...man, I sort of hope that Prowl gets possessed by the ghost of Scrapper via merge-memories stored in the Constructicons and Prowl has this long slow mental breakdown where he loses his identity.
I think everyone makes allowances for their favourite characters.
The question is whether you can realize that you are making allowances and what you do when someone points out evidence that conflicts with your overly rosy view. (I am thinking about someone whom you probably don't know, here.)
The Autobots in general are supposed to be good guys, but IDW G1 did a bad job of portraying that.
1) I think IDW coasts too much on nostalgia. It expects you to have seen the G1 cartoon or... something? And so it expects that you will have a preconceived notion of Autobots as good and Decepticons as bad. 2) But IDW hasn't actually done all that much to actually establish the Autobots as good and the Decepticons as bad. The Autobots have done many bad things. The Autobots have a lot more focus than the Decepticons do. In a lot of stories, the Autobots act as both the villains and protagonists, with the Decepticons shuffled off to the corner. In a lot of stories, the villains are outside parties such as aliens, humans, or ancient undead robots. When the Decepticons are the main storyline villains, quite often they're rogue Decepticons! See: Thunderwing back during the whole Stormbringer arc. See: Overlord. See: Shockwave recently. Very rarely do we see normal card-carrying Decepticons functioning as the actual villains? 3) So they're going for shock value in, "Ooooh, look at the Autobots doing bad things!" but they haven't shown the Autobots doing very much good, so the shock value loses impact, and the Autobots doing bad things mostly becomes annoying.
It's not even a case of "tell, not show". It's a case of, "nostalgia, not show, but we expect you to be shocked anyway".
As a friend pointed out, this is even worse because MTMTE and IDW were good enough to hook new fans who don't have the nostalgia, so... it's good enough that they keep reading, but it causes them these disgust and anger problems in how IDW tries to pass all these villains off as "good guys".
You have a good point about IDW coasting on nostalgia for most of the secondary characters. They did do a lot of character-building work with the primary characters: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream. The very beginning of the series (back when we had actual humans involved--where the hell did they go?), Ratchet got a fair amount of screen time. (Even back then, Prowl was a dick.)
Bumblebee is getting a lot of play--unfortunately, that play and that message seems to be: "being a good, responsible hero makes you weak, so forget about that". Of course, BB was being screwed over from the get-go by his own people (Prowl), so, yeah. I suppose we're supposed to excuse Prowl because Bombshell. Unfortunately, Prowl kept being a dick afterward (Overlord) and when your bestest buddies are a particularly murderous incarnation of the Constructicons... that says something about you.
I think Prowl's characterization is influenced by current politics--Prowl's the CIA/NSA guy who thinks protecting his side from "the bad guys" is more important than annoying technicalities like respecting human rights, obeying the law, telling the truth, not murdering people, that sort of thing... and so turns into a Nietzschean proverb. "He who fights monsters..."
Optimus Prime is actually fairly weakly/inconsistently/villainously characterized. He spent most of the ongoing running away from his problems and then undermining Bumblebee's authority. He spent Autocracy being an overly violent authoritarian. Optimus Prime is just not that heroic in IDW? I have trouble thinking of anything he did that was heroic that wasn't absolutely required. Like, okay, so he stopped Shockwave... if he didn't, the universe as we know it would have ended. And stuff like that.
Megatron is erratic. He's writing poetry one issue and tearing off Starscream's tailfins in another issue and then enslaving Prowl and then broing up Bumblebee...
Starscream's also pretty erratic! He's talking to corpses and... yeah.
A lot of this is due to writer change, but these writers don't even pretend that they read each others' work and that they want things to fit together?
(Roberts doesn't even reread his OWN work, apparently, because the guy contradicts himself quite a bit...)
Bumblebee is actually a pretty evil person. (He just seems good because everyone else is being so much MORE evil.) In the Bumblebee miniseries, he befriended a human girl so that he could betray her father. In RiD, Bumblebee shocks Starscream with a cattle prod just because Starscream visits his office. Neither of these things are acceptable behaviour. So I find it pretty annoying when they later try to pass off Bumblebee as being oh-so-heroic and oh-so-inspiring to Megatron.
Prowl was evil long, long before Bombshell touched him. Prowl was evil in Spotlight Kup, which came out in 2007. Prowl was DEFINITELY evil in Everything in Its Right Place, which came out in 2009. Prowl was also evil in Last Stand of the Wreckers (2010), and even moreso if you bought the hardcover, which made it clear that Prowl deliberately selected death-seeking candidates, knowing that the Aequitas lock required a sacrifice. Prowl was evil in Infestation. Prowl was evil in the ongoing, though he managed to be evil in a different way than Spike (Spike was also evil). So... yeah.
