yo I don't think I've plugged this fic here before sooooo I'm gonna do it now if you have a spare hour or so you should definitely go read Staying Alive: A How-To by The StarHorse, who is one of my all-time favorite writers. (Right up there beside determamfidd, my other favorite) It's a wonderful rollicking smart, snarky, hilarious Sideswipe-centric G1 fic and to be quite honest it's what got me into Transformers in the first place. GO CHECK IT OUT (read her other stuff too she has some really great dramatic character-exploring fics and they're all G1 based)
I accidentally another essay? But I've worked out more details about what it was in LL06 that upsets me. Especially in terms of Rodimus, which I hadn't been consciously aware of just now.
I just had the mental image of Megatron actually telling the lost light crew you came back for me when they actually get him back and. ow. Probably won't happen like that but something along those lines...itd be fun.
A combination of him being surprised and happy that he's WANTED and them being cold and angry because they're here to take him into custody, not to be friends, and everything painful and emotional about both sides filling in their missing information? YES PLEASE :3c
Hahahaaa, okay, so wow, okay. So Larry posted a link to my Terminus essay on her twitter. Which was very exciting on its own! And netted me some extra attention comments from people on there, because twitter is a platform more comment-oriented than tumblr, so that was nice. But guys, she just sent me a message. JRO read my essay Spoiler: large? I'm torn between being pleased with myself, because I totally read the dynamic right and I'm not supposed to feel good about the thing, and being distraught, because noooo, I don't want unhappy endings. But mostly I'm feeling that oh my god if I'd known he was ever going to see this, I would have taken the time to actually polish the writing and make it elegant
so do you think that was never meant to be happy, never meant to be an ending, or both? because although i'm less upset with these developments now i know they're meant to be messed up, i'm still kind of worried that this the end of the story for the two of them
Never meant to be happy is what I'm sure of. But I'm INCREDIBLY suspicious about it being a true ending either. When JRO has tragedies, they're... so rarely for shock value. Rewind I has major plot and character effects. Trailcutter is more subtle, but it advances the plot for the DJD, and the force field thing comes back later. Pipes achieved something critical even while he was dying. Ambulon is the closest one I can think of, since Pharma scampered off into the sunset and First Aid was banished to Combiner Wars (give him back), but I can absolutely see ways for that to make the story richer in the future. But this? It doesn't feel SATISFYING. If Megatron had died in 55, it would have been tragic, but it would have felt right. It had WEIGHT. This didn't have weight, and then the weight it had was undermined by weak-ass upsides, like reconnecting with OP. If the framing leading into him staying behind had been positive, it would have made sense, but... JRO confirmed it's not. Either this is a happy ending where I don't believe the happy, or it's a tragic ending where I don't believe the ENDING. This didn't have any significant story effects beyond weakening the crew in terms of brainpower, influence, and strength. And it's main character impact seems to be hurting Rodimus. Neither of those is... necessary :T They've been weakened significantly. Rodimus was already coping PLENTY badly. And unless Fangry&friend get screen time or Killmaster steps up to the plate, all the decepticons have been neatly snipped out of the narrative focus, which had been mixed. Which is a real shame. The only constructive effect I see if this is final is about punching Rodimus's heart in the face when he was already struggling. But that's the kind of construction that needs RESOLUTION, and this scenario is hard to resolve without Megatron in the picture. Especially with the neglectful dad thing from Optimus and the hard-won respect from Megatron, it feels so cheap to poison what they built and return to the status quo. Besides, I'm SO ANNOYED at how WASTED the entire functionist universe was! We found out what Rung does.... just as original Rung makes a lot of progress in figuring it out for himself. The only duplicate person we see besides Rung is ANODE? I mean, I love her, but she's BRAND NEW. This doesn't have OOMPH. The only thing she did was be like 'yo I'm a blacksmith,' and original Anode reveals that without the functionist info playing in at all! Where's functionist Minimus Ambus seeing Rewind, all while knowing that because of him, his Rewind died a painful death in his brother's arms, after watching Dom's personhood slowly getting erased. Megatron wanted to pay Starscream a visit? Yes! Give me functionist Starscream! Give me Megatron realizing, even MORE, the damage he's done when he sees how this Starscream compares to his. Give me functionist hardliner Optimus! Give me Rodimus who has been beaten down and BEATEN DOWN. Give me Glitch actually having a character and seeing how he reacts to Megatron's words instead of making a silent cameo! Functionist Pharma, maybe being shocked and emotionally vulnerable seeing Ratchet, because Ratchet was too outspoken to survive the government, and Pharma's been quietly grieving-- but Ratchet knows so well what HIS Pharma became. It was all! So! Wasted! Even apart from Megatron, I'm going to be SO UPSET if all that potential goes unused. If they don't return in some way, it's a crime against good writing. Also maybe think about stealing the matrix, just saying >_> Nothing about this feels satisfying, even as a tragedy. The only way it works is if it's that English class type of ~oooh the world is cruel and uncaring and real life doesn't have clean endings~ and that's not the kind of story we've been reading on THIS scale of pointless tragedy. If it ends here... Terminus wins. He poisoned Megatron philosophically for the war, dodged all those consequences, and now he gets to poison this world too. I don't quite want to call him a full on abuser, but it has the flavor of an abuser successfully isolating their victim from any help. Everything about this, if it's a finale and not just a stepping stone, is PROFOUNDLY unsatisfying.
