SDCC 2013 Fanbuilt Bot Windblade Official Reveal Image

Discussion in 'Transformers News and Rumors' started by Sol Fury, Jul 18, 2013.

  1. RedAlert Rescue

    RedAlert Rescue Banned

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    As best I can recall they turn into a duplicate of the last Animal they touch regardless of gender. The real elephant in the room though is what's to stop them turning into another human ? or something incapable of much thought like a mollusc ; They might not know enough to be able to turn back to a human, But yes the Lion Rachael thing was a bit odd - but I think it was accurate to the source material and not something Hasbro just made up.

    It is a bit amusing to consider the gender issues of a Kabuki Female either she's implied to be a Prostitute, or she's a girl pretending to be a man pretending to be a girl.

    I find it safer for my sanity to think of her as a Samurai warrior theme instead.
     
  2. Blitz.

    Blitz. Well-Known Member

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    a bit off topic but I saw that about a month ago on netflix and I really cant understand how people don't talk about this movie more often. Its one of my fav best worst films ever.
     
  3. That Guy

    That Guy Well-Known Member

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    Fell off the thread a bunch of pages back, so I may have missed discussion on it.

    Is it confirmed that she's getting an IDW comic?

    Any word on whether it's in their G1 universe or not?

    I would love for Windblade to be introduced into the IDW G1 universe, and give them some opening for more Fembots. Maybe it'll tie in to Jhiaxus' plans for Cybertron... I just want to see Elita-1 or Override, leader femmes who aren't sociopaths like Arcee (not that mind her murder skills)
     
  4. GAUGE

    GAUGE Wargod ARTS

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    The Kabuki Warrior aesthetic is interesting.

    I would not be surprised if it's already been made at least in test shot form.

    I wonder if Hasbro's going to go the cheap route and just use the RiD Starscream as a base template for this toy.

    Whatever they choose to do, I hope at the very least it's Voyager scale, at least 1 female transformer needs some Voyager love.
    I hope they change the face to appear more feminine, because the face in the colored image just looks out of place. the line art face looks better IMO

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    I also think this Kabuki Make-up would kit better to the face design.

    [​IMG]
     
  5. jordanimus 1

    jordanimus 1 Well-Known Member

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    :2c: WindBlades bio should be another one of Jhihaxus experiments, especially with that killer kabuki make up. This should be a great time for Hasbro to flex its creative styles a new classic style fembot with prime engineering and Takara Tomy aesthetics. I look forward to seeing if this fembot revitalizes the extended use of autobot & decepticon female warriors in the comics and the toy creation realm. :thumb 
     
  6. SMOG

    SMOG Vocabchampion ArgueTitan

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    No worries... I was mainly taking issue with the list itself, not blaming you for its contents. It is nonetheless interesting to see how many completely obscure fembots there are out there.

    Explaining the presence of robot GENDER is the more salient issue. Robotic "beasts" and "weird alien forms" actually make an even further case against generic "fembot" forms, except in the most coincidental sense. After all, does Bayformer Starscream look "male" to you? Does Bumblebee even? It kind of busts apart the anthropomorphic paradigm (which is probably the nicest thing I will ever say about Bayformers). I mean, bearing in mind that those TFs that have "beast" shapes are already a contested phenomenon in Transformers (are they animal "pets", or are they just sentient Bots and Cons like any other?).

    However, in the case of the Bayformer movies, I don't think they ever DID "explain" why there are female bots. The bike triplets were just THERE... no explanations. Ditto the weird pretender chick (though the less said about that bullshit, the better).

    Yeah, that's what I meant. We already have a slightly "gender-neutral" perception of animals, even if we tacitly understand them to be male or female. So, by the same token, why do we need to see obvious markers of gender in alien robots who turn into cars (or in this case, jets)?

    The idea of Transformers being "genderless" has been circulating since the very beginning, and even in the presence of fembots, their visual appearance and portrayal raised worthwhile questions about the purpose of gender in the fiction. The idea that "nobody has used it since 1986" assumes that the idea hasn't been persistent and contested in the fandom at large since those days. Obviously the Fembot issue remains a significant question in the fandom because it's never received an adequate discussion (particularly in the G1 fictions).

    That doesn't really hold up though, since the majority of the Autobots were originally and often described as being initially civilian designs, who had to learn the ways of war. There's no reason for the Fembots being differentiated in that sense.

    As for "less sexist"... well, I think that there are a lot of different ways to look at that. The sexualized physical typing, the insistent "girlfriending", the reduced role in the fiction, the persistent archetypes in the characters... all of that also has sexist underpinnings.

    For my part, I've always preferred the idea of a truly "alien" concept of sexless/genderless TFs... though I understand that Fembots ARE part of the fiction, and won't just "go away". Looking at the alternative, I think that in that case, gender in TFs needs to be explored in an intelligent, logical way, and that if we are to have "Fembots" (whatever that ends up meaning), they should at least be somewhat freed of the sexist physical and social typing that has dogged them in the fiction up till now.

    And then, when you talk like that, I just hear crazy. "IDW's robo-sexists??" I mean, I think everybody here has acknowledged the fact that Furman pretty much botched the whole Fembot thing when he wrote Spotlight Arcee. But has IDW been "robo-sexist" since then? No... though I will agree that they've avoided the issue by not unpacking and rectifying the mess that Furman left them with. However, in terms of moving toward a gender-neutral alien interpretation of Cybertronian culture, they've been showing unprecedented daring (and restraint). Roberts has walked a careful line between a minefield of shipping fanfics, social commentary, and intelligently restructuring the whole biology/cosmology of Transformers. I hope he doesn't stop there.

