This thing...

[bumblemusprime]

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/01/02/ ... nsformers/

Blowing up the IDW board. And now all my friends and family know that I follow Transformers gender wars quite faithfully.

[Kaylee]

We'll written it's a shame your bleeding cool articles can only be snippets rather than longer thoughts.

At Paul's request, I repeat what I said on Facebook: IMO Arcee in IDW is problematic and, while I don't think anyone sat down and thought 'let's write a mysogenistic, transphobic character', that is how she feels to me. If there were one other female character or character who had swapped genders then that might change the coloration for me, as it is we have the one character and she exists as a 'freak' amongst 'normals'. Although not intentional, not cool. Also not hard to fix, either.

[Jack Cade]

Have you guys seen Furman's response on his blog? Very, very disappointing, to say the least. He doesn't seem to get that intention isn't magic - his line is "I didn't intend to offend anyone, therefore anyone who has problems with the story is misinterpreting it." What.

Then there's the ludicrous overreaction to Scott's post, which was a masterclass in judicious diplomacy - essentially: "I recognise that lots of people have problems with Furman's Arcee storyline and I understand why - so we're going to try and fix it without pretending it didn't happen - by developing a wider context around it."

Honestly, what more could anyone ask for? Why on earth would someone be upset by her stated intent?

[inflatable dalek]

Yeah, I found Furman's blog response slightly depressing. I can understand him being pissed to an extent (especially if you regard it as the cumulative effect of various things he may have issue with at IDW), but by writing in haste he manages to say pretty much exactly all the wrong things to cast himself in as bad a light as possible. From the incredibly patronising way he puts "Professional" in inverted commas when talking about a writer with a comparable (bar the seniority) CV to his own through his strange spiel about hating retcons- which not only seems to be missing the point as we're talking a John Barber edited book so they'll be no throwing out of continuity here just working round it, but ignores the fact he's done lots and lots and lots of retcons himself over the years (hell, Spotlight Arcee was a mild retcon as it ignored all the fembots in Megatron: Origin. So this new book is a retcon of a retcon... which goes all the way round to being a con) through to wheeling out a female fan who likes the book in a way that verges on "I'm not sexist, I've a friend who's a woman"...

It all makes him look like a man who time has severely passed by.

Now, I'll admit I may be biased in that Scott pretty much says what has always made me uncomfortable about IDW Arcee (though, as you'd expect from someone who's now being paid to sort out the whole mess she's clearly put more thought into articulating it that I ever have), but I'd say the worst she is possibly guilty of is being unprofessional in airing her concerns publicly (though equally, you could argue if IDW are going to make a go of this new character that Hasbro have thrown at them they do need to draw a line in the sand and assure floating readers the same mistakes aren't going to be repeated). But Furman himself has been happy to complain in the past about the work of Will Simpson; Dan Reed; That Bloke Who Drew Human Factor and The Creative Team of Death's Head 2, so he's hardly sitting on a big high horse here.

If anyone hasn't heard it, this podcast of a panel from AA 2013 a couple of weeks after Windblade was "Created" at Botcon has various other IDW people- James Roberts, Nick Roche, Andrew Griffith and Alex Milne- get asked a question about female Transformers that sees Nick Roche distance the entire panel from having had anything to do with Arcee and makes a lot of the same points as Scott whilst everyone else goes Very Quiet, even Alex Milne can't come up with anything positive to say about the book he drew (letting Roche cover his ass with "Alex only drew it!"). All whilst Furman was likely in the room. So this isn't just a Scott problem, it's clearly one a lot of IDW people have as well and they've not had any trouble expressing so in the recent past.

http://theunderbase.libsyn.com/the-unde ... omic-panel

Officially Furman claims to have smothered things out with Scott, though tellingly there's no qualification along the lines of "...And now I realise what she was trying to say" or even "She admitted she was wrong", it comes across as "I've got four months left on Reg1 and have to play nice till my contractual obligations are fulfilled".

[Best First]

I am a bit baffled by those who say Furman shouldn't have taken offence. Is the below really diplomatic?

In a vacuum, Furman’s story is completely legitimate. The idea that someone is fundamentally changed against her will and struggles/rages against that is a really interesting idea… The issues I have with Furman’s choice is that we don’t exist in a vacuum and the suggestion that 1. women only exist in aberration 2. being a woman is inherently traumatic 3. being a woman has any correlation to mental illness are extremely upsetting. Do I think Furman was trying to make a statement about human women with Arcee’s origins? No. In fact, the largest share of blame lies with the tokenization of women in the brand in general.”

I think Scott tries to have her cake and eat it – she says that she doesn’t think Furman is trying to make a statement about human women immediately after saying Furman has made 3 statement’s about human women all of which are deeply negative. If i were him i would have been offended by this statement as i think you have to almost deliberately misread Spotlight: Arcee to come away with this impression. Scott sandwhiches a significant insult between a pair of caveats that don't work given what she says inbetween.

I can see how, if you want gender in TFs, SL: Arcee is an issue and therefore if there is a decision that there needs to be female TFs (does this mean that all other TFs are now male? can't help but think this is worse precedent wise - " yes we thought rather than push the concept that they were genderless that it was better to establish them as 98% male) then SL: Arcee needs to be worked around. But to introduce it in such a fashion to me seems... clumsy and uneccessary at best.

I am not saying Furman's response is spot on - the bit about retcons is a bit mind boggling but i can see why he bit and why it caused him to question the proffessionalism of and feel the need to respond to the person who, to my mind, said Simon Furman wrote a story saying women are an abberation.

Part of the issue seems to be the suggestion that it is IMPOSSIBLE to imagine the rest of the TF race as genderless because they are all CLEARLY male. I accept that there are male traits to TFs but i find it perfectly possible to see them as genderless because to me this makes far more sense than making biological overtures on a mechanical race that don't reproduce. Scott's statement gives this notion incredibly short shrift (i think her Jazz example is patronising at best) which for me worries me purely from a story telling perspective as does the statement "That’s not how it works for biological women on Earth and that’s not how it’s gonna work on Cybertron" which puts me in mind of Costa's rant about TF's being hard to relate to.

[inflatable dalek]

I am a bit baffled by those who say Furman shouldn't have taken offence. Is the below really diplomatic?.

Just to clarify, I can see why he'd be annoyed (and I certainly don't think any of the unfortunate implications of Spotlight: Arcee were intentional, it's just a poor story that hasn't quite been thought through properly), I just think the wording of his response was pretty much all wrong and if anything made him look more like an out of touch misogynist (which he certainly has never come across as any of the times I've met him) than anything Scott said.

