You’ve come to the right place for hot Prowl news! 🙂
It’s a canon thing, although I will admit I may have exaggerated the number of his canonical exes for comedic effect. 🙂 Basically, you’ve got:
Chromedome: Canon dances around this one a bit, but I think the implication is definitely supposed to be that they were together (hence Rewind’s jealousy, Prowl talking as though future plans for one of them were automatically future plans for both, etc.). Possibly the least questionable of Prowl’s exes, but the breakup was clearly bitter and they did some vicious things to one another in the wake of it, so as a data point in the theory of “Prowl tends to leave people pretty wrecked behind him”, I think it works.
Sins of the Wreckers: I don’t want to spoil too much if you haven’t read it, but – it’s revealed pretty early on that the Big Bad of Sins of the Wreckers is Prowl’s ex-boyfriend (described as such on-panel), who obsessively wants him back and is willing to go to great lengths to get him. Probably the MOST questionable ex, both in terms of personality and in terms of how much the breakup affected him. (Some hinky shit went down on both sides of that breakup, as well.)
Those are basically the two canon exes – and, I’d argue, a list certainly not inconsistent with Prowl being somewhere in the demi range at least (especially if you headcanon one or both as one-sided). But I think there’s also a… how shall I say, a pattern in Prowl’s way of interacting with people, whereby certain people end up kind of hooked on his presence/approval and it messes with them when he withdraws that, or in some way disappoints them. It’s fascinating, because Prowl’s a heartbreaker in a way that’s not necessarily romantic or sexual.
The Constructicons fall so head-over-heels for Prowl’s brain that they follow him across a desert to merge with him, and react with violent jealousy when he leaves Devastator for a new combiner in Combiner Wars. There’s a character called Stardrive whom you might not have encountered yet if you’re still catching up, who falls in with Prowl, and she spends a fair amount of time basically complaining that he’s sweet-talked her into this and she’s increasingly uncomfortable with what they’re doing (not a break-up as such, but you can see how phase 1 – Prowl getting people hooked – takes place). Even Optimus seems to take Prowl’s betrayal harder than he’s ever taken anyone else’s. And this part is speculation, but I’ve always thought that the way Getaway talks about Prowl is more than a little admiring… not necessarily the healthiest setup for someone as fundamentally insecure as Getaway, and as prone to go to extremes to get others’ approval.
I would also love to see the idea taken even further in other continuities, to the point where Prowl just does leave a trail of wrecked lives and panting admirers behind him, maybe even without consciously noticing it. 🙂
WAIT what was that about Hot Rod?? (This is gonna be something depressingly heteronormative, isn’t it, as opposed to like, Hot Rod: *exists* The entire cybertronian race: *suddenly dtf*)
It is PAINFULLY heteronormative, and I like your version a lot better – it’s way more plausible. 🙂
Basically, there’s an issue of the Marvel comics called Prime’s Rib, which introduces Arcee as the first female Transformer… created on Earth to appease angry human feminists. Yeah. Just for reference, in an interview when he started writing for the new IDW TF series, Simon Furman said he wasn’t happy looking back on this issue, and Spotlight: Arcee was actually his attempt to get the introduction of female Transformers right. Which kind of gives a sense of how bad Prime’s Rib is.
Anyway, at the end of the issue, Hot Rod and Arcee accidentally bump into each other and both go sprawling, at which point a reporter asks Hot Rod what he thinks of female Transformers, and he leers and says he’s “all for them”.
Now.
One of two things is happening here. One, Hot Rod is just expressing attraction to Arcee the way he would towards anyone. “Oooh, he’s hot! Sorry, what? She? Okay, she’s hot. What’s a female, btw?” That would be perfectly reasonable, but I don’t think it’s what the creators intended, given that a) it was 1989 and b) a previous issue had made a big deal out of the idea of Transformers not having sex or romance, as well as not having gender.
So that leaves us with two: Hot Rod spontaneously invented sexual attraction.
Needless to say, I’m way more enchanted with the idea of Prowl sauntering into Tarantulas’s lab and purring, “If anyone can make a weapon that poisons energon supplies so that they corrode the spark from the inside out, it’s you, Tarantulas. You will do it, won’t you? For me?” and Tarantulas just staring at him with big, overwhelmed optics and VIBRATING and finally muttering, “The emotions I am experiencing will require the invention of a new biological function to be satiated.”
