What's rich is taking this one case of very disturbing stories going very strongly against social norms and making it equal to a toy company not going out of their way to explain things especially as they're already more inclusive than their toys were before.

That's too rich.

One could be considered an illegal pornography. The second one is selling kids toys.

Pretty sure the corporation got it already figured what they should and can do with their products.

 

Sorry I forgot obscenity laws that also restrict the first amendment, my bad I got the rest. You're proving my point, the cultural norm in the case you presented was codified into law. In America you can't be punished for something that isn't law. You can't be legally be forced to do something that isn't law. I never said I believe in absolute freedom of artists, I listed the bounds of the freedom, the law being one of them. Did you even read what I wrote? Everything I said is fact in America.

 

Why is gender identity something fundamentally inscribed into a person's subjectivity while every other kind of identity is just a stupid accident of history?

I'm an American. It's a part of my identity. But I could have just as easily been raised as an Australian or something. I would possibly be a very different person in that case, but it would not have been some kind of traumatic violation of my soul.

But I'm also a man. If my family had decided to raise me as a woman, is it likely I would be experiencing some kind of dysphoria today, or would it not even occur to me that I should be something other than a woman?

And if I did experience dysphoria, would that be because I was really a man who had been misgendered, or would it be because my society's gender norms were too rigid to accept people with dicks as proper women?

Would trans people not exist as such in a society with less restrictive gender norms?

Could we have a human society without men and women in the same sense that we could have a human society without Americans and Australians?

 

well this thread was destined for this lol, but come on people, what are we talking about here? a man is a man, a woman is a woman, Australians are people living in Australia and so on, what are we talking about? this is like me going to a store and asking for Coke and they give me tea because tea identifies itself as a coke LOL

let's stay on the subject, should Arcee/gender be explored more in TF? No. Arcee was a mistake in IDW that they can't fix now so they're just going to ride it and Transformers don't have gender so therefore it can't be explored

 

People are men and women because they say they are men and women. (Or, they are not men and not women because they say they are not men and not women).

As everyone knows, the crime of male chauvinism is to reduce women to the objects of sexual fantasy. But the endpoint of this is not Frank Cho drawing officially licensed Spider-Woman porn. It's Furman's repeated assertion that there is no sexist ideology in Transformers comics because women don't actually exist.

"The key point in obsessional fantasy is that the barred subject strives to negate the Other as desiring so as to directly relate to the lost object. [...] What the obsessional dreams of, we might say, is a world without others." -- some Lacanian blog

Spotlight Arcee is about what happens when a woman is introduced into the no-girls-allowed zone of G1 TF. It is strangely awful, and therefor good, in the same sense that the Cthulhu Mythos stories are good -- precisely because Lovecraft put all of his weird racist fantasies onto the page for public analysis, rather than in spite of it.

 

For safety sake exploring Arcee being female it is not a safe topic. So no the whole gender thing is polluted by the Spotlight. Arcee is just better focus on other things and move as far away from her Spotlight which was only good for creating controversy. I rather see Arcee develop more as operative and being a field commander on Earth.

 

Though I will note the brief mentions of what happened to Arcee with Jhiaxus back in Sins weren't bad. And when she talks about her gender in exRiD, in brief bits, *that's* worked (not feeling instant connection just because she meets other women, and her being happy with who she is now). But they've been very cautious about it, and rightly so. Filling in more tidbits about what happened with Jhiaxus and Arcee could be interesting.

 

I love Spotlight Arcee. People who want comics with Froid and Rung but without Lacan want comics that are boring and wrong, they are trying to bore me to death, and I will answer their aggression by fighting them irl. Or by boring them to death first, whichever.

 

Which is a thing that, so far, only you have done. Agp and I were discussing the influence of cultural norms on artistic and commercial freedom. Because they made the argument that artists are free of any kind of social responsibility. We wandered a bit away from Transformers, to my chagrin.

I don't see how you established a direct connection between the Red Rose Stories censorship case and Transformers IDW gender portrayal, but you continue to amaze me Haywired, with your ability to see connections where seemingly none were made.

Your point was that, and I quote: "People can debate all they want but you can't force a comercial interest or individual to adhere to a culture, only the law." You acted as if "the law" was free of cultural influence. It's not. You can easily force people to adhere to culture, using laws. And your own country does so.

So arguing that "Only the law can stop artistic freedoms, not culture!" when you claim you knew and had in mind that some of the laws that stop artistic freedom are cultural ones...well that seems a bit disingenuous, or twistedly pedantic to me. But if we both agree that artists do have social responsibility, because culture expectations are and can be enforced by law, then that aspect of the conversation can be laid to rest.