In terms of the new character herself... It is a shame that IDW are basically being forced to do a comic about something that seems to have escaped from a fan fic (tellingly, the one line description makes her sound like Costa Drift), it does have all the hallmarks of going to wind up an epic train-wreck even beyond the gender issue. That does leave me kind of rooting for it in an underdog way though, and everyone who has read it seems to have enjoyed Scott's Beast Hunters worked (and getting someone in who has worked on the Prime cartoon- which, in the one season I've seen, seems to handle female Transformers pretty much better than any previous iteration- just beating Beast Wars as the characters are neither love interests and not especially top heavy- is a sensible move) so maybe they'll pull it off.

In terms of female Transformers, I've always thought the simplest approach is, "If they genderless but when speaking English they refer to themselves as "He" because it's neater than "It" then there's no reason there can't be ones who go by "She" as well". Furman almost touched on that by throwing a couple of female holo-avatars in his original ...Tion crew, it's actually a shame that, considering his reiteration of IDW being intended as a ground up reworking, he didn't go the whole hog and just have Bumblebee be a "She" but still written in exactly the same way. Sunstreaker would have been more of a problem (making the vain pretty one a girl wouldn't have been a step in the right direction), but Bee- who was one of the real successes of those early issues being as smart and canny as a spy should be before Costa came along and ruined him- would have still been a good character and it would have made the point of "Some of them go by male pronouns, some by female, it's a conceit of the language and doesn't affect who they are".

[Metal Vendetta]

Christ on a bike, what a mess.

FWIW, I quite liked Arcee in her Spotlight and Revelation. Since she came back into RID she's been boring as hell.

And frankly, Spotlight Windblade looks like it's going to be a big steaming pile of elephant wank.

[Best First]

What aspect of Furman's response paints him as a misogynist?

Did she write Beast Hunters? Didn't grab me. But i guess that isn't the point of this thread.

[Metal Vendetta]

What aspect of Furman's response paints him as a misogynist?

He didn't check his privilege first?

[Jack Cade]

I think Scott tries to have her cake and eat it – she says that she doesn’t think Furman is trying to make a statement about human women immediately after saying Furman has made 3 statement’s about human women all of which are deeply negative.

She's saying the story, in effect, made those statements - not about 'human women' but about women. And she's right, as far as I can see. There's two ways in which we read stories like this - 1) as a literal account of a fictional reality, and 2) as a reflection of/commentary on our own society. I find it hard to believe that anyone genuinely doesn't do (2), even if you're not aware of it because it's at a subconscious level. We learn from a very early age to read lessons and meaning into stories, and in the wider context of graphic fiction in general, SL: Arcee did enforce the notion that a woman is an aberration, a departure from the norm, which is being a man. At one point, Arcee literally says something like 'We use the pronoun 'he' as a default.' What the story essentially seems to say, therefore, is not that Transformers are genderless but that they're all made up of a single gender - the male one.

Otherwise the story doesn't make sense - for Jhiaxus to 'introduce' gender to the race, he would have to create *two* genders, not one. To create a 'female' and say, "Ta da, I've introduced gender to the Cybertronian race" is effectively to say that everyone else is already male, and you've just introduced the 'other' gender. It could almost be a satire of the poor attitude Western fictional media has towards women, if one could detect a trace of parody in the tone.

Now, I'm sure Furman didn't mean the story to insult women to this degree - he just saw the existence of Arcee, almost the lone 'female' character in the franchise, as a logic problem to be solved, and he put on his high concept sci-fi thinking cap and solved it. The problem is he didn't even think about how this affects the fiction on the level of its commentary/reflection of human society, and on that level, because he didn't think about it, he botched it. Seriously.

And I just don't see how a concept like professional courtesy should prevent Scott from meditating on a problem she has - and many other people share - with a very particular story. It's not like she made a personal attack on him or slated his whole record; it's a legit criticism made with laser precision.

[Metal Vendetta]

That would have been fine had Furman been writing about women, but he wasn't writing about women, he was writing about a collection of robots drawn from a 20+ years-old toyline, only one of which displays any feminine characteristics whatsoever. In terms of G1, unless you could the "girlfriend squad" that showed up in that awful episode of the cartoon, Arcee really is an aberration. All the tumblr feminists in the world whining about intersectionality bollocks won't change that.

[Kaylee]

I think Scott tries to have her cake and eat it – she says that she doesn’t think Furman is trying to make a statement about human women immediately after saying Furman has made 3 statement’s about human women all of which are deeply negative.

She says his work may been suggesting, not that it out-and-out stated. ie that it may have had a different reading to that which SF intended.

If i were him i would have been offended by this statement as i think you have to almost deliberately misread Spotlight: Arcee to come away with this impression.

Your impression is coloured by who you are. I have a different impression and flatter myself that it's not because I'm incapable of reading a comic book. It has (unintentional, I'm sure) themes in it that I find distasteful.

Scott sandwhiches a significant insult between a pair of caveats that don't work given what she says inbetween.

I think she's brave to state publicly what myself and others in this thread have thought. Vive la difference (of opinion)

He didn't check his privilege first?

Because dismissing someone else, for suggesting that you may be speaking from a position of power, is always clever and moves the discussion forward. Even more so when they haven't actually done that and you want to pre-emptively make them sound stupid. Is that because you don't think there is an issue, therefore nobody else should?

FWIW, I quite liked Arcee in her Spotlight and Revelation. Since she came back into RID she's been boring as hell.

And frankly, Spotlight Windblade looks like it's going to be a big steaming pile of elephant wank.

*echo* ...because you don't think there is a problem therefore nobody else should... *echo*

That would have been fine had Furman been writing about women, but he wasn't writing about women, he was writing about a collection of robots drawn from a 20+ years-old toyline, only one of which displays any feminine characteristics whatsoever. In terms of G1, unless you could the "girlfriend squad" that showed up in that awful episode of the cartoon, Arcee really is an aberration. All the tumblr feminists in the world whining about intersectionality bollocks won't change that.

I can make that shorter for you: "It was bad before therefore what's the problem?... If I cherry-pick my series and ignore this episode then I can make this statement!... Waaa, feminists!" Seriously, I believe you're better than that level of discourse. Sincerely I do.

