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Men Are Generic, Women Are Special
- 223 statements
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In media, male is the default, "normal" form of humanity, while female is a special subcategory reserved just for women. This meta-trope is Older Than Feudalism and is found not only in fiction, but is ingrained into many human societies and cultures. The technical term for this is "androcentrism." Take the English language, for example. The terms "Man" and "Mankind" are often used to represent humanity in general, whereas "Woman" and "Womankind" only ever refer to humans of the female gender. Many job titles, such as fireman and mailman, assume maleness, even though there are female firefighters and mail carriers. People often specify that someone is a "female doctor" or "female author", but generally don't say "male doctor" because that is already assumed.note There is an interesting twist in the etymology of "man" and "woman". Originally, "man" only meant "human in general". There were more specific words, namely "were"/"wereman" (= "were" + "man") for "male human" (now only survives in "werewolf" ("man-wolf")) and "wife"/"woman" (= "wife" + "man") meant "female human". Eventually, "man" completely displaced "were"/"wereman" and came to mean "male human" also, while "woman" became dominant in the exclusive sense of "female human", and "wife" retained only the stricter sense of "female spouse". Grammatically speaking, back when English still had the concept of gender, "man" was grammatically masculine despite its supposed gender neutrality, which led to the absurd fact that "woman" was consequently also grammatically masculine. Not that grammatical gender makes any sense anyway, since the word "wife" and its relatives in other Germanic languages were neuter for some reason. The same situation happened for the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) where the Latin word "homo" ("human", masculine) also replaced the word "vir" ("male human"). Also note that "female" has nothing etymologicaly to do with "male", and it spells that only since 14th century (before that, it was femella). If the gender of a person is unknown, it is sometimes argued that the traditional proper pronoun to use is "he" (e.g. "Everyone comes to a point in his life...") – though "singular they" goes back to Geoffrey Chaucer but remains controversial even today, reflecting this trope. Certain languages like French and Spanish take this concept even further, having two words for "They"; a masculine and feminine form, but if there is a mixed group of men and women the masculine is the default. In fact, this is correct even for a group of any number of women, and one single man. Grammatically speaking, in languages featuring gender, masculinity generally prevails and is the default. Adjectives and past participles, as well as nouns for humans, are overwhelmingly masculine by default; feminine equivalents are always derivative, with specific suffixes. For example, in French, a female hunter is "chasseuresse" or "chasseuse", with the feminine suffixes "-esse" and "-euse" attached to the masculine form "chasseur"; in German, you add "-in", so a (male) chancellor is "Kanzler" and a female one is "Kanzlerin"; in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, you swap "-o" for "-a", or stick "-a" to the masculine forms. The use of feminine words is pretty much always exclusive, in that a person or group of people have to be known explicitly as all-female only for the words to be usable; if there is even a hint of ambiguity, like say a theoretical group of "1000 women and 1 man", languages will default to masculine words, be it pronouns or nouns. Feminine-by-default nouns are generally reserved for higher, more abstract concepts such as "humanity", "manliness", "affliction", etc. rather than anything to do with concrete biological sex. The only notable exceptions are animals: many words for animals are feminine by default, and they refer to a species as a whole (which results in expressions such as the grammatically feminine French phrase "une girafe mâle" ("a male giraffe")), and to a lesser extent, specifically the female animals of that species (e.g. French "une chèvre" ("a (female) goat"); still, masculine derivatives are extremely rare (e.g. French "un girafeau" ("a baby giraffe")), and the males tend to have their own words instead (e.g. French "un bouc" ("a male goat"). The trope can be observed in many different elements of society and culture. "Unisex" fashion tends to be built around men's fashion; jeans and shirts are worn by both sexes, but dresses and skirts are exclusive to women in most of the Western world (with the famous exception of the kilt). T-shirts are typically sold in two cuts, women's and mens, but men's T-shirts are sometimes sold as "unisex tees." Most androgynous names (like Jordan or Taylor) started out as men's names. The restroom sign for a man is a featureless stick figure, but the sign for a woman is a stick figure in a dress. (One could imagine an alternate universe where women are represented as a featureless stick figure, and men are represented with a cowboy hat.) Furthermore, it is generally considered far more acceptable to make broad generalizations about men or assume the entirety of the male gender can/should be held accountable for the actions of some males (How many times have you seen women write off all men after a bad relationship with a single man?). Women, meanwhile, are expected to be viewed as individuals whose actions and behaviors do not reflect on women as a whole. In the eyes of society, male is default, and women are basically men plus or minus something else. This phenomenon carries Unfortunate Implications for both male and female characters when used in fiction. The main problem for male characters is that maleness is not special in the way femaleness is, and is often undervalued to the point of being disposable; men's actions are less likely to be judged based on