TFs: DARE TO BE STUPID

/insert good shit meme here/

 

If/when a transcript of that goes up could someone link it here? I cannot retain any info from audio interviews.

 

(i love your brain)

 

@Allenna thank you for doing the research I didn't have the patience for o/

Seconding this.

 

Here's a text interview with Milne. Not as in-depth, but he mention that all of the robots being hot is not really intentional.

 

Transcript in progress. I am not a stenographer.

Spoiler: 00:00-09:51

[Introduction of Roberts]
Rachel Stevens(RS): I'm Rachel Stevens, and this is James Roberts who I'm interviewing today
James Roberts(JR): Hello. We got through some communications problems; we can hear each other and I hope you can hear us.
RS: Okay, just to start, what do you do for IDW right now?
JR: Right now, for IDW I am writing the ongoing Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye title. IDW has got two ongoings; the other one was formerly known as Robots in Disguise, that's now just The Transformers because there's a TV series of the same name coming out soon. So Transformers and its sister series MTMTE both came out at the same time, back in 2012, still going strong, and until someone takes me away, off it, that's what I'm doing each month.
RS: Fantastic. Would you like to describe, briefly, how would you sum up the series for a newcomer? I know you have these questions all the time, but you know, just for the Women Write About Comics audience.
JR: Yeah, okay, right, one level it's an old-fashioned quest. The high-concept pitch is that a group of Autobots in the main, a group of transformers set off from Cybertron in search of the maybe real, maybe not Knights of Cybertron, their sort-of ancestors. It's a sort of multi-year quest, an Odyssian type story although they're going away from home, and on route, they get into all sorts of shenanigans.
It's really about the personalities of the people involved; they're all slightly damaged goods, they're all a bit well-worn, a bit care-worn, and they've each got issues. It's a story of them getting to know each other and finding ways to survive now that the wars ended. Surviving might be a bit more difficult psychologically than anticipated.
But yeah, it's built around this loose framework of a quest, but really it's an excuse to tell strange and unusual and sometimes funny and sometimes heartbraking stories about this group of people who have been thrown together on this adventure.
I think it's easy to get into. I think yes, it makes good sense to start with volume 1 of the trade paperbacks. Volume 1 covers the immediate aftermath of the transformers war; like I said this is a post-war setup, so if you have volume 1 you have the broader setup for the two ongoing series, and off we go on the quest, so just go with that is my advice.
RS: So I guess the next question is related to the setup of Death of Optimus Prime (DOP). I would recommend that anyone who hasn't read my articles on that and MTMTE and Windblade (WB): stop that, please go read them right now, and then come back to this.
JR: We can wait.
[Both laugh]
RS: Related to, what I thought was fascinating was the very alien appearance of the Nails that Nick Roche drew beautifully and were colored beautifully by Josh Burcham. They were suitably not human.
JR: All credit to Nick for visualizing them. John and I, John Barber, who co-wrote DOP with me, we said in the script that we wanted some more fantastic and nonhumanoid designs, because the idea was that a lot of the Cybertronian civilians had left the planet and run away for good reason when the war broke out and four million years had passed. And so the idea was that we were getting a glimpse here of the multiplicity of Cybertronian designs and variations of the form that we may not have seen. Because, I guess we were saying, although we may not have thought about it as much, I guess we were saying in terms of the two warring factions for whatever reason the default designs, the default soldier, the default military design was a humanoid shape and we may have missed out on the some of the weird and more nonhuman and fantastical design that were part and parcel of the Cybertronian society four million years ago.
Having said that, again in hindsight we've now developed more of the backstory in terms of pre-war society and the Functionalists, or was it the Functionists, and their ideology of how you'll do the job that's dictated by your design and by your shape. And I look back on DOP and I wonder what some of these non-humanoid characters actually turn into and what function they serve. It's not incompatible, but it would need some more thought if we were to revisit some of those characters that appeared in DOP.
RS: That actually leads into what I was going to ask you next. I was curious about if you thought about--for those who are unaware, female transformers were able to be introduced in Transformers proper during the Dark Cybertron (DC) event. Which I am very relieved by, I am sure my audience is as well.
I was curious if, obviously the Caminus origin was used, I am going to ask you in detail in a bit too, I was curious if you considered introducing gender via the NAILS, who had gone to alien planets and perhaps learned gender from those beings.
JR: Yes, although we didn't have that conversation, John and I, at the time. Although it was actually in the lead-up to, although I can't remember what the dates were, but obviously the way these things work, we knew some time in advance--actually, that's a lie, Windblade was the winning design in a competition to create a character. There was some delay obviously between that design winning and Windblade making an appearance, and in that time John and I were talking about how to integrate the character into the main books and explain it. I think then we were talking about different ways it could make sense, the gender question, and one of them was maybe as partsformers [pretenders?], not as in infiltration, sorry, I'm conscious of your nonTransformers fans here. Infiltration was like a story staple of the beginning of IDW's run, of Cybertronians being able to infiltrate and take over by stealth. Anyway John and I talked about how it may have been through spreading across the universe away from the war and acclimatising and adjusting and learning about other societies, and that may be where some Cybertronians thought "okay, I will assume that gender, I will go by those personal pronouns or whatever."
Yeah, there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about in the lead-up to the introduction to Windblade as to how this was going to make sense, and I stress in the context of what had gone before.
I can't remember all the various ways in which we suggested explaining it, but in the end it was a case of "well, let's just mull on it", and you'll know having read DC that we didn't rush to immediately explain it away. It was just, you know, there we go. I think there was a recognition among the other characters that Cybertronians referring to themselves as "she" wasn't standard, if you know what I mean, it wasn't the normal way, it wasn't what they were used to at the time. And John and I thought it was something that could be explored in due course outside of DC.
RS: And I think you did an admirable job setting things up for the WB miniseries.
JR: Yes, well, we knew that was coming next as part of season 2, Dawn of the Autobots (DA) launch, so it was only right that that stuff, that sort of ripe backstory stuff was left to the series proper.

