#transfem robots

[pluralsword]

hey y'all! we just finished a voice dub of one of our favorite issues of IDW1 especially for Arcee's (trans) narrative and arcs, and also it just has a really good plot of 'post-war' intrigue, and is the issue that introduced Aileron to the continuity, and Arcee's initial feelings towards her and newly arrived Camiens (after Windblade, Nautica, and Chromia, though her perspective probably applies to them too especially after the idealism she saw in Combiner Hunters), here you go :3 :

In this issue of Transformers' IDW1/IDW2005, "The Transgressors" (written by John Barber, edited by Carlos Guzman, Art by Andrew Griffith, colors by Josh Perez, letters by Tom B. Long), turmoil is afoot on Cybertron. The estranged brotherhood of Tracks & Needlenose is put to the test once more while Needlenose & the Decepticons allied with Galvatron vie for support from the ones in Iacon, tensely crossing paths with Way of Flame proselytizing Camiens Aileron, Sterling, & Swift who (currently) believe Optimus Prime to be a living god. Second in command of Autobots on Earth, Arcee, who provides the interior narration of this issue, continues her visit to Cybertron (after the Combiner Hunters one-shot) & is not particularly pleased with the current events, seeing the unrest & unhappiness of Decepticons whose dreams of conquest are easy to rekindle & the deification of her commander. She worries for the lost colony newcomers while struggling with taking a look back at her past from a tense exchange with Tracks, & the tumult that follows brings her to the governing halls of High Chancellor Starscream, elected leader of Cybertron who seems to be having a one-sided conversation with someone no one but he can see… & she pushes him to face the fact his authoritarianism will be his & Cybertron's undoing by bringing her conflict with one of the secret police to his doorstep. In the aftermath, wrangling wtih personal loss in the past & the bright hope she saw on the faces of the visiting Camiens, she resolves to make sure they never end up with the same pile of trouble & old wounds Cybertronians carry on average, much less herself…

Can't believe we're one of the first to voice dub Aileron! XD more than one of us definitely got a kick out of that.

"The Transformers" is an exclusive property of Hasbro. This video and the system who put together (us) & uploaded it make no claim therein to "The Transformers", (hence, the removal of nearly all of the dialogue from comic bubbles), & thus release this non-commercially with no monetary gain to be had (also some sounds from freesound.org credited at the end are only available on a non-commerical license).

This was video was just done to bring to life with sound a comic issue from the IDW1/IDW2005 run if for no other reason than for people who have struggled to read comics as text to be able to experience the story another way.CW Limb loss, minor robogore, occasional loud sound effects for typical transformer violence.

This dub for the sake of visual impact to the reader during Arcee's final pages of narration in this issue, draws on one panel each from The Transformers: Robots in Disguise #Annual 2012, "Primus: All Good Things", The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye #26, "No Exit: Dark Cybertron Chapter 6", & The Transformers: Lost Light #1, "Dissolution Part 1: Some Other Cybertron" to show people from Arcee's past she was close to she knows or thinks are dead. Hardhead & Anode (& of course, Lug is present even though it's not established in The Transformers: Optimus Prime #25, "Post" if Arcee knew her, it was just easier to show the situation where Arcee thought Anode died by including her, & to be honest given how close the two transfem Conjunx Endura treasure hunters are we struggle to believe that Anode wouldn't have at least mentioned her to Arcee at all), & two people who betrayed her long ago, Jhiaxus (among other things by not listening to her desires for her gender affirming surgery & putting her through unnecessary procedures to conform to rigid ideals & then abandoning her including to the side effects, with a frame she sought help from Anode with & has since iterated away from across reformats of her own parameters) & Galvatron, who became estranged from her in his love of hierarchy and pursuit of power, getting deeply involved in the cause of imperial progress of the differing schemes of Nova Prime, Jhiaxus, & Shockwave before fully going his own way as a warrior ruler seeking to conquer after Dark Cybertron.

While Arcee was not actually present for the 'death' of Anode nor the death of Lug in 1516 CE (don't worry she gets resurrected by her wife & Kaput) & Hardhead in 2014 CE (no such luck), she was aware of both events, and while her friendship with & medical trust for Anode was not intended when this was written (Anode had yet to even appear in canon, MTMTE was still going), "Transgressors" is easily read in that context, as you just heard. It's all in the reasons & emotions you ascribe to Arcee's words from your knowledge and understanding of her story when you read it.

Endless thanks to the people who keep freesound.org alive & well, & a special thank you to our (as in our system's) friends & loved ones who supported the endeavour of doing this dub, & to everyone else who loves EXRID / Robots in Disguise 2012 + Dark Cybertron + Transformers (2014) + Transformers: Optimus Prime + Transformers: Unicron & trans gal (or parallel assemblage) alien robots be they transformers or other dear mechanoids!

[rattlegeist]

"I won't miss." V4 Rusty & 621 vs IA-02: ICE WORM

Thank you all so much for 2k follows! <3

[tgirl-robotics]

Flirt with that cute robot girl

Take her to a private room & open up her back panel

Dig through her internal electronics, yank her wires just hard enough to cause a spark, remove pieces & toss em to the side. She doesn't need them.

Short circuit her till she's unable to think, her fans running at max speed & her internal mechanics sparking are like crazy

Bluescreen that cute robot girl

She needs it

[ashes2caches]

robot girl who’s clearly a bit disappointed after her maintenance session with the butch mechanic turned out to be decidedly non-erotic.

[bungrl-off-leash]

Hey girlies im new to this whole E-Sex thing so which part of the computer do I put my dick in?????

[transmemesfortransqueens]

[artificalamber]

Submissive robot dog girl

Call that a subwoofer

[girl-processing-unit]

Forcefemming your robot gf by going in and changing the pronouns in her BIOS

[rattlegeist]

Doll girls & they’re all roommates. Which one’s ur fave?

