The changing face of GW

[Mr Mystery]

Morning.

Decided we needed a dedicated thread to the interesting things that are happening.

Here's a quick rundown of what I've clocked so far.

1) new advertising doesn't feature young white males
2) flagship army for Age of Sigmar confirmed to include men and women in their ranks
3) persons of colour shown amongst the ranks of the Bloodbound.
4) Page 119 of Curse of the Wulfen....I just clocked Space Wolves of colour. It's true! Check my attached photo.

Possibly the whitest of white Chapters (not counting Ravenguard, who are albino) has crashed into the modern day. It's significant enough to show GW are now branching out, but to have an 'official start' with the one Chapter based on Vikings, and thus long considered to be distinctly Blonde Haired and Blue Eyed?

That's pretty cool. And there's a variety of skin tones elsewhere.

It appears we live in interesting times.

[Haighus]

That is interesting. I've never seen any reason why Space Marines wouldn't retain their prior skin tone after going through the implantations, except for in the obvious cases of Raven Guard and Salamanders, as the transformative process has never been shown as completely making a mini-me of the Primarch out of every Marine. If we go by the SoH fluff, then something like half of them wound up looking like Horus, which means the other half would have a variety of features and skin tones (although mostly coming from Cthonia, they would probably mainly have very pale skin tones due to living underground anyway). It also appears some geneseeds have a greater transformative effect than others- Blood Angels geneseed is noted as being particularly powerful I think? Which they need to be, due to the high levels of mutation on Baal.

Relic has given us poc in the Blood Ravens too, with Jonah Orion.

Eitherway, progress is progress

[Mr Mystery]

Yup.

It's long been in the background that part of the transformation is that a Marine's skin can rapidly produce melanin to suit their environment, and it seems the Ravenguard and Salamanders are at the very extremes of this due to mutation of their Geneseed.

But it's never really been established before whether this affected their 'baseline' skin colour. Here? Seemingly not.

[Kaptain Badrukk]

They have fantastic autonomic control, they may even be able to CHOOSE!

[Mr Mystery]

There is that I suppose.

[Psychosplodge]

That makes no sense on an ice world *shrugs*

[Erik Setzer]

1. Well, at least they're trying to show other people play their games (again).
2. *Yawn.* They're all modeled to be men. There are still no AoS models that are female. I don't want to hear about supposed women forced to look like a man for eternity. It's not news until they make actual female models. Preferably ones that don't use a flimsy "justification" for being dressed in next to nothing.
3. Cannibal evil guys have diversity while the good guys don't... yeah, that sounds like a step in the right direction.
4. As Psychosplodge noted, that's the worst scenario, because it's the one that makes least sense. You could do it with other chapters and, you know, Imperial Guard. Moreover, you could paint some models like that, and model some guys like that. (Now, if it's Space Wolves who've been stuck off Fenris for 10,000 years all over, like Wulfen, it would make more sense. Which is why I planned on going with some non-white Wulfen.)

So they're making token gestures toward "diversity" while still making predominantly male miniatures. And that's a "changing face" how?

We do live in interesting times. People heap praises on GW for that stuff, while third parties create the female and non-white bits to convert their models that they refuse to make. Meanwhile, other games have good amounts of actual diversity, especially games like Malifaux and Infinity, and even Warmachine and Hordes. Somehow, though, they don't get any credit, while people continue to act like GW is somehow "leading the way."

They used to have more diversity in their art and advertising. Going back a short step toward what they used to do isn't that interesting. They still made the stupid choice of getting away from it.

In the end, there are still issues GW refuses to change that will define their falling from the heights they achieved. Price is a huge one. The GW-is-All crowd act like they have to price their products at ridiculous prices to make any profit, which is clearly wrong. The pricing of some books at much lower price points than similar books shows the fallacy to this claim. When the AdMech books came out at a lower price than similarly sized codices and supplements, that was ridiculous enough. Then some supplements were redone, but as softcovers, yet for some reason cost the same price as hardback books of the same size, and twice what some similarly sized books cost. So either the top level is ridiculously overpriced, or they're selling stuff at a loss, and it's clearly not the last one.

Throwing out $74 books and $165 board games is a similarly horrible way to attract new customers (which turns off the people they might be trying to attract with going back to more diversity with token nods to said diversity).

