#tf howlback

[raringooo]

Workin on Soundblaster for a server I’m in! He is heavily HEAVILY inspired by blueey-jayzilla’s design and is purely just for like fun roleplay with friends

[blighted-lights]

u can trust that i am always thinking of these three all of the time every day btw. more cassette designs to come!

[lovinglonerhybrid]

you should say more on your tfp and ll/mtmte mashup thing :3

Always happy to expand on a topic. 😊

Anyway after meeting jacks (extended) family Miko and raf confront their friend. Jack with permission from his mom shows the others that he is infact a cybertronion cassette. Miko thinks this is so cool especially after Jack introduces her to percepter,drift,whirl, and Rodimus who she inevitably bugs for wrecker story’s. Raf is introduced to first aid and ratchet who is a lot happier here. At dinner time the two meet back at Soundwave house and are introduced to rumble and frenzy rat bat and the bird twins. Ravage and howlback are introduced by June who is actually Glit. As the dinner progresses they find out how all these bots where brought to this dimension (it’s brainstorms fault) and that they can’t return home.

I have more ideas but I’m on my lunch break and am almost out of time.😅

[pluralsword]

ID: A meme using Arial font in white with black at the top and bottom for the text, with Transformers comic and cartoon images, tfwiki text, and/or dialogue focused on Arcee, Aileron, Greenlight, Gauge, Marissa Faireborn, Holiday, Lofty, Anode, Lug, Nautica, the Mistress of Flame, Windblade, Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, Starscream, Howlback, Archadis, Overlord, Nightshade, and Mo Malto, specifically dialogue or actions about transness and/or aesthetic actuation, same gender love, pronouns, gender terminology, playing music, joy, smooching, love, survival, family, medical issues, poverty, value of aesthetic journey in spiritual reforging terms, and criticism/opposition to empire and hegemony.

The meme text reads:

You [(Transformers) fanfic] writer:

Are you normal about trans/expansive people & how our stories are unique?

End ID.

(Please note regarding the image dialogue that Bumblebee and Starscream are not trans canonically yet because of how IDW1 works but nonetheless their stories are uh, not at all standard to the human cisgender experience lmao)

Image sources are: TFWiki Ask Vector Prime Facebook archives for December 23rd 2015, The Transformers #44, “The Transgressors”, The Transformers #50, “All Hail Optimus Part 1: Once Upon a Time on Earth”, The Transformers: Lost Light #2, “Dissolution Part 2: Anomie”, The Transformers: Lost Light #8, “An Axe to Break the Ice”,  The Transformers: Till All Are One #12, “Your First Mistake”, Optimus Prime #16, “The Falling Chapter 2: Another Mine”, The Transformers Lost Light #17, “The Everlasting Voices 2: The God War”, Transformers: Unicron #4, “Road’s End”,  Optimus Prime #24, “A Sunrise Dark”, The Transformers Lost Light #24, “Crucible (Part 6): A Spark Among Embers”, Optimus Prime #25, “Post”, Synergy: A Hasbro Creators Showcase, "An Arcee Sort of Day" (Arcee’s comic is also findable in Transformers: Best of the Rarities),  My Little Pony/Transformers: The Magic of Cybertron #1 “A Real Mother,” Transformers #38, “Darkness, Once Gazed Upon: Part Two”, and Transformers: Earthspark episode 10, “Age of Evolution, Part 2.”

[queen-of-heretics]

Costum Howlback in progress

[chamm0y]

Shockwave bonding and falling asleep with his babies sitting on his lap while Soundwave spies on them 👀👀👀

he tried

i promise i was about to draw soundwave spying on them but one of these thingies exploded on my street and have no electricity as of now 🤧

fortunately i kept these panels on my phone but the quality is uh bad i apologize

[ravage-tf]

To Glitt: what's the worst thing to hear in an operating room?

[tfdaycare]

Okay, things have settled and we need to post something cute. Thankfully, Soundwave and Blaster in our universe have given us a picture of their youngest kids who are barely two years old. So here they are!

