#transformers primacy

"Soundwave Lurks: Check."

"Shockwave Plots: Check."

"Starscream lives to Scheme again: Check."

"The Decepticons. A million years to create them. A thousand days to destroy them. A hundred words to rebuild them. Everything is as it should be."

—Megatron

Primacy is a bit of a disappointing way to end this trilogy, as I think it’s the weakest part - it continues some of the ideas of Autocracy and Monstrosity, but what really killed it for me was the characterisation. The challenges to Optimus’ character are rapidly eroded, but it’s Hot Rod/Rodimus and Megatron who are really in trouble.

Hot Rod shows up, having apparently completed Autobot training in the background, and is now completely and unambiguously in support of Optimus. Any skepticism regarding the Autobot cause and its connections to the old Senate have disappeared while he was off page, and his actively Decepticon-leaning sympathies have also disappeared right along with it. In fact, to prove that Hot Rod has moved on, there is a brief and mostly one-sided confrontation with Slinger, his friend and one of the few survivors of Nyon, who has recently joined the Decepticons. Rather than dig into this, the writer makes Slinger abruptly hostile and he disappears from the book until he can be brought back for a death scene where he confesses how wrong he was. (Slinger and Fasttrack can both join the ‘former friend to Decepticon to corpse’ club!). Facetiousness aside, I think the real issue was the feeling that this story wanted Hot Rod to be a different kind of character than Autocracy and Monstrosity had created - for example, pairing up Grimlock and Hot Rod as grizzled veteran and inexperienced, optimistic kid just does not work for me considering Hot Rod’s past as an insurgent, everything that happened to Nyon, etc. I just feel that once you’ve been forced to destroy an entire city, you may no longer qualify for ingenue roles.

Megatron is similarly a point of strange characterisation. Characters making mistakes is not necessarily a problem, but having a supposedly intelligent, strategic character who is intended to serve as a major villain repeatedly make daft choices? Less good, and it is especially not good when the behaviour of the character is described differently from what actually happens in the story. The writers continue to define Megatron’s version of villainy in terms of dominance and control, the implication (to me, at least) being that he is precise and focused in a way that other villains, like Scorponok, were not. However, Megatron’s actual behaviour and dialogue in the comic does not live up to that - he repeatedly takes massive risks or makes obvious tactical errors, relies on fear and blunt, brutal tactics, and can be quite self-indulgent. Although obviously mistakes and character flaws are fine, I think the writers settled for mistakes that were just too, too obvious in terms of tactics and created a bit of a clash between what they wanted Megatron to be and where the plot actually took the character.

First up, there is the decision to place Pentius’ spark inside of Trypticon. Megatron is aware that Pentius is actively malevolent, but seems to find no potential drawbacks to placing his spark inside the most powerful physical body available and only afterwards does he apparently think to ask ‘How am I to trust you?’. He is then shocked when the evil alien whom he had been able to control on Junkion because Pentius was literally a head on a chain, can suddenly be far more independent and dangerous when placed into a giant hell-dinosaur. Later things are smaller, but moments like Megatron only realising that acid rain would damage his air force as well as the Autobots’ halfway through a battle added to the impression that the writers were scrambling for a way to end the series quickly.

Optimus fares better. For example, his enjoyment of the mission to the pole has interesting implications for his tendency to isolate himself, but the flaws or challenges that gave him a lot of texture in Autocracy and Monstrosity have been shaved down - his main personal issue in this book seems to be a generalised sense of the pressure that comes with leadership. Compared to the Optimus of Monstrosity, this is a very smooth Optimus. Overall, the story seems more interested in propping up Optimus as the hero - Omega Supreme’s interactions with him spring to mind - but that comes at the cost of the specificity that previous books had given the character, which is a shame, as I think they helped me appreciate him more.

In fact, a lack of specificity is the cause of a lot of my problems with this book. The battles between Trypticon and Metroplex are so huge that it is difficult to really engage with them, they take place on a disaster movie scale, but named characters are in little danger and I wasn't attached enough to Iacon or Harmonex to really feel their destruction. Other threats are similarly poorly defined, like Pentius, and resolved through vague solutions, like Optimus showing Megatron the Matrix, which apparently removes or destroys Pentius' spark or its connection to Megatron for reasons that are sort of unclear.

There are still things to enjoy about this book and I fully intend to read it again at some point, but the plot holes and characterisation are glaring enough that it is definitely weaker than its predecessors.

Expectation:

Reality: