This thing...

[Metal Vendetta]

The 'outstretched finger' metaphor pertains to your refusal to address/acknowledge/understand my point about fiction operating on multiple levels.

I'm not denying that fiction can be read on multiple levels. I'm just saying you're wrong and here's why.

Imagine the most classic, G1iest piece of classic G1 fiction that has been more influential and imitated than anything else in the brand ever. Are you thinking of The Transformers: The Movie? Good. Now, for the French dub of the movie, the characters of Starscream and Shrapnel were given female voices and pronouns. How could that happen? According to you, these are characters who are unambiguously male.

Let's look at the character of Airazor from Beast Wars. Written and designed as a female character from the very get-go, the Japanese dub made her into a man. Her "heterosexual" relationship with Tigatron switched to being gay. But how could that be? Surely she's unambiguously female on a "representational level"?

And all I have to do to prove that you're wrong is raise one simple question - could that happen again? Could a translator take More Than Meets The Eye and, in rewriting the dialogue, assign a female gender to one of the characters? Tailgate, perhaps, or Swerve. Or Drift. Or Rodimus. Or Rewind, or Chromedome, or any combination of, or all of, the above. You can't deny that it's a possibility - as I've shown, it's happened before.

Thus, most sensible people would accept that there's a lot of sexual imagery in the Alien trilogy, and most sensible people would accept that the majority of Transformers characters are effectively men.

Oh argumentum ad populum, is it? Allow me to prove to you that dogs are male and cats are female because lots of people think that.

At the point when you identify with her, she's both - she's you, she's herself and she's every other audience member who identifies with her.

No she's not. Buffy remains unchanged by the experience whether I identify with her or not, it's the viewer who is changed. I may become a bit more like Buffy, but there is no possible way in the universe that Buffy becomes more like me.

I'm afraid that's just a sign of how incredibly wrong you are about this, that I can describe something I've never seen in more accurate terms than you, simply from what you've inadvertently given away from your description.

It's because the production team needed to come up with a way for the characters to interact with the computer. They could have inserted shots of them typing at a keyboard but dramatically it's easier for them to talk to a user interface. It's a little girl because in fiction it's the head programmer's daughter and in real life little girls are creepy when they say "You're all going to die down there" in a British accent. At no point is anyone in the movie or the audience expected to believe that it is a real little girl. It's like saying The Big Bang Theory is a superhero show because Sheldon dresses like the Flash sometimes.

Interesting interpretation, but still shows that you read these things on multiple levels. This whole conversation we've been having, your attitude has been more along the lines of: "No, Tyrest doesn't stand for anything and cold construction doesn't mean anything either. These are alien robots and nothing they do ever has anything to do with things that we might recognise in our own culture. Tyrest can't be a parent figure because he has no sex organs."

My whole attitude has been sure, you can read this stuff on multiple levels - I've said all along that sometimes they are like us and sometimes they are not. I just don't agree with you that it's impossible to identify with a character until you've crammed them into a box marked "boy" or "girl" in your head first. In fact, I think it shows a spectacular lack of imagination and/or willing suspension of disbelief.

Oh, right - escapist fantasy that, even by your estimation, contains metaphors about parenthood and religion. Sure.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

[Jack Cade]

I'm not denying that fiction can be read on multiple levels.

That's good to know, but I notice you're still ducking a big part of my point by using the word 'can'. We're not just talking about 'can be read on multiple levels' - we are talking about the fact that we all *do* read fiction fundamentally on different levels, even if part of that is subconscious.

You still don't seem to want to admit this. Do you admit that (a) just because you don't consciously read in a particular meaning doesn't mean that you aren't, on a subconscious level, reading in that meaning? And (b) that this is something that is pretty much always happening whenever we take in fiction, whether by reading it or watching it or otherwise?

Also, I'm not sure if our understandings of 'multiple levels' are quite the same, because you come out with stuff like this:

In fact, I think it shows a spectacular lack of imagination and/or willing suspension of disbelief.

Why would it show a 'spectacular lack of imagination' etc when I and everyone else is quite capable of simultaneously reading the fiction as a literal representation of its fictional reality? It isn't that we can't imagine Transformers as genderless at all - it's that we recognise them simultaneously as literally genderless and symbolically gendered. As do you, in my opinion.

