#mirdan lore

[ladymirdan]

I'm thinking about what my next big army project is going to be and im leaning more and more towards a mix of Black Templars and Sisters in matching colours.

Looking over the Sororitas range for a bit when it finally clicks why I love their silly little helmets so much.

My old helmet from when I larped a paladin. My favourite character ever.

[mirdans-100challenge]

Proof that I have always been a great painter. I call it “The Lions of Macragge”.

(I feel like this picture dates how old I actually am too, this was the hottest fashion back then, my mother cares about those things 😂)

[ladymirdan]

This is the book that taught me to read. My eldest sister used to read it to me every night, but one night she was away, so I picked it up and began reading.

hey. hey you. you should tag this with your favourite picture book from your childhood!

[transformers-iconclast]

I am unable to sleep due to cold/flu and chill of winter, so have some lore.

The Thirteen did exist in this, though not as demigods. I've already briefly mentioned Alpha Trion, but let me go into a little more detail about what happens to them.

Spoilers ahead, though, obviously subject to some change since this is a WIP.

Lets start with Rung.

Rung was the only one who remembered Primus and was the one in charge of raising and carrying for all of them. He remained in charge of rearing them alone and Cybertronian/Transformers society was in its infancy.

During this early stage, the somewhat lonely Rung, the others, weren't yet ready to harvest, so he was alone, met someone who had crashed on the planet. This person was Mirdane, an early Quintesson explorer who was absolutely fascinated with Rung as he was the closest he had yet found to his species, mostly mechanical, biology. Rung was overwhelmed, at least partially because they didn't speak the same language.

Mirdane spoke verbally in a double layered vocal dialect and by moving his tentacles for tone indicators. Rung meanwhile communicated mainly through EM field and a clicking and beeping he'd created to mimic the noises Primus's body made for emphasis when communicating via their bond.

They learned each others methods, and it blended into what would have been Ancient Cybertronian in another universe. The better they learned to communicate, the more they shared, and Rung, trusting and happy with his first friend, told him everything.

About how his species was made, his role in creation, their growth cycle. Mirdane soaked it up eagerly and shared stories of his own people and how they were struggling. Then, when the first emerged, Mirdane helped Rung unearth them and name them.

Unbeknownst to Rung, Mirdane had been sending reports back while he repaired his ship. Reports about the fledgling species he'd discovered, the coordinates, and the resources on the planet and notes on what he'd seen in the surrounding star system. These were all sent back per protocol and with the hope help would be sent.

Mirdane had no ill intent.

But then he mentioned that Energon that occurred naturally on the planet worked as a fuel substitute for himself and his vehicle. The Quintessons saw an opportunity, and General Jolup and Lord Kledji dispatched to Cybertron. They wind up setting themselves up as the leaders of Cybertron to the young race. Eventually even convincing the newer generation that they are their Creators, after observing for a long time. Rung is the only problem and he can be locked up. The Quintessons setup to be worshiped and experiment to try and make "Transformers" of their own but through trial and error realize Rung is absolutely needed.

They take from him as soon as they can but the earliest generation, that will eventually be the Thirteen know who he is and the Truth. They build up a rebellion and with Alpha Trion and the others leading the way go to war against the Quintessons. This uprising comes close to succeeding but fails ultimately when Liege Maximo is not convinced they can win when the Quintesson Army arrives and betrays them to Quintessa.

They all meet different fates as Quintessa enjoys keeping trophies of her enemies. Defeating them was her first major victory though a rival stole the credit for the death of Prima and she didn't correct as the escape of Alpha Trion and Onyx also fell on them.

I've got quite a few settled and they'll show up as the story goes on. Everyone not on the list is still being decided on.

Prima is killed outright and made an example of as the face of teh rebellion. Quintessa kills him personally.

Megatronus is domesticated and locked into his Predacon mode. He is a dragon kept in Quintessa's zoo.

Solus is the Hammer wielded by Quintessa and eventually "Ultra Magnus".

Alpha Trion escapes and remains a long standing and permenant thorn in the Quintessons' sides trying to free his people, siblings, and father.

Micronus is Wheelie and forced to be a jester but can only speak in rhyme and has words forbidden to speak. This is an early attempt at what would become mnemosurgery.

Vector is the Quintesson Clock at the center of the Quintesson Capital that all of the Empire is set to the time of.

Onyx is Sky Lynx. He initially escaped with Alpha Trion but was caught in a later rebellion after the invention of mnemosurgery and was locked in one mode with his T-Cog removed and memories wiped.

Liege does go back with Quintessa. Mode locked and processor wiped as her personal ship.

[ladymirdan]

Want some fun Mirdan deep lore?

I have been joking that this Jarlaxle/Entreri brain rot is just a temporary thing to take a small 40k break.

But in fact, 40k is my Jarlaxle/Entreri-break.

Behold, my first ever fanfic; written ca 2002ish:

Yes it was written on paper. No, I never had the guts to post it anywhere. And also, why the fuck were I better at writing dialogue back then?

(also no it does not say “gay”, it says “saying”, my handwriting was/is horrendous)

[ladymirdan]

What's your earliest memory of 40k? First model, first release you remember, first bit of media?

