Male and female representation in GW models

[zilberfrid]

There was a discussion in the rumour thread, where some did not like the percentage of female representation in new models because it is too high for their tastes, while others did not like it because it is too low for their tastes.

There was also discussion about the way females are represented, with some not liking that their equipment was too similar to their male counterpart (heavy armour, short hair), and others did not like the changes made (well, at least me, for the Stormcast heels).

This is a touchy topic, on one side people want their hobby as it always was, on the other side people want the hobby to change with the time. Please try to be polite, even if you do not agree with one another.

I would like to discuss what people would like to see, and what they dislike.

There is also racial diversity, but I would like to keep that to a different topic, as this one is quite enough by itself.

[Huanchi]

I don't want and need female representation in every army. if the army is pure female (amazons) it is completely fine for me but randomly mixing female warriors inside purely male forces jus for the sake to please SJW goes too far for me.

[zilberfrid]

I myself would like to see more female representation.

Females doing exactly the same jobs as males, with appropriate equipment for it.

Preferably in a few dedicated sets (to add females to existing armies) as well as inclusion in regular sets to keep it up.

50/50 isn't neccessary, but between 33-66 seems nice.

Not all females are 20 year old supermodels, and I would like to see a good spread in the modeling as well. There can also be a spread between how buff a female character is. If we look at, for instance, greatswords, a more muscular female would fit better, while gunners need less of a defined physique to be able to do the job.

For me, this counts for dwarves as well. I don't like the trope of females indistinguishable from males.

For those that don't like this, there is always ebay to sell the female figures in new sets and buy male ones. You'll probbly make a profit this way.

Edited November 21, 2019 by zilberfrid

[Eevika]

This is why you play Grots and Orruks truly gender neutral

Edited November 21, 2019 by Eevika

[Harioch]

16 minutes ago, Eevika said:

This is why you play Grots and Orruks truly gender neutral

Death...everyone is just a skeleton at the end...

[Eevika]

2 minutes ago, Harioch said:

Death...everyone is just a skeleton at the end...

But most skeletons are wearing male armor which would indicate they were male when alive

[zilberfrid]

1 minute ago, Harioch said:

Death...everyone is just a skeleton at the end...

Death does have male and female representation in their ghostly department though (whose sculpts I really like from both genders. Almost enough to collect Nighthaunt), and I would say that the Ossiarch are sculpted fleshy enough to be able to do a bit of gender identification as well. but I don't know how that would look for females. Their leader certainly looks male.

[zilberfrid]

26 minutes ago, Huanchi said:

I don't want and need female representation in every army. if the army is pure female (amazons) it is completely fine for me but randomly mixing female warriors inside purely male forces jus for the sake to please SJW goes too far for me.

While I think social justice is something to fight for, please don't use terms that you usually use to disparage people. Any people.

[EccentricCircle]

There definitely need to be more female models. Its slowly getting better, and I have no doubt will continue to do so, but we could definitely use more women among the human models. If free peoples had similar diversity to later stormcast and nighthaunt kits then that would be great. At the moment its kind of weird that the only ladies in city armies are elves. Let's have a mixed gender witch Hunter kit to better reflect the novels, or a lady wizard kit to complement the all male one.

I'm fine with a few factions being one gender, clearly Daughters of Khaine are a predominantly female army, which is great. Likewise we don't necessarily need female orks or skaven, given their background. That said i think some beastwomen would be cool when they come to update that range. There is no good reason why any section of the gor herd wouldn't fight.

 

Fhn note: my tablet tried to auto correct gor herd to government... 

[Eevika]

1 minute ago, EccentricCircle said:

Likewise we don't necessarily need female orks or skaven, given their background.

Orks are literal fungus that grow from the ground. No need for females they have no gender.

[EccentricCircle]

1 minute ago, Eevika said:

Orks are literal fungus that grow from the ground. No need for females they have no gender.

Precisely.

[Beastmaster]

Why not, if it fits the army’s or unit‘s style. 

But isn‘t it already quite diverse? Daughters, of course, all female. Other elves mostly mixed 50/50. Slaanesh mostly female. Rest Male.

I think it fits.

[Kramer]

36 minutes ago, Huanchi said:

I don't want and need female representation in every army. if the army is pure female (amazons) it is completely fine for me but randomly mixing female warriors inside purely male forces jus for the sake to please SJW goes too far for me.