Now, for the French dub of the movie, the characters of Starscream and Shrapnel were given female voices and pronouns. How could that happen? According to you, these are characters who are unambiguously male.

Nope. By giving them female voices and pronouns, the French have established those characters as female for their version of the movie. Voice plus pronoun overrides the visual evidence of Starscream's body, although in a more civilised world where we all recognised transgender more readily, we might read the character automatically as being transgender.

And all I have to do to prove that you're wrong is raise one simple question - could that happen again? Could a translator take More Than Meets The Eye and, in rewriting the dialogue, assign a female gender to one of the characters?

Yes, but it doesn't prove me wrong. In reading a character as male or female, we take in all the evidence and automatically weigh it up, and pronoun usage by an author or translator has a power that overrides a degree of visual evidence. Not completely - if a character looked unambiguously like a human female but was referred to as 'he' by the author, the competing evidences are so strong that we would probably have to consciously puzzle it out. But Transformers, though mostly masculine in build, can be read as female if they seem to be referred to and treated as female by everyone within the fiction, or the narrator.

A simple test: think about the occasions (you must have experienced one) when you've had trouble discerning if an actor or a character is male or female in a normal human narrative. It becomes a conscious irritation - a problem that you want to solve. It actually impedes your ability to follow the story sometimes when you're struggling to nail a character's gender. Sometimes those responsible for the story deliberately play this up by having a gender-ambiguous character who other characters get confused by (thus reassuring the viewer that it's *supposed* to be distracting).

But why is it distracting? Because we're so used to easily being able to read gender into characters we see. If there's no strong indication of femininity, we simply default to male. A good example of this is Ed in Cowboy Bebop, who everyone (including the audience) assumes to be male at first and has to tell the other characters that she's a girl.

Oh argumentum ad populum, is it?

Peer consensus is how most subjects continue to be evaluated - even some sciences. That's why a theory can hold sway for generations before people finally turn against it. Yes, of course it means that the consensus can be wrong, but it's the only method of testing most ideas that we've developed. Even the hard sciences rarely claim anything as actually 'proven', merely widely agreed on.

It's because the production team needed to come up with a way for the characters to interact with the computer.

An explanation as to how something came about doesn't change the fact that as soon as you put something that is, visually, a little girl in a story, whatever that character is literally said to be, she is read by the audience as symbolising a little girl.

I just don't agree with you that it's impossible to identify with a character until you've crammed them into a box marked "boy" or "girl" in your head first.

I don't think it's 'impossible' to - it's just that unless an author goes to considerable lengths to have a character be symbolically, as well as literally, genderless (which means avoiding gendered pronouns and visual indicators - not merely stating the fact in fiction) we will read in gender. It's just what our brains do. We map things to what we know. We interpret symbolically at the same time as reading literally, and this affects how we feel about the fiction at a profound level.

Something for you to think on: if Hasbro had, from the start, made a considerable effort to avoid visual indicators of gender in the build of TFs and the way they talked about each other (ie. no male pronouns, an aversion to the broad shoulder/narrow waist combination and square jaws), do you think it would be just as popular with people? Or do you think real genderless, on a symbolic as well as a literal level, might actually interfere with some people's ability to identify with the characters? I think it would. Not everyone - but I think it would have had a profound effect.

[Metal Vendetta]

That's good to know, but I notice you're still ducking a big part of my point by using the word 'can'. We're not just talking about 'can be read on multiple levels' - we are talking about the fact that we all *do* read fiction fundamentally on different levels, even if part of that is subconscious.

Ah, now it's the subconscious. My ex used to talk about the subconscious a lot, it served as a very useful indicator that what she was talking about was generally bollocks. Let's have a look at some choice quotes from the Wikipedia page, shall we?

If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.

Charles Rycroft explains that the subconscious is a term "never used in psychoanalytic writings".

Peter Gay says that the use of the term subconscious where unconscious is meant is "a common and telling mistake"; indeed, "when [the term] is employed to say something 'Freudian', it is proof that the writer has not read his Freud".

The idea of the subconscious as a powerful or potent agency has allowed the term to become prominent in New Age and self-help literature

Psychologists and psychiatrists take a much more limited view of the capabilities of the unconscious than are represented by New Age depiction of the subconscious.

