Or maybe there are a few more women in the hobby nowadays aswell, at least in my LGS or at the local Warhammer store there are way more then when I was in my teens. There arent really a lot of all female factions kicking some serious ass out there.
That too, and sisters are the only female faction that's actually fully clothed as well. So yeah, anyone that wants to use a relativly serious female faction, and not halfnaked witches will be pulled towards sisters.
Most of the prominent fantasy universes have monsters that are based on Egyptian stuff, that's true, but many of these universes give these monsters gothic undead aesthetics (D&D especially so), as for a long time that was always how people viewed all undead. Tomb Kings (and their descendants a la Empire of Dust) on the other hand are the only coherent Fantasy army in established wargames systems for miles around that not only has the Egyptian-based monsters, but really goes to town on their Egyptian aesthetic as well. Indeed Tomb Kings pretty much made something original out of somthing generic, so I would say you are wrong on calling Tomb Kings generic tropes.
Issue is that all of what made the tomb kings truly stand out from other egyptian based monsters/faction is lore. And you can't see that when just looking at the artwork. Lore-wise tomb kings were fairly unique, being an actual faction (egyptian monsters tend to be lone wolfs) and one of the few interpretations where
everything from egyptian culture was used. Not just taking mummies and a couple of mythical creatures. But also taking things like their form of warfare (loads of chariots and archers) and implementing that in an interesting undead faction. But again, most of that is just lore. Not visual. The visual stayed a generic trope cuz at the end of the day it remains just egyptian stuff. And there's only so much you can do with that. And I think the visual aspect was what was important here.
In the end i would've prefered to have kept tomb kings though. Especially now that we have bonereapers as a replacement. I wouldn't be surprised if the bonereapers solely exist because they wanted to replace the tomb kings with something that's easier to copyright and is more distinct from other fantasy universes. And just hoped that the tomb king fans would (largely) come along.
What's more, nuns-with-guns ideas have still circulated since before Sisters were ever thought of, so I would say Sisters are actually in a similar position to Tomb Kings - they make something original out of an especially generic and unoriginal trope.
Aside from 40K the only variation of "nuns with guns" I've seen are either:
a) A small sect of religious assasins (or just a sect of assasins masquerading as a religious sect)
or
b) A lone nun who for some reason picked up arms. Which is jsut the warrior-cleric archetype, but female.
40K is the only one were the nuns with guns form entire armies. And it's also the only one I've seen were they fight on the frontline proper in massive regiments. The other variations I've seen are either a lone nun, who may or may not have been kicked out of her church and has for for some reason become a soldier which is essentially just the warrior-cleric archetype, but female. Or stuff like
this
I don't know of any other variations of "nuns with guns" where you get power armoured, chainsaw wielding sci-fi nuns with guns fighting in massive wars.
O come on... can they stop releasing new factions into AoS for 2 seconds and actually give existing stuff something new (besides SCE and Nagash). I'd rather have 10 factions where half of them get a new model every 2-3 months than 1 entire new (or overhauled) faction every 2-3 months with the existing factions only getting something new every 2-3 years.
In all seriousness though, has GW ever stated how many factions they're (roughly) going for? I mean, AoS has more distinct factions than 40K by now (unless you count space marine chapters and stuff like the officio assasinorum as "distinct"). It's starting to look a bit crowded.
As for the aelves themselves, I'm curious what they'l do with them given that there are still a lot of aelves left in CoS. And several of those are quite pointy. Also, does this perhaps mean that some of the squatted aelves, like the swifthawk agenst could make a return here under a new name? Would be nice if those models can be re-used without looking completly out of place.
Also, they better keep the name pointy-eared aelves. It's far better than some of their other nonsense
