RODIMUS TWINK DISCOURSE: harvey liveblogs MTMTE!

HE'S SUCH A DOUCHENOZZLE AND I LOVE IT. By which I mean oh my god stop hurting the sweetest boy ever who keeps giving you fresh chances, PLEASE.

I'm half asleep and also a massive massive massive Cyclonus stan, but I'll just say like.... everything he's got going on that helps explain the bad attitude, and everything he's struggling with and refusing to share with the class because he doesn't roll that way, everything sympathetic in his backstory, NONE of it excuses the way he's treated Tailgate up to this point.

And I could write/have written essays on why he's got the extra attitude on top of his natural temperament, and I might throw some backstory details out there when I'm not in the middle of passing out. But the teal deer is that I would die for him because I am a sucker for character development arcs, and he's one of the frontrunners for that in the comics, and like. I love him so very much and like with Starscream, it also means I love him when he's terrible XDDDD

 

(also no spoilers BUT that dramatic moment pissing you off becomes double extra painful later and it's so good)

(wait the pain actually doubles once soon and AGAIN later, SO. Four times the pain!)

 

The unfortunate thing is that the traumatic backstory is buried in the Worst parts of phase one (i legitimately gave up and skipped ahead because I hated it so much), with additional flavor in the dark cybertron arc in phase two, which is hit and miss, with some good character moments, but Cyclonus is stuck in the ramondelli art pit, unfortunately :p I'll see if I can pull together a quick executive summary tomorrow when I need a break from work! He got a lot of screen time in phase one, but the bulk of that was SHITTY screen time.

And the characters who make my ears perk up fastest.... It's probably Starscream, Prowl, Whirl, and Cyclonus, and it says things about me that even pre-development, Cyclonus is probably the nicest boy in the bunch :pppp (i also harbor a shameful passion for pharma, just in case you were in danger of thinking at any point that I had good taste in characters :VVV)

 

Prowl does most of his worst shenanigans outside MTMTE, and not... allllll of it was his fault, but he's been a bad boy in some..... significantly war crime-y ways XDDDDDD

But! Cyclonus backstory. No wiki checking here, we die like men.

Spoiler: i talk forever

Our story starts six million years ago, in the golden age of Cybertron. Cyclonus is a bodyguard to this dude named Galvatron. Galvatron is a warlord slash gladiator slash man of violence. In the eighties, he was born when space orson welles took Megatron's corpse, and remade him into someone new and different and you have to buy all these new toys kids tell your parents!! So he's got some unique character of his own, but he's cut from the same mold as Megatron.

Back in the golden age, Cybertron had been finishing wrapping up what came before the golden age, which was manymany years of brutal on-planet civil war. This was more contained than the autobot/decepticon war, but was supposed to be intensely violent and there was some crazy factional stuff going on, like the low numbers of beast-mode transformers in current Cybertron is a whole THING. There were a number of Titans involved, who are robots the size of cities and/or colony ships, and the 13 historical primes in the mix. Most everyone who lived through the civil war takes a look at the autobots and decepticons and is like HA, you babies and your baby war, that is so CUTE!!!! We don't get much detail about what happened, and TRAGICALLY, most of the detail we do get is through Ramondelli, but Galvatron was in the thick of it, and emerged out the other end with some kind of high rank. Cyclonus wasn't really in the comics we've seen, I think, but he was Galvatron's 'favorite bodyguard'.

Now, the Ark. Once they hit the golden age, there was this whole Thing with wanting to spread ~pax cybertronia~ and Nova Prime, who was Galvatron's boss, was like I'M GONNA TAKE A SHIP AND WE'RE GONNA GO ON A SPACE ADVENTURE. AND SPREAD PEACE. BY FORCE, IF NECESSARY. Galvatron was along for the ride, and Galvatron brought his favorite bodyguard along with him.

As a sidebar, there's like a..... weird cabal of mad scientists in this comic, and a LOT of them are tied together as teachers and students. Most of them are Decepticons, and Brainstorm and Ironfist are probably the closest the autobots come to participating in that, but on the Decepticon side you've got a knot of people surrounding Shockwave. There's Scorponok, Bludgeon, and Killmaster, in the recent story, and I'm not checking my sources, but a LOT of people have learned mad science from Shockwave. Shockwave learned from Jhiaxus. When Nova Prime went off in his spaceship, he brought Jhiaxus along as his pet mad scientist.