I think that, back in 2007, they wanted to make Prowl the Token Evil Teammate. But then I think everyone got carried away exploring moral abhorrence in an attempt to make the characters "deep", and then they forgot to have the characters do anything heroic for contrast. I have to quote this here:
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
Funny thing is, everyone talks up the Constructicons being awful, but we haven't really seen them do anything particularly objectionable. "tell not show" strikes again. :|
As for the Constructicons: their "Yep, these are bad guys" moment was in "Megatron: Origin"; if you blinked, you'd miss it.
Didn't get Autocracy--wasn't that web-only or something? In any case, it never ended up at the comics shop I use, so I still haven't read it. A pity, because I'm missing part of the story of the beginnings of the Great War. Way back, in Infiltration, OP was portrayed as the classic OP. He also seemed to have a bit of a death wish, but y'know, nobody's perfect.
Um, could you not spoil the end of "Dark Cybertron" for me? As I said, I haven't read beyond #10. I was pretty sure that they weren't ending the IDW Transformers license with a big bang, but I don't want to know the details until I read them.
I don't consider Bumblebee evil. It's been a long time since I read the mini-series, but wasn't he pretty conflicted over that? Wasn't he being lied to and manipulated? (Just like happened in RID... Bee seems to have a problem with that).
Spike was evil? I remember Spike being a very angry man, for very good reason. Yes, he didn't accept Scrapper's surrender. He'd just survived the Decepticons trashing New York City (and nearly nuking the place) and killing massive numbers of people. Decepticons that included a certain very high-profile lime-green combiner team dealing out the carnage. As I vaguely recall, Spike was also a very highly-trained Spec Ops sort of guy, and those kind of guys? Don't play nice. A hard, dangerous, and angry man caught up with one of the alien monsters who committed mass murder in New York City. Doesn't make him evil, just human.
I agree, however, that IDW needs fewer "grim & gritty" '90s anti-heroes and more paladins. I mean, the nicest bunch of guys so far is a pack of renegade Decepticons... although if you lock Cyclonus and Whirl in a closet, the rest of the crew of the Lost Light is a pretty decent bunch, if a tad quirky. (Hmm, these characters are all written by Roberts. I sense a pattern...)
I'm annoyed by what they did with Prowl--I stated my opinion in the previous post of why I think they wrote Prowl the way they did (also, he's basically Marvel G1 Prowl turned up to 11--Marvel Prowl was an asshole, too). Unfortunately, I have a sentimental attachment to G1 cartoon fanon Prowl, who is usually written as a decent guy, if a bit heavy on the Law side of Lawful Good. I wrote Prowl, when I used him, as a good leader and a good guy, so I don't like what they did to him in IDW, at all. It messes up the character--I can't write IDW-verse fanfiction because of stuff like that. My head-canon is too thoroughly G1 cartoon, with imports of bits I like from other G1 versions. (I imported the DJD and killed them off. That was fun.)
Have you considered writing fix-fic where IDW Prowl gets what he deserves? Most of the fanfiction I've ever written is a reaction to a canon situation that annoyed me--interesting characters having a Bridge Dropped on them, a complete lack of resolution to a dangling plot thread, etc.
We're going to have to agree to disagree about Bumblebee and Spike. To me, the circumstances do not excuse the actions. Spike doesn't get a free pass to cruelly murder a helpless opponent and then willfully lie to his allies in a way that compromises their fighting strength just because he is a "hard" man with special operations training.
Primus. I'd love to see some characters with special forces training who actually make morally correct choices most of the time, rather than going with the evil choices and then the writers justify it as, "But they're special forces."
The renegade Decepticons aren't actually nice. They wanted to eat Fulcrum. They still wanted to eat Fulcrum even after they realized he was alive. This is an always will be horrific. it being a joke or not doesn't excuse it. They just seem nice because everyone else is so, so terrible that the reader starts to be able to excuse things like wanting to eat live people. Also, they are renegade Decepticons, so actual card-carrying "normal" Decepticons still aren't being allowed to do much of anything interesting...
The crew of the Lost Light is actually not a decent bunch.
Skids is a secret agent who does things like shoot people with bullets that brainwash them. Same goes for getaway, who, once he is introduced, immediately starts doing irritating things. I know Roberts is trying to convey friendship, but he plays up the irritation value too high and too fast.
