Perhaps, oddly enough, given that the two of them, as far as I'm aware, never actually worked 'together', but nevertheless, perhaps it's actually the synergy between Budiansky and Furman, that made the legend, rather than Furman entirely of himself. Some of his greatest moments have come from writing around Budiansky- I believe in the old Titan reprints of Marvel UK he even acknowledged as such at one point "Oh no, he's blown up the Ark" - Furman giving an example (not a real one, obviously) of Budiansky throwing him a curveball. Budiansky's flair for characterisation, of course, is one of the cornerstones of why we're all here, even to this day, and it's possible that Furman is at his best when pinned to a fairly tight brief. "Dinobot Hunt", "In the National Interest", "Target : 2006" - they all have in common that they have to exist inside fairly narrow parameters- he has to pick up pieces which Budiansky had left near the board, but wasn't planning on using soon, and use them in such a way that they'll be where Budiansky's expecting to be able to pick them up, at the end. I always felt that, for instance, "Time Wars" suffered a lot- not just because of the blatantly rushed nature of it (an awful lot happens, and happens fast, for no better reason than 'the plot needs it to' - notably, the 1988/9 Autobots' mass moment of hysterical stupid, when faced with Optimus and co vanishing as a result of a time-jump process which they know happens, which they have numerous records of occurring in the past, and which happens in front of them when they're right in the middle of discussing Galvatron, the sort of scenario where they know this kind of thing is likely to happen - but also because there's no need to set up for the future- Furman's killing 'his' characters, and he knows Budiansky's due to kill off half the cast in the Underbase saga next story anyway, so he doesn't need to be subtle about it. The same, I think, is true with Regeneration One - Furman approached the canvas with freedom- and the lack of restraint hurt the project.
Lack if restraint, I get. But he had the same lack in IDW1, no? RG1 had too much riding on it. A brand new series would not. I say it works
I never understood why the Arcee origin was problematic. TFs are an unorganic mechanical species who reproduce via a magic energy ball creating new souls they implant into manufactured bodies. Of course a species like that would not have genders like us organics. Jhiaxus creating it artificially made sense, he was a mad scientist. If anything, it bothered me more that later IDW introduced more females and never explained them. Give them an origin, maybe a lost colony where TFs evolved differently, anything but the guilty whistling and looking at their feet how Ryall and co ignored it...
The reason why people find it problematic to this day was because not only did it make a fan favorite character into a bloodthirsty lunatic,it it also gave out messed up implications and themes for both women and transgender people. For the Transgender people it made the idea of people changing genders as freaks of nature and for the woman side it was presenting the idea of females being an odd and abnormal thing in the universe in general which turned away a lot of women at the time. Not to mention it pretty much stopped any chances of every other female TF from showing up unless they too were part of Jixaxius's projects or a similar manner for a long time. That may not have been Furman's goal at the end and I'm aware of the context of the story along with how Jihaxius is a messed up character to begin with but still he should've considered what he was about to put out and how people will react to it. Especially when there are better ways of going about it. I mean heck if he went with the whole some TFs developing differently on some worlds like you bring up then people wouldn't have an issue with it but as it is he chose the stupider route. That wasn't a typical TF adaptation/reimagining we're talking about. He was presenting ideas that were going to risk turning away people from the comics. Besides even if people didn't find it offensive,Furman's whole logic and thoughts on genders females especially in transformers makes no sense when you think about this fact. If he had serious questions on why Transformers even have gender to begin with then why is it that it's only when he's mentioning fembots cause he seemed to have had no issues writing up male Transformer characters and have them just exist with no explanation at all? What doesn't help is that this is the same guy who brought in some of the more mystical stuff in Transformers so how come he has no issues doing that but when it comes to female TFs that needs to be addressed? It just comes across as having double standards which doesn't help make him look any better to the people who hated what Spotlight Arcee brought in. If he was going to question the idea of TFs having gender he should've gone all the way and not made the male TFs have many male qualities. I hope that answers your question. If someone else here can do a better job explaining why Furman's take on Fembots is problematic I'd love to hear it. Like I said Furman brought many good things to the brand but he's not perfect. Even he makes some blunders every now and then, and Spotlight Arcee is one of them.
