#stupid speculation

Here we go again.

Image Comics, under the imprint Skybound Entertainment, now has the mantle which the IDW Publishing had for thirteen years. Which means it is time for new stories.

Or a reboot that feels rather familiar.

The thing is, Transformers has a very rich history. While the premise itself can be summarized in 1-2 sentences, there is still nearly forty years of media to draw from.

So, why do we always end up in 1984?

Because it is familiar. It is what we are used to. It is the simpler time where we know what happens, where we are in the familiarity of the franchise and we can call it our comfort. While there is certainly transformers stories that took the big leap, such as Beast Wars and Transformers Animated, those still took their cue from the original cartoon.

So what can we expect from this new comic series?

First of all, there is the obvious. Art references and references to old plots that were once seen Saturday mornings in front of the TV. While building on the true and trusted bare-bones of the cartoon series that started it all.

And secondly, we know there is going to be GI Joe comics, with the main cover of the upcoming "Duke" comic showing a fighter jet that is very familiar. And as the "Energon Universe" is its own imprint, and we have "Void Rivals", four issues already out with four characters in them from the original G1 transformers cartoon. All before this comic issue came out. So it is not only Transformers, but they are going to be alongside Duke, Marissa and Cobra Commander and with few original characters and concept in as well.

And despite all the familiarity, there is a deviation. A significant one but familiar. Grim? Mature? For grownups? No matter what, it is a deviation that's very familiar to everyone. That this medium to tell the story is not aimed at the age group that was the target audience for the cartoon, but for the same kids that watched the cartoon in its infancy, now all grown up and there is no need to sugarcoat anything. Gone are the days of thinly sanitised references to bleaker things which are expanded upon in a PSA before the credits roll. Here they are, out in the open for dissemination or to really hammer home that this is something that can't be seen on the TV during your Saturday mornings.

Kinda like Hawke was a human?

I'm sure most people would hate that, but I actually think that would be fantastic.

So, where are you from?

While this is not the first Transformers media that goes into making Transformers coming from other planets than Cybertron, this is the first media that really goes into making the Transformers from Earth into a very distinct clade of their own, instead of being born of sparks that were brought down to Earth, or were literally built by other Cybertronians.

This is not just to make this more down-to-earth series, to make the kids connect with the characters even more and feel closer to them than if they would be were they aliens. This is not just from tapping into the childhood playground theatres of the Gen X and Millennial writers of the series.

This is a story born out of trauma that all of us experience in one form or another.

This is a story born out of history. Not just the list of events and what year they happened as we learn in school, but also of the little histories. Folktales, fables, bedtime stories.

Transformers Earthspark is about Culture. And how fragile it is.

Let's start with the obvious one. We all know about the Transformers, the lore behind it and all that jazz. Heroic Autobots versus the dastardly Decepticons. Led by Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively.

But the first time we see them in Earthspark, something has changed.

The first thing people noticed, even before Earthspark aired, was that Optimus Prime and Megatron were now on the same side? And neither of them kept their Autobot and Decepticon insignias? Well, it is still there, but such a minuscule and easily overlooked that one would be forgiven to think it part of the GHOST insignia to begin with. The Cybertronian factions have existed for so long that it would be so ingrained into everyone so losing it in such a way would be a big blow. And in fact, anyone not part of GHOST still has their insignias intact.

Apparently for the war to end on Earth, both Optimus Prime and Megatron had to give something up. A part of their identity, a part of their culture.

It looks like the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons has finally ended. But it looks like the victor was Earth.

But it doesn't mean that they gave up everything.

There is still something happening which GHOST is not privy to, and if they were, it would most likely be incorporated into their whole. While there are Decepticons roaming around, and still some Autobots as well allowed to still carry the insignia and apparently not work for GHOST, Bumblebee is somehow the exception. It is very likely he played a big part in the war on Earth, thus not be given whatever immunity the others have.

