Forget the Outrage: Female Custodes Are Canon, and Games Workshop Just Proved It

Let’s get one thing straight from the jump: the sky is not falling on Terra. This past Friday, Games Workshop did what it does best—revealed stunning new miniatures—and a predictably vocal slice of the internet promptly lost its collective mind. The reason? For the first time in plastic, the Emperor’s golden bodyguards, the Adeptus Custodes, will include female warriors.

The reveal during a Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 preview stream was supposed to be a celebration of breathtaking new sculpts for the Imperium’s most elite force. These aren’t your average Space Marines; they’re something else entirely—bigger, faster, and forged through a vastly more complex and ancient process. Yet, for some, the only detail that mattered was the presence of sisters in gold.

Cue the familiar chorus: “Retcon!” “Pandering!” “Go woke, go broke!” It’s a tired tune we’ve heard before, often from corners more invested in gatekeeping than in the actual, richly malleable lore of the 41st millennium. The irony? These complaints are built on a foundation of sand. Female Custodes aren’t some new, boardroom-mandated invention. They’ve existed in the background of the lore for years and even took center stage in an official Warhammer animation. Their arrival on the tabletop was inevitable, a natural evolution from page to plastic.

Seeing the usual tempest brewing in a teacup, Games Workshop was ready. Almost immediately, they dropped a definitive lore explainer. Its core message was blunt: this is not a retcon.

The article draws a crucial, often-missed distinction. The creation of a Custodian is a wholly different art from the mass-production of a Space Marine. It’s a singular, bespoke alchemy of bio-alchemy and psycho-indoctrination starting from infancy, utterly transcending the subject’s original gender. Where the gene-seed of the Astartes has only ever worked on males, the Emperor’s own techniques for crafting his personal guardians never had that limitation. The potential was always there; it just hadn’t been visually modeled until now.

So, what’s the real story here? It’s not about rewriting history. It’s about finally modeling it. Games Workshop is expanding the visual language of its most iconic universe, allowing more players to see themselves reflected in its grandeur. The lore remains intact, the facts are consistent, and the galaxy just got a bit more interesting. The only thing that’s been retconned is the idea that the fanbase would universally reject it. For every grumble online, there are countless more hobbyists excited to paint these new legends in gleaming auric armor.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war… and occasionally, a healthy dose of progress that was there all along.