British tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 has been considered one of the last bastions of non-woke, apolitical pop culture. Its ultraviolent and slightly absurdist setting seemed immune to the weird and fun-hating demands for "diversity" and "representation."
But since it has started to become a bit more mainstream with the announcement of a potential show or movie helmed by actor Henry Cavill, efforts to bring the franchise under the woke heel ramped up. At most, Games Workshop has added more female and non-white characters to the setting while sticking true to the tone and established lore.
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But like the planet Cadia, which held the forces of Chaos at bay for millennia within the lore, Games Workshop finally broke.
One playable faction is known as the Adeptus Custodes, the God-Emperor of Mankind's personal bodyguards (and apparently Cavill's preferred faction, to boot). If you think Space Marines (the most well-known faction) are big, bulky superhumans, the Adeptus Custodes are practically godlings, being even bigger, stronger, and with even fancier gold armor.
For some incomprehensible reason, there are now female members among their ranks, and Games Workshop is acting like this was always the case.
See (and bear with me here, non-Warhammer nerds of PJ Media), there is a sub-faction/auxiliary part of the Custodes (also with playable models) called the Sisters of Silence, who, as the name suggests, are already all-female and tasked with hunting down renegade people with psychic powers.
That's not even counting the Adepta Sororitas, which are basically female Space Marines (except instead of genetic enhancements they are so fanatically devoted to the God-Emperor that it's implied to warp reality), female members of the Astra Militarum/Imperial Guard, the Inquisition, the Adeptus Mechanicus, and other factions just within the overarching Imperium of Man faction. Female aliens and women corrupted by Chaos also exist.
So why not just update the Sororitas models or introduce new characters that happen to be women or female members of the alien races?
According to the hobby and pop culture site That Park Place, our favorite investors BlackRock and Vanguard have a combined 11.5% share in Games Workshop, so we can see what likely influenced whoever wrote the bit of lore confirming female Custodes (who always existed, so don't question it).
Of course, a retcon of this magnitude has set the fandom ablaze with controversy, to the point that even non-hobby news sources are picking up on it. The Daily Mail collected a few tweets and quotes from people such as former World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern, who said of the retcon, "The issue with Warhammer and Custodes is the lie. They could have changed it all they wanted. But they decided to lie and pretend it was that way all along. That lie is part of an insidious malignant ideology that throws away all reason and fact. That is the part that is dangerous."
If you know your lore, you can't help but notice Games Workshop is behaving exactly like the most fanatical factions within the setting, rewriting history and pretending it was always like that. This flies in the face of how it has always excused inconsistencies in lore (the franchise is almost 40 years old): "It's all canon, but not all of it is true."
I'm not abandoning Warhammer 40k over this, having been into it since high school, but I probably won't be buying any new models or books for a while.
