#saperion

AAAHHH thank you so much kdfdjjfd!!! I have neglected my poor little nerd a lot, I am very glad that you liked her!!!

thank you for giving me such a lofty title! and this is a great question! i think it deserves a thought-out response, so sit tight

first things first yeah, getting ready of the heavy-handed imagery. it’s not my lane to allude to the holocaust and it certainly isn’t james roberts’

the cack-handed allusion to jo cox in the mutineers arc legitimately makes my blood boil

-let the readership come to their own conclusions

one thing the narrative of more than losts the light was pretty guilty of was insisting you liked megatron and his character arc, and very subtly throwing shade at you if you didn’t

i think the optimus prime series handled this kind of thing pretty well by acknowledging upfront that optimus prime was a complex character and embracing multiple interpretations of him, positive and negative. that story invites you to come to your own conclusions about him, and importantly doesn’t actively compare you to a skeevoid brexiteer if you don’t

like, at the mtmte 50 signing jro compared that issue to an episode of community where it turns out all the background characters can’t stand the main cast. thing is, the Bit in that kind of episode is that the background cast are justified in not liking the main cast, because the kind of people who make up the cast of a sitcom would be absolute assholes in real life

the comic seems to not understand that, and presents the background characters (the sole dissenting opinion in the story) as this single amorphous blob of assorted irrational shitheads, led by a guy who canonically groomed one of the main cast and rattles off tory catchphrases like it’s his job 

i think a good megatron redeption arc would have to accept that there are some people who will never accept his redemption, in-universe and in the readership, and work that into the story instead of complaining about it

-make megatron the core of the story without making the story about him

one thing that really grated me about season 2 of mtmte and lost light was that the great ensemble cast found family of season 1 was more or less ignored to make room for Robot Atrocity Morrissey and his manpain. like, there were so many interesting character dynamics that could have been explored that just got thrown aside because we needed to see a mass-murderer look sad and rattle off poetry for a few more pages

characters DIED and we didn’t get any time to explore them because we needed to see That One Dude In Your English Class Who Has More Of A Statement Than A Question But A Robot shove his head up his interdimensional portal ass some more!!!

basard

again, i think some lessons could be taken from the optimus prime comic, as well as elegant chaos, which i maintain is the absolute peak of mtmte/ll. 

in the optimus prime comic, optimus prime isn’t the moral core or the protagonist of the story- rather, he’s the discussion point around which the other characters in the story are able to develop. it’s a story ABOUT optimus, not the story OF optimus. i think using megatron as a springboard to develop other characters would have been a better use of the ensemble cast of mtmte, and would have actively_ used_ one of the main strengths of the series rather than working against it

elegant chaos does the same thing! this is a story about a character going back in time to kill megatron, but the narrative space of Autobot Megatron is instead used to give the characters we know and love additional depth. you did it SO WELL this one time, james!!! why couldn’t the rest of it have been like that!!!!!!!

EATS THIS SHIT UP WITH MY HANDS AND MOUTH!!!!!

-more focused theming

one of the strengths of mtmte season 1 imo is that despite the varied ensemble cast, there was a pretty clear and focused story with consistent themes.

for example, broadly speaking the Theme of mmtmte s1 was emotional honesty and the personae we put on to hide parts of ourselves-rodimus, drift, cyclonus, whirl, swerve, tailgate, brainstorm, etc, all their arcs resolved around this general question. 

 this focus gave reveals and moments additional weight and changed the way we viewed this principle guiding question, and in turn the story as a whole

issue 15? rewind's final message? a beautifully crafted moment,but one with a particular emotional power due to how it cuts to the core of the narrative and the questions it asks, both about its cast and about its audience. that "I love you" speaks directly to the heart of the story 

going back to megatron, with mtmte s2 and ll i couldn’t really pick up on what story the comic wanted to tell me. was it about atonement? because there were plenty of avenues to tie into that theme (developing characters like chromedome, or whirl, or i don’t know RODIMUS PERHAPS JAMES ROBERTS) that didn’t get used, and megatron certainly didn’t atone for shit. was it about violence? because the whole final act of dying of the light was megatron going hog fucking wild with violence without consequences

the ending of dotl, with megatron’s brutal unmasking of tarn, implies the Theme is "violent people dress their ideologies in grand narratives to disguise and justify their cruelty" but that doesn’t track because megatron doesn’t change his behaviour at all, and the narrative doesn’t mention how megatron has done and is still doing the exact thing he condemns tarn for doing

this unfocused storytelling also means the shock reveals don’t have the same impact that they do in season 1. things like minimus ambus and everything about overlord had the punch they did because they directly tied into the theme of emotional honesty, but things like DOMINUS AMBUS IS THE PET AND AGENT 113 or TARN IS GLITCH or THE NECROBOT IS JUST A GUY OH WAIT NO HE’S A GOD AND SO IS RUNG fall flat because they don’t change the way we view the characters or the story, they’re just kinda. there

also doesn’t help that they don’t get any oxygen in the story itself because of the megatron dick vortex

basically, if megatron’s redemtpion tied into an over-arching question or topic in mtmte s2 and directly challenged or answered it, it would have felt more like an organic integration into the story and less like something i have to push out of the way to find the few slivers of character development for the cast i actually give a rat’s cock about

thomas dolby - she blinded me with science heheh

literally its not even a thing