I agree with you on this, 100%. I said a lot of similar things in that very long thread, when Scott commented on IDW Arcee.

The art has nothing to do with it though. I think this page is beautifully drawn. There's a place for many different art styles, in Transformers, and comics generally. The cityscape is gorgeous, isn't it?

 

I’m not brushing off the topic; I’m trying to avoid (apparently, unsuccessfully) the kind of 200-page shitstorm that dominated the comics forum last month. Of course I can imagine aspects of gender ambiguity; I’m quite familiar with the breadth of the genderqueer spectrum. However, there’s a clear split between people who want totally asexual robots, and people who want more anthropomorphism. Both sides have become venomous in defense of their preferences, and it’s an intractable argument that I’m thoroughly tired of.

That’s a bit of an overreaction. So, your perception of degrees of maleness is an absolute, defensible truth? If you’re approaching this discussion from an assumption of intellectual superiority rather than collegial disagreement, we should probably stop now. Qualified backhands like “otherwise intelligent” are unnecessary, especially considering we don’t actually know one another at all. Indeed, that’s the problem with discussions like these; they’re best done over a beer between people who at least know some cursory facts about each other, rather than during Internet time-wasting.

Now, you allow (as flaws) for the recent trend toward a distinct gender split in TF fiction. However, you discount its importance as well. Thing is, this is the most popularity the franchise has seen in decades (probably ever, in terms of absolute numbers). The current representations of Transformers are the most far-reaching and widely recognized, so extra weight ought to be given to their presentation of gender. Flawed they may be in your opinion, but there’s no denying that the trend has been going on for seven years now, and it’s likely going to be the way of things going forward. You can hate the idea of change, of course, but slapping me isn’t going to make it go away.

But, let’s ignore the stuff you don’t like, and go with older parts of the franchise. UT and BW both make use of gender dimorphism. As someone noted, this isn’t universal, and there are plenty of non-gendered character designs. However, given that clearly female designs are so rare, even those few clearly male designs overwhelm them by numbers.

But, let’s put those aside too, and go back even further, to G1. You are correct that the toys have no clearly male traits; as conceived, they were piloted machines. However, once licensed by Hasbro and redrawn and reproportioned into TV and comic characters, they instantly gained gender traits, including Optimus’ pecs and the big chins and jaws of action movie heroes.

(I’ll pause a moment to address the “associative effect” that allows you to give a pass to robot pecs. Recent designs for female Transformers also make use of the alt mode’s parts to create different waist-hip ratios, rounded chests, and the universally despised high heels. I dislike robot high heels as much as anyone, but within the topic of engineering of gendered toys, they do fold up and integrate rather cleverly. However, that’s a matter of opinion, so if you disagree, that’s cool.)

A mere two years into the franchise’s life, and we get Galvatron, Cyclonus, and Scourge, three main characters with the traits I described previously. We also get Springer, described by Budiansky himself thus: “his physique is heavily powerful, his arms enormous and well proportioned, like the most massive body builder.”

So, your dramatic reaction to my statement (“the baseline is so heavily male”) is valid, so long as we agree to discount the movies, both recent TV series, several major BW characters, a number of popular G1 characters, and any male character whose transformation uses “clever” mechanics. In that case, I accept your point. Now, was that really worth all that yelling?

Ultimately, though, this is an aesthetic argument, and since you feel face-slappingly strongly about it, I’ll simply concede this point to get to the one that’s more important.

Look, the underlying reason for both lack of sexual attractiveness in the default-male Transformers and the hypersexualization of female Transformers is quite clear: Up till quite recently, Transformers have been written by males, for males. Secondarily, they’re a product of the 80s, decades before the later waves of feminism.

But, what we have now is contextually different from what we had before. We have a female writer, writing characters she specifically asked to write, and a female artist, drawing characters she signed up to draw. I’ll come back to this in a sec.