their gender, which gives them more freedom to act, but the consequences for their actions are likely to be magnified. The implication for female characters is that femaleness is special in a way that maleness isn't or, to put it more bluntly, being male is "normal", while being female is "abnormal", which can either mean superior to men or inferior. This leads to The Smurfette Principle, in which a character's femaleness is the most important and interesting thing about her, often to exclusion of all else. It also tends to result in works failing The Bechdel Test, because if there's a potential character who doesn't have to be any particular gender, the role will probably be filled by a male character by default. It may or may not be the result of Gender Rarity Value. Sexy Dimorphism inverts this, by giving male monsters varied designs and making female monsters into Cute Monster Girls that don't look that different. Likely exacerbated by the fact that Most Writers Are Male. Probably the parent to Men Act, Women Are and Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty. See High-Heel–Face Turn for when being a woman becomes a Chekhov's Gun for a Heel–Face Turn. Compare Men Are the Expendable Gender and Samus Is a Girl. |
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Made in Abyss has an interesting example in Nanachi, a character who most readers/viewers assumed to be female, until Word of God declared their gender as "unknown." Nanachi has no obvious gendered characteristics, but they do have a unique appearance—they're a Beast Man in a world where every other creature is either human or a horrifying monster. This, along with fluffy animals being vaguely feminine, makes Nanachi "special," and presumed female. However, the French translation makes Nanachi male, so there's some cultural difference of opinion on this. | |
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Inverted in the Imperial Radch universe: the Radchaai don't have a societal or linguistic concept of gender, so the narration uses "she" and "her" pronouns universally as a Translation Convention. In-universe, Radchaai are known for referring to people as female unless told not to, and Breq struggles with gendered languages because she doesn't really understand how to identify someone as male on sight. Out-of-universe, it did originally default to a gender-neutral "he", but that just meant it read like any other sci-fi, so Ann Leckie changed it. | |
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At some point during its unending development, Ancient Domains of Mystery added female versions of various humanoid monsters. So now you have "goblins" and "female goblins" — male goblins are still just "goblins". In a temporary example, when the version with actual graphics came out, the creatures were first given only male graphics, and separate graphics for the female versions came later. Some heavily covered, armoured or mutated humanoids didn't get separate female graphics, which is actually an aversion of the trope, because it means you are not to assume every basically genderless humanoid model is male. | |
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The Player of Games: The Azadians have a third gender called apexes that are neither men nor women, but still get referred to by the male pronoun. This is noted as part of the Translation Convention, though - since the apexes are the dominant gender on their world, they are given the pronoun of the dominant gender on whatever world the story gets translated to. | |
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Also touched upon in "The Hobbit: "Battle of Five Studios." Lindsay argues that Hollywood often feels the need to justify women in films simply for being women, "or they might as well be men, am I right?" With the case of Tauriel (a character created from wholecloth due to the lack of female characters in the source material not flying in a Hollywood trilogy in The New '10s), the writers further had to "justify" her by putting her in an inconsequential Love Triangle. | |
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In the Honor Harrington series, the convention is for individuals to use their own gender as a generic pronoun, unless there is some indication otherwise. Many characters still, however default to "men". | |
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In Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), April discovers she has a rare gift when she is able to "communicate" with a psychic mutant monkey. This gift intrigues Splinter and he offers to train her as a Kunoichi, who were traditionally trained with different skillsets than male ninja. | |
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In RWBY, warriors who fight Grimm are called Huntsmen if male, and Huntresses if female. "Huntsmen" is also the gender-neutral term. | |
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Tweeny Witches: The original Japanese version calls witches 魔女 (majo, literally "magical women") and warlocks 魔族 (mazoku, literally "magical tribe"). | |
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A similar point can be made with Discworld dwarfs. All dwarfs look like short, male Vikings. Male dwarfs in human society are content to look like short, male Vikings (except Casanunda, but he's a special case), while many female dwarfs are starting to adopt a "feminine" look along the lines of human society. (Dwarfish, like Inuktitut, has no gender-specific pronouns, but their non-specific ones are generally translated as "he", "him", etc.) | |
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The Transformers: In "The Search for Alpha Trion", Elita-1's Amazon Brigade is just called the "Female Autobots" because it's noted how rare female Transformers are. Optimus Prime's all-male forces, on the other hand, are never called the "Male Autobots" in the episode, because Transformers are considered male by defaultnote Unlike some other continuities, the cartoon doesn't claim that Transformers are genderless, female TFs are just inexplicably rare compared to males. | |
