For Fuck's Sake, Spike: an illustrated mini-rant. Spoiler: The Transformers (2009) #8, numerous large images This issue opens with two pages of Spike lifting weights. First page just has close ups of the weight machine with clanging sfx. Here is the second page: Like, I can see hating robots after spending that much time running around ground zero of a fucking robot invasion. But is this implying that the grudge extends to weight machines?! I get he's speaking partially in metaphor, but the context makes me think he's also speaking partially not in metaphor. Dude, seriously, therapy. Lots of therapy. I like how he insults Scrapper for having a lousy color for disguise (green) after showing up to a stakeout on a red fucking motorcycle. The motorcycle, pictured below, is not that important, but can we just pause to appreciate how damn good the lights are in this scene? I don't really know much about how comic art works, but I'm gonna guess that specific detail was the work of the colorist? In any case, it's a fucking gorgeous representation of the way sites like this are lit at night, and I am in love: Spike is apparently happy that he can misuse his rank to prevent anyone from questioning his unauthorized absences and use of military equipment for personal vendetta field trips. During tonight's escapade he hunts down and then beats the everloving shit out of Scrapper, burns him with some sort of homemade chemical weapon, impales him with an I-beam, and then shoots him in the head after he surrenders. What the actual fuck, Spike. Who decided it was a good idea to put you in charge of anything, let alone relations with an alien race you flat out hate? Was it your dad? And we end with this gem (with more pretty lights behind Spike's bullshit): That seems like a you problem. Perhaps you should take some time off to figure out a different way to cope with PTSD or whatever the fuck your deal is besides wandering away from your post at night to sleep around and commit fucking war crimes? It's not like he doesn't have a legitimate beef with Scrapper, who is part of Devastator, which lived up to that name during All Hail Megatron. Spike, who apparently lost a close friend and comrade to the tunnel destruction, remembers Devastator looking like this: This is what Devastator looked like in All Hail Megatron: Even taking artistic variations into account, the differences are specific and purposeful enough (holy teeth batman) to suggest that Spike remembers seeing a monster rather than what he literally observed. That is actually potentially interesting. It's too bad that after Spike tells Scrapper about his dead friend and related terror of combiners, Scrapper only gets one single word of dialogue (a shaky "No...") before Spike murders him and gets back to soliloquizing. I just feel like Spike could potentially be an interesting character with that set of traits, traumas, skills, and that history. But for some reason he isn't, at least to me, and I can't figure out why. It's so frustrating. There are so many jerkass fictional characters I completely adore, but Spike I offhand loathe. I wish it were possible to trade him in and get Hunter back. :P
Now that you mention it... huh. ....Yeah damn. Wow. But okay, first it was the model in the Soundwave shirt with the suspicious elbow, now this. Someday I'm gonna pull something, and it's gonna be damn challenging to explain that I was attempting to gauge the anatomical feasibility of something depicted in a Transformers fan thread entitled DARE TO BE STUPID.
Spike is just objectively Terrible. One day a bunch of giant alien robots (coughProwlcough) will gather for his funeral due to that pesky fleshy life span, laugh and eat alien robot salad, and then go back to living their billions-year lives with closure
I think part of the problem for Spike (for me) is that he's not the only character with those traumas and he's so aggressively.... Standard Scruffy White Male Antihero about it that I'm just irritated with every part of how he expresses himself. There's nothing interesting about why he does what he does, it's just Spike's Bad Decisions With Moral Righteousness time all the time. He's like that one Simpson's screenshot that's just "No, the children are wrong" because every moment of introspection he has is immediately waved away with 'nah, I'm probably in the clear and still doing the right thing, everyone else just needs to get with the program' but without any of the actual moral heft to it that characters like Prowl or OP get.
Spoiler: lost light You know, I'm still not willing to buy that Rung is seriously a drill, not unless they explain it real, REAL good. But I'd be willing to believe he could be a key to Vector Sigma. Also, Spike, he...... he takes hits from trauma and damage and junk. But he takes it and turns it around and uses it as an excuse to be even MORE of an asshole. And somehow he manages to do this without any of the sympathy that Prowl and Megatron and folks can manage. Maybe it has something to do with the scale of the hits he takes versus the damage he deals? Maybe it's that so much of the damage he deals feels SO personal and petty? I'm not sure, but I adore the hell out of Prowl and Tarn and almost every awful robojerk this franchise has thrown at me, and I hate Spike so much.
Characters damaged by the Cybertronian war and badly coping that are 100 times more interesting than Spike: Marissa Fairborne, Zilong Qian, Verity Carlo, Buster
Now that's just silly! If she'd REALLY been traumatized, she'd be blaming an entire species for everything that happened to her, and spending her whole life finding new and exciting ways to be a sadistic, murderous asshole. Since she's willing to be decent, even to jerkish bots she blames for some majorly shady shit, she obviously hasn't taken any emotional damage at all.
Hunter was just being a big baby over what he went through. If he was a REAL MAN like Spike, he'd have fought his captors off single-handedly, tortured them, and then killed them. Since he didn't do that and instead got turned into a fucked up science experiment and kept alive against his will for a long time before his death, he must have WANTED it. If only he'd sidelined Verity, alpha dogged Jimmy Pink, taken up smoking, and rode a motorcycle without a helmet, he'd have lived!
Spoiler Sure, but even consider the background. In one Optimus is coming through a wall of smoke and you can see part of the guns on his side, in the other Optimus is coming through a wall of a building and you can see basically the same amount of the guns on his side.
I think part of what bothers me is that Spike seems indifferent or oblivious to the horrors he's perpetrating. A friend pointed out that driving the alt locked body of your enemy around town could be a brilliantly sadistic action. Except that it wasn't like that when Spike did it. There was no indication of any brilliance or even any sadism. It was just convenient, I guess. Does he care about anything? Does he have any strong convictions at all? He certainly likes to go on about how much he hates machines, but other than the brief glimmer of show-not-tell with the toothy monster memory, it doesn't ring true. I don't believe him about his own emotions, and it's not that I think he's an unreliable narrator so much as I'm not really convinced he has any emotions beyond petulant. Violence is not an emotion. He doesn't even seem to have any strong social ties. I guuueeessss he has friends? If I can't tell if they're more friends or subordinates I'm not sure they count emotionally. His father has gotten like two seconds of screen time since AHM, and their relationship seems pretty distant at this point. So I can't even manage to care about him by knowing he's important to somebody, because he doesn't seem to be all that important to anybody on any level.
He doesn't really have friends because everyone thinks he's a goddamn prick. The closets he's gotten is Jimmy Pink and even that was more conveniant working together. Basically I could buy Spike having a severe personality disorder that he's not getting help for and isn't working to improve. Which isn't me maligning people with personality disorders or emotional issues or whatever! But it never gets followed up on with spike, he's like... a really flat character.
Like the opinion of other humans in current stuff seems to be 'Spike's a huge prick and we hate him but he knows Cybertronians and gets the job done'. But... does he really? I don't buy he's that competent. And again, if your argument is 'he knows Cybertronians', well, so does Jimmy. EDIT: Like he's not gruffly effective he's a goddamn monster who is going to ignore orders and do whatever the hell he wants. Don't work with him!
Sunstreaker may be an ass, but he has several personality traits to call his own and therefore I love him. Spike can just... go sit down.
And I don't mean like happy dreams, I mean fucking horrible PTSD flashbacks about what happened to the two of them.
