Dominic wrote:The character of Windblade is not a screed. But, we might (actually, Anderson and I *do*) have misgivings about Scott's motivations and how she framed the character.
How did she frame the character in a way that lends you misgivings? Where in the book is Windblade framed in a problematic manner?
JediTricks wrote: You're saying that the audience can only know a work if they know the author and his or her true motivations and any connecting opinions which may color the work at the time of creation. I don't agree with that, each work will some day stand on its own without anything to speak for the creator except the work itself.
This from the guy who will not read Costa's run of TF because Costa is a big jerk?
No, I won't read Costa because Costa said he had serious problems writing for Transformers because he couldn't understand how to write for non-humans, for characters who don't need food or sex, he couldn't wrap his head around motivation for the characters he was tasked with writing. That's the sign of a limited imagination for a comic author, it's a bad sign for the material he produced. And when called on it, he attacked the fans who paid his fucking bills and threw smacktalk at the whole brand.
Furman did not create Arcee. He likely would not have bothered to introduce her at all. He just explained her presence on page, in 2006 and in 1986. He thought she was a stupid idea, and worked that idea on to the page in 1986. In 2006, he took that to the next level.
He created THIS Arcee and from that this entire problem.
Prowl wrote:Scott didn't create Windblade either, and simply explained her presence on page, and she managed to do it without "Hurr girls are dumb and can't be Transformers".
Oh shit, good point! I forgot, Scott was handed a character and told to make something of her. The audience created the character.
Anderson wrote:The characters aren't the problem, the issue is that this brand continues to prove itself resistant to development of any kind, that there is no room for outsiders to enjoy the brand unless they enjoy it the way old-guard fans have always enjoyed it, "the way it was intended back in '84".
I don't think that's fair at all. It's not change in general that's a problem. I take each new thing and form an opinion as it happens, and for the most part I've been fine. The current way the books mix and match the characters and factions is certainly not how it was done or intended in 1984, and until the whole Megatron as captain storyline started, I had no problem with the approach. Even enjoyed it for the most part. Change is fine, but that doesn't mean I'm going to agree with everything.
There was some mix-n-match of characters and factions in '84, heroes and villains crossed over, some media had Autobots not entirely into the cause and Decepticons not being true believers, even Fire From the Sky has mutable faction issues throughout, and not just for SkyJetFire but Starscream as well.
In the past year, we've had the Chromedome/Rewind issue come up and get vocal pushback, the Ultra Magnus as Dread Pirate Roberts issue come up and get vocal pushback, and now Windblade is getting some very vocal pushback. So is it really unreasonable to see the brand resistant to development from G1?
I"m going to quote Dom: some subjects work better with the Transformers concept than others. And how much did character concepts like the ones you mentioned really factor into the fiction? They existed as toy bios, but the subjects raised were never given much exploration, in-depth or otherwise.
But you alone aren't the arbiter of which subjects of change do and don't work. The stuff I quoted from Mirage's bio comes up in Sunbow's More than Meets the Eye and it's not alone, and I know the Marvel G1 book had that sort of thing as well. Rose-tinted glasses?
And they're clearly male, they have male pronouns, they have male physiques, they have male facial features and facial hair, they have male voices in their animated media. If you start arguing that it's "for simplicity in conveying to the audience", you start falling down the rabbit hole of deconstructing why they do anything, and then you end up with Roombas bumping into each other again. The reality is that these fictional characters do have some level of connection to the real-world beings which created them, there's no way around that... it's "engendered" into the brand (pun intended).
Who's going to watch a show about a bunch of emotionless robots with voices like speech synthesizers? (Soundwave excepted, and he certainly wasn't emotionless). For there to be an emotional connection and empathy, the characters have to act in ways that the audience will recognize. The audience recognizes people, understandably, so Transformers are written that way, to some extent. And they are largely voiced by males, because the brand began as and largely remains a boys toy action line, with some females added from time to time.
