Website article crossposting

I've decided to dust off this page and use it as a place to crosspost my website articles for greater visibility. I will be posting them as a backlog.

Why Is The Transformers Fandom So Obsessed With Mpreg?

Transformers notably has a significant narrative focus on reproduction for a franchise that is generally PG rated. This is mostly to do with the plot element that they’re robots that don’t reproduce sexually, and the war has imperiled their species’ future ability to reproduce at all, because the artifacts that allow them to have been lost or destroyed. For instance, the whole central premise of Earthspark is that the first cohort of Transformers born on Earth is the future of the entire species, because their previous methods are now impossible. The Allspark is destroyed in the first Bayverse movie, Cybertron is dead in TFP, etc. This focus is also coupled with the fact that, for a long time, the vast majority of the characters in the franchise were men (from a Doylist perspective; the whole issue of Transformer gender in universe is more complicated), this actually being enforced by Hasbro as part of the brand identity, and all this discussion about reproduction and the future of the species was happening in a situation where it was made very clear that heterosexual relations resulting in female pregnancy was not what was going to happen.

I think it’s important to mention that this focus on the this topic that the franchise has had has been there from the very beginning. In the original G1 Marvel comics, which was the first place the Matrix of Leadership appeared, it was called the “Creation Matrix”, was the method by which new Transformers were given life, and yes, Optimus still had it inside him (via TFWiki). Additionally, there was a plotline in said comics in which Shockwave captured him with the intent of using the Matrix to create “the next generation of Decepticons” and told him that he would be its “parent” and that he should be proud:



In the G1 Sunbow cartoon, Transformer reproduction was more varied, with new Transformers initially just being built and later having to be animated by Vector Sigma in order to gain sentience. Gradually over successive continuities the list of ways Transformers could reproduce decreased in number and became more “centralized” around specific artifacts or around Cybertron itself.
The 2005 IDW comics continuity not only continues this tradition, but feels the need to come up with an in universe explanation for why woman Transformers exist and why there are so few of them in the cast of established characters they had to work with. The original backstory for Arcee in this continuity written by Simon Furman (which is pretty blatantly transphobic) states that Arcee was forged male, was forcibly surgically feminized by Jhiaxus, and had trauma/was violent and unstable because of it. (This was later retconned to be that she had gone to him to transition on purpose and he also committed malpractice.) With it established that the normative presentation for all Transformers on Cybertron was/is male, James Roberts canonized in MTMTE that male/male romantic relationships between Transformers were completely commonplace and in fact the social default. At the same time, the comic goes into detail about how Transformer reproduction is imperiled and has been for some time (hot spots of sparks becoming scarce and the problems with cold construction), with an extended plotline culminating in a character resolving to attempt to create sparks through bioengineered organic reproduction (the infamous "pregnant Scorponok" panel). Additionally, pregnancy imagery is invoked repeatedly in unrelated contexts (see: the scene where Overlord is being converted into a Phase Sixer having the dialogue "Congratulations, Megatron, it's a superwarrior" "He takes after me".) It is also established that the closest equivalent to sex/gender as a physical somewhat birth-determined social stratifier in Transformer society where everyone is masculine presenting is actually alt mode.

All this to say, the Transformers fandom is in a unique situation with the state of its canon material to have decades of precedent and thematic relevance to draw on to make fanworks where two male characters have children together, and significant basis for the idea that Transformer masculinity does not have the same expectations that Western human masculinity does where the assumption is that a hierarchical family will be built around a heterosexual couple. The general trend in the Transformers fandom seems to be depicting both male-presenting and female-presenting Transformers as being physically unisex/cosexual, gay relationships being normative/commonplace, and queering of relationship dynamics around sex and pregnancy in relation to the last two points. I find this trend notable because of how universal in the fandom it seems to be, as opposed to being a subgroup of fans. It often feels like the default assumption for the “endgame” of relationships between two male Transformers is that they settle down and have biological children.

I don't really know where I was going with this. I've had conversations with friends a few different times about why there's such incredible amounts of Transformers mpreg, like, notably more than any other fandom I've been in, and wanted to write up a consolidated explanation of why.

How I Selfhost My Website

(This was originally posted to my website with the assumption and language that the reader is seeing it there.)

I've decided to write up a detailed description of how my selfhosting situation for this website is set up, in the hopes of illuminating how easy it is and how it's more possible for people to do than they probably realize, in the hopes of encouraging more people to self host if they want to.

