Fembots in TransFormers

Discussion in 'Transformers General Discussion' started by cgibsonREX, Mar 19, 2010.

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  1. cgibsonREX

    cgibsonREX Knight of Cybertron

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    A discussion that started in the Don Fig's DevArt: Pages from Unreleased Dreamwave Comic thread. Here is the place to talk about the logic and reason behind Fembots in TransFormers.

    Links to some arguments:

    http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/trans...unreleased-dreamwave-comic-5.html#post4659215

    http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/trans...unreleased-dreamwave-comic-5.html#post4659234

    http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/trans...unreleased-dreamwave-comic-6.html#post4659651

    http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/trans...unreleased-dreamwave-comic-6.html#post4659786

    http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/trans...unreleased-dreamwave-comic-6.html#post4659790


     
  2. Sideswipe80

    Sideswipe80 Well-Known Member

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    I don't mind fembots at all. I encourage it in fact. It'll attract more female fans which will only bolster the fandom. I've always thought Elita-1 and Arcee were pretty cool, even as a kid.
     
  3. Lock Cade

    Lock Cade Tarn Fangirl

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    I generally agree with Sideswipe80. I don't mind fembots at all, and Arcee is the one fembot that always stand out in my mind because I grew up watching her in the 1986 movie.
     
  4. cgibsonREX

    cgibsonREX Knight of Cybertron

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    This is not so much as if there cool or not. But what is their purpose if Transformers don't reproduce as humans do.

    But IDW Arcee FTW! - weird story cool bot!
     
  5. Lunar Archivist

    Lunar Archivist Well-Known Member

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  6. SMOG

    SMOG Vocabchampion ArgueTitan

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    It certainly HAS!! :D 

    I don't know if I have the perseverance to take up the semantic sword again to champion my case on the matter... but I'll have a few things to say at least. :) 

    What indeed?

    I'm not imposing a human notion of female on a non-human species. I'm pointing out that the whole concept of "female" is entirely dependent on our own paradigm. Calling "fembots" female would be equating them with the binary biology of many Earth creatures, which would be a fallacy. By definition, Fembots cannot be "female"... therefore they can only be something else.

    It may be something that reminds us of our own "females" but even that would be ridiculous, because depending on the species, or even just the particular human culture in question, "female" can mean many different things.

    Even on earth, we have creatures that do not rely on the male/female binary. We also have many animals where the female is the larger, more robust or more aggressive gender. We have cultures where femininity is defined by obesity rather than slenderness. The notion of conferring the title of "female" onto members of an asexual alien race simply because it reminds us of a very specific contemporary ideal of femininity, is utterly futile.

    zmog
     
  7. SPLIT LIP

    SPLIT LIP Be strong enough to be gentle

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    The real reason there's fembots in Transformers is because it's fuckin' made-up.

    It's not real, it doesn't try to be real. Of all the things that go unexplained in Transformers and seemingly unnoticed or undisputed, why is the concept of genders the one everyone gets hung up on?

    Hell, sentient robot is practically an oxymoron, and nobody ever even touches that!
     
  8. Optimus Prime23

    Optimus Prime23 Lighting our Darkest Hour

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    LOL
     
  9. Dran0n

    Dran0n miss me w/ that

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    I encourage Fembots. As long as they aren't like Thunderblast.
     
  10. moreprimeland

    moreprimeland Optimus told me to do it!

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    Oh geez, not this again... Please let it go. The above mentioned thread covered it enough for this decade.
     
  11. hupla

    hupla Well-Known Member

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    Most G1 Fembots are autobots right? Quints made Autobots to be "Consumer service goods" Right? I dont know about the rest of you but *I'D* let Arcee service me.
     
  12. Transformed

    Transformed 神戸 Member

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    I don't see why some get up in arms about females being robots, when the same response should be given to male robots. If you're going to throw sex into the mix have both, otherwise, don't add sex at all.

    Transformers don't have to procreate, though if they did, it wouldn’t bother me, so long as it doesn’t happen as it does on our world—I wouldn’t mind it being something like what happened in the computer animated movie ROBOTS (two robots building their own child or what have you, which is what the Transformers did anyway).

    For all we know, while away on other world picking up new forms and personalities, one or two might have copied the body build of males and females, attempting to differentiate oneself from the rest of the pack.
     
  13. Mechafire

    Mechafire Shadow Broker Moderator News Staff

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    Well said. This has always been my stance on the male/female Transformers debate.
     
  14. Metal Maverick

    Metal Maverick Well-Known Member

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    Fembots exist solely to fill a mans primal need for robo boobs. /thread
    :) 
     
  15. BB Shockwave

    BB Shockwave Behold, Gagatron!

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    Frankly, I accept femmebots if there is a logical explanation for their existence. For example, in the G1 toon they can be easily explained as produced by the Quintessons to be sold as nurses, barmaid robots, etc. and made to look female to appeal to the alien buyers. In BW/BM, it's pretty much the same (seeing as BW mostly uses the G1 cartoon as an official past) and also the fact that all BW TFs are partially organic would explain why genders would apply in this regard.

