Spoiler: ll14 liveblog Tarn got himself a face! Nickel's with the scavengers oh nooooooo Awww grim "You broke his face" I'm dying Is that Tarn she's talking about "You're missing all the exposition!" I'M DEAD I LOVE THESE DORKS EPISTEMUS IS REAL Nickel :c EYYYY EYYYYYYYY Aaaand there's the torture UM. I'm going to assume this is in the pile of "shit isn't real" with 13, because this feels really unusual for JRo.
Spoiler: LL 14 I thought this was just an amusing line, but was so specific I went ahead and searched it. Nope, apparently racist physiotherapy students was an actual thing: http://ewn.co.za/2017/10/27/up-students-suspended-over-racist-video On one hand I'm disappointed in humanity. On the other hand I appreciate the joke even more with the context. In other LL14 news, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA my feelings.
Spoiler: LL14 UM. WHAT? I'm assuming there's going to be some kind of further reveal like for Tailgate and all the other crazy ?????? nonsense, but. WOW. I am loving that Tarn/Shockwave dynamic. I have said a ridiculous amount of words that I should think about reformatting to share about Tarn and radicalization and idealization/disillusionment, and since he's sort of dead and all, I never would have expected to get that kind of content showing up in canon. But oh my god though Shockwave: That is illogical Tarn: YUP Shockwave: ??????????? Also, if Grimlock was specifically one of two people Megatron moved up the DJD's list himself, I feel like the other one has to be important. I don't know if it would be Shockwave, his treason was pretty significant, but also difficult to even comprehend and pretty subtle until the universe started imploding. I would love to know if Starscream was ever on the list, or if he just knew he was riding a very, very dangerous edge with Megatron (but I think tarn would be super effective against starscream, in terms of personality and talents, as like... a pokemon type advantage over starscream. i'm too lazy to write about that now, but maybe later). Who else do we really have who's that notable of a defector/traitor? Scorponok did large-scale planning, but I don't know if he would have mattered that much. There's Drift, but he was late in the game and he was still one murder-happy soldier, not any kind of commander or someone with big plans. If there are good candidates buried in the eighties lore, I would probably miss them, I barely even knew the dinobots had been decepticons at some point (and did the comics even mention it before now?). Oh, but shout-out to the Scavengers being all 'just like an autobot with those excuses' over the magnificence being stolen, when 1) yessss give me that lack of charity in all directions, and 2) there was totally a decepticon up to his elbows in this game you dumb silly sods, everyone has been fighting a dirty war for ages and nobody's hands are clean, but 3) YESSSSS give me that evidence of foul play on the other side being used to justify your own foul play, and making everything much uglier and more factionalized. And that includes their lack of charity directed at Nickel and hers directed at them. They can't all be dead, because I need more of everyone's faces being rubbed in The Enemy being actual people. There are so many QUESTIONS. Jro has to start answering some of them soon, because this is killing me :C And that doesn't even touch on the everything surrounding the Magnificence. Or the leftover Getaway, Tailgate, and hijacked-corpse-spaceship questions. I'm dying, and I'm already looking forward so hard to reading this as a full story, with answers in the actual pages I am holding, not lurking out somewhere in the vague future.
Spoiler: LL14 WAIT, actually, one thing about the Magnificence. Okay, so in TAAO, Windblade brought up the outsider's perspective of DDDDDDDD: at the idea of cold construction being a thing. And we know that for the cold construction, there was a while where the Primes didn't have the matrix in their chests, but the matrix was in a lab with its energy being bled off to create the stores of new mechs ready to be activated. If I recall correctly. And at some point a scientist got distressed enough over this to steal the matrix and replace it with a fake, and after so long of using it, everyone else assumed that it had just run out of energy. Awright, so the matrix is about life, and it was exploited with mad science for the purposes of creating life. The magnificence is about truth. Aequitas is a very confusing high-powered science thing that is about truth. The connection isn't quite as direct as I might want, because aequitas was driven significantly by guilt rather than reference to a cold, objective truth. But that's still getting into aequitas being used to verify the truth of someone's feelings, or the truth of their words in terms of what they know. Plus the matrix is chest-mounted, and having a matrix-shaped hole in your chest is both uncommon and also a huge deal. And the magnificence is chest-mounted, and the magnificence-shaped hole looks similar enough to the matrix hole for people to momentarily confuse them. (and both have a sphere motif going on, which also interests me because cybertronian spark chambers and brain modules are also sphere-shaped. And t-cogs too? I don't remember for sure. I'm not going to go down this road much further, because I do not even know what is the heck with the idea of the magnificence being a former person who gave up most of their body. But that's Rossum's triad, the three main organs that cybertronian life revolves around. So I'm.... intrigued.) Optimus was externally modified to be able to hold the matrix, and Shockwave drove that process. And Shockwave and Grimlock were held in Garrus-9 at the same time, and both eventually emerged, and here's Grimlock sporting a conveniently shaped hole for mounting an object in his chest. We don't know when he got that, but it's a PRETTY direct parallel. Anyways, if we gave any credit to the idea that the magnificence is a person (and a knight of cybertron), and the magnificence is used and carried in these ways that parallel the matrix, I'm wondering what that potentially says about the matrix. Or if that's totally off-base, I'm wondering what these parallels say about the magnificence. If it is a knights of cybertron thing, that means there are theoretically three other super-artifacts out there. We've got life and truth with those two, I guess. I don't know if these parallels are meant to suggest anything beyond the similarities between those two artifacts, but I am also very intrigued about a grand entrance for a cybertronian captain planet. fake edit: FUCK. WAIT. Spherical organs. Spherical brain modules and spark chambers. If the magnificence was a person, what are the odds that the matrix used to be part of that person too? The brain and truth, and the spark and life. I have no idea whether the story will go into any sort of direction like that, but these are some weird-ass parallels. I need to collect screencaps and write a post as soon as I get home.
