#tfrants

So I realised as I was writing this that I have way too much to say for a single post. There’s a lot to unpack in the metatextual promotion of Megatron in s2 of MTMTE and LL, so instead of this being Part 2/2 as expected it will be Part 2/??. I’ll update the links at the bottom if/when more posts gets written.  

Since his introduction to the crew at the beginning of Season 2 Megatron has fundamentally changed the way the ensemble cast interacted and resolved situations. This is to be expected, of course, since Megatron is a divisive, dynamic character, but the issue isn’t that this /has/ happened, but /how/ it has happened. Specifically, Megatron is positioned as the main protagonist in the ensemble, at the expense of other characters’ arcs.

To make Megatron sympathetic we see the same four steps used throughout the series: -> Raise an issue as something current Megatron cares about -> Retcon the issue through flashbacks as something that Megatron has always cared about -> Resolve the issue in the present, allowing Megatron to show off his ethical ways -> Refuse to acknowledge specific actions taken by Megatron during the war, and preceding the start of MTMTE

So the intention was to have this out before LL #22, which it kind of is?? Disregarding the leak, which I haven’t read yet - but since Megatron’s back in the picture again, I wanted to go over why I don’t feel his redemption arc works. This is going to be a 2-part post, with Part 1 here based on how Megs’ arc affects his character narrative, and Part 2 (which I’ll probably post within the week), will be about how Megs’ arc functions on a meta level, and how those meta-textual details are used to highlight and hide different parts of his story.

Another thing that grinds my gears in mtmte/LL is prescription to the Great Man theory of history. Often opposed by the People’s History, the Great Man theory of history posits that change only happens because of specific ‘great’ people causing the change. Without these specific people, supposedly revolutions, societal changes (and atrocities) would never have occurred. By comparison, the People’s History focuses on the history of movements - of the tendency for societal issues to build up over time from the oppressed and disenfranchised, before boiling over into change. Like most dichotomies, the answer lies somewhere in the middle: movements must have leaders, but leaders tend to emerge from these masses because they best vocalise the wills of that group. In the case of Megatron, while he was the founder of the Decepticons he was not the first labour build to be oppressed or speak up against the Functionists - that dissatisfaction was already there. Given the presence of the Functionist universe however, we are told that Megatron was the only Cybertronian in four million years who could have pushed the Functionist regime off its rails.

This reads like Decepticon propaganda. The arc literally revolves around the concept that ‘only Megatron can save us’, and involves Megatron being imported from an alternate universe and given a clean slate on which to begin his revolution anew. Are we genuinely expected to believe that every other labour class in the last four million years was sufficiently suppressed that no rebellions took place? We see the rebellion first hand with Rewind and Dominus Ambus, and yet it’s supposed to be so underground that it never effects serious change. The movement supporting ‘The Useless One’ are public enough to engender a crackdown, and yet the rest of the populace has never, in millions of years, reconsidered the effect of the totalitarian state on their daily lives and the lives of those around?

Four million years is a long time - an inconceivably long time. Claiming that Megatron is literally the only effective leader who could have destabilised the Functionist regime over this time period speaks of unbelievable arrogance and a dedication to justifying Megatron’s past actions regardless of the billions of sentient beings he killed along the way.

Megatron ain’t all that. Creating an entire alternate universe to make the main cast feel /grateful/ for Megatron’s galactic rampage improving their quality of life (that is, the quality of life for those who weren’t killed in the four million year war) is bullshit. If it wasn’t Megatron leading the charge, it would have been someone else. From the people come the leaders - and while a ‘Great Man’ might lead the charge, it’s the People behind them who truly change the world. 

So, I had the chance to attend a John Barber Q&A panel last month at TFCon Toronto, and ask a question that had been on my mind for a while: were the introduction of Cybertronian colonies and female characters in the works before Windblade, or was she the catalyst?

Now, a bit of context for those who weren’t around for the whole story. A few years ago Hasbro put up a poll on their website for a fan-created Transformer. This character would get to headline in their own comic, and get a toy made of them. The poll asked voters to select from a variety of options: their faction alignment, their alt mode, their weapon of choice - but one notable thing was missing from the poll;

Gender.

