Hero Factory 2012

Tanma · October 14, 2011

What TCO said.

Also, so it is. I'm honestly shocked. I can't seem to log in, but I'll figure it out.

I can log in, but I can'y manage my account or post in a topic. Still, it is good to look at all those contests that expired months ago.

**Dorek** · October 14, 2011

By saying she wants to be treated like everyone else and screaming about it to everyone, it shows that everyone else doesn't consider her as an equal. This is why people make those complaints over and over, because things are not equal, which is why it's so insulting to see you make these comments, which is why I reacted as I did the first time. You're misunderstanding feminism, and it's frustrating. If Breez was a real woman always complaining about not being treated equally, while doing equal work as her male compatriots, telling her to "stop complaining about it, you're making it worse" is extremely, extremely insulting. It's belittling, and yes, it's going to make feminists mad by saying that, because you're implying her complaints aren't valid. Which comes across as "women complain, but doing so makes them get even less respect, so they should just settle for the status quo".

It's topic conversations like these that turned BZP into an explosion waiting to happen even before it went down.

I don't misunderstand feminism at all; I just hate it when people think the only way to get that particular point across IS to shove it in my face. It's the "quit while you're ahead" adage; it seems defeatist on its surface, but really, the essence is that you are at a point where continuing isn't going to help your cause. I can't tell that Breez isn't being treated equally (aside from snipes about romantic feelings, which are directed as much to Furno as they are to her, in fairness) because all I have to go on is her extremely loud and (in my personal opinion) obnoxious rantings about it. This is why I wish Hero Factory WOULD have more female Heroes; so Breez doesn't have the be the token and reduce herself to a trope just to represent the entire gender, because that just isn't working.

There's also Daniella Capricorn, but she's just mean =P. And more of a parody of newscasters in general.

Play With Fire · October 14, 2011

I can only hope this doesn't turn into an all-out flame war...

What I really don't understand is that in the Hero Factory FM, Breez said that she and the other female heroes are treated as equals by everyone else. Looks like women, even robot women, are equal to their male counterparts in the future. Then, out of nowhere in Ordeal of Fire, Breez devolves into a feminist stereotype, ranting about how she isn't girly and she can stand for herself, when to me it was already implied that everyone else knew that, because women are equal.

Edited October 14, 2011 by Play With Fire

CabooseBM · October 14, 2011

She came across as insecure to me, like she doesn't feel "girly" enough and feels she has to emphasize that she's a girl. I found it amusing, myself.

I dunno, any more I'd have to say would probably just be fanon, so yeah.

**Brickthing** · October 14, 2011

I can only hope this doesn't turn into an all-out flame war...

This isn't going to turn into a flame war. :sweet:

Whether Breez's portrayal is right or wrong, it's simply a stereotype along with all of the other Heroes' stereotype characters. As a simple story made to sell toys, Hero Factory isn't trying to make any social commentary, so I don't try to draw any from it. :sceptic:

Aanchir · October 14, 2011

This isn't going to turn into a flame war.

Whether Breez's portrayal is right or wrong, it's simply a stereotype along with all of the other Heroes' stereotype characters. As a simple story made to sell toys, Hero Factory isn't trying to make any social commentary, so I don't try to draw any from it.

True that. Looking at it from a sales perspective, perhaps Breez's feminism makes some degree of sense. After all, boys within the target age range are going to have a bias against girl characters. For kids who don't follow the story, it's not made totally obvious by the set design that Breez is a girl. By giving her this sort of personality in the story, she maintains sales with people who don't mind girl characters, while still making an effort to remind less open-minded boys that this is a cool, capable character who can stand up for herself. It's not just an effort to break free of in-universe stereotypes, but also an effort to break free of the stereotypes the theme's audience tends to have about female characters.

Not to say I think her feminism is over the top. Really most of her lines seem more like she's trying to stand up for herself than to stand up for her gender as a whole. And her expectation of others to stereotype her based on her gender seems pretty justified based on Hero Factory FM, which establishes that in-universe stereotyping of female heroes is frequent (not to mention gives us the particularly awful example of gender stereotyping by Tibor Terrell).

Tanma · October 14, 2011

Hooray, I just found Wildfire on BZPower. That takes me back, it was the reason I joined the forum in the first place. Just to comment on that story. It was last commented on in December of 2010, so it takes a bit to find(unless you just use the search option I never knew existed). But man, even after all this time it still is impressive and dark. Dark Mirror had nothing on this.

Shameless advertising aside, why do the robots have genders anyway? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the need to classify robots as male or female.

**Dorek** · October 14, 2011

Like I said, that's just my interpretation of things; I found her over the top personality to be obnoxious, and not conducive to the point she's supposedly trying to get across. My only hope is that she isn't that rabid about her feministic points in upcoming story material, so she can have some actual growth as a character. I didn't think it jived with the flow of Ordeal of Fire, and since we're probably (I think it was confirmed, right?) getting an episode of HF in 2012, I would like her character to be less fanatical than OoF.

