Transformers: Kiss Players (franchise)
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| The name or term "Kiss Players" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, seeKiss Players (disambiguation). |
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Transformers: Kiss Players(トランスフォーマー キスぷれToransufōmā Kisu Pure) is a Japanese Transformersfranchisewhich ran from 2006 to 2007, masterminded by artist and writerYuki Ohshima.By virtue of being theonlyTransformers toyline and fiction released in Japan by Takara between the conclusion ofCybertronand thelive-action movie,it was also effectively themainTransformers line in the country for that time, despite its small scope. It takes place in theJapanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity,specifically in the five-year interval betweenThe Transformers: The MovieandFight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers 2010.
The series can be defined as belonging to the extreme creepy end of the "magical girlfetish/horror "genre occupied by series such asNarutaruandBludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan.It derives its name from its controversial gimmick, which involves Transformers getting "power-ups" when they are kissed byhumangirls—the eponymous "Kiss Players"—who fuse with the robots and share their adventures. Although this plotline may seem like a shift in demographics to young girls, it is said that this line was aimed at a much older adult male audience. Indeed, the toys bear an" ages 15 and up "warning, and the subject matter of the accompanying manga is far from child-friendly.
Following the conclusion of its first storyline in late 2006, Kiss Players moved into its second and final phase, which shifted focus to adistinctlymore PG-rated (and "huge Transformers history nerd" ) theme, though it was still kind of heavy on the "cute girls" theme.
TheKiss Playersfranchise comprises:
Additionally, Ohshima's other major contribution toTransformersat the time, the 1-pageInformation Administration Teletraan 15 Go! Go!comic published inDengeki Hobbymagazine, also featured several tie-ins to theKiss Playersstory. These primarily served to introduce readers to theKiss Playersstory and characters when the line was launched, and then later, to summarize the final few radio dramas when both series were drawing to a close.Information Administration Teletraan 15 Go! Go!also featured the first part of a story in whichStarscream's ghost possessed Atari (which was continued in the radio drama), and in the second year, notably incorporated the further adventures ofGlit,Sundor,andRosanna,theKiss Players Positioncassette trio, who were rather confusingly dropped from the radio storyline in its second week and never mentioned again.
Contents |
Storyline
Part 1
Following the events ofUnicron's attackin 2005, in whichGalvatronwas hurled into space byRodimus Prime,theDecepticonleader crash-landed onEarth,his impact utterly devastatingTokyo.This horrific event shattered Transformer-human relations, and the government agency known as theEarth Defense Commandwas formed, led by CommanderHitoshizuku Amaō,who had been driven to her fervent hatred of Transformers by the death of her daughter in the catastrophe. With its headquarters established in Galvatron's impact crater, the EDC set about its assigned task of ridding the Earth of Transformers. To accomplish this, the EDC constructed a fleet of its own man-made Transformers known asAutoroopers,reverse-engineered from the remains of Galvatron himself. With the Autoroopers' added power and the establishment of ananti-electronfield around the Earth, they succeeded in forcing all remaining Transformers to flee the planet. Horrified at what his defeat of Galvatron had wrought, new Autobot leader Rodimus returned theMatrixtoUltra Magnus,and became Hot Rod once again.
As 2006 settled in, Earth had been rendered completely devoid of Transformers, and the rebuilding of Tokyo was underway. Galvatron's impact was revealed to have had a much greater effect than anyone could have predicted—the blast caused by his impact had scattered hisUnicron-empowered cells throughout the planet's atmosphere. When they came into contact with other animals and objects, from marine life to cars, they fused with them, becoming one of many monstrous creatures referred to asLegion.This catastrophe also created the means to defend the world against the Legion—when Galvatron's cells came into contact with human beings, they also become able to fuse with other entities containing his cells by kissing them. With their Autoroopers being the perfect candidates for this "Parasitech"fusion process, the EDC began recruiting and training these" Kiss Players "as combatsquadsto battle the Legion.
Some time after the death of her parents in a Legion attack,Atari Hitotonarifound herself pursued by one of the monstrous creatures. EDC operativeShaoshao Licame to her rescue, but the time-limit of her fusion with her Autorooper,Ne-04,expired and she was ejected from her partner, unconscious. Atari discovered that she was a Kiss Player when she kissed Shaoshao's Autorooper (to the delight of squad commanderHitoshizuku Amaō,who had long known of the girl's potential) and fused with it, defeating the Legion.