Part of the issue seems to be the suggestion that it is IMPOSSIBLE to imagine the rest of the TF race as genderless because they are all CLEARLY male. I accept that there are male traits to TFs but i find it perfectly possible to see them as genderless because to me this makes far more sense than making biological overtures on a mechanical race that don't reproduce. Scott's statement gives this notion incredibly short shrift (i think her Jazz example is patronising at best) which for me worries me purely from a story telling perspective as does the statement "That’s not how it works for biological women on Earth and that’s not how it’s gonna work on Cybertron" which puts me in mind of Costa's rant about TF's being hard to relate to.

I'd argue that seeing them as 'genderless' still makes identification and empathy easy for male readers when (for in-Universe reasons) they refer to themselves with male pronouns and have (mostly) male power fantasy appearances. Even putting that to one side, the only exception to that rule in the IDW comics is a damaged, miserable assassin. That's not cool, from my POV, and I would like that to be corrected. The fanbase would seem to agree, since introducing a new female character won the popular vote hence her inclusion in the IDW-Universe. Consensus of opinion does not make a fact, although it would imply that this is a feeling felt by more than just the new writer at IDW.

[inflatable dalek]

In terms of how Furman's response inadvertently came over to me (and I suppose it's worth emphasising in a thread that's all about interpretation of a text that this is entirely a subjective opinion) it felt like, with just a little dumbing down and the throwing in of the odd "Political correctness gone mad", it would read exactly like the sort of thing someone like Jim Davidson or Roy Chubby Brown would come out with in defence of their material. "Completely got it wrong, here's a woman (of black, or pooooooophta) who likes me, I can't be sexist" and so on, obviously not intended in any way but it did give it a nasty veneer in my reading.

That would have been fine had Furman been writing about women, but he wasn't writing about women, he was writing about a collection of robots drawn from a 20+ years-old toyline, only one of which displays any feminine characteristics whatsoever. In terms of G1, unless you could the "girlfriend squad" that showed up in that awful episode of the cartoon, Arcee really is an aberration. All the tumblr feminists in the world whining about intersectionality bollocks won't change that.

But Furman was writing about a woman with Arcee though wasn't he? And the complaints are entirely about how she was dealt with I'd say they're perfectly valid. The fact the one girl is an abberation is in large part the issue, after all, Furman could have still kept the robots themselves genderless but kept a female (and indeed male) presence with the human supporting cast there wouldn't be a problem. If he'd gone down the Prime route of "Yeah, there are male-y ones and female-y ones" there wouldn't be a problem. He was likely trying to do something properly hard "SF" and emphasise the alien nature of these beings by introducing something that is normal to us but bizarre to them... but frankly that sort of thing isn't where his skills as a writer are so it's little wonder it went (for want of a better phrase) tits up for so many readers.

[Metal Vendetta]

James Roberts, Nick Roche, Andrew Griffith and Alex Milne- get asked a question about female Transformers that sees Nick Roche distance the entire panel from having had anything to do with Arcee and makes a lot of the same points as Scott whilst everyone else goes Very Quiet, even Alex Milne can't come up with anything positive to say about the book he drew (letting Roche cover his ass with "Alex only drew it!").

Alex Milne, whose contributions towards fembots in IDW continuity so far comprise some "eye-candy" draped over the "male" bots watching the pit fights in Megatron Origin? So it's fine if the girls are there purely for decoration? Sure, that's not sexist in the slightest.

But Furman was writing about a woman with Arcee though wasn't he?

Not unless by "woman" you mean "mechanical lifeform artificially introduced to the concept of gender". They're not the same thing, unless you're looking really, really hard for something to be offended by. On the other hand, he was writing about a woman with Verity Carlo.

It was bad before therefore what's the problem?

How come there are no dude ponies in My Little Pony?

[edit]

Seriously, I believe you're better than that level of discourse. Sincerely I do.

Okay, here's how I see it. This Mairghread Scott has (deliberately or not) conflated two separate issues - how Furman writes women and how Furman wrote Arcee - then she has taken what she feels about the latter, applied it to the former and publicly slagged him off about it on the internet which is hugely unprofessional. Then, for disagreeing with her and attempting to defend himself, Furman's been branded a misogynist as is standard for any debate in which a man disagrees with a woman on the internet because it's a really easy word to throw around and shut down further argument. Hell, let's rag on him for being a racist and call Operation Yewtree while we're at it, because it makes just as much sense. If you're going to throw accusations of misogyny at Furman, who wrote great female characters into G1 from the very beginning like archaeologist Dr. Susan Hoffman, geologist Dr. Cindy Newell (she also had a PhD) and go-getting ace reporter Joy Meadows who also knew how to drive a tank, then by comparison every other Transformers writer must hate women so much that they pass through misogyny and out the other side.

The character of Arcee has always been a bit of a trainwreck and while I don't think that Furman's IDW take on her was perfect (nor his Marvel UK introduction, for that matter) I also don't think it's a matter for internet outrage. After being Springer/Rodimus's girlfriend, then Daniel's surrogate mom and body in the cartoon, the Headmasters' secretary with a crush on Chromedome in Japan and a giant grief-spider in the BotCon comics, it's not like the character's ever been portrayed in a particularly positive way before. My take on it was always that Arcee was a prototype and that if they were ever to introduce more fembots to the IDWverse then it would be relatively easy to have a character who was Jhiaxus's student, or to build on more recent developments someone from the JAAT, to "perfect" the original tech and hey presto - non-problematic girlbots. If anything, I think that Barber's choosing to keep her as the psychopath rather than develop as a character is more annoying, especially as it's stretched over 20-odd issues by now.

Anyway, I think that to read Spotlight: Arcee and to deduce that the message is:
1. women only exist in aberration
2. being a woman is inherently traumatic
3. being a woman has any correlation to mental illness
is unfair. If she'd said:
1. female Transformers only exist in aberration
2. having a gender forced upon you when you're naturally genderless is inherently traumatic
3. being subjected to a maelstrom of contradictory sensory input has any correlation to mental illness
then I'd have more time for her argument, but as it is, it's like she's half-read the issue and already decided what she wants it to say. The fact is that we're not talking about women here, we're talking about a sort-of woman analogue in a robotic species that reproduces by squeezing magic juice out of the disco ball. Or digging it out of the ground, apparently.

[bumblemusprime]

I emailed Rich & Hannah (BC's editor in chief) this morning to note that SImon & Mairghread say they've smoothed things out. Hoepfully an update will be in the article soon.

The IDW board reported this article rather dramatically, eh? Like a rap battle? Seriously?

