Yeah, but which one gets to be the Head Cheerleader?
Generations 2027: No More Primes! It is the Age of Evolution!
- Thread starter Steevy Maximus
- Start date
MW since he's the smallest and therefore lightest to get up at the top of the pyramid.
Tarn and Lugnut are still fighting it out.
Which Megatron could best provide a frame?
If movies are allowed, DOTM Megs had a trailer that could provide a frame like Onslaught and Motormaster.
Alternate pipe dream: Remold Silverbolt into Super Megatron and style the combiner as Ultra Megatron.
Alternate pipe dream: Remold Silverbolt into Super Megatron and style the combiner as Ultra Megatron.
That Super Megatron would be bonkers and I would have to have it.
You mean the part of Awakening where Optimus opens the Matrix and realizes that when Hot Rod had it he replaced the Wisdom of the Ancients with Folger's Crystals? (I haven't seen it yet but I just sort of assumed...).
Optimus NEVER has a second cup of Wisdom of the Ancients at home...
I don't do fullrepaints much anymore but made up my mind to definitely buy steamroller guy and paint it in DIO colors.
Guzzle looks better than I expected.
I really do not vibe with the concept of the new line at all. If Fort Max and Scorpy work as the Marvel comics versions I'll pick them up, and Thunderwing will be good. If the new characters are good I'll consider them, but I didn't get what people liked about the Reactivate toys in the first place and I've never given a stuff about Shattered Glass.
I really do not vibe with the concept of the new line at all. If Fort Max and Scorpy work as the Marvel comics versions I'll pick them up, and Thunderwing will be good. If the new characters are good I'll consider them, but I didn't get what people liked about the Reactivate toys in the first place and I've never given a stuff about Shattered Glass.
All of organic “lesser” races the majority of Decepticons didn’t even consider equal life forms in the first place.
That’s not that unbelievable or some kind of gotcha considering we ourselves had a slave-owning Rapist write “The Declaration of Independence” where “All Men are created equal” despite the aforementioned mentioned rape and slave-holding.
Cosigned.The issue with IDW is that it tried to present this as part of a "morally complex narrative," but ended up twisting itself into all kinds of knots.
The Autobots start as fascist thugs and the Decepticons as justified revolutionaries until the narrative has to return to the status quo of "Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons" and the narrative is straining under the weight to make it happen. There are entire flashback issues dedicated to Optimus going "ok Sentinel and Zeta are gone now we're not fascist anymore, guys!" and Megatron going "ok I know this whole thing started because we don't like oppression but hey let's do multiple genocides across the galaxy?"
I'm sure that a good enough writer could thread these needles but to be frank? A writer that good has never worked on this brand, and why would they?
Like you have Megatron in the present day telling Optimus "I would walk through an ocean of sludge to kill the last Autobot standing, just because it makes me happy," and then flashbacks make him an uwo softboi revolutionary who never wanted to hurt anyone until The Systemmade him... and the cover to bridge these two takes is "lol I was kidding"? Get the f outta here.
The closest IDW got to making any kind of sense about its version of this conflict was in the trial of Megatron when Starscream testifies that the Decepticon movement was one big riot that got out of control and Megatron wasn't even really in charge of it after a certain point, but that directly contradicts other stuff we see and besides, they never followed up on that interpretation anyway.
And don't forget how Megatron was whipped back into not-robo-Stalin mode! I liked the "Autobot Megatron" arc, but in order to enjoy it I had to consciously put aside any questions about how, after being the chief driver of the war for millions of years straight, seeing Bumblebee sacrifice himself somehow made him completely change his tune. There might've been a way to justify that if, after the fact, he revealed that he'd been repressing slowly-building doubts for eons, and that was just the chromium straw that broke the magna-camel's back. But as it is,
That said, though, Starscream's backhanded defense of him at his trial was one of the best things ever.
And "Chaos Theory", which you also paraphrased, was on its own an amazing piece of writing. In that and in his later stories, I saw Roberts grappling with the real-life question of how it is that revolutions and their revolutionaries can go awry and become something worse than what they replace. The bottom of this, from "Rules of Disengagement", is one of my favorite panels not just in TF comics, but in all comics I've ever read:
It wonderfully captures the dynamic of a self-negating utopian aim: By setting such an impossibly total kind of peace as the goal, he guarantees endless war. (Also, Roberts imbuing the classic arm-cannon with that meaning is pretty genius.) Maybe that idea could've been brought back as part of his postwar face turn?
