Female robots in Transformers fiction

[Bogatan]

One of the things I liked about TLK was the idea that Hot Rod arrived on Earth and the first language he was exposed to was French and was forever stuck with that as a first language or at least an incredibly heavy accent.

Or perhaps the first source of language that connects with Hot Rods personality was a french resistance hotshot during WWII and so French stuck. For Jazz and Blaster their voices came from the music they latched on to. For Prime maybe it was videos of John Wayne or other leaders who like making big speeches. Ratchet found MASH and so on.

As for gender Im happy to think of them as gender nuetral, but the same process happens with gender. when exposed to a gendered race some individuals robots tend to assimilate one way or another, that still plays in to the robots in disguise angle quite well.

[drmick]

Jazz is nearly always white. Once he was red.

[The Doctor]

*backtracks*

Hang on. When were Transformers 'white' or 'black'? They come in all colours of the rainbow!

-Ralph

[The Doctor]

I'd be fine with Gillian Anderson voicing Optimus Prime. She's a very versatile actor.

-Ralph

[legios]

Feb 26, 2018 18:43:42 GMT The Doctor said:

Which is how I read the comics and played with the toys ad a child. Never occured to me that they had gender or race. I've also never felt the need to see myself represented in fiction at any age, but perhaps I'm odd!

If you are, then I am odd in a related way. I don't tend to identify with characters in fiction that are necessarily similar to me in some physical characteristic, or necessarily the same in psychological characteristics. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I'd say that I identify with Fletcher Niehart in "Finity's End" for example - and whilst he is probably caucasian in ancestry this is neither a certain bet or even mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. But to the same degree I would say that I very strongly with Justin Warrick in Cyteen because of his struggles to deal with the intricacies of social situations - regardless of the fact that he is homosexual and I am at the least hetero-romantic. Similarly, one of the strongest senses of identification I've had with a character on television in many years is with Cadet Tilly in ST: Discovery - she is a different gender to me, but in a lot of other respects is very like my younger self (back when I was in my late teens/early twenties).

So the characters I tend to identify with are usually as different from me as they are similar. I think that makes me a bit of an outlier in this respect.

Stories about a gendered robot race would be interesting but best applied to a new start rather than retro-actively imposing it on past stuff. Also do it properly as a 50-50 split as Jim said.

-Ralph

I think it is an interesting area to explore potentially, but it does open an interesting set of questions - what does gender mean to a non-biological species which isn't necessarily demarcated by physical distinctions. (No testosterone and eostrogen to promote differences in mean stamina, strength etc, body shape not necessarily being correlated with gender (Stormclash and Skyburst are physically identical to CW Blades and Alpha Bravo except for the shape of their heads and faces for example. And Road Rage is the spitting image of Tracks, but one of them is male and one female) Whereas Windblade has a humanoid mode with physical characteristics which code as female to humans. TF's often exhibit as much body dimorphism across genders as they do between). What does it mean socially, historically? Do Cybertronians see their gender as fixed? Or is it a fluid and changeable element of their nature in a way similar to an alt-mode? Do they see gender as a matter of binary distinctions - or do they have three, four or twelve defined genders? (After all, it isn't necessarily something that is going to be related to their reproductive process, depending on the mechanics of that in a given continuity).

I'd agree that it isn't something that we are likely to see explored. There are very few Le Guins around in the world, and the chances of someone of that caliber also being active in writing tie-in fiction for kids robot toys? It is possible...but if I was a betting man I'd put my money on something more likely, like being struck on the head by a meteroid. :-)

Karl

[legios]

Feb 26, 2018 19:01:47 GMT Toph said:

Why should we accept all TFs to be exclusively male coded and expected to call them exclusively by male pronouns?

We don't have to. I don't think anyone has noticed but I have made an attempt to shift to the use of "it" rather than "he" or "she", except where there is an explicit statement in a fiction that supports a gender identification for a character. It looks a bit weird, but as a workaround for the lack of a universally recognised gender-neutral pronoun in English it is all I've got.

The only answer anyone here, or anywhere else for that matter has provided boils down to "male=neutral."
If in your eyes transformers have no gender, then you should have no problem with the next Optimus Prime being voiced by Gillian Anderson or Maggie Smith.
If that thought even for a second makes you twinge, then you need to look at yourself and ask yourself why? Because you truly see them as genderless, why does it matter? They're both brilliant actors, that command great presence in their voices.

Is so can I have Mary Elizabeth McGlynn for Jazz yet? Please?! Seriously, I think she'd be great. Heck, she'd make a better Jazz than she does Motoko. Gillian Anderson for Prime? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. She has voice-acting experience anyway which is handy. Not so sure about Maggie Smith, but that is just because I haven't encountered her doing anything in the "noble leader" kind of ball-park so she wouldn't be my go-to casting there.