With EmVee in saying that Verity and Joy Meadows are exemplary female characters in the TF canon, as opposed to some more embarrassing examples like Circuit Breaker and Spike's cum-dumpsters. I thought that Furman would roll with this more than he has. And had Scott mentioned that the man writes well-rounded female characters in general, she might have avoided some of the dust-up.

But. As I said in the article, I see no accusation, really. She's saying that the story is good in a vacuum, with the high-concept SF hat that Dalek talked about. But in the larger continuity, Arcee is this weird violent creature and the only female. And, Scott points out, that's partially problematic because the entire franchise, which is NOT Furman's responsibility, has had so few females.

So many problems would be solved here if English had a gender-neutral pronoun!

[inflatable dalek]

Alex Milne, whose contributions towards fembots in IDW continuity so far comprise some "eye-candy" draped over the "male" bots watching the pit fights in Megatron Origin? So it's fine if the girls are there purely for decoration? Sure, that's not sexist in the slightest.

And all we can tell from the podcast is Milne won't speak up any words of defence about that one comic when people are complaining about Arcee, whilst sitting right next to him, there's nothing to say for or against what he thinks about his work on Megatron: Origin as well. Though right from the start of MTMTE James Roberts has been holding up Origin as an example of a comic where background cameos can be safely ignored and Milne doesn't seem to have taken any offence at that. IIRC Eric Holmes (and not the almost entirely blameless for the world's woes Eric Roberts as I first wrote...) got the "Blame" at the time for fembots being included even though it wouldn't fit in with Furman's plans, no idea how much he was a sacrificial lamb on that regard though.

If you'll dismiss Milne's silence due to some of the other scripts he's drawn, where do you stand on (the most outspoken person on the podcast) Nick Roche making pretty much the same points as Scott? Or James Roberts coming in at the end to say Windblade might well offer solutions to all that? Do either of them have something in their previous work that invalidates their current (or as of August anyway) opinions?

But Furman was writing about a woman with Arcee though wasn't he?

Not unless by "woman" you mean "mechanical lifeform artificially introduced to the concept of gender". They're not the same thing, unless you're looking really, really hard for something to be offended by. On the other hand, he was writing about a woman with Verity Carlo.[/quote]

If Arcee isn't supposed to be a "She" as a result of what Jhiaxus did to her with his big... groin pump thing, then all the stuff where the issue makes a fuss about her being a "She", with her pointing out to the Autobots that she is one and they constantly call her as such without them even realising (though why I'm not sure, especially as they wouldn't be speaking English at this point within the fiction- even if for the sake of readability it's being translated for our benefit- so they should just be using whatever the default pronoun in Cybertronian is) is needlessly confusing on that score, certainly I've never been left with anything less than the impression that she's been turned into a female.

Now, if you're trying to say she's not a female in terms of actual physical biology... well what was that pump thing actually doing down there (God help us...) and does it make any difference if she actually regards herself as female now?

Part of the problem with Arcee is arguably an admirable one of Furman trying to do something outside his comfort zone, for so much of the internal logic to work it really has to feel as if Arcee is the one female Autobot amongst an otherwise genderless race, which is where the whole conciet falls down because Furman just doesn't write Transformers as anything other than humans in funny costumes. Which usually isn't a bad thing (I can't imagine, say, Nightbeat being anything other than Bogart with shoulders), but because at no point in IDW before, or after, his work on that Spotlight has given any much in the way of indication of them being anything other than blokes.

Steve Parkhouse wrote genuinely alien feeling Transformers that could well have been genderless (admittedly as a side effect of Alan McKenzie feeling the whole idea of the franchise was crap and commissioning Parkhouse to write something that was as un-Transformerey as possible). Uncle Bob generally wrote cooler, more formal Transformers who (with the odd exception) might have been at a pinch (and was the writer who formally made the Marvel Transformers genderless, surprisingly late in the day). Tthat's just not how Furman works. His robots are people, both approaches are valid and can work really well but Arcee is a writer who excels at one thing totally failing to pull off the other.

And yes, Verity is a female character. One who suffers (and this applies in varying degrees to a lot of authors on the franchise trying to write the teen characters) from sounding like a middle aged middle class English man who has no idea what a teenage homeless American woman might talk like. The main thing she has going for her is she's not Jimmy Pink. And telling Furman seemed to think both she and ol' Jimmy weren't working because after Infiltration sets them up as main characters the next two minis shrink and shrink their roles till they're little more than an embarrassed cameo in Maximum Dinobots (and would Hunter have stuck around if Furman hadn't already committed him to the Headmasters process?). Considering all three of them seemed to die a death character wise that's nothing to do with sexism, but equally it's hard to hold her up as an example of a really good female character when even her creator seemed to give up on her in the end.

Of his other female (Transformers) characters... well there's his take on Marvel Arcee. Who gets lots of Autobots slaughtered because she's upset Rodimus doesn't fancy her any more and as a result decides to go for a drive and abandon her post on guard duty (interestingly when Hot Rod himself later/earlier makes a similar mistake in failing to protect Autobot City in the Shockwave Aspects of Evil the story lets him make penance by saving the day. Arcee just gets to make her failure worse by thinking she can take out a force that defeated the city so she can be captured and used as bait for Rodimus...). Prime's Rib I have previously been a big fan of and would defend vigorously because I always assumed the meta joke was supposed to be Optimus/Hasbro were just rubbish at listening to legitimate complaints of sexism and had designed this complete failure of a character that clearly wouldn't do at representing women. After all this I'm now not sure the joke isn't a dig at all the comments from annoyed mothers he'd heard from over his years working the letters page (certainly everything the placard bearers say are almost exactly the sort of thing my own mother was coming out with... well when I made her read Space Pirates with me) and the final pun isn't supposed to be "Women, 'eh?"

Of his human recurring females... Well Cindy was a wet exposition sprouting drip. Joy started off well (ulike certain girls who loved Poweglide she wasn't having any of that nonsense) but then Furman forgot she seemed to be killed at the end of her issue in Dinobot Hunt (last time we see her she's laid out on the ground in front of a group of Decepticons who have definitely just killed her camera crew and slaughtered every other human they've met in the story),and then for Ladies Night she completely forgets she was left **** scared for her (renewed) life and what Soundwave might do to her if she ever so much as thought of going to cover another giant robot story (after the Decepticons leave she won't even do new interviews with the Dinobots sitting right next to her!) at the end of In the National Interest and decides to go down a volcano fighting a group that included the guy who so (understandably) made her crap herself before. If not for the Sludge connection between her first two stories she might as well be three completely different characters.