I guess not! I think I've just been sensitised to bad endings from homestuck, honestly. Also, well, it feels like the kind of place where a lot of writers would consider a story arc finished. Not saying JRo's one of them, but comics are kind of vulnerable to weird editorial decisions and meddling so?
On the note of weird editorial decisions, I have a hard time believing marketing was okay with ditching one of their biggest cash cows forever :p And the business with Killmaster and his CRAZY-cool tech (apparently his work was the basis for the geobomb?) that bridges universes as easily as anything leaves such a convenient window back and forth. Killmaster's wand needs time energy supercharge handwaveium to work? Well isn't it convenient that he's chilling with another mad scientist type who just finished inventing time travel. I can't find any angle that this feels RIGHT in a permanent sense, in or out of universe :p
also what Spock said. If he died in 55, that would be one thing. Or if he'd decided he could do better in the Functionist Universe and had decided to stay, instead of Terminus going over his objections like that. That would have been upsetting but not unfair? This issue just kind of prodded me in some triggery places. (and yeah. even without killmaster, Megatron's got all those wormholes in his body. I guess that I'm more worried about his character development being reversed than him not being brought back at all)
Even in the worst case scenario, where this is for permanent, the confirmation that this was unhappy and it was all about the lie, I'm... not happy, exactly. But it's a tragedy about how little chance Megatron ever stood, with toxic forces pulling on him from all directions. It's sad in a way that's slower and deeper than 'lol I win now' from Terminus. I really don't like tragedies, but it has more emotional weight seeing how he struggled but never managed to escape the hooks people have been putting in him since he was young,
But on a happier note, Whirl<3<Killmaster: good ship or BEST SHIP? They call each other nemesis! They've been fighting and tied for ages! Whirl would be the TINY PARTNER! And when whirl was telling that story about how he 'stuck Killmaster's wand up his--' and Rung cuts him off, come on, he was TOTALLY telling a sex story. It's meant to be :')
Confession: I loved the first functionalist timeline arc and I've been lukewarm on this one. All the jumping around really fucks up my brainpacing, I think, and so is the fact that the storyline I really care about (anode, y'all) moves so slowly bc of the jumping around that I basically predicted each next step in it and already had the emotions over it by the time the actual issue comes out, so my response to what's supposed to be big stuff like Spoiler: LL 06 Lug's rebirth is 'oh, okay' w/o a ton of emotion behind it. The most emotional impact I've had has been in analyzing the storyarc bc then you can pull together everything in a single thread instead of just getting 4 pages of it in each issue. I'm still invested, but I'm really ready for the next story-arc and putting some of these threads on the back burner to get to something more focused, so I can like it again the way I used to. Anode is awesome tho.
>gets free gift card from work >Immediately blow 80% of it on Forged to Fight crystals On the upside I finally have Waspinator and some new sword dudes warriors to fuckin move on through the shark chapter! ETA: call-out post: all three warriors I pulled out of these crystals Arcee handles like a dream, v zippy, fun specials-- but her passives are kinda useless and she has one (1) synergy bonus for a bot I'll never use Bonecrusher has good passives and is a fuckin beast, but I Cannot deal with how bulky and slow he is Bludgeon is just kind of average all around, I don't Hate how he handles like I do bonecrusher but he's not... fun even if he buffs My Queen Windblade. Also ow my eyes, is the neon paint supposed to be some sort of attack too? (Tangentially, has anyone seen a Drift yet or is he just programmed into synergies without having been released?)
