Transformation 234: Sexist Pig.

3/11/2016

This week, despite good intentions, we have what is probably the most dated of all the UK stories, and one that has only become more uncomfortable to read over time.

Yes, it's the explanation of Arcee that no one was asking for by now and a slap down to those pesky feminists who keep demanding things like non-horrible female characters.

plus, Skullgrin gets confused by the amazing sight of a talking car.

It's all in my look at issue 234!

16 Comments

Lupus753

4/11/2016 04:46:04 pm

The best part about the back-up story is the title. I'm a sucker for bad puns.

S II

4/11/2016 06:30:12 pm

Well, we can say more Decepticon Headmaster Juniors, I guess. Woohoo.

The Arcee story struck me as very odd even back when I was 11 or so. Just... weird.

Still, I like to see the "Movie" characters like Arcee and Hot Rod (him especially, as he was more usually seen post-Matrixisation) in a setting with more old skool G1 characters. A bit more blending, a little less of out with the old, in with the new.

Anyway, onward and upward (towards Earthforce!).

Alex Smith link

5/11/2016 12:03:21 am

Yeah, I'm fond of these 'interstitial' stories (that is to say, between the present day and the Movie) - things like this, or Ark Duty, or Aspects: Shockwave. It gives a nice cohesive feel to things, and gets especially fun when you start trying to wedge G2 into it!

Ralph Burns

4/11/2016 11:07:04 pm

Where did you stick your FREE TATTOOS?

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Simon Hall

5/11/2016 07:33:08 am

When I was small, my mum was amused that I wanted to watch Pamela Stephenson's short BBC series 'Move Over Darling', which was about women's role in society how society treated women and featured an amusing and enlightening centre piece of having a fella made up as a woman just going about doing the things he'd normally do. Whilst in full drag, he found that men tended to take more time to explain things and, in some circumstances, talked more slowly and leaned into his personal space. It was a fascinating program and is something that's stayed with me all these years, and I've often been puzzled with the way we treat those who are different to us or have a different set of genitals. That struck me as more odd than anything else.

I do actually have some affection for this story, its not one of Furman's best comedy skits, and as you rightly point out, it does Arcee no favours at all (her bio, written by Bob is actually pretty cool painting her as a tough and effective warrior, who just takes excessive risks to protect the squishable Daniel). That said, I do think Prime's dialogue is a deliberate sending up of his John Wayne macho persona. And having met some particularly hardcore feminists in my time, I can totally vouch for Hot Rod's bewilderment in that end sequence "I'm not acting like a twat!" - "Doesn't matter, you're still a MAN!!!". Prejudice and sexism works both ways, even amongst those who consider themselves morally superior for rejecting convention.

Gender is something Transformers ties itself in knots over. Even now, with characters like Nautica (who I adore), they've had to establish that these 'female' Transformers came from a colony/ planet that favoured a female persuasion...and that's no better than this slight misfire.

Personally, I just like the Beast Wars / Beast Machines approach - some of them are girls. And that's that. No expalantion necessary. And, if you want one, in an environment where Transformers are blending in to alien civilisations, why wouldn't some of them adopt forms that could be considered gender specific?

Arcee shouldn't be pink. Or some mad science experiment.

Alex Smith link

5/11/2016 07:12:45 pm

It's worth pointing out that Furman quite happily put a female Transformer into Alignment without much fanfare.

John D. link

5/11/2016 07:56:22 pm

Was there any need for this story at the time, an Arcee toy never came out in the UK did it? I don't think it's too offensive really. How was the struggling comic paying for this series of free gifts?

Mr. Shortt

6/11/2016 03:08:09 am

I always found 'Prime's Rib' a lovely little story. As others have noted, the between-the-present-and-the-movie setting is cool and I enjoyed seeing characters from traditionally diverse timelines (and toylines!) interacting. Casting Hot Rod and Jazz together here almost as the young lads discovering women for the first time is quite apt, as I'd always saw them as similar 'young hot shot hero' characters what with their flashy sports car alt-modes and the fact that they both talked in quite a youthful, hip way.

I've never been deeply enough involved in Fandom to have encountered the mass revulsion to this story alluded to and demonstrated by Stuart in this review. I remember my mum rolling her eyes at the busty pink Arcee too but if you look at most boys toys franchises from this era there was usually a token girl in a skimpy, impractical costume knocking around and for that matter if you look at popular girls toys franchises of the era, pink glittery shiny sparkly stuff was really popular (My Little Pony, Barbie, even She-Ra) so it's not like Arcee's designers were being completely outrageous. I'm more shocked to hear that female Transformers fans at the time didn't like Arcee because she was pink. Don't remember any girls who were into Transformers at my school anyway but I do remember m little sister thinking Arcee was great. I think the similarities between Arcee and Princess Leia - the premier female action/adventure role model of the 1980s - are clear and very intentional. Why shouldn't an ass-kicking warrior be beautiful anyway?

