I've been watching Transformers Prime recently, and I have to say I am really enjoying it. It is well written, with good characters and stories and lots of good lines.
But the reason I mention it here, is that in one of the later episodes one of the human villains is 'resurrected' by essentially transferring his mind into the body of a dead transformer. I won't go in to the technical details, but essentially it was a body swap, only not between two humans. So I can't help but wonder, what if, instead of being a male decepticon body, he had instead been swapped into Arcee, the FEMALE autobot?
Or some other female Transformer. That would be an interesting story. Since they don't really play up on male and female transformers being different, I don;t know how big of an issue it would be. It would probably only be an issue for the human if anyone.
ReplyDeleteActually, in Beast Wars, they do go more into the concept of gender amongst the cybertronians. Early on there is a start of a relationship between two autobots, but it is later in the series that they go a bit further with things. Black Arachnia is a female predacon who falls in love with Silverbolt, the male maximal. Another male maximal also develops a crush on Black Arachnia, and even makes some sexually suggestive comments regarding her. So there is clearly a gender difference amongst them, even though the show often ignores it. In a way, it is actually refreshing. I like Arcee because she is a fast, deadly and experienced warrior. They never use the fact that she is female as a reason why she can't do something, or why she isn't suited for a task, or even as an excuse to 'protect' her.
DeleteAs for the story, I've thought about it and I actually had two scenarios that I would use. Both are based on technology used in Transformers Prime, and some sort of malfunction. Either due to the 'human element' or perhaps a substance called Dark Energon, which often causes strange effects. The first scenario is through the use of the psychic cortical patch, a device that allows one cybertronian to send his mind in to another's in order to extract information directly. In one episode, one character actually ends up temporarily taking over another character, thus opening up the body swap element. The second scenario I envisioned allows for a little bit 'extra' to the story. This one involves the malfunction of the Phase Shifter, a device that causes it's user to shift out of synch with the dimensional plane, and thus become intangible. The idea is that it would malfunction, causing the human and transformer to merge into a single body. And, once extracted from each other, there may be some, shall we say, lingering side effects...