Hi, I read your comments in detail. I created a forum to be accumulating as much as possible in everything related to Fimirs both in official coo as created by fanes, you can participate.
It is a forum in Spanish, but the translator can translate the pages without any trouble and browse the contents.
Here the link; http://fimir.mforos.com/

Regarding the mode of Fimirs play, it certainly is something unpleasant, but token, also the Dark Elves, the Slanesh, rape and not by necessity, but for fun or sadism worse.
Or from other races that encourage cannibalism, the desecration of the dead, or the weaker discrimination by the mere fact of being stronger as happens with green skins.

Therefore it is stupid Fimirs eliminate, if not profitable, it’s another excuse, but should be in the world of Warhammer.
In any case books armies details such violation is suppressed and as they do with other ejecticos with vestments of rape, death, cannibalism, slavery, murder, genocide and so much more.

Anyway, my attempt to enos part to keep alive Fimirs despite the current situation of Warhammer, but fans are trying to keep both the Warhammer itself as alternative books armies as are Fimirs or Estalia and many others.

Greetings from Spain.

@ David Stafford:
I agree, I loved them ever since I first came across them in HeroQuest. In fact to hear there seems to be annoyingly two different ideas on what size they should be-and what size is correct exactly?-is irritating to say the least. I always felt they otherwise brilliantly sculpted models in HeroQuest were an inch too small at least. I briefly saw a few of the lead ones around, though never got any, pity. Prices were terribly steep, and maybe a few were oversized, but then I always thought of them as more nearer the Troll/Ogre/Bugbear size of the scale than the human/Elf/Orc/Chaos Warrior size they are. But the HeroQuest ones are the easiest to get hold of via eBay on a budget, so I just ignore their small size and pretend they’re the foot taller than a human I imagine a full adult to be whenever I use them, which is often as I love them. As for their dodgy mythology, I don’t see why they can’t be race in themselves, nor why they can’t reproduce themselves, nor why should they be any more savage in life than your average Barbarian-or even just town living “civilised” human being! Why does everything have to be a “human” once before they get “changed” into a monster, as if humans have to make up 90% of humanoid life on whatever world we’re basing our fanatsy worlds in. Only an human creator could be so arrogant…?

What, in life, would all these Fimirs, Orcs, Gnolls etc. even Dwarfs think of all this criticism and possible simplifications of their social heirarcheries if they were to hear them, to say nothing of what they might think of ours! I do not use this in the defence of something like Dark Elves which seem to be unbelivably vile in anyone’s terms, and the likes of vampires too, but creatures like Fimirs and Gnolls, Rhino Men and Deep Ones, I feel terribly sorry for. Especially when they’re completely disregarded often minutes after being dreamed into being!

@ Humphreys:

Bloody funny and brilliant, and I agree with you a lot. I mean I’ve always thought it highly unfair and outrageous how, the minute a human being-even if good in life-becomes an absolute life-hating horror against his own kind the minute he should die and be brought back by some fell human/Witch/Dark Elf etc. sorcerer. It seems that good heroes are more than pressed beyond the brink enough fighting off all the Orc/Goblin/Troll/Ogre/Lizard Men/Gnoll/Hobgoblins/Bugbear armies, monstrous creatures like Dragons, Hydras and Clawbeasts, not to mention special featured evil beings like Medusas and Beholders, to say nothing of killer undead and actual Demons like Fire and Hell ones, and Balrogs, without losing their own kind to the bad side too. I do think an evil sorcerer should make the odd mistake and have a ranimated person as Ghost/Wight/Wraith/Ghoul/Chillborn/Vampire/Spectre/Banshee etc. turn on them and kill them!

About the Fimir, I, like many, was introduced to them through HeroQuest and instantly loved them-their whole reptilian-humanoid appearance, club-tail, cyclopian eye and beaked face, and I always use them for battles when I like. Their folklore is unfortunate, but why can’t it be changed. There’s nothing worse than Zombie folklore being deliberately flouted even by Games Workshop to cynically get in kids to buy their stuff, pretending that Zombies are cannibals capable of free thought and turning others into them like vampires do, just cos one stupid Hollywood director tried it in one of his movies and now the world’s gone mad for it. Illogical, stupid and wrong. GHOULS are the undead cannibals of the world, Zombies are reanimated cadavers barely able to move beyond a few simple orders-“guard”, “build”, “kill” so on!

Back to Fimirs-if they’re coming back, bloody good. They’re utterly themselves and I had no problem doing their stats myself, which I base on the Fighting Fantasy Monsters guide way of doing it. Namely I gave them SKILL 9 STAMINA 9 with an ability to have 2 Attacks-as the same-sized Trolls and Ogres have, and though their marshy home is nowhere in evidence for their dungeon “imprisonment” for HeroQuest, I imagine that’s a brilliant placde for them to live. I don’t think we need the rape thing or the rather arrogant insistence that anything not as “pretty” as a human has sex/mates/rears children. Why the hell shouldn’t they be as successful in their own way continuing their species as any of their contemporaries. And maybe Dwarf women are never mentioned, because their creators find it too embarrassing, rather than the easy assumption the males must be nasty sexist bullies, to try and detail a dwarf’s sex life. In fact my impression of a Dwarf is that they quite worship their women.

At the end of the day, we’re all humans writing this stuff-which maybe says it all! That if other beings were around, they’d possibly taking a very different view and find our generally backward and hypocritical way of life really quite nasty and off-putting, if they were ever to make assumptions about us, and I bet we’d be the first to hate it and take umbridge, even if more than a little freaked they may be going very near the truth about us. Something to mull over perhaps?

