@SMOG
Solus Prime is actually a terrible idea that is only barely better than Arcee SL, but this smurfette principle kitbashed with a girl in the fridge was poked so many times that I really doubt it needs repeating.

It was Hasbro having good intentions and then going as subtle at it as did Furman.

Did not occur to anyone that it wouldn't be as awkward if she wasn't the only female Prime, since so many of them were barely mentioned anywhere before and genderswap would be a fairly easy thing to do. :X

So I really hope Hasbro's not really adamant at implementation and IDW can put a twist on how they want to use her when the time comes.

That's a question with no answer since the Search for Alpha Trion.

Unless you go with Scott's idea of having a mechanical component, but then... Why? They don't outperform or underperform in any way other than their counterparts.

Wouldn't be bad if no attempt at explaining or categorising was ever made and the entire thing was just a cultural import from other species.

But it looks like we're one Spotlight and one Aligned past this opportunity.

I don't see a real reason why to pointlessly bicker over what a company does, since they will do it anyway for good or for bad. Especially given how much inertia companies of this size have.

Less fuss that way. And there's no point in pretending that they pay any serious attention to what fandom on forums thinks about published books.

Also, this time at least the executive meddling forced a change that otherwise would never happend, even if their motivation wasn't genuine. After all, it's the same company that gave no damn before and everyone knows that they have a say in what is approved for publication. So the change comes entirely from online polls and sale numbers they want or expect.

There's also no point in pretending that the company might roll with exploring some deeper possibilities and go smarter about it, because quite possibly they want things simple. OR they may simply don't care what's written as long as they can stuff it into toy packaging.

 

Sadly logic doesn't fly here  
You better stand by your words Hound:
I come back to this discussion at the end of the week and see nothing changed, wich makes me very happy with my decision not to engage.
I find it sad the word "mysognist" is being used here, i had hoped the people engaged in this (endless) discussion where above that.

 

What makes a "him"-robot a male? A robo-penis?

Glad there are female bots. And males. I'm an adult, reading a (seemingly made for younger readers) comic book series (and in itself, can be viewed as childish things as a whole).

I like logic. But nah. I want to have fun. I want a good story. I'm not going to attempt to dissect it piece by piece. They're doing a pretty good job I think with everything that's on their tables.

This was brought up time and time again, but no matter what, Transformers were super human from the getgo. From their voices, mannerisms, their designs. Everything. I mean .. They have fak'ing TEETH and noses for crying out loud -- AND can SMELL. Come on now.

(I know animals can smell also, which I guess is why, some of them transform into animals! All very Earth-y).

I suggest you guys all make up and have a good time  

 

That's exactly my point, in case it wasn't already clear. Nothing makes a "male" robot a male. Nothing at all. Which is why, logically... they aren't really male. In other words, they are exactly the same as the "females" (or should be). Or to put it another way...
1) TFs should be biologically neuter (insomuch as 'human' style gender applies)
2) social/psychological gender should be contextualized so that it makes some small bit of sense in an asexual alien race/culture. I'm not saying that it can't be there... just that it could be explained in a more internally consistent or 'smart' way.

Well, the relative anthropomorphism, and where those lines can/should be drawn has also been brought up time and time again, for as long as there has been a fandom.... and there has NEVER been consensus on that point. The absolutely essential element of Transformers was how they appeared to be humanlike in many aspects of their behaviour and physicality, but ALWAYS this was interrupted by the alien factor, which was based on their race being built around an industrial-mechanical metaphor. So as much as one can argue that they were "always" humanlike, you can also argue that they were also just as much "always" alien/machine-like. You absolutely can't have one without the other.

The question is one of ratio, and where the lines are drawn. How far do you go in one direction before you lose something of what "transformers" are? You can't simply say "they always had human aspects, therefore they should have ALL the human aspects". That would miss the point entirely, IMHO.

The anthropomorphic weight of "noses and teeth" are questionable, since many Tranformers have neither noses nor teeth. Their biology, beyond a very basic humanoid configuration, is subject to a dizzying biodiversity and randomization. In the end, this becomes largely cosmetic.