All of this might sound like a new and exciting story, and we're eagerly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the relevation why Bumblebee's visage is heavily marketed while his death was apparently faked, and why his existence is very inconvenient for Optimus Prime who is apparently playing both sides, Autobot and GHOST, and why exactly Megatron joined GHOST as well despite the treatment the Decepticons are receiving.

The thing is, this is an old story. In war, it is easy to have a victor. It is however very hard not to have someone who lost. And wars have many different forms to them. In this series, we're seeing two different wars being played out. There is the Autobot and Decepticon conflict, which seems to be over now, and then there is the secret war that's going on. As I said before, Humanity seems to have won the war, and they are on the winning side of the other hidden war.

Transformers Earthspark is about two Earthborn Cybertronians bonding with a family of humans, an African American woman and a Filipino immigrant man, and their two kids.

Dot, whose ancestors were taken away from their birthplace and brought across the globe as slaves, losing their connection and familiarities to their culture and ending up as a regular American like so many that have the same roots as her.

Alex, immigrant from the Philippines, still retaining some part of his stories but having to retell them through a book.

A book that is literally part of a series called "Tales of the Obscure". What does that do to a person? Knowing that their culture is being reduced to near nothing or worse, novelty, when moving? What happens to their identity? Is Alex trying his best to tell his kids the stories of his youth to explain where he came from, or is he clinging onto one of the few things he has found in his new life that has something of his old life?

And then we have Twitch and Thrash. The two new Cybertronians who are not from Cybertron, but were born from the Emberstone while on Earth. How will they fit into the society and culture of Earth? The series up until now seems to be about just that. About these two new individuals trying to figure out who they are and how they're going to fit in. And this is a big conflict for the two of them. On one hand, they're going to be learning about themselves and learn about others and try to go their own way into being who they are.

And on the other hand -

Propaganda.

In any sort of conflict, there is propaganda. Either outright lies or grossly exaggerated version of the truth that is touted in order to gain following or to discredit the opposition. Propaganda can come in more forms than that, and at points, it can be a very effective tool when used correctly.

What if Deadlock was just one big propaganda campaign?

Drift at the beginning of the revolution was pretty much a petty criminal, known for his sharpshooting skills after having survived… what exactly?

Even in Drift’s retelling of the events, we see a bunch of unprepared enforcers, who probably were shocked as well as an errant swipe at them caused a weapon discharge, and Drift, in his rage, escalated.

Despite the rather incongruous start, Drift is found by the criminal underground. Someone who is on the run, has already taken a life, would be easily picked up by the right people.

But he is still very well known. He wiped out a squad of enforcers solo, and he survived being part of the organized crime for a while. Megatron makes it clear that he had heard of him, and he makes a very public show of recruiting him in a meeting that he doesn’t only preside, but Starscream and Soundwave are there as well. He is no longer Drift, a gun for whomever rules the underground at the moment, but Deadlock, the deadshot gunman of the Decepticons.

When we next see Drift Deadlock, things seem a bit… off.

Utter inability to read the room, as he tries to incite mutiny against Turmoil and there is not a single one that wants to take him up on that offer. For a second-in-command of this squad, one would think social skills would be a requirement, especially to know where one’s loyalties lie.

And apparently he never bothered to learn anything more than how to shoot?

And yes, well, he is kind of new to swordfighting but those are pretty terrible interrogation skills and he got himself easily overpowered in mere two moves without any chance to fight back.

Despite the lack of diverse skills, and not knowing when to quit, Megatron is still interested in keeping Deadlock instead of letting Turmoil simply kill him. The big question: Why?

Deadlock is a name, a well known name representing a well known entity, a stone cold killer whose first kill was an entire squad of enforcers, then being trained by Cybertron’s Underground as a shooter, then personally recruited by Megatron and rose up to second in command of a squad commanded by Turmoil, who doesn’t come across as any sort of soft type.