(Again, I’ll note how venomous the argument has become in other forums, and avoid certain types of statements and topics for the sake of sanity.) I certainly agree that good science fiction should explore interesting, even uncomfortable concepts. However, in my opinion, Transformers is not, and has never been, good science fiction. Its few clever concepts are wholly derived from the fact that they’re written to anthropomorphize transforming toys for boys. Everything else is drawn from preceding works, seldom with any thought to consistency or plausibility.

Also, even assuming Transformers is good sci-fi, it must, as with all such things, suffer in the transition from niche market to mass market, as did Dune, I Robot, and Starship Troopers (among others). In order to sell to the masses, you must appeal to the masses. If the fandom cannot fund toys on its own, Hasbro must turn to other sources of revenue, including kids, parents, and yes, women. That means that as the franchise becomes more popular, it inevitably reflects its audience (to a degree; I know there’s the whole “is exclusion preferable to tokenism” argument, but I’m tired of that one, too). So, you can argue for using Transformers as an exploration of nongendered alien life until your fingers seize, but ultimately, Hasbro is going to use Transformers to sell toys and movie tickets. In what used to be “our” fandom, we are in the minority. Furthermore, no writer or artist hired by Hasbro can be blamed for this; they’re doing what they’re hired to do, within the best of their ability.

This brings us back to Scott and Stone, and the question I asked before.

Let’s agree, for argument’s sake, that up to this point, female Transformers have been hypersexualized, far out of proportion to any hint of similar treatment of male or nongendered characters. Let’s also agree that the design for Windblade is controversial, and moreover, panders (with or without intent) to a well-known tendency in the fan audience to sexualize Asians, young anime girls, and badass warrior women. Finally, let’s accept the fact that, distasteful as it is to many, Hasbro has mandated that women are coming to Transformers fiction, and, like female Starbuck and black Nick Fury, gendered Transformers are going to be what the younger generation comes to know as the “way things are”.

Now, is it still hyper-sexualized when it’s no longer being drawn by males, for a male audience? At this point, there’s a population of male viewers, telling a female artist that the female character she’s drawing is offensive to women and is too sexy for the males to be comfortable with. If Stone draws a character that is, in her eyes, a hero, is it the place of the male audience to tell her: "no, your hero is sexy and wrong, and you’re a victim of cultural definitions of beauty, and you need to draw women the way we tell you they ought to be drawn"?

Of course, as we both note, there are cultural pressures for women to idealize their body shapes, but part of the point of being aware of that is to then accept that it’s not our role to tell women that we think they’re doing feminism wrong.

You look at some curvy bits and say it’s too sexual. I see a character drawn with athletic proportions, similar to what one might expect from an Olympic competitor. You talk about binaries, but I see no DD-cup cleavage, pronounced buttocks, or arched back. Is she attractive? Of course; athletic people are appealing, at a very basic level. Sexual? Not overtly, and in my view, far less so than most male viewers, conditioned to alternately desire sex and be shamed by it, would care to admit.



P.S. –

Obviously, the use of “cromulent” was a joke. But since you bring it up, I take issue with your definition, for the reasons above. By “delusional aspiration”, are you, again, saying that female artists trying to create their idea of a female hero need to conform to what you, a male, say is their cultural calling? With “ignorance or hubris”, are you suggesting that these two women are less aware of modern feminist and gender issues than you are, and that furthermore, their artistic efforts are born of arrogance and disregard? Look, maybe you’re not trying to come off as some kind of patriarchal moral authority, but comments like that make it seem so. If you’re not meaning to sound that way (and I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, being an, ahem, otherwise intelligent person), then we’ll just leave it at that, and move on. You are clearly highly educated, have a great deal of time to consider and argue your points, and are evidently sympathetic to the issues of women in genre culture; we have far more in common than we have differences.

[Edit: My assumptive mode of address in this post is toward a cisgender male. If this is incorrect, no offense is meant, and certain of my comments would necessarily be reevaluated.]

 

I agree with this too. It seems fairly clear that Hasbro is going in one direction, regardless of what some of us may think. We can either accept it and try to enjoy whatever product Hasbro puts out in the future, or not.

