I Drew The Mosquito And The Fish Again Because I Love Them

Someone (I believe it was @suzielovesships ) pointed out that the reunion between TFONE Starscream and Skyfire would be even more tragic because Starscream’s voice is a battle scar in that continuity, so I HAD to sketch it rahhhhhh

working on starscream’s backstory for To Earth and Back Again, my poor guy 🙏😔 In my fic he used to be the literal Decepticon poster boy and was very idealistic and eager to be involved in the cause, before he and Megatron began to develop their whole situation and Starscream’s life took a turn for the worse

(BUT IT’S OK IT’S GONNA GET BETTER)

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.

~ Fine Dining

wanted to draw Tarn with Pharma as his waiter

Transformers Sparksong: Chapter Two

Here we go :)

Previous / Next

Ew a Mosquito

Minimegs forever

✨husbands✨

The result of this post! I had such a good time drawing these two, I love them so much!

Prowl does not want to be with Tarantulas

daily koss #29: if we only have one shot… better make it count, right?

Since I started on the 18th of February, today marks the one month anniversary of me drawing these wretched old men every day!!! I wanted to make something special for it, so I tried my hand at a comic (even though I am NOT good at comics—dear god, paneling is so unintuitive for me that I ended up wrangling this into a webtoon format just to avoid it).

Despite the increasing level of render and polish on my dailies over the past two weeks, this is the first time I’ve really, actually tried to flex my art muscles and apply my braincells to a piece 😂 Here’s to hoping my work paid off! I have now, officially, moved from low-effort shitposts to real-effort seriousposts 😔

(Also, if you’ve never read a webtoon before, hopefully the long-scroll format wasn’t too jarring! >_<)

A meta aspect I love about KOSS is that Transformers is a multi-timeline franchise: Knock Out and Starscream exist across multiple different continuities, sometimes alongside each other, sometimes not. But they only really ‘work’ in TFP, despite them both having other characters as constants (Breakdown, Megatron). If this were any other world, and they were any other versions of themselves, they might not even have been coworkers—just ships passing in the night.

And yet, the perfect storm of random events led to them being in one thing together, with a compelling dynamic at that (even an entire episode that puts it on blast!!!). Sometimes I think about how, according to the TFP artbook, Knock Out was originally conceived as something of a counterpart to Bumblebee—another fast, pretty car, except a villain this time—but the writers ended up fleshing out his relationship with Starscream the most. I wonder what the thought process behind that was—did the devs find their dynamic fun to play with as well?—and whether the two would get more moments together if Prime wasn’t cancelled…

But I digress! The fact I discovered TFP in the first place is the cherry on top of the serendipity-cake; I never imagined I’d ever get into Transformers, but one impulsive ‘hey, what if we watched the new Transformers movie’ from Lacuna at 3AM in the dead of January changed the trajectory of my life.

I’ve always been really bad at committing to projects for over a month at a time—I often find myself burnt out and restless after only a few days, even. So to still have so much drive and inspiration to create fanworks—for KOSS, of course, but an assortment of other pairings and properties too—is such a novel and exciting experience. My tune may change at a moment’s notice (I can be very fickle), but for now I’m eager to keep scribbling on 🥰I already have something planned for the next week of Daily KOSS hehehe~

Anyway, things referenced in the comic!

G1 cartoon s01e13 “Fire in the Sky”

2019 IDW continuity Tread & Circuits issues 2, 3, and 4

Armada episode 48

TFA s02e03 “Mission Accomplished” and s03e13 “Endgame II”

2005 IDW continuity “Choose Me,” Spotlight: Megatron, and Annual 2017 “Chosen One”

And it’s probably obvious from the art, but I love the juxtaposition of Starscream being tortured by god in every other universe while Knock Out is either happily married or doesn’t exist.