Atari was subsequently drafted into EDC Tokyo Autorooper squad, where she was routinely terrorized by her sociopathic teammate,Ringo Chikuma,but managed to make friends withKayu Michikusa.Atari was clearly not suited to EDC life, getting carsick, being embarrassed by the Kiss Fusion, and accidentally swallowing a Legion and having to have her Autorooper shrink down and venture inside her body to remove it. Her most significant escapade during this time was when she was possessed byStarscream's ghost, who had her seek outDoctor Arkevillein order to have the scientist create him anew body,only for it to be almost immediately destroyed by the EDC's Autoroopers.
Following his death in 2005, the legacy of Optimus Prime became something of a rallying point for those disgruntled with the government's anti-Transformer movement. An anti-EDC commando force established itself; among its members wasMarissa Faireborn,the daughter of soldierDashiell Fairebornand a childhood friend of Shaoshao Li, who was once rescued by and often played with Prime when she was a child. When the EDC decided to move Prime's body from America to Tokyo, Marissa and her commando squad staged a violent ambush on the transport vehicles in an attempt to liberate the Autobot commander's remains. The whole affair turned out to be a trap, when Prime's body was revealed to be a decoy concealing an Autorooper unit piloted by Ringo, who gunned down the whole team, save Marissa herself. Realizing that she had been duped, Marissa turned her attention to a familiar container trailer in the convoy, which concealed the real Prime's body. As an out-of-control Autorooper attempted a Parasitech fusion with Prime's body, Marissa discovered that she too was a Kiss Player when, in giving her childhood friend a farewell kiss, she found herself merging with an unexpectedly resurrected Prime, complete with a new body formed from the Autorooper and his own remains. Prime and Marissa went on the run from the EDC, with Prime reluctant to allow Marissa to enter any of their battles. To placate her, he would often allow her to visit beaches under the cover of night, so that she could indulge her passion for surfing. On one such trip the pair were attacked by a Legion that had fused with an octopus. In the course of their adventures and battles, Marissa met Atari, and she and Prime saved her life several times.
Shaoshao, meanwhile, had disappeared from EDC service after her failure to save Atari during the earlier battle with the Legion, spirited away to a hidden facility beneath the EDC headquarters. There, she was to become part of a twisted experiment involving dismembering Legion corpses, only to be saved from a chewey fate when Hot Rod arrived on Earth as part of his mission of redemption. Crashing into the EDC Headquarters, Hot Rod was immediately attacked by the imprisoned Legions, which attempted to fuse with him. Before the anti-electron field could fully disable the Autobot, Shaoshao kissed him and, like Prime, he was reformatted into a new body complete with the Legions' Galvatron cells. Like Marissa and Optimus Prime, the pair soon found themselves on the run from the EDC's forces, but unlike that pair, Shaoshao did not get along particularly well with Hot Rod. This, it turned out, was due to her own dislike of Transformers, due to her belief that Marissa and her friendship had ended when Optimus Prime had taken Marissa away from her. She swore to use Hot Rod's power to defeat Prime and win her friend back, and trained Hot Rod in the martial arts to this end.
Plagued by destructive impulses caused by the Galvatron cells within his body, Optimus Prime took control of a swarm of Legion units and led them in an attack on the EDC headquarters. Hacking their way through the Autoroopers that opposed them, Marissa and Prime found their attentions diverted by Hot Rod and Shaoshao, who engaged them in battle. As Hot Rod accused Prime of being an impostor (since the real deal was supposed to be dead), Atari fights back her inhibitions and bonds with her Autorooper, successfully managing to turn back the attacking force.
In the wake of this, frivolity became the order of the day, as Shaoshao sulked about Optimus Prime and talked up Hot Rod's skills and weapons, accompanying him on a fishing trip to Tokyo Bay Bridge, where they battled Legions. Marissa lost her underwear and Shaoshao got her hands on it (yeeeeah), and both girls began to reflect on their own pasts, and the histories of their Transformer partners. As Prime and Hot Rod began to suffer violent,Megatron-filled nightmares caused by their Galvatron-cell-infused bodies, Shaoshao witnessed the ghostly figure of a young girl riding on the shoulder of a Legion.
Atari, meanwhile, continued to suffer the whimsical cruelties of Ringo, and could get no help on the matter from Kayu. Angered by her friend's apparent lack of concern, Atari broke a promise to her out of spite. Later, when she sought out her friend to apologize, Atari discovered that Kayu had suffered under Ringo the same way she now was, and that Kayu was now gone, supposedly transferred to another squad within the EDC. Some time later Kayu's Autorooper ran berserk in the EDC headquarters, and Ringo mercilessly gunned it down despite Atari's pleas. Atari's mind went blank, and her own Autorooper went on a rampage, seriously injuring or perhaps even killing Ringo.