I managed to luck into a quality bonecrusher, and I don't think he'd be able to replace arcee on my main squad (and she's on the chopping block the moment I land a quality motormaster), but I've been slowly buffing him up whenever I have leftover ore, and I'm planning to eventually pin my base defense on him. When I run into a bonecrusher paired with a decent attack mod, the bleeding is just a NIGHTMARE. But I do like have a lot of fun with arcee! Even though her passives aren't great, in practice, she's done real nice on the evade front. And my bludgeon has been officially outclassed and just sticks around to go on missions, but he grew on me with the ranged attacks. It wasn't too different from playing ironhide, but he was a bit faster on his feet, I think. But in general, warrior is losing for me when it comes to the classes :P I love my bumblebee, ratchet's healing is gr8, windblade is a QUEEN, ironhide's second special just makes me so happy, and I love motormaster's unstoppable thing. But none of the warriors get me anything I haven't already gotten in a funner way somewhere else :P I don't think drift has been put in yet, or at least I haven't seen anything about it. But oh man, I just cleared a stage with bayerse megatron as the final boss, and he's a demolition type, and I just WANT HIM okay okay okay but consider Spoiler: I've been meaning to write up this meta for ages Lug doesn't look like a people yet. Her spark.... infusion? blew by super fast, but if they'd lingered, the characters involved would have been Anode, Kaput, and Velocity. Anode and Kaput are fun, but new, and there isn't much weight to them yet. Velocity is a little more established, but she's still fairly new and fairly background, in terms of the current cast. If she's taking center stage to play off Anode, that's AWESOME, yes please, but she doesn't have too-too much weight either. Now, Swerve. He's been hanging around from the start, drifting off in some alarming mental health directions. He doesn't feel close to anyone, he's a bit adrift in terms of purpose, and one of the few people he was considering a friend just died. He looks to be taking it a bit hard. And Tailgate and Cyclonus are arguably his friends too, but they're having a pretty intense crisis of their own. Swerve is a metallurgist. This is a specialty that's come up only occasionally, but pretty regularly. And in the context of the comic, it's like second cousins to being a doctor. He helps with Tailgate's cybercrosis, his split holoform has one doctor persona, and he's the one who broke down what had happened to the Necrobot's corpse in DOTL. He ditched being a metallurgist to run a bar, which he's wanted to do since forever, then started shutting down his bar to go back to metallurgy right before the ship was invaded by Legislators (I keep trying to type legislacerators), started bartending again, none of this made him happy, near-death from self-neglect, etc., etc. He was also the one who knew what was going on with the baby in the holiday special. Even in terms of cold constructed bots, new people haven't happened in a very long time, and it's been much longer in terms of hot spots. And those stopped being common long before they disappeared altogether. I doubt many Cybertronians have much casual knowledge about the medical junk behind forging the way humans tend to do with like, childbirth. But even though the last hot spot happened over four million years ago, he still just rattles off the information about how the baby is going to develop as easy as anything. He's the first one to pick her up in a baby-holding way, and he seems totally at ease. (swerve knows how is babby formed) We don't have a good time scale for what's happening in the comic right now because ACTION we have action no time to breathe keep moving. But I'm suspicious of how Lug is doing. Swerve said with the scraplet baby that in a few hours we should be able to guess at an alt mode. It... makes me uneasy that Lug is chilling as a backpack right now. It seems like it's either too fast to be IN alt mode, or her current development is too slow if she can chill that way without being free to make other changes (like the scraplet baby making arms). And whatever was happening in the blacksmithing process with the heat problem, we didn't see a real conclusion, and I am Suspicious. I'd like some Swerve as baby doctor focus, please :D He hasn't been doing well, he's been struggling to make or keep personal connections, he's TOTALLY adrift. He's personally big on the idea of Achievements where most of the crew seems more content to just... exist. Fixing a specialized, difficult health problem, that's the same thing he was so HAPPY over with Tailgate. This is really niche knowledge, and Swerve is being pulled in fewer directions than Ratchet. He was SUCH a natural with surprise baby out of nowhere before. He already got snippy with Anode over HEY I am GRIEVING for my FRIEND WHO DIED. Give him connections and purpose and people valuing him! This is important to me! Very important!! Also he and Lug were MADE to be siblings. They even look similar. They've GOTTA spend time bouncing off each other. It would be the best, best thing.