Spoiler: 9:52-21:44

JR: I remember, actually, in the DC story when we had Nautica and Chromia appear in the end of part 7, I think it was, they're inside Metroplex and they drop out of the ceiling and surprise a Lost Light group. I was keen to, because Windblade doesn't appear until the next part, John and I wanted there to be more than one "fembot" and it couldn't just be Windblade, we wanted to suggest there were others.
And I know for a long time, the plan, what I wanted to do, was for the two fembots to come down from the ceiling and not be immediately, not have that "female" design, if you know what I mean, to just look like a Magnus and a Rodimus or whoever. To look like the default Cybertronian design that we were used to. So that initially, upon arrival you wouldn't have clocked that they were "different", but it would only be through their use of certain personal pronouns that they were female. So that was something that I wanted to do but for the sake of, bearing in mind that these were characters that no one had seen before and we wanted to be able to say that there were fembots in the IDW universe aside from Arcee, it was felt that it was important for that connection to be apparent on that large splash page so the original idea was shelved.
RS: I need you to know how happy that original idea makes me feel for various reasons, so thank you. I wanted to talk briefly about the estriol edit you just did with Nautica and her spark. Especially since a theme of season 2, or at least the opening so far, has been the theme of edits and authors, and relating the two to each other.
JR: Yeah, so this was a real-life edit. The backstory to this, in issue 31 of MTMTE, it's a ship in a bottle episode, that takes place entirely on the RodPod that the cast are trapped in for the duration of the issue, and they're disappearing, apparently randomly, and it's up to the remain cast members to work out what the pattern behind the disappearances is. And because I love worldbuilding and I love giving readers information about Cybertronian society or about the characters themselves, I wanted to use this conceit as a means to give big globs of information. So in between each disappearance, as they're trying to guess what the connection is, we pick a category and see how each of the remaining characters fit into that category.
And one of the categories was spark type, and so, we'd established in MTMTE that there were different spark types, we'd only named one back in issue 12, so here was an opportunity to give some insight into the other types out there. And all the Cybertronians other than Nautica had one of six spark types and then Nautica had a unique one, estriol. And it was a detail on a page, a label underneath her headshot, and it wasn't germane to the story, the disappearances weren't linked to their spark type, it was a red herring, a false alarm, whatever. But the information was out there.
And I'd done that, I'd differentiated her from the others principally to create a worldbuilding hook, if you like, to return to at some point in the future, to "explain" why she was not like the other people that we were used to. And this impulse was a residual one from the days of DC when John and I were trying to rationalize a group of female transformers when everything to date--I was going to say with the exception of Arcee but that made it more complicated--everything to date including the Arcee story suggested that there weren't fembots or that they were anomalous as in Arcee's case.
So I thought okay maybe the difference is somehow linked to their spark so I'll give Nautica a strikingly different spark. It'll be clear that she's the only one of that group with that spark and so the implication will be that it's to do with her female-ness. So I did that, and that was issue 31. And this happens often, I can't think of any MTMTE scenes that I'm entirely happy with, but this particular detail bugged me, and I sense as well, I'm not going to claim ignorance, that in some quarters it was unpopular for reasons that I came to appreciate. And it bugged me for two reasons. For one I thought why make that the difference, that's almost too easy. Why not think more about the fembot question and explore what gender means in the Transformers universe in a different way. It may be me, it may be Mairghread, it could be John, it could be an as yet unidentified future author, but it can be left to be explored in a different way.
And the second thing is, I'd linked the name to something which was feminine. And that's a weakness of mine. People who read MTMTE know that I like to play with words, I like the etymology of words, and I like to use Latin or Pig Latin to give a veneer of respectability or depth to what I'm doing. And that's where I reached for that name, trying to clever but I just made it worse.