[…] lore has always been a tad problematic. Back in the day the Warhammer lore included monsters whose reproductive cycle involved kidnaping and rape. Their sculptors always had issues creating female models without objectifying and sexualizing […]

Interesting article. However, the ‘something you neglected to tell us’, makes for excellent RPG fantasy back story. A nearby horde stealing the local women, all the more reason to hunt and kill them. Adventures needed to solve the towns problem. Rescue the Nobles daughter or solve the mystery of the disappearing young brides to be, a curse that has plagued the town for some time. Or, simply a young local who has gathered his friends to find his lost love.

The more disturbing these characters the better.

As a gamer not knowing the Fimir back story, the more you discover this sickness the better the Quest.

Zoats probably go even further back to the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoomian ‘Thoats’ even if the Anderson Zoats are the direct source:

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/barsoom/images/2/28/Thoat.jpg/revi sion/latest?cb=20110203103436

@ Yodhrin:
I agree with Yodhrin’s response in that people overacted to the Fimir’s reproductive method. Especially since it is true to their folklore origins and not some crazy Heavy-Metal fantasy devised by the original creators.

Black-listing the Fimir because they have to kidnap females to continue their species seems odd when you have the other races of the Warhammer universe that commit even worse crimes on a daily basis, yet they continue to prosper and are headliners in Warhammer. To make this easy, here’s a list of the Warhammer Races and their not so nice social marketing problems:

-Skaven: They eat children or morph them in to rats. (Eating children is in a lot of folklore as well, bty)

-Dark Elves: As if you already didn’t know!….very well; they rape men and women to death on the altars of Khaine, all while on drugs. And the same people they rape are slaves! There’s also the Witch Elves who steal baby girls to make them Heavy Metal sex murdering bikini warriors. (Not sure if that’s a women’s empowerment thing or not)

-Dwarves: There’s next to zero mention of their women in Dwarven society and only a handful of miniatures ever made…which means they oppress their women and that is evil. They are also all severe alcoholics, which means they fly gyrocopters drunk and that’s just plain dangerous.

-Chaos: Jeez, which aspect of them is worse? Khorne murders unarmed men, women and children. Slaanesh also rapes people, animals, and themselves (they’re hermaphrodites!) for their rituals. Nurgle is a capitolist marketing scheme for pharmacy companies. And Tzeentch is just a jerk overall….or is he?

Undead: They desecrate graves! That’s not cool even if you’re an atheist!

Chaos Dwarves: Slavery is bad. And no women mentioned either! Being sexist slavers makes them double evil!

Xenomorphs: They freaking rape your face and their babies explode out of your chest cavity. Without buying dinner and a movie even! (Yeah I know they’re not part of Warhammer, but they have been a popular species for decades)

I really doubt the Fimir reproductive system was a major factor in their phasing out in the Warhammer line. It seems to be more because of their lack of battlefield ability, miniature cost, and lack of proper marketing on Games-Workshop rather than their “dude that’s not cool” social problem.

The Warhammer Fantasy world is popular because it’s a dark and ultraviolent world. Making it all nice and “PR Friendly” would make it an uninteresting and bland game that no one would buy.

I’m a few months late to this discussion it seems, wonders of Google eh. I love the Fimir myself, and it’s a shame that GW backed away from them although I suppose it was inevitable given the pathological avoidance of controversy that all publicly traded companies must favour to avoid being Daily Mailed.

I’d hesitate to say their background is an example of “rape culture” though, to fit that definition surely there would have to be some attempt to justify their behaviour or present it, unconsciously, in something other than a negative light. Twisted daemon-worshipping cyclopean mist-monsters abducting women for their own unspeakable purposes is hardly on the same level as what I’d consider genuinely damaging behaviour/themes which embody the concept of “rape culture” like real life discussions among men that treat methods of artificially eroding a woman’s resistance to their unwanted advances, or just outright sexual violence, as being no more controversial than offering a gift, or the particularly “rapey” examples of “romance” fiction. I don’t think we have to completely eradicate any mention of rape in any context in order to combat sexual violence, only ensure that when it is part of a fiction it’s used in a conscious and deliberate way in service of exactly that goal; indeed I’d argue material like the Fimir background, if written with the purpose in mind rather than as an unconsidered consequence of borrowing from mythology as it seems was the case here, can be a valuable tool in pushing the message that sexual violence is abhorrent among a social group – young nerdy men – that seems unfortunately resistant to that message in many cases.

That said, it’s fairly easy to retcon the Fimir reproductive process to make any connotations of rape more metaphorical and tone them down to the kind of “implied freakishness” level that Slaanesh and its followers have reached, while still preserving the thematic elements drawn from the abduction/changelings aspect of the folk mythology – make the sterility a consequence of their fall from grace in the eyes of the Chaos Gods rather than an inherent biological trait(I’m not sure if that was spelled out in the original background, it may have been but it was before my time and I’ve never managed to get a hold of a copy of the original magazine article); make the abductions gender/sex-neutral, ie they simply take “humans” rather than just women; explicitly lay out the process as being a magical ritual in which the abducted human is transformed into a Fimir through some combination of sacrifice/daemonic possession. That’s the version I went with when my pal’s wee daughter ambushed me with a “who are those cool lizard things?” question after seeing my hobby desk :P

[…] and even proud of were the ones that took me weeks to compile. For example I started working on the Fimir article was already in the making when I posted about the Duckbunny. These things take time, effort and […]

@ Graeme Davis:

And yet they linger on.