So your argument is that they made storytelling concessions in order to make them recognizable to the audience, to make them relatable. Don't you see the irony there? That you're arguing they made them male to make them relatable to the primary audience of the time, but that doing so now by including heroic females is unacceptable? They made female bots in '85 on the show, 29 years ago, it's not like the concept is something the brand felt was impossible - Shockwave even says he thought fembots were extinct, that's an interesting concept, it opens a lot of sci-fi doors while opening the brand to a larger audience.
Your assumption that the the brand "largely remains" a boys toy action line ignores the significant female contingent of passionate audience members, I see like 30% now at Botcon, and then we've got the movies that have opened the brand up even further. So it's a viewpoint that isn't wholly accurate, it's using old data and personal presumptions to try to define the current state of affairs.
The brand is now 30 years old, should it not grow, should it not develop alongside the society that consumes the content? Should it exist in a state of arrested development, permanently stuck in telling stories only for the little boys of the 1980s? The politics and interpersonal relationships of Cybertron and its people are what drew me back into the brand after years of doing the same thing over and over again, first with Beast Wars and now with the earliest issues of RID and MTMTE. There is more to the brand than just telling the same exact stories over and over again. Either that or it's a dying brand stuck in a circle jerk, and the growth we're experiencing now is merely an anomaly which will be wiped out in place of a trip into the downward spiral of repetition.
I"m going to go back to what I said earlier. Some changes work for me, some don't. It doesn't follow that any subject is a good fit to incorporate into the Transformers brand. And obviously, we don't always agree on which ones fit and which ones don't, with this case being a prime example.
But you're not arguing about your personal tastes, you're arguing about the brand's integrity being affected by it, you have taken it personally, let it get under your skin, it's clearly more than just "I don't like X, I will gloss over X in the future" - that's how one might feel about Syndromica or about Sky-Byte, they still buy the comics but they just kinda gloss over those elements. No, this is you taking a huge stand against something you perceive as larger. And you're saying the brand should conform to those beliefs, that there shouldn't be Sky-Byte or Syndromica or whatever at all, and their mere existence is an affront and damages the brand as a whole.
Furman has said as much. I can't read his mind, but I'll take him at his word unless there's a good reason not to.
http://simonfurman.wordpress.com/2013/1 ... ead-scott/
I'm sure you've read this, and his comments to others. I think he and I are largely on the same page with a lot of thinking when it comes to Transformers and gender.
I have read that post but not comments below it, which is why I find it so odd - he didn't say as much, he QUOTED SOMEONE ELSE instead. He took someone else's word for what it all meant and put it out under his banner - you can really see this is a part of the problem when he says "for Scott to (wrongly) accuse me of apparently setting out to be offensive to women is the kind of personal attack that really needs a response" because if he had read what she said instead of taking others' word for it, he'd know she called out the work itself and the implications it left, not the motivations behind it. He admits freely to not understanding PREVIOUS complaints with the issue in those comments below, I see, so there's still a disconnect.
I'm just making the judgment call from each writers' own words.
You are expanding from their words.
Maybe this is the thing that informs our opinion on this subject, because while I had favorite characters, none of them were ever role models. The idea seems quite odd to me, honestly, to take a fictional character, male or female (who in this case isn't even human) and look to them as a role model. It's just fiction. It's just escapist entertainment and fun. I doubt I've ever seen it otherwise. It's too divorced from reality to be anything else for me.
That's not how it works, when a kid takes on a favorite character, whether the kid intends to follow in that character's influence or not, they are still affected and informed by them and since they are still developing, that automatically becomes a role model for them. You may not say "I want to be loyal and stalwart and fight for the little guy like Optimus Prime", but in a small way if those are things in the character's makeup that you respond to, you are going to be affected by them. And that's why different people have different favorite characters, everybody is different and responds differently to those sorts of things.
Every fiction comments on the reader's world, even when it works to distance itself from that world it still is making a comment on the differences, and by doing so it makes a comment on the similarities as well.
