A lot of people try to come up with explanations on gender in the franchise. Is anyone perfectly content with having female transformers with absolutely no explanation? Much like Prime and Animated. Because I prefer it. I know world-building helps make everything believable, but I’ve found too much almost sucks the fun and fantasy out of it all.

 

Do we really need an explanation? I think there's far more important things about cybertronians and how they "operate" that need explaining then "WhY dOeS ThIs OnE hAvE tItZ lOl"

 

That looks painful.

 

I disagree with "a bunch". And it's all connected. IDW often had a political agenda, story was secondary.

Anyway, to suggest G1 had gendered characters is revisionist. Aside from Arcee, some female-appearing characters showed up, once, voiced by females VAs, but nothing beyond that was known. No gender exists. And again, those characters could have been replaced with Kup or another old friend Autobot, and it would not have affected the story whatsoever. It was just unthinking writing that some people have latched onto, inserting their own non-canon ideas.

The idea of "appears female" actually is opposite of what feminists/agenda-pushers usually want. Think about that one!

This also means there are no male characters.

No male.
No female.
Just bots.

You have Decepticons and Aubobots, not boys and girls.  

 

Shockwave literally calls them "Female Autobots" in one of his lines from The Search for Alpha Trion. If anyone is being revisionist, it's you.

 

Being female myself, I'm definitely down with the idea of female Transformers. I started with Beast Wars, which gave us Airazor and Blackarachnia, as well as Transmutate. It helps to humanize these giant alien robots to have some who look and identify as female. I need to add more femmes to my collection though. Right now, I only have a couple non-transforming figurines representing female characters. I do have a Cybertron Override saved for future purchase on eBay though.

 

The two female cars from last year and Elita 1 are still available in Amazon for around retail price or less. BBTS still has a few older ones in stock, including Arcee.

 

Sorry that’s just not correct

The may have showed up only once. But ELITA 1 and her team were referred to as FEMALE autobots, in dialog, not to mention several “she”s and “her”s and I believe at lest one being called “girl”

And besides Arcee, there were 3 panther females that made an appearance in season 3

It it’s in the series then it’s Canon

wrong

With the fact that ELITA and her team were definitely called “females”, then retrospectively you also have males

Male
Female
Robots

So for a fact you have female Autobots

Makes sense the Decepticons once did as well

 

Absolutely. The character can easily be incorporated into the current War for Cybertron lines.

 

Override is OK with me  

 

It again comes back to alien language. She/he/it/father/etc can be (and likely is) just an approximation.

It also does not mean that (Kindergarten Cop reference) girl bots have vaginas, and boy bots have penises. TFs do not have biology, and gender is a biological construct. Gender is based on biological sex. You may have the gender corresponding to sex organs, or not, but it's still rooted in biology. You cannot have gender without biology.

I'm also not convinced that 1 episode ever had this intention. I think some folks have latched onto a throwaway storyline/dialogue, and want to overwrite other aspects of the fictional universe.

Having a "female" bot is fine, I guess, but forcing bots to have relationships/feelings is nonsense, a bridge too far (IDW).

The idea that a male bot must exist, due to a female reference, is logical fallacy. It must not. These are alien robots.

 

You’re stretching it, but even if that’s the case, it’s a clear indication that there was a fundamental difference between those was referred to as females and the others

And your kindergarten cop Analogy is out of place since I have spoken nothing about biological/sexual reproductive organs, and I would thank you not to go there again

Anyway at that point, they were speaking English to each other,

So, either way you were incorrect when saying the concept of female robots was Revisionist

That’s highly debatable not to mention continuity specific, even within G1 continuities

It’s a erroneous to make such flat out statements when the information does not apply across the board

What intention are you speaking of?

