TFcon report

[lunatron]

I finished my last day of Organic Chemistry Laboratory 2 by cleaning a whole drawer of glassware with soap and acetone. Then my parents and I drove up to Mississauga. My parents like coming along because my mother's siblings live in the area, so she gets to visit with family. We arrived in Mississauga late on Thursday night

Comments

[earthscorch]

Sounds like fun! I got to see the Go-Bots movie in theaters, heh! Never thought about the lack of female uselessness before...

Female Transformers are kind of a mess... It wasn't too bad when they were all genderless, albeit with male voices, but adding distinct genders created a sort of weirdness to the whole thing. And like you seem to be saying, not much of anything in Transformers makes a lot of sense if you overthink it, so it's silly to try and justify female Transformers and then say "Well, I guess we can't use them," when they can't. It's all in fun. If it's fun and people enjoy it, it should be in, right? I can see why they would think toys based on cars and jets would attract a predominately male audience, but now there's a large female audience, and they deserve to be able to have characters like them, or whatever.

Will we get to see your cosplay?

[lunatron]

Okay, so...

In the Sunbow G1 cartoon, there were female Transformers, and no one explained it. The same goes for Victory. Masterforce, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Energon, Cybertron, Bayverse, Animated, Prime, and a few other Japanese shows. This worked just fine. No one complains about it being a logical leap when someone like Moonracer or Blackarachnia or Botanica shows up. (At least, not because they are women.) A number of other continuities are also implied to have female characters, even if we don't directly see them, such as RiD. (Side Burn seems to like women who turn into red cars.)

The cartoons don't really have much of a problem. (Their problem is that the women often lack interesting things to do in the plot.)

It's only in the comics that we wade into problem territory. In the Marvel comics, there was only one woman, Arcee, and she was built to appease the feminists. Seriously. That was her in-story origin. In Dreamwave, women were all evil Quintesson spies. In IDW, there is only one woman, Arcee, and she used to be a

[earthscorch]

I agree on all counts. The female Autobots were quite interesting to me, as a kid. The weirdness, to me, just comes from assigning gender to giant space robots at all, and that's only a little weird, really

[lunatron]

Yeah, a lot of the time, if there are any female characters, they're just the girlfriend or don't do much or... they're the girlfriend who doesn't do much. It sends a bad message.

Quite often, if the men are using guns, the female characters won't have guns, because guns are seen as too violent/aggressive for female characters to handle. 6_6; (Also quite often, if the male characters have melee weapons, the female characters will have ranged weapons, so they don't get dirty.)

The whole 'feminine wiles' thing is pretty overdone by this point. I am sure it could be written well, but it's just so... overdone. So I am glad when I don't see it.

Modern cartoons are generally better, but... not as better as they could be? Avatar and Korra are exceptionally good.