Grim Derp- Sisters of Battle | The Harkovast Forum (2024)

Let's have a go at 40K fluff!

GW love what tv tropes describes as the "amazon brigades".
This is the idea of an exclusively female unit or formation in the army.
So an army would be all or predominantly male than have a particular unit that was entirely female.
Witch Elves, Howling Banshees and others are all examples of this odd trend in gender division.

In 40K, the Imperium eventually got its own version of this, known as the Sisters of Battle.
They are basically power armoured nuns, who struggle to find a role being not kinda space marines but not quite.
But's I'm not here for the crunch, I'm here for the fluff. (Crunch is rules, fluff is background, for the uninitiated.)

Seeing as this was the first ever female centred army in 40K, this was a good chance for GW to show some progressive credentials, and possibly attract some real world females into what has always been a very male dominated hobby.

So when the army book came out, as you can imagine the background in it was all about a man who takes over the Imperium and another man who speaks out against him and rallies the other men of the Imperium to stop the guy.

Whaaa?

So where are the Sisters of Battle in this Grim Dark Sausage fest?
Well the bad guy tricks this religious over into being his bodyguards/concubines and they defend him against the good guys.
Eventually another man manages to convince the leader of the bodyguard/concubines that she is on the wrong side and gets her to change sides and finally kill the bad guy.

So the Sisters of Battle are technically involved in their own backstory...being tricked into fighting for the wrong side by a man and needing another man to explain why they are wrong.

The background for the sisters seems to barely make any mention of how bad ass they are, about battles they've won, enemies that fear them etc.
Other than their historical fucking up, that's all they ever seem to have accomplished.

After this very strange choice of information in their Codex (each Codex is a book that describes one of the factions and gives you rules for them), the Sisters of Battle never received much support and seemed to have been basically set up to fail.

Unfortunately this led to them only appearing in other peoples back ground in order to get killed.
In the bad guys fluff they get killed off almost casually, in the the good guys fluff they get killed by the bad guys so the other good guys can then come in to avenge them.

This rather uncomfortable situation where the only predominantly female army getting constantly slaughtered reach its head when back ground was written where some Grey Knights (the anti-demon warriors of the Imperium) kill a load of sisters of battle, smear the blood on their armour to give them protection from some demons.
Yes this did really happen.
They grey knights are treated as a good guys and heroic for defeating the demons.
The sisters of battle, supposedly elite fanatical warriors of the Emperor are now so expendable other servants of the Imperium can and do casually kill them in order to get an armour buff.

So if you bought a Sisters of Battle Army, GW has a middle finger they want to extend in your direction.
They technically have a codex in the newest version but its download only (you still have to pay for it, they just don't want to bother printing it) and the models are all about twenty years old. A squad of ten battle sisters now goes for £45 on the webstore (I shit you not.)

You could draw a ven diagram of all this to see the exact points where stupidity, disregard for the fans and sexism all over lap.

The sisters of battle, supposedly elite fanatical warriors of the Emperor are now so expendable other servants of the Imperium can and do casually kill them in order to get an armour buff.

Soo, quick check, this sort of thing doesn't happen to every faction sooner or later?
Maybe this is just me but I thought Warhammer, 40K or not, was all sortsa dark like that. Well, maybe not THAT bad, but I dunno, your blood being a buff seems like it could have some fun applications if people die as much as they do in 40K...

Technically, I remember reading the Howling Banshee fluff and it said that Howling Banshees can, in fact, be male. Good luck finding a model for that though.

Currently, to my understanding from Tiberia, all Sisters of Battle are metal models at the moment. Allegedly they are working on new plastic models and a new codex. But we'll see.

But yes, the Sisters of Battle get fucked over so bad. The thing that makes the Grey Knights killing those Sisters of Battle even worse? Grey Knights are supposed to be virtually immune from corruption. They shouldn't have needed the Sister's blood! That was ridiculous, though I think it got retconned. Still. Fuck.

It almost makes me want to play the Sisters in Dawn of War, despite them not being my play style. They seem like they could also have gotten a little shafted though. I think there are advantages to them, but Tib and I played a few games and the Dark Eldar are considerably faster, harder hitting, and sometimes even more resilient.

Faction often get their butts kicked in other peoples Codexs (except space marines, who are worst go down a heroic last stand killing loads of the enemy.)
Sisters of Battle get made to look like dupes in their own Codex, and then get a double dose of pain in everyone else's.

Another thing that's annoying with the whole "grey knights kill the sisters" thing...
It implies killing sisters of battle is easy.
These ladies wear freaking POWER ARMOUR!
They are as well armoured as marines.
They are not super human but they are full trained warriors, with equipment on par with the stuff space marines use.
While I accept Grey Knights could take them, it would hardly be a trivial matter.
It's not like the sisters weren't supposedly all fighting at the time.

Literally nothing about it makes any sense...but Sisters of Battle are there, so we gotta kill em because of reasons.

I honestly think they should just take them out. Gamesworkshop obviously don't like them and what's the point of trying to sell models for a side you don't like and constantly try to undermine?

The sisters should be scarey. Probably scarier than space marines.
They are religious fanatics who believes in burning everyone and every thing that goes against their religion.
They should be hard core sadistic bad asses, but they never ever live up to that potential in the fluff.