Transformers has always been male character dominated, and in this case it was a foregone conclusion that the new character would be male. However, noticing the absence, fans petitioned for the inclusion of the gender option. Hasbro did so, and the results of the poll showed an overwhelming vote for a female transformer.

She became Windblade - an Autobot who fights with a sword and transforms into a jet. The first, or second [depending on your opinion of Arcee] female Cybertronian character to be introduced into the IDW comics.

But this lead to a problem - Simon Furman, in his establishment of the IDW comic verse, had explicitly written out the potential for female Cybertronian characters. They didn’t exist, because Cybertronians are genderless - with the exception of Arcee - who was given transgender surgery against their will (does this raise confusion about how you can transgender a genderless being, and then apparently have all the other characters react to them differently because of said surgery they shouldn’t be able to recognise the significance of? Yes. Am I going to focus on the mess that is Spotlight: Arcee? No, not today) and by genderless we mean all act and communicate with each other in traditionally masculine ways, use male pronouns and have body types based on male body types - to the point of including facial hair in their designs.

So then where did Windblade come from, if not Cybertron? The comics introduced the idea of colonies - war refugees who fled the war ravaged Cybertron and formed homes elsewhere, with their own unique cultures. Windblade herself is not Cybertronian, but Camien - from the colony of Caminus.

Windblade headlined a four-part miniseries, in which IDW organised an all-female creative team to take the helm, and is still a major player in the ongoing comic universe. Other female characters have been introduced, including a fan-built combiner of six ladies (Hasbro put the gender option in by default this time), a slew of lady characters of varying import, and most recently, two transladies.

Now back to the question for John Barber: were the introduction of Cybertronian colonies and female characters in the works before Windblade?

(The short answer: no).

John Barber gave a sigh and admitted that in hindsight, they should have done in sooner. He expressed a wish that they had brought female characters in during The Death of Optimus Prime, when the signal called all Cybertronians to come home - how there was no reason they couldn’t have slipped it in as a non issue straight from the beginning of his run as editor. He spoke about the creative team’s push to keep putting female characters into the comics, rather than leaving it at Windblade alone - and the team wide drive to not only include female characters, but make them significant, important characters.

He outlined the thought process behind the creation of the colonies and the decision to make them all mixed genders - beginning with their ‘how not to’ guide. He referenced the Legion of Super-Heroes - a spin-off of Superboy from back in the 1950s. Because of the time period, all the heroes and other characters were white, and in an issue in the 1970s, to explain this, the writers claimed that in this universe all of the non-white people lived on another planet that the cast never spoke about or visited. Yikes. He spoke of the Othering effect this has, and how they wanted to avoid making Camien an all-female colony for the same reason. In the end, all the colonies are mixed genders, and the characters in-universe remark on the oddity of Cybertron having such a high male-identifying collective.

He spoke at length, and while most of his answer I can only paraphrase, but there was one line that stuck with me:

‘We didn’t know how important this was, until we saw people’s reaction to it.’

And that, honestly, that’s the kind of thing I wanna nail up on the wall and draw people’s attention to. We hear a lot of backlash to the idea of equal opportunity schemes in the workplace and in media. ‘What difference do you expect to make if you’re forcing people into diversity’ - but here’s the thing, it’s not about ‘forcing diversity’, it’s about creating motivation to displace the status quo. I’m not implying people do nothing out of malice, but that’s the way the status quo is - it’s easy to maintain. Most changes aren’t made until an external factor force them. In this case, no one at IDW felt putting female characters into the comics was a priority, until it was in their faces with a deadline and contractual obligations.

But change they did. The IDW creative team has given an excellent example of what can happen when this kind of blind spot is brought up, and while they could have gone the defensive route - giving Windblade a miniseries because they had to, before shoving her back into oblivion, they embraced it. The comics have run wild with the colony worlds to explore, with the sociopolitical commentary about xenophobia and immigration at their fingertips, and the ability to create waves of new characters simply because ‘here’s another colony we didn’t mention yet’.