Edit: The gender is mostly to help people relate better; Wall-E, for instance, would be far less interesting (I already found it really boring, but whatever) if there was no romantic connection between him and Eve.

Edited October 14, 2011 by Dorek

Aanchir · October 14, 2011

Like I said, that's just my interpretation of things; I found her over the top personality to be obnoxious, and not conducive to the point she's supposedly trying to get across. My only hope is that she isn't that rabid about her feministic points in upcoming story material, so she can have some actual growth as a character. I didn't think it jived with the flow of Ordeal of Fire, and since we're probably (I think it was confirmed, right?) getting an episode of HF in 2012, I would like her character to be less fanatical than OoF.

Edit: The gender is mostly to help people relate better; Wall-E, for instance, would be far less interesting (I already found it really boring, but whatever) if there was no romantic connection between him and Eve.

Just asking, what do you mean by "the flow in Ordeal of Fire"? Most of the criticisms I've seen (and some of my own criticisms) involve the pacing in that episode being too bad for it to even have a flow. I'm a bit less critical of it now that I've seen Savage Planet, which I consider far, far worse in terms of pacing (instead of cramming things together too close it drags out the banter-filled action scenes until they become painful to watch). But as far as Breez's character not fitting with the flow, that's probably because like most things in that episode, all of her scenes were super-duper-concentrated into short snippets.

I loved Wall-E... :cry_sad:

**Dorek** · October 14, 2011

Just asking, what do you mean by "the flow in Ordeal of Fire"? Most of the criticisms I've seen (and some of my own criticisms) involve the pacing in that episode being too bad for it to even have a flow. I'm a bit less critical of it now that I've seen Savage Planet, which I consider far, far worse in terms of pacing (instead of cramming things together too close it drags out the banter-filled action scenes until they become painful to watch). But as far as Breez's character not fitting with the flow, that's probably because like most things in that episode, all of her scenes were super-duper-concentrated into short snippets.

I loved Wall-E...

I just mean each character has their personality defined in a certain way; Nex and Evo are introduced by Makuro, who explains what they're like, and they have that opportunity to display who they're going to be; Furno and Stormer have their previous characterizations from RotR to carry them through, as they're both strong personalities; Surge has the episode revolving around his emotional struggles and eventually culminates in his success. That leaves Breez. With no opportunity to develop her character or personality, the writers and director simply gave her a "I am woman hear me roar" attitude to compensate for her complete lack of characterization. At least, that's how I see it =P. OoF was definitely too short to have a real flow to it, but there were certain elements that saved it from being a completely disjointed mess; however, I didn't see Breez really meshing in with any of it. Again, that's why I'm hoping she actually gets some development in the new series, and that they don't just fall back on her stereotypes from OoF.

Also lol. I don't really know why I didn't like Wall-E. I just couldn't really seem to bring myself to care about the little robot =P. Whole movie just seemed to futile. I know I'm in the minority opinion on that one, though.

Tanma · October 14, 2011

Like I said, that's just my interpretation of things; I found her over the top personality to be obnoxious, and not conducive to the point she's supposedly trying to get across. My only hope is that she isn't that rabid about her feministic points in upcoming story material, so she can have some actual growth as a character. I didn't think it jived with the flow of Ordeal of Fire, and since we're probably (I think it was confirmed, right?) getting an episode of HF in 2012, I would like her character to be less fanatical than OoF.

Edit: The gender is mostly to help people relate better; Wall-E, for instance, would be far less interesting (I already found it really boring, but whatever) if there was no romantic connection between him and Eve.

Why couldn't a gender neutral robot love another gender neutral robot? Even with "gender" I am pretty sure Breez and Evo couldn't "make" robots any more efficiently than two genderless robots. If you are saying that humans can only associate with characters with a human gender, then doesn't that severly limit the empathy and symphony that humanity can give?

**Dorek** · October 14, 2011

Why couldn't a gender neutral robot love another gender neutral robot? Even with "gender" I am pretty sure Breez and Evo couldn't "make" robots any more efficiently than two genderless robots. If you are saying that humans can only associate with characters with a human gender, then doesn't that severly limit the empathy and symphony that humanity can give?

They can, but without the concept of gender, the concept of "love" is ultimately distorted. We already had BIONICLE, where the only kind of love we saw was platonic, but they still had genders. You can't have something completely alien and expect humans to empathize; that's what villains represent. You can give them certain characteristics befitting a type or another, but without gender to contextualize them, they become incomprehensible in terms of motivation. Not to mention the fact that they have voices; when you have clearly set them apart in terms of everything but calling it gender, there's nothing left to do but label it.

