Mark's Manifesto 1 - Aspiration and Identification

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Today we talk about a pattern emerging in modern media, specifically in Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar. It’s something people often describe, clumsily, as the ‘uglification’ of female characters—but I think that word misses the real issue. What’s actually happening is a shift in design philosophy: away from aspirational, exaggerated fantasy and toward relatability and identification. Warhammer was built on myth, excess, and iconography, where everyone was larger than life. As the setting modernizes and broadens its audience, female characters are often the first place that idealization gets stripped away—not out of malice, but out of corporate caution. And that shift changes what power, beauty, and fantasy are allowed to look like in the grimdark future.

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