First of all, you don't actually need real server equipment. If you're running something high traffic with a lot of users and a lot of heavy media files then maybe, but for just a website (especially a simple HTML Neocities-style one) that's not necessary. My entire server is a 2013 ThinkStation tower PC on the floor of my bedroom. Here's a picture of it:



This computer literally came out of an ewaste bin. You can probably find something similar for dirt cheap or even for free. Ask ewaste recyclers around you if they sell scrap (they often do).

The server is running Ubuntu Server. This means that it doesn't have a GUI and everything is done through the command line. It basically never has a monitor or keyboard plugged into it unless something got messed up and I can't SSH into it, and I usually just access its command line over my home local network from my main PC. I use VSCodium to be able to see the file system, edit text/code files, and access the terminal all in one window. Here's a screenshot of what that looks like:



The numerous services that are running on the server are run through a platform called Docker. What Docker does is it creates self-contained environments called "containers" in which all the component programs necessary to run something can be installed only into that container so that it can't interfere with the dependencies of other programs in other containers. This makes sure that everything that's running is running in a consistent environment with only the things that it needs to run installed. This is very easy to do and a lot of self hosted applications will provide users with a preconfigured Docker container version of their application.

Onto the actual web hosting part of it. I got my domain from Cloudflare, but there are other domain registrars also. In the admin panel for my domain on their website, I have it pointed at the public IP of my home router. I then have the HTTP and HTTPS ports open on my router. The server is running NGINX Proxy Manager on those ports, and what the proxy manager does is it directs browser requests to access subdomains of my domain to different applications running on different ports internally. This adds a layer of security because this means that I only have the web browsing ports open and anyone randomly scanning for open ports won't see the other services that I have running other than the proxy manager. If you don't want to bother with Docker or any of this proxy manager stuff, you can just run the web server software directly on your server and have it running on the HTTP/HTTPS ports, but I find doing this easier for me since I run multiple services on the server.

On the server, the application running the website is a Docker container version of NGINX. In NPM, the main domain without a subdomain is directed to point to the port internally that is being used by NGINX. This is very easy to use. Once you configure what folder the "start point" of the website is in, you can just create new files in that folder and folders inside that folder and they will be automatically seen by the application and added to what is served by the website.

This website was originally on Neocities, and when I decided to switch to self hosting, I just exported the entire site and moved it to my server after NGINX was set up and basically had no problems with it just working exactly like it did on Neocities. The only things I had to change were some internal links to images and such because the folders didn't have the exact same names.

Please let me know if any part of this is unclear or confusing! The aim of this page is to be a simple explanation of everything that I have set up so that people can feel like they can also do the same thing I do.

I Want Everyone To Know That These Things Happened In Transformers

Megatron ate people multiple times

(Sources: Generations Selects Special, Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers: The Battlestars, Transformers vs. GI Joe)

I don't even really know where to start talking about this. Can we agree that this is insane? Like just the whole idea that it is CANON in MULTIPLE COMICS that Megatron enjoys eating humans. I don't know. I think this should show up in more of the mainstream Transformers fiction I think "Megatron eats people" should be a defining aspect of his character. I can't go into more detail about this I plead the fifth.
Honorable mention: the episode "Microbots" from G1 in which the Autobots shrink down and go inside his body.
ALSO THE THING WITH TRAILBREAKER IN SKYBOUND.

Extreme amounts of robot hypno in G1

There are just a lot of episode plotlines in G1 where characters are mind controlled or have their memories altered. Usually it's Megatron doing it but sometimes it's the Insecticons doing it. I don't have like a comprehensive list of the times that this happened but:

• Megatron altered Bumblebee's memories to make him give misinformation about where the Decepticon base was and he used a weird probe thing extending from his chest to Bee's head to do it
• All the various times the Insecticons used their mind control gimmick
• Characters getting "reprogrammed" as if they're regular robots because the whole thing about them being metal-based organisms hadn't really been established yet
• The Decepticons captured Skyfire and Megatron wanted to "rewire his logic circuits" to make him one of them
• Megatron mind controlled an intelligent supercomputer to make it do his bidding
• Megatron apparently made a bunch of the Transformers on Cybertron ally with the Decepticons before the war by permanently altering their minds with some device called a "Robosmasher" and this is why the Constructicons are bad guys (the robosmasher additionally has a bunch of robot tentacles that it grabs people with in order to mind control them), the flashback clip in which this happens shows a freshly mind controlled Transformer saying "instruct me, Megatron, I exist only to serve you, I will obey your every order"
• Honorable mention: there was also an episode in which Soundwave took over a nightclub and used music to mind control a bunch of humans