I’m sure you don’t mean it like that. But this reads like the only reason you can think of to include female models is to prevent negative press. 
Secondly: ‘inside pure male forces’ is exactly the point right 😂 Why should they be pure male? Of pure one race in the case of Free cities.
Was really hoping they would really a free guild guard where the first rank could be dwarfs and  humans and elves in the second rank. 
I would argue that the reason to do so is 1 because it gets us cool models. 2 because it can help immersion. 
 

@zilberfridthis conversation comes up every ones in a while. Usually the thread gets locked so I’ll get my two cents in before that happens. 
although GW is better in this regard than 20 years ago when I started playing.   In deepkin, nighthaunt, daughters of Khaine, most elf races really. Even the old dreadspears models have one in five female bodies. 

The only thing I’m missing is the same treatment for free cities. 

[Beastmaster]

As bad as clichés are in real life, in fantasy, especially if it’s a bit comic style, clichés are a helpful shorthand. Let’s take the Ogors: The bald, bearded, fat-bellied brute who likes his meat raw is a not very positive, actually even quite offensive male cliché in real life. For fantasy miniatures, though, it’s absolutely perfect and lots of fun. Don‘t take it too seriously, and you will enjoy it. 😁

If someday a designer comes up with a female model that fits this style, great. If not, it’s not really missed. Both is ok for me.

[Lightbox]

It has been nice to see more female models starting to get made, the only shame for me is that they are generally stormcast special characters (an army I do not play) but If stormcast are honestly shaping up to be a really nicely designed mix of gender thanks to their newest sequitur ranges and all the units from that chamber having generally a ratio of mixed genders which works great because stormcast are heroic individuals and why on earth should heroes only be male?

I often see a lot of people not wanting female models for reasons of realism (aka in earths history we didn't have many female warriors) but considering this is a universe where people are traversing magic infused realms fighting green slabs of murder fungus and giant demonically possessed creatures fuelled purely by anger that's powerful enough to tear reality I think the idea of realism left a long time ago. Also most armies have a way to compensate any arguments of muscle differences, chaos are literally all empowered by unholy magic, stormcast are forged into perfect beings, kharadrons use guns and super strength harnesses, freeguild will take literally anyone because they are a militia of regular people fighting horrible abominations with nothing but gunpowder and determination, zombies literally don't care about muscle mass they care about weight of numbers and biting power. In worlds where war rages on eternally and people fight for their very survival it kinda makes sense to let every able bodied person fight, I mean If people have survived this amount of time of endless war then population amount surely can't be an issue else they'd have all died out ages back.

Just figured I'd address that one early before it get brought up.

 

Anyhoo I'd like to start seeing more units with females in (or conversion kits if GW really wanna scalp me of my money) than just special characters as I think having the gender mix amongst units really works a lot, especially for things like free cities who will likely take every able bodied person they can and chaos who the gods have shown they care nothing about gender as long as you get the job done (see Valkia or the models in the godsworn hunt / warcry boxes). I know there has been some use of the excuse of 'Warhammer is a boys and toys game' which honestly? Feels hella sexist and very gatekeepy to me, why should anyone want to stop anyone regardless of gender from getting into the hobby? Don't we all want to see it grow and flourish so we can keep having games of 'my dad plastic warriors are stronger than your dad plastic warriors' and as has been stated if you want all male (or all female) units then sell the models of the gender you don't want or swap them with a friend who also wants a single gendered unit but of the opposite gender. It shouldn't be a reason to prevent others from having things they'd like.

 

I also do not think that a couple of elven units & DoK mean 'we have enough female models', it's still a large minority and there should be no real reason for any faction to be purely one gender (heck even DoK who are pretty sexist in lore managed to keep some men around and make it work well in the lore [Warlocks]) not to say I'm against single gender factions though, like if it works well lore wise then sure but it shouldn't be the majority of factions IMO.

 

This is all one person's opinion so take it with however much salt you want etc but I'm honestly all for more diversity in models because more diversity means more models which means more sculpts and more cool looking stuff we get to pick and choose between. Also it's great for converters to have a diversity of models.

[EccentricCircle]

My head canon is that any empire soldier without a massive moustache is a woman who dressed as a man to join the army, but that only really works for the mire historical old world setting. For freeguild in aos, there should just be ladies in the rank and file.