These are seven of their eleven kids. Aren’t they just precious? They stay docked most of the time since they’re so little and young, it’s for their own safety but when they are allowed out they cause so much silly mischief!

Also, because we know people will ask, Frenzy’s the purple one, Rumble’s the red one.

[iloveyoubecauseyouarelove]

Pspsps i drew Howlback and she's on Pillowfort

[cleverthylacine]

Japanese G1 continuity is absolutely not normal about girls but damned if they don't give us some of the best ones

There was a significant amount of Transformers continuity released between 1987 and around 2007 that was produced in Japanese and is really only known to most English-speaking fans through fansubs, dubs that were only released in Australia, and the like. Shows like Headmasters, Victory, and Zone. Manga like Victory and 15 Go Go Go Teletraan (which was really mostly Kiss Players). Radio shows like Kiss Players.

I'm gonna be super up front. Japanese G1 is not normal about femmes in any way, shape or form. At the same time, it gave us some of the BEST and most underused female characters in the Transformers universe.

Headmasters, which came out right after the US G1 show ended, is particularly egregious. In Headmasters, Arcee has been reduced to Fort Max's administrative assistant, uses ridiculously polite and subservient language, and is also the only medic. And being a medic would be kind of badass if they let her be as badass as Ratchet, you know? But they absolutely do not.

Also, in Headmasters, Carly (now married to Spike) allows her son--a freaking child, not even a teenager--to go on missions when Spike can't and a human is needed, because uh, for some reason it's better for a 12 year old boy to go, not an adult woman?

But most of the good femmes don't come from Headmasters. And some of the best femmes we have are from Japanese G1.

Super-God Masterforce made it up to us by giving gave us Minerva, a human girl who is a Headmaster with a robot body (transtector) making her basically a bad ass mecha pilot, and who actively does fight.

The Victory manga gives us Esmeral, Deathsaurus' incredibly classy wife, and Lyzack, Leozack's twin sister, who is in charge of defending the homefront but really does want to go out and fight. Illumina appears in both the Victory manga and the anime. She's a little human girl who has a crush on Jan Minakaze and is always trying to get people to choose nonviolence.

(Lyzack later appears in an English-language comic - the Wings Universe--wherein she's basically Deathsaurus' servant and Starscream hits on her. I don't like that.)

There are a number of great femmes who were only ever toys. The Cobalt Sentries set gave us Howlback, leader of the Decepticon military police (called the Cobalt Sentries). She is basically Ravage's twin sister but instead of being super stealthy she can turn your attacks right back on you.

(Later she appears in several English language comics and in at least one she is canonically trans. I'm not a fan of her depiction in the SG Recordicons Batman tribute arc, though.)

The Unite Warriors toyline - Takara's response to Combiner Wars, basically - gave us the combiner Megatronia, made up of Megaempress, and her four guards, Lunaclub (sometimes called Luna Clover or Luna Trefle), Flowspade, Moonheart, and Trickdiamond. They are incredibly awesome.

(IDW 2019 used Trickdiamond, but none of the others. Tricky was one of Swindle's contacts.)

Then there's the elephant in the room that everyone pretends isn't there...Kiss Players.

So, okay. There is nothing normal about Kiss Players whatsoever. On the other hand, I'd rather listen to KP than watch RID2015 which is just blatant copaganda from hell.

Kiss Players had an interesting plot involving little bits of Galvatron and Unicron getting into humans and creating the Kiss Players--humans who could give TFs a powerup by kissing them and then merging with their internals somehow. Then there are the Legions, the dick-tongued monsters that everyone who hasn't actually listend to the show or read the manga thinks are Megatron.

The dick-tongued monsters are gross. It is also gross that some of the Kiss Players are barely teenagers and definitely not adults and are constantly ending up in Situations.