Megatron took over a city and subjugated all the humans

The plot of the 2 part G1 episode "Megatron's Master Plan" is that Megatron gets jealous seeing the Autobots get an "Autobot Day" parade so he convinces a rich guy who wants to be mayor that the Decepticons are actually the good guys and he should frame the Autobots for crimes to get them kicked off the planet, and then once they do get kicked off the planet (and after the Decepticons have their own parade) Megatron captures and enslaves all the humans in the city, puts handcuffs on them, orders them to labor for him producing energon from all possible energy sources, and renames the city "Megatronia 1". He also shoves the guy he manipulated to the ground and orders him to "grovel for his amusement". I don't know if I'm really getting across how insane this was to watch and how the atmosphere of it was so please just go watch it. It reminds me a lot of All Hail Megatron except they enslave the humans instead of just blowing everything up.

My Transformers Continuity Reviews

Listed roughly in the order that I started watching them. Spoilers for everything.
 

TF One:

This was the first piece of Transformers media that I watched when I was getting into it last year and looking back at it after experiencing a lot of the other continuities I think it's a good introduction to the franchise and merges a lot of the themes that I like. I actually watched this with my best friend Baxter who somehow managed to go into the movie not knowing that D-16 is Megatron and it was really fun to watch their reaction to gradually realizing this in real time. I liked the narrative of Orion and D-16 starting out as friends with the common goal of dismantling the oppressive and strongly class stratified system they live under (reminds me a lot of IDW, but with them being closer to start out with), but with the split point being what they think the method of doing that should be. I was a fan of the way the movie has D-16 gradually get more violent over the course of the story in a way that initially starts as totally justified righteous anger, so the viewer has to decide where exactly the line is drawn for them for when his descent into becoming Megatron is inevitable. I think, though, that the ideological divide between thinking the system can be reformed vs. thinking totally tearing it all down with a violent revolution is necessary could have been sold better if they kept the aspect of previous continuities where Orion was an archivist or some other position in the hierarchy higher than Megatron and thus had more invested in the existing system and subconscious reasons of personal gain through privilege to try to keep but reform it. It's a shame that we're not going to see more done with this continuity because the movie performed poorly in the box office.

Rescue Bots:

This is the one continuity that I do specifically remember being a fan of as a kid. I decided to revisit it. Here's a picture I drew when I was maybe like 9 of myself piloting Blades:



I think it's really cute and fun and I enjoy seeing Transformers in a way more low stakes and calm setting than they're usually in (because this is a show for little kids). The intro theme bangs. I enjoy the Transformer-human social interactions and the stuff about the Rescue Bots learning about Earth culture. I also think the situation with them that feels kind of reminiscent of exchange students living with a host family is interesting and has narrative potential. Additionally the whole thing about it technically taking place in the same universe as TFP is really funny and strange because it opens up just so many questions that are basically never addressed in this show because it's for babies. Like, do they know about the war? Do they know it's happening on Earth? They clearly know who the Decepticons are because there's a single line at one point where Heatwave says "were you expecting Starscream?" as a snarky response to someone asking who's there, but they never actually show up or are mentioned in any capacity other than that. The main Autobot characters in the franchise like Optimus and Bee do occasionally show up on rare occasions but I guess the implied explanation for why they can't visit more often is that they're doing whatever it is they're doing in TFP. According to its page on TFWiki the decision to put them in the same continuity was "a studio decision, and not one Hasbro had expected".

G1:

I absolutely adore G1 specifically because of the fact that they had no idea at that time that Transformers was going to eventually become a massive franchise that people actually took seriously and they were just making slop nonsense to sell toys. Absolutely love it. It's so fucking funny. I am as well just generally a big fan of silly dated animation of questionable quality. It is honestly also just kind of very comforting to me in its silliness (well, at least seasons 1 and 2) because I enjoy in a self indulgent way that everything is always fairly low stakes and you know that the status quo of everyone generally being ok will be reestablished by the end of the episode because this was before kids cartoons aired on TV were really expected or allowed to have an ongoing narrative across long stretches of time.