I've never been fond of TFs having excessive organic detailing (like 'teeth' or humanlike skeletons or hair or whatever). "Smelling" in of itself, isn't an exclusively organic feature. A sense of smell is simply an atmospheric chemical sensor that detects particles in the air... as valuable a tool for alien machine people as any others. Exploring what their scent range actually IS would be interesting, and how much synaesthetic blurring there is between their sense of smell and their other senses (like their electromagnetic sensitivity). Can a TF "smell" radiation, for example? Can they "smell" temperature or radiowaves?

Well, some of them don't transform into animals. Some of them have animal-like original bot modes... which makes them, again, decidedly less human-like in terms of their biological norms.

Also, many of the TFs who transform into "animals" actually started out by tranforming into vehicles in IDW (the Predacons and Dinobots, for example). In other words, their "beast modes" are actually just new disguises they picked up along the way. An eagle is just an aircraft. A lion is just a tank on legs. Again, the analogy to earth biology is almost entirely superficial... an appearance, rather than an essential truth... much like 'gender' I would argue.

How is this not a good time? After all, I'm an adult, so I like to entertain myself with adult-level diversions. Isn't pseudo-intellectual debating about the entirely hypothetical alien ecology of toy robots not inherently frivolous fun?  

zmog

 

In my screwy head, what would have made SL:Arcee work is if Furman had not only made Arcee the way she is, but make someone like Scourge as well. Scourge, with very little exception, is pretty unique among the transformers. He actually has all the very masculine physical structures that a lot of people try to claim that all transformers have. He could have been the male half of "imposing gender" on the Transformers. Then -together- the two gender "imbalanced" characters could take revenge on Jhiaxus. As it is, it's really hard to argue against the crowd that says Arcee is a bit of a sexist caricature of women in transformers. She is.

 

Sure, but why obviate a contextually pertinent fact? It would be a bit tedious to go through any thread on this forum, dismissing anything that has been "already been said before."  

Well, good intentions, badly done. Isn't there some old addage about "good intentions"...?  

I think Hasbro deserves a bit of criticism on that front (as does Furman).

Yeah, that definitely occurred to me... though as of yet, Hasbro doesn't seem to have made any gestures in that direction. IDW should definitely float the idea very soon and effect a course-correction, in my opinion.

Though as mythological quasi-deities, the argument could also easily be made that they are beyond gender as well, and can appear in different forms, according to whim and context.

Exactly.  

I'm not a fan of the "mechanical" component, for several reasons... both ideological and practical.

Fortunately, I never considered the Cartoon to be canonically determinative across the whole spectrum of Transformers fiction. It is literally only a simplistic Saturday morning cartoon version of G1, and now more than ever, we have the potential for more diverse and sophisticated options.

That's been one of my suggestions for a long time now... though some fans really rankle at the idea that Arcee/Fembots then wouldn't be "real girls" or whatever.

I think a strong case could be made for Cybertrons being big cultural "assimilators/appropriators"... especially considering that their own culture has been imploding for millions of years. It would explain why they adopt new practices and idioms so readily from other worlds (especially since 'infiltration' is such an immersive experience), and why there seem to be so many xeno-culture junkies among them. So gender could have been just one more affectation they adopted from "the colonies", so to speak.

Alas... Furman. Interestingly, if you go back to Furman's old UK Marvel story "Prime's Rib", that's essentially the solution he went with too. However, that takes us back to the "good intentions" problem mentioned above...  

Because we're not here to speak directly to Hasbro. We're here to express ourselves and share our feelings as fans of the broad property... and sometimes that includes negative or critical feelings about how the brand has been handled.

Fandoms inherently involve a degree of propriety that is wrested from official hands. Saying "why criticize Hasbro" is like saying "don't have an opinion about something you like / a new toy you bought". If fans didn't have opinions about how their favourite characters and fictions were handled, the internet would be a much duller, emptier place (not necessarily a bad thing, but obviously that possibility isn't even on the table). So I don't see why a moritorium on criticism of Hasbro would be any different... or even desirable. Trying to police that is not only futile, but wrong-headed in my opinion.

Isn't that sort of chicken-and-egg? I'm not entirely convinced that these issues weren't studiously avoided at IDW because Hasbro's stance was pointedly inconclusive and noncommittal. And just because a change is being forced down the pipe, doesn't mean there's not still room for nuance. And criticism, always.  