That (unless there's some good stuff in any of the movie comics I've not read?) leaves Susan Hoffman as by far his best female creation in that she remains entirely consistent across all her showings. She's enthusiastic- occasionally dangerously so- but still smart and keen to get to the bottom of any mystery despite the personal risk (and unlike verity comes accross as you'd expect someone of her background would, but that's hardly surprising when she's about the same age and nationality Furman would have been).

It was bad before therefore what's the problem?

How come there are no dude ponies in My Little Pony?[/quote]

A couple of the people in the comments on Furman's blog (at least at one time anyway, they were coming and going so rapidly what may or may not still be there now gives me a nosebleed) mentioned Pony has considerably more male characters than Transformers has female ones. Any Bromies here want to confirm/deny that (and do they mean comparing the current Ponies to IDW, or both franchises across their entirety across the board? I presume in both cases they're including non-pony and non-Transformer supporting characters?)?

Out of curiosity Vendetta, considering IDW have no choice but to introduce this new female character how would you do it so that it fit in with the whole "They're genderless and Arcee is the only "She"" aspect of her Spotlight? I assume Jhiaxus wheeling out the Groin Pump again isn't an option anyone wants to explore?

[Jack Cade]

MV, you responded to me, but everything you've said completely ignores my first point:

There's two ways in which we read stories like this - 1) as a literal account of a fictional reality, and 2) as a reflection of/commentary on our own society. I find it hard to believe that anyone genuinely doesn't do (2), even if you're not aware of it because it's at a subconscious level. We learn from a very early age to read lessons and meaning into stories ...

Unless a writer makes a serious effort to distance their characters from humans in their appearance and behaviour, some part of our brain is reading them as humans, as reflections of ourselves, however we try to consciously tell ourselves that the concept is alien life forms.

In other words, if Furman/IDW/Hasbro were ever remotely serious about Transformers being about entirely inhuman gender-neutral mechanical life-forms who shouldn't be read as men and women, they should never have been walking, talking bipeds with placement/number of limbs, eyes, mouths etc all lining up more or less exactly with their human counterparts. But man-robots is what they inherited from the franchise's origins, and so gender was always going to be an issue. The fact that they don't reproduce sexually is completely besides the point - sex and gender aren't the same thing. What we've got is a race of mostly asexual male-gendered robots with no goolies.

Not to mention (reinforce?) my other point: that SL: Arcee literally makes no sense unless all the TFs up to Arcee are to be considered male-gendered. Jhiaxus cannot 'introduce gender' to a non-gendered race by giving them a girl unless the rest of them are already boys. He would have had to make a girl and a boy, both equally traumatised by their being distanced from the gender-neutral template.

Plants are gender-neutral. If I genetically engineer a plant with tits, have I introduced gender to plantlife? Like f**k I have.

[Yaya]

I was wondering how long it would take for the phenomenon of IDWs Arcee to blow up.

Seriously, very surprised it took this long for some female readers to take offense at how a whacked-out bitchbot is the only "female" representation in this TF mythos.

Can't blame them. Just impressed they remained silent for so long.

[Metal Vendetta]

There's two ways in which we read stories like this - 1) as a literal account of a fictional reality, and 2) as a reflection of/commentary on our own society. I find it hard to believe that anyone genuinely doesn't do (2), even if you're not aware of it because it's at a subconscious level. We learn from a very early age to read lessons and meaning into stories ...

Unless a writer makes a serious effort to distance their characters from humans in their appearance and behaviour, some part of our brain is reading them as humans, as reflections of ourselves, however we try to consciously tell ourselves that the concept is alien life forms.

They are distanced from humans, they are giant mechanical beings that live for millions of years. That's kind of the point of why I read the comics because I can buy into that. From my point of view complaining that you're offended by Spotlight: Arcee isn't different to those complaining that they're offended by Chromedome and Rewind's "gay marriage". Chromedome and Rewind aren't gay, they're asexual robots that have a personal relationship, just like Arcee is not a woman, she's Jhiaxus's idea of what a sort of woman-Transformer hybrid would look like. In both cases it's someone getting offended by their own interpretation of what they've read, sprinkled with a healthy dose of identity politics, rather than what's on the page and I really don't have a lot of time for either "side". I don't think Transformers should be should be censored or censured because some people are offended by what James Roberts writes, nor do I think that some people's offence at one of Furman's comics should be enough to besmirch the man. There's a great Stephen Fry quote about offence.

In other words, if Furman/IDW/Hasbro were ever remotely serious about Transformers being about entirely inhuman gender-neutral mechanical life-forms who shouldn't be read as men and women, they should never have been walking, talking bipeds with placement/number of limbs, eyes, mouths etc all lining up more or less exactly with their human counterparts. But man-robots is what they inherited from the franchise's origins, and so gender was always going to be an issue. The fact that they don't reproduce sexually is completely besides the point - sex and gender aren't the same thing. What we've got is a race of mostly asexual male-gendered robots with no goolies.

Not to mention (reinforce?) my other point: that SL: Arcee literally makes no sense unless all the TFs up to Arcee are to be considered male-gendered.

But that's just how you read it. There's a whole scene where Jetfire and Fort Max are thoroughly confused by the entire notion of gender, and to me that, along with say, Bumblebee and Sunstreaker having female avatars, rewards a reading where they really are gender-neutral. To be honest, I rarely think of any of them as being "male", I see them as being robots. Sometimes when they're more overtly humanised - I'm thinking basically of Ironhide here, never one of my favourite characters - they do have very male characteristics, but on the whole one of the things I like about them is that they're inherently genderless and I don't think that the introduction of gendered identity politics into Transformers is a positive step in the slightest. To me, it's as relevant as talking about their lack of Christian ethics or their disdain for Jeremy Paxman's beard - unless you're really looking for it, it's not there. I don't think of Optimus Prime or Soundwave as being male (unless they're being written particularly badly) because they're not.

Jhiaxus cannot 'introduce gender' to a non-gendered race by giving them a girl unless the rest of them are already boys. He would have had to make a girl and a boy, both equally traumatised by their being distanced from the gender-neutral template.