    I'm not sure quite what part of IDW you're responding to (since unfortunately IDW has not been terribly consistent as they worked through their various writing teams). However, I think that "revisionism" is what MOST longtime fictions/genres NEED in order to survive. You use the term "revisionism" like it's a bad thing, and yet it is at the core of our tendency to shape our storytelling traditions to suit new (or more mature) audiences over time. Likening it to "fanfic" is a tawdry attempt to paint it with a shame brush, despite the fact that it's only a generic term you've decided fits anything you don't personally like.

    Again, Simon Furman is looooong past his prime, and the times have changed around him. And I've been a vocal critic of IDW's writing over the course of their career. But I don't see why you insist that IDW is still the same fiction it was 8 years ago. If anything, it feels like it's been completely born again in the last year or so... but finally blossoming into the fiction that I wanted to read back when I first started collecting Transformers in 1984 or so... !

    Well, I don't think Elementary is the same thing as an adaptation of Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes... but it can be worthwhile in its own right. More productively, BBC's Sherlock has had some fun exploring the underlying homosocial/homosexual tension in the Holmes/Watson dynamic... though I think that at the same time, it's sort of impossible to throw that out there without considering the extremely homosocial context of British culture of the 1900's (right on up to recent generations, in fact). But I digress...
    This ends up being a moot point, since the special metaphor that makes Transformers different is that they are both "alive" AND "giant machines"... and that their form of life for that reason, is much different than our own. Insisting that they are "alive" really doesn't imply anything, other than the fact that our common human definitions of "alive" are both arbitrary, and insufficient to the task of addressing these Cybertronian organisms.

    Not really. "Womanly virtue" is mostly a construct that is used to prescribe gendered behaviour and control the role models available to women. I think that there are ways of reclaiming old female archetypes, but the fact that most of them hinge around largely archaic notions of "hearth & home" and the old "mother/whore" dicotomy demonstrates the degree to which patriarchy has shaped the concept of gender through much of our history.

    I think this discussion has different facets. I'm not necessarily saying that we need to devalue archetypical maternal values or other "female" traits, or tell women it's wrong to feel like a "girly girl" (any more than it's "wrong" for a man to be domestic, emotive, sensitive, etc) but we do need to question these types, because taking them for granted is part of the problem.

    Ah, but "female proportions" and the fact that you take that entirely for granted is very much at the core of the debate. As is the very term "female" as it applies to Transformers. Both of those are things that bear examination and inquiry, rather than always defaulting to the easiest, most unquestioning answers.

    I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think a big part of my objection to this character, on top of everything else that has been said, is simply this: it's boring. It's not a very creative or stylistically congruous attempt at creating a fembot/jet toy. It's just not a very strong design, and certainly not one that marries form and function.

    If this were a truly awesome and clever design for a new toy, I suspect I'd be less sharply critical of the spirit of the thing.

    Awww, shucks. I do try... though also I flirt with insanity myself on occasion. :D 

    Sadly, this was my own first thought. :( 

    Safer, but not funnier. :) 

    I think one of the reasons that subversion is so appealing here is that it helps soften the pungent odor of cultural appropriation, clumsy essentialization and exoticization that seems to cling to this figure. But in the spirit of turnabout, Japan is the last culture that can throw stones on that account (from their glass pagoda).

    But there's also just the more subtle question of redundancy. I mean, here we have a "transformer on a Japanese cultural theme". To that, I have to ask what's more Japanese than a transforming super-robot???

    A gender-ambiguous kabuki ninja transforming super-robot, of course! :lol 

    zmog
     
  7. GAUGE

    GAUGE Wargod ARTS

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    whatever the case I want to get a few of these and make my female seeker squad a reality.

    the whole body excluding the head look amazing. that combine with that Slipstream Head look amazing.
     
  8. Thunderthruster

    Thunderthruster Autobot Supersoldier

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    A lengthy, but well rounded post SMOG. I agree that Furman has a lot to answer for in this particular topic of the brand.
     
  9. tabtiurf

    tabtiurf Chimeracon

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    Not to go all thread-necro here but has there been any news at all about this gal getting a toy?

    Because if she doesn't, the whole process was kind of pointless. I'm just having difficulty imagining a kabuki spaceplane being part of the AOE line and generations is basically done until the AOE line is over, right? So whither windblade?
     
  10. Galaxy Convoy

    Galaxy Convoy Well-Known Member

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    I think she's supposed to be #30 of the "Thrilling 30" thing Hasbro's doing. Which means her release is a ways off.
     
  11. SPLIT LIP

    SPLIT LIP Be strong enough to be gentle

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    It takes a long time to make a toy.
     
  12. Onslaught24

    Onslaught24 Ayo Fryman. That uh, that's highly illogical. Moderator News Staff

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    Holy shit. I don't know if anyone else noticed this but if they give her a new head, this'd make a damn fine Slipstream retool.
     
  13. PredaconElder

    PredaconElder Well-Known Member

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    Yes. Like everyone.
     
  14. Captain

    Captain Trust me, I’m the best.

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    what market is Hasbro going for? Will tf fans really buy this comic?
     
  15. Murasame

    Murasame 村雨

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    yes
     
  16. That Guy

    That Guy Well-Known Member

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    It's a generations figure, so it's probably going to be marketed towards older TF fans, if you look at all the threads, there looks like there is strong support for the comic on for a significant portion of the fanbase (I could not give you a guess however, if they are a majority or minority among comic fans). Hopefully it's a good figure and a good read, and if that's the case I think it will sell itself.