Ultimately, Marissa and Prime initiated another attack upon the EDC, clashing once more with Shaoshao and Hot Rod. This time, the foursome were able to settle their differences, and proceeded to team up with Atari to investigate the sinister goings-on beneath the public facade of the EDC which had become increasing apparent during their adventures. Venturing through the "Spiral Vagina"into the"Genital System"facility hidden deep in the basement of the EDC headquarters, the group discovered that much of the misfortune that had befallen them was the result of a twisted plan by Commander Amaō, who had been experimenting with Galvatron's corpse, Kiss Players and Legions in an attempt to resurrect her daughter. Amaō's daughter's soul had been infused into the Legions along with their Galvatron cells, and Amaō sought to resurrect her in the body of a Kiss Player, having selected Atari for the process. Amaō's plan was foiled when Atari fought the process, and all of the Legions and Autoroopers were fused with Galvatron, bringing all his cells together and reconstituting his body. Amaō died in the collapse of the complex, and Hot Rod destroyed the anti-electron field generator, just before Galvatron's cells were also extracted from his and the other Kiss Players' bodies; consequently, Hot Rod and Optimus Prime reverted to their original forms, with Prime returning to his state of death. Galvatron's body was blasted back into space, where it would eventually crash-land on the planetThrull.
Part 2
With the deactivation of the anti-electron field, Ultra Magnus and the "Cassette Players" —Sundor, Rosanna and Glit, a trio ofMini-Cassettesthat performed as a singing group, came to Earth in 2007 to reestablish peace with humanity. Marissa, Shaoshao and Atari joined the Cassette Players, and the group became known as the "Kiss Players", who performed to promote human-Transformer relations and good will. As they sang at theBrave Maximusstop of their world tour, the human trio were approached byAngela,Star DustandZangetsu,the mysteriousSparkbots,who instructed the girls to kiss them. When Marissa, Atari and Shaoshao complied, the Sparkbots whisked them off through time and space aboard Brave Maximus, leaving the Cassettrons behind (to go on to have unrelated adventures withTeletraan 15).
Marissa, Atari and Shaoshao reappeared inAmericaover twenty years earlier to witness Optimus Prime's famous battle with Megatron atopSherman Dam.Invisible to that time period's natives, Marissa was directed by Angela to kiss Prime; when she did so, a portion of what the Sparkbots told her was theAllsparkemerged from within Prime. This, the Sparkbots explained, was the Kiss Players' new mission: to gather all the fragments of the Allspark from Autobot leaders throughout time and space.
After a visit to 2010, where Shaoshao retrieved a fragment from Rodimus Prime, the team visited 2011, but arrived in the year a little too early and wound up stranded on the planetQuintessa,where even their inherent cuteness could not save them from being sentenced to theSharkticonpit by the last of theQuintessons.Thankfully, they were saved by Optimus Prime andGoldbug,and fled back into the timestream, with the Quintessons sucked in behind them and trapped in the rift. Moving a little further forward into 2011, they arrived at their proper time and place, allowing Atari to obtain another Allspark fragment fromFortress Maximus.Marissa proceeded to acquire another piece fromGinrai,and the girls progressively hit upStar Saber,Dai Atlasand several of Optimus Prime's future incarnations for more pieces.
It was when the girls turned their attention to Beast Warriors, going from one end of the timestream to the other to acquire fragments fromOptimus Primal,Lio ConvoyandBig Convoy,that things started getting strange. Soon, a mysterious, giant golden hand began to appear at the moment of Allspark emergence and steal the fragments away. After Shaoshao's attempt at getting a fragment fromRobots in DisguiseOptimus Primewas foiled by this set of disembodied digits, the Kiss Players pursued the hand through time aboard Brave Maximus, only to have their spaceship strike the "Wall of Time", scattering the trio across dimensions. Brave Maximus crash-landed on the planetMasterseveral million years ago, while the three girls were blasted into the different eras of theUnicron Trilogyuniverse and faced unique dangers there. The giant golden hand soon reappeared and rescued them, bringing them back to their native universe. It was revealed that the hand belonged to the Transformer deityPrimus,and that the Sparkbots were, in fact, servants ofUnicronthat had been manipulating the Kiss Players since the beginning—in fact, they were the ones responsible for causing Galvatron to crash on Earth, and the so-called "Allspark" fragments they had instructed the Kiss Players to gather were in truth the scattered pieces ofUnicron's lifeforce.Fleeing to prehistoric Earth, the Sparkbots succeed in resurrecting their master, but Unicron was defeated by Primus, and his lifeforce was sealed away within the planet along with the Sparkbots. Completing the circle, Primus created Brave Maximus to serve as the guardian of Unicron's lifeforce, and the Kiss Players were returned to their own time.