To really be able to dive into who Elita-1 is in the (2005) IDW comics, why she is the way she is and how I feel about her, we have to go into the character's history in the franchise, and and the history of female characters in the franchise.

Elita-1 is interesting in her own rights, but not devolving into that history would be doing her a great disservice. This is a character who appeared in the G1 cartoon pre-movie, was canonically the love interest of Orion Pax/Optimus Prime, has powers over time itself, and got a toy in...

2007?! And said toy is from the movie line, and is a redeco of Energon Arcee?! And back to IDW appearance, aside from a minor appearance of two panels without a speaking role in 2006, she actually debuted in 2016?!

This is why we need to go into the actual history of woman-coded transformers, to understand what exactly went wrong.

Like, did you know that Transformers Animated Red Alert is the closest representation we got of the original concept of G1 Ratchet? Bob Budiansky meant for Ratchet to be a woman, inspired by nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

So, where has Elita-1 been? Speaking of TFA, she was in that series, but only as a tragic backstory for Optimus Prime and her more accurate inspired character, Black Arachnia.

TFWiki likes to split up character pages when the individual sections get too big. The best known example is Rewind's page, where previously his page had been summarized as a bullet point list of interesting facts about him, but in the 2005 IDW comics, he played such a big role it had to be summarized properly. But for a proper example, when you look at G1 Optimus Prime, you see in the top right corner the sub-pages, which at the time of this writing is this:

Elita-1's page however? Nothing. And the section of the 2005 IDW continuity is the biggest section on her page. Her biggest role in the Transformers media is the 2005 IDW comics.

So what happened?

Sexism. No girl robots please. And it is known that the inclusion of Elita-1's team in the G1 cartoon, and Arcee, is through the writers themselves, who had daughters and they wanted them to have some representation in what they were writing. Arcee in the Transformers movie is explicitly modeled after Leia from the Star Wars films as that was pretty much the only other girl-friendly representation that was "safe" to display.

But those were just few and small voices that were able to do this. And they couldn't make any proper waves. Even though Arcee was introduced and she had a pretty good representation in the cartoon after the movie, her presense was not strong enough to influence the following years as Transformers was reimagined again and again.

And Elita-1 suffered for it. Arcee became the epitome representation for girls and women in the transformers media, and there was no room for any other, like Elita-1 or Chromia. If you wanted a woman-coded Transformers, you went with Arcee.

So Elita-1 never got any real spotlight on her, nor real character building. She was at most times just referenced as Optimus' girlfriend, or Orion Pax' girlfriend, or maybe on a good day someone spoke of her powers over time as well.

This led to the Elita-1 we see in the 2005 IDW comics. She is pretty much a new character, where the only thing she has in common with the 1985 Elita-1 is that she's a commander.

In the 2005 IDW comics, she is drawn up to make a contrast between Starscream and Windblade, and is even a common foe they have to face together, which is especially apparent as those three are the candidates in an election of who will rule Cybertron. She had her own strict moral code, believes in might and power, and takes no nonsense, and even wanted the humans on Cybertron exterminated after a human-led attack on Iacon.

This Elita-1 would not exist if it wasn't for the rocky start she had, the invisibility the original Elita-1 and other women-coded Transformers suffered through the decades. With the lack of proper screentime and proper character development, the lack of interest from the toy production company, Elita-1 became what the writer wanted her to be, posing her against the fan favorites Starscream and Windblade. Elita-1 did in time become pretty strong showing up until the end of the 2005 run.

Elita-1 did have a bigger role in Netflix's War For Cybertron series, very much modeled after her appearance in the G1 cartoon without any trace of how she was in the 2005 IDW comics.

We'll then also have to wait and see how things develop, both for the Netflix series and the 2019 IDW comics. While the 2005 IDW comics version of her is interesting as she is clearly playing by her own rules and having her own motivations and her relation to the G1 cartoon predecessor is only in name and color, it seems like that the current media of her is going back to the G1 roots.