Another aspect of the show that I really like that I feel like doesn't get talked about or used in other continuities a lot is that it's established from the very beginning that the Transformers being on Earth is universal public knowledge and humanity just has to adapt to the fact that they're here and their war has come to this planet. I feel like this is actually just way more compelling than the angle that most of the more modern stuff has taken where the existence of Transformers is some kind of government secret that must be kept hidden from the public. I feel like this approach is taken a lot because people feel like it's more "realistic" in some way, and I understand where they're coming from in that it seems on its face like it would be hard for everyday life for people on Earth to stay recognizable in a world where everyone knows about the Transformers and the war. I think, however, that this approach is kind of a cop out to avoid getting into the weeds of what the interactions between human and Transformer culture and norms and the gradual meshing of social interactions would look like and a refusal to take its own premise seriously. The idea of giant alien robots showing up on Earth is already unrealistic, just take it on its face and explore the implications. Not that G1 does that. It's slop nonsense to sell toys. I'm just saying that open knowledge of Transformers by all of humanity was where we started and I think as the franchise got more "serious" it was a shame to lose it.

TFA:

I liked TFA a lot and thought it was an interesting break from the status quo of Transformers media both in that it did the thing I mentioned above with G1 where everybody knew about the Transformers and that it had Optimus as an inexperienced younger person with the title of "Prime" not really meaning anything significant. I'm definitely sad that it got canceled and we didn't get any more of it. Honestly what I'm most sad we didn't get to see more of was Sari as a protagonist after the realization that she's technorganic and her figuring out what that means for her identity. She's like one of the only characters in the entire franchise who is canonically a Transformer whose altmode is a human. What are the cultural implications of that for her potentially connecting with her identity as a Transformer and also for her human side as well?

Something that I've thought about a lot in relation to this is (even though TFA does have some woman Transformer characters) the IDW explanation for the uneven gender ratio being that the normative presentation for Transformers on Cybertron is masculine, and the whole confusing situation with Sari being a clone of her dad and also a girl and a Transformer. Like, I don't know, I think it would be interesting if she decided at some point in the future to explore normative Cybertronian gender presentation as like a gender to transition to that would be a xenogender for a human but not for a Transformer. I also genuinely wholeheartedly believe that Dr. Sumdac is a trans man because it would explain why his clone is a girl and also potentially why none of his family of origin seems to be around at all. It's also kind of fascinating that the explanation of where Sari's Transformer half came from is that he found an infant-shaped protoform in the wreckage of Megatron's crashed body and I don't think they really thought through the implications of that. Additionally I think Tom Kenny is the best voice actor for Starscream currently living and they should have had him do it forever.

Bumblebee (2018):

I enjoyed this movie. I thought the designs were a visually appealing midpoint suitable for a live action movie between G1 and Bayverse scrapheap nonsense and thought the relationship between Bee and Charlie was really cute. When Starscream was onscreen near the beginning for like 2 seconds I pogged and pointed at him. I thought it was kind of strange that the two main Decepticons were completely random new characters invented for the movie that nobody would recognize considering how much screen time they had compared to the established Decepticon characters. I was annoyed by this and wanted to see my blorbos. John Cena saying "they literally call themselves Decepticons! That doesn't set off any red flags?" was funny. I don't really have a lot else to say, it was fine.

Earthspark:

I have a lot of really strong emotions about Earthspark and complicated opinions. I really really liked the first season and got extremely emotionally attached to Earthspark Megatron. I thought his repaired friendship with Optimus and his relationship with the Terrans/Malto family and the whole thing about the Terrans being Transformer children adopted and fully accepted by a human family was really just so indulgently sweet and it made me feel feelings. I also really liked the first season's general focus on the fact that the war is over and the labels of Autobot and Decepticon are not binary descriptors of good vs. bad people and that there can be Decepticons who are sincerely trying to be good people. I really wish there had been more focus on how human society was adapting to Transformers living on Earth now that Cybertron was permanently inaccessible in the time that the original writing team had with the show. I have intentionally not watched any of the show past the end of season 1 because I didn't want to subject myself to it knowing that I would get upset but I have read the synopsis of what happens and I'm really disappointed and angry that they gave the show to an entirely different team who clearly didn't care about any of the themes and arcs the first season was trying to set up and just completely trashed everything about nuance and made it another bog standard "Decepticons are bad guys" story. The thing in season 4 about Megatron losing his memories and reverting back to being evil felt completely unnecessary and literally just like a final mean spirited "fuck you" to people who liked season 1. I will be reading a bunch of fanfic pretending everything after season 1 didn't happen because it really is that bad. It makes me feel ashamed to say I like Earthspark because people will think I mean the other seasons when I don't.

