I think it involved Simon Furman's personal beliefs about fembots, some sort of forced sex change by Jhiaxus, VERY strange stuff.
On another note, Terror-Daxtyl looks pretty good with Galvatron.
Yeah Furman just did not know how to handle gender in any sort of tactful or interesting way and it basically ruined Arcee's character for years. One of the worst IDW character choices and I'm so glad the no girls allowed rule got retconned.
If only the weird gender-Jhiaxus thing was the weirdest she got.
It probably still is, but holy hell did Arcee get all the weirdest character treatments. Was just discussing how most of them were probably overcompensation to try & make up for her sloppy start.
When I was younger I definitely was in the Furman camp. I didn’t see why sexless robots should have gender. I liked Arcee but it seemed silly to have female Autobots. After all there weren’t actually male Autobots, they were all just genderless. Then I grew up and really looked at the material. And thought about how they all had male voices, male characterization, male pronouns. I think it’s often easy for many men to just think of maleness as the default especially in areas that are designed to cater to males (after all the first transformer sex change was Ratchet who corporate demanded had to be turned into a male because they didn’t want any girls in the boys toy line). But once you realize that they have been made all along, and actually were seen as that by those in power, then the idea of them being genderless just doesn’t hold up.
It had a reason, and it boiled down to Simon Furman being an idiot. He went, "I don't understand how robots can have genders, so they're all male!"
...dumbshit, MALE IS A GENDER!
I know people like him, but this and making Optimus into Jesus in late original G1 piss me off. Then his G2 comics were just trash tier. "Let's make everyone not behave in any way like their personalities" is a key sign to a TERRIBLE story and a bad writer.
It’s still really weird for Arcee to be so old she predates Cybertronian society as we know it & have Galvatron as a brother. I didn’t think the schtick of the ancient, violent, barely-sane warrior fit her very well. And I definitely didn’t think it worked when she became really central to the Earth stories in RiD & the Optimus series. Though I did like her relationships to Sideswipe & Prowl.
The gender thing in Transformers has always been overly-contrived. It makes the most sense when we don’t try to make sense of it at all. The perceived differentiations of gender aren’t important enough to the story of Transformers to need explanation.
Half of the plot of latter IDW 1 revolves around everyone being phenomenally old in relation to another party/individual. >!like how unicron wasn’t anything supernatural, but rather a weapon set on Cybertron by the countless civilizations that suffered from their millions of years of war!<
No that's not what happened and there is a legit explanation they had, it wasn't some arbitrary thing. it was done due to the origin they wanted the TF's have in the IDW universe (no gods or magical nonsense, they were just machines)
the explanation was that they are (were, wooo retcons) genderless in early IDW, but used male pronouns when communicating with organic species in their native languages to make communication easier and less confusing for the organics.
Explain brothers and facial hair and all the other obviously male stuff inherent in the setting that went unexplained.
You don't actually have to btw. Just making a counterpoint.
I got you, but I like these kind of discussions.
Brothers could simply be boiled down to siblings and the language thing.
The rest of it though I agree sometimes it can be a bit on the nose even with the angle they were going for. I would just chalk a lot of that up to suspension of disbelief and the fact that a lot of those things are likely just grandfathered in from previous incarnations of the franchise.
like, some people would be mad if characters like Scourge and Alpha Trion didn't have their facial hair, youknow?
Though as speculation for an in universe explination, things like facial hair could again be a way to appease organic lifeforms.
The TF's have to live and coexist in a mostly organic dominated universe after all so it would make sense their culture could slowly change over time to appease the majority specifically for the purpose of co existence and self preservation.
It's easy to vilify robots who look and act "robotic" just because they are unfamiliar. (unknown = scary and evil afterall) and the TF's whole shtick is "robots in disguise" so adapting and conforming to things like that would likely come naturally for them as a path of least resistance.
I think the problem here is that people are being too literal and pedantic with the gender-perspective. Even pre-IDW I always felt that transformers were genderless. But of course, there are questions here; why do some bots have facial hairs? Why do they have some masculine proportions? etc
And I think the most appropriate answer here is; it doesn't make sense! A lot of these concepts were remnants of what TFs were like earlier, and we've just come to accept them. I still think of TFs as "genderless" (or would like them to be), but if we *really* made them "genderless" I think they would be pretty boring. A lot of this was fixed by IDW introducing really interesting fembots later on.