The IDW Transformers creative task have done good on this one - they get it. And it was good to see such honesty on display in Barber’s explanations too - dude has obviously done his homework. Serious props to everyone involved.

that sad moment when you accidentally hit backspace and delete everything you’d written…

oh well, let’s try this again. 

yes, let’s talk about brainstorm, but more than that, let’s talk about brainstorm’s plan and how it changed after rewind’s death.

originally, brainstorm dedicated himself to building a time machine so he could save a mech who never loved him back, simply because he felt quark deserved a better life than the one that ended in the decepticon prison camp.

but when rewind was killed, everything changed.

when brainstorm and chromedome’s friendship is originally introduced, it is played for laughs. chromedome is brainstorm’s only friend, ostentatiously because brainstorm is an asshole and domey is the only one who’ll put up with him. and while their relationship does have some overtones of that, chromedome cares about him enough to represent brainstorm during his trial, and brainstorm is willing to change the entirety of history- including erasing himself- to make sure that no one will ever have to suffer as chromedome has. 

but of course, brainstorm knows chromedome’s secret past. chromedome has erased his past lovers not once, not twice, but THREE times, because he couldn’t stand the pain of losing them, even when brainstorm had tried to talk him out of it. but after rewind, when brainstorm sees how much anguish chromedome is going through, his plan shifts from saving one mech from the decepticon movement to dismantling the movement in its entirety.

and let’s consider just how HUGE a change to his agenda that is. this entire endeavour had been based on seeing quark again. on saving him, making sure that he lived through to the present day, regardless of what he thought of brainstorm. but now, the goal has changed. no longer is it about his personal ideas, now it is idealogicial. destroy the events that created megatron, and there will be no rebellion, no uprising, no war, and sure, quark will never be doomed to a decepticon prison camp, but more than that, domey will never be desperate enough to commit suicide, he’ll never lose his lovers again and again, and the mechs of cybertron will suffer less. even if that means giving up on using the machine to save quark. 

yet after mistake after mistake, caused by tracking the wrong signal, by the time he is standing in front of megatron’s thawing corpse, facing down as enemy who cannot fight back at close range, his morals conflict with his goals. for brainstorm has never personally killed. here we have a mech who works in the mass production of weapons, but who has never personally taken a life.

why?

what part of his morality prevents him from taking life with his own hands, when he will happily hand off the weapon to whirl or cyclonus or any other trigger happy soldier without a second thought? but the reason is simpler than it seems- brainstorm is a dreamer. he lives to push the boundaries. he created many weapons that were rejected by the ethics council because of how cruel there were, he created a working time machine based on multiple briefcases, he created a gun that turns creatures into sparkeaters. to brainstorm the question is not ‘why?’ but ‘how?’

and yet the ‘how?’ when facing an enemy face to face is incredibly simple but still not something brainstorm can do. no, he spends ten minutes staring down megatron’s empty body, trying to justify his actions to himself until he is talked down by rung. 

brainstorm might be an asshole, he might be a weapons manufacturer, but he is not a killer. not face to face. he has seen more than enough what going down that path does to mechs, he does not want to follow that path.

and so we have a mech who would ideally erase himself from history, and the thing that stops him is not the thought of being erased, but of having to pull a trigger. of watching a spark gutter out, even if he knows that doing the deed would ultimately be better for his planet.

brainstorm is not a creature of logic, despite being a scientist. instead he is a creature of emotions. he would change a multi millenial plan to see his best friend bettered in the future even at the cost of erasing himself  from existence, and yet that action of pulling the trigger is enough to stop him in his tracks.

Jro did confirm that the spark is the centre of the personality. Having said that, in my headcanon sparks do not have any specific bearings on personality traits. There’s no consistent ‘isomeric-negatives are grouchy’ or ‘vitreous-positives are outgoing’ framework [although similar to the way Koreans use blood type the way we use zodiac sign, I’d like to think that there is a similar astrological interest in spark type].

As for sparktypes, point one percenters are not a spark type in their own category, but rather an attribute of the spark [like being high or low yield]. Only those with compatible sparktypes were able to travel back through time to follow Brainstorm [ferrum-negative and vitreous-positive], meaning that Megatron’s spark must fall in to one of these categories [in #31 Ratchet lists Megatron’s sparktype as ‘indeterminate’, which is because of his shot internals from the spacebridge, not because his spark type was originally unknowable].

