#idw arcee

[tiny-tf-faces]

[utane]

A quick Arcee sketch

[bumblebiboop]

*bumblebee voice* gee arcee, how come hasbro lets you have two girlfriends?

[firel-yy]

*♡:✧Barbie girl.:*•♡

[compaculaaa]

Christmas gfs Christmas shopping

[keferon]

Earthspark Arcee: let's have fun!

IDW Arcee: Let's spill blood

[buzzsawbebop]

Rise of Beasts got me so excited!!!! Finally, we get a cgi Arcee design that does not look like total ass.

The text in the background is Arcee's Japanese name (Āshī) because it was looking too boring back there lmao

[chaifootsteps]

Hey I saw someone on Twitter saying you’re transphobic because it said in your Twitter bio “IDW Arcee is still a guy” even though the character is canonically trans. What’s your take on that? I’m not attacking you or anything I just genuinely want to know the context of all that.

Oh boy. Strap yourselves in kids; time for Chai's villain origin story.

So basically, IDW Arcee made his debut under the pen of Simon Furman, the dude who created Arcee in the first place. Simon Furman has a small massive chip on his shoulder over the notion of girl robots, but we're going to be talking in mostly Watsonian terms for now. IDW Arcee as he comes on the scene in Spotlight Arcee is the victim of a nonconsensual forced sex reassignment, we see right off the bat that this destroyed his life.

He's wracked with trauma and dysphoria over this, on a do-or-die quest to take out the mad scientist who did it (he succeeds and tortures said scientist for seven years straight), and is implied to suffer chronic pain.

This got a lot of criticism, but Simon Furman insisted it wasn't meant to be transphobic, just the opposite. When someone pointed out that this was a story about how traumatic it was to be assigned a gender you didn't feel was the one you should have, Furman agreed with this take.

Eventually Furman was shooed out and John Barber was brought in as writer, and nobody seemed to know how to deal with Arcee's backstory. So they just kind of...didn't. They wrote around it for eight whole years, never really acknowledging it, but frequently alluding to how traumatized he was from it. The only person to ever roll up their sleeves and tackle it head on was Mairghread Scott, the only person IMO to ever do justice to IDW Arcee.

By the way, this panel made me weep. This issue also includes a fleeting, but notable moment where someone refers to Arcee with they/them pronouns, and at the time, I was extremely excited for this.

Shortly after this however, the comic came to an end and John Barber decided -- in the very last issue -- to bring in an expert. And by this, I mean he found some trans lady on Twitter and let her write Arcee. The last issue has Arcee concluding that the whole sex change was consensual and the violent murder spree was the result of, I quote, "bad meds."

Yeah, basically Arcee killed all those people because the Spiro was a little off.

I got into a lot of internet fights with people over this back in the day, criticizing it for being worse than what we started with, but also frequently pointing out that it wasn't Twitter lady's fault, as she wasn't the editor-in-chief at IDW and that there's a very good reason professional writers aren't supposed to do this sort of thing. In return, I got accused of hating trans women and still get some real ugly things in the inbox about it to this day. It was the first taste, bitter as wormwood, of what I as a trans man could expect from my own community.

Regardless of all that, Arcee is probably the most important fictional character to ever enter my life. He helped me realize I was trans, got me through some dark days, got me through heartbreak and top surgery. He saved my life a few times, and every so often he continues to. I owe so much to him.

If writing a very gentle fix-it fic where Arcee has a long talk with Anode (one of the trans lesbian bots from the vastly superior sister series James Roberts wrote) makes me a transphobe in these peoples' eyes, so be it. I don't care what they think. They never reached out to baby trans Chai and held his hand and kept him breathing.

Arcee did.

[sobbingprincess]

Soundwave grieving over the death of his human friend, Mainframe.

CRYING

[hysterical-random-things]

[blighted-lights]

shoves them at you. they have remained in my drafts for months. they are free now.

[tiny-tf-faces]

[spashahoney]

Day 4: I Want to Know What Love is/Falling Away from Me (Arcee x Greenlight)

Her processor caught on that her mentors are married.

[signanothername]

@nintendogirl106734-blog

Prime Arcee is easily my favorite, she got everything fr

Of course that’s not to say other Arcees are bad, in this house, we love and appreciate every Arcee <3333333

[firel-yy]

💔

[katchless]