My first memory of 40k is being over at a friend's house and my friend's big brother is painting up orks. I thing I was about 8 years old.

I have no idea what is going on, but everything looked so cool, and he and his friends pretended to voice the characters and everything. I have a core memory of licking brushes and those black GW transport bags, and I just knew I wanted all of it.

Then years go by, im 14 and finally have my own allowance. Im visiting my local games store who is going out of sale and everything in the store is 10sek (about 1$)

I see this wall of blisterpacks and I just grab everything I liked. So many pretty little minis. The guy at the counter tells me about the offial GW store who has more stuff, its just down the street.

I go there and show my haul and buy a codex and some core troops.

This wasnt for 40k tho, but warhammer fantasy. Turns out that almost every single model I picked on random was a dark elf (and two beastmen), so yes, I got Malekith on a fucking dragon for 1$.

I find out some friends play it at my school and I play a bit with them, but lets face it. Dark Elves was a hard army to ply back in 6th edition. Absolute glass cannons, and for the moat part I lost and got mad 😂

I start hanging out a lot at a FLGS and play there a lot. It is here I become obsessed with lore stuff. There werent that many books back then but I devoured them. And I got a ton of codices, new and old, just to read the fluff. And I buy a bunch of second hand White dwarf.

In one of the magazines I see the Drukhari (dark eldar back then) and I'm in love. The old minis were so spooky and beautiful and I want them.

But the guy in the store goes, “Don't buy dark Eldar. They suck. Buy Eldar instead, you love Khaine, and so do they. Eldar in 40k is basically if the dark elves won back Ulthuan”

I promptly become so offended over the fact I'm being offered “High elves”, and in my eternal hatred swear to disavow 40k forever. And I do. Until 2020. Covid has just locked down everything (exept for my job because im essential), but all I have to do in my spare time is to watch youtube and rot.

And youtube is spamming me with Warhammer stuff, and I have a sudden burst of nostalgia after all these years and I start looking at models. It was extremely easy to get into the lore because WHFB and 40k had such a huge overlap int themes and tropes, and I already knew what authors I would like and such.

And that is how I got a Night Lord army for 30k. The minis are so spooky and cool, and I wanted to learn more about them. I started reading about space marines and how the imperium is so whacky and fun, so I bought some Imperial Fists, but there is so little lore about them, so I headed back to my Nightlords.

But then, I pick up and read Unremembered Empire, because I got told Curze is an absolute beast in that book.

And now I play Ultramarines.

[ladymirdan]

I often think about a thing that happened when I was still a kid and pretty new to Warhammer.

There were this FLGS located pretty much exactly inbetween my school and my home. I didnt do very well in school, my grades were okish but I skipped class A LOT. Oh the joy of being a girl with comically autistic traits in the 90’s, my baby brother got a diagnosis, I got a “why are you so weird, stop it”.

But I spent a lot of time in this store, and im genuinely surprised they let me do that. I was a kid, I couldnt buy very much. I just sat there and painted or played a few games. And sometimes I got to build stuff for the store (very exciting). They even convinced me to send in a contribution to Golden Daemon (I did not win, not even close 😂)

Even back then I was obsessed with oldhammer stuff. And the store owner who had been into nerd stuff for decades thought that was really fun and says something along the line of “hey I have a few first edition WHFB armies in a box in the basement, if you want tou can cone down with me and look at them.

So there I go, 14 year old girl, with this 40+ year old man into a shady ass basement to look at minis.

And the minis were soo awesome, he was a very good painter. He also found a “how to paint minis”- pamphlet from like the 80’s and gave it to me (boy do I wish I still had it)

But like, what was I thinking. If he had been any kind of shady guy, things could have ended so badly. I cringe just thinking about it. And I wasnt a naive kid either, ever since I hit puberty at like 11 ive had grown ass men grope me on the street before. I knew all about “bad men”.

But shoutout to that store for being one of the first places in my life where I felt appreciateed and not not a burden. Where people would greet me excitedly whenever I showed up. My guess is they saw a lot of themselves in that lonely and weird kid.

I would link to it, but it closed down over a decade ago, and I heard the owner passed away. And that is such a damn shame because the world needs more people like him. That creates safe spaces for the weird and the lost.

[whining-ylthin]

That's a very fair point.

I personally stick to the fact that Marines are male-only as a form of both in-universe and IRL critique/satire of misogyny, macho attitudes common in fascism, pro-military propaganda and overall "gamification" of war - the fact that Marines are taken in for transformation and training at about 10-12 years of age, compared to the average age at which your typical old-school 40K fan got into the hobby, isn't a coincidence; the Emperor and his servants (hi, Malcador) have been shown to hold some really backwards, out-the-ass beliefs about gender roles and attitudes - not overt enough to affect most of the Imperium, but enough to alter who the Emperor deemed to be "good" material for his mass-produced superhuman soldier army; finally real-life fascism adores the trope of powerful, hypermasculine (yet also utterly sexless) soldier or worker, the Super-Man of superior pedigree, and 40K strongly draws upon that imagery and philosophy for the Imperium.