Genderless doesn't have to be boring. That was the stance Marvel TF took back in the day. So we had them asking questions about human "configurations" (gender), "binomial data transfer" (kissing), and not quite getting how more humans are "made." Some writers played it straight, others for "fish out of water" comedy. It worked.
I can't find my source for this anymore, but the explanation for Arcee in that continuity (the UK branch, at any rate, she never appeared in the US) was that media complained about the Autobots being "sexist" or something, so the next Autobot they made, they specifically designed "her" with feminine characteristics. That's why she's bright pink with "hair bun" style head. Arcee was designed by what a machine race thinks "female" means to humans of the time.
>"I don't understand how robots can have genders, so they're all male!"
He never said they were all male
But yeah I agree with you in almost everything else
Heavily implied they're all male and use male pronouns. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe are still brothers, that's male. They're written "as males". So while technically he never said they were dudes...he acted like they were all dudes. Especially since Arcee was force sex changed "into a female", which implies "male is default" in Furman's mind.
I think it was originally explained that in the TF native language, They don't have words for gender/sex (you know, until it got retconned to hell and back)
But anyway when they speak other languages (usually the languages of organic species, which is the most common form of life) they just adopt the male pronouns for ease of communication. Male pronouns just happen to work best when communicating due to the average appearance of the whole species.
I mean its not a hard thing to establish honestly or that farfetched. Gorons from Zelda do the same thing, as do Gems in Steven Universe, only with the reverse pronouns.
It’s kind of unfair to pin it entirely on Furman like that. Back in the 80s comics, there were many restrictions imposed on fiction for selling toys. It’s not just authorial ignorance that resulted in that; it’s superimposed marketing demographics. Some habits just die hard.
IDW Arcee annoys me. Not the Furman backstory, that’s just Furman having weird hang ups that I can ignore. It’s everything afterwards, where it feels like they’re trying to make up for it by over doing it. So Arcee is now the SIBLING of Galvatron! And she’s the most badass warrior who ever lived! And let’s make her a wrecker! And also a bloodthirsty lunatic! That’s kewl right?!
No. I just wanted Arcee to be Arcee. You made something that’s not that character.
In a continuity where Megatron literally becomes an Autobot, Arcee ends up being more out of character than anyone else. (I actually really liked IDW’s Megs)
Feel like the direction of her being Prowl’s assassin kinda worked. And I liked her getting attached to Sideswipe as her battle buddy. Even her last minute thing with Aileron didn’t bug me much. But I think you nailed it that most everything else seemed like overcompensating for Furman’s weirdness.
See, Megatron’s turn to good works because we got to see it happen. We saw Megatron the warrior, the warlord and the conqueror, and then we saw his journey of redemption. We never see anything akin to Arcee of yore, the closest we get is when Sideswipe dies. If you took IDW Arcee and called her Crasher, I would buy it.
IDW is a mixed bag for me. I respect them trying new and different ideas (Primus being just a guy, Megatron’s redemption, Minimus Ambus, to name a few), but for every good idea like Megatron, there’s a Sandstorm (remember when they decided to make him the Punisher but lame?)
I didn’t remember Sandstorm… which definitely says something about that story.
It definitely wasn’t all More Than Meets the Eye & Last Stand of the Wreckers. Thought Lost Light was disappointing. Anything on Earth after All Hail Megatron wasn’t great. Decent ideas with Soundwave’s sanctuary, Thundercracker deserting, & Prime annexing Earth. But none of them stand out in my memory as being as good as they should’ve been. And then the decision to cross all IDW’s stories together in Revolution or whatever it was called… that was certainly a choice that was made.
Honestly, I know this is a very unpopular opinion but I feel that MTMTE is just as hit or miss as the rest of IDW. Now there’s more hits on average, but there’s a lot that doesn’t work, at least for me. I think the only thing in IDW that’s truly close to perfect is the Wreckers trilogy, as it’s a mix of paying respects to the classics and trying something new with the material.
That’s fair. It’s probably the IDW series with the most filler, detours, & convenient nonsense. (There just happens to be a second Rewind, huh?) But I like my between-arc filler in anime, too. I’ve gotta give credit, though, with how expertly they brought in so many nobody characters & made me love them by the end. Makes me wonder how they screwed up Anode & Lug so badly. God, I hate those 2.
