Read it and enjoyed it for the most part. Artwork was expressive so that was nice to see. It's not Milne or Roche but I think that's a time-gone-by now.

I don't care for the gender politics - not that I care one way or the other - but I find it distracting. I don't think you serve your cause well when you make the most intrusive and obnoxious Mary-Sue the focus for this, but that's for Roberts to decide.

Personally I'm all for shipping Skids x Nautica, I mean why not at this point if it moves the story on. I like the couple and since it feels like MTMTE/LL has become more interested in its characters than the plot, let's have a happy ending at least.

 

Ok, I'll cut to the chase and ask one question important to me:

"Worth purchasing and reading it or not?"

Yeah, I know that a single issue on Comixology won't make or break my account, but it's still money spent on something I could regret...

 

Not worth a purchase.

 

At the risk of de-derailing this thread all the way back on topic, I actually do think this issue is worth a buy even if you don't care for Nautica, Lotty, Anode, and Lug.

This issue deals with a lot of important plot threads that have been lurking in the universe since the beginning of MTMTE dealing both with the Knights and there relation to Symbol Ship where the The Scavengers (note the proper spelling) found Grimlock as well as the symbols that Skids saw at the end of Remain in the Light. There aren't any resolutions to these plots yet, but they are finally starting to converge with each other and with the main cast. I think James really delivers in getting more into the deep MTMTE/LL mythology and broader plot (as he promised we would). This is the first time that all the different plot threads seem like it might start converging together in the near future. There is also a VERY interesting tie-in with Last Stand of the Wreckers and Tyrest that raises FAR more questions than it answers.

The Anode/Lug gender thing is really just a short two-page aside in their plot through the book if you aren't fans of those characters or don't care about them yet.

 

In that case we are talking about north of 70 million people worldwide. So in other words I was not literally correct. We just counted em.  

I'd go so far as to say this is the most significant single issue in the MtMtE/Lost Light specific mythology to date. Which of course has no bearing at all on the quality of the issue. Middle of the road IMO.

WRT intersex, nonbinary folks, Trans-Excluding Radical Feminists, etc., I subscribe to the following three research-based tenets.

1) There is a biological basis to gender.
2) It does not map simply to physical sex and is in fact a complex and incompletely explored topic.
3) Every time you have been told that biological science supports a traditional cliche or prejudice against any group of people, it is a specious lie. Human sexual dimorphism is modest and human genetic diversity is very low, relative to other species.

 

70% of the focus is on Anode and Lug whlie the rest isn't all that interesting. The only thing going is some plot points but considering Roberts track record with resolutions, you're better off reading the wiki syop.

 

IMO, there are no physical differences between Cybertronians who identify themselves as male and Cybertronians who identify themselves as female. Cybertronians as a race are technically genderless, and the labels "male" and "female" are an organic biological concept that we place upon them due to how they act. Lug and Anode are still genderless; there was no gender reassignment. They were always "female" no matter how far back you go in their lives; they just had yet to encounter an organic alien race which did have the concept of males and females. And changing their body is no different to any other Cybertronian changing their body either.

And Arcee? Always "female" no matter how far back you go in her life either. No gender reassignment there, never any "male" Arcee; she just had no concept of there being males and females. Jhiaxus introduced the concept to her and her violent aggressive reaction was not because she was now female, but because she was now a minority where previously she was an equal. She was made to see differences between her and everyone else that she felt it completely stripped away her identity and she couldn't deal with that. I like to imagine it as being similar to Adam and Eve having no concept of nudity before they ate the apple despite always being naked before then, or perhaps an adopted child who never knew or suspected they were adopted suddenly being told that they were.

 

If there's no biological basis to gender, then there's no such thing as a female brain.

 

No there isn't. A "female" Cybertronian doesn't have a female brain. Maybe in organic biology but I don't know enough about that to discuss it. As far as in Transformers goes, Lug and Anode's personalities are just similar to that of an organic female being that they formed a connection and a kinship with the females of whatever alien race they had encountered that they decided to label themselves female. If they were in a cartoon, they would have always been voiced by a female, even in those scenes set before they labelled themselves as female. It would have been obvious to everyone except to themselves.

