Abstract
“Everything is Canon” or so goes the meme which exploded through the Warhammer 40,000 online community in mid April 2024. In reaction to the ostensibly new revelation of female Custodes in the 10th Edition a proportion of 40K fans declared this news as “heretical” and a betrayal of the fandom. In response Games Workshop declared that “there have always been female Custodians,” thus setting forth the parameters of their own canon. Despite this declaration a portion of the community has continued to reject the official canon declaration, instead choosing to maintain their own understanding of the Custodian order. This paper will examine this apparent disconnect between the ideas of “official canon” and the “fan canon” present throughout the communities which participate in the universe. We will first work through the lens of Narrative Transportation theory to examine how fans are transported to cognitive worlds created from source material, and therefore how fan canons may be assembled or “performed” from these cognitive worlds. Second we will then turn to the generation and sustenance of fan communities through the framework of Social Identity Theory to consider how these shared fan canons form normative worlds for defining group membership. Subsequently we will also consider how members of these groups may be denigrated as black sheep—or in 40K terms: Excommunicate Traitoris—for breaking these normative understandings of both official and fan canons. Finally, the paper will conclude with some challenges for the symbiotic relationship between canon maintainers and participatory groups, and relate these to broader social challenges.
Author bio
Chris Porter is a religious studies scholar working in the intersection of theology and psychology. Previously he has worked in personal and social identity and memory research, and in computational linguistics. He started out in the 40K universe with Space Crusade and then 2nd Edition, and is an unapologetic member of the Unforgiven.