The old "Hmph! Men!"/"I'll never understand women!" joke is something of a comedy staple, especially in comic books, and it's based on the principle that males and females generally have different ways of looking at certain things. Which in my experience, they do. I think it's jumping the gun a bit to accuse Simon Furman of being a horrible old chauvinist for doing what is basically a comedy sketch involving a men leaping to a woman's aid and her taking offence because (as she goes on to prove) she's more than capable of looking after herself.

The human feminists in the story aren't presented as man-hating nutters and their criticisms of Arcee ("Why only one?" "Why Pink?" etc) are presented as valid - it's Prime, the big extraterrestrial robot, who's presented as not having a flawed understanding of the deeper issues. I think it's a stretch to suppose that Furman was hitting out at feminists/female fans he'd met in his career.

Not being an apologist for anyone but ultimately, Hasbro trialled a female Transformer and it didn't bring in more female fans. What if Omega Supreme had been identified as a woman on his Tech Specs and Universe profile, would that have been a more acceptable or less sexist attempt at a female Tramsformer? Would that have brought in more female fans, or impressed existing female fans more?

Finally I know that there's basic truth in Stuart's assertions that 1980s Transformers aren't actually male anyway, but again I think it's a stretch to act like we didn't all consider them to be guys. They have men's voices in the cartoon and are referred to as 'he' in all media, from Tech Specs to Tell-a-Tale tapes. Maybe the point of this story is that they didn't know they were male until they built a female or something. I must have been 12 or 13 when this came out and it was pretty reassuring to see that the Autobots were having girl troubles too.

Mr. Shortt

6/11/2016 03:13:23 am

Must apologise for the typos in my earlier post, hopefully you'll get the gist. My point about Prime is that he has a flawed understanding, not that he does not. :)

Alex Smith link

6/11/2016 01:08:15 pm

Yeah, I enjoy having Hot Rod and Jazz together.

As for female fans of Transformers - my sister's been a fan as long as I have, but for her she's just a fan of robots, gender be damned. Don't think she ever gave much of a thought to Arcee, but then she's always been a bit of a tomboy.

Oh, and Bob Budiansky originally wanted to make Ratchet female but was overruled by Hasbro.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

6/11/2016 10:30:59 pm

I think the reference to yet another attempt at more Action Force will materialise earlier than predicted as part of the Incredible Hulk Presents which launched a few weeks later. If the original plan was to launch it in the new year this might explain why Doctor Who Magazine reprinted a two-part story some months later rather than at the time.

Ah Prime's Rib. I have to be honest, at the time this was originally printed I pretty much saw it as just a comedy piece to explain away the existence of female Transformers. In later years I didn't tend to give this story much thought when involved with online TF fandom later on, but my involvement dried up not long before the pocket books finally reprinted this one, so unless you had an old copy of this issue one didn't really know the story and I must have missed the great controversies.

Back in 1989 feminism was something I knew little about. I grew up in what I now know was an extremely traditional environment - single sex & traditional schools, Cubs, my mother was a housewife and so forth, to the point that even the use of "Ms" was unknown to my classmates and I. On the other hand both real life and fiction presented strong women a lot so it was easy in my own little bubble to be utterly unaware that there was even an issue about it. So I didn't really realise that Furman was sending up both the tendency to add token female characters to all male franchises or the way that attempts to meet feminist criticism can so often fail.

Sure there are a few stories when Arcee works well as one of the main future Autobots without much comment but frankly she could have been left out completely and dismissed as one of those cartoon only characters (from recollection she didn't get a toy until an early 2000s Botcon exclusive) who never needed to be acknowledge. Looking back a year one has to wonder why Furman made Space Pirates such a cartoonfest rather than leaving out some of the bits that conflicted with his vision of how the TF universe works. (Actually isn't this even more a conflict with Bob's vision? After all he's the one who explicitly said there was no concept of male & female amongst the Transformers.) Without that story I doubt we'd have seen Arcee at all. Other comics often did leave the cartoon originated bits out - ISTR in the Mask comics Vanessa Warfield only appeared when she got a toy in the third year (with a cover treating her as a brand new character) and Gloria Baker never showed up (they stopped before she got a toy in the Split Seconds final year).