So...the subconscious. Not a great start if I'm honest. My ex tried for years, without success, to convince me that I have one. I'm fairly sure that I don't. I don't believe in healing crystals or tarot cards either, just for the record.

Do you admit that (a) just because you don't consciously read in a particular meaning doesn't mean that you aren't, on a subconscious level, reading in that meaning? And (b) that this is something that is pretty much always happening whenever we take in fiction, whether by reading it or watching it or otherwise?

I admit nothing - see above, regarding the subconscious and my lack of one. If I read something, I am aware of the level I am reading it at. I'm a very literal person.

Why would it show a 'spectacular lack of imagination' etc when I and everyone else is quite capable of simultaneously reading the fiction as a literal representation of its fictional reality? It isn't that we can't imagine Transformers as genderless at all - it's that we recognise them simultaneously as literally genderless and symbolically gendered. As do you, in my opinion.

Right, while I was pondering this over the weekend, I looked up a related question: "What gender is R2-D2?" I found a bunch of places where this had been asked all over the net and read a ton of replies and the most telling thing about the answers? They were essentially just projections of whatever people wanted to see. Some people were adamant that Artoo is male, others were equally adamant that she's female. Some argued that being, essentially, a Swiss-army satnav, it's just a manufactured product and giving it a gender would be as ludicrous as giving one to a toaster. Others were convinced that he and C3PO are a gay couple, others argued that while C3PO is clearly gay, R2 is just his "beard" and is actually a ladies' man. One fan who was a bit more clued up to the existence of something in the Star Wars universe called "feminine programming" explained that R2 has "masculine programming" and he gave examples of battle droids being "masculine" and cleaning droids being "feminine". I'm sure we can all marvel at what an enlightened viewpoint he had on the subject. Interestingly, that would suggest that C3PO also has "masculine programming", which seems a bit of a contradiction in terms, but still.

The point is that even when there is a clear edict from the powers-that-be about the supposed gender of an artificial character like a robot, there will always be plenty of scope for personal interpretation and how you read a genderless character probably says more about you than the character itself. The more you tell me "you must see them as male", the more I think that you might be a tiny bit obsessed with gender politics, but you're not illuminating anything about the funny robot comics.

Nope. By giving them female voices and pronouns, the French have established those characters as female for their version of the movie. Voice plus pronoun overrides the visual evidence of Starscream's body, although in a more civilised world where we all recognised transgender more readily, we might read the character automatically as being transgender.

It shows that these characters are robots, their "gender" is almost entirely arbitrary and can be changed on a whim without altering the fundamental traits - physical or psychological - of the characters themselves. If it's just a matter of pronouns - because when reading comics the voices happen in the reader's head and sound like anything they want - then I am not convinced in the slightest, mainly because we don't really have gender-neutral pronouns in English so we generally use "he" as a convenience. It's hardly world-shattering evidence for what is essentially just your opinion.

Yes, but it doesn't prove me wrong. In reading a character as male or female, we take in all the evidence and automatically weigh it up, and pronoun usage by an author or translator has a power that overrides a degree of visual evidence.

Again, just a matter of pronouns that are used by convention.

A simple test: think about the occasions (you must have experienced one) when you've had trouble discerning if an actor or a character is male or female in a normal human narrative. It becomes a conscious irritation - a problem that you want to solve. It actually impedes your ability to follow the story sometimes when you're struggling to nail a character's gender. Sometimes those responsible for the story deliberately play this up by having a gender-ambiguous character who other characters get confused by (thus reassuring the viewer that it's *supposed* to be distracting).

Complete strawman - a character in a normal human narrative would have a gender, while a robot character doesn't have to. There's no reason to worry about what gender a robot character is, because they don't need one.

Peer consensus is how most subjects continue to be evaluated - even some sciences. That's why a theory can hold sway for generations before people finally turn against it. Yes, of course it means that the consensus can be wrong, but it's the only method of testing most ideas that we've developed. Even the hard sciences rarely claim anything as actually 'proven', merely widely agreed on.

Yet you're claiming that your view of the Transformers universe is not only proved for you - it's so widely agreed on that I must see it too. Sorry, doesn't work that way, otherwise I'd believe in God.