Earlier this year, a toy of Ultra Magnus was released. And a Walmart exclusive came along later, marked “spoiler”, with a translucent pink Rung battlemaster toy with it. This caused quite a stir, as in the IDW comics Rung ended up being Primus himself, so no one quite knew what this version of Rung could mean.

Now that War for Cybertron: Siege has come out, we know now that Rung is nowhere to be seen. Not even as one of the background bots.

So what does pink translucent Rung mean? There were not that many pink things in the series. There was Arcee, Energon, and -

oh yeah, that. The virus made to basically destroy Autobot infrastructure along with deleting the Alpha Trion protocols that Ultra Magnus had previously carried.

The Villains of Transformers.

This seems like a basic non-question. We got Unicron as the world-ending threat, and various incarnations of Megatron doing the rest of the job to keep the threat going. However, there is another angle to it.

Often we hear the phrase “write what you know”. Which seems simple enough, that you got experience with something that you can write it pretty true. But what does one know about mechanical aliens that have been fighting a war for 4 million years?

But the various writers of the Transformers franchise throughout the years have written what they know. There is an overarching threat in each one of the transformers incarnations that is different from the Megatron the Tyrant or the Planet-eating Unicron. It’s more like background noise, providing the constant that is happening, a crutch when writing.

Unfortunately I won’t be touching on Japanese produced media, I haven’t studied the history of Japan to know the nuanced details of culture background noise or incidental historic events to comment on Headmaster, Victory, RID2001, Unicron Trilogy and any other that I have missed.

I will also skip the Marvel, Dreamwave and FunPub comics/media as I’ve not read them. Cyberverse and the second IDW release are skipped as they are pretty recent additions. Rescue Bots and Rescue Bots Academy is skipped as well due to simplicity.

The main theme of the G1 cartoon is energy shortage. Cybertron is out of Energon, they flee Cybertron to find more energy. The Decepticons set up base on Earth because the humans have begun to harness the energy of their planet, allowing easy access to said energy and to ship it home.

This doesn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, most people have heard of the precursor in passing. The time when cars were lined up at the gas stations.

1979 was a bad shock for the oil market. Iran revolted, causing oil production to shrink a bit and caused panic, which in turned caused the prices of oil to rise dramatically. This was also the year where the Three Mile Island Accident happened, so people got vary of nuclear power. Gas rationing was discussed, and in some states actually implemented. Then recession hit in the wake of this.

The effects of the oil crisis and the following recession were still felt, so a cartoon about an energy crisis was very easy to write.

Beast Wars is an odd one to analyse. It came as the Transformers franchise was dying, and Hasbro was desperate to reinvent Transformers for the new kids. The appeal of cars turning into robots was no longer around, but making them animals was the push Hasbro needed to refresh the Transformers.

So we end up with the beginning basically rehashing the Transformers cartoon, but when the overarching plot hits, when the threads get revealed after a whole season of basically filler, we find the inspiration that the writers had. This time, it is not energy crisis, in 1996 we had put that behind us.

We have Megatron leading a team trying to restore the Decepticons as rightful rulers via time travel. We then discover he had actually gone against the so-called Tripredacus Council, the fractured Predacon Alliance who were biding their time and see the usefulness of what Megatron is trying to accomplish. In order to gain more power without breaking the peace made with the Pax Cybertronia, they use secret agents and secret police.

This is very familiar to a lot of people who haven’t seen Beast Wars or heard of it. This is Russia.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and with that the Cold War ended. Peace was had. But as Russia threw off the communism ties from them, the ruling body still needed to exert control over the nation, and to broaden their influence beyond their borders. Russia went from Communism to Mafia-like control, using secret police, subtle threats and various other shady things. People saw what was going on, and with the new fear they were facing, they made it known in the media.

Beast Machines is a bit easier to figure out compared to its predecessor. It’s mostly because the message of Beast Machines resonates strongly today. 

