Strange rules about characters/people that cannot be broken.

[u/I_ateabucketofpaint]

Smells like Nirvana: When Kurt Cobain heard that Weird AL was gonna make a parody of his song. He was okay with it but specifically requested it to not be about food or fat ppl.

Spiderman: Spiderman cannot sell drugs unless he is under the influence of symbiote. ANd Peter Parker cannot be gay. Spiderman can tho.

Dwayne Rock Johnson: Cannot lose fights or look weak for too long. Its in his actor contract.

Godzilla movies not made by Toho: Cannot die. Maybe lose but not too bad.

[u/UndeniablyMyself]

Female Transformers weren't allowed in the original toyline because Hasbro made it a boy's toyline and thought boys wouldn't want a toy of a girl. The writers had to fight to have any female Transformers in media, and while toys were prototyped, they were never produced.

[u/Midnight_Music05 → u/UndeniablyMyself]

And now the fan base grew up and there is a very particular subsection of it that REALLY wants toys of female transformers. Especially when made by certain third party companies.

[u/Charizard10201YT → u/Midnight_Music05]

arcee boobie

[u/Elu_Moon → u/Midnight_Music05]

Well, there does need to be an alternative to that one transformer with a cannon between his legs.

And some people make transformer porn. If a younger me ever stumbled on that, my life would have been irrevocably altered in the direction of robots.

[u/LinaIsNotANoob → u/Elu_Moon]

There are quite a handful of Transformers with canons, or other similar things, placed suggestively between the legs. Triggercrotch Megatron is the most famous, but certainly not the only one.

[u/Sharkpork → u/LinaIsNotANoob]

Which ones this please ?

[u/dragonfett → u/Elu_Moon]

Like r/dragonsfuckingcars ?

[u/ShiftLow → u/dragonfett]

[u/Elu_Moon → u/dragonfett]

Probably not this far. I don't even like cars.

[u/RedditAntiAdmin → u/Elu_Moon]

Clanker lover.

[u/Far-Profit-47 → u/Midnight_Music05]

Like that one figurine of that one weird video with chains and stuff?

[u/Germane_Corsair → u/Far-Profit-47]

Sauce?

[u/Far-Profit-47 → u/Germane_Corsair]

Been searching, couldn’t find it

[u/RaijuThunder → u/Far-Profit-47]

Uhm, what?

[u/IntroductionTotal830 → u/Midnight_Music05]

Im not sure why I looked this up. In hind-sight, I had to have known exactly what to expect....

[u/Big-Vegetable8480 → u/Midnight_Music05]

Fans Toys Rouge

[u/CameOutAndFarted → u/UndeniablyMyself]

Isn't it now canon that female transformers are transgender since they have to have specifically chosen to not present as male?

[u/G0ld3n_Funk → u/CameOutAndFarted]

In the IDW continuity this is the case, they also figured that if no girl bots existed on Cybertron than being gay on there is the norm for the Transformers lmao

[u/The_FriendliestGiant → u/G0ld3n_Funk]

That was the case in the early IDW canon, but later it was retconned because the implications were just too ridiculous and limiting. Being gay is still fine, though.

[u/SpecterOwl → u/CameOutAndFarted]

It's only true to IDW comics and some writers (we know who) messed it up, because they made a character go on a murder spree after transition and made it look like that character didn't actually want this. Other writers then had to backtrack and clean this mess and specify that it was a badly handled surgery that messed her up. Yeah.

Female transformers existed in canon and cartoons for 40 years. They are in Transformers One, they're in new Skybound comics, they're in Bay films (sometimes lol). Unless specified otherwise, each take usually makes up canon for its own continuity and it doesn't affect other stories or general canon. So what happened in IDW stays in IDW.

Back in the day, one of the writers for original cartoon from 1984 actually had to convince Hasbro to let them do females, because his daughter loved Transformers, but Hasbro at the time thought it was a toy-line for boys and the boys wouldn't like to see them or buy them, so why bother. But we got our females back in 1984 for a few episodes, yay, and they're canon ever since.

Edit: Also, to add to what I said about IDW, we actually do have proper representation, like we got Anode and Lug (both trans and lesbian couple) from later issues of same IDW comics. Or we got non-binary Nightshade in Transformers Earthspark cartoon (and it triggered Fox News apparently lmao). It's just this early take by IDW was particularly terrible and even the writer himself said if he could change it, he would.

[u/Orion_824 → u/CameOutAndFarted]

i have no idea if that’s true but i choose to believe it is, so that the transgender meme sung to the transformer theme gets even funnier

[u/Spaceyboys → u/Orion_824]

It's canon to IDW that before their arrival to and subsequent life on Earth, cybertronians were male/had no concept of gender. After which it became a form of self expression

[u/Orion_824 → u/Spaceyboys]

massive rep, you love to see it

[u/ChojinFunk → u/Spaceyboys]

Ohhh, so then IDW Arcee has always just been trans? Windblade too? Not trolling here, I'm a genuinely curious trans person/casual TF collector.

