Feminism in Transformers PT 1

It has come to my attention that my fellow members of the Transformers fan community like to bandy about different issues.  Everyone has their own views about everything from Cybertronian reproduction to whether or not a certain character’s name is really Brawl or Devastator.  One issue, however, stood out to me as being one that I do have very strong views on, and that’s the idea of feminist principals in the various cartoons.  I recently read an essay on the roles of the character Elita One from the original cartoon, which for convenience will be referred to as G1, and Blackarachnia from Transformers Animated. This essay along with a conversation with a fellow fan made me decide to write up my own interpretations of the various female Transformers and several of the other female characters.  

This is the first in a series of essays since there is simply too much to discuss to keep it within a reasonable length for reading on DeviantArt or any other website that I choose to publish on.  However, please keep in mind that these essays are merely my interpretations.  Everyone has their own, and I will discuss the alternatives, some of which I cannot honestly see in the character and thus find incorrect.  It is not my intention to attack anyone, but instead to inspire thought.

I will begin my analysis with the original cartoon series, commonly called Generation 1.

The Idea Behind The Transformers

To sum it up succinctly, The Transformers started out as nothing more than an extended toy commercial.  To paraphrase the Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs, the money is in the merchandising. Churning out fifty thousand lumps of plastic is much cheaper than animating a cartoon. Add into that the potential for t-shirts, lunch boxes, coloring books, and bed linens, and you have a recipe for some major money making.

What’s more, since the toys were aimed at young boys, so was the cartoon.  The limited presence of female characters at all is due to the fact that at this time the allure of female action heroes was still underestimated.  In the West, female characters in action movies and such were mostly limited to secondary characters or in conjunction with a male hero, with a few notable exceptions.  Ripley from Alien aside, it was not commonly thought that a heroine would engender enthusiastic response from male viewers.  Thus, it is not surprising that Sunbow and Hasbro would not wish to include many, if any, female characters.  It should be noted that even when they did, there were no toys produced for the female characters.

The Ladies of Generation 1

The Fleshling Girls

Throughout the cartoon, we meet many human characters. Most are more secondary to the main cast of Spike and Sparkplug Witwicky, but among their number we find several human and humanoid women. I have not personally come across any essays that deal with the human females of the show, and if there are any I would love to read them.  I find it sort of disappointing that the women and girls of The Transformers are ignored, and I will be the first to admit that I usually don’t particularly care for the human characters of the show anyway.  

The organic females show themselves to be both strong and some - in my own personal opinion - somewhat aggravating. Amazingly enough, the number of irritating ones is small, and even then she isn’t a waste of space. Astoria annoys me to no end, but my own scruples aside, she does show herself to have a backbone. In the end, Astoria helps save the day.

On the other hand - and strangely enough - most of the other organic females have shown themselves to be very intelligent and very warlike. The Titan Talaria particularly comes to mind. She is trying to rid her fellow Titans of their overly superstitious ways, and throughout the episode shows that she’s not afraid of a fight.  However, she does end up needing to be rescued. That is the only mark she has against her, and as I discuss later, that begins to look less and less like a bad thing.

The Non-Transformers</u>

The first female robot that we meet in the history of Transformers is the character Nightbird.  She has an entire episode surrounding her entitled Enter the Nightbird.  She is developed by Japanese scientists around a ninja motif and is stolen by the Decepticons to do their bidding.  On her own she shows that she is more than capable of dealing with the Autobots, even though they “gallantly” try not to hurt her.  This gallantry is in name only, they are only trying not to destroy her so that they can return her in one piece to the scientists who own her.  Now, think of this what you will, but personally, I find this attitude to be attributed to the fact that none of the robots or humans see Nightbird as fully sentient. She is represented as being somewhere between a mindless machine and the Transformers themselves.  

The fact that she is given the feminine pronoun when she is rather asexual could be construed several ways, but to my mind the only truly valid reason for her designation is because Nightbird is being likened more to a boat or some other machine.  It’s a common practice to refer to boats and other mechanical objects as “she”, and interestingly enough, several of the artificially intelligent computers that I can think of off the top of my head are given female personas.  It’s more than probable in my mind that the entire reason that Nightbird is a female is because of this tendency.

One other female robot that is worth note is the extraterrestrial robot Ninjika. Even though most of the episode the robot is technically Perceptor, what little we do see of Ninjika is positive. She’s a symbol of hope and the future for her people as she’s an explorer.

The Search for Alpha Trion

This brings me to the actual female Transformers, of which we are introduced to four in the episode The Search for Alpha Trion.  When fellow fans write about the feminist principals in Generation 1, this is the episode most commonly cited.  Here we meet Firestar, Moonracer, Chromia, and Elita One along with a few unnamed characters.  By the time we meet them, it is a common belief among most of the other Transformers that females have died out, but these four and their comrades have been operating in secret on Cybertron.  