[tgirl-robotics]

Robot girl who escapes from her creators because she hated doing the things she was designed for & was forced to do.

Robot girl who runs away & meets a few others like her, and with their help begins to replace parts of herself with new pieces that feel right.

Robot girl who has to deal with judgmental humans constantly complaining that she's replacing her "perfectly good" parts with "less useful" parts, claiming that she'll regret it.

Robot girl who undergoes so many changes that she ends up unrecognizable from her original form, but is so much happier as her new self.

Robot girl who continues to swap out pieces of herself with whatever feels right at the time, never forcing herself to settle with her original choices

Robot girl who fights for her freedom, and eventually finds herself living in comfort with 3 others like her, finally truly happy

Robot girl who goes through all of this, just to play Stardew Valley for 12 hours a day

[ashes2caches]

robotgirls wrapped in material that mimics human skin and robotgirls with hard metal exteriors actually love to kiss each other. it’s true.

[storm-aeterna]

underclocking her and removing half her RAM while she sleeps so she wakes up so so stupid.

[pluralsword]

yeah as much as it feels imminently obvious to us based on IRL erasure/loss of knowledge of historical expansive genders around the world (including in the West and long before interoceanic colonialism that is a more easily remembered context for many) and accompanying gender systems whether inequal or with parallel power or equality, erasure due to conquests that enforced a loss of rights and knowledge (basically a form of genocide, to us this is what the loss of gender equality in Illyria due to Rome taking over, and the despair that colored the last of the rebellions by Illyria are particularly stark) or declines of countries involving the rise of patriarchies (ancient Sumeria is a very good example, the furthest back the concepts of transfem and drag equivalent gala and transmasc pilipili among other genders can be traced. to be clear Sumeria was at least as much as archaeologists have determined a country that was patriarchic for much of it's history, it just got worse around the time when farming became more difficult and people started to move elsewhere, iirc. the context and collective identity of the galli was something later held by people in Babylon, Phyrgia, and later in Rome, where some viewed them with contempt that became more widespread during the Late Roman Empire) that it is very, very easy to read the loss of knowledge of gender due to the reign of Nova Prime who inspired Functionism, there isn't anything in the text that explicitly says this. it's not particularly clear what the original plan for Functionist Universe Anode's gender stuff was, what is clear is that in the finalized form she at some point figured out gender stuff before or after quitting from being a blacksmith, and we do see other transfem characters among the Anti-Vocationist League side (thinking of the one who looked like Rung on purpose and tossed out her T-Cog). There was a sort of structural discrimination in that the Primal Vanguard peacekeeper members in the main timeline who came back from service beyond Cybertron with she pronouns due to contact with other species helping them realize themselves were seen as, in Anode's own words for her view at the time, something not understood, and society didn't really go to the effort of trying to unlike the Cybertron that welcomed and helped out Ask Vector Prime Arcee (from the December 23rd 2015 entry) and had a very endearing trans revolution after she wrote a paper based on her own gender realizations and observing the 'transformations' of lifeforms of another world.

The indie videogame Phoning Home actually does explicitly explore this premise, the organic species the mechanoid protagonist is descended from abandoned gender in a male as genderless sort of way, he pronouns becoming standard for everyone, and they went about wiping out organic life on their planet in order to cultivate resources to expand and have done so on other worlds, in fact the planet Ion and his ship partner crash on is a world they were supposed to scout out. they encounter a bot and ship duo who both use she pronouns, who want knowledge of gender variation to be reinstated and for harmony with organic life to be had, including for people who want to be organic to be allowed to do so (we haven't finished the game so we don't fully know where the plot went but we deeply enjoyed it), the game came out in 2017 so we definitely wonder if this was inspired by a read of IDW1 at all, it was interesting to us because it doesn't conflate gender with being organic.

IDW1 on the other hand by the time it was digging more deeply into transfem narratives was juggling a lot in Phase 3 and there was knowledge of cancellation of IDW1 in 2018 as far back as 2016, iirc, so it's understandable that they didn't explore how androcentrism happened on Cybertron after contact with the colonies due to collapse of the spacebridge network was lost. so there's nothing explicitly stated, but it does make sense and is something that could be explored, which we ourselves due in a rather lengthy fanfiction focused on IDW1 Arcee starting with the period of Nova Prime's reign around the time knowledge of gender was walked away from by the majority of bots... hell of a time to try and seek a gender-affirming surgery, we think that must have been difficult for her emotionally. it could further explain why she took to Jhiaxus and didn't fully see the betrayal that was coming in terms of gatekeeping, unnecessary procedures, rigid gender ideals, and abandonment.

also, arcee went from tank to car for her surgery, which would be something Functionism would oppose due to changing alt mode

the thing w talking about which transformers in MTMTE are LGBT is that by human standards the answer is prolly 'all of them'? like it's textually the case that they've only had contact with masc-presenting he/him transformers for millions of years so sexual orientation is presumably a matter of 'yes please' or 'no thank you' so in human terms they're all either gay or ace

which means from an in universe perspective the answer is potentially 'none of them' bcos being into other guy transformers is socially normal (like. they marry each other.) and there's no indication that not being attracted to anyone isn't socially normal

i suppose it's possible that there might be guy transformers who are exclusively attracted to girl transformers (presumably thought they were attracted to no-one prior to Dark Cybertron fdgkhfdgkj) but no indication of that in canon

gender is a separate matter bcos Arcee is trans which is not socially normal but for different reasons than on earth (former oppressive government made being a woman illegal)

[sadcoldcoffee]

Metal Cali idk I'm kinda drunk

[average-transfem-robotgirl]

>Robot girl frotting that friction welds your dicks together.

>Welcome to my TED Talk.