Female Representation - Blog Posts

Transformers and Female Body Types (Rant/Essay)

(I wanted more images in this, but tumblr has a limit and it was a lot of pictures anyway)

Anyone who complains about female transformers having “robot boobs” needs to shut up. Unless it’s a case of critiquing a design that’s genuinely caricatured, this complaint only serves to protest against robots looking too feminine, as if all robots by default should have broad, masculine shoulders and flat chests instead. The problem is that people look at a masculine transformer and say, “Ah yes, an anthropomorphised robot.” But the moment it’s one of the female transformers, it’s “why do robots need boobs?” as if a male-looking body type is anthropomorphizing, but a female-looking body time is suddenly “too human” or “too much.” As if all humanoid robot aliens should look male by default.

That being said, for a long time transformers did have a glaring issue of their female transformers having a generic, Barbie-doll like body type. This especially became problematic as male characters appeared with several different and varying heights and builds, while female characters all looked the same.

This eventually improved with newer media. I’m going to go through different transformers series, giving my opinions on various female Cybertronians designs.

Transformers Animated and Transformers Prime are the cases where we see the very few female characters that there are being designed with this more Barbie doll look, especially in comparison to the male cast, who each have strikingly different silhouettes. I maintain that there’s nothing wrong with having this stereotypically feminine figure as long as it’s not caricatured or designed to sxualize the character (in TFA’s case, Black Airachnid was extremely sexualized, but Arcee wasn’t at least) it’s just the lack of variety that makes it painful. If all female characters were designed with a stocky, square body type, it would be just as bad; the problem is the lack of diversity in representing how each woman is different.

I think Arcee from Transformers Prime gets some of the most comments about how she has breasts and hips and is most often faced with the question “why should robots have boobs?” In response to this question, I propose: why shouldn’t they? The shape of their chassis really doesn’t matter in the end. I like Arcee’s design and acting like she’s inherently caricatured for looking like a woman is just a way of alienating femininity.

TFP Arcee is also unfortunately sexualized a lot by the fandom. Primus forbid a woman exist in peace.

The problem with these ‘Barbie doll’ designs isn’t that they are oversexualized— while this may have been a problem with Black Airachnia, the true problem, as seen especially with the treatment of TFP Arcee, is the concept that any female body traits are inherently sexual, which both creators and fandom spaces feed into.

It’s not as prominent, but I’ve also seen a trend of attempting to give female transformers more diverse body types by giving them… male body types.

In Transformers Cyberverse, the Seekers all have the same body type, whether they are male, female, or genderfluid, the only differences being that the female models have lips and the male ones have facial-hair like chin stubs (and Acid Storm switches back and forth). However I would hardly call this progress, because the body type is more male-leaning, not truly gender neutral.

Often to make something appear gender neutral, people will just remove anything too obviously feminine. This treats masculine traits as the “default” and female traits as a deviance from this. A truly gender-neutral design would incorporate both masculine and feminine traits at the same time.

(What if we just made all the Seekers look like women and gave the dudes chins. What if we did that. Huh.)

Shadowstriker from Cyberverse is a better example of this, having a female body type but a chin stub and generally gender neutral face.

I like the look of Alpha Strike as well, she feels actually gender neutral and isn’t too exaggerated like most muscular (and especially muscular female) characters are.

For example, Clobber’s design is good, but I do think her lips were strangely exaggerated.

Once the IDW run of the Transformers comics actually introduced female characters, they eventually gained a large cast with a variety of different body types. Take Windblade, Nautica, Pyra Magna, the Mistress of Flame, and Aileron.

These aren’t all examples, but IDW certainly had a unique design for each of their female characters, with different heights, width, mixing and matching the proportions of their bodies and displaying diverse body types. Aileron is also a stand-out character design for me, as one of the few heavy-set transformers to be designed in a way that looks more rounded than bulky, implying weight over muscle. We need more weighted transformers in general.

I have many positive feelings about Transformers Earthspark’s choice of character design for their female characters.

Earthspark has the most consistently diverse character design for its female characters.

And it shows that the key to designing actually good female Cybertronians isn’t necessarily to make them not feminine, but to show diverse depictions of femininity. All of the female characters in this show are pretty feminine, but they all look different. Twitch is small and slight, Hashtag is tall and boxy. Each one has different proportions and are easy to tell apart by body type alone. Even better, they each have drastically different facial structures. Twitch has large eyes, Hashtag has a strong chin, Elita-1 has a straight nose and pronounced lips, Arcee has small eyes and a very slight nose, et cetera. Earthspark is definitely a win in this department.

My point with all of this is to say that femininity isn’t a one-size fits all. Every woman is different and everyone should get to express their gender in whatever way they see fit. Transformers gradually diversifying the look of their female characters represents this, and I hope they continue improving as the franchise continues.

[Hey, That’s Her] The Riemann Sphere is Her Mirror on the Wall

                                   MBC 드라마 《신입사관 구해령》 (2019)

There may be such a woman.

For at least eleven hours a day, her analytical, artistic, emotional and ethical minds are collectively locked up in a Taylorist cell block where the mantra is familiarly simple: Don’t question, don’t tell. Every reasonable client is aware that this is a dog-eat-dog world, so it is up to him or her to look out for personal interests not yet covered by contract law or even fiduciary law. If you value your principles and dreams over your corporation’s needs, you are a selfish hypocrite. Oh, and complain all you want at the water cooler; just remember to put back your angel mask and keep your head low at meetings.

That much is not really astonishing. No one in this place is a one-day-old. What stuns more is the utterly dim calaboose she toils away at her daytime lockup to return her body to every night, where broken bottles and suspicious pools of liquids bedeck the streets, literal rock concerts never cease, homeless druggies openly spread their limp bodies on pavements, and drunken Cinderellas and Cinderfellas bang on random doors when the clock strikes twelve. 