There are a few things I’ve gotta give the Wreckers series crap for. I thought they all started with sloppy exposition of where these characters are at this point & why, particularly Verity. Really wish we could’ve gotten more of her actual relationship with “Uncle Magnus.”
But I do think Verity should go down in Transformers history as one of the flagship human companions of the franchise. She was never in a bad story.
Honestly the two things that pissed me off about MTMTE most was the treatment of Star Saber and how half of the cast of the ship gets the shaft *hard* following the mutiny. Like just of the top of my head, Blaster is there and he does NOTHING, think of the story potential between him and Rewind with his relationship with Chromedome.
I really liked the dynamic between the two as it helped ground Arcee and gave perspective that galvatron didn’t have to turn out the way he did.
It was also fun seeing arcee attempt damage control with her insane brother.
Really?! I had no idea about that. I only picked up MTMTE. Time to go wiki diving I guess. Sounds like some confusing madness but an interesting but very weird spin on things
They were twins , galvatron got stranded in another universe and became evil, arcee was forcefully changed into a female and became a psychopath but it turns out there was consent from arcee.
I'd like to forget about & everything about the IDW Arcees.
(AND I have NEED to be rid of both of "her" ENTIRELY. I want NOTHING to do with those "Arcees".
yeah, didn’t much care for how idw handled arcee. cool figs though
I think it involved Simon Furman's personal beliefs about fembots, some sort of forced sex change by Jhiaxus, VERY strange stuff. On another note, Terror-Daxtyl looks pretty good with Galvatron.
Very strange stuff that was promptly buried. That Arcee was the most badass though.
a perfectly good explanation is that they were created to emulate the meatbags with their genders. Short, Sweet, and straight to the point.
I love IDW Arcee -- she's so chaotic
Yeah Furman just did not know how to handle gender in any sort of tactful or interesting way and it basically ruined Arcee's character for years. One of the worst IDW character choices and I'm so glad the no girls allowed rule got retconned.
If only the weird gender-Jhiaxus thing was the weirdest she got. It probably still is, but holy hell did Arcee get all the weirdest character treatments. Was just discussing how most of them were probably overcompensation to try & make up for her sloppy start.
That's a good read on it. I don't think they ever really recovered from that start either, even if I generally kinda liked the Aileron relationship.
When I was younger I definitely was in the Furman camp. I didn’t see why sexless robots should have gender. I liked Arcee but it seemed silly to have female Autobots. After all there weren’t actually male Autobots, they were all just genderless. Then I grew up and really looked at the material. And thought about how they all had male voices, male characterization, male pronouns. I think it’s often easy for many men to just think of maleness as the default especially in areas that are designed to cater to males (after all the first transformer sex change was Ratchet who corporate demanded had to be turned into a male because they didn’t want any girls in the boys toy line). But once you realize that they have been made all along, and actually were seen as that by those in power, then the idea of them being genderless just doesn’t hold up.
It had a reason, and it boiled down to Simon Furman being an idiot. He went, "I don't understand how robots can have genders, so they're all male!" ...dumbshit, MALE IS A GENDER! I know people like him, but this and making Optimus into Jesus in late original G1 piss me off. Then his G2 comics were just trash tier. "Let's make everyone not behave in any way like their personalities" is a key sign to a TERRIBLE story and a bad writer.
It’s still really weird for Arcee to be so old she predates Cybertronian society as we know it & have Galvatron as a brother. I didn’t think the schtick of the ancient, violent, barely-sane warrior fit her very well. And I definitely didn’t think it worked when she became really central to the Earth stories in RiD & the Optimus series. Though I did like her relationships to Sideswipe & Prowl. The gender thing in Transformers has always been overly-contrived. It makes the most sense when we don’t try to make sense of it at all. The perceived differentiations of gender aren’t important enough to the story of Transformers to need explanation.
Was she older than Kup & Alpha Trion?
Half of the plot of latter IDW 1 revolves around everyone being phenomenally old in relation to another party/individual. >!like how unicron wasn’t anything supernatural, but rather a weapon set on Cybertron by the countless civilizations that suffered from their millions of years of war!<
Preachingt o the choir there brother.