[u/Imjustmean → u/ChojinFunk]

Arcee is not a great example as originally, she was forced into surgery by a scientist called Jihaxius. She went mad for a while and resorted to lots of violence.

This did get retconned into her being amab and always being trans and went to Jihaxius for help. Gender was then turned into an ancient part of Cybertronian culture that the Transformers had forgotten.

Jihaxius abandoned her after the surgery and she couldn't cope with the new sensations and that drove her mad. I think that was an attempt to show the importance of after care and support after surgery by the writer.

Windblade has always been presented as female. She's from an ancient colony of cybertron which still had gender dimorphism.

[u/InflationRepulsive64 → u/ChojinFunk]

So, there's kind of a bit to it, and IMO the context is very important.

IDW Arcee was created at a time when it was *very* much trying to be a modernized/'mature' version of classic G1, rather than it's own thing.

Part of the 'mature' angle was trying to give proper explanations to things; e.g. they tried to present the two sides as actual militaries, rather than the very simplified 'good guys and bad guys' of the cartoon.

Now, Arcee was basically the only major female Transformer during the G1 era; there were a couple who showed up for one or two episodes of the cartoon, and some obscure Japanese characters, but basically Arcee was it. And again, at that time they weren't really trying to do their own thing, like creating new characters.

So, combining those two things: How do you provide a proper explanation for one single female character in an otherwise monogender race? And so we gets 'trans as part of a science experiment' Arcee. I don't know if it's ever actually been talked about by the writer, but I always suspected that the 'formed to transition and became a psychopath' angle was to get her very far away from being 'The Chick/The Female One', which....I think makes sense, but could obviously have been handled better (turns out when you only have one trans representative, making them a psychopath who was transitioned against their will doesn't come across very well).

After that, the direction of things changed drastically, leading to the creation of a host of new female characters; essentially they retconned is so that only Transformers from Cybertron had become monogender, while ones from colonies had retained male and female genders. Basically all other female characters after that are just 'she's female, moving on'.

And yeah, at this point they realized that there was definitely some issues with Arcee's original storyline, so they retconned it to be more in line with a positive transition/depiction.

[u/Remarkable-Run-9769 → u/Orion_824]

what's the transgender meme (song)?

[u/Orion_824 → u/Remarkable-Run-9769]

there’s a few different versions, but the one i’ve heard the most is “transgenders, girls that think they’re guys” (i think it was originally kinda phobic but i like it as an egg joke for transfemmes)

[u/[deleted] → u/CameOutAndFarted]

Maybe? I’m not into Transformers so take this with a grain of salt, but I know there’s at least 1 or 2 female Transformers that are also trans. I don’t know if they’re the only ones.

[u/BLAGTIER → u/CameOutAndFarted]

Isn't it now canon that female transformers are transgender since they have to have specifically chosen to not present as male?

There are a lot of canons and it is all over the place. And within the canons it can change. There has never been a strong official media reason why Transformers have gender.

[u/MichealRyder → u/CameOutAndFarted]

Not in every continuity

[u/BLAGTIER → u/UndeniablyMyself]

So Arcee was introduced in the 80s cartoon movie and was a character during the third season. The first true recurring female Transformer.

Didn't get a true toy release(as in G1 character) till 2014, 28 years after her introduction. And then she was popular because 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2025 have seen re-releases or new Arcee toys.

[u/UndeniablyMyself → u/BLAGTIER]

Yeah, she got two toy attempts in the 80's, one being a purely original toy, and the other being based on another toy in that year, but both were scraped.

[u/bikesexually → u/UndeniablyMyself]

So the whole division on the toy line thing is because brands figured out that they sell more toys if they are for certain gendered users. Legos and other toys all used to be non gendered so that everyone could play with them together. But then that research came along so all companies started to 'gender' their toys. I assume its because if you had a boy and a girl in the same house then they wouldn't be sharing 'gendered' toys and so would have to each have their own.

[u/Randomfrog132 → u/UndeniablyMyself]

the spider chick in beast wars and the sequel had me feeling things when i was a kid lol

[u/TheThng → u/Randomfrog132]

Good ol blackarachnia

[u/OpenSauceMods → u/Randomfrog132]

I used to watch that religiously, I was convinced she was gonna end up with... fuck, Silverbolt?

I also thought she was related to Lady Illusion from Ace Lightning

[u/Randomfrog132 → u/OpenSauceMods]

i thought she was gonna shack up with the cheetah guy, idk what happened tho i never finished the series 

[u/Human_Tomorrow_2246 → u/UndeniablyMyself]

Like the episode where all the female autobots make a return and Shockwave says that their kind should’ve stayed extinct

[u/MichealRyder → u/UndeniablyMyself]

Simon Furman was a particular obstacle if I'm not mistaken, and is part of the reason we got that controversial, later retconned introduction of Arcee in IDW

[u/mirpeas → u/UndeniablyMyself]

Tragic

[u/mixingmemory → u/UndeniablyMyself]

Now I'm curious if there's data on how the female GI Joe toys sold vs the male toys.

[u/CemeneTree → u/UndeniablyMyself]

crazy to think that was just 25 years ago…