Is Transformers an emotionally-stunted franchise?

[Dominic]

The 4chan thing is....unfortunate.

How much of the Bronie fandom is "that sort" of fan though? No doubt, there are some terrible bits of fanfic and fan art out there. (-late edit: Oh my lord. Why did I go to fanfiction.net? Lessee, slash fic, "unique perspectives", fan characters as main characters...... It is like a clearinghouse for every bad fanfic cliche.)

But, in practical terms, does that take anything away from the little girl demographic? Remember, they are unllikely to be reading 4chan.

Television shows are not a finite resource. One person watching or taping a show does not prevent another person from doing the same thing. The distribution of MLP merchandise is no worse than the distribution of TF product. Hasbro is to blame for that more than the fandom. (Aside, as with the blind bagged Kre-O figures, I promised myself that I would share bag codes with kids. Of course, I had to delete them from my phone for lack of space. But, you get the idea.) Collectors are not picking "My LIttle Pony" product clean off of shelves.

I have not been following the show as much as others. But, how much is the show bending and responding to the Bronies? The comic has a rotating creator team, including legitimate comics talent. But, it is nothing that one could not give to a kid.


Mind you, I am not defending that kind of Bronie. They do not seem to be damaging the Pony property as much as that kind of Transfan is arguably damaging the Transformers franchise.


Dom
-forgot just how bad fanfic could be....

[Shockwave]

And I have to acknowledge that because it's something that directly relates to the story. But, I do not care who CS Lewis was trying to write for when he wrote because it doesn't have any impact on the story.

I am not sure how you can do that.

Lewis wrote what he wrote for a specific and stated reason.

True, but...

That is inevitably going to impact the tone and content of the book.

Not necessarily.

The short answer is I read the book and the story and that's it. Then I go play Minecraft for what I think is ten minutes but actually turns out to be ten hours. Sure, Lewis probably had a specific audience in mind when he wrote it. He definitely had a specific purpose for writing it and there's additional meaning in the story that I still fail to see. It's there, but the fact that I fail to see it is more a commentary on his effectiveness as a writer more than anything else. He intended Aslan to be Jesus. I still really think he failed in the execution of that concept but that's not for me to say that because he failed it doesn't exist.

But, what I'm getting at is that when I read Narnia, I don't read the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and analyze it's quality based on what the existing Narnia fandom is going to percieve it. Nor do I bother to consider what audience Lewis wrote it for. I'm reading it, so I'm part of that audience, intention be damned. And, none of any of that has any impact on the story itself. It may have influenced how he wrote it (ie: omition of swear words when writing appropriately for children) but that's not the same as changing the fundamental story. He had a story to tell and he told it. It's now up to me as the reader to decide it's quality based on my own criteria.

The way this circles back to MTMTE is that, again, you still seem to be basing your dislike of it on criteria other than the story itself. I seriously doubt Roberts is pandering to any fandom. He has stories he wants to tell and is telling them, fandom be damned. Or maybe I just have a hard time believing that any creator of official content would actually give two shits what any fan has to say about said content when creating said content. The just seems so far fetched to me. But then again, I grew up in a world where content creators were mostly inaccessible to their public. If one was a fan of Star Wars you didn't just email or facebook George Lucas with suggestions of things that should be in Return of the Jedi. He just made the movie and you either liked it or hated it and that was it. Game over. But in this case it's almost as if you're saying Roberts is standing around yelling "Hey fans! Fans! Over here! CANDY FOR EVERYBODY!!!" and I really just have a hard time understanding why anyone would do that.

I do get what you're saying. You started hating the book because Roberts was... aimless (for lack of a better term). But, the question (on the face of it) of why is robot movie night worth reading could apply to anything and everything? Why is robots fighting in space worth your time to read?

I would not bother to read a book that was simply all "robot fights in space" either.

Yeah and I still say there's a lot of subtlety in MTMTE that you're just not seeing. It's not about movie night, it's about the characters and how they relate to each other and that leads to deeper themes than that which leads to other stuff, it's like an onion but you can't get past the first layer of it.

[Mako Crab]

Right now there's an topic on TFW asking if a female Autobot or Decepticon could lead the factions. And I keep seeing a very specific view creeping into the discussion that says:

1. The Transformers have no gender.
2. A female-looking TF cannot lead the factions.

What is the context of those statements? Who said it and why?

And, is anybody else trying mightily not to make a joke about Override/Nitro Convoy (from "Cybertron"/"Galaxy Force") and then saying "whoops 'female looking'"?

Here to provide context!!

The thread is currently 11 pages long.
Every reply supported the idea of female Transformers in a wider variety of roles, including leadership.
While many replies were pro-gender, the call for asexual Transformers is also very loud.
Some replies said that while they would like to see female TFs lead smaller groups, they didn't feel a female could lead an entire faction.

