Warhammer 40,000 has slightly more women in it now and the neckbeards aren't happy

Since Warhammer 40,000's 10th edition was released last year, each of the wargame's factions has been getting the traditional rules refresh in the form of a new Codex book. The latest deals with the Adeptus Custodes, genetically engineered bodyguards of the Emperor so gigantic they make space marines look weedy. (They also happen to be Henry Cavill's army of choice). There are 10,000 of them and in the past they've only ever been depicted as men. In this latest iteration, shock horror, at least two of the Custodes are women.

Most players seem to have responded to this by shrugging and getting back to arguing about the new rules, but there's always a vocal minority who go on a tear. The Mail Online ran a typically subtle and understated headline that declared «It's Wokehammer!» and the meme community Grimdank has declared posts about «Femstodes» will only be allowed for one week before they join «Female Space Marine posts» as a banned topic. Games Workshop's official response is a tweet that says, «In regards to female Custodians, there have always been female Custodians, since the first of the Ten Thousand were created.»

Is this a retcon? Yep, and it won't be the last. Warhammer 40,000 has had fluid «lore» right from the start. The original Custodian Guards were depicted as shirtless hunks who never leave Earth—a long way from the heavily armored galaxy-spanning golden gods they became—to say nothing of tweaks to the 40K canon like ditching half-eldar space marines and rewriting the Horus Heresy from a short story a handful of pages long into a series of 60+ novels.

The Adeptus Custodes aren't 40K's only genetically engineered supersoldiers, of course. The setting's flagship faction are the space marines, who are created differently—where Custodes are enhanced via a unique process begun when they're infants, space marines begin being grafted with a «gene-seed» when they're on the verge of puberty. And while the explanation that space marine gene-seeds are «keyed to