![]() Troubling ideas about gender writ large were even at play in this perspective, as the Transformers by default being male speaks to a larger idea (informed by Adam being the basis for Eve) that men are the “normal” for human existence and women are deviations from that “normal.” The whole idea is preposterous even before grappling with larger realities about how mainstream perceptions of the gender binary are just constructs. The dominant idea in mainstream pop culture, especially pieces of art geared towards Western audiences, that male characters are more “marketable” just seemed to instill an idea that Transformers had to innately be dudes. Still, various comics and future TV shows would often lean into the idea of lady Transformers being a rarity. ![]() In subsequent pieces of Transformers media, lady Transformers weren’t suddenly running the entire franchise, but programs like Beast Wars did make more room for these characters. Arcee, arguably the most famous of the original lady Transformers, would be introduced in the 1986 movie The Transformers: The Movie. A comment from the nefarious Decepticon Shockwave here intriguingly suggests that an original part of the Transformers mythos was the idea that female Transformers were initially thought to have gone extinct, an idea that’s never really come back into play again. Save for a ninja by the name of Nightbird, lady robots were entirely absent from this animated program until a Season 2 episode introduced a collection of female Transformers (like Chromia, Moonracer, and Firestar) led by Elita-One. The default and misguided thought of family-friendly sci-fi entertainment being "for boys" meant that the original Transformers cartoon from the 1980s (known as the G1 continuity) ensured that all on-screen robots were male without question. The Transformers media franchise as a whole has a complicated history with the idea of women Transformers. Image via De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
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