These are robots who can change size and mass with no adequately explained means. Megatron regularly allows his gun mode to be fired by his most treacherous lieutenant, who would attempt to claim leadership for himself the instant Megatron tripped and fell. Soundwave is able to fly in tape deck mode. The Constructicons are under the impression that bright green construction vehicles are inconspicuous (though to their credit, the humans seem to buy it because they're dumb) and speaking of whom they have three different contradicting origins in the cartoon. Optimus Prime blew himself up once because he cheated at a video game. Megatron once thought that a giant purple griffin was a surefire way to take over the world. The Autobots are apparently so dumb that they can't tell Optimus apart from an imposter, especially when they're dropping obvious hints, and clearly a race is the way to discern who's the real deal. Lord Chumley is apparently obscenely wealthy enough to own a billboard of giant hands that forcibly transform Blaster into his boom box configuration and toss them to him so that he might be held captive. Sky Lynx exists. But sure, girls are what need explanation.
Cybertronians don’t become transgenders. They aren’t transitioning from one gender to another. Arcee was a genderless being having gender labels forced upon her unnaturally. Although later, some of those genderless choose to label themselves a gender that they identify with. But that’s all it is, a label. Physically, there would be no internal differences between a Cybertronian who labelled themselves male, and another who has labelled themselves female. Gender reassignment just does not exist amongst Cybertronians. They’re not organic. So it’s erroneous to discuss the issue as if they were humans with a human concept of gender. We are, so that’s what we identify with, but Cybertronians are not. “Male” Cybertronians aren’t Male. What we call masculine is just their default genderless attributes. IDW Arcee was always “female” going by our classification of gender. Jhiaxus didn’t make her female, he just awakened the concept of different gender labels within Arcee. To put it another way, Adam and Eve were not ashamed of being naked initially because they had no concept or understanding of nudity, even though they were always naked. Jhiaxus was the snake, and his experiment the apple - introducing gender to a genderless race. She did not take it well. She became a minority where she was previously an equal.
Thing is though Cybertronians have always been written like they were a lot like us thus when they exhibit actual gender traits in some manner or another it's hard to ignore that. So it's not surprising that for a lot of people Transformers very much act like a mirror to us in a lot of ways so when you try to pull a story stunt like that it's also not surprising that people are going to get repulsed by that. Also while when you said about Cybertronians in the IDW being what you said they are might be true that's not the case with the other TF universe where they're made and function differently. They're not just robots so we shouldn't try to think of them as being like normal Earth machines when they're clearly not.
I thought Spotlight Arcee was pretty interesting, and not an indictment of transgender people or women or anything else. Years and years down the road, and we still have people who can't seem to separate Arcee's plight in the comic from actual, real life human beings and the amazing amount of differences we can have or what Furman may actually think of said real life beings. I don't want to call anybody out, but the assertion upthread that Arcee somehow was a bar to entry for women reading Transformers comics... look. I'll refrain from saying anything mean, but that was a comic that sold a few thousand copies AT BEST. Hardly anyone saw it, even fewer read it. It was in the middle of a highly confusing publishing scheme (not scheme in the pejorative sense) from IDW where these spin offs sort of fed into the ongoing limited series; they stopped publishing those oneshots specifically because they sold poorly in comparison to the ongoing books, and presumably created brand confusion with the relatively small handful of TF comics readers. Did some people have a problem with it at the time? Yeah, I seem to remember a bit of controversy about it (more in the are they gendered or not sense, I seem to recall), but nothing like the retroactive one that grew around it years later when people (particularly when a writer unprofessionally called out Furman in preparing for their own Transformers comic) decided the book was some sort of anti-women treatise.
There's also the implication that, by taking a genderless Arcee and making her "female," all other TFs were rendered "male" by default, rather than themselves remaining genderless. Whether or not that was the intention, that result is more than a little troubling.
Been a long time since I read it but pretty sure it is clearly stated that there was no gender at all until Arcee. If she had been made male it would have still been the only instance of gender. It was only when Scott decided that there were more female robots that every other TF became default male by implication. Anyway, very much looking forward to TF84!
I can sort of see the point, with regard to Arcee- although I always took it to be not so much a problem that she changed gender, and this caused her to become psychotic, but more that her gender was changed by a surgeon who happened to be a complete bloody loony- in such a way that it's not an indictment, of, for instance, dentistry, if you wake up after an orthodontic procedure under anaesthetic, and the surgeon greets you with "Hi, great news! I fixed your teeth- oh, and I grafted on these amazing giant bat wings and tentacles as well, thought I might as well, while you were on the table... aren't they really cool?"
Personally, I always rather preferred the notion that 'gender' to Transformers was just a part of their instinct for mimicry, rather than really anything intrinsic to them.
The implication I'm suggesting... your first sentence is entirely correct, but the second... not so much. Definitely don't blame Scott.
Anyways, in a flaccid attempt to bring things back on topic... I wonder how many Furmanisms can be crammed into this one-shot?
I wouldn't be too shocked if we see at least Grimlock shown in the comic in some manner given how Furman's famously a fan of the character.
