Okay, this is probably old news, but Simon Furman, for some reason still writing comics (badly), can’t wrap his head around the concept of “female robots”. I guess someone didn’t watch Mazinger Z and know the benefits of a breast based payload. Okay, so Transformers don’t reproduce sexually…unless you’re a female fan who likes Megatron/Starscream as some sort of tsundere kinky thing. But Furman has to continue to screw up the female Transformers concept. In the 80s, he wrote a story called “Prime’s Rib” where feminists in America were mad at the TFs for having no ‘female Transformer’ (Sunstreaker, Starscream, Soundwave, Tracks, Bumblebee existing already as a bunch of pussies not withstanding), so the Autobots build Arcee. Which brings up the same question I had with the cartoon origins of the Dinobots: If they can just BUILD new TF life, why the hell don’t they just make a buttload of troops to throw at the Cons and win the battle? Anyway, the story is at least more acceptable than what we get in his IDW offering w/Spotlight Arcee.
In the IDWverse, Arcee’s not created to be politically correct. In fact, pretty
much the opposite is true. Arcee already existed as a normal TF (who are, of
course, all males). Jhiaxus experiments on him, to give him a sex change op
and turn him into a her. And now, everyone uses female pronouns to refer
to now her, even though the TFs at this time haven’t met any other race,
much less a race with male-female genders. Much less a race that uses in
any sort, gender based pronouns in their language. Not every language on
Earth itself uses gender based pronouns, it’s just the conceit of English that
makes that assumption. So, we now get a horrible sex change operation story
that makes no sense whatsoever (why would Jhiaxus make a female TF if he
also never saw a female, huh?).
You want female TFs? It’s simple. In the G1 toons, in theory, Quints made the
TFs (course, the Quints are all liars and there’s no independently verifiable
proof of the TF origin, but that’s another topic). In every other universe, the
TFs either evolved on Cybertron or were created by Primus. Nothing stops the
two from being contradictory: The TFs could have been made before, the Quints
found them and modified them. Either way, that’s beides the point.
Easy explanation for female TFs: Quints (re)made the TF race to sell to other races to earn profits on their products. Some of those alien clients had to have been female based, or feminine exclusive, or amazonian in nature, or a female controlled society. Some of those aliens had to have been dirty perverts wanting to hump alien (to them) races. I’m looking at you, Jabba the Hutt. Obvious conclusion being…
Female TFs were designed that way especially, so they can be sold to those
clients.
They’re still on Cybertron because they either returned home, were never put
on the market, or produced as the Quints were getting kicked off planet and
thus ’born’ on a Quint free Cybertron.