Anyway, point being, selling Megatron as having given up his evil ways is a heavy lift in any continuity. Now apparently he'll have done so in five of them?
When I was a kid, it occurred to me that if the Autobots ever won, a very realistic outcome could be fracturing in the absence of a unifying threat, and a restart of the war along new lines. Little did I know that in the UK this idea was briefly explored right around the same time I was thinking it. I still think it's not a bad idea, though it maybe doesn't have the same high-concept simplicity that can be communicated primarily through a toyline that "evil Autobots, heroic Decepticons" does.
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I remember first reading about "Peace" early in my (sort of) grown-up return to Transformers collecting, and being unsettled by both the thought of the war being rekindled and the realization that this had never occurred to me as a possibility before but was definitely a viable narrative path. (I was also spooked by the other tale that had Rodimus consigned to having to spend the remainder of his life containing Unicron.) "Peace" was kind of hilarious considering something so small started the whole war up again, but also kind of spoke to the precarity of a post-war tension, and how easy it was to just fall back into old habits, even for the good guys. The one thing that could improve it is if Triton hadn't been a double agent, and if the Autobots had just had different choices for the new leader. (Quickly brushing up on it now via the wiki, I also discovered that apparently Roberts had written in about how bleak this ending was. Lovely coincidence.)
The way IDW (okay, mostly Roberts) explored the Autobot Megatron arc was fun. It was never going to hold up as intended, not when the continuity (and Roberts himself) had dug a deep hole of building a history of millions of years of fleshed-out atrocities. And the heel-face turn was pretty contrived and not really set up (they did have a few openings, but Dark Cybertron was still overall hot on the heels of Megatron's latest attempt).
But what got my interest is that they committed and tried beyond the 'shocking' story beat it provides, and in that deeply imperfect direction told some interesting stories that had powerful moments. Those moments ARE deservedly undercut by the weakness/es of the premise, but even given that, I'm happy to have them.
That said, it's also not really that much more or less hokey than just "it's just a straight up alternate universe where the moral alignments have ALWAYS been flipped, conveniently not needing to have any justification", if those are even comparable. Although having a history behind it (as much as it has to poorly paper over things) makes things like Tarn reacting poorly to the news of his idol palling around with Ultra Magnus and enjoying a Rodimus Star more interesting than Shattered Glass Tarn just always having been, idk, a jovial masked carnival performer who has just always lifted spirits by singing or whatever (IDK and IDC if there already is a canonical SG Tarn, that is not the point, get bent, pedants).
Megatron TURNING good is a hard sell, and has yet to be written in an airtight manner. He somehow has to be doing something wrong enough to be a proper bad guy, but has to find a worthy reason to change for the better, and then to actually do it. One failure at one of those points derails it all: Was he always just a half-baked bad guy? Why change for THIS and not the x, y, and z moments from the long past? How does he deal with the fallout and how do others, including his victims and their loved ones, deal with it?
But even the clunky way it was done was satisfying to me in some ways, and led to things that were better. I'm fine with it popping up again, even if it does come paired with the The Good Guys Turn Bad thing (which I'm actually more open to buying into, given how it's also sadly a more common real life thing anyway). Ironically it's a case of the less they write and flesh out, the better. "I'm Go-Bot Megatron. In my home universe, I led an uprising in Velocitron that got very violent, but changed my ways", okay, then go from there. (Don't say he changed when he realized he'd been fueling up on the wrong kind of Energon.)
This is sorta moot because who knows if this will get anything, but if it's spinning out of Awakening and is likely to be of the same quality I'd rather not hold my breath. But the concept by itself is intriguing and welcome.
The way IDW (okay, mostly Roberts) explored the Autobot Megatron arc was fun. It was never going to hold up as intended, not when the continuity (and Roberts himself) had dug a deep hole of building a history of millions of years of fleshed-out atrocities. And the heel-face turn was pretty contrived and not really set up (they did have a few openings, but Dark Cybertron was still overall hot on the heels of Megatron's latest attempt).
