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The Emperor, genetics and no female Space Marines

18K views 73 replies 17 participants last post by  Kreuger 
#1 ·
So as I typically do I was mulling some stuff over in my mind on the way to work and was struck by a random thought on why the Emperor needs to use the Y chromosome to make Marines. Basically it's because of something the gene has: a short leg. My thought is to minimize rejection, failure and catastrophic mutation the geneseed amends that short leg of the Y early in puberty basically making it an artificial X. The body is already geared to read that chromosome for puberty so it just reads the additional instructions on top of the base ones.

Also crossed my mind is that the switch for psykers is likely in the X chromosome since both sexes can be psykers.

Thoughts, or disagreements?
 
#2 ·
Possible.

I think it would be difficulty to justify the inability to create female space marines, but in the same way that speying a bitch is much more intrusive than castration, perhaps it's simply that they additional physiological stress on top of the already immensely harrowing insertion of the black carapace leads to a sufficiently high failure rate of candidates. The inefficiency has led to an all inclusive ban on the practice to save progenoid glands and time? Maybe this would then justify female space marines for chapters like the Crimson Fists, who are decimated and urgently need recruits no matter the cost?

In relation to the psyker gene; It may be linked to the gender chromosome, but there are a lot of other possible chromosomes that it could be a mutation of, or perhaps all mankind in the 41st millenium is not the same species as now, despite outward appearances? Perhaps the chromosome chains are sufficiently different?
 
#10 ·
*lets out a long sigh and drags out her soapbox*

Out of everything in the 30/40k universe that people accept without question- all of the deamonic entities, xenos species, psykers with god-like powers, lobotomized human-machine hybrids, perpetuals, Primarchs, etc...

The fact that seems to come up for argument over and over again is that females CAN NOT be astartes.

Let me be clear here, the lore does not leave wiggle room: Astartes are, and can only be, male.

'But, but.. what if *insert whatever lore butchering left-field concept that the arguer has convinced themselves of*...'

No. Just, NO. The lore states directly that the process fails if tried on a female. Not sometimes work in rare cases. Not one in a billion chance. Fails - and fails catastrophically at that. Why does it fail? It fails because the process doesn't work on those who are genetically female.

Why is this so hard of a pill to swallow over all of the strange and bizarre facets of 30/40k? You want boobs on your army, got it... Sisters of Battle are that way :washim:. Yes, I know they need an update. I hope they get a glorious one sometime soon, with enough plastic models and bitz to choke a bloodthirster. The fact that their models are less than stellar right now is no reason to take a chainglave to nearly 30 years of established lore.

*kicks soapbox over*

Now, onto the second topic that has reared its head in this thread. Astartes and procreation.

The Crimson Fist book - Rynn's World touches on this topic. Apparently, one of the older chapter masters (Traegus) had attempted a breeding program with failed aspirants. It is noted in this program that only aspirants that failed early in the process to become astartes were viable for the breeding because after a certain point in the process (if they even survived failure) they were rendered sterile. This breeding program failed so spectacularly that is was not only abandoned but was banned from ever being attempted again.

Now, there are some Chapters that encourage their warriors to live among the people of their home world (Salamanders are a great example of this). These Chapters tend to emphasis protection of humanity and 'living' amongst the human population helps to remind the trans-human astartes of this mentality as it is apparently easy for astartes to 'forget' their humanity and view normal mortals with disdain.

From everything the lore hints at- astartes cannot breed (be that from lack of viability to lack of desire). But, the lore has notable instances of astartes becoming 'attached' to females in a protective sense. This can be seen in a number of storylines- from Ragnar (40k Space Wolves) to Argel Tal (30k Word Bearer). It seems that physical attraction and desire is mostly wiped out from an astartes through the indoctrination process and any lingering traces that remain convert into a fierce desire to 'protect' the female in question- much like a highly trained attack dog 'bonding' to a certain individual.
 
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#14 ·
Cartoon Fiction Illustration Comics Fictional character


There are no female astartes and there never will be and the fluff is absolutely concrete that the made up science doesn't work on the lady people with the boob things. That's as far as it goes; if you introduce real science 40k falls apart at the best of times. The only thing I can think of that's even a vague shot is the Daemonculabula, which was a. a woman with astartes gene seed and b. as far as I know accepted female 'aspirants' as well as male, but what crawled out after 'the process' was usually hard to call a space marine at the best of times. God knows what it'd do to someone that wasn't already an ideal astartes candidate i.e. a woman.
 
#19 ·
Why over explain lore? Because I think it's fun. I mean I am same person who spent the better part of a day researching the Imperium's rough population to try and work out a realistic number of Sisters of Battle for the setting. Stuff like this is what I do.

And lengthenibg the short leg on the Y just seems like it's have less possible ways to wrong than lengthening the legs on the X beyond what it is. The body could read an X chromosome (even if it was essentially a fake X made to trick the body into running additional instructions) over expecting it to read a gene it's not designed to read. Additionally regular Marines require no voodoo or else they would need psykers or sorcerors to create instead of apothocaries.

One fluff justification I think Insawfor the lack of female Marines is that it's to keep the Marines tied to humanity, to be dependent on them so they could never breed on their own and become completely devoid of their human roots or reject those they protect.