And because it was just one word on one page, when the time came I was able to prepare volume 6 for trade, I was able to say to John, "I have misgivings about this, it's a minor edit but it's an important one, so could we just replace that word with another word, give Nautica a spark type which is, you know, one of the six main groups, and then all the other stuff about exploring or contextualizing or defining the Transformers gender, that can come in time, but that word in that page in that issue, that is not the way to do it." And here we are now we're talking about it.
RS: Thank you. I was definitely curious about the context. Can I say that it didn't bug me too much? Obviously as a transgender woman I can appreciate the difference between something being inherently something, like the chromosome stuff, but even then that's still iffy, there's XXY and all that, but even then I understood what you were going for, so I can say that I wasn't personally bothered by it, especially since it still allowed for possibly transgender characters later on.
JR: This is true. This particular avenue of exploring binary gender or the equivalent, or multiple genders and the idea of certain characters feeling that they were miscategorized, we can still go there. It was hamfisted of me I think to use a label that was inherently female. Let's try to be a bit smarter than that.
RS: Thank you. Going into the transgender question because I'm me and I have to do this, the label for Tailgate, in the teaser for season 2 of MTMTE, was the gendering of that word intentional?
JR: I'll be honest, it wasn't. I loved it when I found out it had that scope, and I mean, I'm happy, I think I said elsewhere, each of the characters have human holomatter avatars, and we've established in previous issues they can be devised by the characters, or they can be a reflection of their subconscious somehow, I guess the holomatter device somehow reads their subconscious and turns it into a humanoid representation or whatever. And we've seen Tailgate as a baby, strapped to Swerve's back in issue 13. I'm happy for that to be a female baby. I haven't seen anything to suggest otherwise. And someone else asked me what Cyclonus's human avatar would be. And there's something about Cyclonus where I just think a stern Victorian schoolmarm or something, I think that would somehow fit. It would be fair going back to the original, Simon Furman's original series, some of the avatars were female. I think Bumblebee's avatar was female, was a Lindsay Lohan. So I'm not breaking any new ground there.
RS: And Whirl with the pigtails.
JR And Whirl with the pigtails. And Ultra Magnus had a Verity look-alike, but for slightly different reasons.
RS: I was just very curious if the Tailgate hinting was intentional and if you were gonna tease anything with their interactions with Nautica or anything, if they'd consider that because of how naive they are, how little of the world they knew, but obviously that's would be coming up later on if anything so that's, you know, too prying I would understand.
JR: Yeah, I mean, I like to keep my options open, and it's like on Twitter when I get asked, and I love the people being able to ask questions, a lot of questions I can't answer either because it'd give something away, even whether I'm saying yes or no to something it could give something away, it could lead to people reading stuff into things.
And also because I don't want to pass comments on something which I may go there in the future. So I put that in that category. The more that MTMTE continues, and the more characters we get, and the more we get into a post-WB world, where questions of gender, as we just discussed, inevitably bubble to the surface, all these story ideas could well take shape. And I want the journey of discovery to happen organically with readers. I could speculate now, I could say, "Oh yeah, we could do that" but I might inadvertently shut off avenues of exploration, do you know what I mean?
RS: Thank you for obliging me, I appreciate it, for this podcast. I'm just a very curious sort.
JR: No, of course, that's good. Curiosity is good. I hope the comic makes people curious and ask questions and things. That's positive.

More tomorrow; I think that's the end of the gender stuff.

 

@Exohedron ty so much!

 

Sharkwasp.

 

Perfect Lost Light Megatron song.

Spoiler: Lyrics

In the white noise of everything,
I heard voices still trying to sing.
Who were they? What'd they say?
What was lost? Was it worth all the fuss of it?
I don't know, maybe so.

We stole the light from their eyes.
While it was still just a spark.
We mined it for what it was worth.
Wasn't much, wasn't much.
Find another pair of lights.
No machine is ever free.

