Generations 2027: No More Primes! It is the Age of Evolution!

[CoffeeHorse]

I'd write direct competent writers to write both Optimus and Megatron as nobodies who had nothing to do with starting the war and don't become truly important until the war spills over to Earth. I'd do it for a number of reasons, but one side effect is you could do a reformed Megatron arc (I wouldn't, but you could) and you could pin all the war crimes on Trannis and Straxus or whoever.

 

[LBD "Nytetrayn"]

That said, though, Starscream's backhanded defense of him at his trial was one of the best things ever.

I had to look this up to remind myself of what exactly he said.

Totally worth it.

What strikes me about the Megatron face turn, though, is that it seemed to come at a time when beliefs seemed to be skewing more towards "there is good in everyone deep down," "evil for evil's sake is unrealistic," and "a great villain is the hero of their own story". And with the possible exception of that last one, in the years since... I'm not sure I feel that way anymore. Not as much as I once did.

Kind of strange, really.

 

[LordGigaIce]

What strikes me about the Megatron face turn, though, is that it seemed to come at a time when beliefs seemed to be skewing more towards "there is good in everyone deep down," "evil for evil's sake is unrealistic," and "a great villain is the hero of their own story". And with the possible exception of that last one, in the years since... I'm not sure I feel that way anymore. Not as much as I once did.

Kind of strange, really.

As with all things, a trend in pop culture got popular and then it got overdone, there was burnout, and the previous way of doing things became retroactively appreciated more.

In this case, I think the tipping point in broader pop culture may have been the Disney Cruella de Vil movie, where the movie is so in love with the main character's sympathetic backstory that it can't bring itself to actually make her the villain who wants to skin puppies to make a coat. Which is... like... her thing. The character's name is "the cruel devil lady" and the movie was so lost in the sauce it went "she's not bad, really!" Just sort of caused a "what are we doing here?" reaction.

With Transformers, I've seen memes since TFO came out about how hard they leaned into making D-16/Megatron's motivations sympathetic that it pales in comparison to G1 Sunbow Megs doing it for the love of the game.

Now it's just a meme but it is indicative of how some people are viewing and taking this stuff.

A lot of it is also generational.
For most of us here, we grew up in the 80s and 90s where cartoon villains were snarling sociopaths who were evil just because. So when enough of us got old enough to write for these franchises and they were like "what if Snarly McMoustache had a sympathetic backstory and a reason to build the pollution factory?" the rest of us went "yes this is a refreshing change of pace."

But we're old now, man. Teens and young adults today grew up with increasingly sympathetic villains as the default and never had that 80s/90s experience that makes such writing seem new and insightful. To them this is just the standard, and your standard as a kid gets boring. They discover Snarly McMoustache being a prick just because and it's so different from what they're used to as the default they appreciate it.

Back to Transformers specifically... I think you CAN do a Megatron faceturn, it's just that IDW Megs was one of the worst to attempt it with.
Earthspark Megs works as a good guy because while there was a war, it's a kids show so the details are vague enough that you can tell yourself that this Megs didn't do any war crimes if you wanted to.
IDW Megs, however, spent over a decade being Space Hitler, and when he wasn't being Space Hitler, he was being Space Stalin. And you're going to give THAT guy a redemption arc? Please.

I've spoken before how uncomfortable that was for me personally, as someone with family who died in the Holocaust. IDW gave their Megatron his own version of Auschwitz, very clearly coded as Auschwitz, and then asked me to feel sorry for the guy? What?
But I don't think you need someone with my family history to actually appreciate the level of messed up that is, just conceptually. That so much time was spent trying to smooth the rocky gaps between early IDW's genocidal space tyrant and Roberts and Barber's owo softboy revolutionary kind of speaks to the problem there. If you need that much retroactive narrative massaging to make it work... it probably doesn't work.

Finally... I think a lot of this is a symptom of our inability as a society to appreciate nuance.
You can give a villain a sympathetic backstory. You can give them logical reasons that lead to them doing villainous things... but they can still be villains. Sure. Give Snarly McMoustache a sympathetic backstory and let us see what led to him opening the pollution factory... but he still opens the pollution factory. That we maybe sympathize with his early life situation and can see how he got here doesn't make him any less wrong. Lots of people do wrong things after starting from a sympathetic or understandable place.
We have socially, however, lost the ability to have nuance and so writers who opt for this path often fall in love with the sympathetic badguy and decide he's not so bad.