Well yeah, that occurred to me too - having just one female amongst non-gendered robots would be useless. Which it is, in fiction, as the gender project was abandoned after Arcee because it left her dangerously unstable, making her the only gendered Transformer. But who's to say Jhiaxus wasn't planning on turning some other poor 'bot into a schlong-swinging robo-dude? I mean, he's studied genders, presumably he knows there are at least two. And doesn't the idea that Arcee is part of an incomplete system account for some of her issues, being a yin without a yang?

Plants are gender-neutral.

No, they're not. Anyone who's ever tried to grow their own could tell you that.

If you'll dismiss Milne's silence due to some of the other scripts he's drawn, where do you stand on (the most outspoken person on the podcast) Nick Roche making pretty much the same points as Scott? Or James Roberts coming in at the end to say Windblade might well offer solutions to all that? Do either of them have something in their previous work that invalidates their current (or as of August anyway) opinions?

Well how deep do you want to dig into this stuff to take some kind of perceived offence? After being drawn in (the same) normal clothes for issue after issue, Roche turned Verity into the Wreckers' T&A. Roberts took the most disturbed, deranged, traumatised, psychopathic member of the Lost Light's crew and made his avatar female. Is that not directly correlating mental illness with being a woman? Also, amongst the crew's "naturally occurring" avatars, Whirl's was the only female - an aberration - and to cap it all, while in the issue itself Magnus's Verity avatar wears normal clothes, on the cover Milne's got her in Roche's T&A outfit, front and centre, looking all perky. Wanna see how deep the rabbit hole goes, because if we're going through the entirety of Transformers we can pick holes in anyone's work and throw out accusations of misogyny until the cows come home. Hell, if we're going to get properly outraged, what about Escargon, the Maximal snail whose Love-Love Lancer weapon forcibly changes his enemies' gender? He's like a mother****ing Spotlight: Arcee machine, ready to drop Spotlight: Arcees at a moment's notice, any time of day or night. Pointing at one bit of Transformers fiction and saying "this could be read as offensive" is like going to the beach and saying "hey, it's a bit sandy over there".

And Windblade, well, I'll wait and see but she's basically GirlDrift with make-up, so no, my hopes are not high, see above.

Now, if you're trying to say she's not a female in terms of actual physical biology... well what was that pump thing actually doing down there (God help us...) and does it make any difference if she actually regards herself as female now?

I'm saying that she's not a woman, because she's not a woman, any more that Sixshot is a man. In terms of physical biology, well who knows - Jhiaxus tampered with her "CNA" but this just brings us back to metal mammaries, doesn't it? I notice Windblade has them too. Is that what makes a female Transformer, they're like regular Transformers but with metal tits and high heels?

at no point in IDW before, or after, his work on that Spotlight has given any much in the way of indication of them being anything other than blokes

Aside from the female avatars, which lends ambiguity to the subject and the fact that nothing supports them being blokes either.

And yes, Verity is a female character. One who suffers (and this applies in varying degrees to a lot of authors on the franchise trying to write the teen characters) from sounding like a middle aged middle class English man who has no idea what a teenage homeless American woman might talk like. The main thing she has going for her is she's not Jimmy Pink.

I liked Verity. I thought she was a good "in" to the universe and I'm annoyed she was dropped, particularly for IDW's Spike Witwicky. Ugh.

Who gets lots of Autobots slaughtered because she's upset Rodimus doesn't fancy her any more and as a result decides to go for a drive and abandon her post on guard duty

No, she gets bored and then reflects that when Hot Rod was more reckless he'd have abandoned his post with her, but now he's Rodimus he's too responsible. That's not the same thing at all - if anything's wrong with Space Pirates it's Dan Reed depicting her from behind, about arse-height. I mean, I doubt Furman wrote that into his script. She may be used as bait, at least she doesn't get killed or crucified like every other Autobot who's present and when she's recovered it's Arcee who leads the cassettes in the fightback against the Quints, while Hot Rod's off fiddling with Metroplex. She subsequently held her own against Soundwave and the Terrorcons, the Dinobots and Galvatron during the Time Wars, and then when we next see her with the future Autobots fleeing to Earth in the post Time Wars future she's the only one who has the nerve to try and take the possessed Rodimus down.

Prime's Rib I have previously been a big fan of and would defend vigorously because I always assumed the meta joke was supposed to be Optimus/Hasbro were just rubbish at listening to legitimate complaints of sexism and had designed this complete failure of a character that clearly wouldn't do at representing women. After all this I'm now not sure the joke isn't a dig at all the comments from annoyed mothers he'd heard from over his years working the letters page

I think it's a bit of both. After all, Furman didn't create the character of Arcee, she is the only girl in the movie cast and she is pink. They're all valid concerns and probably ones he heard a lot but it's not like he was directly responsible.

That (unless there's some good stuff in any of the movie comics I've not read?) leaves Susan Hoffman as by far his best female creation in that she remains entirely consistent across all her showings. She's enthusiastic- occasionally dangerously so- but still smart and keen to get to the bottom of any mystery despite the personal risk (and unlike verity comes accross as you'd expect someone of her background would, but that's hardly surprising when she's about the same age and nationality Furman would have been).

There was the bit where Joy ripped her own face off and blasted Sludge with her eye-lasers, that was in a dream but it was pretty cool. The point is, inconsistency != misogyny. None of them were written as stupid or helpless or weak or decorative, they were always strong characters in their own right - human women who could stand up to the Transformers. Which is entirely the opposite of the central message of Animated, where Sari turns out to be a secret Transformer, rather than "just" a girl.

Any Bromies here want to confirm/deny that (and do they mean comparing the current Ponies to IDW, or both franchises across their entirety across the board? I presume in both cases they're including non-pony and non-Transformer supporting characters?)?

The Friendship is Magic wiki lists 54 male characters in total across all of (presumably?) G4 while mylittlewiki.org covers all the generations but doesn't categorise by gender so it's kind of hard to get an estimate. Tfwiki doesn't categorise by gender other than to specify female Transformers - which across all continuities number about 160 - but just from browsing just the Generation 1 human characters and not delving into sub-categories like Victory humans, I get a rough count of about 100 women. I can't dismiss it out of hand but unless they can pull out some firm statistics to back it up, I don't give it a lot of credibility.

Out of curiosity Vendetta, considering IDW have no choice but to introduce this new female character how would you do it so that it fit in with the whole "They're genderless and Arcee is the only "She"" aspect of her Spotlight? I assume Jhiaxus wheeling out the Groin Pump again isn't an option anyone wants to explore?

I don't really have issues with them revisiting the groin pump, if it's done well. If the issues of Arcee were addressed and the repeated experiment was a success, bringing both male and female gender to Cybertronians, why not? What's the big deal?

