User:Locoman/Sandbox/TFRomance

Conceptual origins

Like many boy's toy brands in the eighties, the early years of the Transformers franchise shied away from anything particularly intimate: when Marvel Comics brought on Bob Budiansky to help develop the brand beyond the toys, he was informed that Hasbro had no intent to introduce any female characters into the toyline (at least one of his early drafts suggests Ratchet was going to be a female). Thus, while penning the Marvel US comic, Budiansky instead introduced the Creation Matrix as an asexual mechanism by which new Transformers came into being—conviently, this also gave him an easy means by which to introduce new toys into his ongoing storylines. Before long, however, the concurrently-running Transformers cartoon did introduce female characters into its mythos by introducing Elita One and her band of Female Autobots; dialogue between Elita and Optimus Prime made it abundantly clear that the two held each other in high esteem; the flashback episode "War Dawn" would later explicitly confirm the nature of their relationship as a romantic one.

1986's The Transformers: The Movie, introduced Arcee as the first major female character and set up a quasi-romantic dynamic between film protagonist Hot Rod and Arcee, though season three of the cartoon saw Arcee transfer her affections to swashbuckling hero Springer instead. The Marvel comic, on the other hand, continued to shy away from anything approaching romance; indeed, issue #53 of the comic had a terrified Cloudburst narrowly avoid an intimate encounter with the organic First One—fooled by the outer appearance of his Pretender shell—by explaining that his race had "no men, no women, no mates."

By the mid-1990s, loosening attitudes led to the Beast Wars cartoon featuring several explicitly romantic pairings: Tigatron and Airazor, and later Silverbolt and Blackarachnia... the notorious Japanese dub of the cartoon, however, chose to reinterpret Airazor as a young man, and re-contextualized their relationship as a platonic friendship between a samurai warrior and his ward. This approached worked for the first season of the cartoon... however, when the events of "Other Visits (Part 1)" wrote the two out of the franchise, the pair's final, unambiguously romantic declaration of their love led the Japanese dub to follow through on the original romantic intent for the scene.

Permutations

Transformer-Transformer

Transformer-organic

Transformer-inanimate