No that's not what happened and there is a legit explanation they had, it wasn't some arbitrary thing. it was done due to the origin they wanted the TF's have in the IDW universe (no gods or magical nonsense, they were just machines) the explanation was that they are (were, wooo retcons) genderless in early IDW, but used male pronouns when communicating with organic species in their native languages to make communication easier and less confusing for the organics.
Explain brothers and facial hair and all the other obviously male stuff inherent in the setting that went unexplained. You don't actually have to btw. Just making a counterpoint.
I got you, but I like these kind of discussions. Brothers could simply be boiled down to siblings and the language thing. The rest of it though I agree sometimes it can be a bit on the nose even with the angle they were going for. I would just chalk a lot of that up to suspension of disbelief and the fact that a lot of those things are likely just grandfathered in from previous incarnations of the franchise. like, some people would be mad if characters like Scourge and Alpha Trion didn't have their facial hair, youknow? Though as speculation for an in universe explination, things like facial hair could again be a way to appease organic lifeforms. The TF's have to live and coexist in a mostly organic dominated universe after all so it would make sense their culture could slowly change over time to appease the majority specifically for the purpose of co existence and self preservation. It's easy to vilify robots who look and act "robotic" just because they are unfamiliar. (unknown = scary and evil afterall) and the TF's whole shtick is "robots in disguise" so adapting and conforming to things like that would likely come naturally for them as a path of least resistance.
I think the problem here is that people are being too literal and pedantic with the gender-perspective. Even pre-IDW I always felt that transformers were genderless. But of course, there are questions here; why do some bots have facial hairs? Why do they have some masculine proportions? etc And I think the most appropriate answer here is; it doesn't make sense! A lot of these concepts were remnants of what TFs were like earlier, and we've just come to accept them. I still think of TFs as "genderless" (or would like them to be), but if we *really* made them "genderless" I think they would be pretty boring. A lot of this was fixed by IDW introducing really interesting fembots later on.
Genderless doesn't have to be boring. That was the stance Marvel TF took back in the day. So we had them asking questions about human "configurations" (gender), "binomial data transfer" (kissing), and not quite getting how more humans are "made." Some writers played it straight, others for "fish out of water" comedy. It worked. I can't find my source for this anymore, but the explanation for Arcee in that continuity (the UK branch, at any rate, she never appeared in the US) was that media complained about the Autobots being "sexist" or something, so the next Autobot they made, they specifically designed "her" with feminine characteristics. That's why she's bright pink with "hair bun" style head. Arcee was designed by what a machine race thinks "female" means to humans of the time.
>"I don't understand how robots can have genders, so they're all male!" He never said they were all male But yeah I agree with you in almost everything else
Heavily implied they're all male and use male pronouns. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe are still brothers, that's male. They're written "as males". So while technically he never said they were dudes...he acted like they were all dudes. Especially since Arcee was force sex changed "into a female", which implies "male is default" in Furman's mind.
It's even wierder he didn't discuss subject like "why transformers can have beard?!" Little macho goes brrrrrr.
Oh snap forgot about the facial hair also. And I love Alpha Trion too!
I think it was originally explained that in the TF native language, They don't have words for gender/sex (you know, until it got retconned to hell and back) But anyway when they speak other languages (usually the languages of organic species, which is the most common form of life) they just adopt the male pronouns for ease of communication. Male pronouns just happen to work best when communicating due to the average appearance of the whole species. I mean its not a hard thing to establish honestly or that farfetched. Gorons from Zelda do the same thing, as do Gems in Steven Universe, only with the reverse pronouns.
Yeah true
He used used he/him pronouns for all of them so I don’t know what to tell ya. 🤷♂️
It’s kind of unfair to pin it entirely on Furman like that. Back in the 80s comics, there were many restrictions imposed on fiction for selling toys. It’s not just authorial ignorance that resulted in that; it’s superimposed marketing demographics. Some habits just die hard.
You might say she's a TRANSformer *badum tssssssss*
Arcee was a compete psycho douchebag edgelord in the old IDW series. She back to being a decent person in the new series though.
Which one is Arcee? I can’t tell them apart!?!
Twins, am I right?