Beast Machines came shortly after Beast Wars, as the toyline was trying to go away from the purely animal transformers and going for more mechanical look. But how do you really bridge those together?

At the tail end of the 80ies, environmentalism was on the rise. There was an undercurrent of that happening in Beast Wars, but in Beast Machines it had much more weight to it. With Megatron wanting to stamp out any biological influences from Cybertron, ready to eradicate any traces of it and mass-producing purely mechanical beings to repopulate Cybertron. While Optimus Primal was embracing the biological side of it, becoming sort of a guru through the Oracle.

The rise of industrialism is frightening prospect, seeing the nature retreat into near nothingness, and seeing the callousness of the industry just ignore it completely in favour for profits. But there was no denying that industrialism was there to stay, so while it is the main fear of the series, the message of the series was not to abolish it but to tame it, not let it out of control and make sure that the environment was put on equal grounds to it.

Animated is a strong reboot like Beast Wars was, coming at the same time as the Michael Bay films. Japanese production had taken over after Beast Machines finished, but Hasbro sought to retake the American market with media that they controlled. Importing Anime and dubbing it was all and good, but if they had complete control, they would have better chance to make it appeal to the market they wanted, the Western one.

It’s 2007. Following 9/11 the USA goes to war. And it is still going, with a certain hopelessness attached to it as people are getting more and more jaded by it. But most people never really felt the impact, only heard about it. There was no draft, there was no conscription. People joined the military, and those who came back came back either just a little bit off, or really suffering, and couldn’t get proper help.

Transformers Animated touches on civilians being basically forced into the war, against foes that were thought to be defeated long ago. It touches on the hardship of those civilians as they are part of it, feeling both the elation of being thought as heroes, and feeling the terror of the situation that they are in. A highlight of this is the episode Thrill of the Hunt, which came rather early, and touched on themes that are not common to see in media aimed at children, looking at Ratchet going too far, and suffering from some form of PTSD as well.

While the actual war had never visited the US or the spacebridge repair crew, the impact of it was felt on them, with all the horrors that entails.

Transformers Animated and first Michael Bay Transformers film came out on the same year. Yet the themes of the film series is far from what Animated did. One part of it is that Hollywood movies are more constricted as they have to appeal to a whole lot of audience in order to gain any return from the production cost. So everything is analysed in detail, making sure that nothing would alienate the vast majority of the Western World. We are in fact seeing it more obviously as China is growing stronger as a consumer market for Hollywood movies, and we see how the movies are made to appeal to that market as well.

So doing a commentary on the Afghanistan war like Transformers Animated did was out of the question. But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a fear in the movie like in anything else.

Technology is on rapid rise. The rule of CPU power doubling every 18 months was still holding. New technology comes before anyone can really adapt to what had been introduced not so long ago.

The fear in the Michael Bay films is the rampancy of technology. We have severely advanced alien race make contact, and in fact made most of the technology based on one of them, found at the turn of the previous century. Technology that wasn’t even fully understood, that people thought they could easily control. But it goes out of control.

This concept is called Technological Singularity, where technology eventually becomes uncontrollable and we get swept up in the wake of it, having to deal with the new reality that we are no longer the masters of the world we are in. Grey Goo is one of the better known representation of this idea. Another is the idea of an overlord AI that either seeks to exterminate humanity, rule it with iron fist, or simply think of humans as we think of ants, insignificant.

IDW Publishing was on the scene two years earlier, in 2005. However given how long the first G1 iteration of it ran it gets mentioned after TFA and the movies due to that, allowing for Aligned continuity to come after it.

While TFA showed how the Afghanistan War impacted US citizens, who had not really experienced being at war while being so interconnected with the world and able to receive so much information, the IDW comics went for the other angle, the other fear that ruled in the USA at that time.

