It’s finally happened. The results are in!
Earlier this year, Hasbro asked its fans to download an app for their mobile devices that enabled fans to vote for input in creating a new combiner team. The last time fans got to do something similar, the heroine Windblade was the result—she earned considerable face-time under Mairghread Scott’s pen and Sarah Stone’s beautiful illustrations for an initial miniseries. Windblade has since gone on to get a second comic series and will be showing up in the cartoon Transformers: Robots in Disguise, in an episode written by Scott. In addition, Windblade is teaming up with other fembots, Arcee, and Chromia, in a comics one-shot called Combiner Hunters, written by Scott and illustrated by Sara Pitre-Durocher. All in all, Windblade has been pretty successful.
This time around, fans voted for the altmodes, color scheme, faction, place of origin, combiner name, personality, gender, and nemesis for an independent combiner team from the Sea of Rust (fingers crossed for a Mad Max-y paint job) who have a rivalry with the new toy-only combiner Galvatronus. As of April 23rd, we know their gestalt name and gender. Six female Autobots combine to form the limbs, torso, and additional armaments for the mighty Victorion—a perfect name that stands alongside the likes of Superion and Defensor.
The combiner team will be getting toys and an appearance in the Combiner Hunters one-shot.
Victorion is the first proper female combiner in Transformers ever. In the 31 year history of the series, we have only had one female component in a predominantly male combiner team with a male personality or a female combiner team that had to be retconned to be female in the first place and never got any fiction. Of course, sexist fanboys complaining about gender actively voted against female Transformers in the poll, but just as in the first poll, common sense prevailed. The fans in general, and the creators, want more female Transformers, so more female Transformers we get.
Additionally, the female Transformer ranks will grow with the reveal of five more female Transformers in the More Than Meets The Eye cast, as shown in the preview for MTMTE #41 and artist Alex Milne’s tumblr.
Of the five revealed, four are brand new. Firestar’s been around since 1985 and has gotten a 21st century update in her first appearance in IDW’s Transformers comics, while Velocity, Roadmaster, Javelin, and Proxima are brand new characters with names that have never been used before by Transformers. These transformers have exceedingly unique body types and design attributes, ranging from Roadmaster’s bulk to Firestar’s flame hair formed by the exhaust of her alternate mode. They have features unlike most other female Transformers or even Transformers of any gender. They will join Nautica of the Lost Light and Nickel of the Decepticon Justice Division as named female characters in More Than Meets the Eye, and I’m excited to see them get screentime in the comics and hopefully be accepted by forward thinking fans. As Milne said in an interview with me, “the more the merrier.”
