User:BerylRoll

(technology), (substance), (phenomenon), (planet), (rank), (ship), (moon), (food), (subgroup), (group), (weapon), (issue), (episode), (video game), (book), (film), (species), (toyline), (console)

Salutation

Hello!

Name

BerylRoll is a portmanteau of "barrel roll", because despite that I have never played a StarFox game I love the meme, and "beryl", because I like beryls ever since they were the only decent worldbuilding element in the deeply flawed narrative of Subnautica 2.

Wiki experience

Been editing wikis since I was some 15, mainly on TVTropes. Have/Had multiple accounts since I always forgot my passwords and it used to be easier to make a new account than figuring out my password because there was no email verification. I'm quite proud of most of my work there, probably Poe's "Ulalume" the most just because I think I did a decent job making a poem accessible that has historically been joked about as being one many liked but few understood (down to literally being used as "You like Poe? Prove that by explaining "Ulalume").

Work

I decided to make an account because of the typos I encountered while reading through the wiki and I thought I could help fix them. (No insult intended. This wiki has text you'd need months to all read, and that's if you read at optimum efficiency, so typos are just bound to happen.)
I also started an account to get a little more attention on the CBS pitch.
I guess I found my niche working on Beast Wars II coverage. I have a quaint fondness for the series. It's very elegant and probably did the most with transformation (scan-bombing, scanning another TF, scanning vs downloading, creature mode, alt mode favoritism, etc.) of any TF show.
I know the basics of Japanese and am roughly familiar with Japanese dominant culture of the 20th Century (not particularly relevant to TF, but I love the '90s Occult Boom), so I can help out there.
I like crosslinking and cleaning up redirects (if proper).

Gender timeline safekeeping

This is a timeline of Transformers-related events that occurred in the "real" world, including release dates and other major occurrences.

1980s

1984 — Jim Shooter creates Aunty, the female computer of the Autobots' ship. At some point during development, Aunty gets absorbed into the non-female identity of the Ark.
1984 — Bob Budiansky proposes for Ratchet to be a female medic, which is reflected in the name "Ratchet", a reference to [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Nurse Ratched|{{#if:||Nurse Ratched}}]] from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Hasbro does not approve. The original handwritten note, which describes Ratchet as "her" and as the Autobots' "go-to gal" for repairs, is included in Into the Creation Matrix: A Conversation With Bob Budiansky in the Shout! Factory Matrix of Leadership Special Edition DVD set released in 2009.
1984 — During his time working on the CBS pitch, Jeffrey Scott proposes for Sideswipe and Starscream to be female, one for each faction. Hasbro does not approve and they go from being female in the first bible to male in the second bible, being replaced by two non-toy female characters. Once more, it's one female per faction: Firecycle for the Autobots and Whirlpool for the Decepticons. Firecycle is to be an Autobot medic and Whirlpool is an Autobot-turned-Decepticon who is something of a quadruple changer, having an amphibious alternate mode that with minor tweaks goes from being suitable for driving and faring to either flying or diving. Both characters are axed when the CBS pitch falls through.
1984 — Armored Insect Corps Beetras is a rarity among the pre-Transformers lines in that it features transforming insects with distinctly feminine builds. Whether they were ever meant to get toys is in doubt, unless the line would've gotten popular in which case the molds wouldn't have been given to Hasbro to be sold as Insecticons. Either way, the female Beetras designs do not make it into Transformers like some of their male peers.
1984 — A solitary mention of the female Cybertronian computer Aunty makes it into "The Transformers" by accident.
1984 — Arcee is among the cast in the first draft of The Transformers: The Movie
1984 — The script for "Enter the Nightbird" is written, marking the first time anything close to a female Cybertronian has a female writer.
1985 — The female Cybertronian computer Auntie is a main character in "Raiders of the Last Ark", making her the first female Cybertronian whose proposal solidifies in a character.
1985 — The original script for "Sea Change" calls for a memory moment of Bumblebee as a baby transforming for the first time under the watchful gaze of his parents. "Bumblebee's Mother" or "Momma Bumblebee" has a speaking line. Neither parent makes it into the episode because the memory moment is scrapped from the final script.
1985 — Nightbird debuts in "Enter the Nightbird".
1986 — Arcee debuts in The Transformers: The Movie.
1986 — Arcee is the only member of the new Transformers cast not to be made into a toy. A prototype is made, but it doesn't lead to a toy on shelves.
1986 — "Target: 2006" features what appears to be a female bartender at Maccadam's Old Oil House. Her status as a female Transformer is unconfirmed, but if she is, she is the only other besides Arcee to appear in panels of the Marvel Comics.

