Onslaught Six wrote:**Incidentally, replace Lamborghinis with "dudes with mono eyes and limbs that are weapons" and you have accurately described what happens in-canon to Empurata victims. The difference is, very few humans have one eye and robot limbs.
The difference between Empurata and Arcee is that Empurata victims don't have a direct real world counterpart group to point to as being mistreated. Empurata victims are victims of systematic torture, scarred illegally in secret by a system more interested in propping up its corruptions then dealing with its core problems. What would the correlation be to our society?
Shockwave wrote:Also, the thing to remember with Arcee is that it wasn't being made female that made her all psycho, it was the fact that she was radically physically altered against her will. I suppose it would essentially be the closest thing to Cybertronian rape. It was a traumatic physical experience that she never got over. So, being psycho isn't a side effect of being female, it was an effect of Jhiaxus' experiment/torture. It certainly wasn't Furman's way of saying "Bitches be crazy".
First off, what you described isn't a correlation to rape at all, not everything done to someone against their will is automatically rape - that is a bad analogy.
Now, on your larger point, the "changed against her will" portion, it doesn't hold that much water, and the reason is because Transformers change their bodies all the time. Arcee even changes her body in Dark Cybertron, I beleive. So the idea that forced change somehow is grossly traumatizing rings hollow, it comes across more as an excuse for a misogynist concept than a justified alternative to one. The end result is that the only female in that universe was Arcee, Arcee was hysterical insane psycho, therefore the only female was hysterical insane psycho. Whether he intended it or not, he ended up saying "being female is bad here, and every bitch be crazy".
O6 wrote:Never said it was; my reading of it is "females are an anomaly and have no place in this universe I have personally curated."
Pretty much.
Dom wrote:"Windblade" is also marketed as part of IDW's long-running TF comics. IDW's comics (as a whole) have been set in real time. But, after nearly a decade with the license, that seems to be breaking down (not just in Windblade). Taking place in real-time (more or less) made "Transformers" unique. I would hate to see that go away. (RiD and MTMTE seem to be breaking with that as well.)
Yawn. Dom people problems.
How? Every time DC does a reset, every time any company launches a book, certain things are established and other things are ruled out. Why is it so wrong that Furman tried to extirpate a character-gimmick that seems like a Silver-Age throwback?
Because it's a representative of 51% of our society's genetic makeup.
I will not accuse you of conflating homosexuality and misogyny if you do not accuse me of homophobia.
I have had enough personal experience to know that some homosexual men are vocally misogynistic, to the point where it's become known as a stereotype, especially for someone his age.
Short answer, yes, if I found out that was Furman's motive, it would affect how I saw his handling of Arcee. One of my problems with the last 20 pages of "Enders Game" (beyond the fact that it sucks) is that it springs from the foetid loins of Card's insane universalism. ("Everybody is, or wants to be like, us....white folks. Even aliens want to be like us.")
But, I am pretty sure that it was not Furman's motive. (And, for the record, if Furman is gay, I do not care. I hope he is banging Transformers groupies half his age and not making any commitments to them. Go Furman!)
So your arguments are on faith then, faith that you know Furman enough to let that slant positively affect your take on the situation. I try not to argue from that position unless either the work is clearly an intended mouthpiece for the author, or the author is vocal about a belief that affects the work; if it doesn't stand out, or someone doesn't make it stand out, I try to leave such things out.
The "why" matters because that is what Furman was actually saying/trying to say.
You're saying that the audience can only know a work if they know the author and his or her true motivations and any connecting opinions which may color the work at the time of creation. I don't agree with that, each work will some day stand on its own without anything to speak for the creator except the work itself.
Prowl wrote:And I don't think Scott was trying to say anything with her quickie retcon of 'colony of some-female Transformers' other than "Hey, wouldn't it be nice if there were female characters that weren't deranged sex-changed males?". She makes no indictment of Furman's concept on the page; she never even mentions Arcee. If Windblade and Chromia were meeting Arcee in the comic and recoiling in disgust and talking about what a "bad idea" she was, you might have a point, but they don't, and you don't.
Bingo.
Dom wrote:Yeah, Furman hates writing women. That is why the first POV character he introduced in IDW was Verity Carlo. Mercy (from "Dragon's Claw"), several human female characters from TF UK and likely some others (from books I have not read) are all indicative of Furman's disdain for writing women.