Rediscovering nuance as a broader society would do ourselves a lot of good in a lot of ways, but in terms of pop culture? It will at least help us to understand that we can have complex villains who are still ultimately villains.

 

[Steevy Maximus]

With Transformers, I've seen memes since TFO came out about how hard they leaned into making D-16/Megatron's motivations sympathetic that it pales in comparison to G1 Sunbow Megs doing it for the love of the game.

I think that’s a big reason Leto’s Skeletor went over as well as it did. There is no deep, tragic, backstory. He’s got a frickin’ skull for a face, of course he’s going to be the bad guy! And he loves it! And he all but called He-Man an idiot for trying to dig for a depth that isn’t there.

Rediscovering nuance as a broader society would do ourselves a lot of good in a lot of ways, but in terms of pop culture? It will at least help us to understand that we can have complex villains who are still ultimately villains.

But nuance is complex and messy. It doesn’t fit into clean, short, slogans. /s

I fully agree with your statement, but I think, culturally, we need to recover a few IQ points before getting BACK to that point.

 

[LordGigaIce]

I think that’s a big reason Leto’s Skeletor went over as well as it did. There is no deep, tragic, backstory. He’s got a frickin’ skull for a face, of course he’s going to be the bad guy! And he loves it! And he all but called He-Man an idiot for trying to dig for a depth that isn’t there.

I was prepared to hate that movie's Skelator because of Leto but G-ddamnit, they made it work.

I fully agree with your statement, but I think, culturally, we need to recover a few IQ points before getting BACK to that point.

Very true.

 

[lastmaximal]

The Cruella movie was Disney's latest attempt (Maleficent, the Descendants?) to do Wicked without actually doing Wicked. Now that someone finally went and did Wicked, maybe they can let that rest.

Nothing was ever going to make "woman who wanted to skin puppies" work. It's actually a lot of fun to imagine it as an entirely unique character who happens to have similar hair at some point I guess. So much is changed to make the movie happen ANYWAY, and Emma Stone is delightful in the role. Just file the serial numbers off and it's a perfectly cromulent movie. (I'd say the thing that actually finalized the wearing out of the welcome was the Joker movie.)

In much the same way, IDW Megatron was not going to work with a face turn after the writing he'd had. Too much worldbuilding had been cast his way, naming the atrocities and providing specifics that they then tried to buy back and gloss over despite otherwise rewarding the reader for paying attention. Any turn would have to reflect that complexity, that commitment to the cause that lasted millions of years and was not SHOWN to really waver.

I genuinely don't know about the nuance point. Making a character sympathetic is a trope that serves a purpose, a card played to lead to a desired outcome. It's the basis of the MCU, it's the basis of face turns in WWE, it's a staple in fiction besides those, it's the backfire effect of true crime adaptations. Likewise, the concept of a villain being the hero of their own story is just life; who wakes up and explicitly decides to be evil? Like, beyond petty selfishness? Even assholes who gain self-awareness are just living life or taking what they feel is deserved, no Mister Burns "taking candy from a baby" for its own sake. Even actual evil people (Thiel) are in the news trying to retcon evil as being "good", so while they ARE claiming evil, they're still whitewashing it. There's nothing wrong with that character framing; it's just been overused, mostly by fiction that wasn't very well-made. I'm weary of it too, but I prefer it to the "here's the bad guy! He's just evil, we need an evil dude" that I grew up with. Save that for force of nature characters, but don't lump everyone into that pot.

(Upon reflection I think a KEY piece of this is that you can make a villain sympathetic, but making them LIKABLE is a step too far for maintaining the direction of keeping them on a villainous footing. They can be enhanced if they're made to be UNDERSTOOD, but it derails things if they are to be ROOTED FOR. Then again, as we've seen time and again, sometimes a good portrayal is just going to be appealing no matter what. And some people will let damn near anything in their pants, which amplifies that.)

