Better Be Meta

On one hand, I understand and accept responsibility for some amount of confusion. I like to write long stories. The story in question is a longfic sequel to longfic with many OCs, idiosyncratic terms, headcanons, and sometimes hiatus between chapters. Right away, cosmic horror workplace drama with psych-thriller elements is not going to be the most accessible thing in the world. And I'm autistic! I have to be realistic and understand that most of my work asks more of readers than a one-shot where only canon characters are named, written in extremely straightforward language.

But going back to review something you missed, or pointing out specific things that confused you, are also both options for a reader. If you opened a volume of any long, stylistic book series to a random middle chapter and then proclaimed, "I don't understand anything that's going on," who would expect otherwise?

Fanfiction is free, and I'm not paid to do recaps of what information to remember before any given chapter. It's not a TV show and I don't benefit from anyone binging it or not. I'm not going to create a glossary or a wiki for my work. If someone won't review prior chapters, they won't read those either.

What happened was not 'losers overprotective of the lore' because there is actually no relevant lore that was changed. Details were added, but not really contradicted. There is no record of the Emperor of Mankind declaring to anyone, "my Custodes will be only Men, Always, Forever, No Women, They May Not Decide to Be Women Either, Boys Rule Girls Drool." That would also be ridiculous.

But there is a reason why reactionaries behaved like a rule was broken. It doesn't actually exist inside Warhammer 40k at all, but inside their worldbuilding for our real world.

First, these guys rely on homosocial power to regulate their relationships. That's a fancy way to say 'they are nothing without the lads.' They seriously don't know who they are or who other people are without an all-dude insider group to tell them. This is not said to insult them or say they are individually weak, but we need to identify their behavior as politically weak and hesitant to commit to more voluntary, mutual forms of connection that form real community.

To cover this political weakness, they idealize state structures like the military as homosocial power groups. Or, 'they want the army for the lads.' It is easy for them to adapt the concept of a chain of command in their mind to a machismo gang structure, where dominant men get to command submissive men. If you think about this for more than 4 seconds it falls apart because you do not gain authority in the military by being the Lad Master (unless you're an ork, and they don't have 'a military,' all of them just fight stuff!)

This is why it is very VERY important to these types to keep women out of the military, and also to prevent any gay or trans stuff from happening in militaries and also their own slimy in-groups. They must shun all people who are outside of the scheme of power, or who have nonstandard relationships which could screw up that power.

The logistics follow, not as a means to simplify clothing, arms, training, but as a way to lock in a completely arbitrary cult as seemingly something born of standardization and common sense. Then they point to historical militaries being all-male as if opinions from before the invention of the tampon or scrubbing up before surgery really matter.

What all of this means is that there really is no load-bearing lore in Warhammer 40k that says the types of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia we're familiar with in real life exist among humans in that galaxy. Some types of these certainly exist. There is bioessentialist thought everywhere. The average human does not have access to adequate medical care, let alone care that would make a gender transition possible (even if it's extremely possible for the upper class!) and the military is often a segregated by gender. It would probably be hard to send a notice to the Munitorum to transfer you to an all-female regiment because you came out.

But the reasons that actually explain the fashy obsession with breeding more soldiers and segregating work by gender don't really exist in Warhammer 40k's setting for humans. There's more than enough humans, untold billions. There's no social or political control to be gained by persecuting LGBT+ people, or not allowing women to work in a manufactorum or whatever. Nonbinary genders and diverse sexuality are not a challenge to structures of power. Most human people don't have any power at all.

Citations that associate queerness, nonbinary identity, transfemininity, any femininity, with daemonic forces are mostly just writers over the years not really knowing what to do about the non-daemonic versions of those things. Without experience they simply are not going to mention other circumstances APART from the extreme, alienating, exaggerated Slaaneshi faction.

I don't mean any specific topic. I mean any topic, real or perceived.

Whole subcultures isolate their (predominantly male) marks by encouraging hostility towards any source of information that could potentially 'lecture' them, which is any communication with a topic actually. If you hear that anything was achieved by anybody through any means, "things," "achievements," "people," and "methods" are all topics.

Any portrayed group of human beings. Any music that has context or lyrics. Any news, data, or trivia. Any time an article has a thesis or lede, or even just a human author. Anything that could 'make a point,' or includes something one could make a point about.

What these guys don't consider to be a topic and thus 'safe' will of course be biased, but even their comfort zone will eventually stress them out. The order required to enforce it and the status of people within that order are also Topics.

Private corporations also like things this way, because they're often vultures of the military. They like that top-down authority structure. They like to set the price of stability and for people to bargain lower to access it. They like fitting you into the role of an 'employee' the way the military likes fitting you into the role of a 'soldier.' The military doesn't see the private sphere as a competitor much though, because private corporations don't usually promise the logistical support that the military offers (but does not always adequately deliver) as a simplification to life.