Why is there a black dude who is an ultramarine

[Last Jackdaw]

I really don't care one way or the other but just curious if the lore has changed?
I thought only the Salamanders had black Marines and the Ultramarines are white guys only?

Also why does he say Zeee NOHs instead of Zeee NAHs?

[Hazmat616]

UnCivilServant님이 먼저 게시:

Last Jackdaw님이 먼저 게시:

I really don't care one way or the other but just curious if the lore has changed?
I thought only the Salamanders had black Marines and the Ultramarines are white guys only?

It really depends on whether the Melanochrome organ is operating properly and the amount of elecromagnetic radiation recieved what hue the individual Space Marine turns. The Smurfs and Dark Angels will change color in sunlight, the Salamanders are stuck dark, and the Raven Guard and Blood Angels are stuck white.

Now if you get into facial mrophology, that's a different question.

Yeah I’ve often wondered if it works in reverse and will make someone with a medium or dark skin tone turn lighter as melanin production is relatively speaking bodily inefficient if not being exposed to sunlight so if it’s perfectly functioning everyone gets super pale and then up to and including as dark as salamanders depending on radiation.

[Rozenade]

Why wouldn't there be black space marines ? Not a single racist hiding behind lore can show me a piece of writing where it was ever said that black people or non whites can't be space marines, there are many chapters of racially diverse marines the Imperium is a largely post-racial society,

[The God Ghetto Holy]

Salamanders aren't black people. They are black colored because of geneseed. All space marines can have black people in them.

[Kaezeribato]

Rozenade님이 먼저 게시:

Why wouldn't there be black space marines ? Not a single racist hiding behind lore can show me a piece of writing where it was ever said that black people or non whites can't be space marines, there are many chapters of racially diverse marines the Imperium is a largely post-racial society,

Because 40k lore is set in the far future, and we know for a fact that when different ethnicity are mixed for many generation their skin color and aprerance will "mix" into an uniforme one. And we also know that this will make it so all these people will have the same skin color as the people who live in the Levant.
Since all woke consider that all Caucasian are white this mean that all people in 40k should be white.
This mean that all human in 40k, beside some specific case like the Salamander, should have the same skin color as the Emperor.

[Alpharius Nox]

Kaezeribato님이 먼저 게시:

Rozenade님이 먼저 게시:

Why wouldn't there be black space marines ? Not a single racist hiding behind lore can show me a piece of writing where it was ever said that black people or non whites can't be space marines, there are many chapters of racially diverse marines the Imperium is a largely post-racial society,

Because 40k lore is set in the far future, and we know for a fact that when different ethnicity are mixed for many generation their skin color and aprerance will "mix" into an uniforme one. And we also know that this will make it so all these people will have the same skin color as the people who live in the Levant.
Since all woke consider that all Caucasian are white this mean that all people in 40k should be white.
This mean that all human in 40k, beside some specific case like the Salamander, should have the same skin color as the Emperor.

That's goofy, the mutation it takes to change skin tones is always active in humans. So a population of Europeans that ended up on a planet that was a hot desert, would, over the course of a few thousand years, end up darkening. You're making the assumption that skin tones are set in stone and would never change back or forth between. It also depends on diet too, for instance, a black population that continued to have a diet high in Vitamin D, would have no need to mutate to lighter skin (Eskimos).

Its nice notion, that in the future we'll all be tanned, but that's not how it's going to be. We will continue to adapt to our environment.

And besides, Games Workshop/Forge World/Black Library writers and artists clearly don't agree with you since they always have multi-ethnic characters in all their stories. If you've read "Thousand Sons", many of the characters are described as either tan, brown, or black skin toned, matching the Afro-Asiatic cultures they were inspired by.

[Kaezeribato]

Alpharius님이 먼저 게시:

That's goofy, the mutation it takes to change skin tones is always active in humans. So a population of Europeans that ended up on a planet that was a hot desert, would, over the course of a few thousand years, end up darkening.

It would not... These things happened before human started to live in massive concret building. People that live in massive city, that never ever see the light of the sun even on desertic world, would not see any change in their skin color because of this.
Their body would adapt to the life in massive city, where having dark skin color would be uterly useless.
The place you live have no impact on your evolution if you're spending your life inside massive concret city. The human body would never have any need to adapt to the place the same way as it did for nomad that lived in subsaharian lands.
Mogol does not have dark skin, but many of them lived in a desert, people that live in the middle est dont have dark skin, but they live in desert too.

