Warhammer and Sex

Corsets everywhere

Go and scan the shelves of your local Warhammer or gaming store—what do you see? Behind the Eavy Metal paint schemes and shiny new logos, you’ll find boxes and boxes, rows and rows, of little plastic space and fantasy people showing off their chiselled abs, ten inch-wide arms and metal corsets. From Khornate priests to Sanguinary Guard, from Battle Sisters to Blissbarb Archers, so many of your favourite characters, if you push past your desensitisation to their forms, have been literally sculpted with traditionally beautiful bodies, representations of the traditional sexualised form, weapons slung aside, chests forward. And yet, as RS Benedict puts it:

“A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.”

              It might be tempting to dismiss the lack of sexuality in the setting, beyond the aforementioned aesthetic sensibilities, as a function of its satire. Afterall, the essay I just quoted is speaking on Starship Troopers—a military satire and one of 40k’s major pop-culture influences. There is, after all, dark humour in the fact that there are essentially no references to anyone in this setting getting it on, despite looking like gods and goddesses, only interested in using their (problematically traditional) beautiful bodies to perfect their ability to fire oversized weapons (oop). If 40k and AoS were just sandbox games with lore only existing as a backdrop to set your fighting characters against (like some hypersexualised video games or a short-form movie), I think that could be the end of this discussion. The satire would work.

But the worlds of Warhammer have evolved so rapidly over the decades that they’re no longer just satire. There are satirical elements, obviously, and broadly, I believe 40k is satirical still: an empire collapsing under its own lies and hubris, its useless leader literally a corpse, eternally hungry for war and death for reasons ill-remembered. But the lore of the games is so much broader now, with thousands of novels, novellas and audio dramas, official animations and a potential TV series in the works—the more Warhammer is explored and fleshed out, the less the 1:1 allegories function and the more the settings grow. 40k isn’t just a satire now; it’s a universe full of heist and crime novels, horror shorts and whimsical adventures played, in many cases, and by some particular authors, completely straight. So, as the worlds of Warhammer are expanded upon and made more three-dimensional and domestic—where’s the sex?

This feels like a needless thing to summarise, but in an era of all-time low media-literacy surrounding sex, I think it bears repeating: sex functions not only as a reproductive activity (for creating future Imperial Guardsmen, no doubt), but also as a recreational one and most importantly here—both in wider fiction and reality—it is something that motivates and kills. How many conflicts (not just war, but socio-political) in the present or history have been motivated by an affair, a desire for marriage or existential loneliness? The number is beyond count. And yet, the main conflicts in Warhammer appear to be motivated by uncaring demi-gods and expansionist, bureaucratic systems. Again, perhaps this is satire.

But this satire falls apart when you realise that the Primarchs of the Heresy are motivated not by unknowable, godly whims, but by very human characteristics—father issues, bouts of rage, jealousy, that existential loneliness. If a 12’ tall superhuman can wage war because his dad didn’t love him enough, then there’s sure as hell space for one waged for romance or sex. Same for those expansionist frameworks—historically, and in these histories, tragically and abominably, wars for land expansion, to dispel or remove “the other” from a specific area, have been motivated not just by ideas of “empire” or “manifest destiny”, but also by a want to establish domesticity. Hell, even real-world political groups who want sexuality eradicated from public discourse are motivated by it. Sexual-repression often can’t be more euphemistic. Similarly, the human characters in the Black Library novels and Codex lore excerpts should be motivated by coming home to a partner or getting their kicks in at a club, but they’re just not.

You might argue that Warhammer is a family-friendly game, and on the surface, I agree. The deeper lore, however, doesn’t have to be; if Betrayer can write in detail on a daemonic flesh ritual that mangles body and bone and blood, then I’m sure a book with a similar 13+ age warning can get away with describing sexual desire (the distinction between the graphic nature of violence vs the graphic nature of sex having historic roots in religious orthodoxy), integrating it into both plot and character without giving it to just Fulgrim. As Benedict goes on to discuss in their essay, modern Blockbuster films are plagued with unattainable beautiful bodies but no sex; it is an era of puritanical media, where overt sexuality is reserved only for R-rated pictures. I don’t think what is being asked for here is graphic sex in wider entertainment, but some acknowledgement that, between consenting adult characters, sex is a human motivation and an aspect of storytelling as old as storytelling itself.

On the flip-side, despite being, and perhaps because of being, such a sexless setting, the Warhammer fan community is endlessly horny. The pure amount of Eldar smut written out there is astounding, as fans clamber to fill in the gaps (lol) that Games Workshop won’t. That being said, pushing sex underground to explicit corners labelled as "kink" will do more to stigmatise it rather than incorporating it into the setting as a part of life.

Whenever someone brings up this sex or sexuality in Warhammer, the knee-jerk, childish response is for someone to shout “Slaanesh!” and that will be the end of the critical thinking. But Slaanesh is the god of excess and wantonness, the logical extreme of every human desire. Not just the god of sex. It would be like shouting “Khorne!” to shut down any discussion of representation of violence in Warhammer, which I think is fine and fun when you’re 12 years old, but you’d hope as fans mature, so might their engagement with the themes of the setting. At the same time, I don’t think Slaanesh’s relationship with sex should be downplayed or eradicated by the lore either, it just shouldn’t be the only representation of sex in the setting, else immature and bigoted fans will just continue to equate sex, gender and sexual-orientation with heresy or deviancy. And they are not. They are things than happen and occur in real life (that can be both as innocent and selfish as any other human act or emotion).

In discussion threads surrounding the implementation of more sexuality and romance into the setting, there are many parroted cries and suggestions that Games Workshop should introduce a series of novels like Warhammer Horror or Warhammer Crime to introduce “Warhammer Romance”. This would be a huge mistake. To relegate sexuality and romance to a webstore only series of novels would be worse than it not existing at all. It sends a message that sex is a separate genre to the rest of the setting, that it is an alien, unknowable thing, ripe for uninformed parody or general memeing and mockery by the community, in the same way that Slaanesh is now, or in the wider world, sex scenes and adult magazines are. Relegating something intensely human to a “locked-away”, private sphere of life alienates the subject and others it. The complete opposite of what we want here. We don’t want a tiny section of “Warhammer Romance”. We just want romance. Let it motivate characters. A Commissar driven by his need to cover up an affair. A Space Marine yearning for a sexuality that was taken from them before reconditioning. It may not sound as cool as chainswords and titans, but it’s as much as part of life and death and war as is murder and betrayal and the taxation of trade routes.

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Perhaps there might be some inspiration found in a little 1979 film...