But what got my interest is that they committed and tried beyond the 'shocking' story beat it provides, and in that deeply imperfect direction told some interesting stories that had powerful moments. Those moments ARE deservedly undercut by the weakness/es of the premise, but even given that, I'm happy to have them.
That said, it's also not really that much more or less hokey than just "it's just a straight up alternate universe where the moral alignments have ALWAYS been flipped, conveniently not needing to have any justification", if those are even comparable. Although having a history behind it (as much as it has to poorly paper over things) makes things like Tarn reacting poorly to the news of his idol palling around with Ultra Magnus and enjoying a Rodimus Star more interesting than Shattered Glass Tarn just always having been, idk, a jovial masked carnival performer who has just always lifted spirits by singing or whatever (IDK and IDC if there already is a canonical SG Tarn, that is not the point, get bent, pedants).
Megatron TURNING good is a hard sell, and has yet to be written in an airtight manner. He somehow has to be doing something wrong enough to be a proper bad guy, but has to find a worthy reason to change for the better, and then to actually do it. One failure at one of those points derails it all: Was he always just a half-baked bad guy? Why change for THIS and not the x, y, and z moments from the long past? How does he deal with the fallout and how do others, including his victims and their loved ones, deal with it?
But even the clunky way it was done was satisfying to me in some ways, and led to things that were better. I'm fine with it popping up again, even if it does come paired with the The Good Guys Turn Bad thing (which I'm actually more open to buying into, given how it's also sadly a more common real life thing anyway). Ironically it's a case of the less they write and flesh out, the better. "I'm Go-Bot Megatron. In my home universe, I led an uprising in Velocitron that got very violent, but changed my ways", okay, then go from there. (Don't say he changed when he realized he'd been fueling up on the wrong kind of Energon.)
This is sorta moot because who knows if this will get anything, but if it's spinning out of Awakening and is likely to be of the same quality I'd rather not hold my breath. But the concept by itself is intriguing and welcome.
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Yeah, I was thinking that as I was writing that post - Roberts' run has so many great moments (like the one in that panel), and even if they struggle to form a genuinely cohesive whole, they're still worthwhile to me. Like, the wordless image of Megatron instinctively holding his unarmed arm out because he was about to blast someone, then realizing what it meant that he'd done that, was >chef's kiss<.
A kind of opposite phenomenon I've noticed in more than one series that goes on long enough is that a too-well-fleshed-out bad guy ends up turning good because the writer(s) make him so sympathetic or give him a motivation that ends up resolved, and there's almost nowhere else to go. That happened to a lot of major Cobra figures in Hama's Joe run, until he decided to brainwave-scanner them back to the "evil" setting.
But yeah, most Megatrons aren't so amenable to plausible redemption, due to their incredibly long histories and in most cases absence of motives the audience can relate to in any way. Dude's an evil robot leader! Bwaa!
Both IDW Optimus and Megatron’s entire arc was about how it was impossible to escape your past.
Optimus died to atone and Megatron either did too (or spent eternity in prison). Weird sci-fi quantum double hand pull aside, that’s about as well as you could end it. Even if Megatron had truly changed he’d still have to pay for his crimes and that was done.
Optimus died to atone and Megatron either did too (or spent eternity in prison). Weird sci-fi quantum double hand pull aside, that’s about as well as you could end it. Even if Megatron had truly changed he’d still have to pay for his crimes and that was done.
This is the curse of solid writing there, I guess, but more specifically a matter of overcorrection. In wanting to avoid a character who's evil for evil's sake for whatever reason, they make a character who's more plausible and complex, and that complexity can't just be dismissed either, so sometimes they believably shift alignments over time. This is far from the only way to do that well, but to not do it can create other problems.
I don’t see it that way.
Aside from the necessary narrative contrivance, I can get behind the idea that the Resistance believes the only counter to Optimus Prime would be his “equal” in Megatron. They might not be looking for a heroic Megatron, just A Megatron that can break Optimus’s hold on Cybertron.
Some might be more nobler than others, some more adaptable to work with the Resistance, maybe even some capable of being a good leader….but you KNOW there will be the schemers and the megalomaniacs that make it through the cracks. Transmetal Megatron is a good example, and if they do Beast Machines/Grand Mal Megatron, he’s certainly not about that “sharing power” thing.