And the link to that thread if you're curious
http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transform ... aders.html

The thread overall is overwhelmingly supportive of the idea of female Transformers, and it is worth noting that even people that don't like the idea of seeing them as faction leaders were still comfortable with females leading smaller groups. Perhaps they were speaking from a business POV- as in, "Would Hasbro be willing to risk their boys' toys franchise by making the leaders girls?" I can't really guess their motivations, but it was an attitude I noticed and it stuck in my mind.

Not sure how much Arcee's UK origin really challenged much of anything. It was Furman being snarky about a cheap focus-grouped character that he got stuck with. "Prime's Rib" is one of the few examples of a TF story that was intentionally bad that I give a pass to.

The IDW origin had a bit mroe going on, and it definitely had more depth. But, it was still Furman shitting on the idea of female TFs.

The thing with Cloudburst and the Femaxian was more or less generic "boy meets powerful girl". And, Budiansky made sure to have both characters avoid any mix of meat and metal.

I agree that none of these examples are all that good, but they were the few times I could think of where asexual Transformers of the comics (rather than the gendered TFs of the cartoons) were anywhere close to addressing issues of gender. "Prime's Rib" is crap, but I remembered it more for Jazz' confusion over what a female is more than anything Arcee did or said.

By the same token, why should TF bother to tackle those questions. As I have said before, TF lends itself to tackling other issues. Why should it go out of its way to tacke gender questions?

So you're just going to answer my question with a question, Dom? Come on, man. You're better than that.

But okay. I'll bite. I'm going to quote SMOG from the "Female Leaders" discussion on TFW, as he makes a strong case for asexual Transformers and why gender issues should be addressed in the fiction.

Posted by SMOG
I think the key is actually making them relatable and effective metaphors while simultaneously foregrounding how alien they are. In other words, by providing an disjunctive mirror of our norms and cultural/biological presumptions, it actually allows us to see through our own humanity, or to contextualize it more truthfully. Case in point: the abolishing of "conventional" gender in Transformers actually encourages us to re-evaluate our own constructions and taken-for-granted biases about gender in humans, and allows us to view our world afresh. Which, I would argue, is one of the great strengths of science-fiction as a genre.

There is absolutely no value in making them direct uncomplicated metaphors for humanity because at that point, they become as boring (relatively speaking) as any other space franchise. You lose what makes them special, and erase their potential beyond being simply a way to promote toys.

It is also a question of having girly looking robots is getting in to depths of Silver Age stupidity that most fans do not want to see in their comics.

Silver Age stupidity? I'm not sure I follow.

[BWprowl]

Don't let anyone fool you--the pony stuff started when 4chan saw that the Hub was getting a new MLP series, and decided to spam posts about it all over /co/ (the cartoon and comics board) for about a month. Then people started actually watching it, and there you go. It started ironically.

I've been hella busy so I haven't had the time to formulate responses to some of the newer points raised in this thread (it's been interesting to read though, for sure), but I had to clarify on this that it wasn't all that clear-cut as you make it out to be here. While I would bet money that the majority of adult fans watching MLP: FiM came from /co/, and a lot of it was people who watched the first episode initially to go "Okay, let's see how lame this is-Oh wait, it's actually pretty good!", there was legitimate interest in the series due to Lauren Faust being involved (she's responsible for Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which /co/ effing loved). There also honestly wasn't much 'spamming' of it on the board, at least for malicious purposes, just a lot of people talking about it because there was a lot of legitimate interest in it because holy shit, there's a really good My Little Pony cartoon, what are the odds! So /co/ flipped the fuck out because Ooh Cooties and couldn't handle the idea of more than one horse thread at a time (despite the fact that they've got no problem with thirty Batman threads going at once).

Anyway, my point is, if the show hadn't actually had *something* there, then it would've just been a few weeks of people watching and posting about it ironically as a joke and it would've dried up (remember My Life Me?), instead of growing into the phenomenon it became. Sometimes popular things are popular for a reason.

That said, while I do enjoy the show and own a decent smattering of the toys (hey, I like owning physical representations of things I like), I do agree with your sentiment that a large majority of the fanbase are horrible people. The same way I think a large majority of the Transformers fanbase are horrible people, or a large majority of the anime-viewing fanbase are horrible people.

Look, if any of us has been objectively right about anything in this thread, it's Shockwave with his point that all fandoms are like 90% retarded.

[Dominic]

"Prime's Rib" is crap, but I remembered it more for Jazz' confusion over what a female is more than anything Arcee did or said.

Furman was basically shitting on a character while being forced to introducesaid character.

Silver Age stupidity? I'm not sure I follow.

"This is ____________, and this is the female analogue for ______________."

Look, if any of us has been objectively right about anything in this thread, it's Shockwave with his point that all fandoms are like 90% retarded.

There is something to this. The stereotype of fans as over-grown children carries an uncomfortable amount of truth.

[Mako Crab]

Furman was basically shitting on a character while being forced to introducesaid character.

Yeah. No argument there.

"This is ____________, and this is the female analogue for ______________."

Ah, now I see. Yeah, totally right. That was one of the suggestions made in the Female Leaders thread btw. A few people thought that the only way we'd ever get female faction leaders was to just make female versions of Optimus and Megatron.