TFs: DARE TO BE STUPID

Yesgood!

 

He looks so disappointed.

 

"I came down up to tell you to stop"

 

'Can't you leave things unfuckedup for half a million years, is that too much too ask'

 

I just remembered LL 14 came out and got it on Comixology. Good stuff.

...honestly everyone's speculations in here helps a ton for me keeping things straight.

 

I havent finished it but if anyone were interested i could fish my iveblogging of the bayverse novel out of discord for your delectation.

 

I bingeread mtmte and exrid a couple of weeks ago so I'm just going to use this space to YELL INCOHERENTLY about MEGATRON

Spoiler: Megs' character arc I guess

It's easy to draw a line from the thoughtful miner from Tarn to the person who leads a revolution that killed the senate and burned the world. As he says, his life is a series of decisions made in confined spaces: Messatine, the lab table, an interrupted murder in a jail cell. It's after that that things fall apart. Poet Megatron and Tyrant Megatron are recognizably the same person, but there's this big sketchy "it was a long war and things went wrong" in between that just... I don't know. How does it go from "revolution by any means necessary" to "hm yes time to kill organics and conquer the galaxy"?

I know the answer here is "because that's the way it's set up and despite introduced moral ambiguity the decepticons are the mandated villains", but part of it is the holdover red scare nature of the beast. They want him to be Stalin, but they also want him to be Lenin and Marx and Trotsky, the whole arc of history compressed into one person, and conflating them ends up in a very weird place. The hell of the thing is that Megatron is right, and the Autobots' peaceful reforms wouldn't have gotten them anywhere--all it takes for the functionists to take complete power is Megatron not existing. Peaceful protest only gets you so far if the ones in power don't consider you people in any meaningful sense.

(And he and Starscream are the revolution in miniature. Starscream threatens him with all the arrogance of any functionist senator, and Megatron makes a ruin of his plans and tears him down. Then he pushes Starscream until he starts over again. It's a war he can win over and over and over. I don't know that he even realizes he's doing it.)

(There's also this weird and maybe-unintentional undercurrent of classism re: the cold constructed. It's likened to apartheid, but there's little stuff about how forged really is better. Ratchet says cold constructed medic's hands are inferior. The cold constructed tend toward dysphoria because they can't choose their shape. There's the whole business with aequitas and autobot war crimes (but Tyrest was also nuts, so, I mean. Grain of salt). Windblade calls it an abomination. Then there's the special spark in Megatron's cold constructed frame, and on some level it feels like--oh, of course he was smarter and better than the average miner, he wasn't even supposed to be here, an ordinary miner could never have come up with any of this. Even using the archetype of the working class hero, he has to be special in some way. Maybe it's the American-ness of the thing shining through.)

But how did he get to be the tyrant? Why did he never think of stopping? Why was anything short of absolute victory unacceptable? I don't get the sense that he started out looking for power, or wanting to run an empire; he just found himself there, and it stuck, and maybe power corrupts; but after your revolution, when the war drags on one year and ten years and a hundred years and a thousand and all your cities are ashes, what's the point? Is it a sunk cost? Do you go on without compromise because it's all you remember how to do?

Megatron finds power addictive, but it doesn't make him happy. I think it took until the Lost Light for him to figure that out, because he hadn't been happy since he was a miner writing poetry in his spare time and probably not even then.

 

Also I'm fascinated by the idea of Megs interacting with Terminus later on and just having this slow-dawning horrified realization that he's always thought of Terminus as old, but Terminus is maybe a thousand and Primus, Megatron is so much older, now.

 

There's so much of the early and middle parts of the war that we only get to see in tiny pieces. Megatron changed a lot, but he isn't the only one. The Optimus Prime who led the march on the Citadel is not the Optimus Prime who landed on Earth.
For almost all of the characters we see, most or even all of their lifetimes were spent at war, often far away from Cybertron. There is so much room for character development that we don't get to see because it's millions of years across thousands of planets.
But yeah, the Doylist view shows a bunch of conflicting writing, possibly because of conflicting writers.