You had a fixed bullet proof sort of world view
Now it's bent, it's bent, it's bent
You used to say you know exactly where you're off to
Now you can't, you can't, you can't

You make your mark in everything
'Cause you don't know where you are
You've been swearing up and down you knew your way
But now you're back at the start

So you shed your former shell for a new one
And find the appropriate dress
Dazzle anyone who listens with those big words
But know that they're meaningless

You need them all to know your name
'Cause you don't know who you are
You've been swearing up and down you know your way
But now you're back at the start
Don't feel bad, you're like the rest of us

Time moves on and we realize we're all strangers
Nothing binding us now except our habits and scowls
and our off-hand nitpicks
We try and close our books, and put an end to endless chapters
But then wake up the same, bear our teeth and complain
And then do it all again

No! That's not me, not this time
I won't fall into line
I'm gonna cut a different path if it kills me
No, I'm not sold
I won't roll with the punches again
I'd rather take a couple hits than lay back on this one

We make our mark in everything
'Cause we don't know where we are
We're always swearing up and down we know the way
But wind up back at the start
And in hindsight it's all circular

 

See, it says something that I can't tell if that's a ship name or the name of a mech.

 

I also vote shark-wasp duet.

 

.... HUH. A "Tailgate" is mentioned as being Arcee's partner in TF:P in uhhh I think season 3 episode 3. She even talks to him on comm-link.
Do we ever get to meet him in Prime?

 

(We probably won't. But the sillhouette matches up in interesting ways except for the size lol I can't remember years but TF:P was aired a while before MTMTE started, right?)

 

Digs up an older post to scream into the night about Aliens

Spoiler: but what if weird

In the vein of "sparks don't die when the mech does"-- what if the sparks are the actual organism, and the mechs are exoskeletons of a sort? Or a different, surface-dwelling organism that's coevolved into some sort of mutualistic relationship with sparks?

...I think I like mutualism better. Sparks don't survive very long in the Cybertronian atmosphere without protection, and were originally basically parasites that nested in surface-dwelling species when they weren't recuperating/procreating within the core. Sparks also feed on energon, and attach themselves to the circulatory system of the host body to siphon off nutrients. Protoforms are the... "larval" is not the word I'm looking for, but it's late and I can't find it in my brain... babby stage of the surface-dwelling species that would eventually become the primary sapient lifeform of the planet. They are significantly less well-armored than adult mechs, and so easier targets for sparks. Sparks output a lot of easily-converted energy to sustain their host; eventually mechs start making better use of this free energy, and develop specific spark chambers to better protect their energy source. Better-protected sparks survive longer on the surface, and well-sustained mechs are much better at, y'know, getting nutrients for their little heartworms.

Sparks outside their host body flee back to the core to recuperate; fed a steady diet of energon, they slowly grow. A larger spark can sustain a larger mech, but eventually they get too big to safely inhabit protoforms, at which point they begin to divide a la cell-splitting (albeit usually into more than two "sparklings"). These smaller sparks will inhabit minicons, and/or mech sparklings if mechs having kids is your jam. Occasionally, a spark can get 'confused' and try to inhabit a protoform while still splitting; this results in the split, branched, and mitotic sparks we see in TF canon until the spark/s in question can return to the core and finish splitting.

 

"The spark is the powerhouse of the mech"

 

hello my name is "incredibly petty" and i am here to complain about petty, rude things

Spoiler: up to 52

every single 'oh my god but what if tarn is roller???' post i've seen in the past week or so has slowly driven me farther up the wall because they're all, like.... how do i put it... they're all presented as though it's this ~wild conspiracy theory~ instead of, y'know, the conclusion we are very very obviously supposed to have reached?? it has not been that subtle..... like. 1. similar frame, 2. both point-one-percenters, 3. roller being abandoned, injured, after hearing about megatron for the first time, 4. robo-steroids, 5. roller's envy of outliers and tarn's talent which was "slow to manifest", and then the fucking super obvious ones in recent issues like roller's name on the plaque, "i corrupted you", "i saw an opportunity to hurt someone (i.e. optimus like let's be real)", tarn's huge inferiority complex vs roller's huge inferiority complex, etc etc etc...... like dude. this is not a curveball. it's not new!!

*eyes roll out of sockets, up into the sky, there they go, achieving their dreams*

am i being petty because i still deeply hope it is a red herring? probably

 

We do meet him in a matter of speaking. Tailgate had been a character before he was in mtmte just not in IDW run.