I dont get why people think that living in a desert mean that you need to have have dark skin, most ethnic group that live in desert dont have dark skin. Most of them have skin color close to the people that live around the Mediteranean sea.

[Alpharius Nox]

Kaezeribato님이 먼저 게시:

Alpharius님이 먼저 게시:

That's goofy, the mutation it takes to change skin tones is always active in humans. So a population of Europeans that ended up on a planet that was a hot desert, would, over the course of a few thousand years, end up darkening.

It would not... These things happened before human started to live in massive concret building. People that live in massive city, that never ever see the light of the sun even on desertic world, would not see any change in their skin color because of this.
Their body would adapt to the life in massive city, where having dark skin color would be uterly useless.
The place you live have no impact on your evolution if you're spending your life inside massive concret city. The human body would never have any need to adapt to the place the same way as it did for nomad that lived in subsaharian lands.
Mogol does not have dark skin, but many of them lived in a desert, people that live in the middle est dont have dark skin, but they live in desert too.

I dont get why people think that living in a desert mean that you need to have have dark skin, most ethnic group that live in desert dont have dark skin. Most of them have skin color close to the people that live around the Mediteranean sea.

You're assuming that in Warhammer 40k, people have always lived in healthy prospering societies in massive cities. No. There were thousands of years where whole planets were cast back to the stone age because of Old Night.

"The Age of Technology ended catastrophically, as widespread insanity, daemonic possession, and inter-human war suddenly took hold throughout the human worlds. With the emergence of Warp storms through most of the galaxy, travel through the Warp became more and more dangerous until all but impossible, isolating many planets. Several worlds, particularly Terra, dependent on the export of other worlds to feed their enormous populations, suffered massive famine. Several alien races such as Orks, sensing mankind's weakness, raided and devastated many human-colonised worlds. Mankind battled itself, daemons, and aliens.[1]

Over the long period of isolation new species of humans began to evolve, adapting to suit their new environment, becoming the Abhuman races: the Ratlings (stunted by thousands of years of inbreeding on worlds with climates and environments even more conducive to human life than ancient Terra) , the Ogryns (harsh, cold, and barren worlds), and the Squats (the barren high-gravity worlds towards the galactic core). The Age of Strife was a time of anarchy, destruction, and regression, lasting thousands of years. Mankind's successes in the Age of Technology were lost, and many human worlds regressed to the level of barbarity."

-Lexicanum

[Nightmarian]

Kaezeribato님이 먼저 게시:

Rozenade님이 먼저 게시:

Why wouldn't there be black space marines ? Not a single racist hiding behind lore can show me a piece of writing where it was ever said that black people or non whites can't be space marines, there are many chapters of racially diverse marines the Imperium is a largely post-racial society,

Because 40k lore is set in the far future, and we know for a fact that when different ethnicity are mixed for many generation their skin color and aprerance will "mix" into an uniforme one. And we also know that this will make it so all these people will have the same skin color as the people who live in the Levant.
Since all woke consider that all Caucasian are white this mean that all people in 40k should be white.
This mean that all human in 40k, beside some specific case like the Salamander, should have the same skin color as the Emperor.

Kaezeribato님이 먼저 게시:

Alpharius님이 먼저 게시:

That's goofy, the mutation it takes to change skin tones is always active in humans. So a population of Europeans that ended up on a planet that was a hot desert, would, over the course of a few thousand years, end up darkening.

It would not... These things happened before human started to live in massive concret building. People that live in massive city, that never ever see the light of the sun even on desertic world, would not see any change in their skin color because of this.
Their body would adapt to the life in massive city, where having dark skin color would be uterly useless.
The place you live have no impact on your evolution if you're spending your life inside massive concret city. The human body would never have any need to adapt to the place the same way as it did for nomad that lived in subsaharian lands.
Mogol does not have dark skin, but many of them lived in a desert, people that live in the middle est dont have dark skin, but they live in desert too.

I dont get why people think that living in a desert mean that you need to have have dark skin, most ethnic group that live in desert dont have dark skin. Most of them have skin color close to the people that live around the Mediteranean sea.