Oh an another thing I forgot to add...The reason they are all women is that the church signed and agreement to have no men under arms, and having women was a loops hole.
Yes they really went there.

This seems to imply the Imperium is really stupid AND really sexist, because who the fuck would word it that way? The imperial guard has women in it (in the background, they don't get models...big surprise) so they idea of women soldiers wouldn't catch anyone off guard.

Look at any conflict, story or major event in 40K background.
I will guarantee men outnumber women in what ever you look at.
More than this, if you find one of the VERY few pieces of fluff to feature any named woman at all you will have lucked out.

And don't feed me any BS that its because its a war so everyone is a man.
I already explained that the imperium has women in all branches of its military (except the space marines, but that's justified as they've been turned into super powered homosexual buff dudes with special genetics. At least I assume they are gay? They haven't got any chicks and even when they turn evil and can do whatever they want...they still only want to hang around with other super buff space dudes.)
But even discounting that, loads of stories feature none combat characters, like church leaders, planetry governors, evil tyrants etc who could easily be female.
But virtually none of them all.

In the story I told about the sisters of battles dumb ass backstory, did you notice that only the sisters of battle were women in that story? Literally every other character, soldier and person of interest was a man. Why couldn't the evil tyrant that took over be woman? Or the heroic person who led the rebellion against them? You could have made them the founder of a new order of battle sisters that save the Imperium from corruption.
But no, the default is male unless there is literally no other option and the fluff makes them expressly female.

The sisters of battle aren't just the only female led army...they appear to be the only women in Imperium!

Praise the Emperor and pass the tube sock because if you aren't a gay space marine you are going to be doing a lot of extremely grim dark wanking.

By the way, when I get a BFG campaign going I'm planning to make every named character that logically could be female, female. They keep telling me there are women in the Imperial Navy...well in my navy lets have them all rise to the top. Not that there aren't men on the ships, just none that we are going to bother naming.

Females in a Gaming thing? I thought that was supposed to be impossible!

The humans lack females. Whereas the Eldar have plenty of ladies (especially in the video games). And, of course, in the video games, there is almost always this weird sexual tension between the male human characters and the female Eldar ones.

I blame Games Workshop's tendency to rip off Tolkien.

Actually, the most gender balanced race I've come across are the Eldar. Both Dark and Craftworld. At least back when I was building them, there were male and female models, and even the "Wyches" aren't all female, plenty of them are male too. And the Drachon model was female, but of course the Archon (the higher level version) was male. Still. For a race that apparently don't fuck enough, the Eldar represent gender diversity pretty well.

Oh, and Dawn of War 2 featured a female character in the Imperium. Elena Derosa, who eventually becomes governor of one of the major planets. At one point, one of the characters say that she missed her calling and should have been a Sister of Battle. Something about her being a bit of a badass.

Surprise. One of my favourite characters.

Oh, also, they had the Inquisitor lady in Dawn of War Retribution. She was actually handled fairly well.

Those are the computer games- licensed out from GW.
I'm told the same thing happens with the novels. People notice there are no women and try to fit at least one or two in just for variety.

When GW make it themselves, its a no girls allowed tree house.

Somehow, I don't feel too bothered by all this...

The way I see it, WH40K isn't an earnest attempt at creating a fantasy-scifi world, it's about spewing GRIM and DARKNESS at every turn. I almost feel like more equal representation of gender would be detrimental to the over the top atmosphere of the superracist, personality-cultist, religious-fanatical, imperialistic, genocidal, fascist, war-obsessed... yeah, you get the idea, Imperium's fucked up by design.

Space Marines, who are the main focus, are an idealization of a wartime-band-of-brothers archetype, except the jolly war never ends, they have no life to go back to or to regret, so their existence consist only of glorious victories and laying their lives down for their cause and their battle brothers. Why ruin the perfect fantasy by adding women?

(Also, Space Marines aren't gay, I'm pretty sure they get off huge guns, but I don't know how to name that... ballistophilia?)

It's this "grimdark at all costs!" mentality that causes those absurd bits like Khorne Knights.

StyxD I don't really get your point.
Why would making it grim dark mean you can't put women in?

Or are you saying the Imperium is meant to be sexist deiberately as part of the grim setting?
Because the background officially says it isn't.
They throw in lots of off hand references to "men and women" in various roles, but when we actually see them or identify them with names they are 99.999% male.

If they actual just flat out said the Imperium is sexist, that would at least acknowledge women exist.
It could be that women are expected to stay home permanently raising kids that can be drafted into the army as soon as they turn 16.
But GW's sexism is far more inadvertent.
It simply never occurs to them to include women most of the time, and when they do its always in kind of a "Wow! This bunch are ALL women! Isn't that weird?" way.
Its a similar thing with the way sisters of battle never get to win and always get slaughtered.

I hate to say it, but I kinda think they have a default that showing someone losing to women would make the defeated group look too bad. I honestly have so little faith in GW that I wouldn't put it past them to do that without realising.

I have more Grim Derp coming up soon...

Corn knight?

Thanks, I am clearly the image god.

So, what is everyone fighting for in Warhammer? My understanding is that people use a mixture of obsolete and futuristic weapons, cruise around in spaceships, and fight huge, universe-spanning, world destroying wars with everyone else, genocide is just standard operating procedure... do they have real reasons for fighting, or is everybody killing people with space cudgels because that's all anyone has done for generations?