Spoiler: LL7 The Scavengers trace the signal of the Rod Squad's death transmission back to the Necroworld because why not, and wind up locating Tailgate...and just when they figure out how to dig him up, a giant moon appears in the sky a la the moon from Majora's Mask. A ship flies down. As the dust from its landing clears, everyone is coughing...and out of the cloud, a familiar voice quotes Minerva McGonagall: "Why is it whenever something happens, it is always you five." And Fort Max storms out of the ship, appalled and disgusted that he's faced with these numbskulls again Just as the Scavengers try to talk their way out of things, another figure emerges from the ship. "Who the fuck are you?" Prowl asks, quoting the Most Popular Girls in School, equally disgusted. "And where is my idiot ex?" Tailgate is like, hey Fort Max! I know that guy! While Misfire just starts wailing because it's fucking Prowl. Sabbatical his ass, it's fucking Prowl
Spoiler KAPUT IS PHARMA 2.0 They go to a fun little planet on a fun little adventure with a bit of serious driving it (passing on CMO position, dealing with guilt gun) Oh god sudden carnage oh jesus what Hey, would you just look at this nice friendly doctor who some of us have a positive history with Hey, would you just look at this SECRETLY SUPER SKETCHY DOCTOR oh my god dude what are you trying to accomplish here Sketchy doctor carries out sketchy mad science medical experiment, promptly has head removed from body by person on murderous vengeance quest. Pharma is all flash and style, while Kaput is more of a Harold Shipman, but this is... REMARKABLY similar. And Kaput showed up around the same point in LL as Pharma did in MTMTE. Goddammit, I'm going to have to write an exhaustive rundown of all the Kaput content, aren't I. Why do I do this to myself XD
"Kaput, the surgeon who had concluded (rather too quickly for Ironfist's liking) that it was impossible to safely remove the bullet" - Ironfist, listing the three people who knew about his "accident" "I could've saved him, you know. Fisitron. Ironfist. I think about that a lot." - First Aid, calling Kaput's assessment horseshit
on its own it is Small, but with everything else it makes me Suspicion. if nothing else: he is not the Best Doctor and it is Weird that everyone is going to him for help with Everything
... tfwiki says Kaput was stationed on Kimia station at some point with... a bunch of mad science types. Like. Brainstorm, Perceptor, Wheeljack, Swerve and several others. He is at least mentioned to have worked with Brainstorm in specific. This does not actually make me any less suspicious.
That Bullets screencap is file 01 in my Kaput folder and I never would have noticed if you hadn't brought it up :D And..... That is true, mister new institute 1 and mister new institute 2 are not exactly the best gauge of how on the level his work was. Also ironfist had just finished developing a weapon where the ethics committee labeled use of it as a war crime. That's the gun that got him. The gun itself was sabotaged by That One Asshole, but I wonder if anyone in upper management was like wink wink nudge nudge over it. AND ironfist had already been right at the center of the inquiry over gideon's glue and who gave it to the decepticons. Of course, Brainstorm also presents things to the committee, and his tastes run... extreme, and he hasn't been killed. But hm. This needs a tiny piece in my meta.
Spoiler Feel free to jump off mine if you need to yoink pics of Kaput nonsense in 7! But yeah. I looked Kaput up in the TFWiki and the fact that he was involved even tangentially in the Ironfist thing makes me EVEN MORE SUSPICIOUS. He is a suspicious unicycle man
Spoiler: LL07 I mean, witnessed, but I don't think this is bc of stuff being rushed, I think these are plot beats. You're SUPPOSED to take it super personal and get caught up in what's happening w/ Tailgate and Cyclonus and Fangry and even Lug being back so so good that you miss out on the fact that nothing that Kaput is saying makes factual sense. And you're supposed to catch that Kaput thing hours to weeks later, imo. So it's a deeply upsetting story on a surface level AND on the deeper level of what is Kaput doing, what has he done, oh no. But the fact that the story rushes so quickly to 'The End!' for Tailgate is really indictative that it isn't the end. As for Cyclonus, if you're overinvested in him distance might be a good idea. But at least, right now he's got Whirl with him, and Whirl isn't always a good friend but he's been increasingly good for Cyclonus. Cy isn't alone, and he might feel hopeless in the moment but Whirl isn't going to let him rot in his own emotions. Whirl is not going to let Cyclonus fall without a safety net, even if he can't stop the emotional fall Cy is having. I think that quiet little scene of Cyclonus starting to self-harm and Whirl just grabbing his arm, saying 'no', and them sitting quietly together was really good and actually like, hopeful for the both of them. BC Whirl can't force Cyclonus to Be Healthy but he can like... be there for him and provide an alternative.
Spoiler: LL07 In conclusion, I am greatly enjoying the dawning horror of Kaput. He looked like a good good helper boy, he really did! But guys? I'm pretty sure he's a bad bad naughty boy.