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Pokémon GO originally had no genders except for the Nidoran family, just like Gen I... but it used the modern 3D models, which have gender differences. They were not used consistently, and sometimes the gender of a model would change for no apparent reason; for a while, you could evolve a Pikachu and it would apparently transform from male to female. When genders were (officially) added, the trope was played straight—all previously-captured mons with gender differences became male, and only new spawns of those species could be female. | |
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A very minor one, but in Pokémon Brillant Diamond and Shining Pearl there is a sticker exhibition in the Jubilife TV station, where you can see which stickers are used by the Gym Leaders, Elite Four and Champion you have defeated on their Poké Balls, allowing the player to replicate them. Each list of stickers is accompanied by an image of the trainer with their ace Pokémon, which apparently, due of an oversight, always display the male (default) model, even if the trainer's actual Pokémon is female and have sexual dimorphism. Most of these gender differences are barely noticeable unless you look specifically for them, so it usually goes unnoticed... until you see Bertha's Hippowdon, whose gender dimorphism completely changes the Pokémon's color palette. | |
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Becoming YouTube discusses the unfortunate Truth in Television-ness of this. | |
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The Chinese word 兄弟, composed of 兄 ("older brother") and 弟 ("younger brother"), can simply mean "siblings", "brothers and sisters", "brethren" or "a brotherhood" in general. The group of rebels in the novel Water Margin referred to themselves as "brothers", even though there were a few female members among them. | |
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Shortpacked! Everyone refers to Ultra-Car, a talking car, as "he". It's not until U.C. gets a human body that we learn she identifies as female, and when people are surprised she points out that cars don't have sexes. One standalone strip had two screenwriters working on an ensemble movie, and when one of them suggested that maybe they could make a character female, the other insisted you couldn't have a female character just for the sake of having a female character. |
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CGP Grey uses male and female stick figure designs, where the female design consists of the male design with hair and a miniskirt. Human characters (without a specific gender) are male by default. Characters representing political and geographic entities are female by default, with the design on the miniskirt signifying the entity that the character represents. | |
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Dungeons & Dragons has done the above too, as well as other methods of avoiding bias like alternating "he" and "she" (in one infamous instance for the same character) or basing it upon the Iconic that best represents the situation. | |
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Something similar happens to Rincewind in Interesting Times. After his Luggage (a sentient trunk on legs) starts following a more 'feminine' model (its toes are painted, etc) around, he is first bewildered at the general idea, then realizes that he's never had a proper reason for thinking of his Luggage as male. "True, it had a homicidal nature, but so had a lot of the women Rincewind had met." | |
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In Going Postal, one of the golems gets named Gladys and given a gingham dress so that Miss Maccalariat will approve it cleaning the ladies' privies (prior to which, neither Gladys nor anyone else minded what "she" wore). In Making Money Moist compares Gladys to the generic "male" golems, and then has to remind himself that they aren't male, any more than Gladys is really female. | |
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Jerry Seinfeld finds this out the hard way. When he notices that his girlfriend enjoys being naked in his apartment, he tries to be naked too, but the girlfriend finds it disgusting. Later, he and George are told this by Elaine: | |
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One strategy in various games from the 1990s on was to refer to the Game Master as female and to the players as male in the examples. | |
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"Green Patches: The alien creature from Saybrook's Planet uses masculine pronouns to refer to himself, although there's really no explanation as to why he might identify with one gender/sex over another. | |
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In Kill Six Billion Demons angels have No Biological Sex and are theoretically beyond mortal concepts such as gender, but in practice a lot of them call each other "brother" and present much closer to male, while White Chain becoming "a little feminine" is treated as human contamination and results in banishment. | |
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Wonder Woman Vol 1: The reversal of this concept is toyed with during Marston's run. Diana assumes characters are female until their gender identity is revealed, and goes with female pronouns for the gender-ambiguous Hypnota, most characters are female with only two somewhat regularly recurring male characters (Steve Trevor, Phillip Darnell) and there are multiple societies made up entirely of women. | |
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In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Metamorphosis", Spock modifies their Universal Translator to communicate with an Energy Being that has been maintaining the life and health of a man marooned on its planet. The device gives the Energy Being a female voice, which Kirk and Spock find worthy of note. (Perhaps the translator has a "gender neutral mode", but going by this exchange, it seems more likely that the crew would have considered a male voice "genderless.") | |