But the plot centres around the apparent rise of Convoy, or Optimus, from the dead, and his transformation into a weird groomery dude, which many people don't understand there was an actual reason for, because it's not Optimus, it's someone else riding around in his body.

Melissa Faireborn is like if you chopped Marissa Faireborn's IQ in half, dyed her hair blond and threw out any pants or skirts that covered her knees. She is nothing like Marissa and I treat them as cousins, but Xiaoxiao Li is amazing and her real lover.

Anyhow, this female scientist (Dr Amaou) lost her mind over the loss of her daughter during the events of the 1986 movie et sequelae, and she's got to be stopped from turning Atari and her Autorooper robot pal into a permanent fusion to reincarnate her daughter Shizuku (whom for some reason I always want to call Setsuna instead).

It's a little confusing because most of the really good parts of the plot got jammed into a few episodes near the end of the season, although once you know what it is, it's clear that it's being set up. That artist just likes borderline lolicon way too much.

The second season of KP is very squeaky clean and sends the girls out to collect what they think are Allspark fragments, and they are very annoyed because Ravage, whom they call "black panther man" keeps getting in their way and fucking with them, only to later find out that the bots who gave them this task are Unicronian heralds and Ravage is trying to stop them from helping Unicron do what Unicron does.

Rosanna, everyone's favourite robot pop idol, comes from the second season of KP, although you don't see very much of her or her companions Glit and Sundor.

Incidentally KP sets up the Unicron Trilogy and some of its characters end up in the UT--which did come to the US, and gave us Alexis Thi Dang.

(This post is brought to you because I just wrote an Esmeral thing and someone was musing separately about Megaempress as a parent and I almost ended up writing this post while reblogging them, because I'm a nerd with a hyperfixation).

[decepti-thots]

i would be super interesting in hearing your thoughts on the first trans tf character actually! transgender, textual and subtextual, in transformers is something i've been thinking about a lot recently

Personally, I do count it as Classics/Recordicons Howlback- for those not aware, the strip I'm referring to is this one.

...oh god this got longgggg, i will cut this to save all your dashes.

Willis actually talks about it here on Tumblr, basically saying he had been avoiding female characters in writing those strips for a while because while there are a couple of lasses in that continuity, the general rule of thumb was that everyone was supposed to be 'genderless' (which unfortunately in Classics continuity was actually just 'man as a default', because of course it was). And then he decided this was pretty daft of him because why couldn't a 'genderless society' just. Like. Decide 'hey, being a girl sounds neat' or whatever and then Be A Girl if they wanted. Which is pretty much what IDW would eventually retcon in as an explanation for how a robot species conceives of gender.

But since this is basically just a word of god situation, some folks argue this doesn't 'count'. Personally, despite not usually paying much attention to 'word of god', I count it because I think you have to give a certain amount of leeway when looking at the context it was being done in; if a creative wants a queer character or concept in there for a franchise where asking permission for that is required and yields uncertain results, insisting 'word of god doesn't ever count' strikes me as ungenerous. But true, Howlback is never canonized on panel as trans, so I see what people mean.

And then one elephant in the room in this whole discussion is... IDW Arcee. Spotlight Arcee is not a 'trans narrative' just because it leans on some very, very nasty transphobic tropes, and for many years IDW Arcee was not really treated as trans even by writers trying to do better by her than that shitty-ass comic. But as of the last ever issue of IDW1, and yes I really mean it was made 100% confirmed in the last ever comic for folks who didn't read exRiD btw, Barber managed to retcon it so Arcee was definitively, in-universe trans the whole time. And the Jhiaxus stuff didn't even have to be thrown out to do it. So is Arcee the 'first canon trans character'? Do we go from the date of OP #25, or from her Spotlight appearance? I personally go somewhere in the middle- Barber functionally treats her as trans throughout exRiD, he just never quite finds room to fit in an unambiguous mention- but that muddies stuff a lot. Some people argue IDW Arcee is the first canon trans character because she is both on-page trans and was introduced earlier, even if the confirmation of her as trans came way later, and very much in spite of what happened at the beginning.

