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Fellas. I love Skybound and I love the art on its run, both by Mora and DWJ/Spicer, but this Elita Prime design is not doing it for me. I’m sorry. But I’ve been saying this all along, Transformers girls designs are just not good, and Elita Prime is the culmination of all of these complaints.

Before I get on with this I want to say that this is really just an opinion and my shitty analysis of design based on the few classes I’ve taken in character design; if you love how Elita looks, I support that! She does look pretty cool and I’m very excited that she actually gets to be a Prime this run. But all being said now, the way it has happened both narratively and visually is very eh. We'll focus on the visual part for now.

For reference, here’s Elita pre-matrix, and I will be ragging on both of her designs for a bit (mostly post-matrix though):

This is a woman who’s been fighting a war for four million years. A woman on the front lines of a losing battle of attrition, leading their thinning faction, holding her own against the likes of Shockwave and co. She is a soldier by character.

And now let’s look at Elita-Prime: remember, a Prime is blessed with divine energy that makes them the leader of the faction, and during war you’d kind of expect for said leader to fight a lot, so let’s see what upgrades our new Prime gets in her fight for Cybertron:

Ah. She gets wings and two rectangles on the torso. And her arms and legs are chunky now rather than sculpted cylinders. Also her waist is still thinner than her head and thighs. I don’t think it was possible but I think it got thinner. Incredible.

Now I could spend the rest of this rant talking about how this is just misogyny in the comics space again and all that, and it is, but let’s look at it from a practical, character design/narrative standpoint first.

First off: doesn’t Elita turn into a bike pre-Matrix? Why is she suddenly turning into a jet? (It's bad enough that I had to go back into the comic to find a picture of her transformation, because I can't tell what she turns into at a glance with zero kibble present!)

If there is an actual reason she became a jet other than the Cool Factor, let me know and I’ll retract this criticism. But it just seems lazy and sort of out of place, and more of an excuse to throw some wings on the woman and call it a day for her design. Because other than giving her more arm and leg and making her taller, that’s really the extent of the changes, she is still an extremely skinny woman with hardly any kibble. I don't even think she'd have gotten any changes if she remained a bikeformer. And yes, Optimus and Magnus also don’t have a great deal of kibble either (mostly being rectangles) but that’s the next point I want to go into.

There’s a very basic concept that design classes will teach you called shape language. It’s the idea that certain shapes or forms in a character will help you understand from a glance what they’re meant to be/what they do: it’s the reason why red triangles are associated with danger, for an example.

Without the context of the Matrix, let’s look at Optimus, Magnus, and Elita. OP and Mags first. (Please excuse my very shitty interpretations of shape language here. It's a learning experience for me.)

Both Optimus and Magnus are comprised of generally rectangular, bulky, blocky forms. They are wide, generally imposing, red and blue indicates some level of heroism to them (if you want to get into color language too), if you asked someone unfamiliar to the franchise to describe what they are, they’d probably say the leaders. Square shapes generally convey some level of sturdiness, reliability, and strength.

Elita, however, is a lot more triangles and ovals(?). Triangles being a bit more fickle, maybe unbalanced, potentially dangerous; ovals are sort of unclear (I’d argue some level of sleekness in the design here, though oftentimes circular shapes are generally ‘friendly’- or soft-looking shapes). But these are a pretty far cry from the sturdy stability that OP and Magnus evoke, and if you were to look at them all in a crowd you probably wouldn’t guess Elita to be their (new) leader; maybe a character with a cool gimmick, but not someone particularly imposing or solid enough to lead. Her design doesn't give enough away to indicate she's going to be a leader.

Even Arcee Magnus does it better, with her new kibble at least giving her a good, sturdy, imposing rectangle to it:

She has her own (similar) design flaws, but the back kibble at least gives her a more powerful silhouette that suggests a level of oomph. Not nearly enough, but I'd believe her to be the leader over Elita almost any day if you put them side-by-side.

