Welcome to She Who Thirsts - site launch and purpose

[She Who Thirsts]

She Who Thirsts​

Welcome followers of the Dark Prince!

As of the time of writing (17th April 2024) I'm gearing up to launch the site, having completed the basic structure and forum setup and now focusing on filling out all the initial planned content. When I feel there is enough I'll advertise it in the various regular social channels.

If you have found your way here you're already a devotee of Slaanesh, or perhaps you're merely curious? In future I hope a certain overdue faction launch might see our numbers swell.

If anything is amiss or you have feedback then please let me know in the site and forum feedback thread.

With that out of the way I can image what the first question may be. With all the other media and communities out there though, why add another?

Why does She Who Thirsts exist?​

Have a look at the site about page for a general summary

Below I'm going to go into more detail and reasoning though.

To make one thing explicitly clear before that though. She Who Thirsts doesn't exist for clout or as an attempt to monetise / drive traffic for advertising and the like. I'm too old to care about the former and have been lucky enough in life to be comfortable on the latter. I don't have any ego riding on this or any other objective other than to create what I wished to see to supporting our faction (and I hope others feel the same).

As a note to the above there should be no ads or invasive requirements anywhere, let me know if you come across any and I'll squash them.

This site and the forums are a labour of love, they're what I had wished existed as a long (long! - 1996) time EC player. Since there was nothing out there that really that fit the bill I've gone ahead and made the effort myself but I'm more than happy to move (and put the effort into) in whatever direction would be useful for the community. Still, what do I personally think is missing and how does the site fit that?

Gaps and Solutions​

Long-form site content and articles​

The major 40k sites have smatterings of EC specific information and content, however none of them focus on this in any great deepth and it's disjointed across multiple sources. Where there is content though it's often fantastic as there are some wonderful authors and content creators out there. (Looking at you WarpHammer & GoonHammer especially).

The aim of the site itself in this space is towfold. Firstly to generate more primary Emperor's Children Content directly, that one is pretty simple. At the moment site content is solely by yours truly however I hope in future we'll have more contributors, particularly when there is a cutting edge of players in the competitive scene. I'd personally love to be able to end up as more of a curator / facilitator for the EC community than some sort of monolithic site owner / content pusher.

Secondly, to bring together the various disparate resources out there into a central hub. This won't be by copying content, but by linking to them. Goonhammer, Warphammer, Spikeybits, BoLS, smaller blogs, youtube, 40kstats, reddit - the lists goes on of where EC content exists. I'm hoping She Who Thirsts can save the need to trawl and track multiple sources.

Community and Discussion​

A new community, and a forum at that, in 2024? I can see some might thing I've lost my mind here, but bear with me.

There are various existing great (and large) Emperor's Children communities around, particularly on Reddit and Discord (hi folks!), and the aim isn't to cannibalise those or to see them as competition. There's no way I'd ever create something new on Reddit or Discord in an attempt to supplant those, nor are these forums an attempt to do so. I'm actually hoping they admins of each will agree to allow me to link to them from here and drive traffic into those communities.

The gap, and perceived solution, is the format and content. It is much easier to engage on those platforms and you can do so in multiple interests and groups at once, it's arguably social media has thrived and specialist forums withered on the vine. Forums, however, do not need to compete as they meet a different need.

Social media moves so fast that even brilliant contributions are quickly lost. I firmly believe that there is a place for longer form content with discussions more able to happen over longer time periods and utilising the better the search and archival features that forums offer.

Forums cannot compete with wider multi-content channel social media in terms of ease and user volume. They are ring-fenced and need to manage specific logins in one source for that one focus, however they do excel in that space when a topic is specialist / specific for the very same reason.

Do I expect the forums here to be as active as the heyday from the late 90s and early 00s? Absolutely not. But I do hope there is enough interest to warrant the time and expense of setting them up and look forward to chatting (and debating!) with all of you once things start rolling.

The Hobby aspect​

There is a similar issues here to those of long-form articles and site content. There is an absolute wealth of Emperor's Children content out there but it's across a similarly large number of platforms! Blogs, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, other 40k forums, sites etc.

Collating resources will help with that, I'm sure anyone in the hobby already has a long list of saved links across all of the above, but in this space providing the tools and a central hub I think will offer the most benefit and, over time, there would be a wealth of EC specific content.

For now that's dedicated image hosting in the Media Gallery and a place for discussion and hobby blogs, but this is something I'd love to expand and support in future.

Being able to have a single source with a large amount of EC specific hobby resources is definitely something I have missed.

Aspirational focus​

As you can see a lot of the the above is aspirational based on my own personal views. This is not quite a case of 'build it and they will come" though. I'm hoping that by aiming to meet my own wants, and quash my own frustrations, in the hobby space as fellow long time Emperor's Children fan myself I tap into similar feelings held by the rest of the community. Time will tell and, as noted, I'm willing to change track and put the effort into whatever is proving most useful.

As (very much!) pie in the sky stretch goal I'd love for the content and structure here to offer a level of support high enough to lift our Faction, either through just having that active and content rich community drawing people in, or through competitive results. Tau and Dhrukari have done so almost off the back of a small number of individuals. I lack that cutting edge in this space personally, but can collate and data crunch with the best of them. I hope we'll see some leading lights emerge post Codex and willing to share.

A quick note to other systems. I don't personally to go much beyond 40k (Blood Bowl aside) however Slaanesh has a wider community than just the Emperor's Children in 40k. Should the structure prove useful, and willing contributors emerge, then moving out as a hub for Slaanesh in general is certainly an option. Hedonites of Slaanesh would make a perfect sister to Emperor's Children.

Summing up​

There you have it. All of the above is very grand when there's barely a skeleton in place for a few articles and an empty forum hanging off it. There's a a chance that, even though I may have wanted to see such content there just isn't the interest / demand, or perhaps the scale needed, in such a niche community.

In such a scenario the site and forums will effectively just be me shouting into the wind. If that turns out to the the case I expect I'll keep plugging away at content for a while to confirm that's and not just a case of it taking time for awareness to populate.

I'll then happily take back my free time and, less happily, return to wishing there was something for more Emperor's Children out there!

I hope that isn't the case though and I'll be speaking with a lot of you soon.

Thanks,

Aaron