These aren't the kind of genetic traits that recces since they are typically beneficial even if you don't use them and are also dominant in humans. A lot of people don't know that, but dark hair, dark eyes, dark skins is genetically far more prominent than anything else, and it is predicted that if there is enough genetic mixing all of humanity will slowly shift to the middle ground of brown hair, brown eyes, black hair. The most startling stuff (red hair, green eyes, etc) are genetically incredibly rare and hard to pass on if it competes with dominant genes.

There actually were, as far as we are aware, no whites in modern terminology once upon a time, and it was believed the early humans were indeed of darker color like those in the mediterranean. White skin and lighter her probably only survived because it didn't influence life in cooler climates so wasn't involved in genetic selection, and then as it became commonplace within the subgroups with no genetic competition, just because the regional norms.

Regardless, you're talking about a fake setting with made up history and lore. There is no "right" way to see the future with the exception of the most obvious ones. I would agree that a European setting or one based on certain mythologies (i.e. norse) should have the right to embrace their cultural roots even if that makes a completely 'white' cast.

However, it makes no sense in 40k or the vast majority of science fiction without context. The evening out line is brown hair, brown hairs, black hair, so if you want to say everyone should be one skin color--which is ridiculous on a thousand different levels in this setting--it should be that, not white.

Secondly, the populations of the worlds should be incredibly diverse and include inhuman (to else) colors and minor mutations, THAT is realistic.

It's not done this way because 40k is lazily written sci-fi from the 80s that had a specific purpose that meant it was pointless to be granular with the fine points.

That is why a lot of completely other stuff is being retcon, like entire chaos legions getting lore and personality instead of being the tropey barbaric raiders and marauder stereotypes they used to be.

If you can accept those changes then I don't know why you can't except objectively simpler and more obvious changes too that also have utterly zero influence on the world.

Suggesting an empire of an untold trillion souls originating from earth should all be white is ludicrous, period. In fact, there should be an insane amount of them with normalized variations, which modern sci fi does a much better job of depicting realistically.

Secondly, I would accept the primarchs and custodians to be white even though the lore of the geneseed allows for an insane amount of variation, meaning they are NOT directly genetically related to the emperor, but he is instead specifically pulling specific points of power from himself (i.e. akin to someone finding the gene in a fantasy world that makes better mages, or lets people use magical artifacts better) and then using them to create super soldiers.

However, Space Marines most certainly should not be, and be whatever their homeworld was, and we know this is the case.

The hard reality is that Games Workshop just wasn't very creative back then. You can see the inspirations for every single legion and see how they were thematically changed without explanation to match them, i.e. both the Lunar Wolves and the White Scars.

I can't believe this thread is still up, but all it's done is prove way too many of you are dilettantes. Look that world up, please.

[Shade]

The emperor himself wasn’t even European, he predates the concept of Caucasian by 5-10k years. He was born in ~10,000 BC in Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey. But this was way before even the Turks lived in Anatolia. He’s most likely to be whatever ethnicity the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, or Babylonians were or something similar, which likely means brown skin and being more closely related to modern assyrians who are a pretty isolated ethnic group but range from Mediterranean tanned to darker skinned like Arabs.

Since all the primarch gene seeds and therefore the space marine gene seeds were based on the emperor himself, unless there was some major genetic tampering (there was) all the space marines should have tanned/light brown skin like the emperor does. But since a lot of them are fairly obviously pale and European looking, it seems clear that the emperor decided to allow diversity in skin color and ethnicity in the gene seeds. But then again a lot of legions don’t even look like their primarchs, though some do end up with the majority sharing some traits, like white hair and purple eyes with the emperors children legion. Considering that space marine legions do recruit from several planets and some legions even do so from random planets they come across. So basically nothing points to space marines being genetically homogenous, and if they were genetically homogenous it’s more likely that they’d be more similar to modern Assyrians than Europeans. At best they might look like a Mediterranean European.

[Obby]

Last Jackdaw님이 먼저 게시:

I really don't care one way or the other but just curious if the lore has changed?
I thought only the Salamanders had black Marines and the Ultramarines are white guys only?

Also why does he say Zeee NOHs instead of Zeee NAHs?

There was never any lore saying the imperium is all white, thats just more of a very funny observation the fanbase has made

[Alpharius Nox]

Shade님이 먼저 게시:

The emperor himself wasn’t even European, he predates the concept of Caucasian by 5-10k years. He was born in ~10,000 BC in Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey. But this was way before even the Turks lived in Anatolia. He’s most likely to be whatever ethnicity the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, or Babylonians were or something similar, which likely means brown skin and being more closely related to modern assyrians who are a pretty isolated ethnic group but range from Mediterranean tanned to darker skinned like Arabs.