And then there's the actual quality. You might get a decent feeling softcover book for $16.50... and then they want you to pay twice that for the same sized book of the same quality. But then there's the worse cases. Like when they switched from pewter to resin to save money and did so in a hurry which caused a lot of messed up products, and to this day the inferior material they use will snap way too easily and warps in any degree of heat (meaning product used here in Florida ends up messed up over time, also leading to why they can't sell any on the shelves)... while somehow the price went up. The switch to plastic was for a cheaper material, and computer design for cheaper design (which is still inferior in certain areas), and yet they keep charging more and more for new products. White Dwarf was moved to being a weekly sales flyer and has already been repeating articles, but is $16-$20 a month versus when it was $5 a month for something a lot more useful. And the most egregious recent example, these ridiculous Supremacy Tactical Objective cards I paid over twice as much as standard cards for, while they're non-standard shape so can't be mixed with the others, come in a cheap flimsy box rather than a nice hard case, and are made of a material that feels almost like paper... I paid a lot more money for a quite inferior product. (Which, mind you, says "Made in China" on it, so come on, don't talk about the cost of producing stuff in the UK. But then, my Harlequin cards I pulled out for comparison also were made in China. But, again, better quality by miles.)

Speaking of quality, it's clear looking through the Grand Alliance books that they're rushing their painting staff, or even just outsourcing parts of it. You can spot units that were painted in a completely different style from other units, despite all being painted recent enough to be part of the AoS line. There are some models where the paintjob seems rushed and feels like a junior grade paint job, too robotic in how it looks and not nearly the quality you expect from the 'Eavy Metal team of old.

So, yeah. Congrats. They're making token efforts to show a bit of diversity. They're finally making token efforts to return to the kind of stores that helped them grow, all while continuing to swear they're not a company who'd make products the way they have to market them in those stores. They're taking very minor steps BACK in the right direction.

But they're also running toward the ledge at the same time. And you can show girls playing the game, and black cannibals, and a token non-white Space Marine from a world where no one would have that much melanin, and produce products to sell in toy stores, and have starter boxes with a savings... but at the end of the day, the core of the line is still well overpriced products that have been slipping further and further in quality. For each lone right step they take, they take a dozen wrong ones. They're getting desperate, but it won't help when their response to lagging sales is to shove out a product they assume people will snatch up like the TO cards (plenty of us out there who like the concept) and it turns out to be so lacking in quality that it turns people off on buying future products of a similar source.

They won't ever see how these things are a problem, or where they have real issues with diversity and the like, until they stop their bunker mentality and reach out to get in touch with customers again. Being afraid of negative feedback means they'll never know what they need to fix, how to fix it, and how long they have to fix it before patience runs out.

Doesn't help when they poke their head out and see that some people will accept the bare minimum and lower quality at higher prices and proclaim to everyone that things are looking up.

[Gotthammer]

That makes no sense on an ice world *shrugs*

4. As Psychosplodge noted, that's the worst scenario, because it's the one that makes least sense. You could do it with other chapters and, you know, Imperial Guard. Moreover, you could paint some models like that, and model some guys like that. (Now, if it's Space Wolves who've been stuck off Fenris for 10,000 years all over, like Wulfen, it would make more sense. Which is why I planned on going with some non-white Wulfen.)

...

and a token non-white Space Marine from a world where no one would have that much melanin,

Why's that?

I mean it's a world where there's a single permanent landmass, giant monsters abound, there are - despite almost no permanent land - permanent colonies of wolves (who may or may not actually be people) but it's thinking that non-white people might exist there that's too much?

Also Fenris isn't encased in a perpetual winter, during the summer months there's like volcanoes and all that jazz, so doesn't seem far fetched to me that people not living at polar latitudes could be non-white. I mean Mongolia is rather well known as a cold place, covered in snow during winter, but wouldn't call the people there white or say their existence makes no sense.

But maybe that's just me...

[grimmas]

Quick point of order. There are female Stormcasts, that's a fact not liking how this is represented doesn't change this. Where does it say that they are all white ? It's not been mentioned, we know that people of other ethnicities exist in the realms why wouldn't they be members of the Stormcast. They are completely covered in armour to hide their identity. Dryads are all female as well.

Space Marines change skin colour depending on the conditions anyway and judging by the performance of their other implants probably dramatically and quickly their skin colour won't be fixed. There are a couple exceptions to this rule but generally they can be whatever you fancy. Also don't forget they are massively genetically and surgically altered so we are talking purely about skin colour if they have a racial grouping it's space marine.

[Psychosplodge]

Because Space Wolves are space vikings. And White scars are space mongols. And the lack of thought to the background makes it look like tokenism not inclusivity. We're talking a setting where it's been long enough for squats to both evolve from humans and get eaten by tyranids, but the easiest way to get vitamin d hasn't evolved in an iceworld native?
Now if we look grimmas's suggestion, unless the lone marine is an ex wolfblade the entire pack or even great company should be painted dark skinned if they've been fighting somewhere with high UV levels.
Whereas if there's massive scope for non-white space marines in the Ultramarines, Dark Angels, Imperial Fists, Black Templars, and many more that recruit from varied populations.
I'd have the same objection to the idea of white space marines in a chapter that recruits from a desert world. It just wouldn't make sense.