Chromedome was a cop who discovered an evil brainwashing ring... and decided to join the evil brainwashing ring and do evil brainwashing and evil lobotomies on people. He wipes his own memory whenever he loses a husband, which seems both unhealthy and disrespectful. He refuses to give up injecting, even though he promised Rewind that he would. He throws Prowl off a cliff for daring to be upset that Chromedome violated Prowl's mind and led directly to Prowl being body-jacked by Constructicons. Chromedome was party to Overlord being on board.
Brainstorm is the supportive friend to the monster that Chromedome is... and is explicitly described as an amoral maker of weapons of mass destruction, who is repeatedly shown to be cowardly at times where his intervention would help others. He's just shady as all get out in general. Brainstorm was party to Overlord being on board.
Rodimus was party to Overlord being on board. Rodimus risked Rung to get the sparkeater, without Rung's consent. Rodimus is okay with torturing prisoners and does not believe in due process. Rodimus got rung shot in the head due to not listening to his own man when he said he was a bad shot. He's self-absorbed to the point of being dangerous to other people as a result. Stole Ultra Magnus's ship back in the ongoing and this has never been addressed in MTMTE. :| Also, offensive to neurodivergent people.
Drift was party to Overlord being on board. Drift is okay with torturing prisoners and ignoring due process. He murdered a sick patient and everyone writes this off.
Ratchet: Wrote off that Drift murdered a sick patient. Keeps saying that he wants First Aid to replace him but keeps undermining First Aid's authority and development as a leader.
Whirl. Started the war. Abused Rotorstorm physically and emotionally. Tried to murder Springer. Murdered and tortured Sweeps. Refused to acknowledge the inherent sapient life value of Sweeps. Murdered an alien he had never met. Made the Ammonite war worse. And seems to be deliberately manipulative, in how he tried to kill Cyclonus and then took the credit for saving Rewind (who was injured due to his own actions) and in how he set himself up as the hero who stopped Fortress Maximus...
Ultra Magnus. Totally okay with releasing known criminals that he knows will reoffend again, as long as they give him information, if you go back to the ongoing. Okay with torture, in the ongoing. In MTMTE, okay with selling out the whole crew into danger just to make a point to Rodimus, rather than, you know, actually talking to Rodimus and telling him what the problem is first.
Rung. Interestingly, Roberts says that Rung was wrong to shout What's wrong with you - paraphrase - at Whirl. Roberts says a good psychiatrist shouldn't have done that to a patient. Plus, he cleared a a guy who pulled off his own head and needed consistent therapy for paranoia to... go be security director on Luna 2, where he won't be able to get any therapy. :| Well, also, cleared the guy with violent PSTD to go enforce law, too.
Cyclonus. Thinks beating smaller people is okay. Fantasizes about murder. Manipulates Tailgate and publically shames him.
Tailgate. Insists on rooming with someone who makes it explicitly clear that he doesn't want Tailgate there. Keeps hanging out with Cyclonus, despite Cyclonus repeatedly pushing him away. Tailgate is... that Nice Guy who feels that he'll get what he wants out of a relationship, if only he breaks the other person down. Huge liar.
Swerve. Gaslights Red Alert. Doesn't turn down an order that he knows he cannot fulfill properly. Just obnoxious in general.
Red Alert. We're shown that, in the past, he was a snob and a jerk to the lower classes.
Rewind. Watches illegal snuff. Which he gets from Decepticons. He may be doing it for an okay reason, but it doesn't change the fact that what he does is illegal.
Even the few and far between semi-decent characters will just whip out awful things?
Your mileage may vary, but it's just really hard to point at anyone in the crew and say, "Yeah, this guy is decent. I have no qualms about calling him decent." Like... Rewind's a pretty okay guy, but you have to think about how a lot of them would look if they were actually in a crew with decent people? In a crew of actually decent people, Rewind would, for example would look really weird, with his snuff thing. He would be the creepy one, not the adorable one.
Anyway... Marvel Prowl was a jerk, but he usually did the right thing, not the evil thing. IDW Prowl is not Marvel Prowl turned up to 11. IDW Prowl is an escaped Mirrorverse Prowl, who is evil. Anyway... I don't like what IDW has done with a whole lot of characters? IDW's a new continuity, and they can do what they want, but I don't like some of the precedents that they're setting. For example, future prowls are likely to be evil, because IDW has so firmly established Evil Prowl. Future Whirls are liable to be Evil Whirl, too.
I can't write fix-it fic for IDW. There's just way too much broken. Even the basic world-building for the reality is broken.
