ZeroWolf wrote:Interesting...though if they used that name for janes recent run as the thunder goddess, would they have reacted the same?
My response is the same though (and this is where we get locked into a infinite loop) is that why should they give a reason for that (as to why they have male and female?) We already suspend our belief about giant alien robots that can transform into cars and household objects, surely it would be easy to say that there is gendered cybertronians and leave it at that? I mean we could just say that sparks are gendered like what black hat was thinking.
This is pretty much my thinking. I like fembots, I wanna see more of them. I will admit an explanation for their presence would be nice, but not strictly necessary.
If you actually need an explanation for the existence of boy-robots and girl-robots, there's a variety of approaches one could take. (I have mentioned these before but I'll expand on them here.)
1: The evolutionary holdover/appendix approach. Perhaps the Transformers are so ancient that they evolved into purely mechanical beings over a long, long period of time (as opposed to the Gobots who became cyborgs to escape some kind of catastrophe IIRC). Gender, sexuality and various other "humanizing" features of Transformers are all holdovers from this period, be they cultural or anatomical. This would open up pathways for interesting story ideas- perhaps have "Bio-Luddites" who believe the whole technoevolution thing was a bad idea and want to return to their organic roots, possibly via horrible experiments (like an evil version of the Beast Machines Maximals). On the flipside, you'd have "Ascendents" who believe that all organic features and holdovers are flaws in need of purging, and only by shedding all "obsolete behaviour and anatomy" can the Transformers become true gods (Shockwave would be perfect for this with his featureless mono-eye face, emotionless, calculating outlook and "For Science!" motivations).
2: The cultural osmosis/"Hey, that looks nifty!" approach. Perhaps in the old days, the Cybertronians were androgynous and very, very "inhuman". When they first ventured forth into the wild blue yonder and encountered organic races, they took notes of their cultures and biology. Upon returning to Cybertron with their findings, many features of the alien races they had made contact with, notably gender and elements of organic anatomy (notably faces) were considered good enough ideas to be worth incorporating into their culture and technology. This would also explain the presence of romance and, if you wanted it, sex (be it for reproduction or simply for pleasure) in Transformers culture; some ancient Transformer explorer bore witness to some alien wedding, thought "Huh, that's nice, we should do something like that!" and sure enbough the emergent race developed the concept of romance.
3: The purpose-built approach. If we gave them a "creationist" approach (be it divine in the form of Primus or mundane in the form of the Quintessons) then perhaps their creator deliberately gave them gender for whatever reason- Primus did so to bless his children with the ability to feel love as organics do, the Quintessons did so to make them more appealing to the buyers of their products (a robot house servant is obviuously going to sell better if you make it look like a friendly butler/maid than a featureless, cyclopean drone). The former is good for a more lighthearted, uplifting story whilst the latter could raise some very dark and interesting questions depending on how you wanted to do the Quintessons.
4: The reproductive approach. Transformer bodies are manufactured in factories and foundries and the creation of them has long been mastered, but sparks cannot be so easily made. Sparks are created by the union of a male and female spark (technically speaking this can be a very clinical, boring chore, but Transformers generally enjoy adding some element of romance/sexuality to the process for whatever reason) and after a gestation period, the female spark "buds", splitting off a portion of itself into a new spark. This is obviously quite tiring and requires some recovery time for the female (their soul just divided itself after all) but given that other methods of making new sparks are ususally disastrous, the old-fashioned way isn't going out of fashion any time soon.