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Ojamajo Doremi: The original Japanese version calls witches 魔女 (majo, literally "magical women") and wizards 魔法使い (mahō tsukai, literally "magic user"). | |
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Gen IV in Pokémon introduced aesthetic gender differences on members of the same species. In most cases, the "regular" design (i.e., the one that had been used in previous generations) went for males and the females got something different (One notable exception would be Xatu). Although the gender differences are quite realistic and reflect gender differences in animals in real life (for example, female Bug Pokémon tend to have wider thoraxes than the males), some Pokémon have a clearly "human feminine" traits like female Wobbuffet using lipstick. Generally, the official art of every Pokémon with small gender differences only shows the male version. This has some exceptions like the Gible evolution line, Combee or Bibarel. Pokémon with more drastic gender dimorphism (Jellicent, Meowstic or Pyroar) has both versions represented. The Mega Evolutions that appeared in Gen VI only have one model for both genders of each species. If the Pokémon that Mega Evolves has some gender dimorphism, the Mega Evolution will be modeled after the male version. For example, a female Venusaur will lose the small yellow seed in her flower when she Mega Evolves, and a female Garchomp will gain a triangular scar in her dorsal fin, like the one that the male Garchomps have. A very minor one, but in Pokémon Brillant Diamond and Shining Pearl there is a sticker exhibition in the Jubilife TV station, where you can see which stickers are used by the Gym Leaders, Elite Four and Champion you have defeated on their Poké Balls, allowing the player to replicate them. Each list of stickers is accompanied by an image of the trainer with their ace Pokémon, which apparently, due of an oversight, always display the male (default) model, even if the trainer's actual Pokémon is female and have sexual dimorphism. Most of these gender differences are barely noticeable unless you look specifically for them, so it usually goes unnoticed... until you see Bertha's Hippowdon, whose gender dimorphism completely changes the Pokémon's color palette. Pokémon GO originally had no genders except for the Nidoran family, just like Gen I... but it used the modern 3D models, which have gender differences. They were not used consistently, and sometimes the gender of a model would change for no apparent reason; for a while, you could evolve a Pikachu and it would apparently transform from male to female. When genders were (officially) added, the trope was played straight—all previously-captured mons with gender differences became male, and only new spawns of those species could be female. In Pokémon Unite all playable Pokémon whose species have visible gender differences are male. |
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Magic: The Gathering tends to use gender-neutral terms for occupations, even if a female-specific version could be applied. Benalish Hero depicts a woman, for instance, but isn't called "Benalish Heroine." Also, a creature could be depicted as either male or female in the art as long as it's not a specific storyline character. There are two major exceptions to these rules: enchantresses, which are grandfathered (grandmothered?) in from the early days and angels, which are always female (with one or two very early exceptions). Even the rules text defaulted to "he or she" for a long time, until they decided to let nonbinary people in on the fun and shifted to using the singular "they", much to the annoyance of strange people on the internet. This can lead to translation shenanigans, especially with terms that are genderless in English, but not in another language. For example, in French, the card elvish champion was first translated as championne elfe (a resolutely feminine term) because the illustration featured an elvish woman. When the card reappeared in a later edition, the new illustration was that of a man, but the French translation had to stick with the feminine word. There must be an entire gender study argument to be had on whether this is more inappropriate than having champion elfe be illustrated with a woman. |
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In-universe example in The Dark Eye, male dwarves outnumber females by 4:1,note Males are born more often and mostly as twins or quadruplets, while females are only born as single children as a result, this trope is played straight in their cultures. | |
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This is played with Young Justice. There's a perfectly good strategic reason for Nightwing to send an all-female squad for the day's mission (they are dealing with Queen Bee whose powers bend mennote to be precise, "most men and some women" to her will), but he still presents it as though an all-female squad is a deviation. Batgirl calls him on it, on the basis that while Nightwing wasn't wrong to send an all-female squad, he was wrong to assume that the all-female squad would find the fact that they were an all-female squad strange and in need of explanation. | |
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Inverted in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode Brotherhooves Social where Rainbow Dash declares "Don't think me and Scootaloo are gonna take it easy on you just 'cause you're a stallion!" to Big Macintosh. | |