 

Spoiler

There’s so much fascinating stuff here and I hope I can get my shit together to respond more later. But you’re right about how extremely American the franchise has historically been. So I think it’s really interesting how much of Megatron’s recent writing has been handled by people who aren’t. James Roberts is British. Nick Roche, who wrote Spotlight: Megatron, is Irish. I find myself continually doing the mental equivalent of a head tilt trying to understand the implications that could have on the political context of the comic.

For some reason MTMTE just constantly background keeps reminding me of the Jaspers Warp and I’m not sure I have a solid handle on why. But it’s happening again right this moment and it’s kinda driving me crazy.

 

Spoiler

Now contrast with Optimus Prime (the series, not the character), where we're apparently supposed to be... happy??? That Earth has been colonized Saved From The Evil Invaders Via Annexation : )

 

God, yes, this. And every time there's a crossover event and the GI Joes show up it's like, who the hell are these fascist motherfuckers? Am I supposed to like these people? And sure, maybe some of them are evil because they're possessed by aliens or something, but the others seemed happy enough to go along with torturing a giant robot as it begs you to stop because it's ~just a machine~.

 

There's also the set-up that organic and mechanoid tensions run deep and old, far before Megatron came to power. The best answer to how he got to be a xenocidal monster is paranoia, paranoia possibly (probably?) spurred by acts of mechanoid xenocide carried out by some organic governments. Add that to a deep-seated bigotry that doesn't see organic brains as capable of truly supporting personhood and you get a monster. It's notable that Soundwave has to work to 'hear' humans and presumably other organics, not because we don't have emotions and thoughts and feelings, but because we somehow broadcast on a different wavelength. As soon as Soundwave works that out and actually starts getting input, he rapidly reverses position on organic personhood. There's something similar going on with Megatron despite him not being a telepath... maybe just the fallacy of time, with the lifespan difference.

Of course, the irony is that Megatron's widespread xenocidal tendencies have made Cybertronians extremely virulantly hated on a galactic scale, when without that they'd maybe be distrusted for their size and power, but wouldn't be 'kill on sight'. Megatron's belief that the Cybertronian species must be protected by any means necessary not only killed off most Cybertronians (from Cybertron, not colonies) in a 4 million year long war, it's, uh...

It's not much of a jump to guess that the fear Megatron inspired directly caused the brutal slaughter of the Prion colony, which also makes it doubly ironic that the sole survivor of that massacre, Nickel, joined the Decepticons afterwards and uses it to justify a hatred of organics. We also KNOW the brutal nature of the Decepticon/Autobot war lead to a Camien ship transporting protoforms getting shot down, and the only survivor of THAT, Stardrive, was raised being taught that Cybertronians were violent monsters, because from the outside the Decepticon/Autobot war doesn't really seem like a war with one side protecting organics and the other side killing them, since any planet the war gets dragged to pretty much eventually gets destroyed, except for Earth.

 

If it helps in the GI Joe series this is dealt with and everyone now firmly knows that nope, Cybertronians people. A lot of why the characters were going so far in the initial crossover was because people they trusted were feeding them false information... so it's a conflict between the trust you have in people you know and love, and the trust you have in your own senses. And in the end, the second thing wins, because it gets harder and harder to other the Cybertronians as time goes on.

It probably doesn't help that the shared Earth went through a brutal Cybertronian invasion years previously, either. There's a reason humans are primed to see Cybertronians as killing machines, because that's what they experienced. I'm not denying that I super didn't like the GI Joes initially, but I've softened on them.

 

I think the latest xkcd is relevant to this fandom:


Alt text: "Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them."

Words to live by.

 

Consider Rumble encountering the phrase "we've been rumbled" (ie found out)

 

Clearly he originated the cybertronian equivalent of it.

 

Just happened to come across that panel about Starscream and the list:



Desperately curious about Megatron's linguistic tells, tbh.

 

Forgive my double post, but I was backreading the maccadam tag, and...