TFP:

I still technically haven't finished the show so I will update this review when I do but in general I think TFP is resoundingly meh. Like, I don't know. I think it has some good parts (I think the whole thing with Earth being Unicron is kind of interesting I guess, I liked the bit where that human antagonist puppets Breakdown's corpse and tries to join the Decepticons and is then confronted with the fact that they still don't actually respect him because he's organic even though he tried to pander to them and betrayed his own human troops for them) but the story in general doesn't really compel me and I think the designs not having noses is ugly. I do like that it seems to be the origin point or first instance that I know of of Optimus and Megatron having previously been friends before the war and I like the specific spin it has on it where Megatron was his mentor and Optimus was like "I would have followed you anywhere but you're going somewhere that I can't support". I thought it was funny as fuck that they apparently prominently featured Cliffjumper in the promo material and then immediately killed him off in the first episode because they didn't want to pay the Rock to voice him for the whole show. I don't really have a lot else to say about it because I found it to be pretty middle of the road. I do actually have hazy childhood memories of watching this when I was in elementary school but I don't remember being wowed by it then either.

IDW:

IDW quickly became one of my all time favorite continuities as soon as I got to the issues that James Roberts wrote because just, wow, what an absolutely fascinating exploration of class and gender for Transformers taking the setting entirely seriously to its logical conclusion. As I said before I'm just absolutely enamored with them just explicitly spelling out that all female Transformers from Cybertron are trans women and experience transmisogyny. I think that's probably the best explanation you could go with when you're doing a new spin on a franchise that historically has too few female characters. I think it's just so interesting that in a society where almost all of them have the same single gender presentation the social stratifier that's the closest equivalent to gender for them is what their altmode is, and that it's gone into in detail the problems that a society that discriminates and assigns people functions based on their altmode causes. I really enjoy that they established that romantic relationships between two masculine-presenting Transformers are socially normative and have multiple of these couples featured prominently.

Another thing about IDW that stands out to me and that I am really compelled by is their exploration of the idea of Megatron as a complicated figure and what a redemption arc for him would look like. They touch on the idea that he has caused suffering on a literally uncountable scale (there's a scene at one point where the crew of the Lost Light happens upon a planet where there are statues of everyone with a flower planted by them representing each person they've killed, and Megatron's statue is surrounded by an endless rolling plain of blue flowers, which is such a striking image) and the question of if after this, it would be possible for him to meaningfully be redeemed in any proportional capacity. They also state plainly that if he had not risen up and caused the war, everything that he was fighting against in Cybertronian society would have gotten exponentially worse and it would have descended into totalitarian hardline Functionism. There are some samples included in the comic of his political theory writing before he became a dictator and it was kind of jaw dropping for me because it was like, actual coherent leftist commentary on the society that the viewer had just been presented and familiarized with. It makes me sad that Hasbro has so far seemed pretty uninterested since in exploring the themes of the setting on a deeper level in the way that IDW did, but I'm happy that the comics exist and stand as an example of what Transformers *can be* with really good writing.

Transformers (2007):

Watched it to see if it was really that bad. It was pretty fucking bad. Way too long with a plot that just completely drags. Sam is insufferable and totally unlikeable as a protagonist and Mikaela is barely fleshed out as a character because Michael Bay is a misogynist. I have to wonder if the reason he's named Sam is because by 2007 Hasbro knew what "spike" meant. Not enough Transformers in the Transformers movie. Optimus Prime did not show up until halfway through the damn thing. The designs are completely unrecognizable and I frequently had to stop to look up who the hell I was supposed to be looking at. Tons of focus on the US military as the good guys and blatant propaganda which was gross. The only Autobot who died was Jazz which did not escape my notice as racist. The only good part of the movie was Optimus who is always a ray of sunshine and also the line where Megatron tells Sam that if he gives him the Allspark "[he] may live to be [his] pet" which made me go "WHAT???" out loud. I was also intrigued by the ending scene where Sam and Mikaela are making out on top of Bumblebee's hood. Is he just being subjected to it or is he into it? I don't know. Don't watch this.

Cyberworld

This may change because the series is still ongoing but I've enjoyed it so far and liked a lot of the novel concepts that it's introduced. There's not really anything special going on in terms of the narrative because its target audience is a lot younger than most Transformers media but it's fun to watch and the animation and style is quite nice. I think it's fun that Megatron is a bull, Elita is a boat, and Grimlock is Russian for some reason. I also think it's fucking hilarious that Hasbro reposted Cyberworld Megop fanart to the official Transformers social media accounts.



It's still up. They never took it down. Insane.

Bio

Hi! I'm Ben, he/it, I like bugs and various fandoms and I post my longform writing here. Currently very into Transformers. 
My Tumblr: bensect
My Website: bensect.space