I’m sure the writers never thought they’d be these kind of debates over a single episode, hell it was a kids cartoon and I’m sure he was just trying to tell a story and a simple fashion

But they certainly had the intention to tell us there was such a thing as a girl transformer.......That just cannot be denied

Not to mention that they made a clear and definitive point to showcase thatcher transformer have relationships/ and feelings that are very similar to those humans have with the opposite sex

You may feel it’s nonsense, but to say it it isint a part of the transformers fictional world is a flat out lie

And that’s bs and you know it

It’s not just that there are female reference, but that the dialog definitively established that female robots exist

Not only that but the dialog also definitely established that they were fundamentally different then the other robots we already knew

Again, you don’t have to like it
But it’s a fact of the fiction

 

I actually don't think it was intentional to the degree in which it has been interpreted. Nor do I think any such interpretations would be condoned by the writers. The obvious intention was to give Optimus Prime a girlfriend, as silly and out-of-character as it was. Again, no compelling reason, just because. Nothing like that had before, or since. And again, you could have subbed in any bot, and the story would have remain unchanged.

S2 had some weak episodes, and this was one of them. The story would have been much stronger without the female/girlfriend sidetrack angle, and been about an elite Autobot squad still fighting on Cybertron.

Transformers make more scientific sense if you ignore the attempt to give bots gender, and chalk it up to terms being lost in translation. We run into that with Earth languages already. And BTW, having "extra powers" gives credibility to that idea. They're different. Robots know binary. A simple binary concept to describe differences in humans is male/female.

 

i can agree with you on that

But I can’t say it was out of character to have s girlfriend

And it may not had been done before in G1, but it most definitely has been done, since.

Please don’t take this wrong, your post seem very well thought out but your facts almost always seem to be off

Even in the 86 film they hint at ”something” between Hotrod and Arcee, season 3 kind of does the same between her and Springer

Wreck-Gar had what looked like a wife

Earlier in season 2 we see Seaspray and Powerglide have “relationships” with humans/humanoids

And Beast Wars and Beast Machines showed us several romantic relationships

So yeah, it’s been done since that single episode

Nonsense

They intended to give prime a girlfriend, And likewise imply the same with a few other characters

That was pretty much their main goal with that episode, sub in “Kup” as you mentioned before with out a re-write” And it would’ve never delivered the same message and it would’ve opened up an entirely different can of worms

 

It depends. Kids show? Sure, no problem. "More adult" like works such as the comics? You should at least have a way of explaining it for world building purposes; especially if romance is going to play a large role in your story (*cough* IDW *cough*). Like I said in a different thread, it could be as simple as 'male' transformers provide the protoform, while females generate the new spark, or vice-versa, or either gender can create a spark or protoform, but only the spark from opposite gender can inhabit a newly forged protoform. It's not complicated, can be explained in a panel or two at most, and justifies the race being sexually dimorphic while still making them unique.

 

There's also an implicit explanation for it, since the Gobots' bodies host the living brains of organic, sexually dimorphic humanoids.

 

Spotlight: Nightbeat hinted at a similar origin for the Transformers.

 

Yes, I mentioned this earlier  

Certain people rejected the obvious implications as "retcon" though, and I didn't feel like getting into that conversation.

 

Yep. Best to keep this thread on topic.

 

It was a subplot, and a dumb one at that. Probably an afterthought.

The main plot was:
- elite team of Autobots on Cybertron
- finding Alpha Trion

We didn't need "girl bots" to do that, and it did nothing for the story.

And some of us consider the toon to be crap because of stuff like this. Dark, moody, broody, biology nonsense, feelings, not-funny "humor", etc. Much like Bayverse, you often wonder if it started out as an actual TF story, or if the Transformers name came later to a generic bot toon/flick that needed an angle. People are unaware how often that sort of stuff happens.

And again, season 2 had some weak episodes.

I never saw anything whatsoever between Arcee and Hot Rod. Arcee did have something with Springer, some sort of kinship, but we saw that with other bots as well. But it reminds me more of Data from Star Trek (with Geordi, etc), not romance. Most of the romance stuff comes from fanfiction and fan drawings.

I really think most of the female/male bots stuff is people projecting onto the characters, rather than seeing what's actually there.