stunt_muppet

You'd judge me if I told you I was taking study breaks by watching Transformers Animated, wouldn't you?

I knew you would. Good on you, I deserve judging for that.

I'll freely admit that I've been poking at Transformers fandom since the movies came out, mostly because the TF Wiki is inordinately amusing (they're the Trope Namers for Ruined FOREVER) and is full of loving mockery and frank acknowledgment that their show/franchise ultimately exists to sell toys and they're okay with that. But I hesitated, because between this and Batman I feel like as I grow older the maturity of the shows I watch has plunged, and I fear that a) that says disquieting things about me and b) by the time I'm thirty I'll think Teletubbies is really neat and will hole up in my room watching The Wiggles concerts, quietly drooling. I do still engage in intellectual activity and watch/read things that make me think, I really really do. You guys believe me, right?

Anyway, I'm kind of glad I finally leaped in, because TFA has robot ninjas. (I think Prowl might be my favorite character so far. He's a robot ninja. Who was trained by a robot ninja voiced by George Takei) I'm quite enjoying it so far, though it has the usual problems of not-very-thoughtful kids series (Jazz still talks jive; there are maybe two girl robots in the entire series, and one of them's a Tragic Villain and the other doesn't do anything); it presents Decepticons as credible threats instead of having their schemes foiled every week and it has human characters who don't grate on the nerves. It's not bad for what it is.

It does bring up something that's irked me since I started getting into comics and "boy stuff", and that's that there will, I'm quite certain, never be a Transformers series or a kid's superhero show that's inclusive of a young female audience. And that's because even female SF fans don't think girls like that kind of thing. Male SF fen don't think girls like it because they assume we're too busy talking about lipstick and shoes to appreciate robots beating each other up; even other women (at least that I've noticed) tend to write off action-driven shows (and the military SF or action-SF that tends to arise from people who grew up with them) as "boy stuff", inherently uninteresting to young girls or women.

I think SFF as a genre is definitely improving on the whole so far as representation of women and various racial, sexual, and gender identities goes, though of course it still has a long way to go. But, in the unlikely event that I ever manage to get anything published ever, I'd love to take some of those changes to the boy stuff. I'd like to write military SF with soldiers and generals who are black, Hispanic, Asian, female, genderqueer, trans, gay, bi, people of every variety, and have it not be a big deal. I'd like to write a girl robot who kicks just as much ass as the boys and doesn't have to be a villain or a medic to do it. Hell, I'd like to take on the idea of shape-shifting robots having a gender assignment.

It's a little discouraging knowing that such a project really wouldn't have much of an audience, although I'd also like to query the idea that young boys will lose interest if more than one character on their action-adventure shows is a girl, or that a straight male will see dialogue between two women and read nothing but "shoes shoes makeup boys shoes babies cooking dresses shoes".

tl;dr thanks TFA guys but next time have Arcee actually do something, kthanxbai.

Back to work.

[ETA] Although reading up on Arcee gives me fresh new reasons to hate Michael Bay, who apparently though Arcee wasn't cool enough for the second live-action Transformers movie and delighted in killing her off. Because, you know, Bay, it's not like you had the power as the director to make her more awesome or anything rather than gleefully slaughtering the only female robot in the entire movie franchise after about ten minutes of screentime, you fucking tool.