Spoiler: OP 10 Yeah, I think she and Sideswipe originally bonded as a weird sort of camaraderie because Sideswipe actually understood where Arcee was coming from, and wasn't disgusted by/terrified of her like the rest of the 'bots. We see them interact a lot in The Transformers and while sometimes Sideswipe puts is foot in his big dumb mouth, they pretty much get along. I think that was intensified by the whole estranged-twins thing, but Arcee got a double whammy because when Sideswipe was mortally wounded, Sunstreaker came RUNNING back and was ready to turn over a new leaf. when Arcee was captured by Jihaxus, where was Galvatron? aand then Sideswipe had to go and die the most un-warriorlike death imaginable for either of them, and she had to help him do it. man, poor Arcee. (BRING. HIM. BACK. BRING HIM BACK.)
Oh wow. Okay. Wow. I just caught up with like five issues in one go, and I'd largely managed to avoid spoilers, and I legit have a headache with how many emotions I'm feeling. Spoiler: OP10 First, these flashbacks with Jetfire bring me GREAT joy. I love him. I love mister giant puppy science shooty snark man. I see the way that person said 'needlenose and his boyfriend' and now I am extremely sad about them (again) JAZZ, MY BABY, MY BOY :C Okay, so I knew that obviously the interview was going to go south. I was not expecting it to go THAT south. I was not expecting a military sting operation with spike motherfucking witwicky. I am in a great deal of pain over how Jazz followed this lady around and tried really hard to be helpful and nice and he was SO EXCITED to get to do the interview, and he had such good intentions and a lot of hope and just... she turned right around and helped set up the sting :C I don't exactly blame her, but MAN do I hurt for Jazz. Also, he asked her particularly if he could bring his bass... and then left it behind when he ran. I am really, really intensely sad over this. And, okay. For some reason, I thought I'd caught a peak of spoiler that said that Sideswipe survived. I WAS EXPECTING SIDESWIPE TO SURVIVE. I went into this pretty sure that they'd found a way out. And then the story was just... unsettling and weirdly paced and the feel was just WEIRD and that's because it's not real and he's dead now. Oh my god, that fucked me up but good. I had to read a short story for english once where a similar thing happened to a guy trying to run from his execution, and that messed me up, and I wasn't even invested in the characters. Plus I just read some early exrid yesterday with arcee struggling so, so hard with PEOPLE, and some of the early nice interactions with her and sideswipe, and then I started out with issue 5 today, which has the core exploding and ends with her curled and maybe-probably crying next to his CR chamber. Plus Sunstreaker. Just. GOD. I'm screwed up over this, I was going to take it hard at the best of times, but I accidentally set myself up for it to be even worse ;-; GIVE HIM BACK, I need him to have positive emotion times with Sunstreaker and Arcee, and I want all three of them to get along well, and just. AHHHHH. The emotions were laid out SO NICE for why he's lost and unhappy and then resolved too quick, because it was SUPPOSED to be resolved too quick, so he could go out thinking things worked out for the best. I. FUCK. The reveal about Arcee and Galvatron and siblinghood isn't helping with those emotions either. Additionally, consider: Galvatron is her brother who she loves but doesn't trust, where they think one of them will kill the other. And then Arcee is there and standing by as Galvatron gets taken out, defeated, then....... tries to surrender and Optimus executes him. Fast enough that I'd believe she didn't have time to react, but however it happened, she stood there and WATCHED it happen, involuntarily or not. Then, Sideswipe. She doesn't stand there and watch him die. She tries so hard to find ANYTHING that will help him, and she fights hard to get the positronic core, and she's SO CLOSE, and it all slips through her fingers, and even though she isn't standing by, even though she's doing everything she can, it isn't enough. I'm in a significant amount of pain. Additional astonishment over how good Onyx Prime looks in Ramondelli's style. I am miffed that his debut panel was while he was sharing the screen with nose goblin discount bin loki bot, but I'll take what I can get. Alchemist Prime looks like a cartoon and it Bothers Me All the primes bother me, actually. I maybe hate them all? Not sure. It might just be the Alpha Trion feelings talking, because I have a hard time absorbing anything through Ramondelli. BUT HOLY SHIT TITAN HUSBANDS????? !!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ohhh my god I'm so happy right now. Like, there isn't really any other way to read that, is there? I was just grumping earlier about how Metrotitan has acted as so little of a PERSON, and all the titans are reflecting damage in their own ways, even Metroplex, who had his Prime with him for most of the intervening time. But! This!!!!!!! Oh man, imagine parting ways with your husband. You've got space bridges, you're BUILT to stay in contact over long distances. For whatever reason, that connection gets severed. Ten million years pass, while both of you fall into some sort of hibernation/coma. You start to wake up, gradually, gradually. The connections between Titans are slowly being reestablished. And just as this is happening... your husband is killed. Like, DANG!! Also, there's a big deal made of Chela not trusting standardformers. Except his husband, apparently :3c God, I never cared about either of them before, and now I am SO FASCINATED Alsoooooo that subtext with Metroplex caring SO MUCH for Caminus is looking a lot less subtext-y right now. Very eyes emoji. Adds a whole new layer of tragedy to reconnecting after so long apart to find your partner effectively dead, except Chela was just plain dead, and Caminus was technically alive but voluntarily dismembered and not so much alive as a person anymore. Lots of delicious emotional plain in there. (but mainly please give sideswipe back, this loss is causing me more pain that almost any other deaths i can recall. i think he even beats out dominus ambus. this is the! absolute!! worst!!!! :C)
On the subject of upsetting things Spoiler: OP10 Remember how Metrotitan was the one who proclaimed Starscream to be the Chosen One? And how that proclamation kicked off a series of events which led to Starscream killing Chela?
