Quote Originally Posted by KELPIE View Post
Difficult topic, however they should all really be gender neutral... However I get that they aren't and why they shouldn't.
Transformers have genders to make them more relatable to the audience, and because languages like English lack gender-neutral third person pronouns. The first (and only?) tech specs bio in English to have no gendered pronouns was G2 Dreadwing/Smokescreen, making them the first gender-neutral Transformers... for a short while at least - until they appeared in the G2 comics and were referred to with male pronouns. And also because the voice actors/actresses are either men or women, and will have a man's or woman's voice.

I gotta admit that Machine Men handled robot genders better than Transformers. Lipstick aside (which TFs is equally guilty of), none of the female Machine Men had effeminate body proportions. Toys were just randomly assigned as male or female and just looked like their toys. And female Machine Men with faceplates just looked the same as the male robots... you couldn't tell if they were male or female until you heard their voices.

Quote Originally Posted by KELPIE View Post
For Elita and her Dunebuggy alt mode, I just hope that a) it can be tooled to look like her proper alt mode, or they don't try and ham-fist Nightbeat into that mould and b) this dunebuggy does not equal Sureshot, Joyride, Ruckus. and I seriously want those guys, but not repurposed from this.
It might not be so bad if these characters have already been pre-purposed as other characters, like Nightbeat. I think that pre-tooling is a better option than retooling. e.g. Earthrise Cliffjumper was also pre-tooled as Bumblebee. It's obvious that from the outset, that mould was built to be both characters (then later retooled as Hubcap). As a result, all three figures are pretty solid. Kingdom Ultra Magnus on the other hand is clearly a retrospective retool of Siege Ultra Magnus, and does consequently suffer somewhat.