It's been well documented that audiences as a whole connect better with things the closer to human they are. Disney is a prime example of this; even with non-humanoids, they experience very real, human emotions, which allows audiences to understand what they are experiencing and place it in the proper context.

We need a generalized HF topic =P

Play With Fire · October 14, 2011

On the topic of characters not feeling like... well, characters, Stringer doesn't really feel like he's a real character in the TV series. He just feels like he has no personality and he's just a cowboy, nothing more to it (and he also happens to have at one point herded cattle). Breez and Stringer just feel like living stereotypes, and I really hope something is done in the TV series about it. Now, I never saw The Enemy Within all the way through (watched the first five minutes or so at a friend's house, then stopped paying attention), so I don't know if Stringer or Breez really got anything important character-wise in that. To me, Stringer's rookie-friendly and music-loving attitude wasn't really showing at all.

Mesonak · October 14, 2011

Apologies for disrupting the conversation you guys've got going on, but finalized pictures of the 2012 sets just got found by yours truly (on the same site that the finalized Ultrabuild sets were found at). Here's the link for those interested.

I went ahead and compiled all the pictures found into a gallery along with the prelim pictures. That can be found here.

They all look almost exactly the same as they did before, except Black Phantom which looks to be quite a lot better than I had thought he'd be, even though almost nothing has been changed except the pieces now have that glossy effect that they always do when finalized

-Mesonak

Play With Fire · October 15, 2011

Apologies for disrupting the conversation you guys've got going on, but finalized pictures of the 2012 sets just got found by yours truly (on the same site that the finalized Ultrabuild sets were found at). Here's the link for those interested.

I went ahead and compiled all the pictures found into a gallery along with the prelim pictures. That can be found here.

They all look almost exactly the same as they did before, except Black Phantom which looks to be quite a lot better than I had thought he'd be, even though almost nothing has been changed except the pieces now have that glossy effect that they always do when finalized

-Mesonak

Those simple touches made on Black Phantom somehow make him look a LOT better.

Still disappointed in the usage of the Glatorian heads, the faces just don't look right to me anymore and the transparent colors don't work to me. I also don't like the lack of a chest plate, but I suppose there isn't one because it would limit the posability of the crappy Glatorian heads.

Vinyl Scratch · October 15, 2011

Apologies for disrupting the conversation you guys've got going on, but finalized pictures of the 2012 sets just got found by yours truly (on the same site that the finalized Ultrabuild sets were found at). Here's the link for those interested.

I went ahead and compiled all the pictures found into a gallery along with the prelim pictures. That can be found here.

They all look almost exactly the same as they did before, except Black Phantom which looks to be quite a lot better than I had thought he'd be, even though almost nothing has been changed except the pieces now have that glossy effect that they always do when finalized

-Mesonak

Oh god.

Look at Splitface, closely in his neck.

You can see they are two parts.

**Dorek** · October 15, 2011

Dude, don't apologize. The conversation was getting derailed anyway XP. Those pictures are the shiznit. BP isn't terribly different, but he looks a lot more well done, even if the build is the same. This line is gonna rock.

Play With Fire · October 15, 2011

Is it just me, or does it look like Black Phantom is in... oh no...

He's in the Hero Factory's Assembly Tower.

Oh crap. This just got real. Looks like 2012 is going to be really exciting!

Tanma · October 15, 2011

Great find, Surge's shoulder plates look just weird to me though. Wait, does Breez have rocket boots? Was that there the whole time, and did I only just notice it? Evo still looks as great as ever.

On the matter of Nathan Evo, every time I hear his full name I think of that evil X-Man geneticist. And while looking at his metallic arm I can easily associate him with Cable. And somehow his eyes, chest symbol, and the prior connections put me in the mind of Nate Grey. Anyone else seeing these links, or am I just imagining them?

Edited October 15, 2011 by Tanma

Play With Fire · October 15, 2011

Great find, Surge's shoulder plates look just weird to me though. Wait, does Breez have rocket boots? Was that there the whole time, and did I only just notice it? Evo still looks as great as ever.

On the matter of Nathan Evo, every time I hear his full name I think of that evil X-Man geneticist. And while looking at his metallic arm I can easily associate him with Cable. And somehow his eyes, chest symbol, and the prior connections put me in the mind of Nate Grey. Anyone else seeing these links, or am I just imagining them?

The rocket boots were always there.

**Dorek** · October 15, 2011

The rocket boots were always there.

Yeah, we ended up debating on whether or not they would go through with that idea =P

Also somebody needs to make a gallery, so I can be lazy and not work around the fact that they're php files.

Vinyl Scratch · October 15, 2011

Yeah, we ended up debating on whether or not they would go through with that idea =P

Also somebody needs to make a gallery, so I can be lazy and not work around the fact that they're php files.

ohai

Credit Meso.