Va'al wrote:She's not making a big deal out of it, she's posting on her Tumblr about how she's defining her work and the preparation involved in it and how she wants to relate to and deal with the fans in an inclusive way.
It *is* a big deal that this is the first female character who is not a deviation or aberration or experiment in the IDW continuity, that it's both a woman writing and a woman drawing, and that it's the result of a fan poll!
Please do not use the 'what about the menz' argument here, as we're clearly missing the whole point if that's what we're resorting to. The whole universe/franchise is gendered, with the balance in favour of the male side of the issue, even though they are allegedly genderless. Yes, because of the English language and its gendered properties with personal pronouns, but that nonetheless the status quo and a fact.
No, I can use that here since it's relevant and accurate.
This comic is set in the idw G1 universe, in which unlike other incarnations, the Transformers species is genderless. Which has been made even more obvious with MTMTE. They have no gender, and gender is a foreign concept to them, something they only know from biological species.
Arcee's origin is that Jhiaxus decided to emulate biological species, and introduce genders into the species. The first victim of that experiment we got to see was Arcee, but nowhere does it state she was the only victim, for all we know that experiment yielded a number of females and males, which would be pretty interesting to explore.
This is all in the context to the universe this takes place in, if this was say the Aligned, Movie, Armada, etc continuity I can understand the need for this approach, but seeing how it's set in the genderless incarnation, it just comes off as belittling.
The whole TF franchise needs more female characters, this incarnation here however has two females, zero males, and millions of genderless Transformers.
Coming in here and claiming it's not inclusive enough and stating they're going to fix that by introducing a handful of new female characters with a comic that was commissioned to sell a toy, comes across as somewhat offensive actually.
It almost seems like it's trying to associate itself with other actual causes for equality and inclusiveness, like video games, TV shows, the work place, the comic industry.
Again, if this was any other continuity, I wouldn't have a problem, but this one here is exactly the wrong incarnation for this approach.
This is as if someone wrote a story set in the Ultimate Marvel universe and introduced a new Jewish Supervillain and tried to make a huge deal out of this because there are too many Nazi based Supervillains in the Classic Marvel universe.