Although, considering that I don't accept any product that Hasbro puts out, unless it's a rerun of the 1980s, it may not apply to me. I'll just keep watching DVDs of the cartoon, particularly my favourite episode "The Search For Alpha Trion."  

 

But your free time brings me such great joy!

Oh, if there is one at the moment, they usually are... Not quite as high as SMOG though... Nowhere near my #1... Who is NOT Optimus Prime...  

 

So...What's going on here, may I ask?

 

"Stop liking what I don't like."

 

Mm. So the usual? Neat.

I'd like to say, its okay if you don't like what I like, or like what I don't.

 

^ That's the board in one sentence.

Everyone probably knows my feelings on the matter by now but I'll rattle off some bullet points:

-I don't hate Windblade's design but don't love it either, would like to see more female bots with faceplates and who are built like trucks, gorillas, whatever.

-I think having females with over-feminized design cues is much better than having no females. As long as the three new females aren't three more aberrations, I am optimistic that the door is opened for more non-traditional females.

-Animated went too far with style for my taste, but I think it had a beneficial effect on neo-G1, movie, and Prime designs.

-There's ample precedent for toyline females sharing bodies with males (Fracture, Road Rage, et al.) so hopefully all of Hasbro's creative liaisons observe that female, whatever else it is, is NOT dictated by body-type.

-The Transformers franchise isn't taking a genderless society and mucking it up. Transformers are already a bi-gendered society. The only aberration since the earliest days of the franchise is the IDW timeline, and it only became that way due to an ill-advised "explanation" for Arcee and a laudable devotion to continuity.

-Recently I read and enjoyed the Insecticomics, would be pretty okay with most Transformers franchises adopting that comic's view of gender as arbitrary, self-declared, and largely a method of fucking around with witless humans.

 

Still caring about gender in Transformers.

Live with it. Is it so freaking hard to not question ever little thing.

 

I am more neutral in this regard. If the characters are done intelligently I won't have a problem no matter what the gender is.

I am not fan Windblade design but I am glad it is not over femalized. I think gender in Transformers will not be apparent as the human species where it obvious.

I would welcome non-traditional roles for frame types.

 

This thread is weird. Furmans idea of a genderless species being forced to deal with gender is cool, but it was a bad fit for transformers.

Transformers have had gender since G1. We had ones with facial hair (Alpha Trion, Scourge, Galvatron, Unicron) and explicitly named 'Female Autobots'. I think the complaint of Windblade looking too femanine only works if you have previously complained about Prime or Megatrons broad shoulders making them too masculine or Wreck Gars beard destroying the illusion that they are genderless robots. Or any of the male voices and personalities they possess. You obviously cant point to any one behaviour and say its masculine but as a trend the transformers have typically been a bunch of manly asexual machines.

Anyway, I really dig Windblades design and Im excited to check out this book. Though I didnt think the single page was enough to base a very firm opinion on it like it seems a lot of people did.

 

Think it's bad now, wait until the series actually come out and we get our explanation.

 

So i've not expected much if anything from the fan vote or Wingblade. My impression on her is disappointed she looks so humanoid in the face from first pics we saw. Her whole head looks more like headdress than bothead, i don't mind the Japanese face painted thing it's just stylistically maybe she could look a little more Transformer typical but maybe that is just me.

Just as this opening page might suggest they could go anywhere with Wingblade. So i see this comic as just her establishing some roots and maybe once we're into it more there's more to like, maybe they change her allot. If they go that far.

Her face paint and overall flamboyant head does suggest something of that in her character which could interesting/different.

Good that this an all female assignment, feminist kinda assignment maybe, no qualms about that. There are to females in Transformers it's obvious.

 

Yep. Funny how gender in Transformers only becomes an issue when femmebots are being added. Never hear about it otherwise.

There is nothing wrong with wanting Transformers to be genderless robots, the trouble is that ship sailed 30 years ago. It would be like me wanting Teenage Mutant Ninja Kittens. Theoretically sound (and adorable) but far too late to argue for it. Arguing for it now and only when female Transformers are introduced really just comes across as 'I see male as the default and women as an optional inclusion that has to be justified and I disagree with the justification so no women!'. It's sexist, pure and simple.

