Why can't we have both a gender poll and a personality poll? A grizzled female veteran would be awesome! And if you leave it to Hasbro to determine gender, than is it truly fan built?

From a personal standpoint, I'd love to be able to build each member separetly and leave it to Hasbro to decide how to gel those elements together into a unified combiner. If we decide there should be a cow, a blimp, a tractor, and a motorcycle than by God make Hasbro make it work.  

One of the cool things about Strongarm in RiD is she's a female character with a police theme, which we typically associate with male characters in animation. Heck, the fact they created Strongarm for the role instead of making it Prowl says a lot about Hasbro wanting to include new female characters in the Universe.

So while I wouldn't want a female combiner just to have one, it'd be fun to see a combiner team with a female leader or at least a few members of the team that are female and have themes that are typically "male". So a female bulldozer, or a female bison...etc.

 

What would I like most...

• A combiner who's combined mode was a lion or something.
• A voyager fembot for the torso. Not a podge, just bigger than deluxe, like voyager Jetfire is.
• A chinook alt mode, with moving crane.

 

To be honest, we collect children's toys, so technically were all manchildren.

but holy cripes some of you stop posting, just -stop-. I have never seen this level of pure shitposting on a forum.

 

Sounds like I need to finish my work on this

http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transformers-fan-art/263617-fembot-combiner-penthesilea-wip.html

Or better yet, the combiner that is made only of pegwarming figures from past waves. Movie-verse Bumblebee Maximus!

 

Can we get a "like" option on this board? So I can use it on this post?

 

Here is my list of Must Hits for this to be considered a success in my book:

1) The Alt modes must be something new and interesting. it does no good if we get a bunch of cars, trucks, or jets again. We already have those. I want something different. I have heard some mention trains and the others mention boats... now those would be very interesting (ESPECIALLY if they did boats and made Nautica part of the team...). Or if they did team of land vehicles that we haven't seen before... like a garbage truck, a cherry picker, a street cleaner, so on.

2) The team must feel like a team. That is something I think people forget when it comes to making a great combiner team... the members need to feel like they belong together. Devastator is made up of the rough neck decepticons. Bruticus is the Decepticon elite commandos. Predaking is the hunters and trackers. I want this team to feel like they belong together. There is a reason people think there should be a Dinobot or Incesticon combiner... it just makes sense. They can have different personalities but when together you have to be able to go "Yup, those guys are a group! Can see it instantly!"

3) The combiner form must take cues from the individuals. I have never been a fan of Menasor (He is ok and I am going to get all his parts but he isn't one of my favorites) and the reason for that is that Menasor really doesn't look like the rest of the Stunticons. He just looks like an evil robot wearing cars as shoulderpads. Now Superion and Devastator and Predaking? Those are GREAT looking gestalts. They have visual cues that run through all the rest of their team. I don't want the combiner we make to be a hodge-podge of vehicles.

4) A theme. Ow, ow, stop hitting me and let me explain! Listen, I get that some of you don't like her but I actually like the design of Windblade. I think she has a nice look and find her very interesting. And the look then allowed the writers to create interesting explanations for why she was the way she was (Why no guns? Because on her planet they prefer hand to hand weapons to converse resources. Why the makeup? Because of her role as a City Speaker.). This feeds back into the 'Make them a team' requirement. I want there to be a theme that makes these guys and girls feel like they belong together. Someone mentioned salty seam...sailors. I would love that! Or outlaws that have a Wild West theme. Or even make them 5 members of the Knights of Cybertron and give them a King Arthur feel. It would make them feel different and new and worth the price.


Right now my picks, if I were the sole one deciding, would be (NOTE: except for the first one, all these teams could be male or female... or mixed!):

-A female Autobot combiner team based around Nautica. 5 vehicles, all fems, in nice purples and blues.

-A pirate combiner team that does not work for either faction. Take the design cues they had for Thundertron and continue them here. The Voyager is the Captain. A swordsman arm. A gunner arm (maybe one arm is a giant cannon!). Swashbuckler leg. A wildcard leg. And include a parrot robot that can sit on the Captain's shoulder OR become a gun for the combined form

-A train combiner. We haven't had one since RID and I'd be interested to get a new one.

-A WWII Era combiner. Again, going with my idea of themes, I'd love to get a group of grizzled, surly, swearing, gun cleaning warriors that have taken their forms from footage they intercepted of old WWII newsreels. A fighter plane, a tank, an amphibious lander, a modified assault jeep, and a military medical truck. Most likely thinking of this because I am reading a book on Patton.

-The Knights of Cybertron style combiner. 5 bots, based on mythical creatures commonly found on Coat of Arms. A Griffin, Manticore, Unicorn, Capricorn, and a Voyager Dragon. Robot modes look like English knights.

-A helicopter team with one random jet thrown in.

 

Wall o' text incoming!

They're toys, which people attach their own cognitive biases to (hence why Nightbeat will always be my bestest figure ever, no matter how flawed he is). People will always do that, no matter what ('cos we're human, and it's what we do). I'm suggesting we let people's own cognitive biases do half the work of defining what the figure is, and while yes, there will be arguments, when are there ever not arguments?

