Opinion: Bottom 5 Moments of IDW's Transformers Run

[BigTransformerTrev]

Transformer genders exist for the same reason why most robot modes look humanoid -- to help the human audience relate to them as characters.

People tend to forget this and get caught up in the whole idea that Transformers is this whole real thing, devoid of the pressures of appealing to the public and selling toys.

Yup, there are female Transformers and bipedal Transformers because they appeal to toy buyers. If Transformers existed simply as fiction devoid of market pressures, then there would be no reason every TF couldn't look like they were out of the Movieverse or something, with 4 legs and 3 arms and their head in their chests and one big eye with no discernible gender and speaking in binary. But toys like that might freak 5 year-olds out rather than enticing them to buy, and would make animation for tv cartoon shows a nightmare.

[Sinnertwin]

Transformers are real for me, damn it!
Ooh, bright lights!

[KELPIE]

There is no similar theory that a species action/reaction can be directly tied to being brought to life by a living planet in order to one day fight another living planet so as to save the universe from being devoured?

Sadly that wasn't their history in the IDWverse

Yeah but I spose by the same token Malebots don't make sense either.

Agreed. If they didn't have voices in the cartoons they likely would all be gender neutral.

But from the perspective that Transformers are a toyline and all the related media such as comics and cartoons are to sell those toys, having malebots and fembots makes perfect sense. It really opens up a plethora of options for both new toys and storylines, and increases the range of the franchises appeal to various markets. For instance, my daughter took all my Autobot Fembots the other day and made them have a tea party. She loved the fact that they had working knees so she could make them sit on her dollhouse chairs! It was so cute! She wouldn't have been remotely interested in playing with my Transformers if they were all boys that turned into tanks. And because she loves playing with my Fembots, I have at least a half-dozen different ones stashed away to give her when she gets older. So ergo, having Fembots means more sales for Hasbro

Is that an association with them being fembots, colour or alt mode? Did you tell her they were the female ones? What does she think of Missfire?

[BigTransformerTrev]

Sadly that wasn't their history in the IDWverse

True - got so caught up in the discussion I forgot the original purpose of the thread

Is that an association with them being fembots, colour or alt mode? Did you tell her they were the female ones? What does she think of Missfire?

Fembots. I never open new toys without my 6 year old son, and my daughter always questions me if any of the new toys I got are girls. She has gotten pretty good at spotting them independently though and holding up the box going 'this is a girl one Dad!'. Sometimes its the colour that clues her in (Arcee, Elita-1 etc) and sometimes its their body shape, such as she was able to tell straight off the bat that Novastar was a girl. If she is unsure she asks. For instance she didn't know if Slash was a girl so asked.

[Jellico]

Agreed. If they didn't have voices in the cartoons they likely would all be gender neutral.

My view is based on the Gobot Spay-C.

I owned the toy and barely watched the cartoon and for 30 years thought she was male.

These are toys that for the best part of 35 years been marketed at boys. There are civilians out there who don't know that female Transformers exist. The kids who play with them for the most part are boys. And because of wish fulfillment and self insertion they associate with the male characters. Plenty of boys out there think Prime Arcee was awesome but they will pick a male character first as toy sales showed. And if the character isn't overtly female the assumption is that it will be male until told otherwise.

To me that is the reality. Adding more female characters is good but I don't know if it will help. It may even hurt if they don't sell as well.

I love this article on the subject.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai.../legos/484115/

If Lego are right the old Japanese trope of Arcee staying back at base might be the way to go. Of course not as a maid. But if boys play patterns are about the vehicles and girls play patterns are about interacting with an environment like a playset it would be interesting to see how Transformers would have to be modified to facilitate it.

[BigTransformerTrev]

I love this article on the subject.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai.../legos/484115/

If Lego are right the old Japanese trope of Arcee staying back at base might be the way to go. Of course not as a maid. But if boys play patterns are about the vehicles and girls play patterns are about interacting with an environment like a playset it would be interesting to see how Transformers would have to be modified to facilitate it.

Well, my daughter:

took all my Autobot Fembots the other day and made them have a tea party. She loved the fact that they had working knees so she could make them sit on her dollhouse chairs! It was so cute! She wouldn't have been remotely interested in playing with my Transformers if they were all boys that turned into tanks.

So just make sure the Fembots have knees so they can sit down with each other for a nice chat

Jokes aside, I've often used Transformers to try and show my son there is nothing wrong with, as he terms it, 'girl stuff'. Like he has an eversion to the colour pink so I will dig out my Seacons and say 'Well these are pink and they combine into a giant killing machine!'. I quite liked Strongarm in RID as she really got away from the Fembot stereotype, both with her attitude and her alt-mode. I was really pleased when my son complained the other day the only Strongarm he has is the Happy Meals one.

We really tried not to steer our kids towards gender-specific toys and when they were little made sure the majority of their toys didn't make them conform to the stereotypes. But it soon became apparent when they started daycare at around 18 months that those were the toys they wanted. There were tons of different toys on offer but my son never showed interest in the dolls, he liked the trucks. Conversely my daughter made straight for the dollies and wasn't interested in playing cars.

We are really liking the Marble Run set we gave my son for Xmas as they both play with it and both really enjoy it. It's got a ton of different colours so there are as many pink connectors as blue and it encourages creativity and understanding of the basic principles of cause and effect. It's a brilliant example of a fun non-gender specific toy.