One option is to do a few all female kits, lets have some dwarven shield maidens, or chaos ladies in the style of the warqueen. If they have the same stats, then you can mix and match or segregate your units to your heart's content.

[Lightbox]

6 minutes ago, EccentricCircle said:

My head canon is that any empire soldier without a massive moustache is a woman who dressed as a man to join the army, but that only really works for the mire historical old world setting. For freeguild in aos, there should just be ladies in the rank and file.

One option is to do a few all female kits, lets have some dwarven shield maidens, or chaos ladies in the style of the warqueen. If they have the same stats, then you can mix and match or segregate your units to your heart's content.

I like that idea, it's basically what northstar have done with their soldiers 2 set.

[zilberfrid]

4 minutes ago, Kramer said:

I’m sure you don’t mean it like that. But this reads like the only reason you can think of to include female models is to prevent negative press. 
Secondly: ‘inside pure male forces’ is exactly the point right 😂 Why should they be pure male? Of pure one race in the case of Free cities.
Was really hoping they would really a free guild guard where the first rank could be dwarfs and  humans and elves in the second rank. 
I would argue that the reason to do so is 1 because it gets us cool models. 2 because it can help immersion. 

@zilberfridthis conversation comes up every ones in a while. Usually the thread gets locked so I’ll get my two cents in before that happens. 
although GW is better in this regard than 20 years ago when I started playing.   In deepkin, nighthaunt, daughters of Khaine, most elf races really. Even the old dreadspears models have one in five female bodies. 

The only thing I’m missing is the same treatment for free cities. 

I know it is a touchy subject, and it's easy to offend either party, but it needed to be split from the rumour thread.

I agree with you that not all armies need be very diverse, Daughters of Khaine, obviously is primarily female, perhaps Khorne could be largely male.

But apart from elves, there are so very few female figures. Slaanesh is purposefully ambiguous (so does not count in either direction), and the best we can find otherwise is one in three in the Warcry sets.

Of course, I would prefer Freeguild to have a few female sets (a battlemage body, a few armoured bodies, and few unarmoured bodies).

[shinros]

My opinion is I don't really care as long as it makes sense. 

[Mayple]

Female orks. 

 

Problem solved! 😙

[JPjr]

I can hear a honking in the distance so before the clown car pulls up and dumps all its occupants into this thread...

Coming out with stuff like Orruk armies are gender neutral is clearly nonsense and every single person knows it, or at least really should. I've almost certainly never seen an explicitly gender neutral pronoun used in conjunction with them in any official context, the models there release and the characters they feature in fiction and fluff are all explicitly as well as implicitly coded as male.

Or something like Skaven, why not introduce female characters, you don't have to stick ****** on a rat to make it female. And before anyone drops some ****** about skaven brood mares or whatever that's a ****** awful thing that they can easily just excise from the lore. It's a fictional magical world, keeping stuff like that in is an active choice.

If it hasn't come up already I'm sure we'll get some chirruping about 'forced diversity' or some other incel nonsense. Funny how for these people nearly always 'don't have a problem' with diversity it's just when it's "forced", except weirdly it turns out that 99/100 it just happens to be "forced" in their view and for some reason their view is the one that counts on these issues.

Or how 'they don't mind female models' (oh how generous sir!) but this is one is too ugly, mannish, or otherwise doesn't serve to act as an object of arousal for them. Is that how you judge male models? I'm not saying female models can't be 'good looking' (in whatever way you judge the looks of a 2" high piece of plastic) but representation is about body shapes, ages etc too. No one blinks an eye if GW release a grizzled silver fox Stormcast like Stormsire, because it's just accepted that male models can come in all different shapes and sizes and we're not judging them on their bonerability.

41 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

50/50 isn't neccessary, but between 33-66 seems nice.

And stuff like this. Even people that see it's a problem and do want more representation are happy to limit that to a 1/3 minority, and this isn't an attack on @zilberfrid, when you're starting from close to zero in most cases then I agree, 33% would be nice and the part of me that is a terrible ally would see that as a victory of sorts too, when any female player would be more than entitled to roll their eyes at this.

As said this is an entirely fictional world suffused with magic, everything that features or doesn't feature in it is an active choice and one that can be changed at any point. What we cling on to tells us everything about us and not the world we're playing in.

And the thing is it doesn't really affect people at all.