I did say that "the nicest bunch of guys so far is a pack of renegade Decepticons". I didn't say they were objectively nice, just relatively, compared to everyone else. Besides, they get to start with fewer "good expectations" because they're Decepticons. I expect atrocious behavior, and the fact that all they did was talk about continuing to cannibalize Fulcrum for spare parts (they actually stopped after he turned out to be alive), and then actually took him in as a comrade actually makes them pretty damn decent for Decepticons. Face it, even Fulcrum, the idealist who condemns the thugs and sadists, is a xenophobic racist.
I did except Cyclonus and Whirl, who are both nasty hardcases. Whirl is a sociopathic murder, and Cyclonus has serious issues that lead to violence. Everyone on Lost Light has issues, to put it mildly. They are an interesting bunch. Some of your examples are overly picky, I think--obnoxious or having poor judgment is not the same as evil.
You know what disturbs me? The number of fanfic authors who think having Autobots torture Decepticon prisoners for information in their stories is A-OK. WTF, over? Where and when I come from, "torturing prisoners" is a classic sign that the torturers are bad guys.
IMHO, torture in Transformers is a property of sadistic bad guys only--Transformers have memories that can be read. No torture necessary. (Canon example: TF:Prime's Shockwave disdained Starscream's attempts at torture and used his mind-reading patch cable to get information.)
So yeah, I agree that there's a bunch of morally dubious characters running around in IDW's G1. I tend to have problems with the choppy storytelling--I think I just have to sit down with all the series and read them in one go. I don't handle month-by-month storytelling very well any more; I lose track of the storylines. I have trouble distinguishing a lot of the characters visually, too, except for the most flamboyant ones. OTOH, I had issues with a lot of Marvel's storytelling, too--WTF, Grimlock?
To a certain extent, you may be preaching to the choir. I won't deny that Fulcrum is a xenophobic racist! I'm glad you clarified, though. I do see people who insist that the Scavengers are outright good, which... they aren't. They are still bad. Just less bad. Which is sort of head-bangery...
(I would really rather see the Autobots presented as mostly good, no arguments, with a few neutral and evil examples, and the Decepticons as mostly evil but functional with a few outliers, but IDW is not going to give me that, whine, whine, complain.)
Thing is, Whirl didn't have to be evil like that? Whirl was... actually a decent guy in Marvel. Stood up for a bullying victim. IDW is a different continuity, sure, so the characters are different, but in a lot of cases, the way that the characters are different is "more evil", which just feels more and more banal the more often it happens.
And yeah, fanfic authors normalizing torture is very disturbing, but you have to look at where they're getting it from. :| Chaos2112 will remember this! Someone asked barber if we'd get any female characters who aren't psychopaths. Barber insisted that Arcee isn't a psychopath and said she was a fully developed character instead. 1) That showed he doesn't understand what a psychopath is, that he cannot see that Arcee is one. 2) It showed that he does not understand that psychopaths and fully developed characters are not mutually exclusive.
When the canon writers, like Barber, don't understand that their characters are acting like psychopaths, how are the fanfic writers supposed to learn any better? :| It's bad.
It's totally fair for you to have problems with the storytelling. I have my share of them (such a recent realization that a lot of the characters in MTMTE do not exhibit normal decision making skills)... as for telling which character is who, that is what TFwiki is for. :v (Well, art failure.)
It's fair for you to have issues with Marvel. Not everything is going to be to everyone's liking!
Grimlock... is pretty clearly Furman's favourite, so Grimlock got to do a lot of consequences-free things, as a result.
BTW, your icon amuses me, because my Everquest necromancer...is also a master baker.
It was actually Budiansky's Grimlock, of the "King Grimlock of the Autobots" storyline that made me go "WTF?" For some reason, the Autobots totally ignored all the oaths made during Jetfire's Autobrand ceremony some issues previous (about Autobots being free people, including free to leave) and went along with Grimlock declaring everyone traitors that disagreed with him--or left. If the Autobots actually believed the oaths Jetfire made (and they all presumably made), they would have told Grimlock to stop being an idiot and ignored his rantings. They certainly wouldn't have acted as his enforcers.
I have said that current politics is affecting comics and other storytelling ("24" for gawd's sake). I did not realize that fanfic writers were normalizing "enhanced interrogation" and such like. That scares me. I should have guess that they would, given crap like "24". After all, Hollywood taught my generation that respecting the constitutional rights of defendants was "letting crooks get away on a technicality". I had to read law blogs for a while to learn how horribly wrong that trope was.
Of course sociopaths can be fully developed characters! (c.f. Hannibal Lechter). I write my fanfic Starscream as a sociopath with a small, but larger than zero, monkeyspace (there was a useful "Cracked" article about that term and sociopaths that helped me get a handle on sociopath characters). IDW Arcee appears to be a sociopath with a larger-than-zerio monkeyspace.