Basically, if people class them as "male" in their heads, fine. If they class them as "female", also fine. S'like me, with Siren: I still, to this day, see Siren as being a fembot. No idea why, but it works in my head, so I go with it.

Or, if you want to couch it in different terms, I'm not suggesting Hasbro should take away the figures' gender in a strop. I'm suggesting they move past that binary view, and make the figures genderfluid (even though I hate that word; it sounds so... gooey).

As for the point about being drawn, designed and named: 1/ Transformer names are, for the most part, completely gender-neutral anyway (Windblade, for example, would work equally well on a bot of either gender); and 2/ Strongarm exists, and the only real indication that her toy is a fembot is the fact she's got pouty lips (I'm convinced she'd work as a take on IDW Prowl, too). Then there's Strika, as well, whose toy gives absolutely zero impression that she's a fembot, yet she still is.

Both of those figures break the stereotypical "fembot mould", and are brilliant partly because of it.

So, since this is a poll about a fan-combiner... why not carry that conceit right through to the finished figure, and let fans define the figures' personalities and genders themselves, when they get the figures in-hand? Or can they not be fembots without having obvious "female" cues?

ETA:
I will say, though, that if we got a voyager Nautica out of it, I'd be a very happy bunny.  

 

86 movie combiner

repaints/remolds of existing toys, Ultra Magnus voyager at the core, Limbots Hot Rod, Kup, Blurr, and Springer, legends Arcee for the chest plate, and legends Daniel in exosuit that converts to weapon. Named Junkimus Maximus for the Junkions that worked out the combined mode. Heck, throw in two more Junkion legends that make a shield and axe. There's a whole wave. The only real work aside from new heads and colors would be Daniel and the Junkions.

 

And then there's this: Fan Built Combiner! | The Audio Knights Theatre Fan Built Combiner! | The Audio Knights Theatre

 

lmao at girl ninja. plz no pirates either.

 

The problem is a "generic" figure with "no cues" is inherently male. It's the default we assign when something has no known gender. It's why on the Internet (especially boards for things such as action figures or games) the assumption is typically that a poster is male until they "prove" otherwise.

Take Strongarm for example. If she had a visor and faceplate instead of her eyes and lips, would you guess that was a female figure?

You suggest that since it's "fan built" that we should allow fans to assign a gender to the character. The problem is why is gender the only aspect we're going to throw out of the equation?

Part of the reason some people want more female bots is because we want to see Hasbro encourage the idea that Transformers isn't just a boys toys. It's a way to help women and girls who are fans of Transformers understand they aren't some kind of "weird" thing.

Leaving it up to fans won't change anything, because (as we've seen in this thread) there are a large number of fans who are more than willing to keep it a "boy's club" and treat female characters as some sort of feminist invasion.

 

pirates sound awesome!  

 

Maybe half pirate, half knight? That way the fandom can rage at Fun Pub again. /trollface.

 

Define "we".

Indeed. Which is kind of my point. If she didn't have poutier lips (and a massive presence in the accompanying fiction), she's about as gender-neutral as a fembot figure has ever been (Strika notwithstanding).

So what I'm suggesting is only two steps away from being Strongarm, anyway.

This is possibly my fault for not being clearer, but you've misinterpreted why I made that suggestion in the first place: it's not some kind of desire to take away gender from the equation, it's a compromise between what people are saying in this specific thread and only this thread, applied to one set of figures, not the entire product line.

And as for throwing gender out: I'm not, I'm suggesting a compromise that at least some people can agree on, so there's less arguing.  

Well if we're going to talk about things outside the figures themselves, I could make a argument that the figures having no specified gender could help fans of all stripes to move past the concept of "male" and "female" altogether.  

I'm also only suggesting doing that in this one case, purely because it's a fan-built combiner. It's one set of five figures (six if there's a legends figure too), this isn't some sweeping move to erase gender from the equation across the board. It is, purely and simply, a one-off to let fans have their own headcanon characters, for the figures they voted on.

Again, might help prevent arguments, or at least make it so that the arguments are more along the lines of the fact that (controversial opinion) any other vehicle makes more sense than trains...

Sorry, had to.  

Which will happen anyway, even if the new figures are specifically billed as being female. This suggestion is about mitigating that. It is, essentially, Headcanon: The Figure.

I'm also going to suggest that as a name, if the Legends figure can form the head...  

 

You got my vote.

 

It would be incredibly cool if they gave the option for beasts. A new Predaking or Abominus would be amazing. I mean, they did the platinum edition G1 Predacon re-release last year and 2013 gave us the Cyberverse Abominus. Third parties already have their Predakings and at least one Abominus on the way.
Let's get some official product. Some of us can't afford those delightful looking third party combiners.
Even Monstructor would be good.

 

Yeah, if Beasts or Monsters are an option, I'm in.

Otherwise it's Decepticon trains for me. Astrotrain-team, go!

 

So. That show kicked ass.

 

Oh I'm sorry do you work for hasbro?????

Amazon hahahahaha like any person that buys their comics buys from there. Garbage.

 

Again, everywhere I go, Windblade is sold out and there's only like one Arcee or Chromia.