My interpretation of the spark is that it is actually a self-shielding fissionable core [the fissionable material is, of course, cybertronium]. I think of it this way because we know that the spark gives off energy, is stable enough to be removed for a short time, but a partially digested [by the sparkeater] spark gives off a huge amount of energy if destroyed. It has to be able to provide energy over millions of years for the bot, but if disrupted the remaining material in the spark shrinks and wavers before giving out.

So I’ve been watching the new RID series, and while I love the main cast, it quickly became apparent that something is off about the Decepticons- and I mean beyond the Earth-animal based alt modes. 

Here’s a quick list of the oddities in the Decepticons: -> the Alchemor is supposed to be a high security prison ship, but also houses petty criminals like Ped and those with mental health issues like Springload -> some Decepticons, like Grimlock, show no allegiance, interest or knowledge about their party alliance -> Terrashock’s last memory before coming out of stasis was going out on a mission for Contrail- meaning he was sentenced without a trial -> Grimlock doesn’t even know he is considered a criminal -> there are trackers implanted in the Decepticon symbols, meaning they were tampered with after capture -> Fixit is the only guard on the ship, despite not being physically able to keep any of the ‘cons in line should they escape -> Russell scares Minitron off by telling him Optimus Prime is on the way, when it is common knowledge on post-war Cybertron that Optimus is dead  [Sideswipe- a kid with no interest in political or current affairs remarked on it as a well known fact] -> there is a weapon onboard the Alchemor known as the ‘Decepticon hunter’ illustrating the way the Autobots feel about Decepticons- that they are game to be hunted down -> the first two episodes show that Cybertronian alts favour hover modes, while all of the Decepticons have wheels

Which leads me to the conclusion that the prisoners aboard the Alchemor are neither newsparks, nor ‘cons captured during the war: they are the result of the Senate’s pre-war crackdown. The senate, seeking to keep potential soldiers out of Megatron’s hands, began arresting anyone with criminal tendencies or was seen Decepticon sympathiser [we still don’t know what Steeljaw was arrested for, after all]. Even those who didn’t previously identify as Decepticons were branded as such upon their capture, which the Senate used to fuel anti-Decepticon propaganda. 

We already know from TFP that sending relics and weapons off-world became a common event during the war, and it is possible that as Decepticon prison breaks became more common, they opted to send as many of the prisoners off-world as possible too. At the same time, however, they needed all able-bodied soldiers on the home front, to fight Megatron’s forces; thus the reason why the only guard aboard the ship was Fixit, the minicon with the faulty wiring. Much like the relics, once launched into space they would continue on course until they crashed on Earth, where they could be collected later- meaning they would not need to send a large amount of energon or rocket fuel along with the ship. 

Traditional Cybertronian Rhyme (The Chaos of Warm Things)

A revision of THIS post, in light of new evidence.

Information in #31 alongside previous knowledge of crew spark types show that the two spark types able to time travel are either vitreous-positive or ferrum-negative. 

The confirmed bots for each type so far are Whirl, Riptide, Rewind and Chromedome for vitreous-positive and Cyclonus and Tailgate for ferrum-negative, leaving Rung and Rodimus unidentified. 

We also know that vitreous-positive is a rare spark type, making it more statistically probable that Rung and Rodimus are ferrum-negative.

In my previous post, I drew an assumption from the poem’s reference to nickel, iron, cobalt and chrome [all metals that have ferromagnetic properties] that a sparkeater’s interest in bots was dependent upon their spark type- specifically, the ferromagnetic materials in their spark. Not that these materials are necessarily found in large quantities in the spark, simply that their presence or absence is noticeable in the way the spark behaves and is catalogued into types.

Originally, I hypothesised that the sparkeater would be drawn to ferrum-positive bots, and that the ‘brightness’ of a spark was a reference to the ferromagnetic component content, rather than any standardised gauge of overall spark strength.

Based on the new data however, I believe my original hypothesis got it backwards. While the ferromagnetic content does affect the brightness of a spark, a sparkeater is predominantly drawn towards those who lack these materials; the poem perhaps suggesting that bots should who have these metals in their sparks should run from the sparkeater while they have the chance, rather than that bots who match that criteria should run because they will be the first targets.