There's always someone in the room to make broad statements without actually adding any specific point!  

It's more of a Western ideal, you should argue. The Eastern ideal differs quite a bit (at least in regards to men). Nonetheless, my point is that TFs have no distinguishable genders anyway, so making one slender and the other thick just helps establish "gender" at a glance. Unless you say they have specific genders for a REASON, then my opinion is as valid as your own (save that your view makes it impossible to establish gender on sight, which may or may not be useful in certain situation).

First off (and thanks for your response), it's not like we have a TON OF SEXY ROBOTS! We have what? 3? I'm not asking for all females to be sexbots!   It's a visual identification issue. If male and female bodies are identical, why is a robot "male" or "female" and not "transgender"?   Anyway, I think you and I can agree that if these ladies looked different from each other (and they're kind of similar in build here), the team would benefit visually. For such a dramatic dissension in opinion, I find it odd that either one or the other must exist, and not both. Let's do a muscular girl and a slender girl. Fine. But this team is all muscle dudes with "female" faces, IMO.  

 

I'm sorry, I'm not feeling these barely-hueshifted pictures-- if I can even tell what the difference is, it just looks different as opposed to "better". At least to me.

And put me in the category of people who'd think a red/orange scheme would look magnitudes worse (c'mon, people, red and orange CLASH!), and that a rusty-brownish hue would just be boring (video games are JUST starting to move beyond the Real Is Brown trope, we don't need that shit leaking into toys now too).

 

I wonder if the Offroad and Dragstrip molds had won (and I think the team would've been more visually interesting, and looked better in combined mode, that way regardless of what gender they ended up) people would be saying they look too bulky to be female, too "masculine", etc.?
Actually, anyone with da skills care to make a digibash of what Dustup and Jumpstream (the car ones) would look like if those molds had won instead?

 

The Christmas bots

 

Nice pics! I see the inspiration... Ironically, the majority of us probably think of rusted iron when one says "sea of rust", and even the IDW stuff features those colors, no?

I don't mind the colors on the toys, just the fact that they're male robots with "female" heads. A fan-built toy should be more original (i.e. Windblade), but this reeks of shortcuts and half-assery. And really, no one enjoys the smell of half-assery!  

 

Preach brother, preach.

 

You only say that because you've been looking at robots that are almost entirely coded male for the past 30 years. You can't tell the Torchbearers are female at a glance? So what? The IDW art and elements of the face suggest they are female without requiring molded breasts and "thin" limbs. Hell, thy could've done a straight repaint of Hot Spot and told us it was female. Guess what, that means Pyra Magna is female.

And don't even start playing the "transgender robots" card. Men and women who don't conform to the "ideal" body type that's been arbitrarily assigned to their gender don't automatically lose their ability to identify as men and women. Kate Upton is just as much a woman as Ronda Rousey as is Melissa McCarthy.

TLDR: Strika and Strongarm say hi. Meanwhile Samus just took the helmet off her power-armor so you could see her roll her eyes. They don't stop being female just because you can't tell if they've got breasts or not.

 

Agreed. Varying body-types FTW. These are aliens, after all. Problem is, this only goes one way. We have a lot of female TFs with more "masculine" body-types, so why can't we have a male Transformer with robo-boobs? Now that would be cool. Straight repaint of Arcee or Windblade, call him Deathtron or something. That would be amazing.

 

We've gotten some of that variety when you look at the beer guts on Bulkhound or movie Leadfoot, and even going back as far as Cybertron (Energon?) Mirage. There was also Nitro Convoy (Overdrive?) in Cybertron who I think got gender-swapped between versions.

There's also Prime FE Starscream, which was a very slender build compared to other more "macho" bots.

They male bots don't need breasts to differ from the "ideal" because there's been so many already they've had quite a bit of diversity. Bulky, slender, athletic, muscular...

Though, I do like the idea of dropping a new head on somebody like Generations Arcee. The figure is somewhat feminine without having breasts, so a male head on it would make for an interesting result.

 

I think back to Adventures Greejeeber (The RID Rollbar repaint of Strongarm) that character is still male despite being from a fembot body.

I'd like more of that.

 

Red and Teal are complementary colors. Basically, they opposite end of the color spectrum from each other.

I like it because I like teal.

BUT it also reminded me of this, though I honestly think that this was an accident. Splatoon's first splatfest was Cats Vs. Dogs, with ink colors teal and red in the almost exact same shade as their palette. (this image's colors are kind of off for the red though, it was much more red in game on the TV screen)

Spoiler'd for just it being a large image.

Spoiler

 

So Hasbro was definitely going for an oxidized metal look, but couldn't quite balance the colors due to the limitations of molding.

Given that info, I appreciate the colors a bit more. But man...they needed to use some of that silver color to help break it up a bit.