Which one was the IDW writer who claimed it was hard to write stories about robot characters, because they have no feelings or relationships, thereby proving he didn't know a damn thing about the franchise he was supposed to be writing for?
I am enjoying our extended correspondence via LJ, btw.
Sweet! The baker in my icon is actually a seer, and his brother is the necromancer.
I haven't read it in a while, but with that story, if I remember it right... the whole point was that Grimlock had everyone *terrified*, and sometimes, people do some really bad things out of fear, when they are labouring under a bad leader. I recall some of the Autobots trying to subtly work against Grimlock. For example, I recall the Protectobots letting Blaster get away?
It's one thing to say that they could have just ignored Grimlock, but it's another thing to remember that... Grimlock's the leader of the Dinobots. Four other violent, angry guys answer to him and have answered to him for a very long time. (The Dinobots have been together for millions of years, in Marvel.)
It wasn't a case of, "Oh, I can just ignore this guy." It was a case of, "If I ignore this guy, Snarl might set me on fire."
If you look at the Stanford Prison Experiment... even normal people placed into a weird situation can start doing terrible things pretty quickly...
Also, I think Budiansky was pretty clear that what Grimlock was doing was wrong? It wasn't presented as normalized behaviour. It was presented as, "Okay, we established how Autobots usually act. Let's show how Autobots should never act, for contrast."
Anyway, yes, it is scary that fanfic writers are normalizing torture. I've seen fans argue that torturing Soundwave is okay because he's... different? Somehow? (And also that putting bombs in unwilling people is okay if it is cultural???)
Yeah, I know that you know that sociopaths can be fully developed characters. The head-bangy thing is that Barber apparently doesn't.
Mike Costa. http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Mike_Costa The quote is: "They don't have all of the basic things that humans have that motivate them and give them motivation for drama for a story. They don't really get hungry, they don't get tired, they don't have women or relationships like that [which] they value because they don’t have females that they can love; maybe brotherly love but how, they don’t have parents? They don't have religion or spirituality... you have to manufacture [these things] and that makes it very incoherent."
This is just a guy who doesn't understand how to write aliens or robots, in general? Sheesh. Or even how to write humans who lack sexual desire or adoption or Army guys who feel like a band of brothers... Seriously. Army guys manage to feel like brothers, all the time, despite not having the same parents. Also, the implicit homophobia... that quote is such a hot mess.
*snicker* I like the way the TFwiki article on Mike Costa has potholes leading to articles that contradict everything he said about writing Transformers. Dude does not only not know how to write aliens, he doesn't understand the franchise he's writing for.
You would be referring to when Soundwave was captured in TF:Prime? The Autobots made some terrifying threats, but they didn't actually torture him as I recall. Being a Decepticon, from a military where they do torture captives, he believed them. (My recollections may be incorrect). The writers are a little too on-board with the modern Hollywood and actual U.S. law enforcement attitude that it is okay (e.g., legal) to lie to and threaten a suspect as long as you don't actually physically torture them. Psychological torture is apparently A-OK. Me, I have these old-fashioned notions of honor and ethics, and don't think any of that crap is moral or ethical. 'Necessary evil' is a thing, and people forget that the 'necessary' part does not make the 'evil' part go away. And often, it's not even necessary... just evil. I thought that some of the Autobots were letting personal hatreds push them over the line in that episode.
I'm more disturbed now by what they did with Lazerbeak than I was then, since reading the TFWiki revealed that in the linked WFC games, Lazerbeak and the other "deployers" are actual Cybertronians with sparks. The TV series implied that Lazerbeak was just a dumb machine, a drone. It's possible that that is one of the many differences between TF:Prime and TF:WFC--maybe in the context of the cartoon, the deployer is just a UAV drone.
OTOH, nothing wrong (beyond the general wrongness of war) with sticking limpet mines on your enemy in the middle of battle, which both Dreadwing and Wheeljack were fond of. That's war--you're trying to kill people.
The question is whether you can realize that you are making allowances and what you do when someone points out evidence that conflicts with your overly rosy view. (I am thinking about someone whom you probably don't know, here.)
The Autobots in general are supposed to be good guys, but IDW G1 did a bad job of portraying that.
1) I think IDW coasts too much on nostalgia. It expects you to have seen the G1 cartoon or... something? And so it expects that you will have a preconceived notion of Autobots as good and Decepticons as bad.