Space Marines are locked in a difficult dance between drawing directly upon these tropes to criticize them, and indulging in the power fantasy of being a big mean unstoppable warrior. Personally I can see why some people want to embrace that power fantasy with another gender, and I'm not going to deny them that opportunity, but to me Marines should be primarily male/AMAB, not because of some innate superiority of men but because of shoddy outdated designs driven by equally backwards logic of a petty tyrant, with scant exceptions for faux-Astartes (which is a largely Heresy-era concept of heavily augmented mortals in power armor) or other bypasses mostly clustered on the Chaos side of things (from Fabius Bile's experiments to Thousand Sons switching to arcane rituals; hell, you could make a point that some Iron Warriors' offshoots could go as far as to begrudgingly allow AFAB warriors given their high attrition rates and penchant for geneseed meddling) serving to punctuate just how inane that (still prevalent, as Mirdan rightly points out) logic is.

Also, Astartes-like tech (such as power armor and Marine vehicles) isn't exclusive to Imperium - it's all STCs, stolen research and recovered Dark Age of Technology stuff mixed with scarce innovations and changes, meaning we can technically get (potentially more ethical) Big Strong Female Soldiers from other factions. They can even keep the knight/monk stylings, just file off the Astartes serial numbers and find a new and exciting way to piss in the Emperor's cereal of ineptitude on the lore level (and flip a finger to actual misogynists in the fandom).

What is your opinion on the "Female Space Marines" thing, Lady Mirdan?

Are you trying to get me cancelled, my good man? 😅

Strap in. This is gonna be an unhinged and unfocused ranty wall of text.

Short answer: 

Female space marines are a primaris level of a bad idea, and I really hope it doesn't become canon.

Slightly longer answer: 

I feel like people forget that the Imperium are bad guys. Even the Emperor's “dream” for the Imperium is a fascist utopia, with all its horrible connotations going along with that.

There are good/interesting people/characters mixed into this mess, and I find it so interesting to see them interact in a world where the morals are (sometimes not) so radically different from the one we are living in.

The Imperium is a horrible, xenophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic hellhole. 

The rotting carcass of the Emperor on a golden throne is a perfect metaphor for this.

The only thing that matters is brute strength or power/resources.

Human lives are very cheap in the Imperium. I have heard the argument “It doesnt make any sense to ignore half of your population when making space marines”, yes it does. Geneseed is rare and valuable, but humans are not. There is always someone willing to give up their son for a chance to get the God Emperors' blessing.

But let's say it is possible. Geneseed is fully compatible with female anatomy. Would someone still do it? 

My guess is: probably not. 

The Imperium can't even come up with a new pair of shoelaces without the inventors risking being called heretics. None of the bigger, more established chapters would risk it. Entire chapters have been wiped out for less.

I would also expect that the Ecclesiarchy would be rather unhappy with the Astartes dipping their toes into their own military recruitment pool. Terran bureaucracy is not a thing to be taken lightly.

Can’t Roboute Guilliman just go in and make it a thing?

Maybe, but why would he want to? What has given anyone the opinion that Guilliman is a “good guy”?

He often (in my opinion) wrongly gets accredited as the primarch of reason/tactics/politics when he is clearly the master of Propaganda. 

He is memed to be this chivalrous boy scout when he absolutely is not. That is his carefully crafted public image.

Look at what types of men he chooses to promote when given the chance. Strong and dumb, every time.

But how about the chaos space marines?

Here we actually have an argument to do it. We have seen in several books (Nightlords, Fabius Bile etc,) that human fertility drops dramatically in the warp.

Here every body counts, and they have to be more economical with their initiates.

Fabius Bile himself is working hard to make this a possibility. Even though he wants to do his own thing and not just more space marines, they are close enough for me to be called female space marines, and I'm fine with them. The EC can have them… but do we really want them to?  

What about the other Traitor Legions then?

Most of the traitor Legions leaders grew up in the Imperium and shares a lot of their sensibilities and morals. 

I would doubt that the Black Legion would be fine with it even IF (big if) Abaddon himself were ok with it. A lot of his warbands would be pissed. There aren't good and rational people; they are just as brainwashed as the imperials. (I imagine a good re-enactment of this happening would be the Templin institute’s comment field on their video about this, but with (actual) curses and no profanity filter)

But GW has done bigger retcons in the past!

Yes, they have. And most of them have been handled badly.

I fully believe that female space marines CAN be introduced in a good way. 

Do I trust GW/BL to do this well? Absolutely the fuck not.

I have read a good number of BL books by now, and I think I have come across well-written female characters… twice?

But my friend has a kitbashed army with female space marines, and he wants to play with them. Hell yeah! Can I see it? I love kitbashes, and I much rather see a female space marine on the table than an “Angry marine”, for example. I’m not bothered in the least by anything fan created. It is GW I don't trust.

You don't want female space marines because you are a sexist!

I'm not gonna bother defending against this because that would make me a hypocrite.

Yes, the primary reason I don’t want female space marines is so I can have a harem of imaginary big, buff boyfriend waifus that will never ever have an unmotivated, badly written love interest written in. Do you have any idea how rare that is to come across in a fandom?