As for how the Japanese treat Fembots, I think they make the best toys by far, but they still market those Fembots to males rather than girls. For instance I love my Megatronia but the comic that came with her showed the rest of the female team soaping Megaempress up in the shower Definitely aimed at male collectors. Likewise Legends Blackarachnia is a great toy, but considering how busty they made her on the boxart, it made it apparent that it was a Fembot once again marketed to males.

How you would market Fembots specifically to girls I don't know, the most I have bought my daughter so far was the My Little Kitty/Transformers crossover toy an I intend to get her some Bot-Bots this Xmas.

[FatalityPitt]

How you would market Fembots specifically to girls I don't know, the most I have bought my daughter so far was the My Little Kitty/Transformers crossover toy an I intend to get her some Bot-Bots this Xmas.

I'm probably generalising a bit, but I think a lot of younger girls like princesses and plush animals. Maybe if Hasbro wanted to market Transformers to a female audience; they could make fembots who transform into cute animals (bears, cats, rabbits, etc) and give them these princess-themed accessories like tiaras, magic wands, etc. I don't have kids so I'm really just guessing.

In the spirit of the thread, one thing I found underwhelming with the IDW run was the Titans Return arc. I thought it was going to tie in with the toy line but the only Titan Master characters I saw during that arc were Infinitus/Sentinel Prime, Sovereign, and that guy who's head turned into a cat who got killed by Galvatron. Besides Chromedome, Brainstorm, Misfire and Krok; I thought a lot of the characters in the toyline like Blaster, Highbrow, Weirdwolf and Mindwipe were underused in the comics. Since most of the Autobot Headmasters (except Hardhead who was dead at the time) were on the lost light, it maybe would have been good if James Roberts did a 2 or 3 issue arc that focused on those characters back when Titans Return toys were still on the store shelves.

[GoktimusPrime]

Agreed. If they didn't have voices in the cartoons they likely would all be gender neutral.

As much as I dislike the Machine Men, I gotta admit that gender balance was something that they handled much better than the Transformers. As you've rightly pointed out, Tonka/Hanna Barbera drew upon a good number of existing toys and designated them as female, and there was nothing that really physically differentiated them from the male Gobots. And later canon would explain why the Gobots have genders; they're cyborgs, not robots. Let's face it, Arcee was basically the Smurfette of the Transformers. She was really just a token female character and deliberately designed to be overtly exaggerated feminine in design (whereas characters like Megatron and Shockwave had their trigger sections reduced to avoid making them look too masculine ). Although Japan was a bit more progressive as they did have Minerva. And while Clipper was still pink and never had a toy, she wasn't given a buxom female body type but was basically a repaint of Hyperdrive/Detour with a different head.

There were very few Transformer toys that fans could pretend were female because many canonical sources, including the tech spec bios included with the figures, would use masculine pronouns. But one example from Generation 2 was Dreadwing and Smokescreen.

Note the absence of any gendered pronouns, this means that for a brief time when this toy was first released, you could choose what gender you wanted these toys to be. But then ancillary canon like the G2 comics came along and assigned male gender pronouns so... bleh.

Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward were more proactive in this regard as they wanted to, as has happened with Machine Men, assign existing toys as females. They initially convinced Hasbro (well, Kenner) to allow the repaint of Tarantulas, Blackarachnia, to be written as a female character. Then for the Maximal side they managed to get hold of Kenner early enough so that female pronouns could be inserted into Airazor's tech spec bios, making her the first female Transformer that wasn't a repaint of a male character. And yeah, we all know that Blackarachnia's body proportions were greatly tweaked in the cartoon to make her look much more buxom than the toy; but to be fair, it wasn't unusual for the animators to "retool" characters based on existing models to make them look more distinctive (Tigatron has "retooled" features from Cheetor). The first true female Transformer toy - one that was conceived to be female from its inception, was of course Transmetal Airazor in 1998... and given a distinctively feminine body shape in robot mode.

Beast Machines was somewhat more progressive with Strika; the first female Transformer also conceived to be female but not given a remotely feminine looking body type. She's just given the same design aesthetic as any other Vehicon and not physically treated any differently from her male counterparts. It's only her voice and other characters referring to her with feminine pronouns that tells you that she's female. Some G1 toys that never had their gender previously specified have since been retroactively established as being female, such as the rather unfortunately named Windy and Discharge.

I personally felt that the gender issues in IDW were initially handled quite well; it was just matter of fact and they didn't make a deal of it. Until they made a deal of it, then it sucked. Part of me also thinks that it's weird that the first female Transformer was called Solus Prime as "Solus" is masculine. The feminine is "Sola Prime." But then again, "Ultra" is also feminine and we have male Transformers called "Ultra Magnus," so... yeah. The masculine for Ultra is "Ulter" (which is where English gets words like "ulterior" from).

[Jellico]

I sometimes wonder how the world would have been different if Ratchet had gone the full Ratched as originally intended.

The Chick in the Five Man Band was a pretty established trope by the mid 80s. Transformers is near unique in not employing it. I can only assume that the sales of Baroness were relatively poor establishing the commercial incentive to go all male.

[GoktimusPrime]

See... toy companies assumed that boys didn't want to buy female action figures but this wasn't necessarily true. I had Princess Leia figures as a kid, as did a lot of other boys that I knew. Ditto Teela and Evil-Lyn. She-Ra might've been more appealing if she were an actual action figure and not a doll. And yeah, plenty of 80s kids had female Machine Men.