Which decision are we talking about here, though? Because the Aligned continuity predates any of the "fembot polls" doesn't it? But yes... as much as content supervisors at Hasbro had to vet everything done at IDW, real decisions at Hasbbro are not made by the Creatives, but rather the marketing people, who love to put their faith in sale numbers and online polls (though how they interpret what those numbers and polls are telling them might be up for debate) and policies trickle down from there.

Could go either way, but the inertia is huge. But as you yourself suggest... online polls, sales numbers, etc... all that contributes to the process of change. In that sense, it still comes back to us... the "people" (or the "consumers" more accurately). We end up shaping the "culture" of Transformers... not individually, but as a group. And this group is also part of the culture at large.

So I would argue that there's no point in pretending that the larger social discourse, and the Transformers gender discourse, are irrelevant to the process. They are very relevant; perhaps more than they've ever been, due to the ways that public opinions can gather force and momentum through social media in ways that were never really possible before.

The comics too are part of this circular process... not only do they contribute to the shaping of the culture of the fandom in many ways, but they are in turn shaped by the fandom. It would be too cynical to dismiss everything written at IDW as being solely the product of a Hasbro marketing mouthpiece. Writers are individuals, and still transmit their own ideas even within the parameters of corporate mandates. MTMTE has been one example of this.

All of which to say... there's no reason to STOP talking about this stuff. In the short term, it may be just a way for unambitious nerds like us to self-indulgently wile away our lives on the internet, but it all still contributes to a discourse in the fandom, which is part of the greater entity of popular culture. Sea changes don't just 'happen'. They start from many tiny little places, just like this one.  

zmog

 

@SMOG -

Damn it. Stop with all the making of sense! Haha

Honestly for me. Male and female is good enough. I don't need to see them have robot sex or have correct human anatomy.

But like humans (males and females), perhaps the females circuitry/brains are just wired (excuse the pun!) differently than the males to an extent. Since they'll all different like us, it would be sense in that aspect.

It's the very human-ness that attracts me to this series (and relatable - even though they're alien robots). I can't help but to "d'aww" at some of the hook-up's. It's all very engaging and emotional - just as much as the fights and deaths are (for me).


At the end of the day though, if anything at all bothered me, it also would be the facial "hair" on some of them. I mean .. Why??! Lol

 

Yeah, that's true.

I think I still would have disliked the story if it were told that way, but I would have had fewer things to directly object to, since it still constructed the idea of an asexual standard Cybertronian "type" and then posited hyper-gendered exceptions as a separate (and equal) variant. Though of course, the implications of biological reproduction would have still been there... perhaps even moreso.

But at least the male-female depictions would have been defined more by whatever archetypes Jhiaxus was operating on, and the subtextual insinuation wouldn't have been so strong that Arcee was crazy because she was made "female", but rather that both of them went crazy because they had alien behavioural patterns artificially imposed on them.

Interesting how Scott's comments on the gender question have completely overshadowed anything else about the upcoming Till All are One series? I suppose once we actually get a couple of issues to judge where she's going with the series, we'll have other things to complain about...    

zmog

 

Heh... I guess my response to facial hair is very much the same as my response to obvious "girl" features like lipstick and curvy thighs.  

You could argue that a moustache is really no different than a faceplate or, say the red crest on Prowl's helmet... they're just visual aesthetic distinguishers. You could also say the same thing about the "girly" features too... some TFs just have them - coincidentally - and others don't.

But if you're going to take that route, you should mix it up a bit... so we get more "feminine" traits in "male" TFs, and vice-versa (bearded robo-lady, here we come!   ). And of course, the underlying question might still be... ARE they really "masculine or feminine" or are we just reading them that way because of how they look. Would Minimus Ambus seem as "masculine" if 'he' didn't have that 'stache? What makes First Aid male or female? Anything, really?

As for the emotional attachment, it works both ways for me. I can still find the stories emotionally engaging without needing clearly defined genders. To some degree, I think Rewind and Chromedome were one such example... although both are "male-identified", they are both still pretty neutral in terms of their physical designs. And I have to wonder how many readers who would normally be indifferent to a "gay" story were still touched by their relationship (especially in the wake of Rewind I's death)? I think that's one example of how the ambiguous gender of TFs can actually still communicate strong emotion. I don't need clear-cut and permanently fixed boy/girl identities to relate to them.