Spoiler: OP 10 Arcee is old enough there were femmes on Cybertron when she was young... and she wasn't considered one, because she was big and bulky and looked like her brother. Really feeling the trans thing there?
Spoiler: OP 10 Oooh, you know what, I'd been thinking about some of the older Arcee things, and also the seeker triads and the cold constructed dysphoria versus being Part Of The Trine, and okay, let me see if I can phrase things. So most of the twins and siblings and such that we've seen have been same-gender pairs. The deck is kind of stacked on Cybertron since just about everyone is defaulting to he/him, but there are also the twins from Caminus, stuff like that. Given that they don't have biological reproduction, or anything much resembling HUMAN families, I can see there being a cultural understanding that like, siblings are part of a Matched Set. And in human terms, it would be silly to look at a family and decide that oh, your first kid is a boy? All your other kids are definitely also boys. Because there are tons of earth families where obviously that isn't true. But on Cybertron, siblings are much more rare, and I don't even know if THEY know how sibling pairs happen. So if you've got a set of twins being born. And one of them is like 'HE/HIM, I am definitely a guy, this is me' and the other is less certain, and feels their gender less strongly, I can see an unconscious social thing where like, 'well, my brother's a guy. I match my brother. So I'm a guy.' With that casual assumption coming from all fronts, including from inside your head. Because I was thinking of what Arcee said, where she was basically like 'being a man was a lie I told myself'. In terms of a society where there are no ladies and 100% of the people are dudes? Makes sense, kind of odd phrasing for it to be a lie, when there wasn't a truth culturally available to you, but it makes sense. In terms of a world where there ARE women, and she's still thinking she's a guy? That makes a lot more sense in terms of calling it a lie. And then it makes really cool sense in terms of Galvatron's reaction later. 'Because, um, SIBLINGS. We MATCH. And obviously I'm not.... whatever this is. Women are women, but we were a pair of men, and I don't know what you're doing.' Kind of like how some human families get really hung up on their image of their trans child as one gender, because it's what they've known for so long and now it's suddenly wrong??? Except here it's also being tied in with Galvatron's own gender identity, for extra discomfort/confusion points. I have no idea if I'm saying coherent things :P But Galvatron is such a FORCE of I-do-what-I-want. And Arcee is very independent and does what she wants too, but she's also very very very lonely and wants badly to belong somewhere. In terms of Cybertronian biology, the sibling thing is one of the only forms of familial-type belonging, and probably the most intimate kind, short of being a natural combiner. Arcee will like.... take detours from the group and slip away and do things the group doesn't want her to do, but then she'll come back. Galvatron will head off in whatever direction and drag the entire group along behind him. So imagine Galvatron being like 'HE' and dragging Arcee along without even realizing that it's dragging her at all. I really like their whole current dynamic of love without trust, and it's... how to words this. It would be a flavor of love with trust in the past that does her a whole lot of unintentional harm. She trusted their bond and his self-image to guide her, and it was extremely incorrect. And it puts a whole nother layer of uncomfortable distance between them in the present, where I doubt he's even properly aware of how it could have hurt her, and it's totally foreign to his sense of self and the way it's just a built-in assumption that her sense of self should match his. Yes, wow, I can't tell if I'm making sense. I'm going to stop there. If I'm not being clear, please prod me, because there's some really cool alien relationship theorizing happening in my head, but finding the right words to describe it is the actual worst (fake edit: cis misgendering discomfort for galvatron, where when arcee says 'I'm a woman,' and he's hearing it with an implicit assertion of 'therefore you must be a woman too'. that plus galvatron's natural personality and his flexible, easygoing, accommodating nature :PPP)
Spoiler: OP 10 AND ANOTHER THING Time scales. Are a confusing thing. But does this make Arcee the oldest living average-sized person we know of, aside from like, maybe Alpha Trion? How old is Rung? We don't know, but he's old with hecked up memory banks. Ohhhh you know what, detour. The fic @coldstars wrote for Rung was already amazing and makes way too much sense. But okay, the council. A set of twelve natural combiners, designed as the key to vector sigma. A natural combiner with INTIMATE ties to the core of cybertronian existence. Rung being part of a matched set made to help with formation of hot spots is really truly plausible in this setting. And it's really cool thinking of them as being particularly angry/frustrated with not being able to figure out what he's FOR, when his nature is actually so much like theirs, he's just divided from his group. But Arcee was alive to see her brother go off into space with Nova Prime.... and never return. Arcee and loneliness are a major Thing, and that had to have hurt real good, no matter how strained their relationship might have gotten. Also, Galvatron went on a space party with JHIAXUS. What if that has