And of course in between Barber taking over Arcee and him canonizing her as For Real Trans, we have Lug and Anode in Lost Light. This is on the page, it is explicitly unambiguously trans, and for some folks both of those things are needed for First Trans Character credentials. Meaning that they feel Lug and Anode, in 2016, were the actual honest-to-god first trans characters in TF, since they may not count Arcee's earlier appearances since at the time they were written, she wasn't yet trans. (Edit: amendment regarding a precursor to them is here.)

But then, what about the AVP stuff? Well after Howlback was word of god-ed as trans and before the above from Barber on the page in IDW, back in 2015 AVP, which is considered canon material, got asked about if any characters were trans. And answered in the affirmative! Notably, these are all little nods to characters who for various reasons have Stuff going on with their canon genders, e.g. G1 Overlord being nodded to as genderfluid because that character in the anime he originates from is basically 'created from' a man and a woman who are a married couple. (G1 Overlord is weird.) Also, Archadis was originally designed to be a female character and then swapped to male, which gets a nod as a trans man character, that sort of thing. These are technically not 'word of god', as AVP, despite functionally being a way to canonize word of god stuff, is in-universe fiction of its own and considered as such. I have seen at least one argument, therefore, that the 2015 AVP stuff constitutes the first unambiguous in-fiction depiction of explicitly trans characters in TF, as it predates all the above bar Howlback, who they don't count. But I've also seen some people say AVP is actually just a word of god machine and not canon as a result! So some people say none of the trans stuff in there is Real Canon!

...and you could really take it further and therefore look at which of those characters would be the earliest to debut in-fiction and I think that means you could make the claim the first ever canon trans character in TF is indeed G1 Overlord, which would be mostly very silly to do, but funny, so I think someone oughta.

Anyway. All this is to say, there's a lot of contenders for who is first, and probably more characters you can definitively call 'trans' in SOME context than many folks realize!

[blighted-lights]

canon howlback:

howlback, according to @mohavegecko:

[polyhexian]

Can I ask you to show us all your tf holy grail of toys you have? Or like super rare ones?

Your collection is so cool

CAN you? You know I'll take any opportunity to talk about my collection

Also you gotta remember there's a difference between RARE and EXPENSIVE lol. I have other expensive things. And also rarer stuff but. Grails are favourites.

I'll start with the best. Mg G1 Minerva and my G1 star saber. There's over 500 dollars of market value in this image LOL.

These guys because of the difficulty of acquisition. These are exclusive to China. When I got the one on the left I genuinely might have been the only person in North America to own one LMFAO. I'm certainly not now but when I got it I literally had neeeeever seen a north American who owned one.

Lots of awesome stuff here front and center. My ehobby and Mmc rosannas, my Mmc Howlback. My bootiful girl Optimus. My ripclaw and iron factory arcee in the corner. I adore iron factory figures even if they're not super expensive. Ripclaw is like. A $10 figure but I just fucking love it lol

These lovely ladies are numbered

My APC airachnid! I fucking love APC. They understand me.

And finally, what everyone knows my favourite is lol. My lovely UK magazine whirl jr, now aurographed

Oh, god, dammit, I keep forgetting because it's not actually a toy, but

My hard copy of eugenesis lol! Which, Christ. What is THAT fucking thing worth these days. We all know what the last one sold for, but the fact that was for charity and sooo public makes it a little messier. Is that the real market value?? Hmmmm

Oh and just my old zines in general

[queen-of-heretics]

Costum Howlback in progress

[transingthoseformers]

TF Surge: Howlback could be average size instead of a minibot, to help set her apart from Ravage.

On the other hand, a powerful and feared secret police leader being tiny....

That would be so fun, but you're probably right

[ravage-tf]

who is the LEAST annoying decepticon (besides soundwave)?

(you can ask the other catsettes questions here too, by the way.)