I understand why IDW handled the soft-retcon of Arcee's whole situation at a distance, with the trans-friendly version of the story being implied through scattered lines. But a spotlight Arcee redux would have gone so hard, just because of how unique Arcee's situation is:
You grow up enslaved in a gendered society (although there seems to be an ethnic/regional aspect to what frames pop out of the ground feminine). Your masculine frame is an exact copy of your brother's body, something that already marks you as a novelty. You secure your freedom by your blade, fight on the loosing side of a civil war, and end up in the entourage of the guy who played a big role in driving the cis women off your planet.
Like how colonial powers erase their own internal diversity to create a shared national/ethnic identity, there is no more gender. Everything is masculine. You start to forget that cis women ever existed. What that just a wistful dream? What do you yearn for? Gender is a thing organic species have, the kind of weakness Nova Prime's pax cybertronia seeks to erase.
There are bots like you, transgender women who have adopted gender from the sexually dimorphic species they've encountered as part of the Primal Vanguard. Is there something about their version of womanhood that is subtly different from what you know? Are the echoes that remain reinterpreted to be about other species?
The ones who transition, they're from lower classes, the kind whose "contamination" is a sign of their weakness, tolerated because of their usefulness (Anode, blacksmith) or because they're not even thought to have interiority (Rosanna and Flip Sides). Not you, you're of Nova Prime's court. You're nothing more than a warrior, without a patron you're nothing. Or maybe the characters we know to transition are only able to do so during a more liberal point in time, during Nominus' reign. Perhaps why you feel so alone is that there is no transgender community, at least that you can find.
Jhiaxus, another member of Nova's court, offers to modify you. This could be your new patron, someone who could protect you when Nova and your brother won't. But instead he violates you on some deep level, changing you more than you agreed on. And then he leaves you, now outcast from your social network and emotionally destabilized from side effects you had no reason to expect.
Jhiaxus, Nova Prime, and your brother are gone. There is triply no place for you within society.
You meet someone like you, another trans woman. She offers to help heal you, but then she disappears. Either she has found a planet full of women and hasn't contacted you, or she already knew about it- and despite being exiled from it, didn't tell you. Perhaps honoring a promise to keep the planet a secret from a war neither of you have a part in. Regardless, the last strands of your sanity crack and your new goal becomes to erase every other experiment of Jhiaxus- every other being like you- from the universe.
You're captured and thrown in prison. When your soul is literally removed from your body you finally feel a measure of peace. You're brought back to resume your energon-soaked existence killing your tormenter over and over again.
When a war you had no part in finally ends, you become the assassin and only friend of the biggest bastard ever, who uses you like a living weapon. But finally, after so long, you decide to be your own person and more than your blade. Also women are back, but there's a completely different cultural gap between you two.
I just find the removal of women from post-primal cybertronian society so fascinating, and I think exploring that with Arcee would give us something that isn't an allegory for transmisogyny, but rather a form of it that is just contextualized by a speculative setting that is very different than earth. And if this was a series of flashbacks they could have shown the Arcee x Aileron relationship in the frame narrative in a way that I would actually get it.
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
2087
blakekathryn