(Actually, now that you've started me thinking down this path my imagination has just dropped the idea of Ultra Magnus voiced by Gina Torres into my brain. Damn it! I want that to be an actual thing now. She'd be a fantastic Marvel-style Ultra Magnus).

Karl

[Toph]

To be fair, I pulled those two out of thin air at the time, as I was thinking "what woman has a voice that works for soneone like Prime?"
But since then, the more I thought, and the more I realized I was actually onto something because now I really do want to see Anderson take on Optimus.

Gina Torres as Magnus? Brilliant!

[Toph]

A friend of mine added
Cree Summers as Megatron
And Tara Strong as Starscream

I lean towards Grey Griffin as Starscream and Strong as Rumble/Frenzy myself, though.

I wish I could do video editing. I'd love to splice together some scenes of Optimus with soundbites of Gillian Anderson as a proof of concept.

[Jim]

Well, I didn't quite expect to generate this much debate, but it's nice to see that it's healthy debate! This is a great forum!

My main reason for wanting more prominent female Transformers (and Hasbro seem to be on this track a little with POTP) is representation; I can see from how my daughter responds to things just how important it is to her. She sat and watched a lot of Civil War with me the other day based just on how great Black Widow and Scarlet Witch are in it, and is a big Princess Leia fan now after seeing Empire (and she thinks both Luke and Han are idiots in it. It's hard to disagree).

Also though, I think gender-swapping some classic characters would be visually interesting and a potential way to make the nth retread of the core '84 designs in a toyline a bit more appealing.

[Toph]

Feb 26, 2018 22:51:50 GMT Jim said:

Well, I didn't quite expect to generate this much debate, but it's nice to see that it's healthy debate! This is a great forum!

My main reason for wanting more prominent female Transformers (and Hasbro seem to be on this track a little with POTP) is representation; I can see from how my daughter responds to things just how important it is to her. She sat and watched a lot of Civil War with me the other day based just on how great Black Widow and Scarlet Witch are in it, and is a big Princess Leia fan now after seeing Empire (and she thinks both Luke and Han are idiots in it. It's hard to disagree).

Which was the exact point I'd been trying to make all along.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Feb 26, 2018 21:49:57 GMT The Doctor said:

I'd be fine with Gillian Anderson voicing Optimus Prime. She's a very versatile actor.

No problem here, either. It wouldn't make Prime seem female to me any more than a male actor makes him seem male - he/she/it's a robot who reproduces by building another robot and programming it with life with the Creation Matrix. Male and female aren't relevant concepts to them except when they're trying to relate to humans and Nebulans.

I think TFs would also work fine if all the TFs were referred to by female pronouns. But having some referred to by male and some by female pronouns suggests they do actually have a well-defined gender split by their nature, which they don't (unless they're trying to conform to human expectations, or binary-bonding with humans from Earth or Nebulos who have gender).

In the original comic, I would say the first generation of Autobot Pretenders are white and male because they were built by Fortress Maximus's Autobots, who had just come from Nebulos where most (but not all) the humans were white and all the soldiers were men. All the Nebulans binary-bonded to the Autobots and Decepticons were initially white and male. (Though some of the second wave were black.) But later on, Autobot Pretenders have two heads or the face of a walrus, or were in the form of sabretooth cats.

Martin

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Couple of other Marvel comic observations:

1. Auntie (the Ark's sentient computer) was referred to in the human tongue using female pronouns, suggesting a clear distinction between her/it and the other Autobots, but her nature was never really explored. Was she an Autobot given life by the Matrix, or something else?

2. The first time the Autobots disguised themselves as humans ('Rock and Roll Out'), Tracks disguised himself as a woman.

Martin

[Andy Turnbull]

Auntie - is an odd one.

It's one of the things I liked when TFA made the ship - Omega Supreme. If there was a consciousness at the control of the ship - then why would it not be a Transformer?

If she was the last of the Arks, were all the spacecraft that had been constructed done so around the core of a Transformer? When we see her in Raiders of the Last Ark - there is a feminine humanoid face - suggesting perhaps a pre-spacecraft identity and life.

Andy

[Toph]

Maybe they had plans to do something like that, but just got forgotten about as the story progressed?

[Andy Turnbull]

Aside from Raiders of the Last Ark - we never see or hear about her again (well till Regeneration One).

It's a missed opportunity and something that had some potential for some thought-provoking stories,

Andy

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Maybe, while Cybertronian life-forms are asexual, and don't have gender in the Earth sense, there are still more than one form of intelligent life - the Autobots (which as species rather than a faction, includes the Decepticons) are one type, and sentient supercomputers running massively complex systems, such as the Ark, are another type. And to distinguish between them in the human tongue, they used the male pronoun for one and the female for the other. (Until they built Arcee and realised they needed to use the female pronoun with her, to placate the humans.)

Martin