Anyone want some memories from MTMTE #21 that raise more questions than they answer? Spoiler: MTMTE #21, many large image Skids follows Tyrest through the portal to supposed Cyberutopia: Later:
Spoiler: no LL spoilers but re: those mtmte 21 images Wow, the visual similarities here... I can't find the best-best images from this computer, but. Palette aside, the coloring on the spark is pretty much the same shading scheme as that other image. And the sphere with erratic tall pointy bits is a pretty darn distinctive shape. jro, i just. answers. please. you can't do me this way. i'm barely recovered from the long, endless rounds of speculation over dying of the light.
Spoiler: LL14 It occurs to me that Rodimus, whom Drift believes is essential to the quest to find the Knights of Cybertron, has used both the Matrix and the Magnificence. Unrelatedly, I was thinking, at least that finally explains why Grimlock drew that symbol on the wall, except then I realized that it kinda really doesn't yet.
Spoiler: LL The Magnifence/Resus Cradle being the disembodied processor of a Cybertronian would oddly fit with my theory that it couldn’t have really resurrected Skids from just his processor, actually. They claimed the Magnificence as the Cradle could resurrect mechanical lifeforms, but if it’s basically a super search engine, the best it might be able to do is copy and paste a copy of the dead mech’s mind (or just a copy of the Magnificence’s original mind...) onto a body that’s little more than an automaton. The spark/soul is probably required for a true resurrection like we see with Lug and Anode, since, as we saw with Rung earlier, getting your processor blown up means basically nothing if your spark is intact
Spoiler: LL On another tangent, I could easily see the Magnifcence being somehow drained of its power in this arc, similar to how the Matrix was left a hollow shell pre-MTMTE. The Matrix, the Magnificence...what would a good M-word be for a super transformation cog analog?
Spoiler well, the word 'magnificence' doesn't really connect to 'super brain' so it could really be anything
Spoiler: ll14 Huh, it also occurs to me that the limited role of the Magnificence in IDW so far has been very connected to guilt. Rodimus had that whole thing in phase one with Dealer/Doubledealer where he thought he'd been responsible for the deaths of most of his team plus the capture of Dealer while trying to keep the Magnificence out of Decepticon hands. (Just like the Scavengers thought.) He went to incredible lengths to infiltrate a Decepticon prison and break Dealer out. Of course it turned out that the operation had failed due to Dealer's sabotage. They ended up back at the scene of the incident, with the Magnificence. Rodimus put two and two together in time to ask the Magnificence one question: whether Dealer had betrayed them. It said yes. Horrible all-consuming guilt sort of absolved! Shoot out happens!
Spoiler: i'm sorry i can't stop speculating :V Or if the magnificence really is an eye, then two eyes + the brain/spark/t-cog triad brings us up to five spherical organs. And I can see an eye being a sentient search engine that relates back to truth. Slash right now we've also got rodimus and company riding around in the repurposed corpse of a dead mech, and ambulon was just used as part of a combiner despite being deceased. We've just gotten two very prominent examples of dead mechs still serving some kind of mechanical function even after the person inside is dead. This is INTERESTING! :DDD
Spoiler So we're still looking for Mortilus and Adaptus, then? Since we've got Primus who became Vector Sigma, Solomus, now a dead pair of crystal halves, and Epistemus, now in Scorponok's possession. Mortilus could be either something connected to Unicron or something connected to the Dead Universe (the Heart of Darkness?)
Spoiler Honestly my money is on Mortilus' artifact being the one that can revive people but in a weird ass disturbing zombie way :P He is Death after all.