Fiction helps open minds to worlds beyond those they know, so to narrow it to only what they know only reinforces small-mindedness. I'm part jewish, my mom had a friend at work when I was a kid who lived her whole life in Minnesota before coming to Los Angeles not long before we met her. This person had never met a jewish person ever, she wasn't even educated that they were people or that it was a religion, the only exposure she had to the concept was the idea of "jew" as a verb, to "jew something down" in the same way we use "gyp" (it's from "gypsy", if you didn't know). She had no hatred in her heart for jews at all, but she was informed by her role models without knowing it that they were a bad thing, that they were the cause of a negative, because the people she looked up to did carry that belief.
Funny how you, a male, can't identify with anybody who could take personal offense at Furman's story about Arcee, the sole representative for female characters in that entire race, being defined as an insane aberration. I wonder what about you, a male, not being able to identify with a character, a female, being seen as different might affect another reader, perhaps a female. Where oh where is the disconnect between you, a male, and another, a female, in a story about the single and thus whole representation of females in the story, have come from. Where might a difference in viewpoint exist between a male and a female exist in this situation. What's the divide between male and female in this complex issue of audience acceptance of representative gender. It's a mystery I guess, maybe they just have a chip on their shoulders for no reason.
See above. Transformers aren't human, they aren't real, and how they are portrayed has no effect on how I view myself or other people.
My comment wasn't about Transformers, it was about the female audience and your male disconnect from their viewpoints. They
are real.
I'm responding to the author's comments, not the material itself, it is true.
Well, I hope you'll reconsider commenting solely on the meta aspects, and look with fresh eyes at the content itself as it is both interesting and could have a drastic affect on the future of the brand, or could just be a gimmicky flash in the pan that peters out, but it's interesting in its own merits enough to warrant that conversation rather than this one.
Dom wrote:But, it usually tackled bigger questons than gender theory (which is typically on discussed on college campuses). In that respect, Scott's antics are a step down.
I don't think gender theory is really a small question, I believe in true equality, that justice for some is justice for none, so even a seemingly small thing can be a big impact on society. Also, what are these "antics" you speak of? There are no "antics" in this book, and her post about Arcee wasn't antics, it was explanation of her opinion.
Generally I agree. But, to invert this..... If somebody is going to use a fictional character that represents an alien space robot as a roll model, why is gender such a big thing? (Once somebody crosses the lines between species and actually existing....gender seems pretty trivial.)
More to the point, if people need corresponding gender for their role models, where does the problem really lie? To use a non-political example, I *really* think that Shreve (Daily Coyote) Stockton is worthy of admiration. I never once looked at her site and thought "I cannot think well of her and want to mimic her work because she is a woman." I looked over her site and thought...."damn, someone beat me to it. But, it can be done." (If anything, she raised the bar and now I want to do it *better*....because a woman is worth surpassing in this case.)
Different genders think differently, that's how it can be a big thing. The audiences think differently from each other and the genders in life generally act a bit differently from each other, so not only can it inform differently but it can be accepted differently.
O6 wrote:The difference between Empurata and Arcee is that Empurata victims don't have a direct real world counterpart group to point to as being mistreated. Empurata victims are victims of systematic torture, scarred illegally in secret by a system more interested in propping up its corruptions then dealing with its core problems. What would the correlation be to our society?
...Black people...? *shrug*
Not all black people were slaves, not all black people are tortured and mutilated. You could say Nelson Mandella is a potential correlation since he was tortured and mutilated for political reasons, but not all black people are Nelson Mandella. (Did I just say Whirl and Shockwave are correlated to Nelson Mandella? Oh my.)
Anderson wrote:female Transformers in IDW - fine until Scott started talking about how terrible and how misogynist Arcee was, blah blah blah... and that's when I got put out with the concept.
But you haven't stopped to consider that she could be right, you assumed from the outset that she was creating a problem rather than voicing an existing problem that she was tasked by the content creators - Hasbro - to address.
It's the attitude of the author injecting gender issues where they weren't needed that has put me off the book, not putting "girls" in a 30 year old brand. That's as plain as I can make it, though I thought I'd been just as plain already.