Verity Carlo in the books I read before LSotW was very much a guy-gal, a gal written to be the token but who acted almost exclusively like one of the guys (aside from the occasional outburst of over-the-top girliness).
Saying "girl robots are stupid" is not the same as saying "girls are stupid".
They
are when set in a universe dominated by stories about sentient humanoid guy robots.
Anderson wrote:And this is why Windblade and the other characters are a major annoyance. Because now we're discussing gender issues instead of Transformers.
The characters aren't the problem, the issue is that this brand continues to prove itself resistant to development of any kind, that there is no room for outsiders to enjoy the brand unless they enjoy it the way old-guard fans have always enjoyed it, "the way it was intended back in '84". Nothing in the Windblade first issue discussed gender issues in any significant manner.
Can't my light entertainment be free of politics and social issues? I guess not.
That would be the light entertainment that had never had factions warring over limited resources and philosophical differences and beings' inalienable rights? Even the earliest fiction elements of G1 are steeped in politics and social issues, you just didn't care before because you chose to overlook them, or you didn't understand them at the time. Even before the Sunbow cartoon, look at Mirage's tech spec bio:
Mirage is not thrilled about being an Autobot freedom fighter. Prefers hunting turbofoxes on Cybertron with his high-priced friends. - Class warfare.
Unsure of Autobot cause... can't be fully trusted. - Philosophical and ethical questions.
So they reproduce sexually? Have little baby Transformers? Grow up and hit puberty? Go on dates? We perceive them as mostly male because of the voice actors in all the cartoons, and because some genius had to write that episode with the female Autobots, which made all the others male by default, and because someone had to add Arcee to the mix without thinking the whole concept through. But the Transformers are neither male nor female. They are genderless machines.
Not all creatures develop the way humans do, they are aliens. And all living things are machines, they're just mechanical rather than biological ones.
And they're clearly male, they have male pronouns, they have male physiques, they have male facial features and facial hair, they have male voices in their animated media. If you start arguing that it's "for simplicity in conveying to the audience", you start falling down the rabbit hole of deconstructing why they do anything, and then you end up with Roombas bumping into each other again. The reality is that these fictional characters do have some level of connection to the real-world beings which created them, there's no way around that... it's "engendered" into the brand (pun intended).
If I want to read about interpersonal relationships between male and female, I can check out just about every other form of entertainment out there. If I want to read about giant shape-changing robots from outer space having adventures, my options are much more limited. Why anyone would want to make Transformers like everything else is beyond me, honestly.
The brand is now 30 years old, should it not grow, should it not develop alongside the society that consumes the content? Should it exist in a state of arrested development, permanently stuck in telling stories only for the little boys of the 1980s? The politics and interpersonal relationships of Cybertron and its people are what drew me back into the brand after years of doing the same thing over and over again, first with Beast Wars and now with the earliest issues of RID and MTMTE. There is more to the brand than just telling the same exact stories over and over again. Either that or it's a dying brand stuck in a circle jerk, and the growth we're experiencing now is merely an anomaly which will be wiped out in place of a trip into the downward spiral of repetition.
O6 wrote:Is the fact that Windblade is a female even a fucking plot point? Or are you all freaking out over the stupidest shit? Consider that!
And I mean, a real plot point, as in, does it affect the fucking plot? So far, the plot I've seen from the book is "Windblade is from another planet and is getting used to Cybertron" and also "Starscream bad." The plot could easily work with any off-world Transformer, male or female. The fact that some of her and her cohorts are ladybots seems pretty damn insignificant in the larger run.
Not even remotely is it a plot point. It's hardly mentioned in-universe in any way at all. They simply ARE PEOPLE in the story, they are outsiders learning new ways with responsibilities and political intrigues not their own.
Honestly, I will be surprised if Windblade is not in TF5. (Maybe she'll date Drift! I ship it.)
OHHHH DAMNIT! She's got kabuki makeup, he's got a samurai mask-derived head in the movie already, this is a thing that could very well happen! Stop stop stop oh no they heard you too late we're doomed. Fucking shallow movies.