I WILL agree that it requires more deft writing than we've seen to add a sympathetic backstory and/or turn, and still make the character plausibly evil without defaulting to clichés that lie THAT way (I'll just be what you say I am, the ol' Macbeth it's too late to change now anyway, etc). Roberts fumbled that badly when he took too long to air any real counterpoints to Megatron's appointment, and then assigning that to an Angry Mob whose mouthpiece was the gaslighting Getaway, and the story of which was left to be summed up in clunky and messy fashion.

That said, a Megatron written with far vaguer Evil History would leave more room for that storytelling pivot. But who knows, maybe even that just won't be explained.

 

[unluckiness]

I liked how they tried to justify stealing, killing and skinning a hundred dogs because dalmatians knocked her mother over a cliff. It's like something out of Family Guy

 

[Sabrblade]

Honestly, one of the few cases of Hollywood making a sympathetic backstory for a villain that I feel actually worked was in DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt. Rameses is cast in a sympathetic light that fully allows audiences to understand his motivations and why he considers himself a victim of his circumstances (with just enough nuance to even let some argue that he actually is, to some extent, what with the pressure and high standards placed upon him by his father).

But what makes his story work as well as it does is that, in the end, he is not validated or vindicated in his motivations, and is instead depicted as a tragic villain rather than a tragic hero-turned-villain. He is still defeated and proven to be in the wrong by the end, and ultimately never learns anything, brought down by his own stubbornness and hubris.

Unlike such cases as Wicked, Maleficent, and Cruella, he is never portrayed as the hero of the story. At best, he is originally an ally and foil to the hero, but only because Moses begins the story on the wrong side and must find his way back to the light by the middle of the story, whereas Rameses only continues down the same path that his father had planned for him from the beginning, without ever getting to see the light as Moses does.

 

[lastmaximal]

He's also never the narrative focus, which makes that easier to pull off. And that type of focalization is the appropriate approach for achieving that; no messing with "the villain is the hero of his own story" if it's not his own story.

 

[Jackpot]

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.

Depends on how hard Hasbro leans into the Shattered-Glass-ish angle. Your take is very realistic (insofar as space robots go) and could make for a great story. But for toy marketing, which side is the "good" one? I mean, I guess it's possible Hasbro has looked at the adult-collector vs. child sales numbers and decided they don't need to limit themselves to the typical frame of the latter market anymore.

This popped into my head: In the tenth year of President-for-Life Harry S Truman's despotic reign, a cabal of freedom fighters and scientists devise a desperate plan to break his iron grip: resurrect his greatest enemies to lead the resistance. Thus are Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung (who'd died in the nuclear bombing of Pyongyang) reborn as... heroes?

You can give a villain a sympathetic backstory. You can give them logical reasons that lead to them doing villainous things... but they can still be villains. Sure. Give Snarly McMoustache a sympathetic backstory and let us see what led to him opening the pollution factory... but he still opens the pollution factory. That we maybe sympathize with his early life situation and can see how he got here doesn't make him any less wrong. Lots of people do wrong things after starting from a sympathetic or understandable place.
We have socially, however, lost the ability to have nuance and so writers who opt for this path often fall in love with the sympathetic badguy and decide he's not so bad.

Agreed. Though it's funny, as much as I can critique IDW Megatron's character arc, I also have complaints in the opposite direction for how Roberts wrote Pharma and Getaway. I was struck by how both of them were introduced as understandable characters who were basically too willing to make little compromises that would add up to tragedy, but who then went full moustache-twirl pretty quickly afterward. Felt jarring to me.

I mentioned Hama's Cobra character arcs - one villain he never redeemed was Cobra Commander, and I think that's a model for what you're talking about. CC had a grounded origin as a put-upon everyman in a soul-sucking sales job who'd lost a tether with the death of his brother. When he realized he could rile up others' similar resentments as a faceless firebrand and found himself with an insurgent army, he had power and purpose. That's all understandable and human. And it's also perfectly congruent with him becoming an irredeemable warlord drunk on his own self-narrative as both victim and superman, reveling in cruelty and enjoying the theatricality of it all. There is maybe a potential redemption arc in there with the fact that his villainy was all committed under a guise, allowing the possibility of his former "true self" still being alive deep below the mask, Anakin-style. But man, who wants that? The mask is what we're here for!