An explanation as to how something came about doesn't change the fact that as soon as you put something that is, visually, a little girl in a story, whatever that character is literally said to be, she is read by the audience as symbolising a little girl.

No, she's read by the audience as symbolising a computer. You would have to be literally retarded to imagine that it's a little girl. Literally. Retarded.

I don't think it's 'impossible' to - it's just that unless an author goes to considerable lengths to have a character be symbolically, as well as literally, genderless (which means avoiding gendered pronouns and visual indicators - not merely stating the fact in fiction) we will read in gender. It's just what our brains do. We map things to what we know. We interpret symbolically at the same time as reading literally, and this affects how we feel about the fiction at a profound level.

So you don't have the imagination to picture the viewpoint of a genderless character.

Something for you to think on: if Hasbro had, from the start, made a considerable effort to avoid visual indicators of gender in the build of TFs and the way they talked about each other (ie. no male pronouns, an aversion to the broad shoulder/narrow waist combination and square jaws), do you think it would be just as popular with people? Or do you think real genderless, on a symbolic as well as a literal level, might actually interfere with some people's ability to identify with the characters? I think it would. Not everyone - but I think it would have had a profound effect.

I've already shown that the character's physical characteristics are irrelevant to their supposed "gender". All you are left with are pronouns, and even then I've shown that they don't really matter because they're just a matter of convenience. Like I have said before, if you read the Marvel comics as your introduction to the brand, with their naturally occurring gears, levers and pulleys and their lack of gender amongst TFs, you've already got that. The cartoon series had some stupid episodes where they all had girl robots that were their girlfriends - I'm perfectly happy to ignore those, and much of the cartoon series if I'm honest.

[inflatable dalek]

I will bow to superior knowledge as it has been a long time, but am I mistaken in remembering that within the Star Wars films themselves R2D2 is referred to as "He" several times (including by C3PO, who is enough of a stickler to know and use the proper form above all else beyond how various humans anthropomorphise the little droid)?
[Genuinely curious as to how faulty my memory may or may not be on the films rather than trying to make any wider point]

I'm currently rewatching the G1 cartoon (I need no pity. Well, maybe a little) and after a first season with very few (None? The only one that springs to mind is the woman who shouts "Thanks neighbours!" in MTMTE, who is voiced by a husky man...) female characters the second year suggests the writers were (as well as high on cocaine based on the plots) really, really randy. The Autobots will suddenly try it on with anything vaguely female, be it their own kind, human women or mermaids. I think the only woman in the entire season so far who hasn't been lusted after by someone- even if it's just Spike- is the scientist from Attack of the Autobots, and she manages to make the "You want me to meet you in the command bunker?" line sound filthier than it ever should. All that without getting as far as Octane watching bit tittied robo-porn.

The irony is, the cartoon has the origin (out of those versions of the franchise that have bothered to show any sort of origin) that lends itself best to them being entirely genderless. They're manufactured goods that just happen to have (at times, except when Dinobots get knocked up in five minutes) sophisticated programming, nice and simple.And completely at odds with them having girlfriends and big pink flashing hearts and a fish woman fetish. It's like the cartoon people didn't have a bloody clue what they were doing. Surely not?

At least the Primus (and indeed, the Allspark) thing in theory gives some leeway of, "Well, they're made from glowey bits of God, basically anything goes".

Oddly, because even though I enjoy them I'd say "subtlety" isn't a word I'd normally associate with them, that the first Bay film actually did the best job out of any recent Transformers fiction of suggesting they're not remotely human like. When you hear them talking in their own language it's completely inhuman- and indeed, gender neutral- and helps to create the sense, without hammering it home, that the personas they adopt on Earth are just as much of a disguise as their alt modes. It's even used rather cleverly- again, not a word normally associated with the Bay films- as a way of signposting the difference between Autobots and Decepticons. The good guys really try to assimilate into the culture of the planet they're on/country they're in and Prime and Jazz seem to be almost revelling in the idioms. The Decepticons don't bother at all, there's only one scene in the whole film where they speak English when it's not addressed at a human (and that feels like a "Hugo Weaving is the only Big Name actor we've got playing a robot, so he's going to do every single line of Megatron's regardless of internal logic!" moment). It's a shame that got a bit lost in the sequels.

