Lindsay Ellis

Out of context, all that could be partially chalked up to English person-related nouns and pronouns tending to more often than not be derived from the gender binary. In context, though, yeah, Furman kinda dropped the ball.

Honestly, I feel like female Cybertronians should be a necessity. Aliens they may be, but they're in a series meant to appeal to a species with more than one gender, and I think humanizing the robots in that sort of way would go a long way in achieving that goal.

Ok I'm only a filthy casual when it comes to transformers lore so correct me if im wrong here:dont they reproduce by building more cybertronians.

edited 2nd Jul '17 7:24:00 AM by Thelastwarrior

In most continuity they don't reproduce at all. New Cybertronian Sparks (ie: Souls) are created by act of God (literally). The transformers themselves only put these new sparks inside manufactured bodies.

That said there's been transformers presented as having family relations, but it's never explained what that entails. Sideswipe and Sunstreak are twins. Quickswitch is Sixshot's son. In some continuity, Optimus and Ultra Magnus are brothers. Wheelie in the movie mention he had parents - plural.

The show never fully explains what those entail, and there's a lot of theories (Optimus and Magnus could've both be built by the same guy, hence "Brothers". Sixshot might've raised Quickswitch, and thus be his "father").

Japan in particular is WAY more prone to giving Transformers familial relationships. Longrack of Beast Wars 2 had a long series of ancestors, from father to great, great, great (keeps going) grandfather.

edited 2nd Jul '17 7:56:26 AM by Ghilz

So this is. Slightly. Relevant. To The Whole Plate.

well there was Lindsay Ellis talking about Transformers. And Lindsay Ellis videos are thread relevant regardless

I do enjoy Lindsay talking about Transformers, yes.

Most critics: Transformers isnt worth putting serious analysis into Lindsay: Creates 12 part miniseries that seriously analyzes it.

Anything is worthy of analysis, even if it's down right awful.

One analysis I could make is get Michael Bay off these movies, and reboot them with another director. I was thinking maybe a competent female director, who could take the franchise into a new direction. I know Transformers is mainly a male franchise, but as anyone knows chicks dig big robots.

Why do they still keep bay around anyways.

Bad case of judgment.

I still want there to be a female director who does a reboot, because Transformers is for everyone not only guys.

They keep Bay around because he consistently earns a lot of money on a relatively small budget. It's that simple.

edited 4th Jul '17 11:46:04 AM by Gaon

That and he's the perfect guy to cave into what the studio wants.

I mean I know the fanbase goes beyond guys. Also I do like that Lindsay is actually doing academic analysis of it, because as she points out sometimes pop culture gets academic study but it tends to be well regarded stuff like Star Wars, not stuff like Bay's Transformers, but why should only the good stuff be analysed? Certainly it still means something.

I think it's because it's mindless thought put into it, which is why people don't want to put into academic analysis into it.

At the same time, I'd wager there's A LOT of stuff that we've critically analysed in colleges and professional studies that were probably fairly 'writing from the seat of your pants' or even comparativly mindless to some other things.

I mean, we study the fuck out of old Folk and Fairy Tales and a lot of those just passed via word of mouth because they were entertaining. You can get a lot out of them and I'm not discounting the work of the scholars who do that, but the people who told them probably though very little about the details when they told them, let alone the next guy who played telephone and either forgot a part or decided to change something to fit their version of the story.

Yeah it says something about things, even if that wasn't what the creator intended, it says something about the people who made it and the society it came from and all that. Of course that's a fairly "New Historian" or whatever it's called lens.

Part of it is that the people who do academic analyses really don't want to have to sit through all these movies multiple times.

I mean that's fair enough.

Yeah, after a while they would realize all of this is stupid, and wondering why they are spending so much time watching this when they could be seeing Pacific Rim.

That was a really good video.

Is VERY intersting she spoke of cultural apropiation in term of harmless of hurtfull rather than good or bad as it kinda shape how people really rate this thing and why is so hard to draw a line.

"It suits you."

Cultural appropriation by this point has been reduced to a buzz word by the extreme left (the extreme right also uses it occasionally but not as often).