Honestly, one of the few cases of Hollywood making a sympathetic backstory for a villain that I feel actually worked was in DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt. Rameses is cast in a sympathetic light that fully allows audiences to understand his motivations and why he considers himself a victim of his circumstances (with just enough nuance to even let some argue that he actually is, to some extent, what with the pressure and high standards placed upon him by his father).

Or the Ten Commandments version, where his problem is that he's married. Either/or.

(Let's see Hollywood have the guts to stick to the source material, where just as he starts on a redemption arc, God straight-up turns him evil for the plot.)

 

[Platypus Prime]

I still think the best version of 'reform' I've seen in Megatron was years before IDW, there was a fanfic that won an award called "Cybertron Dreams" which was a very strange Transformers x Macross x all sorts of stuff crossover, but the core was that Galvatron was a copy of Megatron made by Unicron. He didn't even know. Megatron was then left to drift in space, which he did for years, and it gave him time to reflect. When he came back to Cybertron centuries later, he wasn't 'good', he was focused in a very different direction, towards species survival rather than power and conquest, realizing if there was something like Unicron out there, there are probably more, and he was going to be ready for them.

It's not a spoiler for a 20+ year old fanfic that probably no one can find, but it had the very strange ending, where Megatron and Soundwave actually partnered up with humans, to go out and learn more about what threats exist beyond the parts of space Cybertronians had explored to that point.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

It's funny how cyclical this all is.

Dom Claude Frollo was originally written with a sympathetic backstory. Hollywood decided he doesn't need one. Today they'd probably invent one, forgetting that he already has one.

 

[Jackpot]

For most of us here, we grew up in the 80s and 90s where cartoon villains were snarling sociopaths who were evil just because. So when enough of us got old enough to write for these franchises and they were like "what if Snarly McMoustache had a sympathetic backstory and a reason to build the pollution factory?" the rest of us went "yes this is a refreshing change of pace."

Another factor of G1-era storytelling was its constraints due to its target audience. Villains could be full-on sociopaths in worlds were pilots always safely parachuted out of their exploding helicopters, and de-materialization ray guys could re-materialize their victims with a flip of a switch. Megatron and Cobra Commander and Shredder and all of them were basically Stitch playing with models of San Francisco.

But whenever the chocks come off, whether it's the Bayverse or IDW or even Regeneration One, things get grim. Because the core premise really is grim. Maybe villain-redemption is a way to cut that. I wouldn't be surprised if that were part of Roberts' motivation with Megatron, to present the possibility of a way out of the sunless depths that he (Roberts and Megatron both) had taken the IDWverse into.

This, incidentally, is why I prefer stories that don't take the TFverse too seriously. Magic Reset Buttons are fine! Give me a Signal Lancer mini any day. Oh man, why was there never a SpotStoplight: Signal Lancer?

I still think the best version of 'reform' I've seen in Megatron was years before IDW, there was a fanfic that won an award called "Cybertron Dreams" which was a very strange Transformers x Macross x all sorts of stuff crossover, but the core was that Galvatron was a copy of Megatron made by Unicron. He didn't even know. Megatron was then left to drift in space, which he did for years, and it gave him time to reflect. When he came back to Cybertron centuries later, he wasn't 'good', he was focused in a very different direction, towards species survival rather than power and conquest, realizing if there was something like Unicron out there, there are probably more, and he was going to be ready for them.

I've had similar thoughts about how things would go in a continuation of the G2 comics. I could see the truce persisting while most of the 'Cons focused on deep-space scouting and/or taking the fight to the Cybertronian Empire, and most of the 'Bots focused on shoring up the homefront. I say "most of" because some from each faction would be better suited to do the non-typical thing, and that would make for some fun interactions. (Also, unrelated to the topic at hand, but something I picture is the starfaring 'Cons running into species who were the inspirations for Scorponok's Pretender shell designs. So, like, there's a water planet where Submarauder and/or Finback can go undercover.)

