[ SECRET POST #2105 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2105 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 107 secrets from Secret Submission Post #301.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Err, notice how Bee's holo looks like Lindsay Lohan.
It's a "Herby Fully Loaded" joke and not some cool comment on genders or the lack thereof. Just like Optimus' holo looked like Peter Cullen and Jazz's holo was the only black dude. It's all just jokes and fanservice.

But great if you can see it differently.

Personally, I fucking hate the "TFs have no gender but they refer to each other as dudes and generally look like muscle men and their voice actors are male" shit. It's androcentrism at its finest and I hate how it seeps into almost every other TF incarnation there is. Blah, rant over.

[stainless]

Personally, I fucking hate the "TFs have no gender but they refer to each other as dudes and generally look like muscle men and their voice actors are male" shit. It's androcentrism at its finest and I hate how it seeps into almost every other TF incarnation there is.

I feel EXACTLY the same. I'm really tired of seeing that in female-dominated fandom spaces, especially.

[(Anonymous)]

The language medium is English, therefore we need a gendered pronoun unless we refer to them as "it", and that would not go over very well. Can't really argue about the voice-actors. Prime has certainly done away with the "built like muscle men" thing.

Not sure where you get "female-dominated" for TF fandom, though. Hasbro made the toys for boys and markets towards males. I was at Bot-con a couple of years ago and at least 80% of the folks there were male.

[stainless]

The language medium is English, therefore we need a gendered pronoun unless we refer to them as "it", and that would not go over very well. Can't really argue about the voice-actors. Prime has certainly done away with the "built like muscle men" thing.

Wait, what are you actually arguing here? Not sure if you're the anon I responded to, but... what I thought the anon above me was saying was that Transformers are not genderless. That's what I was agreeing with.

They are sexless (unless there's something weird I don't know about going on that would most likely borrowed from the shippers), but they are also portrayed in ways that are clearly meant to be reminiscent of human genders. It's humanizing them, yes, perhaps too much, but they've always been more humanoid than they need to be. Hence, when a character is referred to by "he" or "she," I take it to mean something.

I do think fans' meta explanations of TF gender can be very interesting. But I reject the idea that they have none. If we are to reject all the ways that they are humanized for no good reason, maybe I'll go with it. Otherwise no.

And I did not say TF fandom is female-dominated -- I said some SECTIONS of it are. I run into a lot more fic written by women than by men, for one. Shipping fic even more so. And it's not just topic, it's also Internet locale if you will -- fandom on LJ is clearly mostly women.

It is in those spaces, where most people are women, that I find myself surprised to see TFs thought of as genderless. It seems, as the above anon pointed out, very androcentric to me. And I would not be surprised to see androcentrism in male-dominated fandom spaces -- when your point of view is centralized, you may not see it. But I am surprised to see it in the, as I mentioned, fandom spaces that happen to be female-dominated.

Clearer now?

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I just can't fathom a fandom treating such things, which I consider meta and "philosophical", for a very broad and given value of the word, differently. I understand that expressions of fandom would be different, such as more fanfiction coming from women (at least from those that give their gender, because god knows there are plenty of secrets on here from males who are afraid/tentative about admitting it.) And, well, Eugenesis is obviously either evidence to the contrary or an incredibly massive, glorious exception).

Thank you so much for explaining your point of view and clarifying points. I am very sorry if I sounded combative, and over-assumed regarding pronouns. For the record, my point there was that the writers had to use SOMETHING if they wanted to portray the bots as living beings rather than the inanimate/non-living ("it"), and since English relies heavily on pronouns, which are gendered, they needed to pick one or the other. I don't doubt that Hasbro chose "he" because of the fact that they were marketing towards boys, but I don't think it automatically discredits the argument of Cybertronians being genderless. Or their having MANY genders. Through a friend of a friend I know of someone who recently presented the argument that they're gendered by bodytype. Ie, Perceptor and Prime could be considered one gender while Bee and Cliffjumper would be another one, which is certainly an interesting theory.

Not OP

[(Anonymous)]

What's not to say that it's not what the Cybertronians themselves identified with? (well, what the writers thought the Cybertronians would identify with since they're fictional). Jazz would have looked at the humans in the media known for playing the music he so loved, and therefore adopted a black avatar. Optimus would have looked, practically, at the type of person who drove his alt-form, and that avatar is pretty in keeping with the stereotypical truck driver. Regardless of any other label Sunstreaker is DEFINITELY vain, so he would have looked for what was considered attractive where they were. Slender blondes are venerated in the US, where they were on Earth. So, yup. Pretty blonde for Sunny.

They look mechanical to me, not like musclemen. They're made up of rectangles! And what would you have suggested for them to use to refer to one another as, when they're talking in English. Pronouns for living objects must have a gender. "It" is considered demeaning. We don't use it for anything alive, and many non-alive objects, especially those capable of locomotion (boats are often "she", for example). In a language without gendered pronouns it actually worked a bit differently. In the Japanese dub of the cartoon the characters were using the 1st-person personal pronoun - which does vary by gender and even has multiple levels) all over the place. English requires a gendered pronoun. They don't really have a choice but to refer to one another by one. Yes, they chose "he". They would have to be consistent to BE genderless, because if half were using he and half she then it would mean there was a difference somewhere because the words have different meanings once both are used. And while "they" is an acceptable replacement for when the gender is not known, I imagine that would have been confusing for the voice actors and original target audience for Transformers. "Go talk to Wheeljack, they'll have the answer" also reads incredibly strangely.

You can't blame something for the limits and rules of the language it's written in.

Re: Not OP

[(Anonymous)]

But you can use it as an example of the male-centricness of English-speaking cultures. Why aren't the Decepticons or the airframes or the minibots "female"? Why aren't they all female?

Re: Not OP

[(Anonymous)]

TF was marketed towards young boys. The male pronoun was used so the kids could identify with the characters, and would be confused by an "it" or a "hir" or "they". On the other side you have MLP. It took 5 years for Hasbro to introduce males into that line and, what I have been told, although I cannot verify, one of the reasons was because parents were disturbed that their kids were playing house with two female ponies. Otherwise there would have been an entire world populated with females. As for one of the subgroups being called "she/her/female", well, as someone else said: "once you use both pronouns you have assigned them to that gender". By having everyone using the same pronoun they may be male, but they're all the SAME in male. It's not EXCLUDING females, it's just not including them.

Fandoms are microcosms of culture, but taking it THAT far out to "it's a problem with all of the culture" is uncalled for. You seem to be calling dozens of cultures problematic, which...is kind of problematic in and of itself.

Re: Not OP

[(Anonymous)]

Did you seriously just call dozens of cultures problematic because of pronouns? You must be a miserable person, hating millions of people based on 1000s of years of linguistic evolution.