Twincast / Podcast Episode #75 "Lady Robots"

Well I found this episode very enjoyable

On the subject of my user name, razorclaw's right it's Soundwave's Silverhammer, and it is based on the Beatles song, it was just to long so I shortened to "SW's". Also it was funny as hell listening to you guys trying to figure out the pronunciation

I figure its only fair to voice my personal opinion on the subject of fembots, seeing as i put all you on the spot XD. Personally I prefer the idea of "lady bots" and "dude bots" over there being no gender. My thought on the way they should reflect their gender is that if there are two distinct "sexes" female and male, then it would go to reason that both would have traits that differentiate one sex from the other. However one can also reason, like real women, these fembots would have different body types as well, skinny, tall, short, athletic, curvy, boxy, whatever. Much like how their "male" counterparts also have different body types any where from a barrel chested prime to a willowy seeker. Personally i would like to see as much assorted body types in "fembots" as there are "malebots".

On the subject of Ratchets original characterization, as Counterpunch noted, Doctor Ratchet is the antithesis of his namesake, Nurse Ratched, from one flew over the cuckoo's nest. To me though Bob Budiansky's characterization of,(lady), Doc Ratchet is more akin to Doctor Chakwas from the Mass effect games, or alternatively Doc Cottle from Battlestar Galactica.

Thought-provoking as it was, the fembot discussion could've gone deeper, but right off the bat...

Am I seriously the only person who sees that Ripclaw's torso does have an intentionally feminine shape to it?!? The most masculine thing about her robot mode is the extremely wide hatchet-jaw, which indeed skews it from the head of a generic monster to a male monster at a glance; therefore Bakudora doesn't look any more masculine to me, just more SheZow-esque. (More on that below)

I'm still all for Transformers initially being neuter, but having to somehow adopt genders for the sake of human interaction, as it makes them more alien, and it's interesting to think of them adapting to deal with us in ways other than making their alt-modes disguises. That idea's also a reflection of how we project gender onto imaginary beings, and what that says about social norms. Are all Transformers neuter until the introduction of a fembot makes the rest male by default? We do tend to assume that animals without a visual tell (ex: lion, peacock, cardinal) are male until learning otherwise, right?

And I bring up SheZow again because there's a burning question that all the fury from the family-values crowd and religious nuts directed at that cartoon begs, but hasn't yet been asked AFAIK: Why is it supposedly natural for established male superheroes to have female variants of themselves (Supergirl, Batgirl, American Dream, She-Hulk), but some sort of assault on our children's sexual identity if a male version of a female hero comes up? (No, Wonder Man is not a male version of Wonder Woman, they're with different companies) Elita One, Chromia, and Firestar were clearly female counterparts to their boyfriends in terms of their functions, but has any male TF has ever been a functional counterpart to fembot? The answer's likely that the "function" of most female characters in boys' entertainment is tokenism, which you can only have a true reversal of by going all Shattered Glass...

...I guess my only point is that this one discussion could've been the entire podcast. Glad to hear someone agreed that introducing entirely new genders could actually make sense for Transformers; the whole alien angle.

My thoughts on gender are as such, being as there really isn't a difference genetically or mechanically different than each other, what if stereotyping is exactly what transformers genders are about? A buncha robots set off into space and started noticing similarities between their armor constructs and general build and the culture "assimilated" gender because that's what the rest of the universe was doing.

"hey, I look like a girl!" From a bi-sexual standoint, it might sound sexist to us, but try to imagine it from a mechanical scientificpoint of view, and not a human one... No?

JRFitzpatrick7 wrote:Bob. The King you say?

[pictures]

Mother of god...

What a great week! I download and listen to episode 74 only for a new one to appear in my RSS feed the next day. Great company guys! You made this week pass by faster than I thought it was going to be. Like ScottyP I too am a functioning Alcoholic,

its fair enough that you get stuff wrong about comics in general, but Transformers comics? "the Marvel G1 comics never dealt with alternate realities!" except for Time Wars and the whole Galvatron mess.

but it was still an establishing of there being alternate realities, surely?

I gotta agree with Ryan in that the Marvel Comics felt isolated within their own little corner of the multiverse, not acknowledging any other TF worlds existing outside of those made specificially by Marvel Comics. Why, it didn't have energon as the main source of energy for its characters; "Transformer fuel" filled that role (though Energon Cubes did exist, they were far a few in appearance, and mostly served as energy storage materials than anything else that the cartoon used them for).

But, at the same time, the same was true for the cartoon. It also never acknowledged any worlds outside of the Sunbow/Toei/AKOM/etc.-made materials.

The reason being that there was no known mutliverse back then for them to acknowledge. The brand was still in its infancy, and the multiverse concept hadn't developed enough to a point that the contemporary fiction could make reference to it in a feasible manner. It took the Armada Dreamwave comics to make the first baby steps in doing so.

But, in this day and age, even though Marvel G1 never referenced the mutliverse, that doesn't mean it was excluded from it. Why, some of the Fun Pub multiverse fiction cite the Marvel G1 comics as having events that are some of the most important to multiverse of all. Like, when Octopunch accidentally shot Primus and woke him up in issue #61 ("The Primal Scream!"), that scream of Primus's that alerted Unicron was not only heard throughout the universe, but throughout the whole multiverse. And Unicron's destruction in issue #75 ("On the Edge of Extinction!") resulted in an anomaly that not only created the Classics splinter timeline but also destroyed both the "Another Time & Place" and "Challenge of the GoBots" realities.

Even though the Marvel Comics started off as their own individuated entity, the multiverse owes a great deal of respect to Marvel G1 for many of the things it established in its original 80-issue run.

fine.

Marvels wasn't an OGN though. It was single issues that were then collected.

Flashwave wrote:My thoughts on gender are as such, being as there really isn't a difference genetically or mechanically different than each other, what if stereotyping is exactly what transformers genders are about? A buncha robots set off into space and started noticing similarities between their armor constructs and general build and the culture "assimilated" gender because that's what the rest of the universe was doing.

"hey, I look like a girl!" From a bi-sexual standoint, it might sound sexist to us, but try to imagine it from a mechanical scientificpoint of view, and not a human one... No?

the gender between the transformers goes beyond the physical appearance there's the emotional part the need for companionship that only female can give a male and a male can give a female
keep in mind these are more than just machines they are biological too that think and feel and have strong emotions. its not like giving a pure mechanical android simulated feelings they are an alien race that has a biology that happens to be cybernetic and there males and females are physically and emotionally different