Miss Optimus Prime

The last post being on the subject of heroic self-sacrifice, I think the transition into talking about Optimus Prime is seamless, here.

I realized the other day while watching Transformers 3 two things: One, the Transformers movies are kind of a lot sexist. As in, kind of a lot actually - particularly the third movie, whose two only female characters delivered an incredibly blunt message: Eye candy girlfriend is useless except as eye candy, also women in charge are terrible and need to get sexed up - preferably by the worthless comedy relief character, because, y'know. Women.

The other thing I realized, however, was a more profound insight. There's something I've always found kinda cool about the Transformers: They're a sexless species. They don't have genders. In fact, their reproduction works in an entirely different way from most species on Earth. We refer to most of the Transformers as male, because... well to be honest, kinda just because men are the default sex in our culture. I thought that perhaps it's because most of the Transformers look male, but actually... not really. They look so different from humans that there's no real way of telling what sex they would be if they had them. Yes, the voice actors in the cartoon are men, but I read the comics so the cartoon voices aren't really "canon" to me - and besides, female bears don't exactly sound anything like female humans, but they're still she-bears.

And then it struck me: Not that human terms really apply to the Transformers, but if we desperately wanted to assign them sexes... wouldn't it make the most sense to refer to Optimus as a woman? After all, Optimus Prime has the Creation Matrix - Optimus is the one who creates new life. The creation of life has, on Earth, in most cultures, been viewed as pretty much the definition of being female.

Optimus Prime is really only set apart from the other Transformers because she can give birth. She is also the one who nurtures, teaches and heals the other Transformers using the Matrix. It marks whoever bears it as a leader, but are we going to call Optimus Prime a man simply because she's in charge?

Optimus Prime is, of course, neither man nor woman because the terms don't apply to Transformers. But if we're going to go with one of them... wouldn't woman be the most logical choice, given the biological functions of Earth females?

Easter Sunday

Today is a peculiar day. It's a day whose religious implications pass by us almost unnoticed: Even if we're aware of what the holiday celebrates, I don't think we stop to reflect on what it really means.

Today is Easter Sunday, the day when Jesus conquered Death. By now, it's a story that's been re-told, re-imagined, re-arranged so many times that we hardly even think about what it's trying to say. This story is getting old. It's getting too old for us. It doesn't seem to mean very much, not anymore, not to us. But we're not the people whom this story is for. We're not the target audience.

The story of Easter was meant for people to whom Death is not a distant threat, not someone who waits at the threshold of old age, not a snarky skeleton with a scythe or a woman in black robes. The story of Easter was written for those to whom Death is an enemy; for those who live in constant fear of plague and famine and bullets. Because death may be a natural thing, and it may be something that we can accept and talk about and understand, but ultimately, it is destructive. Death ends things. We can wax poetical about it, but at the end of the day, death hurts – not so much its victims as it hurts those who are left behind. But we can't hope to understand this. I don't understand it. I have never seen the ugly face of death up close – the random, pointless, indiscriminately cruel face of death – and I pray I never will.

The story of Easter is written for those who have seen that face. It is written for those who have seen people crucified by the Romans, slaughtered in the World Wars, burned by napalm, taken by the Black Plague. Those people are not us.

But if there's one thing we should take away from the story of Easter, it's that those people are still out there, and to them, this story is still meaningful. It doesn't matter that Jesus came back; that's not the important part. What matters is that things got better, that things will get better.

And so, the true meaning of the story is this: If we work hard, if we live our lives with grace and virtue and compassion, then there may come a day when nobody needs to hear it.