Since all the primarch gene seeds and therefore the space marine gene seeds were based on the emperor himself, unless there was some major genetic tampering (there was) all the space marines should have tanned/light brown skin like the emperor does. But since a lot of them are fairly obviously pale and European looking, it seems clear that the emperor decided to allow diversity in skin color and ethnicity in the gene seeds. But then again a lot of legions don’t even look like their primarchs, though some do end up with the majority sharing some traits, like white hair and purple eyes with the emperors children legion. Considering that space marine legions do recruit from several planets and some legions even do so from random planets they come across. So basically nothing points to space marines being genetically homogenous, and if they were genetically homogenous it’s more likely that they’d be more similar to modern Assyrians than Europeans. At best they might look like a Mediterranean European.

Well, considering that it's 10,000 B.C., he would be very dark skinned, like people from India, considering that the gene for light skin hadn't mutated yet. But that's a discovery only made recently, so you can't expect GW to update that lol.

[Nightmarian]

Alpharius님이 먼저 게시:

Shade님이 먼저 게시:

The emperor himself wasn’t even European, he predates the concept of Caucasian by 5-10k years. He was born in ~10,000 BC in Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey. But this was way before even the Turks lived in Anatolia. He’s most likely to be whatever ethnicity the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, or Babylonians were or something similar, which likely means brown skin and being more closely related to modern assyrians who are a pretty isolated ethnic group but range from Mediterranean tanned to darker skinned like Arabs.

Since all the primarch gene seeds and therefore the space marine gene seeds were based on the emperor himself, unless there was some major genetic tampering (there was) all the space marines should have tanned/light brown skin like the emperor does. But since a lot of them are fairly obviously pale and European looking, it seems clear that the emperor decided to allow diversity in skin color and ethnicity in the gene seeds. But then again a lot of legions don’t even look like their primarchs, though some do end up with the majority sharing some traits, like white hair and purple eyes with the emperors children legion. Considering that space marine legions do recruit from several planets and some legions even do so from random planets they come across. So basically nothing points to space marines being genetically homogenous, and if they were genetically homogenous it’s more likely that they’d be more similar to modern Assyrians than Europeans. At best they might look like a Mediterranean European.

Well, considering that it's 10,000 B.C., he would be very dark skinned, like people from India, considering that the gene for light skin hadn't mutated yet. But that's a discovery only made recently, so you can't expect GW to update that lol.

Merely based off the date 40k and fantasy released and the history of 40k and GW, we know it's just oversight, as with a ton of their stuff.

There is no in-lore reason, no logical explanation. The majority of the company were white men who wrote and designed what they knew best, white men, and drew inspiration from fantasy and sci-fi, the majority of which were written by white men for white men, a fact true even today as white readership and authors still make up well over 60% of both. When they made exceptions, it it's for a caricature, like the White Scars.

To be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of anything, they are a product of their times and their environments, and it's not like they really dug deep with most of the legions. The quirker and/or more interesting ones were recent retcons, especially for chaos, which were mostly just portrayed like space barbarians/marauders with very little nuance in the old lore.

As you and many have said though, from a strictly pragmatic and logical view of the universe, the emperor shouldn't be white and neither is there anything indicating the space marines wouldn't be genetically diverse.

In fact, we should see quite a few variations given the setting's history, diverse range of planets, and the amount of time it spans, even if tamer stuff like unusual hair, skin, and eye colors.

We do get a bit of that, but it's lazily written fluff to account for the traits of a special IG regiment or whatever, like being better at fighting at night or underground.

If 40k were even remotely realistically, there would be a ton of genic and evolutionary diversity, far beyond what we consider so day, ESPECIALLY because of canon stuff like the navigator gene and abdhumans.

We KNOW it happens, it's just super unrealistic it happens in such finite, tightly controlled ways.

[Rolando Zolo]

salamanders are not just black. they are demonically black with scales and red eyes.

for day to day human skin tones they can be in ALL space marine chapters and canonically space marines can shift their skin tone when needed as part of a melanin response they have.

[Hazmat616]

Everyone’s gangster until the purple haired primarch shows up.

[Alpharius Nox]

Hazmat616님이 먼저 게시:

Everyone’s gangster until the purple haired primarch shows up.

You mean Fulgrim?