I sometimes get pushback when I describe Warhammer 40K Space Marines as eroticised figures, usually on the grounds that canonically, Space Marines can't fuck – then you look at the source material and it's like:
The text frequently dwells on long, luridly detailed lists of the various ways in which Space Marines' bodies have been modified. A disproportionate number of these modifications involve bodily fluids and/or the mouth.
The text tells us that Space Marines' power armour actually makes them less scary to other humans, because the mere sight of a Space Marine's unclothed body causes unenhanced humans to experience primal terror – and sure, you could interpret this as a body horror thing, but it's really not framed that way.
The text tells us that the only way to make a new Space Marine is to cut out part of an existing Space Marine and put it inside you, and that each chapter has a specific guy whose duty is to pick over battlefields and harvest the "gene-seed" of dead Space Marines so that their lineages might carry on.
Frankly, at this point, the fact that they're biomechanically incapable of fucking only makes it more horny.
(My actual controversial 40K opinion is that the whole "heavily marketed brand-flagship faction of genderless-in-theory-but-exclusively-male-in-practice eroticised caricatures of butch masculinity who are as a matter of explicit canon biomechanically incapable of fucking" thing actually pops up twice, because this description applies equally to 40K's interpretation of Orks, and that the distinction between the two hinges entirely on whether you prefer your blue balls upper class or working class.)
I think that's an oversimplification of the Orks. If the Space Marines are unexpressed masculine homosexuality, then the Orks are expressed masculine homosociality.
Orks are derived from English football hooligans, and they intentionally inherit the particular masculine competitiveness of factionalized sports. Orks are an eroticization of that combative/competitive masculinity, to the exclusion of sex as a practice.
Orks collapse the masculine connection between fighting and fucking into a single point. War is their orgiastic release, in contrast to the repression surrounding Space Marines. Orks want to fight because fighting makes them feel amazing! Ork societies revolve around fighting to such a degree that I would say Orks resemble a globalized fetish fiction; it's just not a fetish based in sexual pleasure.
I don't think the Space Marine's homosexuality is unexpressed. Space Marines also collapse that masculine connection into a single point, it's just more formalized and ritualized. War is the Space Marine's sexual release as much as it is the Ork's; you can't really call it orgiastic for the Space Marine, but that's just a different flavour. Space Marines societies also revolve around fighting to such a degree that you could say they resemble a globalized fetish fiction for a fetish not based in sexual pleasure; it's just that they have layers of ritual and formalized structures that spread the eroticism from combat itself to combat-adjacent things: both things that are already erotic like maintaining weapons, male camaraderie between squadmates, and military/monastic hierachy; and to things that weren't already erotic like logistics and tradition.
I think the key point is that neither Space Marines nor Orks are erotic at all in-universe, they're only erotic to the audience. A Space Marine is not sexually repressed, they canonically don't fuck and don't want to fuck, just like an Ork. And from an out-of-universe viewpoint, they're both hunky beefcakes who love Gun like it's dick and spend all their time in close, sweaty proximity with a bunch of other hunky beefcakes who love Gun like it's dick. The only real difference is the "football hooligan" vs. military/monastic source materials for the male homosociality, and the resulting flavour thereof; they even both reproduce by fighting, it's just that the Space Marine's reproduction is, again, more formalized and ritualized. So I think that the "upper class or working class" thing definitely holds.