So, Nova Prime was like WOO PAX CYBERTRONIA! Galvatron and Jhiaxus were like WOOOO SMASHING THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM! And they tore a hole in the universe and ended up in the 'dead universe'. Which is a parallel universe of some kind, made of.... death? Almost everyone on board the ship promptly started dying, but slowly. It took a long time. Six million years later, of the officers, Nova Prime, Galvatron, and Jhiaxus were alive. Of everyone else, Cyclonus was alive, technically, and this other guy called Scourge (who was like 75% dead at this point, iirc). Cyclonus references Scourge as an old friend in his first mtmte appearance, I think.

At this point, the officers playing their weird-ass games against each other were ready to bust back into the regular world. Timing-wise, this worked out to being right near the end of the autobot-decepticon war, but them cannonballing into the plot ended up being a big factor in the war actually ending. Galvatron mostly led this part of the action, and took Scourge and made a ton of zombie clones of him, 'Sweeps', to be his army. I'm not sure if original flavor Scourge was still mentally there in any of this, or if Cyclonus watched his boss kill his last friend. And Galvatron took.... partial mental control of Cyclonus too, and sent him off into the regular universe to do Shenanigans.

Galvatron was steering Cyclonus in a very murdery way, and a this-might-destroy-cybertron-but-so-what way. Cyclonus was able to exert a little independence, but not much. At this point in the war, Cybertron was pretty uninhabitable, and right on the hairy edge of being permanently ruined forever. Part of this all was when Cyclonus destroyed the Kimia station, which is what has Chromedome so pissed at him.

Then, god, this part of the plot was where galvatron's shit got completely incomprehensible and I hate it so much. But eventually. There was a plot detour where one of the old primes helped scrub cybertron clean enough that it wasn't actively trying to murder residents. At some point after that, a contingent of autobots and a separate contingent of decepticons finally stopped farting around on earth and arrived on the planet. And then Galvatron crashed in with his army of Sweeps, ready to wreak havoc. The autobots and decepticons tentatively teamed up to fight him, which they did, Megatron theoretically died in the attack, and Cyclonus managed to break free of the mind control and turn on Galvatron, and he was intensely horrified at how he'd been used, and how he'd been used against his home.

So that's roughly where things stand at the beginning of MTMTE. Cyclonus is really religious, but the plot never stops to give us toooooo many details about what that entails, but like, Primes are sacred figures, Titans are sacred figures, and the Vector Sigma, which is a vaguely defined force of life, is sacred, and the process of new sparks being formed is sacred, etc., etc. Most of the Primes are gone, most of the Titans are gone and the ones that are left are so busted up they can barely think. The beautiful old cities are all gone, but it's not just that they were destroyed, the entire PLANET is barely habitable, one of the MOONS is missing, the whole thing has gone to shit. New sparks haven't been formed in millions of years, and nobody seems to care about what a crisis that is, in a spiritual or practical sense, the priorities of everyone who's left seem completely fuckt, and all anyone seems to care about is this stupid autobot-vs-decepticon shit.

So he left at the height of the golden age, which was rich in terms of art and culture and religion, got fucked over and suffered for six million years in a universe made of death, got fucked over HARDER by the guy he served, and then when he finally managed to break free, everything he loved about his home and all those memories he'd been holding onto for millions of years.... totally destroyed.

Some of that is subtextual, but it's not digging too far past the text (digging too far is reading autistic cyclonus struggling to cope with horrible amounts of change with no warning or support, and a completely changed social paradigm, with nobody to understand what he's feeling, or even recognize that he'd be feeling anything at all :VVVV). He's coping badly for sure, but compared to how some of the other characters do, he lllllllargely manages to keep a lid on the worst of the anger. He's got a bad attitude, yes, but he mostly doesn't act on it. Except with the friendly, lonely, trusting motherfucker who decided to room with him :B

So he's definitely lashing out in not-okay ways, which are like... hmm. He doesn't cope badly as often as some of the other characters, but when his self-control slips, it tends to involve things like.... hitting Tailgate. Which is very unfortunate, but without going into spoilers, the development!!!! I know you're skeptical, but once he finds his footing in the new cybertronian world, his character goes some COOL places, and I love him. There's even some Cyclonus-Swerve interactions in the future that will probably interest you very much. I can't really say how he develops without spoiling plot points, because he tends to be tied closely to the plot, but I adore it to pieces, just from a pure this-is-cool-writing perspective :DDD

 

I'm awful slow to pick up on the juxtaposition, but I just realized that even though they're on a planet called hedonia, this is very much an issue about how some of these bots are... not doing so gr8 XD