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This has been open in a tab in my browser for weeks. I think I found this through Gamasutra. I keep meaning to ask you about it.

The link is this: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Most Suprisingly Feminist Game of the Year Contender. An excerpt:

[2nd Lieutenant Mira is] the one person keeping the army of men on this world besieged by an alien force functioning and fighting, and she isn’t oversexualized, treated as weak, nor needing a man, fuck no[,] good readers. Mira doesn’t have time for this motherfucking conventional treatment of motherfucking women in motherfucking videogames.

Compare with the discussions of feminism and female characters, say, in the commentary after The Escapist‘s review of the game. (Beware, yes, it is an Internet comment thread.) Or consider Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s commentary on Warhammer 40k in general, in which he writes:

At one point the boy’s club happens upon an outpost commander who has been talked up by other characters for a while and discovers that she’s an attractive young lady. “Oh god, you chunky fucks are going to be taken aback by this, aren’t you,” I predicted. And sure enough, they were, in the least emotional possible way.

If Yahtzee is right, that the Space Marines are taken aback by Lt. Mira, does that make the game (or the whole setting) sexist? Or is that part of the game’s feminism—presuming that the Space Marines are institutionally sexist as a result of their particular regimented and ritualized existence and then purposefully matching them with a not-genetically-engineered human character who is highly capable, tough, serious, and female. The Space Marines may have some lousy preconceptions and biases but does that mean Space Marine the game does?

I have barely scratched the surface of Space Marine, so far, so I don’t have a fully informed opinion on this yet. Do you?