Hey, hey, hey, hey you guys you guys Spoiler: LL07 It is entirely possible that Kaput lied about a very important tidbit to Anode. Which is that he does understand. And that he can do it on purpose. It''d make sense, he's the Spark Guy. He is the super genius about shit having to do with the soul crystal bullshit lights. It has also been established on a few occassions that the one truly reliable way to kill the fuck out of a transformer is snuffing their spark, that Decapitations means nothing. Because the brainmodule does not hold all the data and the data it does hold can be temporarily stored in the spark we just learned. Plus you never know how dead someone is until they're grey. Guys I think Kaput is either not dead or is planning to make a big fucking comeback with some Moriarity-esque plot necessitating his murder at Fangry's hands here.
I just realized it's entirely possible for a transformer to alter themselves so that their brain is no longer in their head. Any of those 3 super-important essential organs, actually. There'd probably be lag-time from sensory organs in the head to your brain, but in the matter of like, nanoseconds. And why leave all your sensory organs in your head, either? Put your ears on your chest, nobody can tell!!!
They yoinked metroplex's brain and took it on an adventure to his shoulder, and didn't act like it was a huge deal. Oooh, this is interesting. If we look at the vague references to Rossum's rule of thirds and Red Alert and Whirl such, it looks like the spark starts to flicker out when it's isolated from.... Hmmm.......... This is just far enough from real science to make it tricky XD I want to say that if the spark is disconnected from a power supply, it starts to fade. Based on Pharma and Ratchet, the connection to the brain module is the most important factor. Based on Metroplex, you can safely take the brain off on an adventure for a bit without destroying the spark. Based on..... Was it Rung where they specifically mentioned this? There's 'spark support' somewhere in the mix. If Kaput is doing mad spark science, I bet he could have built an emergency life support system in his chassis. And if he was doing mad science with Brainstorm and Chromedome, he's probably experimental enough and close enough to the front lines to go for it. This is interesting. All of this is so INTERESTING also, re: pacing I have no memory, but I think I was among the first cdcf-inspired wave of transformers readers. I know I came in just as issue 47 happened. After that, there have only been two ARCS that happened, dying of the light, and lost light's intro. Dying of the light was pretty frenetic, which makes sense for the climax of a season like they had. But if you look back at the other big starts to the arcs, things always start happening like WHOA. At the beginning of the series, we meet the people, get background.... annnnd we're off at a dead sprint. The ship is flipping out! There's a dead guy in the engine! SPARKEATER! And we barely get to catch our breath before Ratchet is off on his Delphi adventure, with sudden evil doctor and horrifying plague and oh god everything happens so much Season two starts out busy also, and the quantum LL barely pauses before diving into the time travel madness. I think it's easier to take when it's happening as a SET of comics, not as the individual issues drop. And I think the more dignified art helped too :p But I think this has actually been a fairly consistent part of how JRO starts seasons, I just didn't realize when I was just archive bingeing.
Spoiler: LL07 and listen at this point I am just. tinfoil hatting ......... Kaput canonically has a "bad eye". (that's why the lense). Turned down resolution on one of his optics to help with lag? maybe???
I agree. Lost Light has felt kind of rushed reading through it issue by issue but it's really no different than most of mtmte, it's just that I left the archives during the days of deception arc which is really slow in comparison. (I also didn't find Dying of the Light all that fast paced? There's a lot going on, but it felt like each plot point was given more space)
Spoiler: LL7 Yeah same I'm recognizing JRO's very distinct lets-get-this-trainwreck-a-rollin' style that he used in MTMTE so much where SO MANY TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPEN TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE AT ONCE but it's all solved at the end of the arc. In other words, I think we're just getting started here and I am excite.
I think dying of the light benefited a lot from having things happen in a pretty compact area. It didn't feel like so MUCH when we had 'oh, it's megatron's ex, whoops, there's his other ex, they're catty as Fuck until Kaon comes and oh jeez okay then no more Kaon' mixed with a the other stuff when everyone is in easy reach. This one had the galaxy-spanning teleporter shenanigans, introducing us to a complicated new world that whoops no time to learn about it, moving on, plus assorted back-to-normal-universe shenanigans with Killmaster and Brainstorm. Just the necroplanet characters did their thing in about the same amount of space as the whole DOTL, and meanwhile Rodimus is bopping all over Cybertron and stealing moons. The amount of mental distance I had to jump to put the storylines side by side was much more draining. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but hey :B
Spoiler: LL7 If Kaput comes back as literally just a spark-powered wheel man, like a reverse Headmaster, I will die laughing (This is not helped at all by the fact that I already have an OC who stores most of her memories and does most of her processing via her spark, and considers her brain module a redundant calculator that everyone else evolved to be too heavily reliant on) (She's very Old)
So there's a Product Placement on Viewcomic going by the name of Schick Hydrobot & the Transformers. It's about as awful as you'd expect a Bayverse comic advertisement to be. Anyway, two things of note: 1: That's a lot of people who worked on this comic about a transforming shaving razor. 2: Two of them are named Barber and Shearer respectively.