Other thoughts I had, only very loosely connected to other stuff here. Mostly wild speculation. Could probably be interpreted as shameless Prowl apologism, not because I think he's a good person even though I really like him as a character, but because I thrive on upsetting moral complexity. Spoiler: Tyrest and Aequitas, LSotW, probably imperfect memory of SotW I'm kinda haunted by the fact that Tyrest and Prowl both observed the Aequitas trials and were both heavily involved in and traumatized by them. According to Rodimus, Tyrest invented Aequitas and the trials were suspended at his request. He then disappeared 25 years before the killswitch incident, and apparently went to the moon. The one that had been missing for 12 million years. Not a guy to accomplish small things. He also seems to be perfectly happy using technology appropriated from questionable sources, such as alien innovations based on Cybertronian tech confiscated under the Tyrest Accord. Like a crooked movie cop who pilfers convenient items from the evidence locker. I'm pretty sure that Sins of the Wreckers had it that Aequitas was actually Tarantulas' invention on behalf of Prowl, but that's probably not something most people in a position to know would want even more people to know. In Last Stand, Prowl told Ultra Magnus that he did not want the records of the trials publicized before the end of the war because of how bad it would make the Autobots look. A PR and a morale problem. Aequitas tried Autobot war crimes. Apparently they were horrendous. Bad enough they broke Tyrest. Then he broke himself even worse, but it started at the trials. According to Tyrest, all the defendants were constructed cold. Because he'd led the team that pioneered cold construction, his overwhelming horror became overwhelming guilt. He started self-harming during the period of time when the trials were taking place by drilling holes in himself. Eventually it wasn't enough and he drilled into his head until he damaged his processor. Which, I mean, it did solve his guilt problem. Apparently Tyrest had knowledge of who was or wasn't constructed cold. It's unclear how common that knowledge was, or whether it was strictly regarding the defendants. Tyrest says that Ultra Magnus, who also witnessed the trials, didn't notice the pattern. That doesn't necessarily say anything about whether he had the data or not. The characters shown on panel witnessing the trials are Prowl, Tyrest, Xaaron, and Nightbeat. I'm not sure who else besides Ultra Magnus is supposed to have witnessed them. I'm not sure whether all these characters were there for the whole thing, though I think it's pretty clear that Tyrest and Prowl at least were fixtures. I don't think we know Xaaron's origin. Tyrest was obviously forged. Ultra Magnus was also forged. Prowl and Nightbeat were both constructed cold. Neither one of them is remotely stupid. You can't convince me for an instant that Nightbeat, if he stuck around for any significant number of these trials, would not have noticed Tyrest's growing distress. Let alone frikkin drill holes. I find it unlikely that he wouldn't have eventually worked out the reason. He decoded Rodimus' cryptic hand of shame, he could totally handle this mystery. If Tyrest knew about the defendants, did he know about Prowl and Nightbeat? Wouldn't that be REMARKABLY AWKWARD? Would Prowl have worked it out? Prowl obviously realized something was up with Tyrest at some point because he sent two spec ops agents to forcibly resign him from office, which just can't not sound like a euphemism for murder even though it isn't. Getaway said they'd been tracking him for years, so it wasn't a super recent realization. Near the end of LSotW, Prowl is shown holding what he believes to be the only copy of the Aequitas trial records. He is squeezing it, obviously contemplating destroying it, though it's not shown whether he did. Does he have any idea that the trials recorded on that slug don't just paint an unflattering picture of the Autobots, they could also be interpreted as a condemnation of people who are constructed cold? Does he have any clue that Tyrest will eventually use those trials as justification for attempted genocide, and he will be one of the victims? Would Tyrest be the only one who might see it that way?
Spoiler I think Xaaron is probably forged; he was prominent even before the war, being basically the symbol for due process (such as it was under the Senate). I don't think someone who was cold-constructed would have been able to rise so high in those days.
Spoiler: Relevant to LL14 discussion, huuuuuge image not joking A relevant excerpt from Cyclonus' version of the creation story he told in the MTMTE 2012 Annual:
Spoiler: LL I can't for the life of me remember which issue it is, but that guy the LL crew visits looking for knight-related artifacts mentions he has an old version of the list with Starscream on it. I'd love to know how he wrangled himself out of that. Man though, Starscream wouldn't know how to handle Tarn at all. He's all about plans and loud misdirection. Tarn would be like, all right then, you have my full attention :) as Starscream breaks out in a cold sweat.
Spoiler People I can think of off the top of my head who have done extended Mortilus impersonations: Sunder Tarantulas People I can think of off the top of my head with a history of worshipping Mortilus: Roadbuster The previous owners of the Lost Light I'm automatically slightly nervous about anybody who thinks Mortilus is a good idea.