In an RPG then you may want to explore issues of racism, sexism etc through the game, and whilst a lot of people will tell you they play these games to get away from that (that is actively having to spend every minute of their life in a world that discriminates against them in some way not being someone who is oh so tired of having to respect others) it at least has the potential to be explored in an interesting and possibly cathartic manner.

But more often I hear people saying you know what perhaps at the end of the day I dont want to have to deal with fantasy racism, sexism or whatever.

And if a few things need to be changed in a setting well why not. I grew up in the 80s, I don't think the people that designed RPGs and war-games back then were racists or sexists at all, in fact certainly on the British side most would have been, or considered themselves to have been, left wing and anti-discrimination. But cultural attitudes were not as sensitive (in a good way) as they are now, so baked into the core of the genre are a lot of problematic things, we do not have to keep them.

Just because something seemed ok in 1983 that doesn't mean we have to cling on to it in 2019. We don't have to burn all our books and defenestrate our past, but we can simply acknowledge things have changed and we can be better now.

Especially with a Wargame? It makes zero difference on the table, there's no special rules for gender, you're not dealing with social interactions or issues just trying to kill what's opposite you. But it makes the game more accessible and tells people who aren't white boys that this is something they can be involved in too. Representation matters.

Seeing how many people seem to be worrying about how to build up and maintain gaming groups you'd think anything that made the game more open to new people would and should be welcomed.

GW are doing a hell of a lot better than they used to, and for that I congratulate and applaud them, but they're still a long, long, long way off from achieving anything even vaguely close to parity. The new Chaos Warriors look absolutely fantastic, I'd love to have seen how they could have adapted that aesthetic to a few female sculpts, they actually made an effort to include more in the Warcry warbands so it's a shame not to develop that.

This isn't just me 'virtue signalling' or whatever ****** someone's learnt by rote on a reddit forum to immediately spout in situations like this, I'm being selfish here, I'd love to see what they could make if they tried. I want more people from different backgrounds involved because it makes it more interesting, it makes it more welcoming, it makes it better.

I want more people to play the game, because the more people that play the game the healthier it is, the more interesting it is, the more toys we get. Right now there are huge demographics that could be brought into the game and showing them through artwork, models, stories that they're welcome in the, not our, hobby helps that.

 

 

[zilberfrid]

2 minutes ago, Mayple said:

Female orks. 

 

Problem solved! 😙

They already exist, the cheerleaders from Blood Bowl.

Which is actually the place where we can also find order human females. The cheerleaders, at 29 euro per set of 4, are the cheapest source of human females GW offers.

[Still-young]

So, I’m left handed. That’s about the only thing about me that makes me any kind of ‘minority’ whatsoever. Whenever I see a left handed model, it makes me strangely happy. 

I can only imagine how good it must be for actual minority and marginalised groups to see themselves represented in places where they haven’t been before. That’s how I personally understand the importance of representation, and it’s such a small thing in my case. It’s hard to see why representation is important I think when you are of the group that is consistently represented, but it is important. 

[Beastmaster]

Let’s take the Troggoth Hag as a perfect example. No, she’s not young or sexy. She is the embodiment of the old Crone archetype. She fits the range. Well done.

If young and beautiful fits (elves, nuns with guns), it’s young and beautiful they should do.

Simple as that.

[shinros]

7 minutes ago, Still-young said:

So, I’m left handed. That’s about the only thing about me that makes me any kind of ‘minority’ whatsoever. Whenever I see a left handed model, it makes me strangely happy. 

I can only imagine how good it must be for actual minority and marginalised groups to see themselves represented in places where they haven’t been before. That’s how I personally understand the importance of representation, and it’s such a small thing in my case. It’s hard to see why representation is important I think when you are of the group that is consistently represented, but it is important. 

Thing is most corporations are using it to fill a quota and will remove it for the sake of more money. Aka wizard coast, a female had interest in both sexes, that was quickly changed in a novel to appease China she now only likes big muscled men. A novel that was also available in the west now people are in an uproar over twitter. They even remove black characters or altar them for their Chinese game client aka blizzard Diablo 3 and even star wars when it comes to finn. Now GW aren't like that(thankfully), but most are. Hence why I'm cynical whenever I see it.

It's why whenever I see companies pushing that angle hard I just roll my eyes. I mean you heard of the China Blizzard situation right? That's basic human rights. I'm just really jaded, don't let me pull down your excitement, I just don't trust corporations in general. 

Edited November 21, 2019 by shinros