Jstove is back at it again with another editorial that ponders the Female model Dilemma and how Games Workshop may have just turned a corner.
Jstove here, and while everyone else is at LVO getting Warhammered drunk and drinking while playing Warhammer, I’m stuck here looking at GW’s new releases. It looks like girl power is coming to Age of Sigmar.
The Femme Dilemma
Like a lot of Chaos followers, and especially my Slaanesh brethren, I was often perplexed at GW’s treatment of Slaanesh lately. Fantasy players were concerned that Slaanesh would get deleted from the narrative for being too racy and not family friendly. I personally always believed that even if ‘Neshi took a backseat, he was never going away for good. For Slaanesh to get dropped in the GW pantheon, they’d have to re-write the book on the Heresy. You can’t have an entire Traitor Legion disappear just because you think one god needs an image change.
The Horus Heresy is the most pivotal and defining moment in the 40k narrative.
But GW did seem to have a problem for a while, and that problem was, “Guys what are we really gonna do about female models?” For a while, it was easy for us to say they weren’t up to the job. While there were some pretty cringy sculpts in the late nineties, there were also the original House Escher minis, which were, and still are, gorgeous.
Then, we started getting progressively better, cleaner, more attractive ladies. I don’t just mean in terms of physical attractiveness, I mean in terms of anatomical precision. Lelith Hesperax is a ballerina chiseled out of granite. The plastic Witch Elves that came out near the end of Warhammer 7 were incredibly graceful, and the new plastic Eschers have some serious abdominal muscle. The sculptor responsible for these girls has done some serious anatomy homework.
Morathi came back and she’s pissed!
Through it all, we were missing the Sororitas. This isn’t a Sororitas article though. I think those girls are stuck on the backburner because they have identity issues. I personally don’t think GW has really decided what they want to do with Sisters yet. Are they lady marines? Are they fetish nuns? Do we really need naked girls wrapped in purity seals and toilet paper? Is the army just way too risque? Time will tell.
But one thing that we kind of always knew in the back of our heads was that GW was never going to make an out-and-out sexy girl army. They’d get dangerously close and give us the tools for it, but it’d always be in the back of the room and they’d never acknowledge it. You could always make a sexy Slaanesh army or a sexy Wych Cult or a Witch Elf theme list, but in Codex Demons, Codex Dark Eldar, and Dark Elves, metal bikini girls were always a sexy option, not really the main show.
Until now. For the last couple years, it was the indie miniature scene that covered the sexy army. When you think of the all-girl metal bikini girls from hell army, you pretty much think of two words – RAGING HEROES. The people at Raging Heroes make what are probably the sexiest, raciest, and most outright aggressively stylish and sexy girl army miniatures you can buy. They aren’t just lewd or covered in Slaaneshi multi-boobs. They’re actually terrifying, Hellraiser-esque, nightmare fuel, provocative models. They’re seductive and terrifying at the same time. It’s truly a wonderful looking line of models… But it’s all resin and pewter. You have to be really committed to building a risque army, and I always thought the whole murder stripper army theme was a little too niche for it to ever get out of that hole.
And then GW did it.
You never thought GW was going to be the company that would bring sexy back. Never in a hundred years would I predict that the biggest, publicly traded, fish and chips British miniature manufacturer in the world would take the closet risque murder stripper army and go all plastic with it! Are you excited?
About plastic models, I mean.
I think they caught us off guard. There’s always been a fetish flair left over from the heavy metal days of early GW, but as I mentioned above, it was always safely contained on a fringe.
The Big Questions
Which leads us to the big questions. Now that there’s going to be the risque army on a GW level availability and production scale, how popular will it really be? Do Morathi and the girls have the chops to hold their own against classic favorites like Chaos, Orcs, and the Sigdeptus Custodes? Does this mean GW has reached a place where they’re comfortable with female inclusion, and will we see some of it bleed over to 40k in some form? Is this the army that is finally gonna get your wife into the hobby? (Of course not. Girls like Nids and Orks everyone knows this.)
And finally… These girls are really pissed at Slaanesh. Really pissed. So what’s he gonna do about it?
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About the Author: Jack Stover