We don't really have recognised words for something or someone that is neither male nor female. Not in a "third gender" way, but where gender just isn't a concept. There is no equivalent of he, she, him or her pronouns that I'm aware of. When Anode said "He to she", it's because she is aware of gender concepts and so she talks using gender pronouns. I still don't see it as actually a physical male to female change; just the pronouns used - "he" being the default pronoun used, even for the genderless.

 

Worth purchasing and reading.

Even aside from the aforementioned talked about bit I found it a solid issue.

 

Ok, thanks.

To tfwiki then.

After reading the synopsis there...

Was this edgelordism with Nautica carrying it in her head ever needed? More and more the book starts to look like a fanfic...

Glad I saved the money.

 

That's what happens when you don't have an editor to reign you in.

 

Like I mentioned in a previous post, I don't think anyone in the crew would have honestly been shocked or told her not to take the thing with her if it meant either A) saying a last goodbye, or 2) bringing him back.

Of course, unless it's well-known among everyone (except us) that the methods to do so are some kind of poison chalice that will only result in more sad.

 

This book literally has it's roots as fanfiction so I just have to chuckle every time it's brought up.

Started as fanfiction, and stated as a Transformers sitcom by Roberts in issue #1.

 

There is a biological basis for gender, as I said in so many words in the post you quoted.

It's not real well understood because it's hard to understand the brain. But it's been pretty well established that kids can end up gendered even despite Herculean attempts to raise them without reference to gender, so the naive TERF viewpoint that gender is purely a social construct of oppression is wrong.

That said, while to some extent brains can be conceptualized as male or female, they are more like points along a spectrum than two separate bins. There's skew toward the far ends but no one knows to what extent.

Biology is messy.

 

I brought this conversation up earlier with a friend, who consequently demanded expert sources from me, so from now on I will be politely asking if anyone has any, er, sources. But my query about this comment is: how was this established? How were the kids isolated from gender references, and how did they subsequently identify as being gendered? I mean, it seems to me like one of those things you can't ethically test - bringing kids up in complete isolation from societal influences.

I can see where you're coming from on this, but the next step - for me, at least - is to ascertain whether there's really more evidence for your (plausible) account than there is for what you call the 'naive TERF viewpoint'. I wasn't aware there was a clear scientific consensus, and it seems like it must be incredibly difficult to compartmentalise the different factors affecting psychological development.

 

There's a reasonably well-known (and tragic) case study that contradicts the view of gender as purely learned:

David Reimer - Wikipedia

But OTOH I'm doing a little digging and gender-neutral parenting is taking off right now. Importantly, rather than imposing (lack of) gender or restricting knowledge to the child, freedom seems to be the goal. One of the more famous cases, Storm Stocker-Witterick in Toronto, currently identifies as female (she's five).

 

And yeah I probably overstated my case above based on vague memories from psychology class that I haven't been able to source.

 

btfo people that don't like the direction of this comic

 

Okay, I'm going to put on my Gender Studies PhD (yeah, I have one) hat here. The question you're asking is, in and of itself, the crux of the issue. As Judith Butler states in Gender Trouble and later in Bodies that Matter (the general bibles of gender theory) to be gendered is to be rendered legible by society. In other words, without making this too simplistic, to be able to function in a society with ANY set up of gender (binary or tertiary, quaternary, whatevs), people born in that society either evince legibility along the gender norms, or they simply are not allowed to be fully 'subjects' in that society. As Butler states: “The object designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject”. To have agency and power and self determination (to be a subject, in other words) means one must not be an object.

Basically, you will NEVER be able to raise a child isolated from gender differences. You, yourselves, the parents raising the child, are going to contaminate the otherwise 'gender sterile' environment of the experiment. Just by bringing such assumptions into the experiment that gender maps to sex, or reductive ideas that playing with dolls 'makes' one a girl, and liking trucks and hating pink 'makes' one a girl, you are ruining the experiment. Any parental influence at all will introduce gender. Even if we could put the child in with, say, a different (non Western binary) system, that recognizes three, four, five genders...they would ALSO contaminate the experiment in the same way. The problem isn't binary gender here--it's the fact that we canNOT. CANNOT separate gender from culture, and we cannot raise a child without raising it in a cultural milieu.

We don't need to bring biology's can of worms into this equation at all.