Whether you believe it valid or not, some people identify as non-binary genders, i.e a gender other than man or woman. Some people are also born intersex and are not easily assigned as "man" or "woman" by physical traits alone. Other people are binary gendered (identify as a man or woman) but may identify as a binary gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

When you look at non-humans, it becomes even more complicated, because on this Earth we have animals that can even change their reproductive sex/gender (clownfish, for instance) and it begs the question, why do Cybertronians follow human sex traits and traditional genders, when just our own planet alone contains species with far different sex traits and behavior patterns?

With imitating humans, there is also the issues of gender norms, gender policing, and gender essentialism (trying to say that "Girls must be this way" or "Men must do this or they are not *real* men").

And that is the world that comics are trying to emulate when they strive to be "inclusive". In other words, a very complex, highly politicized and often emotional topic that is, in other words, quite a can of worms.

 

You mean a connection you made (btw, there wasn't any censorship - she published something that was an obvious breach of the law since there are laws in place against the children pornography and it's a very desirable situation when the law is executed) using this case as a rebuttal to how a toy company or a comic book isn't really beholden to anything?

You continue to amaze me Succursal with being selective, now.

If there would be a bill in place demanding a kind of a social norm from the company, then they'd be under obligation. As it stands now, the only obligation there is to their shareholders. They don't really have to do anything. They're free of any perceived responsibility with no real way to force anything.
The worst case scenario a company can face is their product not being popular and thus not selling well enough.

These two cases aren't even related. There's a law in place the woman violated. If the law wasn't there, nobody would be able to touch her no matter what cultural norm was violated.

 

It's a rebuttal to someone saying "IN AMERICA! Artists are free from social responsibility." which is simply not true. They were making a very specific statement of fact that was incorrect, and so I corrected it.

I'm afraid you'll have to explain to me how that was "making it equal to a toy company not going out of theri way to explain things especially as they're already more inclusive than their toys were before".

I'm eager to see how that idea of yours connects to anything I said. Where is the part where my correction of agp "[made Red Rose Stories censorship] equal to a toy company not going out of their way to explain things"?

Care to show us? It seems my abilities still aren't up to par with yours Haywired, because I still don't see the connection.

No, it's actually not an "obvious breach of the law", especially not of a child pornography laws. She wasn't arrested because of child pornography laws--she was arrested on obscenity charges. They are not the same thing.

There is also the issue of it being text. No one has ever been convicted, in the United States, of child pornography charges for purely text creations. That's because United States' law defines child pornography as a visual depiction.

So you're just straight out factually wrong. And that's kind of amazing. That you bother to act as if you know ~the obvious truth~ about a subject you've clearly given very little research into or thought on. I suspect you are very unfamiliar with the history of and finer points of censorship, especially as it applies to text. What's amazing is that you bothered to speak up anyway. It's just really fascinating to me.

Do tell me, dear Haywired, how U.S obscenity laws are not laws obligating artists (and the companies that publish them) to follow social norms. Tell me what the purpose of U.S obscenity laws are, if not to enforce social norms. Keep in mind that we are not talking about child pornography charges, because those are separate and different from obscenity charges--obscenity charges fall under the Miller Test's jurisdiction, child pornography does not and has its own defintion.

 

from what i understand the IDW Transformers aren't even sentient, are they? i mean the whole Shadowplay thing just simply defies that, in this universe they are 100% mechanical customizable machines, you can practically change their personalities, their likings etc. normally Transformers were mechanical but they had the mysticism of sparks, their souls that contained.. "them" their sentience, the "AllSaprk and Till All Are One in the AllSpark etc.", all that has no meaning here, i really feel like Roberts doesn't give a f**k about any Transformers lore and just goes on with his mission of giving us a crew of "diverse personalities", in the IDW universe the sparks are what exactly? they are practically just that, a spark that can be reignited when it's running low by one that is bright, this whole IDW Transformers gender/identity debate thing is very tired, the source material it isn't consistent at all, it doesn't make sense not one bit

 

I think you misunderstand, shadowplay is akin to lobotomies, humans are sentient but given certain conditioning, you can change how someone thinks and reacts to things.

They are mechanical lifeforms, the same rules of organics don't apply, but they are very much alive, and very much sentient, if they weren't sentient they wouldn't have personalities. Being mechanical it is possible to mess with the mind in a more literal. Sparks are like the power source to the other components, their lifeforce as it were, but needed alongside the brain module, hence why Cyclonus was able to save Tailgate's life.

That said IDW is unique amongst the takes on the franchise.

 

@Succursal I assumed you were talking of social responsibilities not codified into law. Typically when I hear people speak of social responsibility it's about matters that fall outside of the rule of law.

I want to clarify is that I never acted as if law was free cultural influence. Law is part of culture, not all culture is part of law. Do I really need to say that in my argument? It's freaking common knowledge to everyone that is through high school. Typically when people argue they don't include points that are assumed to fundamentally understood by the lowest common denominator.

I agree that any individual or entity is bound by the all facets of the law, be they social, cultural, economic or of any other nature. Again, I really didn't think I had to spell that out.