But like I said... I think that having a sense of social gender can still work for them... it just needs to be explored a bit from a science-fictional standpoint to better explain where these concepts of gender come from for Cybertronians. But I'd prefer if there was no biological distinction or norm associated with these genders, and more characters fell into the 'ambiguous' category.

zmog

 

Is the discussion about what makes a transformer a female or a male worth investing so much resources? It looks like the right answer would have to go to an anatomical/mechanical level deep and is it really necessary to be this meticulous? Do we need a complex book on transformers psychology or physiology? After all no one demands a precise run down on how transformers transform -- they have a transformation cog and therefore they transform. No step by step procedure description. Why some of the sparks form hot spots end up being POPs? Why transformers die when one of Rossum's Trinity components is destroyed? Why do some transformers end up being a truck and some a memory stick? In the end it's all part of the in-universe mechanics, the rules of how that world operates. Sure, we could write a treatise on what happens when a subcomponent no. ab-14523 slides into a subcomponent bb-12453 and why it's bad if it doesn't. But would the readers enjoy it? After all, a casual reader doesn't read medical or physics textbooks to know how superheroes work.

I think the whole discussion warrants application of Occam's razor principle - do not complicate solutions above what is strictly necessary or in other words first exhaust the simplest solutions before you move on to the complex ones.

On a different note:

I appreciate that someone somewhere decided to make Transformers more inclusive for girls. However do they have to take such a roundabout way about it?

Girls liked Transformers the first time they appeared with most of characters being guys and all. And it worked. (Personally, I liked them being aliens that could transform.) Than someone got a decent idea to acknowledge the female part of the audience, but instead of giving us the same thing, but with a girl twist they went: "We know that you like Transformers so we have gone out of our way to make something that is different and specifically for you - a female transformer." The keyword here is 'different'. Why differentiate female transformers from male? Why separate your female audience from the core audience? I am aware that there were good intentions at play there, but the end result ended up more alienating than inclusive. Right now it reached the point where we need an entire new series to tackle the female transformers, because they don't fit in the main titles. That's in no way inclusive or progressive. That's throwing a dog a bone to make it shut up.

 

Actually... No, we don't.

We may want it (though probably not everyone), but we don't need it for the better enjoyment of the IDWverse. Or, specifically, better enjoyment of the female characters there.

We as readers don't need a third series to tackle the female TFs. Both MTME and ExRID have females mixed with the rest of the cast and they work as fine as any other cast member. And nobody's trying too hard to turn both books any more "feminine".
They're just books.
About bots.
And some of them bots happends to look more female and some more male, but that's not affecting them much.
They're characters in story first, everything else comes later.
Not written with a focus at them being females, but with making the characters either interesting or likeable.

In this aspect TAAO isn't really that needed and you could probably skip it entirely without loosing too much.





But I do agree on a one thing.

Trying to pull some kind of specific "female literature" in TFs isn't really being equalitarian, inclusive or progressive... but cliche. If not short-sighted and hamfisted.
"Here, dear reader, have a cookie. Now gently go to your corner, sit quiet, and let us bask in the shine of our inclusiveness because we hired a writer especially for you."  

 

I think the 'we need' does not encapsulate well what I wanted to say.

What I meant is that there appears to be a strange need of another medium that will mediate the inclusion of binary gender into Transformers and the brunt of potential questions and explanations falls on this series. Windblade was the first series to actively introduce the concept of female transformers and planets that support the binary gender division. It was the series that sparked up the whole discussion and when push comes to shove it is the one readers expect the answers from. When the topic about female transformers comes up it's always at the backs of Windblade and -- as the current thread continues -- TAAO. Despite having their own female transformers neither exRID nor MTMTE start these sort of discussions, at least not at such magnitude.

I think that a lot issues stems from the way the series was marketed to readers. It was presented as the series that brings (back?) female transformers to the universe, written by an all-women team to boot. They didn't just introduce new characters that are female (or use female-based pronounces), they introduced a concept of a female gender into Transformers and in the process implied that it is actually matters, like a lot. The audience focused not on who the characters are, but what they are.

I do hope that with time the series will move on from being a pioneer of female transformer introduction to Transformers and becomes a series that happens to have a main female lead with majority of characters being female (nothing's wrong with that).

An that's the gist of the whole matter.

 

Well, if not Scott trying to sell her books by this PR spiel and then the publisher following the suit, then nobody would look at WB and TAAO that way.