And he walks off, and Prowl’s just like, so is that a no on the bomb, or…?
my favourite part is the small crisis halfway through about whether or not beast wars TFs can have sex
YES. 😀 I kind of wonder whether he got caught in his own logic loop – “Wait, I said they can’t have gender because they’re not organic but some of them ARE organic, what do I do??” – or whether Beast Wars is just so chock full of sex jokes that he couldn’t get away from it. 🙂
Beast Wars TFs are the most powerful TFs because they’ve finally obtained the power to fuck. They’re the next stage in Cybertronian evolution.
Which brings up the alarming possibility that this result is the reason why IDW Tarantulas started the Chimeracon project.
I’m really sick of the way certain sections of the Transformers fandom treat the issue of accents in Transformers.
The canon introduces a new character who has, say, a British or Australian accent, and inevitably you get assholes going,
“What?? This doesn’t make sense! Transformers don’t have accents! They’re giant transforming alien robots, they don’t even learn language the same way we do!”
“But… but what about all the other characters’ accents?”
“They don’t have accents! Transformers are ACCENTLESS!!”
“But they clearly do – they all speak in the same kind of standard mid-coastal American -”
“THAT’S NOT AN ACCENT THAT’S JUST THE WAY NORMAL PEOPLE TALK!”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s really -”
“I KNOW WHAT’S BEHIND THIS. DAMN SJWS FORCING HASBRO TO INCLUDE DIFFERENT ACCENTS. IT’S RUINING TRANSFORMERS!”
“But what about all the characters from G1 with non-American accents? Like Perceptor and Outback and -”
“RUINING. TRANSFORMERS!”
Now imagine you’re a little kid in, say, Melbourne who’s just seen your first-ever Transformers episode, and you’re absolutely in love. It’s the best thing you’ve ever seen. And best of all, one of the characters sounds like you! You never see heroes who sound like you on your favourite TV shows!
And then you go on the internet. And you see people telling you that people like you are ruining your favourite show for everyone.
No wonder all the world maps with New Zealand I’ve seen on them here in America are reduced-to-clear
I’m sorry – I’m actually really not sure whether this is calling me out for using the accent thing as a metaphor, or whether I didn’t get across clearly that it IS a metaphor. I’m sorry if it was insensitive to use this to make the gender point.
I get that it was a metaphor, but it was a very insensitive metaphor to use. The message was “Here, I’m going to describe your entire life experience perfectly and then make it about something else because you and your country don’t exist and it doesn’t matter because nobody really experiences that kind of a thing anyway.”
When the rest of the world even deigns to acknowledge that New Zealand exists it’s only to make Kiwis the butt of jokes or use us to the advantage of the bigger and more populous nations. We exist and I’m tired of people acting like we don’t.
Representation is important, I get that. Gender representation and breaking conventional gender stereotypes is something I’ve spent my life fighting for. I’m just tired of my country being erased and our experiences being crapped on so someone from a “real” country can make a point.
You’re right, and I should have taken that into account. I’m really sorry.
I’m really sick of the way certain sections of the Transformers fandom treat the issue of accents in Transformers.
The canon introduces a new character who has, say, a British or Australian accent, and inevitably you get assholes going,
“What?? This doesn’t make sense! Transformers don’t have accents! They’re giant transforming alien robots, they don’t even learn language the same way we do!”
“But… but what about all the other characters’ accents?”
“They don’t have accents! Transformers are ACCENTLESS!!”
“But they clearly do – they all speak in the same kind of standard mid-coastal American -”
“THAT’S NOT AN ACCENT THAT’S JUST THE WAY NORMAL PEOPLE TALK!”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s really -”
“I KNOW WHAT’S BEHIND THIS. DAMN SJWS FORCING HASBRO TO INCLUDE DIFFERENT ACCENTS. IT’S RUINING TRANSFORMERS!”
“But what about all the characters from G1 with non-American accents? Like Perceptor and Outback and -”
“RUINING. TRANSFORMERS!”
Now imagine you’re a little kid in, say, Melbourne who’s just seen your first-ever Transformers episode, and you’re absolutely in love. It’s the best thing you’ve ever seen. And best of all, one of the characters sounds like you! You never see heroes who sound like you on your favourite TV shows!
And then you go on the internet. And you see people telling you that people like you are ruining your favourite show for everyone.
No wonder all the world maps with New Zealand I’ve seen on them here in America are reduced-to-clear
I’m sorry – I’m actually really not sure whether this is calling me out for using the accent thing as a metaphor, or whether I didn’t get across clearly that it IS a metaphor. I’m sorry if it was insensitive to use this to make the gender point.
Decepticonsensual's Armada 