I don't know if you're being untrue to yourself or just missing it, but Furman is the one who injected this gender issue into the IDW line, not Scott. Scott was tasked with undoing it to include new female characters and open the brand up to new female readers.
Who wants to read about a bunch of dirtbags as Autobots? I sure don't. Despite the ongoing attempt to write gray and gray morality in these books, Autobots are still nominally the more decent side. I'd like to see them act like it.
Whirl? The pre-Autobot society of Sentinel Prime and them? There is some value in having some folks be gray and some folks be white, I don't think you've argued against those examples before. Thundercracker seemed to have more honor than Whirl, and he paid a heavy price for that - that's interesting IMO.
Dom wrote:It's the attitude of the author injecting gender issues where they weren't needed that has put me off the book, not putting "girls" in a 30 year old brand. That's as plain as I can make it, though I thought I'd been just as plain already.
Exactly. It is the motive as much as the action.
As it was with Furman, the only difference being that you agree with his misogynistic creation under the guise of a fantasy opinion where the Cybertronians are gender-neutral, despite mountains of evidence showing that wasn't the case.
Shockwave wrote:Arcee isn't crazy because she's female, she was crazy because she had suffered a trauma. Scott misinterpreted that specifically for the forum post where she called out Furman's Spotlight issue. And at this point, I am thoroughly convinced she did that exclusively as a publicity stunt. I personally think she just wanted to create a shitstorm in the interest of raising interest in her book. And really, the fact that there isn't anything in the Windblade comic about this is what really makes me question her motives. And the unprofessional way she went about it (ie: attacking another writer's work) is about as low as it can get. At least in the world of comic book writing.
She's not misinterpreting it, you are misinterpreting her original point that the way it got there doesn't change the end result, that under Furman, "all" the Cybertronian women are insane freaks, and that it speaks poorly of the brand's opinion of females in general whether that was the intention or not. She didn't attack the intentions of the work, she attacked the problem that work created.
I read the first issue finally and putting all the other shit aside, I am intrigued to see where this is going. Why is Metroplex losing power? And why is Starscream out to get Windblade? For that matter,
is Metroplex dying? Is that why He's losing power and why Windblade is having trouble talking to him?
This issue sets up a lot for the rest of the arc so I'll be interested to see how this plays out.
OMFG! Are we actually going to talk about the goddamned book now again??!? Holy shitballs. Yeah, that's interesting stuff. That's marginally the significant driving conflict of the book, and I don't think she did a good enough job setting up the stakes there. ... I think, it has been a while since I thought about the content of the book itself.
So, what did you think of the art?
I don't mind people posting stuff on the internet, that's why it's there. I guess what puts me off regarding Scott is that the whole thing smacks of "Publicity stunt for the sake of publicity stunt". Especially since it involved one professional commenting publicly on another professional's work. Such comments need to be thought out more carefully than "forum post" because at that point, it's virtually like issuing an official statement.
I still don't know how this could really be a thing, but I also don't put much weight into the affect a blog or forum post can have on a larger audience, especially one that is in such an incredibly tiny microcosm as this. How exactly would this word get out to female comic fans who don't read TF? It only matters to TF nerds, that's where the resonating message started. And she was responding to what was asked of her, IIRC.
Sparky wrote:To be fair, where does Furman say Arcee is scorned and hated by the rest of the species? Or that she's a freaky aberration? Or that by simply being female makes her somehow dangerous? He doesn't. That is no where in the comic. The only way the other characters treat Arcee any differently is they use the feminine specific pronouns like "she" and "her". That's it. All Furman was trying to do was explain why a race of robots would have more than one gender seeing as the Transformers really have no reason to have gender at all seeing as they don't reproduce sexually.
From what I've read, Furman set the foundation towards the end of the Spotlight Arcee issue and as it played out in later books such as Spotlight Sideswipe, and Barber ran with it in RID.
My power is going out in a little bit, so I can't proofread this. My apologies if there's any sort of errors.
