FRONT LINE OF GENDER EQUALITY IDENTIFIED AS COMBINER FAN POLL

Weekly World Transformers · Fri Apr 10, 2015 7:59 pm

WEEKLY WORLD TRANSFORMERS

Tel Megiddo, where the final battle will be fought.

BREAKING - the ongoing struggle to have women, making up slightly more than one-half of all humans, recognised as legal, moral and intellectual equals to men has reached its peak on an unusual battlefield - the Hasbro Combiner Fan Poll.

The poll, a standard piece of choice architecture conducted through a downloadable app, allows fans of the Transformers franchise to vote on the components and characteristics that will make up a new 'Combiner,' a giant, Voltron-like Transformer made up of five or more smaller characters. Hasbro is devoting much of its Transformers product this year to the gimmick and the fan-chosen Combiner will be made available at retail. Not only can fans choose which 'modes,' like car or firetruck, each component of the combiner can be, they can also help to choose more abstract features of the toys such as their faction, colour and, most significantly, gender.

"A female Combiner would change everything," stated a high-ranking Tumblr user stationed at the foot of Tel Megiddo, said to be the site of the final battle for positive female representation in media. He was dressed in the uniform of his cause - practical Medieval armour that would fit a woman without showing much skin or overemphasising secondary sexual characteristics. "This is what we've been waiting for."

"I don't think the Combiner should be a girl," said a footsoldier of the opposition, who hadn't yet quite got round to leaving the house due to learning difficulties and profound social anxiety. He visibly struggled with the blazing Freudian implications of gendered characters 'combining' physically to overcome challenges for several moments before managing, "That would be weird."

"They made Windblade [the subject of last year's fan-mediated poll] a woman and now they want this too?" said a slightly more eloquent man who makes his living by recording himself playing computer games. "And they call us the fascists?" He then spent eighteen straight hours making dummy accounts from various IP addresses in an attempt to swing the vote towards the Combiner being male.

The world holds its breath as this conflict teeters on the brink.

In other news, the 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram soliders in Nigeria remain unfound.