[KingMob]

This was a very interesting thread and actually the kind of thing I was hoping to read when I thought to pop by here after just seeing Windblade's cover image in the solicits. I didn't know about the writer kerfuffle, so cheers for all of that.

My thoughts about the new female gender character being introduced in a universe with Arcee have pretty much be expanded on very well (thanks everyone), but I wondered what people thought of the design? I know Japanese culture is a legitimate source of inspiration in Transformers, from Bludgeon to Drift and the current depiction of Cyclonus as a ronin complete with samurai barding on his legs, but I was a little taken aback to find out this new female character is a geisha in a kabuki mask. It didn't strike me as especially progressive, which is what I assumed was the intention behind introducing actual concepts of gender into the fiction.

I don't think I really have a point to make about cultural appropriation or 'is a being a geisha better than being pink', but it did strike me as missed opportunity and I wondered what more knowledgable and thoughtful people were thinking about it all. I guess I should just wait and find out if she's going to be a caricature like Drift has ben for most of his existence.

[Metal Vendetta]

I will bow to superior knowledge as it has been a long time, but am I mistaken in remembering that within the Star Wars films themselves R2D2 is referred to as "He" several times (including by C3PO, who is enough of a stickler to know and use the proper form above all else beyond how various humans anthropomorphise the little droid)?
[Genuinely curious as to how faulty my memory may or may not be on the films rather than trying to make any wider point]

No, you're right. The most obvious example is at the end of New Hope when 3PO says "You must save him!" but IIRC every time 3PO uses a gendered pronoun he's talking to a human being, so it could be argued that he's merely imitating the way people refer to droids in "English", the way a protocol droid would.

However, Word of God in the SW universe has it that R2 is indeed "male" while R4-G9 and R4-P17 are "female". How that works is probably best left unexplored, but I suspect that the whole concept of "feminine programming" was invented to explain away an episode of the Droids cartoon series where Artoo got a girlfriend-bot, who was - naturally - pink. Actually, the more I'm delving into this, the weirder it's getting. The torturer droid on Jabba's sailbarge is female, despite being voiced by a man (though later voiced by Lisa Simpson in the radio adaptation). Whether that was always intended or if it's a retcon I don't know.

I'm currently rewatching the G1 cartoon (I need no pity. Well, maybe a little)

You have it nonetheless. I just got through S1 with the missus. We didn't bother with S2.

I agree that the Quintesson consumer goods origin does provide a good reason for them being genderless, being toasters and all, and it's notable that Arcee just turns up in cartoon continuity without explanation. I think Dreamwave were going to riff on that a little, with Arcee and the other female Transformers from the cartoon being a new line of product, or at least that seemed to be where they were going with that before they imploded.

I also thought the first Bay film handled their alien origins quite well - even Ratchet's "the boy wants to mate" lines (which kind of irked me at the time) could be read from the perspective of a Cybertronian scientist who has studied human biology - though the second two were a bit of a mess. It sort of reminded me of how in the first Matrix movie the programs were all faceless men in suits that betrayed no emotion or humanity and Agent Smith was implied to be an aberration, taking on too many human emotions and being driven mad by the experience. Then in the second two films everyone and their dog turned out to be a program and were into giving women orgasms, apparently. For some reason.

My thoughts about the new female gender character being introduced in a universe with Arcee have pretty much be expanded on very well (thanks everyone), but I wondered what people thought of the design? I know Japanese culture is a legitimate source of inspiration in Transformers, from Bludgeon to Drift and the current depiction of Cyclonus as a ronin complete with samurai barding on his legs, but I was a little taken aback to find out this new female character is a geisha in a kabuki mask. It didn't strike me as especially progressive, which is what I assumed was the intention behind introducing actual concepts of gender into the fiction.

As far as I'm aware, the kabuki mask and geisha elements were added by the design guys at Hasbro rather than chosen by the fandom. Personally, I think it's hard not to see parallels between Arcee's design being inspired by Leia and Windblade being reminiscent of Amidala - whether that's deliberate or not, I couldn't say but I don't think it bodes particularly well for a great character.