Let me stop right there... all of that came OUT OF HER HEAD. Furman was never talking about women in general, he was talking about the only female Transforer ever (at the time). There is NO applicability to real, living, human women or to fictional female characters in any other series or context. She took offense because she was looking to take offense, and I get so tired of people with a chip on their shoulder like that.
So you know for a fact what Furman was talking about, and that when he created the only female Transformer, that somehow that wasn't indicative of every female Transformer despite
BEING every female Transformer at the time? That his writing of wars and humanity and camaraderie were all influenced by real-world society but this wasn't one of them? You KNOW this? You already seem to KNOW what Ms. Scott was thinking somehow, so I guess you must also KNOW what Mr. Furman was thinking. But in reality you don't at all, you are projecting your opinions from your perspective. Funny how little boys gravitate towards various role models like Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, representative characters for ideal personalities which are personified in male form with male features, yet women are being stubborn because they aren't just going along with that same ideal male character as well, that they want to be seen as valuable in that same media and they have a chip on their shoulders.
So she's set out to "fix" a "problem". A problem that only exists because people insist on adding gender where it isn't required, or making an issue out of it when it's really not necessary.
Almost, what you neglected to factor in is that Hasbro hired her to fix the problem, and it's a problem that the fans asked Hasbro to address when they voted to create a female Transformers character.
There should be no controversy here. We've got a light fantasy series about robots from outer space? Why even introduce gender issues into it? Understand that if they'd just thrown in female Transformers with no comment about origins or where they came from and were just matter of fact about it (as in the G1 cartoon), I'd be fine. But the author picked a fight with Furman and made it a feminist issue, and there was no need for that at all.
Why introduce it? Because the brand already had it, that's a good reason. Because in nearly every prior incarnation of the brand, there have been significant female characters. Because half the potential audience is female and this media doesn't offer them significant inroads to connect to the material, there aren't enough characters they can connect to and feel represented by. Because the fans requested it. Because broadening and growing with society is the only way the brand can mature and survive. "Because" is also a good enough reason.
I didn't. I'm in the ignored minority here.
Good thing you're an affluent male in a ruling class then, you have more voice and can affect change more readily than others.
Except that the book isn't about people. It's about genderless robots, and Furman trying to figure out how gender could possibly exist in that type of race. It was Scott with whatever chip on the shoulder she's carrying that caused her to project a single story about a female robot onto women everywhere (and then say that she had done no such thing when she just did). I don't blame Furman for being angry about it. And I have a hard time imagining anyone reading the book and taking personal offense at Arcee's story. Really, if they do, they've already got problems that the story didn't cause.
You mistake humans for the only possible people there. This book
is about people, all Transformers media are about people.
Funny how you, a male, can't identify with anybody who could take personal offense at Furman's story about Arcee, the sole representative for female characters in that entire race, being defined as an insane aberration. I wonder what about you, a male, not being able to identify with a character, a female, being seen as different might affect another reader, perhaps a female. Where oh where is the disconnect between you, a male, and another, a female, in a story about the single and thus whole representation of females in the story, have come from. Where might a difference in viewpoint exist between a male and a female exist in this situation. What's the divide between male and female in this complex issue of audience acceptance of representative gender. It's a mystery I guess, maybe they just have a chip on their shoulders for no reason.
You're a good person, I like you, but you haven't even read the material, you are judging and discussing it solely on meta elements. You are complaining that you don't like gender politics and social issues, yet the material itself is free of both, I'd argue to a disappointing degree - YOU are the one bringing the issue into the material, you are the one with the chip on your shoulder here. The material is clean and clear and straightforward, it takes the cheapest of shortcuts to not step on Furman's prior work in a way that I actually think is a cop-out that is literally selling out to remain safely "separate yet equal". Separate yet equal is lazy bullshit, it's justice for no one, but the book tries to live there in the days when white men in power could define others rather than letting them define themselves (I was going to say just "white men" but then I remembered the jews and the Irish and the Italians) just to avoid stepping on the toes of those too sensitive to handle the gender equality already afforded to this brand back when all 50 states still hadn't ratified the 13th amendment outlawing slavery and just one year after the last state ratified the 19th amendment giving the vote to women -- yes, the US fully ratified the right to vote at the same time that The Transformers hit shelves. Coincidence? Probably!