Initially it was simply supposed to be a book featuring a fan-voted character.

One day people will be smarter than to follow every media hype they're fed.

Oh, wait...

Whom I am kidding.

 

This right here is my problem with how femmes are being introduced here. I appreciate that some female readers will be more engaged in the universe with the addition of more female characters, but making a Big Deal about the existence of femmes is the wrong way to go about it. The goal is inclusion, not creathing an 'other'. TAAO isn't going to be a Transformers story... It's going to be a female Transformers story, written by an author who thinks little girls were "less enlightened" before she started writing for Hasbro and denounces female readers who disagree with her. I could not be less interested in such a thing.

On a related note, I learned the other day that Roberts tried to get Chromia and Nautica to look just like any other mech, but use female pronouns. IDW shot the idea down because (obviously) non-reproductive female robots need to look recognizably feminine; they couldn't possibly be women without makeup and curves. Wished I could have seen that.

Even as they are, the femmes in Roberts' writing are all I could hope for. Good characters integrated into a story in which their gender is completely irrelevant, introduced at a pace that lets the reader get to know them as more than just "one of those female robots."

 

That's why I hope Strongarm can make her way into Generations universe (and, subsequently, into IDW).
Provided nobody will try to "improve" upon her design.

Also why I like Aileron's design. It's dictated by being a robot that turns into a flying space car, not by her gender.

They're effin Transformers. Having an alt mode is what makes them different than generic space robots. This is what should dictate their robot body variations more than anything else.

 

Aileron is great. Most of the torchbearer's designs are on point in this regard as well. You could make the argument that it's because their design constraints were limited to existing male toys, but I'll take what I can get.

 

From I'm hearing Scott is getting flak for trying too hard to appeal to have fembots be pushed to the forefront of IDW and even if that were true I don't think she may have even considered doing it had not Furman tried too hard to have make TFs in IDW genderless in the first place. Maybe she might but we'll never know at this point.

Also is she really getting flak for working around the TFs used to be thought genderless idea yet turns out most were hidden on other worlds too? If so then why? Wouldn't people be mad at her more if she ignored that and did her own thing entirely with it? Isn't a good writer in any comic company like Marvel,DC and IDW suppose to research what came before so her or she can have an idea of how to make things consistent and bring in new things too?

 

Complaints about Scott trying too hard and focusing on "female" instead of characterisation had nothing to do with what Furman was writing before.
The raw fact that there's now an opportunity window to put some girls into the books was a rebalance enough. There wasn't a real need for focusing on this one facet, but it was more a kind of "please buy my books because there are girls in them".

When Marvel started with their new Cap and Miss Marvel, them Carol being the new Captain and Kamala being ethnic was an increase in publicity that would help them with a first few issues at best. Same was with Miles Morales and his ethnicity. Or with the female Thor.

But it can get you only so far and these books also had to stand on their own by keeping writing and characters interesting.

The Pre-Secret Wars run of Spider Gwen or Ms Marvel? Cool books. Love them. That characters are girls? Well, hard to miss this detail, but never the main selling point there.

Especially if you consider that when it comes to TFs, characters are completely lacking this entire human background related to gender or anything of the same scale and you can get them only so far based mostly on their casing and faceplate shapes.

People aren't following Amanda Conner or Gail Simone just because they're female authors and have female characters under their care. They're following them because they're good at what they're doing and can do more than enough to outperform guys working in the same industry.

 

Lol oh man. Someone mentioned not wanting to complicate things for complication sake, and then wrote out an entire thesis.

Someone mentioned why females need to look feminine, but forgets coincidently how Prime has a 6 pack and pecs.

Trust me. The males look pretty damn male. Especially the ones with mustaches and facial hair.

Speaking of hair - you're all splitting them right now.

There are "female" transformers. They look "female." There are "males." They look "male." There are some who are "males" who look more feminine and there are some "females" who look masculine.

That's it.

Let's have some fun.

 

Interesting. Where did you hear that? I've been curious just where Roberts fits into this debate, since on many fronts it seems like I agree with his thinking on these kinds of things.

Yeah... that's something that would bother me a lot, especially since it's almost sure to happen.  

Yes, exactly. Thank you.

That 'someone' was me, based on your wording... but I always make a point of mentioning that hyper-masculinized anthropomorphized TFs exist, but are actually exceptions, not the rule.

