#birdbrain thoughts

*this post brought about by sporadic pondering of how Yautja might feel about (or react to) a human OC who is "addicted to music"

Ohh nooo Starscream killed Cliffjumper, that is bad. He belongs to the Decepticons, so by association the Decepticons must be bad as well~~

Okay, murder is bad, yes sure. Not disputing that.

Next, Optimus had his reasons for getting his team to destroy the Decepticon spacebridge - and Megatron (supposedly) died in that explosion. The framing here is: Megatron could’ve ran away to save himself, but was obsessed with getting his huge army to Earth.

hurp dee durp, it’s his fault for not running away in the name of self preservation. the destruction is justified, this is his lesson for trying to bring an army of undead warriors to Earth~

anyway. Optimus and Bumblebee fighting Skyquake. Bumblebee proving himself a warrior by injuring Skyquake while the latter is in flight and later crash-lands. The camera shows Skyquake closing his eyes for the last time; the warrior was not even shown to be given a burial.

ohh nooo if the bad guy (who was stubbornly loyal to what the good guys see as a supreme villain) had joined the good guys, then he wouldn’t have needed to be killed off~~~ the good guys who killed him are apparently not wrong to have murdered him, though

Makeshift. Evil Decepticon (because he’s in the dark and you can’t even see his face) with the talent of disguising as any Cybertronian of similar size to him. Yeah okay, Starscream torturing the real Wheeljack is wrong. Any, uh, props to Soundwave for keeping Starscream from terminating the Wrecker?

Friendship jealousy plot line, identical bots battle it out. And when Shift!WJ is lobbed through the portal to the Nemesis, he turned out to have a live grenade on him which then explodes him to oblivion, and Starscream supposedly yells in frustration, and the scene was portrayed to be funny to the audience - because the bad guys did not manage to learn where the good guys live and destroy the good guys in their sleep, right?

which, if you’re the part of the audience that thinks too hard, maybe it’s not funny that there is one confirmed kill, maybe more Vehicon/Eradicon deaths or injuries

oh right, the audience was not supposed to pity the numerous faceless goons~~

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I found a series of posts that I haven’t read in a long time, but the outlook still rings true today. Some of the readmores there are missing, but I can read-again the writings that are still available. (Not at my current hour of night, though.) I remembered them because I started looking too closely at portrayal of deaths in this particular kids’ cartoon.

The Nad of the past wanted to write stuff more overtly aligned to Decepticons and social justice, but did not have the knowledge or confidence to write a full story at a level and tone that I wanted.