Change might come with time but, given a burgeoning workload and an increasingly creepy cardiac rhythm, it must come soon. So, one night, she decides that if all jobs are this suffocating, she might as well take the best-paid one. It’s time to head back to graduate school, except that, this time, economic logic shall prevail over passion and intrigue.

As part of her research on Wealth and Investment Management MScs, she hunts down sample class videos from different business schools. Nestled among the suggested clips accompanying one search result, though, is a familiarly curious title that hypnotizingly whispers to her, Shopaholic Louis-style. It is the name an adviser, frowning over yet another overloaded course plan from her, pressed her into canceling out all those years ago right when meeting times for the semester did not conflict with those of her core classes. And soon, before her eyes, is an entire playlist for her narrowly missed destiny.

What harm could playing the introductory video at 2x do? Business schools’ admissions websites would not vanish in 30 minutes’ time. Ah, that was a collegiate equivalent of a soulful tearjerker but covered mostly basics she learnt in other classes. Application deadlines are half a year away, so there is ample room for a second lecture. Cool! The plot thickened pretty fast. Her college and graduate school debts are still badly in arrears. Can she be certain that she truly understands everything without attempting an unseen problem? Fetch homework sets from the official homepage tomorrow. Had she been bolder in imagination, she would have gotten question 7 right. Try harder for lecture three’s assignments. She has run out of eligible guarantors for a third loan. Lecture 11. Course completed. What a satisfying visual feast! Hey, the blurb of the follow-up course sounds fascinating too. It is not that she does not love investment banking. How about challenging herself at that course while the material of this course is still fresh in her mind? It is that she loathes investment banking. Mathematical logic has trumped economic logic. 

  How do you hold every number up to infinity in the palm of your hand without a poetic soul? Scoop out a round piece of dough and fancy being able to spread it so thin that it stretches to infinity. But instead of actually spreading it, roll up the edge to form a sphere. Let the bottom tip represent zero and the top tip represent infinity. As a point on the surface moves up from the bottom, it can have components that are each positive or negative, real or imaginary, depending on which pairs of opposite longitudes you assign the real number line and imaginary number line (recall: e.g. …, -10i, -9.99i, … , 0, … , 9.99i, 10i, …, where i is the square root of -1) to. The rise in value of each component accelerates with height, such that the physical gap representing any given numerical difference shrinks infinitely on the surface of the sphere as infinity approaches, making it harder and harder to advance and actually reach infinity. You are now cradling a physical version of the Riemann sphere.

© Jean-Christophe BENOIST, modified under the permission of CC BY-SA 3.0. P(A), around 1.5 in value, on the sphere corresponds to A on the grid, which represents the same numerical system in a typical boundless, regularly spaced 2D format. Similarly, P(B), around -0.5 in value, on the sphere corresponds to B on the grid.

 The macrocosm of universal random structures, infinite products, manifolds and many more is a dearly missed oracle that reveals her inadequacies for what they are, without miserliness, patronizing sugar-coating, or, ironically, calculation: her inflexibility, her inattentiveness, her impatience and her indolence. “Shortcuts and cookie-cutter approaches cannot be your default,” it states plainly. So long as they do not cross a certain line, tactful hypocrites, on the whole, seem to be treated better by their surrounding adult peers than sharp-tongued, straight-talking observers with pure intentions in her circle. Yet the more she experiences of the grown-up world, with the heightened stakes and heightened awareness of interpersonal dangers that deter verbalization of contrarian opinions on the one hand and massive clots of intractable ills on the other, the more she wishes to cherish many of those straight talkers. The ideal living beings are, of course, the severely scarce breed who efficiently marry the circumspection, civility and altruistic strategizing that come with tact with the determination to convey, where necessary, uncomfortable truths. 

For all its uninhibited criticism, mathematics gives credit where it is due and those who converse with it are frequently safe in the knowledge that it means its flattery. It reassures this corporate internee who feels increasingly stuck in her ways that she still has what it takes to master new grammars and vocabularies. It rewards her finesse at plugging gaps in background knowledge by improvising from scratch techniques taught only in later, simpler courses. What if these skills could let her pivot directly to some sector slightly less lucrative but also less odious to her than investment banking, never mind exactly how competitively relevant her prior higher education and corporate experience are?

Far more certain is that her deliciously madcap approach to this discipline with a matchingly rebellious streak has magically quietened the rock concerts and the intoxicated fairy tales and almost erased the jail bars. Nonetheless, as the faded bars unveil more and more vistas stretching beyond the horizons, she starts to wonder if she will live long enough to look a little further, if she will ever squirrel away enough bucks—after all those deductions for debt payments, taxes, food, rent, basic maintenance and transport—to hike a little closer, and if her wrinkled, financially secure self will continue to have the visual and cognitive acuities to deconstruct or even remember the sights a little longer. The jail bars resolidify to some degree.

Still, if positive infinity and negative infinity have been rendezvousing in a dimension invisible until intrepid mind adventurers outed them, and if functions as diverse as trigonometric functions, inverse polynomials and logarithmic functions share the same class of undercover identities, i.e. infinite sums of terms with increasing powers, maybe, she thinks, escape hatches exist somewhere nearby after all.

There may be such a woman. There may be such a snowless ending by a grilled window.

Note: This work of fiction commemorating Pi Day was inspired by an old Dramabeans guest post campaign, a few heartfelt entries of which have appeared in the admin’s Twitter feed. There is no intention, however, to establish any kind of association with the site. Interested readers can find slightly similar math-life themes in the book versions of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영) and The Devotion of Suspect X (容疑者Xの献身).