Controversy
When the basic concept ofKiss Players— "toys with figures ofcute girls"—first surfaced, the reaction from the Western fan community was generally unremarkable, amounting to little more than a bit of good-natured eye-rolling and mutterings of" Those wacky Japanese...but if that's what it takes to sell the toys... ", understanding that thereisa certain subset of collector who enjoys such things. Besides, such a premise had been explored before in the short-livedBinaltech Asteriskline (in whichthe first toy in theKiss Playersserieswas originally meant to be released).
This reaction took a sharp turn with the unveiling of theDengeki Daiohmanga. Although not featuring anyexplicitnudity or sexual content, the comic consists of a virtually unceasing stream of images clearly designed to evoke various violent sexual situations, from the endless streams of viscous, white liquid that frequently splatter over the scantily-clad-to-nude cast members, to cowering, flush-faced, teary-eyed girls pressed against walls with their hips raised into the air, to the most (in)famous of all, the distinctive image of theLegion's blatant penis-shaped tongue, leaking goo from agoddamn urethra.Putting the cherry on this sundae of depravity, the manga employs an art style that uses proportions specifically and deliberately designed to make the vast majority of its female characters appear as though they are underage (despite the fiction identifying them as being at least old enough to drive). Subsequent translations of the radio dramas also revealed that the show's dialogue wasloadedwith sexual double-entendres, ranging from humor-based (Optimus Prime deriving pleasure from Marissa rubbing the rim of his gas tank) to grotesque examples blatantly evocative of sexual assault (a shrunken Autorooper forces its way into Atari's mouth and makes her swallow it, followed by her begging it not to "move too roughly inside" her).
Reactions ran the gamut from outright disgust to comedic derision, with most fans agreeing that the transformation of a children's toyline intoborderline pedophiliawas a "bad thing". There were a number of people who claimed, amazingly, that there wasabsolutely nothingwrong with such a thing, and that everyone else simply wasn't understanding it was a "cultural thing" — "it" being... the enjoyment of sexual assault imagery, apparently. This, of course, is in defiance of the fact that manyJapanesefans were themselves openly decryingKiss Players,fearing that American fans would think that this was somehow accepted as "normal" in Japan. The line's writer/designer,Yuki Ohshima,even admitted that he crafted the series in this manner because he wanted to "make people's jaws drop". Mission accomplished, it would seem.
The second half of the series, however, pretty much abandoned the use of overtly sexual content and became a walking tour of all the pastTransformersfranchises. The most "risque" thing the series did was have the girls dressing up in costumes in the hopes that their cuteness would spare them from being dropped into aSharkticonpit. (It didn't work.) Of course, by that point, most fans had written the series off as a pile of depravity and an easy go-to punchline for "worst thing TFs ever". The exact reasons for the tonal shift are unknown; it's possible Takara was reacting to the negative responses, possibly they simply stopped dictating what the tone of the series should be and let manga scribe Yuki Ohshima dictate its new direction. Ohshimahadpublished numerous Transformersdōjinshi(fan-comics), all of them clean, prior to being officially involved with theTransformersseries, and played a heavy role in the massiveretcon-filled grand unified timeline Takara would put forward in this series and other ventures.
Possibly as a result of the majority of fans trying to distance themselves from a fiction that is generally regarded as distasteful, combined with the general inaccessibility of the radio show to an English audience (no pictures!), there is an astonishingly minimal awareness of the specific details of the (horrifying, yet darkly interesting)Kiss Playersstoryline in the fandom.
Notes
- The official logo for the series says "Kiss Play" in Japanese text and "Kiss Players" beneath it in English. To avoid confusion, the English title is used here.
- Kiss Playersis notable—if headache-inducing—for consolidating several previously disparateTransformersstories into one. Timelines officially published with its products incorporated not onlyGeneration 1events, but also those of other time-and-space-bending Japanese G1 spin-offs,Robotmasters,Binaltech,andBinaltech Asterisk,and obscure stories likeThe Battle of the Star Gateand the details of numerouse-HOBBYstories andbiosinto one massive chronicle.
- Most notably of all,Kiss Playersappears to have been the first affirmation thatRobots in Disguise(orCar Robots,to be precise) was part of the Japanese Generation 1 continuity. The storyline links Brave Maximus to the Japanese incarnation of Generation 1 Fortress Maximus, offers an actual origin for Brave Maximus that links him to the story ofBeast Wars II,and explains why Unicron's lifeforce was sealed within Earth in that series.
