As I pondered existence, as one does, I wandered into the Movieverse toys thread and saw some pictures of the arcees. The poster uses the common TF term, fembots and that got me wondering, do we really need it anymore? Robots are robots are just robots and while I understand Im talking about a fictional race, I just find it an interesting product of its time. Any thoughts?

 

I get where you are coming from, but, I honestly don’t see any need to change it or do away with it. It isn’t derogatory nor is it inaccurate. It is simply a word used to specify a certain subset of characters in the TF universe.

 

I don't see why it would be? Its not negative or rude. Keep in mind that no one is forcing anyone to use it and the people who don't want to, don't have to. She, her, name, girl, femme. Those work just as well.

 

Don't see anything wrong with it. I really only use "Female Autobots" to describe Elita One's specific group that is actually called that, all the other female characters are just... who they are.

 

I tend to agree, I've always thought the term was unnecessary since we don't have Malebots or whatevs.

That said, I understand people that just use the term due to it's convenience.

 

Instead of Male bots, I suggest the term Robros.

 

 

I actually like this, I recall in War For Cybertron Sideswipe was calling Bee his Robro, and I thought that was amusing and endearing.

 

Somebody needs to watch Austin Powers, clearly.

 

Machine gun jubblies!

 

I just call them femformers. They'e externally shaped like organic females, most of them anyway.

 

Femmes is a better term, if you ask me.

 

Well, having a personality relatable to that of a human male is just the default for many Cybertronians. There are so few Cybertronians with a personality relatable to that of a human female that there's a distinction. They are technically genderless because they are not organic beings, but we as humans can identify our own gender traits in those genderless Cybertronians.

Or to put it much more simply, if a regular car is given a female voice and personality, that doesn't make it a female car, because cars too are genderless. Its still just a car.

 

UH NO, obviously the car is a girl if it has a girl voice D:<

 

No, it's a descriptive term useful because it refers to the small subset of characters whose defining trait is that they represent a Cybertronian approximation of the female biological gender (if nothing else, at least in the eyes of a species with outward gender differences like us humans). It's not like it's using an outdated or inappropriate vernacular. Like calling them "chickbots" or "sexydroids" or "bots who are for looking pretty and should stay in the kitchen (also known as "Headmasters-series Arcee")"

Saying we don't need that term is like saying we don't need any other group-based categorical term. Like combiners, or seekers, or pretenders, or micromasters, or headmasters, or dinobots, or constructicons, or monstrobots, or... etc.

After all, they're just robots too and robots are robots are just robots.

 

I would say so. I don't really see it as an offensive term, but I find it super unnecessarily. I've never used it or even felt the need to use it. I guess I'm not really sure what the purpose in having a separate name for female robots is. Like, we don't call male Transformers "malebots" or something. If we need to distinguish male Transformers from female Transformers, we just say "male Transformer". I don't think it's ever crossed my mind once to use the term "fembot".

When real languages make a distinction between male and female, there's usually a form for both. Like in Spanish, masculine words usually end in "o" and feminine words usually end in "a". Fembot is weird because there's no masculine form. Like, there's nothing masculine about the word "robot" in the first place, so I don't see what purpose having a feminine vision serves. It would be like calling a female cat a "femcat" or something. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use the term "fembot", but I do question why the term even exists.

 

The thing is that:

1) fembot is largely fanspeak so it will by virtue of its origin tend towards looser, more compact, slangy structure rather than proper and grammatically correct form (setting aside that expecting structural consistency and something as controlled as gendered word traits out of English is laughable both because English lacks the gendering of nouns the way that romance languages like Spanish or French have and because rules in English grammar and spelling largely only exist to be ignored, overruled, and mocked by convention). It's not an official term as far as I know and thus hasn't needed to be codified in the same way that other subline terms have been and thus hasn't needed to be subject to any sort of strict assessment of the term's suitability.

2) The "we don't call male transformers anything specific" is an issue of the "societal" makeup of the Transformers. Basic, male-identifiable, non-gimmicked transformers who have one robot mode and one alt mode that is not thematically tied to a bunch of similar other bots are the norm. So the implication always is that if you don't use a modifying identifier, that's what you're referring to (or that you're referring to the species in a general sense without care for sub-line distinctions. For what it's worth it's not like people don't refer to the fembots as Transformers, or that they can't. It's just the term used when people refer specifically to that group of Transformers but not the species as a whole. Because all fembots are Transformers, but not all Transformers are fembots). As I noted earlier, "combiners" is a term to refer specifically to Transformers whose power set includes the ability to link up with others of their kind to form a merged, singular giant robot. But that doesn't mean we need to say "non-combiners" to refer to bots that don't do this because the implication of the term is that the ones that are under that umbrella have that power and the ones that aren't don't (or are being spoken of in a context where the presence of that power is irrelevant to the discussion). Similarly, if a bot is referred to as a "fembot" by fans, they're one of the group that is identifiably female. And if a bot isn't referred to as such either they aren't one (and are a male-style Transformer) or it doesn't matter whether they are or not based on the discussion. These terms exist to specify what makes a given Transformer "special" relative to most of the rest of their peers. And in a property where gender difference is such a rare and unusual trait, being identifiably female would count as such.

 

I feel like this isn't that serious lol

 

I've seen a lot of people use the word "mech" to refer to the males.

 

It's descriptive, as any term is. No one thinks anything with the term "minibots" and how it may irk short people. And if it does, perhaps a thicker hide is needed? Much ado about nothing IMO...

 

Something being allegedly offensive or dated (in some peoples views) doesn’t have to be the primary or only motivation behind choosing not to use a term anymore as I always found it a bit stupid so I’m glad it’s use has been gradually dropping but I’m sure if someone looked at some of my older posts here I probably used it in my posts as it was/is a commonly understood term on this website and I wanted my posts to be understood easily by others.