1986 — The script for "The Search for Alpha Trion" is written, marking the first time anything close to a female Transformer has a female writer.
1987 — Headmaster Chromedome recolor Arcee no-go.
1987 — Arcee the Super High-Breed Model line fell through
1988 — Takara beat Hasbro to the punch by releasing the first female Transformer toy in the form of Minerva, who was a redeco of the male Nightbeat.
1988 — Two scrapped Godmasters in Super-God Masterforce are the female Decepticon Mayumi and the male Autobot Shinichi. They were replaced by Clouder. What this duality would've meant for Doubleclouder, if they would've been defaulted to male like Overlord or effectively been genderfluid, is unknown.
1989 — "Prime's Rib!"
1989(?) — Eos and Killjoy are two Pretenders with female-looking shells that didn't go beyond their concept art. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/09/30 canonized them and confirmed them as female.

while "The Search for Alpha Trion" was written in the summer of '85. Ron Friedman says he fought for Arcee's inclusion in The Transformers: The Movie because his daughter was a fan of similar stuff.<ref>Interview with Todd Mathy</ref>

The first recurring female Transformer is Elita One, courtesy of her second appearance as Ariel in "War Dawn".

1990s

1990? — No Action Master toy for Arcee.
1995 — BotCon 1995 saw the limited release of the first Decepticon toy to be characterized as female at the time, Nightracer, but likewise she was a redeco of Generation 2 High Beam and only 298 were produced.
1996 — MC Axis line-up, for her and Elita One jointly to become the first female Transformer figurines ever to be officially available to the public.
1998 — Scylla first female combiner member
1999 — Archadis is one of the submissions was intended to be female as per the original design but is presented as male in the fiction.
1999 — Nightscream was proposed to be female but Hasbro said no.

2000s

2001 — Arcee redeco Beast Wars Transmetal 2 Blackarachnia
2005 — Early in development of BotCon 2005, there were supposed to be three Decepticon biker chicks who'd serve as the lieutenants of the Decepticon General. The idea was to take the Energon Arcee sculpt and redeco it three times over into wildly different schemes but consistently based on a "bad biker" type look. The idea was dropped to keep the focus on the Insecticons and the three bikers materialized as only one: Flamewar.<ref>Flamewar toy notes at BWTF.com</ref>
2007 — The original proposal for the Autobot main team in Animated was for a female medic named Red Alert. For unknown reasons, Red Alert got reworked into a male character, and this male character later became Ratchet. Later, the female Red Alert was added after all, though in a guest role.

2010s

2013 — Elita One's character artwork in Transformers Legends causes some controversy due to its overly sexualized "boobs and butt" pose. A game update changes the art to cover up some of the more outrageous aspects.
2013 — A major step for female Transformer toys came when Hasbro held a "Fan-Built Bot" programme in 2013 as part of the Thrilling 30 celebration. Among the numerous options to "build" a brand new character-toy for the 30th anniversary retail line was "male" / "female" The fans voted "female". The result was Windblade, who got her own mold.
2015 — This "Fan-Built Bot" debut worked out well enough that Hasbro had another contest for Combiner Wars in 2015 and fans voted for female Transformers again: this time six that made up the gestalt Victorion, the first ever all-female combiner team. That said, unlike Windblade, they are redecos.
2015 — Ask Vector Prime, 2015/12/23 came back on this by identifying Archadis as a trans man.
2015 — Acceleron is namedropped. This character started out as male but was reimagined as female according to her creators. This direction is a first.
2017 — Megatronia is released as an all-female quintuple combiner, omitting a redeco of Groove/Rust Dust and thereby missing out on a sixth member who'd logically been female.

2020s

2020: — Windblade's After the prototype's reveal, the model kit also generated a fair number of controversies regarding her curvy proportions, notably her well-endowed rear skidplates. The official Facebook and Twitter pages later removed the prototype pics and posted an updated design on their Twitter page in late July 2020.
2022 — Windblade's Furai Model by Flame Toys
2022 — Nightshade An early concept for Nightshade was that they identified as "Terran" rather than male or female, as they did not consider gender to be an important part of their identity. This concept was dropped at some point during Earthspark's development in favor of making the character explicitly non-binary, but this early draft persisted long enough that a version of the backstory found its way into the official Earthspark guidebook, as well as several foreign-language websites.
The original pitch for Nightshade came from EarthSpark creator Dale Malinowski, and was conceived as non-binary from the beginning. Mae Catt and other LGBT staff contributed their own perspective and lived experience to help shape Nightshade's character.
2025 — Missing Link Arcee (Prototype) is released. This is a Generation 1-style figure of the character, based directly on her original unfinished prototype that didn't get made in 1986.

Beast Wars brought female Transformers to worldwide mass retail, in the form of 1996's Blackarachnia and 1997's Airazor. Again, these hadn't been designed to represent female characters. Thus, it was the 1998 Transmetal version of Airazor that marked the first release of a Transformer toy intentionally designed to represent a female character. Ironically, Airazor was written out of the show in the same year and she never became Transmetal. On the Decepticon/Predacon half of things, while Blackarachnia got her own intended-female Transmetal toy in 1999, this was when her allegiance had already shifted to the Maximals. The first intended-female and unambiguously evil Transformer toy is Cybertron Thunderblast in 2005.