Since the 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000 was released last year, factions have received updates to their traditional rules in the form of new editions of the Codex. The latest Codex deals with the Adeptus Custodes, genetically engineered bodyguards of the emperor so huge that they make space marines look like weeds. (They are also Henry Cavill's army of choice). They number 10,000 and in the past have been depicted only as men. In this latest iteration, shockingly, at least two of the Custodes are women.

While most players seem to respond to this by shrugging their shoulders and returning to discussing the new rules, there is always a vocal minority who shed tears; Mail Online, in a typically subtle and understated headline, "It's a Walk Hammer!" and the meme community Grimdank declared that posts about "femstodes" would only be allowed for a week before joining "Female Space Marine Posts" as a banned topic. The official response from Games Workshop was a tweet that "As for female custodians, there have always been female custodians since Ten Thousand was first created."

Is this a reformation? Warhammer 40,000 has had a fluid "lore" from the beginning. The first custodian guard was portrayed as a shirtless hottie who never left Earth. That's a far cry from the heavily armored, galaxy-hopping golden gods they became, not to mention the adjustments to the 40K canon, such as ditching the Half Elder Space Marine and rewriting the Horus Heresy from a mere few pages of short stories into a 60+ novel series. [Of course, Adeptus Custodes is not 40K's only genetically engineered super-soldier. Whereas the Custodes are enhanced by their own process from infancy, the Space Marines begin to be implanted with "gene seeds" on the verge of puberty. And while the explanation that the Space Marines' gene seeds are "linked to male hormones and tissue type" goes back, it is not the real reason Games Workshop created an all-male army.

As GW's former intellectual property director Alan Merrett once explained on Facebook, "The reason there are no female Space Marines has nothing to do with the lore, background or character of the Marine Corps. It has to do with the simple logistics of making miniatures and selling miniatures." In the 1980s, GW sold miniatures in sets called blister packs. That didn't last long." This was because "retailers kept complaining that they didn't want to include female models in restocks because their customers wouldn't buy them. By the time "Warhammer 40,000" was designed, GW had made its poster boy, well, boy, to ensure sales. As Merrett says, "All the background talk about why there are only male Marines is to justify the commercial logistical problems."

And the same was true for Adeptus Custodes. The average Warhammer store customer is mostly male, but these days there are usually one or two women as well. And, as Reddit and Twitter might suggest, far fewer men are offended by the presence of women in their armies than were gamers in the 1980s. 40K lore and stories all exist to provide a context for selling people toy soldiers, and as the customer base As they change, so does the lore.