is the EXACT word used to describe the "goth subculture" in most dictionaries I've seen :P

Black and red eyeliner, black lipstick, white heat applied to the face, black dyed hair, black clothes with BDSM influenced styles, lots of piercings, and tattoos. That's "goth". And that's just the mainstream version.

[url]http://gothichairstyles.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/man-goth.jpg[/url]

That's the extreme version :P

[more on topic at the bottom of the post!]

*cough* straw man much? *cough*

but, OK, maybe just a cultural difference in the meaning of gloom (not used in the wiki article!). The more important point is where the attitude comes from - while part of it is the person, most goths I've know are relatively upbeat people, the gloom is a forced attitude required for their over emphasis on the dark side of victorian gothic romance (and has probably become more import due to media portrayals of goths that caricature this further, cf Noel Fielding's goth server admin in the IT crowd, he is gloomy and a half).

More to the point, the emphasis on the gloomy aspect is relatively recent (as compared to the simple dark aspects), and Sisters of Battle were in 40k from the start (the original art work dates back to at least 87).

Further to this. I think a bit of historicity is required when analysing why SoB look like bondage madams (and there is a difference between them a prostitutes in most case, most of all in dress style!). The style is distinctly British mid 70s-mid 80s sci fi fantasy. This is a period when a lot of sci fi was still extremely sexist as a whole (cf amazon chicks next to spaceships etc).

Rogue Trader was also highly satirical (not very intelligent though, cf Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau - new rules by mkerr for him too), and borrowed freely from accepted tropes, meaning that things did not make 'sense', but there was usually a reason for each thing.

The main tropes for the SoB were the naughty-nun and the strict-nun (both are really aspects of the same thing, and both ancient concepts probably stemming from a male desire for that which they cannot have - John Blanche, I'm looking at you). Why these in 40k? In the UK, years of Benny Hill, Carry-On movies and the more recent Monty Python and the Holy Grail (featuring a rather long naughty nun scene, minus spanking) means these are deeply ingrained.

The imperium is baroque-gothic in its style, so they can't be your slap-and-tickle sort of naughty nun, so the strict side should come in. So you have strict gothic bondage nuns, since the image of gothic at the time was strongly informed by the nacent goth movement in the UK. And the fit in - the visual style is a charicature of the for force of their belief and desire to force it onto others (not very subtle really).

Does this have relevence in the modern 40K? As much as anything does, I think. 40K is such a hodge-podge of ideas that don't really make sense that they fit in as well as anything else. Are they sometimes too over the top? Probably, it is GW. Do you have to like it? Of couse not.

And back on topic, should female space marines look like this? If you want bondage space nuns, then yes. But that doesn't really fit the marine aesthetic, which is more of a mix of monastic, classical and medieval. Maybe changed lines to slightly emphasise femininity (assuming we are still allowing a little charicaturing here - if you want reality with all the hormone etc therapies the guys and gals would probably all turn out the looking same), but nothing over the top otherwise they'd stop being space marines.

[Melissia]

[snip]

... meh. You're right, I'm really overreacting and becoming rude. I'm gonna take a step back and stay out of this discussion for a while.

I never claimed to have a normal or orthodox or even sane viewpoint. Just my own. And that's all my posts ever claim to express... my view. I also never said everyone who wears them prostitute themselves, that would be stupid... only that it is associated with the act, much like balaclavas are often associated with bank robbers and terrorists and even though there ARE perfectly good reasons to wear them if a man with a gun and a balaclava is shown that's what most people around here, including myself, would think. And I have very strong opinions, and this time I let it get the better of me. So yeah... sorry I guess.

Gonna go play Swat 4 for a bit now... see if I can just come back later when I've let off some steam.

[Sangre]

See? Buttons.

[Commissar Lewis]

Swat 4? Never heard of it, but for great stress relief in terms of video games, I find Borderlands is great, as is Saints Row 2.

[AirHorse]

borderlands is ace :P Until your brother rockets himself on wave 19 out of 20 in mad moxxis underdome! Arrr :P