9/11. The fear of terrorism happening, the fear of foreign infiltration. The Decepticons had a plan on how the infiltration happened, every step of it planned, making sure that they could make the residents of the planet do most of the work of disrupting the peace, making it easy for them to swoop in and destroy the rest.

While things didn’t go as planned as the Autobots intervened pretty early, the Decepticons went public on full force, taking over New York City and almost dropped an atomic bomb on it. The connection to 9/11 is pretty hard to miss.

And then Phase 2 hits. James Roberts becomes one of the more interesting writers in the series. And this is where things go slightly off. James Roberts is more of a writer that knows what he’s writing about, instead of being influenced by current events.

And James Roberts has made known he has major interest in politics as he worked with politicians before picking up the pen for IDW Publishing. Write what you know, and James Roberts know politics, and political history.

In Phase 2 there is increased focus on the actual motivations behind the war. While Megatron Origins did go into how Megatron became the leader of the Deceptioncs, it was James Roberts that made it into the communism reflection that it became in the comics. It isn’t really some overarching fear in the background of the comics, it’s known quantity woven into the narrative of the comic.

Transformers Prime came in 2010, after Transformers Animated, seeking to remove the stylised aesthetics of the former toyline and try to be more like the movies.

And it wasn’t the only thing it changed. What was changed as well was the work that was actually put behind the actual lore of the series, making a true production bible that was used not for just the TV series but the accompanying video games as well, War For Cybertron and Fall Of Cybertron. And there was also a clear message along with that, this was a new continuity, new setting. Aligned, seeking to mesh together all the good from the various franchises into one good package.

But with all that background done on it, it’s easy to point out how Megatron went from a revolutionary to a tyrant and that would be about that. But it is not that simple.

What colors Transformers Prime is subtle and easily overlooked. In 2007 we experienced a dire financial crisis. Unemployment shot up, investments plummeted, there was no good safety net for people and a lot of them fell through the cracks. But these things are hard to really put into a show like this without it being explicitly about it. But there is another side effect of the recession that wasn’t that apparent in 2010, is more obvious now, but with the Transformers lore from the 1984 cartoon being similar, it blends into the usual Transformers noise.

Refugees.

Optimus Prime and his small team are simply refugees. Cybertron did run out of fuel, but the plots of harvesting energon and fighting over resources is more rehashing of the old cartoon plots. The focus is more on the Autobot team as they deal with being literal aliens in the US, escaping the tyranny that they fled. How they are treated by the locals, how they deal with the isolation of being in a culture different from theirs. They simply try to survive. Like how most people hit by the recession felt.

Robots in Disguise was released after Transformers Prime, going away from the expensive production and to more cheaper look. But with the so-called Aligned continuty having been a strong reboot of the “TV cartoons” series, Hasbro was in no hurry to abandon it, making Robots in Disguise a sequel to Transformers Prime.

Though with the war over, a new kind of threat had to be made. And Steeljaw steps into the role, not only as the main antagonist of the series, but as the representation of the fear theme of the series.

What isn’t really that obvious in Robots in Disguise is just how powerful Steeljaw is. Steeljaw isn’t just some generic Decepticon villain who escapes just so they can reuse his model instead of having to create even more Decepticons. He has fighting prowess, he is able to outwit the Bumblebee team. And the most dangerous weapons he has are his personality and voice.

Steeljaw is able to talk himself out of trouble. He has major ambitions, he knows what to do in order to recruit others. He wants power and respect, and if left unchecked, he will have it. And he knows that if there is some that he can’t convince, he can fight, and he will fight dirty.

Steeljaw represents a fear that people have experienced for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that it really put into the spotlight. He is the abuser, the person in power that will make your life miserable. He antagonises Bumblebee and his team by causing them trouble, drive them off their safe haven of Earth and later drives them from their safe space, forcing them to go on the run. He finds power by leading a pack of Decepticons, then later by allying himself to the new council until he realises that he will not achieve his goals with him.