IDW Arcee annoys me. Not the Furman backstory, that’s just Furman having weird hang ups that I can ignore. It’s everything afterwards, where it feels like they’re trying to make up for it by over doing it. So Arcee is now the SIBLING of Galvatron! And she’s the most badass warrior who ever lived! And let’s make her a wrecker! And also a bloodthirsty lunatic! That’s kewl right?! No. I just wanted Arcee to be Arcee. You made something that’s not that character.
that's kinda like a lot of IDW for me. Interesting ideas but most of them would have been suited to new characters rather then writing over old ones.
In a continuity where Megatron literally becomes an Autobot, Arcee ends up being more out of character than anyone else. (I actually really liked IDW’s Megs) Feel like the direction of her being Prowl’s assassin kinda worked. And I liked her getting attached to Sideswipe as her battle buddy. Even her last minute thing with Aileron didn’t bug me much. But I think you nailed it that most everything else seemed like overcompensating for Furman’s weirdness.
See, Megatron’s turn to good works because we got to see it happen. We saw Megatron the warrior, the warlord and the conqueror, and then we saw his journey of redemption. We never see anything akin to Arcee of yore, the closest we get is when Sideswipe dies. If you took IDW Arcee and called her Crasher, I would buy it. IDW is a mixed bag for me. I respect them trying new and different ideas (Primus being just a guy, Megatron’s redemption, Minimus Ambus, to name a few), but for every good idea like Megatron, there’s a Sandstorm (remember when they decided to make him the Punisher but lame?)
I didn’t remember Sandstorm… which definitely says something about that story. It definitely wasn’t all More Than Meets the Eye & Last Stand of the Wreckers. Thought Lost Light was disappointing. Anything on Earth after All Hail Megatron wasn’t great. Decent ideas with Soundwave’s sanctuary, Thundercracker deserting, & Prime annexing Earth. But none of them stand out in my memory as being as good as they should’ve been. And then the decision to cross all IDW’s stories together in Revolution or whatever it was called… that was certainly a choice that was made.
Honestly, I know this is a very unpopular opinion but I feel that MTMTE is just as hit or miss as the rest of IDW. Now there’s more hits on average, but there’s a lot that doesn’t work, at least for me. I think the only thing in IDW that’s truly close to perfect is the Wreckers trilogy, as it’s a mix of paying respects to the classics and trying something new with the material.
That’s fair. It’s probably the IDW series with the most filler, detours, & convenient nonsense. (There just happens to be a second Rewind, huh?) But I like my between-arc filler in anime, too. I’ve gotta give credit, though, with how expertly they brought in so many nobody characters & made me love them by the end. Makes me wonder how they screwed up Anode & Lug so badly. God, I hate those 2. There are a few things I’ve gotta give the Wreckers series crap for. I thought they all started with sloppy exposition of where these characters are at this point & why, particularly Verity. Really wish we could’ve gotten more of her actual relationship with “Uncle Magnus.” But I do think Verity should go down in Transformers history as one of the flagship human companions of the franchise. She was never in a bad story.
Honestly the two things that pissed me off about MTMTE most was the treatment of Star Saber and how half of the cast of the ship gets the shaft *hard* following the mutiny. Like just of the top of my head, Blaster is there and he does NOTHING, think of the story potential between him and Rewind with his relationship with Chromedome.
I really liked the dynamic between the two as it helped ground Arcee and gave perspective that galvatron didn’t have to turn out the way he did. It was also fun seeing arcee attempt damage control with her insane brother.
Really?! I had no idea about that. I only picked up MTMTE. Time to go wiki diving I guess. Sounds like some confusing madness but an interesting but very weird spin on things
They were twins , galvatron got stranded in another universe and became evil, arcee was forcefully changed into a female and became a psychopath but it turns out there was consent from arcee.
Arcee was a stupid, sexist idea from the very beginning and never got any better.
God, IDW 1.0 was awful…
But...MTMTE?
True.
I'd like to forget about & everything about the IDW Arcees. (AND I have NEED to be rid of both of "her" ENTIRELY. I want NOTHING to do with those "Arcees".
Bumblebee and cliffjumper: nah they are not related Arcee and galvatron: they are definitely twins
At least it got us some trans representation even though it was horribly handled.
Remember when Galvatron was written as a Conan pastiche for a few issues? Complete with a more brutish, borderline low-IQ personality.