Which is not to say that characters are not allowed to go against shape theory and that all leaders must be very square; I think it could be clever if Elita’s triangular themes were intentional and put there to show that she’s a very different, possibly unstable leader, but I’m not sure that’s the case. Mora and Kirkman will have to prove that in time with the comic. (I also feel like if you're going to give the character slightly contradictory shape theory, you should be prepared to subvert it: will Elita be a good leader, or will she turn out to be as chaotic and violent as they've written her as far?)

But shape theory aside, let's also look a bit at just character worldbuilding, and this one is a bit of a common sense one. When you're fighting a war, you probably expect the characters to have relatively armored, bulky designs. You're expecting explosions, gunshots, probably things that exert a ridiculous amount of force upon a body because these are giant metal robots, and metal can be pretty hard to damage beyond repair. So tell me the lore benefits of giving Elita (Prime or no Prime, it's the same here) the skinniest waist ever when every single other bot ever has got armored chunk going for them. (Same for Arcee actually, though this rant is not about her.)

If Elita were a spy or an infiltrator by nature, I'd get it, sure. But someone leading the faction in a bid to push out the Decepticons, someone fighting a losing war with mounting casualties, girl she's going to get snapped in half I fear. One missile to the midsection and it may be over. Not once in the 4 million years of war did she ever come close to being totaled in some massive explosion or attack? Not once did she get the chance to upgrade or fortify her frame? Not even out of desperation with whatever scrap was lying around? She stayed that small and thin the entire time? Because otherwise, why don't we see more bots that look like her, gender be damned, and on either side of the war: why are she and Arcee the exceptions? (Well the obvious reason is because misogyny defies concepts of logic, but that's out-of-universe.)

Other points I want to make (I think all of you kind of know this isn't my point anyways, but just in case): don't mistake any of this for me saying that a character's looks are everything, and that conventionally-attractive female characters can never be faction leaders or warriors because they are skinny and attractive. Or even that femininity makes no logical sense on a battlefield, and masculinity should be the default. Otherwise then we fall back into the Furman rabbithole of "all transformers are genderless so why include 'female' transformers", and that's not good.

If a character's gender is explicitly defined as female, I'm in all support of giving them more female characteristics. But you can do fem AND car robot warrior at the same time, they're not mutually exclusive, literally just. Slipstream. Slipstream in the SAME continuity. Not 3 comics earlier.

She's a seeker frametype but has jet kibble like any other seeker should have. She's more angular and a bit skinnier than Thundercracker in the backdrop and has lipstick, but that's pretty much it, and she's still pretty clearly fem despite the copy-and-paste frame. You can tell she's supposed to turn into a jet. If you scroll back up and look at pre-prime Elita, there's really no indication what she turns into. She looks like a human woman in a suit, out of place amongst these ranks of large, rectangular robots that are her contemporaries and comrades in arms, and for what reason?

Arcee too (pre-Magnus): she has the little back kibble things but has the exact same body type as Elita. We have three female robot characters in this comic right now, one is still offline and the other two look almost exactly the same. (Four if you count Moonracer in one of the flashbacks, but she's also offline and also seems to have the same frame as her other two alive counterparts.)

It's 2026, and we're still drawing women like the 80's. I get that this is supposed to be a reboot of G1. But then you also notice they introduced Bulkhead and Slipstream (who is technically there) and OC characters like Shredhead and we have these amazing new ideas like Arcee Magnus and Elita Prime, but we still can't escape the sexy-woman-ification of current female characters. You know, I would've even accepted Arcee and Elita's initial designs if they'd started out with the blocky arms and legs that they get when they upgrade, but not even that bare minimum of robot-semblance could be made.

There isn't a good reason to make them so human-woman-looking other than G1-nostalgia-bait. Character design-wise, it's a pretty poor choice. Lore-wise, it's nonsensical. Go on and justify a narrative reason for Elita's thighs to be thicker than her head, and then consider what it would be like if Optimus looked that way. Would he still feel like the same steadfast leader of the Autobots? Would outsiders to the franchise look at him and think he commands a faction? (I mean granted half the people on this site would be into this, and I support this fully, but fandom is different from canon.)