[inflatable dalek]

I was wondering how long it would take for the phenomenon of IDWs Arcee to blow up.

Seriously, very surprised it took this long for some female readers to take offense at how a whacked-out bitchbot is the only "female" representation in this TF mythos.

Can't blame them. Just impressed they remained silent for so long.

I must admit to not having my finger closely on the pulse of fandom, but I was under the impression it was never a hugely popular story, often for the reasons of the idea of Arcee not being pulled off (though oddly enough, looking back on my own thoughts at the time, I was more concerned by the fact she's completely irrelevant to the plot of her Spotlight, achieving and contributing nothing in it beyond being set free for future plots).

I think one big thing that has changed over the last five years is that the demographic of fandom has changed quite drastically with a lot of younger, and indeed more female people invested in the comics than before. Certainly the amount of teens and women attending Auto Assembly (other than ones dragged along by unwilling partners and parents) has shifted hugely. A large part of that (ironically considering they don't have the best reputation for the treatment of women) is down to the Bay films raising awareness of the franchise, but in terms of the comics I think the deciding factor is down to the current ongoings- well basically MTMTE really- being so much better written than anything we've had before. With the odd honourable exception, the comics we've been having for the past decade have been, at their best, good Transformers comics. MTMTE is a genuinely great comic beyond any such cavets and is probably the first book since Dreamwave started to actually feel like a "Proper" 21st century comic (of course, that was what Furman was trying to do with the ...tions, but as much as I still enjoy Escalation I don't think he pulled it off).

So because there's this younger and more varied audience from outside the previous fandom ghetto, there's suddenly a decent (if by no means majority) percentage of the audience who don't have that deference to Furman and his work that I would say most of us old farts have. They just see a writer with a fundamentally 1980's attitude and all the (from their pov) flaws that come with it and don't feel especially keen to treat him any lighter than we would Mike Costa whenever he did something really, really stupid.

Now, there's nothing wrong with Furman being an old fashioned writer (and the fact he has never really gotten the hang of things like writing for trade is understandable when he was basically completely out of comic writing for a 5/6 year period where the market changed entirely before Dreamwave came a knocking for him), and after such a dreadful start (and managing to get worse with the Scorponok stuff) ReGeneration One has in the last couple of months become delightfully silly fun, still very stupid but entertainingly so which covers a multitude of sins. To be honest I'd say the problem is more with the editors at Dreamwave and IDW being happy to use him as a Chris Clearmont* style crutch without properly cultivating decent new writers to compliment his more retro take on things. It shouldn't have taken us a decade to get to the point where we were getting something as constantly good and fresh feeling as MTMTE, and it's a pity IDW/Hasbro seem keen to destroy everything they've achieved by making Dark Cybertron as generic and dull as possible.

And that's why a lot of my issues with the Windblade thing have nothing to do with the character, "Dawn of the Autobots" implying an overarching storyline between books of some sort? Set on Cybertron? Lots of Starscream? None of that worked out so well in the last three months. Just hurry up IDW and get everyone back in the pub.




*There's also a lot of the Terrance Dicks about him as well, in that he's such a big part of the childhood of Fans of a Certain Age everyone just politely ignores how poor so much of his recent work is and gets slightly uncomfortable whenever anyone who didn't grow up with his novelizations dares to point out how worryingly obsessed with rape all his original books are...

[inflatable dalek]

Though thinking about it, 95% of Dark Cybertron being so dull probably hasn't helped with the timing here, with so little else to talk or debate about (I don't think I've ever seen so many fans all agree as much as I have with DC, "A bit crap apart from the Roberts bits") I think there may be a bit of us all be latching onto something, anything, that will get a decent back and forth conversation going.

Though talking about these things, even via the ultimately silly medium of Transformers comics, is a good thing, being more open to discussing our thoughts on gender issues would (at least in the UK anyway) probably do a lot of good generally.

[Jack Cade]

They are distanced from humans, they are giant mechanical beings that live for millions of years. That's kind of the point of why I read the comics because I can buy into that.

'Giant mechanical beings that live for millions of years' is what we're told; men in funny costumes with magic powers is what we're shown/how they're written. There's zero effort - even on Roberts' part - to imagine the different ways million-year old life-forms would behave. Why is Rodimus still acting like a young go-getter with everything to prove? Who wouldn't be past that by their first centenary? Everyone else is basically permanently in their thirties, with the exception of Tailgate who (in a way that makes sense, since he was very young when trapped on Cybertron) is written as a child in an old man's body.

The franchise has always asked us to let some things go for the sake of an easy ride - one obvious point being that any genuine giant would have to be built differently. If humans were the size of elephants, our legs would buckle - our shape is only efficient up to a certain size. So we're left with suspending our disbelief for the sake of the fiction, while at the same time understanding that TF writers are essentially still writing about people. People like us. The problems they encounter - even when derived from some hard sci-fi concept - can always be mapped pretty much directly onto the problems humans experience. It's a story about us at the same time as being a story about aliens. Chromedome and Rewing are a gay couple; at the same time, they're asexual beings who love each other.

In a sense, I'm not sure why I'm even arguing this because you *know* it already - you just seem to be denying it for the sake of defending a comic that didn't personally offend you from criticism by people it did hurt and offend. (And hurt here, along with marginalisation, is the litmus test, rather than offence caused).

To be honest, I rarely think of any of them as being "male", I see them as being robots.

If you don't consciously think of them as male, that's largely because you *are* male, because for you, male = neutrality, the norm. If every TF from the 1984 onwards had been built like Arcee and they referred to each other as 'she', you sure as s**t wouldn't be on these boards now saying you don't think of any of them as being female. Would you? Really?

Which it is, in fiction, as the gender project was abandoned after Arcee because it left her dangerously unstable, making her the only gendered Transformer.

I see what you're saying here, but Furman's clumsy dialogue about the use of pronouns basically makes the notion of Jhiaxus creating a 'boy' Transformer ludicrous. What would they look like? Nearly every other Transformer. What pronoun would be applied? 'He'. So how would he be any different? Some kind of robo-cock? That would just make him sexually functional while barely shifting the gender. The whole point that Arcee drives home is that she's somehow an 'opposite' to everyone else, and that can only work if she's defining herself as the second gender in a previously single-gendered (but not un-gendered) race. Otherwise her problem would be, as you say, that she's a yin without a yang. But she's not a yin without a yang. She's a yin and every other ****** is a yang, and she used to be a yang too. That theme rings out pretty clearly in the story, no matter which way you hold the book up.

