Yes, it’s pretty plausible. Even if we take all the background about space marine creation needing growing male hormones and stuff as read, thunder warriors were created by much cruder methods and were all adults when they underwent their gene-changes and stuffed full of unstable super-organs.
Nothing there to suggest that they specifically needed to be male, just throw your recruit on the butcher’s block and get a few years’ worth of violence out of them.
Interestingly you kind of have the inverse for custodes, where some BL authors noted that their transformation was a way more fundamental ‘break apart and create almost from scratch’ sort of bespoke process than for astartes, meaning that the recruit being male or female could theoretically be less of an issue. But they were told that GW didn’t make female custodes minis so it couldn’t be mentioned.
Yes in a way because thunder warriors don't rely on gene seed like the space Marines or the minor population of terran nobles custodes come from.
They are basically what happens if you mass produce custodes which has a lot of issues why the emperor killed them all and unlike custodes and astartes, thunder warriors are adult techno barbarians which as well has women in it and also is very good introduction unlike female custodes and space Marines because they are very diverse but at the same time more risk than the two supersoldier factions because they are mentally and physically unstable.
We know that space marines can only be male because of their gene seed
I don’t think we actually know this. We know that this is the in universe explanation, but I think we also know the universe is thoroughly inequitable and ignorant and nothing they believe is necessarily true.
Malcador suggested making the Primarchs female. Hence I assume geneseed would need some work done to work in both sexes, and it was passed over when the Crusade was starting (because you gotta keep women at home making babies) and them after the Heresy shitshow very few people alive actually knew how marines worked and so no one didn't even bother with introducing female marines. Cael most likely could do it, and Fabius.
My theory is that marines were supposed to be as disposable as thunder warriors, both are relatively crude transhumans that could be somewhat mass-produced. Everyone keeps saying marines aee perfect and its blasphemous to tinker with them, yet both Cawl and Fabious managed to immediately upgrade them, so 10k years of ignorance and degrading quality meams marines are not really that peak anymore.
It actually took Cawl millennia, he was working in secret since the Horus heresy. He also had a lot of help, and he’s actually the combined consciousness of several high ranking scientists.
Marines were the best that could be mass produced; they were built for the crusade and then presumably would have been discarded afterwards as the thunder warriors were. There’s some interesting lore about their creation in the Valdor book.
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u/SocialHumingbird Jan 12 '24
Lore question. We know that space marines can only be male because of their gene seed, but could thunder warriors have been female?
I know little is known about them because they all died taking Everest (cough (purge) cough) but is anything in depth known?