2) But IDW hasn't actually done all that much to actually establish the Autobots as good and the Decepticons as bad. The Autobots have done many bad things. The Autobots have a lot more focus than the Decepticons do. In a lot of stories, the Autobots act as both the villains and protagonists, with the Decepticons shuffled off to the corner. In a lot of stories, the villains are outside parties such as aliens, humans, or ancient undead robots. When the Decepticons are the main storyline villains, quite often they're rogue Decepticons! See: Thunderwing back during the whole Stormbringer arc. See: Overlord. See: Shockwave recently. Very rarely do we see normal card-carrying Decepticons functioning as the actual villains?
3) So they're going for shock value in, "Ooooh, look at the Autobots doing bad things!" but they haven't shown the Autobots doing very much good, so the shock value loses impact, and the Autobots doing bad things mostly becomes annoying.
It's not even a case of "tell, not show". It's a case of, "nostalgia, not show, but we expect you to be shocked anyway".
As a friend pointed out, this is even worse because MTMTE and IDW were good enough to hook new fans who don't have the nostalgia, so... it's good enough that they keep reading, but it causes them these disgust and anger problems in how IDW tries to pass all these villains off as "good guys".
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Bumblebee is getting a lot of play--unfortunately, that play and that message seems to be: "being a good, responsible hero makes you weak, so forget about that". Of course, BB was being screwed over from the get-go by his own people (Prowl), so, yeah. I suppose we're supposed to excuse Prowl because Bombshell. Unfortunately, Prowl kept being a dick afterward (Overlord) and when your bestest buddies are a particularly murderous incarnation of the Constructicons... that says something about you.
I think Prowl's characterization is influenced by current politics--Prowl's the CIA/NSA guy who thinks protecting his side from "the bad guys" is more important than annoying technicalities like respecting human rights, obeying the law, telling the truth, not murdering people, that sort of thing... and so turns into a Nietzschean proverb. "He who fights monsters..."
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Megatron is erratic. He's writing poetry one issue and tearing off Starscream's tailfins in another issue and then enslaving Prowl and then broing up Bumblebee...
Starscream's also pretty erratic! He's talking to corpses and... yeah.
A lot of this is due to writer change, but these writers don't even pretend that they read each others' work and that they want things to fit together?
(Roberts doesn't even reread his OWN work, apparently, because the guy contradicts himself quite a bit...)
Bumblebee is actually a pretty evil person. (He just seems good because everyone else is being so much MORE evil.) In the Bumblebee miniseries, he befriended a human girl so that he could betray her father. In RiD, Bumblebee shocks Starscream with a cattle prod just because Starscream visits his office. Neither of these things are acceptable behaviour. So I find it pretty annoying when they later try to pass off Bumblebee as being oh-so-heroic and oh-so-inspiring to Megatron.
Prowl was evil long, long before Bombshell touched him. Prowl was evil in Spotlight Kup, which came out in 2007. Prowl was DEFINITELY evil in Everything in Its Right Place, which came out in 2009. Prowl was also evil in Last Stand of the Wreckers (2010), and even moreso if you bought the hardcover, which made it clear that Prowl deliberately selected death-seeking candidates, knowing that the Aequitas lock required a sacrifice. Prowl was evil in Infestation. Prowl was evil in the ongoing, though he managed to be evil in a different way than Spike (Spike was also evil). So... yeah.
I think that, back in 2007, they wanted to make Prowl the Token Evil Teammate. But then I think everyone got carried away exploring moral abhorrence in an attempt to make the characters "deep", and then they forgot to have the characters do anything heroic for contrast. I have to quote this here:
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
Funny thing is, everyone talks up the Constructicons being awful, but we haven't really seen them do anything particularly objectionable. "tell not show" strikes again. :|
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Didn't get Autocracy--wasn't that web-only or something? In any case, it never ended up at the comics shop I use, so I still haven't read it. A pity, because I'm missing part of the story of the beginnings of the Great War. Way back, in Infiltration, OP was portrayed as the classic OP. He also seemed to have a bit of a death wish, but y'know, nobody's perfect.
Um, could you not spoil the end of "Dark Cybertron" for me? As I said, I haven't read beyond #10. I was pretty sure that they weren't ending the IDW Transformers license with a big bang, but I don't want to know the details until I read them.
I don't consider Bumblebee evil. It's been a long time since I read the mini-series, but wasn't he pretty conflicted over that? Wasn't he being lied to and manipulated? (Just like happened in RID... Bee seems to have a problem with that).
Spike was evil? I remember Spike being a very angry man, for very good reason. Yes, he didn't accept Scrapper's surrender. He'd just survived the Decepticons trashing New York City (and nearly nuking the place) and killing massive numbers of people. Decepticons that included a certain very high-profile lime-green combiner team dealing out the carnage. As I vaguely recall, Spike was also a very highly-trained Spec Ops sort of guy, and those kind of guys? Don't play nice. A hard, dangerous, and angry man caught up with one of the alien monsters who committed mass murder in New York City. Doesn't make him evil, just human.