No, they're not. Anyone who's ever tried to grow their own could tell you that.

What, did they run into problems with one set of plants refusing to wear pink or something? Gender is different to sex!

[Metal Vendetta]

Chromedome and Rewing are a gay couple

Ngh. No, they're a couple. They're not a gay couple because they have no concept of sexuality, hetero or homo.

And hurt here, along with marginalisation, is the litmus test, rather than offence caused

People were physically harmed? Or do you mean they were offended by the toy robot in the funny comic?

What, did they run into problems with one set of plants refusing to wear pink or something? Gender is different to sex!

Exhibiting different behaviours according to sexual characteristics - including spontaneously changing sex in single-sex environments like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park - sounds gendered to me.

[bumblemusprime]

Jeez, ID, you're a little too harsh on Furman. I liked Verity a lot, and Joy Meadows and Space Pirates Arcee were decent characters. You can parse the stories apart all you want, but I think if you come at Furman's track record without an agenda, he looks pretty good as a writer of female characters.

I see a lot of binary thinking in this discussion. Furman doesn't have to be a misogynist or 100% innocent. Spotlight: Arcee doesn't have to be complete crap but it doesn't have to be innocent of larger implications either. And some people can easily read the TFs as genderless sexless beings. Others get larger implications. Surely Spotlight: Windblade or whatever this is won't damage the franchise... any worse than DC already is.

Aww, that's depressing.

[Jack Cade]

Ngh. No, they're a couple. They're not a gay couple because they have no concept of sexuality, hetero or homo.

They're a gay couple. And Arcee is a girl. You're ignoring (in these particular instances) the sense in which the whole fiction is about people, a reflection of our own culture. Which is inconsistent of you, because you must be applying that reading elsewhere, or the whole franchise basically falls apart as a ludicrous string of coincidences, whereby a supposedly completely different, much older society of physiologically non-parallel beings miraculously closely resembles our own.

I keep saying it, and you keep ignoring this pretty simple point: we all read the comic on at least two levels.

People were physically harmed?

Harm doesn't have to be physical. You know that. Just because it's done through social mechanisms such as ostracisation doesn't immediately relegate harm to the level of 'people taking offence'. That story *suggests* - not dictates, but suggests - that femininity itself is outside the norm, and does so alongside a barrage of other titles that, *cumulatively* (ie. not each one on their own) have a harmful effect.

Exhibiting different behaviours according to sexual characteristics - including spontaneously changing sex in single-sex environments like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park - sounds gendered to me.

Gender is largely a social construct. Exhibiting different behaviours according to sexual characteristics is ... exhibiting different behaviours according to sexual characteristics. It's not automatic proof of genderedness.

Furman doesn't have to be a misogynist or 100% innocent.

Exactly. He's not a misogynist - he is, like many men, somehow who hasn't considered the implications for women of certain decisions he has made. It's a kind of neglect, one that comes from not being alive to the issues. He just didn't think, "Wait, this story makes sense on the level of the fiction (sort of), but what would it say to women, to have the representation of their entire gender reduced, in this fictional universe, to a single character who regards herself as abnormal and is so disturbed by who she is that she feels compelled to act in a violent, borderline psychotic manner?"

[Yaya]

I think one big thing that has changed over the last five years is that the demographic of fandom has changed quite drastically with a lot of younger, and indeed more female people invested in the comics than before. Certainly the amount of teens and women attending Auto Assembly (other than ones dragged along by unwilling partners and parents) has shifted huge...

Nah. I think we've got the same 9,000 to 11,000 comic fans reading TF comics that we've had since the end of DW days. Doubt there's been any real shift in TF comic demographics, really. Just think the female fans who have been reading have had enough of Arcee. Much like the rest of us, I suppose.

[inflatable dalek]

Jeez, ID, you're a little too harsh on Furman. I liked Verity a lot, and Joy Meadows and Space Pirates Arcee were decent characters. You can parse the stories apart all you want, but I think if you come at Furman's track record without an agenda, he looks pretty good as a writer of female characters.

My "agenda" is,: The very first story I every had properly brought for me as a child was Space Pirates. I wasn't a big reader at the time (despite my age), my mother started buying me the comic weekly as a way of making me behave at school... and even at the time she was reading to me as my reward for good behaviour... She felt compelled to add her own commentary of "This is really. Very Badly. Written. An entire city dependant on one lookout? And Arcee is a horrible, sexist, character. She's from the cartoon film Grandand copied for you as well isn't she? These robots shouldn't have males or females at all.. We have to get you reading some proper SF if you think this is a sensible way of portraying alien races...."

As much as I mocked her at the time, and as much as getting out of having to put up with her thoughts on every issue was the main driving force in me learning to read by myself...

The fact of the matter is, in 1988 my mother was deeply and horribly offended by Simon Furman's writing. To the point if she were to meet him now she could give him a three hour lecture on what He Did Wrong. Trust me, I've heard it.

[inflatable dalek]

Ngh. No, they're a couple. They're not a gay couple because they have no concept of sexuality, hetero or homo.

They're a gay couple.

And, however we do or don't read the relationship between Chromedome and Rewind... in the podcast I linked to a question from Chris McFeely is preceded by describing them as "A fundamentally gay couple", and James Roberts not only agrees with that description but talks about how Hasbro were fine with it.

[Metal Vendetta]

And, however we do or don't read the relationship between Chromedome and Rewind... in the podcast I linked to a question from Chris McFeely is preceded by describing them as "A fundamentally gay couple", and James Roberts not only agrees with that description but talks about how Hasbro were fine with it.

Sorry, but James Roberts is a horrible misogynist, as noted above. Or does this stuff only count when it's someone you want to rag on?

[Computron]

I think for myself I'm biased by the fact that as a male I do view an overwhelming amount of the TF's as male. Objectively I "know" they are genderless, but subjectively my mind interpretes them as having "male" voices, masculine features, and well, that Chromedome and Rewind are a gay couple.

But that is because Im looking at the story from the perspective of a person who has grown up in a society that is in many ways defined by the need ti classify things as male or female.

I'll have to ask my wife what she thinks.

One point though, whay about the case of Black Arachnia and Air Razor? I rather thought they are voth well written female TF's that dont insult women. I'm curious if that affects this conversation particularly in relation to the question of whether it "makes sense" to have "female" TF's.