 

[LordGigaIce]

I wanted to touch on the notion of Optimus Prime Awakening being tied to this line... one of the lines the entity says to Optimus is that if the Decepticons were defeated there would just be more conflict via different enemies.

And that does mesh very well with this line's "backstory." The Autobots win and unify Cybertron and then become tyrannical, and rebel Autobots and some remnant Decepticons oppose them.

 

[Steevy Maximus]

I still think the best version of 'reform' I've seen in Megatron was years before IDW, there was a fanfic that won an award called "Cybertron Dreams" which was a very strange Transformers x Macross x all sorts of stuff crossover, but the core was that Galvatron was a copy of Megatron made by Unicron. He didn't even know. Megatron was then left to drift in space, which he did for years, and it gave him time to reflect. When he came back to Cybertron centuries later, he wasn't 'good', he was focused in a very different direction, towards species survival rather than power and conquest, realizing if there was something like Unicron out there, there are probably more, and he was going to be ready for them.

It's not a spoiler for a 20+ year old fanfic that probably no one can find, but it had the very strange ending, where Megatron and Soundwave actually partnered up with humans, to go out and learn more about what threats exist beyond the parts of space Cybertronians had explored to that point.

I know exactly where it is at…
www.eyrie.net/UF/FI/cybertron.txt

I read it in 1996 or 97 at the dawn of the wider internet. Good god, I’m old.

 

[Platypus Prime]

Oh wow, thanks! It's been years, now I can see if my description was close or if I just misremembered something!

 

[The Predaking]

I really need to finish reading the rest of the IDW run.

The Cruella movie was Disney's latest attempt (Maleficent, the Descendants?) to do Wicked without actually doing Wicked. Now that someone finally went and did Wicked, maybe they can let that rest.

I just wanted to say that I think that Maleficent is a much better film than it gets credit for, and personally I would rather watch it than Wicked.

 

[Sabrblade]

I just wanted to say that I think that Maleficent is a much better film than it gets credit for, and personally I would rather watch it than Wicked.

I watched Maleficent for the first time earlier this year and found it utterly baffling. They had to make significantly worse so many other characters (pretty much everyone who wasn't Aurora) from the original animated version in order to make Maleficent believably sympathetic. At that point, they might as well have just made a completely original story with completely news characters as part of a new IP, instead of making it part of the Sleeping Beauty franchise.

 

[The Predaking]

I watched Maleficent for the first time earlier this year and found it utterly baffling. They had to make significantly worse so many other characters (pretty much everyone who wasn't Aurora) from the original animated version in order to make Maleficent believably sympathetic.

Well three people get changed, but that is the point of the story though. It is an alternate version of the story where she is a good person that went through horrible things by the person that she trusted the most.

At that point, they might as well have just made a completely original story with completely news characters as part of a new IP, instead of making it part of the Sleeping Beauty franchise.

I don't think that it is that big of a leap to say that both of the kings were jerks, and that the entire myth was twisted by the victors. Don't get me wrong the original Disney animated film is a great classic film, but I really think that Maleficent works well as a different take of the story. The sequel I didn't enjoy as much, but the first film really works for me.

 

[lastmaximal]

Well three people get changed, but that is the point of the story though. It is an alternate version of the story where she is a good person that went through horrible things by the person that she trusted the most.

This is kind of the point of the complaint too. The angle is that "it's the other side of the story", which is immediately and demonstrably false because it's not the same story. An "alternate version of the story" is, idk, Sleeping Beauty itself told differently; a prequel is by definition a wholly different story. But this steps beyond that and asks the audience to buy into entirely switched moral alignments, with one of the new ones being made up whole cloth and LOADED with They're Bad Now. It's Cruella but it takes itself much more seriously.

If you have to replace characters with straight-up evil versions to make the villain (who is also no longer villainOUS, conveniently) sympathetic, then that's not "the other side of the story" or even "an alternate version of the story", it's just another story entirely. Which is FINE, but don't try to sell it as anything else.

I like a lot about it, like the aesthetic and the design for Maleficent was very striking and the performances were fairly solid for at least Angelina and Elle. But the premise was so transparently fix fic that I could not get on board.