I agree, however, that IDW needs fewer "grim & gritty" '90s anti-heroes and more paladins. I mean, the nicest bunch of guys so far is a pack of renegade Decepticons... although if you lock Cyclonus and Whirl in a closet, the rest of the crew of the Lost Light is a pretty decent bunch, if a tad quirky. (Hmm, these characters are all written by Roberts. I sense a pattern...)
I'm annoyed by what they did with Prowl--I stated my opinion in the previous post of why I think they wrote Prowl the way they did (also, he's basically Marvel G1 Prowl turned up to 11--Marvel Prowl was an asshole, too). Unfortunately, I have a sentimental attachment to G1 cartoon fanon Prowl, who is usually written as a decent guy, if a bit heavy on the Law side of Lawful Good. I wrote Prowl, when I used him, as a good leader and a good guy, so I don't like what they did to him in IDW, at all. It messes up the character--I can't write IDW-verse fanfiction because of stuff like that. My head-canon is too thoroughly G1 cartoon, with imports of bits I like from other G1 versions. (I imported the DJD and killed them off. That was fun.)
Have you considered writing fix-fic where IDW Prowl gets what he deserves? Most of the fanfiction I've ever written is a reaction to a canon situation that annoyed me--interesting characters having a Bridge Dropped on them, a complete lack of resolution to a dangling plot thread, etc.
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A lot of the so-called good guys have more sustained bad guy moments than the Constructicons do. So they made some arenas and killed some dudes.
You can get Autocracy as a TPB now: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/transformers-chris-metzen/1112356710?ean=9781613772904 Amazon has it, too, whatever store you like can probably order it.
We're going to have to agree to disagree about Bumblebee and Spike. To me, the circumstances do not excuse the actions. Spike doesn't get a free pass to cruelly murder a helpless opponent and then willfully lie to his allies in a way that compromises their fighting strength just because he is a "hard" man with special operations training.
Primus. I'd love to see some characters with special forces training who actually make morally correct choices most of the time, rather than going with the evil choices and then the writers justify it as, "But they're special forces."
The renegade Decepticons aren't actually nice. They wanted to eat Fulcrum. They still wanted to eat Fulcrum even after they realized he was alive. This is an always will be horrific. it being a joke or not doesn't excuse it. They just seem nice because everyone else is so, so terrible that the reader starts to be able to excuse things like wanting to eat live people. Also, they are renegade Decepticons, so actual card-carrying "normal" Decepticons still aren't being allowed to do much of anything interesting...
The crew of the Lost Light is actually not a decent bunch.
Skids is a secret agent who does things like shoot people with bullets that brainwash them. Same goes for getaway, who, once he is introduced, immediately starts doing irritating things. I know Roberts is trying to convey friendship, but he plays up the irritation value too high and too fast.
Chromedome was a cop who discovered an evil brainwashing ring... and decided to join the evil brainwashing ring and do evil brainwashing and evil lobotomies on people. He wipes his own memory whenever he loses a husband, which seems both unhealthy and disrespectful. He refuses to give up injecting, even though he promised Rewind that he would. He throws Prowl off a cliff for daring to be upset that Chromedome violated Prowl's mind and led directly to Prowl being body-jacked by Constructicons. Chromedome was party to Overlord being on board.
Brainstorm is the supportive friend to the monster that Chromedome is... and is explicitly described as an amoral maker of weapons of mass destruction, who is repeatedly shown to be cowardly at times where his intervention would help others. He's just shady as all get out in general. Brainstorm was party to Overlord being on board.
Rodimus was party to Overlord being on board. Rodimus risked Rung to get the sparkeater, without Rung's consent. Rodimus is okay with torturing prisoners and does not believe in due process. Rodimus got rung shot in the head due to not listening to his own man when he said he was a bad shot. He's self-absorbed to the point of being dangerous to other people as a result. Stole Ultra Magnus's ship back in the ongoing and this has never been addressed in MTMTE. :| Also, offensive to neurodivergent people.
Drift was party to Overlord being on board. Drift is okay with torturing prisoners and ignoring due process. He murdered a sick patient and everyone writes this off.
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Whirl. Started the war. Abused Rotorstorm physically and emotionally. Tried to murder Springer. Murdered and tortured Sweeps. Refused to acknowledge the inherent sapient life value of Sweeps. Murdered an alien he had never met. Made the Ammonite war worse. And seems to be deliberately manipulative, in how he tried to kill Cyclonus and then took the credit for saving Rewind (who was injured due to his own actions) and in how he set himself up as the hero who stopped Fortress Maximus...
