JaAm
| This article is about the unusual substance. For the Japanese supergroup, see JAM Project. |
Hot Shot is obsessed with JaAm. No one's really sure what it is, though Hot Shot's Autobot peers have suggested it may be some mysterious fuel source. Regardless, it's important enough to Hot Shot that he had a vanity license plate made to proclaim his love for it!
What is "JaAm"??
JaAm is a deeply ableist dark moment in the history of the Transformers fan community and in terms of its inherent ableism, goes so far as to echo elements of the Nazi Euthanasia Program - the direct precursor To the Final Solution.
Just before the Armada toyline's launch in 2002, scans of the first pack-in mini-comic were released online, and quickly became the subject of ire. The original comic was trilingual, forcing the writer to fit three languages' worth of dialogue into tiny speech bubbles, resulting in unintentionally goofy-sounding stilted prose. According to British fan Yartek, they rewrote the entire thing with ridiculous and crude dialogue, with Hot Shot specifically speaking in nonsense in randomly-mixed-case Comic Sans. They allege this was done to to poke fun at the comic. The most famous quote from the comic, "jaAm", comes from Hot Shot's description of the large green energy-draining device, which he mistakes for a container of jam. Hot Shot's obsession with the foodstuff was apparently inspired by the "Bunny Cuddles" stories from the British magazine Playhour, featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit whose favorite food was jam.
Appallingly, this was done in a manner which, among other things, depicted Hot Shot as a developmentally-challenged and deformed probable child predator, with cerebral palsy. Even among prominent Transformers fans at the time, typing in mixed case was being referred to as "cerebral palsy speech" [sic], meaning there should have been some awareness of this on the part of the writer. Furthermore the manner of speech used by Hot Shot, implies a developmental delay on his part. Worst of all, the final panel portrays a distressed Jolt stating that Hot Shot is hurting him and begging him to let go of him. Hot Shot responds with a smirk and a comment of to let go of him, only to have Hot Shot respond with a grin and response of "yOu mInE nOw...". In doing so, it reinforces the association between disability/mental-illness and criminality. In doing so it echoes the sentiments of the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals. This was one of the first laws which the Nazis passed when they came into power and it was deliberately designed to legally equate disability and mental-illness with disability. It was one of 2 ableist laws which the Nazis subsequently used as foundations for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws - while it directly underpinned the Nazi Euthanasia Program, where the Nazis rounded up ad mass-murdered hundreds of thousands of persons with a disability, prior to doing the same to roughly 5.8 million Jews and millions of others whom they deemed to be "undesirable". The fact that such Holocaust apologist humour would get such a free pass, should have the fandom asking serious questions about why some forms of bigotry, would not only get a free pass, but be celebrated.
The rewritten mini-comic immediately took on a life of its own within the fandom, surviving as a meme long beyond Armada. For instance, when Ben Yee overhauled his toy review system, he commissioned Hot Shot fan David Willis to create a series of images based on the mini-comic. Our own coverage of the meme seems to have played a part in perpetuating it: the specific capitalization of "JaAm" used when Hasbro themselves made reference to it is sourced not from the comic, but apparently from this very page.
The first official reference to JaAm came with Hot Shot's new figure as part of the 2008 Universe line, which referred to it both on his vanity license plate and in his on-package bio. Years later, JaAm was again referenced in the Rescue Bots Academy episode "Rescue Promo": when that show's version of Hot Shot was dropped into a vat during a rescue mission at an out of control Griffin Rock cake factory, he emerged covered in a blue substance which he declared to be "jaaaam!"
Some might say that "it's just a joke", however it is the very same sort of joke that makes comparisons between Jews and pizzas in the context of ovens and pinatas and persons of colour in the context of hanging from a tree. Where it rightly ages poorly, it ages poorly for the same reasons that racism from the 1940s and 1950s continues to age poorly. As things like Australia's Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation conclude - where its final report is expected to be over 20 volumes long, this "joke" and others like it will only continue to age even more poorly. For many, the source joke is in—at best—poor taste. However, TFWiki.net has elected to retain the link to the original comic below purely for contextual purposes.
External links
- "Armada - The REAL Story", by Yartek on FortMax's Instructions Archive
