After decades of mostly watching 40K from the sidelines , I've suddenly recently gotten the urge to engage and am having a lot of fun with novels and game books. (Minis aren't physically feasible for me, so that part I still watch from the sidelines.) I will have questions. In fact, here's one now.
Hey, so, Primarch Guilliman. He's a product of the whole rationalistic, atheistic incarnation of imperial dogma. Do we know if he still leans that way at all, or if the whole Very Long Nap plus pressing new circumstances moved him over to the religious version?
1: Occasionally I moved in closer, particularly when James Wallis asked Bryant Durrell and I to work with him on a pitch for a Dark Future RPG. I got to read the secret plot file in its mid-1990s incarnation. Pretty sure that about nothing of it beyond conjunctions and prepositions remains in effect.
He is horrified by what the Imperium has become so I'm gonna go with remaining '''''rational'''''.
However his hands are tied by the existing Imperial hierarchy, culture and entrenched power. He's trying to make reforms and to ameliorate the worst of the Imperium but has to do it in such a way that doesn't trigger uprising he and civil war nor too heavily disrupts thing while the forces of Chaos are running rampant.
Yeah, Guilliman's really unhappy with how the Imperium has turned out. Including the rampant religious fanaticism.
This is my ultimate in-universe get-out clause for why things are different in my game than "canon".
I think the other interesting thing with Guilliman is that he's in no doubt that the Emperor is a monster. But he's also well aware that the reason the Imperium is so utterly fucked is because of Horus' stupidity in capitulating the Chaos gods. So he's trying to build something better while remaining deeply conflicted about his father and the wider universe. He's a demigod out of time and he's trying to work through a lot of anger issues, cognitive dissonance and a determination to... preserve and build on the utterly horrible ruins. He doesn't get any sleep.
Question: Why are all Sisters of Battle depicted with white hair and bob cuts? Is it just fan inertia or is it written somewhere in the lore that Sisters of the Adepta Sororitas do their hair that way as part of their vows? Where does this come from? Why is this a thing? Why no red heads? Why no black sisters with dreads?
I believe that dyeing hair in a specific colour is often a part of a given Order's tradition, and it's usually white because most Battle Sister units in GW art are from a specific Order that favours that colour.
The them-all-being-white-people thing is because it's GW and they're not notably good at representation.
When the Sisters are released, and I build my new army, I'm planning on using the imagery of Wakanda (movie version) as an inspiration (at least insofar as my feeble painting skills can realize).
The bob cuts are from the original 1997 models, and just stuck as part of the aesthetic. The white was from the Studio army for Codex: Witchhunters, but I believe it's just a tradition from a single Order rather than all Adepta Sororitas.
I believe the new miniatures - what we've seen so far - have a bit more variety than the late-90s era sculpts.
In a way, it's a lot like asking why so many Space Marines are painted blue in the official art. GW's just picked that particular chapter as the in house standard.