[ SECRET POST #2105 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2105 ⌋

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

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________



16.


__________________________________________________



17.


__________________________________________________



18.


__________________________________________________



19.


__________________________________________________



20.


__________________________________________________














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

[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.