There should be female Transformers because Transformers is a franchise made by gendered humans for gendered humans and the female half of the population have a right to be fucking represented in our popular culture. The 40% of the fanbase that are female despite being actively excluded by the franchise and the fans deserve better and I really hope this latest burst of femmebots is a sign Hasbro/IDW are wising up.

 

The argument could be made that is because no one ever introduced hommebots.

Though I suppose it could be worse, Mazinger Z (or Tranzor Z, as I was introduced to it) actually had full-on "feminine" robots… with interchangeable boob missiles. So hurrah for that.

::facepalm::
Not only a totally different argument (last time I checked kittens were not the female equivalent of turtles), but also… way to hammer home the stereotype of wanting "cute" being equated with wanting feminine representation.

 

Virtually every single Transformer is a male Transformer. In the very beginning with G1 they had male voices, male coded appearances and used male pronouns. You are illustrating exactly what I mean about viewing male as the default.

It is the same thing. Transformers have been gendered since 1984, TNMT have been Turtles since the beginning. You arguing for non-gendered Transformers as a way to exclude female Transformers is no different from me arguing for kittens instead of turtles, it just removes the gender politics. TNMT are cute as hell so that doesn't follow either.

 

I'm not trying to exclude anything. I'm saying your argument about the oppression of women since 1984 in Transformers because of a male-dominated society, right or wrong, is stupid. Earthworm Jim is a male character. Earthworms are hermaphrodites. There's a valid complaint. Made-up non-human characters designed for boys 30 years ago were undoubtedly going to be based on males. Duh. The market has changed in 30 years, and so the brand should change as well. Point-taken and made. But ranting on about the evils of 30 years ago, man bad, blah, blah, only alienates the valid point that gender SHOULD NOT matter in giant asexual robots from space THAT ARE MADE UP. It's the same stupid argument that Chromedome and Rewind were gay. No. They were not gay. Chromedome and Rewind were in love and have no gender, so the concept of gay does not even apply. That fact that WE feel the need to assign gender where there should be none is OUR problem. There is no valid option for genderless. There is no sentient asexual, genderless role-model for us to use. So we settle for "male" and "female". Fine. Then just do it and don't make a big deal about. Just do it and do it well and no one will notice or care. When we stop noticing the number of women, or people of colour, or people of different abilities—because everyone matters equally—then maybe it will FINALLY stop being "a thing" and we can move on.

I'm old-school TMNT were everything was black-white, or in the colour-specials they all had the same colour masks, and were basically a parody (or homage) of Frank Miller's Daredevil run. I don't know from the cartoons or, apparently, movies.

 

Also, disappointed that my "joke" about femmebots and hommebots totally fell flat, stupid French language…

 

You aren't making sense. Yes, Transformers are made up robots designed for boys 30 years ago because the men making them didn't think girls mattered as an audience. That's another issue. The fact is now that is being rectified (better late than never) and people are raising this myth of non-gendered Transformers as some kind of reason why female Transformers are unneeded. That is sexist and that is what I am complaining about.

Yes but until then we have to FIGHT for it otherwise it will not happen. Think I'm joking? Womens representation in Hollywood has gone backwards over the past ten years as have depictions of people of colour.

I would actually have LOVED Transformers to be genderless, genuinely genderless. Non-gneder coded bodies and voices that were not recnoisably male or female. It would have been really refreshing in a television dominated by gender. But it was never the case so arguing for it now is ridiculous.

As I said it is perfectly fine to want genderless Transformers. The problem only arises when you turn around and use this to try and argue against the addition of femmebots. At that moment you cross the line from 'what would be cool' to 'excluding women' and that is bad. If you're not trying to exclude women then nothing I've said is pertinent to you so no need to get offended.

'I really like the idea of genderless robots and it is an interesting thing to explore in an academic sense but I accept that Transformers have been gendered from the beginning so therefore femmebots need to balance things out in the interest of fairness'
^The appropriate position.

Ha, sorry, I missed it, really tired.