Looking now and yes, this piece has completely the wrong tone. It's trying to be comical and make a serious point at the same time and that's a very bad combination. On top of everything else the idea of the Autobots at least having a public celebrity status amongst the humans is yet another silly concept from the cartoon that the comics otherwise ignored in the present day and 1995 was closer to then than to the Movie era, so the entire underlying rationale falls down. I guess we can give the story a point for tackling head on the inevitable postbag about how Arcee could exist given Cloudburst's statements, but surely there must have been a better way to reconcile this? (No, not by having a mad scientist forcibly carry out gender reassignment surgery.)

Alex Smith link

6/11/2016 11:15:45 pm

Recalling my early days in the fandom when, like a lot of other British fans, I was quite bullish about the comic being best and the cartoon not counting, it's interesting now to look at how influenced by the cartoon Furman was. He's definitely far fonder of it than you might think - the Movie, obviously, but also season 3. I think Stuart (1) has touched on some of the swipes on this very blog.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

7/11/2016 09:01:15 pm

I think a lot of that comes back to us having almost had it drummed into us that "Comic right & good, cartoon wrong & bad" by the letters page. And because for the majority of the comic's existence the cartoon simply wasn't on TV at all then it never really grew much of an alternate fandom following that would challenge these ideas in the 1990s so most of the counter arguments tended to come from US fans who'd primarily only seen the Budiansky years and little to none of the UK stuff. Really it took the DVDs to change things over here.

Furman seems to have mellowed in more recent years but was Space Pirates a product of that mellowing starting earlier than we all thought or some other mandate?

Alex Smith link

7/11/2016 10:50:43 pm

Space Pirates is a big fat crib from lots of bits of season 3 of the toon - The Quints involvement, the destruction of their homeworld (albeit for different, epic-starting reasons), Ghyrik being able to absorb the power of the Matrix like Scourge does, and Metroplex's transformation.

I'd argue his fondness for the cartoon - or at least, seeing it as a place to nick ideas from - goes back a bit further. The Matrix as a physical object, for instance, flies in the face of Bob's idea of it as a computer programme; plus, his Perceptor and Blaster are consistently written as their cartoon selves, with no regard for their origins as resistance fighters as per Bob. It could be argued that Legacy... using Unicron's disembodied head is also a nod to the toon's use of the same thing.

Ryan F

7/11/2016 08:41:33 pm

If this is a ‘message’ story, then it’s a very mixed message indeed. On the plus side, the Autobots’ attitude to gender (or rather, their lack of attitude) is rather refreshing. Transformers are practically unique as action heroes, in that they’re rarely driven or distracted by their libidos. If it’s a trite moral, at least it’s a good one – Autobots don’t care what gender you’re born with (or associate as), humans are all the same to them.

Furthermore, this is a chance for the comic to correct a previous error of judgment (the presentation of Arcee in ‘Space Pirates’), and portray the female Autobot as a brilliant warrior, dispatching the Decepticons with ease.

On the other side of the coin, however, this story comes across as decidedly smug and unfunny, not least when Jazz makes a reference to Arcee’s ‘upper chassis design’. The women’s rights activists (whose point of argument seems to be quite valid), are portrayed as militant harpies who do nothing but wave placards and call the Autobots ‘pigs’. Even worse is the exchange between Optimus Prime and Arcee, which includes lines such as ‘Stay back, Arcee, these Decepticons look tough’, and ends with Arcee exclaiming: ‘Honestly! Men!’ This adventure tries to have its cake and eat it: on the one hand it seems to be espousing the idea that gender isn’t and shouldn’t be an issue, while simultaneously having Jazz, Prime and Arcee make ‘humorous’ sexist comments. It just doesn’t work.

As a five-page action vignette, it succeeds on a basic level: it shows us Arcee’s origin and gives us a decent fight scene. But in every other respect – the mixed messages, the sitcom dialogue, and the unnecessary tone – this is weak stuff.

Felicity link

23/11/2019 11:04:49 am

I got the impression that Mudslinger pressed his wheel against Skullgrin and then started it spinning, and the friction was abrasive to Skullgrin.

Cartoon Arcee was well-written, I thought; a strong female character but not in a harsh, pointed way, just a normal warrior like any of the male Autobots. She seemed to be less empowered in the “Headmasters” cartoon. So did Carly, for that matter.

I don’t remember if Arcee ever appeared in the American comic outside of the movie adaptation. I don’t think so. If so, we’ll never know how Bob Budiansky would have written her.

For comparison, although all the heroines and villainesses in “GI Joe” were young and attractive, none of them were pink. Well, maybe Zarana, in the comics. She had spiky pink hair. She was a Dreadnok, though, and they were punks.

Transformation 234: Sexist Pig.

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