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Quite often in late-60s-to-mid-80s Doctor Who, where, due to the sexist blind spots of the time, characters were only women when there was a good reason for them to be, even if this stretched credibility. For just one example, Leela in "The Face of Evil" was conceptualised as coming from a society where sexism wasn't an issue and her status as a brave warrior was not contested, but we have to take her word for it since she's the only woman we meet on her entire planet. One notable aversion of the trope, simply due to her origins, is Bettan from "Genesis of the Daleks". Terry Nation refused the producers' requests to add a female character to the story (since companion Sarah-Jane Smith was the only one in his script), so they simply switched the gender of one of his male characters and changed nothing else, leaving the story with an otherwise-generic Thal soldier that happens to be a woman. |
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"Feminine Intuition": The robots built by US Robotics have no gender, but when it's suggested that they build a robot with intuition, people immediately jump to the idea of a girl robot. Madarian takes that idea and pushes it as a way to make the JN series special. | |
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Pac-Man is an example of this trope. The original male Pac-Man character is a plain circle who doesn't even have eyes, while Ms. Pac-Man has a bow, a mole, lipstick, and eyelashes. | |
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The Legend of Spyro: There are only male characters except for Cynder, who first appears as a villainess in The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning. You don't get to see any other female dragons (or female characters in general) besides her, as if she is the only female in the world. You do get to see a little of Sparx's mother, but since she appears too little in the first game, she doesn't count. There are no female cheetahs in Hunter's village or female moles in Warfang in Dawn of the Dragon, making this trope even more true. | |
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Inverted in Second Stage Lensmen with the "persons" of Lyrane II. They are all biologically female (but do not use the term "female"), and use "it" and "its" instead of "she" and "her". Meanwhile, the males (ratio of 1:100) are not considered persons, are implied to have zero intelligence, and are allowed to exist only for the continuation of the species via procreation. Until Kimball Kinnison shows up, the "persons" routinely kill any male humanoids who find their way to the planet and are not wearing thought shields. They are completely baffled by Illona Potter, because they cannot conceive of a female who is not a "person". | |
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The Left Hand of Darkness: The Gethenians are genderless most of the time and assume one gender or the other randomly when they enter a mating cycle, but they're still always referred to as "men." | |
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In The Transformers, all the Transformers were considered genderless, but were referred to with masculine pronouns... until one story in which the Autobots created Arcee, who is considered female and is described with feminine pronouns. Arcee was actually created, in story, as female to respond to the sexism that people saw in the perception of the Autobots as male. | |
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In Pokémon Unite all playable Pokémon whose species have visible gender differences are male. | |
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Transformers: In The Transformers, all the Transformers were considered genderless, but were referred to with masculine pronouns... until one story in which the Autobots created Arcee, who is considered female and is described with feminine pronouns. Arcee was actually created, in story, as female to respond to the sexism that people saw in the perception of the Autobots as male. The same writer (Simon Furman) returned for the IDW-published new continuity, he again set all cybertronians as genderless but using male pronouns. When he introduced Arcee, it was presented as an experiment by Jhiaxus to introduce gender into the formerly genderless species. This ended up having loads of Unfortunate Implications as it both made being female "abnormal" and the fact that Arcee went insane (rather understandably, considering the experiment amounted to a forced sex-change operation) had plenty of potential sexist/transphobic implications. This would end up getting getting fixed (depending on who you ask) in later issues where Cybertronians from Camiens are introduced as naturally occurring female Transformers, and issues set in Cybertron's past show that Female Transformers did exist while Arcee was retconned into being Transgender and having volunteered for Jhiaxus's experiment and her insanity was due to him deciding that it would be fun to torture her afterward. It's worth noting that in both cases, the "Transformers are Genderless" tends to not only ignore their using male words (pronouns, calling themselves brothers for example), but also that the actual character are visually coded male. With male Heroic Builds, almost exclusively male voice actors doing deliberately masculine voices and sometimes even male features like beards and mustaches (Alpha Trion, Scourge and Cyclonus being examples) and that out of universe, that design is a deliberate decision so the toys will appeal to a predominantly male audience. Many of the people who have worked on the franchise over the years have gone on record mentioning that Hasbro for the longest time did not like female characters, as they believed these did not sell in a toyline aimed at boys (It is why Arcee, despite being a mainstay of the series in a Merchandise-Driven show, did not get a figure till several decades later). In fact the show runners of the various TV shows have been noted to sometime force female characters into Hasbro's originally all male cast. Recently Hasbro's proven more open to female characters, starting with fan polls leading to the creation fan-created character Windblade, who got her own comic series, and got to be the Deuteragonist of Transformers: Cyberverse. |
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