    IDW's Arcee is a strange, but not illogical explanation to femmebots. Certainly only a mad scientist like Jhiaxus would do that based on the typical mad scientist logic that "because I could".
     
  16. Sage o' G-fruit

    Sage o' G-fruit Critics gonna critique

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    No...for the love of God, no more fembot threads. It took me a day to read through the last one.

    Thank you. /thread
     
  17. SMOG

    SMOG Vocabchampion ArgueTitan

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    Well, duh... yeah. This is the real truth...

    As is this. :D 

    It's not... LOTS of things that are "just because" fantasy elements get dissected within the fandom... yes, we know the Transformers are cartoon characters, but the side effect of having it capture our curiosity for a decade or so, is that we end up trying to retcon, trying to explain, trying to scientifically rationalize so many of the superficial devices of Transformers. It's part of the process of being a fan. Subspace trailers, mass-shifting, origin of the species... and yes, FEMBOTS.

    And moreover, Fembots are contentious because they never made much sense, and didn't really appear until after the line was well underway. Then it was like "WTF? Where did THEY come from??"

    Even as a 10 year old kid, my response to Fembots wasn't "Oh gross! GIRLS!!" (I mean, I watched Jem and She-Ra for chrissakes!)... it was "This isn't logical...!"

    Don't be cheap. If we started judging every word in common usage based solely on its latin roots (or in this case 19th century literary roots), a LOT of things would stop making sense. The world "robot" has been shorthand for a whole concept for a very long time, and doesn't really depend on servitude, any more than our common usages of the words "knight" or "samurai" do.

    And to this, I must point out that only we would assume that "normal" transformers are "male". They are not male OR female... they simply ARE. Their bodies are not universally "masculine"... or even "human" in most senses. Some of them don't even have hands or faces, so assuming that "male" transformers exist as a default, even before the introduction of "fembots" is a misunderstanding and misnomer on our parts, not theirs. It says something about humankind's biases, but doesn't not mean a "male" transformer is anything even resembling "male".

    It would be like me -assuming- that all Mac computers are "female" because of their pastel colours, slender proportions and smooth, elegant aesthetic. Then when I see a fat, boxy, utilitarian PC cabinet, I assume it must be "male". Both assumptions would be wrong, and the presence of one does not magically confer gender upon the other simply by means of comparison.

    Honestly, I don't even disagree with this... at all. But then the fandom would be up in arms when Hoist and Grapple get together to make that protoform they always wanted to build, and then we'd get the "gay robot" declamations the same way we get the idiotic "trannie Arcee" noisemaking in these threads. ;) 

    I find this an amenable explanation to some degree. It isn't really so far off from Furman's old Marvel UK explanation for Arcee... "she" is just another Autobot, but one remodeled to resemble Earth females for the purposes of public relations.

    zmog
     
  18. Transformed

    Transformed 神戸 Member

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    Assume?” We assume nothing. With the Transformers using pronouns like him or her, its pretty clear what they are; they’ve told us inadvertently in the original comics and cartoons.
     
  19. MrSoundwaveGuy

    MrSoundwaveGuy I've made a huge mistake

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    This explanation may not make perfect sense but it's my personal cannon of female Transformers: When Primus created the Transformers he took ideas from all over the galaxy including different genders and incorporated this into them. Now of course since TF's can't reproduce it pretty much makes genders useless which means that it wouldn't matter if 2 male TFs or 2 female TFs were partners since genders have no real meanings. But again this is just my own preference
     
  20. AllSpark Ferret

    AllSpark Ferret hANDYman

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    I don't have a problem with female Transformers, I just wish they were treated more like female Gobots. Challenge of the Gobots depicted females as being female personalities in a normal robot body that looked no different than the males. While I like Arcee, I'm not keen on the whole female Transformers normally having high heeled feet, robotic breasts, etc thing.

    I've created my own fictional backstory for my Classics / Universe toys which includes the female Fracture (Crasher from Gobots really.)

    My backstory for female Transformers is:

    Long ago and far away, an advanced race of humanoids faced exstinction from a catastrophe that would destroy their solar system and their civilisation. They didn't have the resources to transport the entire population away from the solar system in time, so they built The Cube. The cube is a sort of Genesis Device, like the one in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn. Here, the advanced civilisation transfer the life force of their entire population (male & female) into The Cube which was shot into space. The Cube was designed to withstand the destruction of their solar system and then seek out an uninhabited planet, terraform it into a likeness of their own planet and seed the planet with life, including their life force and their race would be reborn.

    However they miscalculated and The Cube was damaged in the catastrophe. It flew on for millions of years before arriving at an inhabited planet. Malfunctioning, it started terraforming the planet, wiping out the indiginous population, turning the planet into a metal world - Cybertron! It then gave life to the machines left by the previous inhabitants and transferred the life forces it was carrying into these machines, creating the first Transformers. Some were given female life forces but none remembered the history of The Cube or their previous lives...
     
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