Which is an arguement I like, but I also like my gene one too.
 
#20 ·
Actually, there is some very specific 'voodoo' required for standard astartes.

It is called geneseed.

They cannot produce more geneseed from scratch, as it requires already mature geneseed to grow more in the body of a new astartes. Much to the dismay of Legions that suffered great losses in the heresy.

No geneseed, no astartes. Geneseed is a direct genetic line back to the first astartes, the Primarchs, and the Emperor's original 'voodoo'.

It might not require a pysker to install it, but it sure was created by one of the greatest psykers to live.
 
#23 ·
It seems like a reasonable explanation, as it explains both why there's a maximum age on becoming a Space Marine (you'd otherwise expect recruitment to heavily focus on older veterans), and why the process would only work on males.

Note, in my view it's extremely likely that the Dark Age of Technology also had a process for females, and it's actually equally likely that the process would've been conspicuously missing from the book the Emperor had to work from. Reason: As soon as you make a superior man and a superior female, and they can breed, you've just made your species obsolete. The situation may well have been the biological equivalent to the Men of Iron... and been resolved in a similar manner :)

Anyway, the situation is as it is, and Brother Armiger worded my feelings on it quite well :biggrin:
 
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#26 ·
Reason: As soon as you make a superior man and a superior female, and they can breed, you've just made your species obsolete. The situation may well have been the biological equivalent to the Men of Iron... and been resolved in a similar manner
That's... actually a really cool theory. It's not that female Astartes can't be done, but anyone who does it has the Inquisition come knocking. With extreme prejudice. And their work announced, posthumously, as a failure of catastrophic proportions, so nobody ever tries it again.

I like it a lot.
 
#27 · (Edited)
The idea has merit, I think, but it's hard to say either way with 40k.

There are a few sorta hand-wavey ways you can go about explaining marines being only male, with this sorta being one of them. As far as adding stuff into the genome, assuming you add said stuff into a non-coding region, you can pretty much get away with murder; the body can't really tell if something isn't you once it's in the genome, especially in terminally differentiated cells - that's why retroviruses work. On the Y chromosome, it's true that it might be a little easier to do something like this and get away with it simply because there are comparatively fewer genes and the ones which are there can be fudged without the person dyeing. This might help to explain marines being incapable of fathering children as the process might cause a loss-of-functon mutation in a gene like spy which is needed to initiate spermatogenesis. So yeah, that's one explanation.

Another explanation, and one I like, is that aspirants undergo the process during puberty because maturation and activation of the various organs required male sex hormones, which increase drastically during puberty. If activation of the various organs were tied to DHT levels, for example, it would make perfect sense for the process to only work in males because DHT levels are considerably higher in males than females. I suppose you could supplement females with male sex hormones as a workaround, but why? It isn't as though the Imperium is lacking in young men. As far as this going into explaining why marines can't father children, well.... perhaps they can, just not with human women. Assuming that they can't reproduce with human women, it is possible that marines, due to whatever genetics modifications they undergo, are genetically different enough that they can no longer produce viable offspring with humans. Which would make them a different species, but, hey, space magic.

At the end of the day, you can explain away whatever you want in 40K however you want to do it, because none of it makes any god damn sense. Even what I said above is probably largely horse shit, and there's something I've forgotten from one of my genetics courses that explains why it's horse shit. But, again, space magic.

Oh, and to the psyker thing, I have no reason to think that it's a sex-linked trait, besides the fact that males and females can become psykers. It's entirely possible that the phenotype is polygenic and that the genes responsible are on one OR MORE different chromosomes, which may or may not include X. Polygenic incoherence can get complicated fast.
 
#54 · (Edited)
Space Marines leaving to have semi-normal lives: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Cloud_Runner

This would be where I'd read that. Having a family, well- I can't see that in there, maybe I incorrectly inferred that. It makes mention of his great-great-great grandfather being one of the Astartes from the Dark Angels- I'd assume that meant great-grandpappy laid some 'power glaive' at some point, and I'd always thought that right at puberty is when Astartes were drafted.

Adeptus Sororitas not being press-ganged: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Adepta_Sororitas

Also inferred in there, as well as from the basic requirements to be one of them- 'lacking of faith' would be a disqualifier, and saying "I would rather not" seems like it'd be 'lacking in faith'. Do not get me wrong, I would fully expect the young lady to be given something -terrible- for declining it, as well as some mockery.

Space Marine Press-gang recruiting: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Space_Marines

"Still others watch and kidnap potential warriors, turning them into Astartes whether they will it or not."

Now, someone be kind and show me, if any of this- which is inaccurate? I'm running off wikis here, not Codex.
 
#61 ·
Aaaaahhh this thread reminds me of the old days... Back when I was bright eyed and thought that Chaos had room for good guys in it.

Man, was I wrong! Although... female space marines could still be a thing if...



KHORNE WILLS IT!
 
#72 ·
Yeah. The first few Dune books are good but the deeper in the series you go the stranger they get.
 
#74 ·
Aww. The first 2 or 3 are sci-fi classics and are pretty brilliant, especially the first 2, Dune and Dune Messiah.

Book 4 is decent. After that it gets strange and less good.
 
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