Now, in several places I have seen these four attacked for being damsels in distress and being useless.  This is not the case at all.  I would point out that in the first five minutes of the episode, Moonracer was trapped by Shockwave, but she was rescued not by a male character, but by fellow female Chromia. These two proceeded to escape him quite easily.  Later when Firestar, Chromia, and Moonracer were trapped in their destroyed base, it was Moonracer who came up with the plan to escape.  Both instances show quite readily that the female Autobots are just as capable as their male counterparts. Furthermore, the fact is that their team is comprised entirely of females; for millions of years they didn’t have any “knights” to save them from trouble, they had to save themselves.

Their leader, Elita One shows that she is quite capable as well.  Yes, she is captured by the Decepticons, but it did take Starscream, Rumble, and Ramjet to take her down.  Upon her capture, Megatron does hold her hostage in order to get Optimus Prime to give himself up.  However, in this case, Optimus doesn’t come to the rescue on a white charger.  Optimus finds himself dangling above a cauldron of acid, and it is Elita who rescues him, using her secret power in the process.  Now here, Optimus does manage to be the white knight since he was the one who had to find Alpha Trion and then provide the power needed to save her life, but it was more a tit for tat situation since she’d been injured saving him.  If anything, this situation only makes them seem more equal since in less than ten minutes they each save the other from certain destruction.

What’s more, Optimus Prime actually starts off his part in the episode showing a piece of bad judgment on his part.  Right after he receives the news that not only Elita is alive, but that she is in Megatron’s clutches, Optimus charges off to her rescue without telling anyone where he was going.  Now, the romantic in me finds this very cute, but the leader in me is calling him about five kinds of stupid.  Even if he was told to come alone, he should have informed his men where he was going and why.  The fact that it took Ironhide noticing that Prime had up and left to make sure that there would be back up does not shed a nice light on Optimus as a leader.  What’s more, the backup that consists of Ironhide, Powerglide, and Inferno find themselves in need of backup toward the end of the episode.  Their backup arrives in the form of Chromia, Firestar, and Moonracer.  

The only character that doesn’t need rescuing in the entire episode is the character Alpha Trion.  He is the mentor of Elita One, and she admits that she looks upon him as a father figure.  Thus, it is not surprising that when faced with a difficult situation - that of her secret base being discovered by Shockwave - she turns to him for advice.  This is a natural reaction, and shows that she is a wise leader.  She confers with one who is older and wiser than her before making such an important decision as to whether she should defend her base or move quickly. This is not indicative of weakness, but instead of strength.

As for the infamous secret power that Alpha Trion told Elita not to use, if you think about it, she wouldn’t have used it if Optimus wasn’t in the process of being dropped into a vat of acid. Alpha Trion’s warning was more or less a cautionary one. Elita’s power is of the last-resort variety, and it really was a last resort. If she had had any other choice, Elita one strikes me as enough of a leader to not use her power.  However, she had to do something and her power was the only way she think of that would be successful. The fact that she uses it knowing that it would probably kill her shows both incredible bravery and deep trust.

In all, I find most arguments saying that the female Autobots shown in The Search for Alpha Trion to be weak are not founded in fact. To my mind, those that believe them to be weak are merely seeing what they want to see. If you really watch the episode, the clear message is that in order to truly succeed there must be teamwork, not just cooperation of males and males, and females and females, but both genders together. It’s only when both teams of Autobots meet up that the main victory is won. Yes, Elita One is a female version of Optimus Prime, but on the flip side, that means that Optimus Prime is a male version of Elita One.

Why “Damsel in Distress” Shouldn’t Even Apply</u>

The more I watch The Transformers the more I am convinced that we fans shouldn’t really put much stock into the idea that anyone should be called a “damsel in distress”.  Scarcely an episode goes by that someone doesn’t need rescuing. In the first and second parts of More Than Meets the Eye it was Spike and Sparkplug Witwicky. In Divide and Conquer it was Optimus Prime. In The Search for Alpha Trion it was everybody.

Being rescued in The Transformers pretty much means nothing when it comes to placing anyone into a role.

If anything, the insistence of fans of saying that females of any species are nothing more than “damsels in distress” is more or less their own bias coming to the fore. If you want a real damsel in distress, there’s Bumblebee. He’s captured and needs rescue at least three times that I can think of right off the top of my head, but no one says a word about the amount of times that he gets captured. Optimus Prime himself has to be saved from destruction a few times as well, specifically in Divide and Conquer, S.O.S. Dinobots, and the above mentioned Search for Alpha Trion.

The problem is that people watch the cartoon and see what they expect to see. The societal mindset is still very patriarchal, so it’s still easier to see males rescuing females but not the other way around. No matter how open for change people are, we human beings still don’t like it very much. Heroes still outnumber heroines even post-Buffy, and that doesn’t look to change soon. However, that doesn’t mean that we should continue to look at things with the same views as the people who came before.

That’s why here at the end of my first essay I implore my fellow fans to watch or read Transformers with an open mind.  It could open up a whole new world of possibilities.