Someone always brings up Prime's "six pack", and I usually name him specifically as an example. He is both exceptional in that regard, and also illustrates how gender can be conveyed with associations rather than literal cues.

For example, Prime is still made out of boxes. He is not smooth and rounded, with literal sculpted human-like musculature. He is still, at the core, a box-robot. Secondly, his "muscles" are actually a direct product of his alt-mode kibble, which has been arranged in such a way that it recalls pecs and abs, while actually instead functioning as explicit vehicle reference points. It is symbolic, rather than direct in its analogies. I think that using functional kibble in clever ways to -imply- gender is perfectly cool every now and again.

On the other hand, I can point to Windblade, who is an awful design (based on those standards). For all intents and purposes, she is a curvy little swimwear model first, and a Transformer second (some kibble tacked on her back). I think that by comparing Optimus and Windblade you can really see just how great the discrepancy and slant are between the ways that "male" TFs are often anthopomorphized, and the way that "fembots" usually are.

GoLion mentioned Scourge as a better example of an "anthropomorphized masculine" TF... his design is arguably way too humanlike in its shapes and aesthetics, and doesn't quite fit in with the overall style. He is one of the very few 'male' TFs who is designed along similar anthropomorphic lines to a Fembot. He's one of those weird outlier 'masculine' exceptions, pink nail polish notwithstanding.  

And I think it's okay to have some 'freaks' like him in the mix. But I don't think that this approach should be normalized to an entire gender. It should be an exception.

Meanwhile, the other 95% of Transformer designs have kibble and basic physiques that are really pretty much gender-neutral, looking mostly like any human would... if they were covered in mechanized armour and vehicle parts. Additionally, some of them have big protruding "breasts", some have slender legs, some of them have giant shoulders, some have big hips... but these traits are incidental to their alt-modes and engineering, not gender-determining, and in that sense they are pretty much neutral.

First... why would I trust you on that? Convince me.  

Secondly... do you mean that handful of, like, maybe a half-dozen bots, out of literally hundreds of bots who don't have facial hair?  

Or do you mean all those bots who are made out of vehicle parts and geometric shapes, which are usually, at best, "humanoid".... but for some reason, because they don't look like slight-bodied barbies, people say they look "male"?

This is exactly what people mean when we talk about male-default thinking, where males are generic and females are somehow "special" and need to be overdetermined by an excess of sexualized features.

So what we end up with is a bunch of ostensibly "male" bots who are pretty much just boxy industrial machine robots. And then we have "females" who look like fashion dolls with a bit of kibble on a backpack (if that).

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but men don't actually look like geometric heavy machinery. The funny thing is that ordinary men actually look remarkably similar to ordinary women. Fleshy women look a lot like fleshy men. And heavily muscled women look a lot like muscular men.

Sure men tend to be a bit bigger, but that's kind of irrelevant in a species with as much crazy size and shape variation as TFs. The "default" TF body-type is not actually all that inherently male, but instead defined most by basic robot tropes and the functionality of the kibble and transformation.

So assigning arbitrary masculinity to the "normal" Transformer body is actually much more of a stretch than you'd think. Sure, "normal" TFs were traditionally depicted as male, but that doesn't mean that the females would need to look more like human females in such blatantly nonsensical ways.

Nope. Sorry. Oversimplifying it doesn't make it correct. My point is that what we identify as 'masculine' and 'feminine' looking is highly constructed and often arbitrary (not unlike the way that some people compulsively always refer to cats as "she" and dogs as "he"). These associations come out of a very specific biological, cultural, and historical Earth context. So overplaying it with Transformers is sort of silly.

The difference between the (supposed) masculinity of "male" Transformers and the way that "female" Transformers are depicted is pretty huge, and really taken for granted. Take a step back, and it's obvious that we're projecting a highly inequal system of values onto an alien species where those markers of physical gender really make no internal sense.

And yes, it's just a cartoon fantasy series based on toys... but it's also more than that. If we start taking some of the theoretical science to another 'grown-up' level... if we start taking the emotional depth to another grown-up level... then it only makes sense to apply some critical over-thinking to other aspects of the fiction too... especially something that has always been an obvious square peg in the Transformers cosmology (gender).

I'm having fun right now. Aren't you?  

I mean, I assume you are, because you engaged with the debate again. You wanted this, right?  

zmog