something to do with her willingness to trust Jhiaxus later, and ended up putting her in his hands for those fucked up experiments with her? :( Gah, I made this post meaning to talk about Chela. First, OW, these thoughts about the chain of events from Metrotitan's announcement to Starscream killing Chela, this does me much pain. But Chela doesn't trust standardformers, up to the point where he died making a pointless, sad stand, and that ending to his story depressed me even before the new information. But he was married to Metrotitan. I'd been speculating about them being separated on good terms, and slowly drifting into a coma apart from each other where they can't reach out the way they should have been able to. I like that a lot, but..... alternately, consider it ending UGLY between them. Chela is being pretty chill in the flashback, in a crowd that has lots of standardformers, standing next to two other standardformers, married to a standardformer. Did his feelings about standardformers come up later? Did they have anything to do with oh, I dunno, his husband? :D I don't know where I'd want to take this, but it's a whole different flavor of tragedy with how they parted estranged, and when they began to revive and the space bridges were reestablished, there wasn't even a chance to attempt reconciliation before Chela's grudge against standardformers led to his death. Everything about this situation is amazing to think about, and I demand that IDW give me more information, even if it has to come through ramen man's artwork
Hi it's me again because you know what Spoiler: OP 10 Unless Arcee and Galvatron were completely estranged and had been that way for a long time, Arcee was probably at least casually acquainted with Cyclonus. If he was Galvatron's favorite bodyguard, it would have been hard to avoid meeting him. Dude. That's awesome. new crackship and they can bond over conflicted galvatron feelings
Spoiler Idea: Chela and Metrotitan breaking up because of religious differences, i .e. the Chosen One prophecy.
Spoiler Yeah, Galvatron and Nova Prime basically destroyed all of Nexus' and Onyx' people still on Cybertron during the Defense of the Citadel of Light and the subsequent attack on Onyx' fortress.
Spoiler: Reference related to twist in OP 10 One thing I'm noticing in skimming Arcee's interactions with Galvatron is he's a lot more casual with her than she is with him... (ExRID 37) (exRID 38) But pretty soon they both get casual, although Arcee is the more hostile of the two. I'm just going to copy and paste most of this scene without leaving pages out, because it's SUPER interesting with the reveal in mind. (exRID 42) Brotherhood, eh? Seems a painful topic for both of them. And I misremembered, by the way, unlike Sentinal Prime, Galvatron doesn't seem to see femmes inherently as abberations. Which makes sense if he's old enough that femmes were common on Cybertron when he was young! probably the thing that bothers him with Arcee is her being a femme when he knows her as a brother, and I'm not even sure if that's transphobia so much as defensiveness of his own experience. And finally... [Skipping over some pages of optimus and soundwave coming in and fighting bc this is already a fucking long reference post] [ExRID 55]
Spoiler He was alone when he got to the Citadel of Light. He was apparently part of a legion that fought Nexus Prime's Headmasters, but was by himself and kind of prickly about it. So Arcee might have split off by that point. I'm not sure when the disappearance of femmes happened in the timeline. They don't seem to appear during the first Civil War or the immediate aftermath, although maybe that's because it's not entirely clear whose point of view issue 34 is being seen through; if that's Optimus visualizing to Alpha Trion's narration, it would make sense that there would be no femmes since Optimus doesn't naturally think of them. It's not even very clear when the unification happened: the first Civil War was 10M years ago, and the current religion states that the first Cybertronians were made 12M years ago. I'd guess that would put the unification at maybe 11M years ago? Also, to be honest I never really got the feeling, and still don't, that Arcee and Galvatron recognize any shared history beyond the Second Civil War. They make no references to their siblinghood with the possible exception of the use of the word "brotherhood", but otherwise are just two people who fought once upon a time and then settled into a comfortable mutual manipulation, rather than long-estranged siblings.
Spoiler Ah, remember information creep though. Depending on when they split they literally might not have remembered being siblings very clearly. Except I think interacting again might have started to trigger some of that coming back? But too late to do anything about.
Spoiler Furthermore, Galvatron and Arcee really do sound like siblings to me when they talk. Siblings that are not really allies. But siblings.
Spoiler They do sound like they're comfortable with each other, that they understand each other. They just don't sound like they, say, were almost forced to kill each other in an arena at the whim of a decadent Prime. They sound like they tried to kill each other once upon a few weeks ago, not like they grew up together and fought together before circumstances and ambition tore them apart. And sure, they're Old as Dirt, so maybe Information Creep explains why they don't seem to remember each other, but that really strikes me as a narrative copout to cover for a plot twist with no foreshadowing.