Ultra Magnus. Totally okay with releasing known criminals that he knows will reoffend again, as long as they give him information, if you go back to the ongoing. Okay with torture, in the ongoing. In MTMTE, okay with selling out the whole crew into danger just to make a point to Rodimus, rather than, you know, actually talking to Rodimus and telling him what the problem is first.
Rung. Interestingly, Roberts says that Rung was wrong to shout What's wrong with you - paraphrase - at Whirl. Roberts says a good psychiatrist shouldn't have done that to a patient. Plus, he cleared a a guy who pulled off his own head and needed consistent therapy for paranoia to... go be security director on Luna 2, where he won't be able to get any therapy. :| Well, also, cleared the guy with violent PSTD to go enforce law, too.
Cyclonus. Thinks beating smaller people is okay. Fantasizes about murder. Manipulates Tailgate and publically shames him.
Tailgate. Insists on rooming with someone who makes it explicitly clear that he doesn't want Tailgate there. Keeps hanging out with Cyclonus, despite Cyclonus repeatedly pushing him away. Tailgate is... that Nice Guy who feels that he'll get what he wants out of a relationship, if only he breaks the other person down. Huge liar.
Swerve. Gaslights Red Alert. Doesn't turn down an order that he knows he cannot fulfill properly. Just obnoxious in general.
Red Alert. We're shown that, in the past, he was a snob and a jerk to the lower classes.
Rewind. Watches illegal snuff. Which he gets from Decepticons. He may be doing it for an okay reason, but it doesn't change the fact that what he does is illegal.
Even the few and far between semi-decent characters will just whip out awful things?
Your mileage may vary, but it's just really hard to point at anyone in the crew and say, "Yeah, this guy is decent. I have no qualms about calling him decent." Like... Rewind's a pretty okay guy, but you have to think about how a lot of them would look if they were actually in a crew with decent people? In a crew of actually decent people, Rewind would, for example would look really weird, with his snuff thing. He would be the creepy one, not the adorable one.
Anyway... Marvel Prowl was a jerk, but he usually did the right thing, not the evil thing. IDW Prowl is not Marvel Prowl turned up to 11. IDW Prowl is an escaped Mirrorverse Prowl, who is evil. Anyway... I don't like what IDW has done with a whole lot of characters? IDW's a new continuity, and they can do what they want, but I don't like some of the precedents that they're setting. For example, future prowls are likely to be evil, because IDW has so firmly established Evil Prowl. Future Whirls are liable to be Evil Whirl, too.
I can't write fix-it fic for IDW. There's just way too much broken. Even the basic world-building for the reality is broken.
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I did except Cyclonus and Whirl, who are both nasty hardcases. Whirl is a sociopathic murder, and Cyclonus has serious issues that lead to violence. Everyone on Lost Light has issues, to put it mildly. They are an interesting bunch. Some of your examples are overly picky, I think--obnoxious or having poor judgment is not the same as evil.
You know what disturbs me? The number of fanfic authors who think having Autobots torture Decepticon prisoners for information in their stories is A-OK. WTF, over? Where and when I come from, "torturing prisoners" is a classic sign that the torturers are bad guys.
IMHO, torture in Transformers is a property of sadistic bad guys only--Transformers have memories that can be read. No torture necessary. (Canon example: TF:Prime's Shockwave disdained Starscream's attempts at torture and used his mind-reading patch cable to get information.)
So yeah, I agree that there's a bunch of morally dubious characters running around in IDW's G1. I tend to have problems with the choppy storytelling--I think I just have to sit down with all the series and read them in one go. I don't handle month-by-month storytelling very well any more; I lose track of the storylines. I have trouble distinguishing a lot of the characters visually, too, except for the most flamboyant ones. OTOH, I had issues with a lot of Marvel's storytelling, too--WTF, Grimlock?
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(I would really rather see the Autobots presented as mostly good, no arguments, with a few neutral and evil examples, and the Decepticons as mostly evil but functional with a few outliers, but IDW is not going to give me that, whine, whine, complain.)
Thing is, Whirl didn't have to be evil like that? Whirl was... actually a decent guy in Marvel. Stood up for a bullying victim. IDW is a different continuity, sure, so the characters are different, but in a lot of cases, the way that the characters are different is "more evil", which just feels more and more banal the more often it happens.
And yeah, fanfic authors normalizing torture is very disturbing, but you have to look at where they're getting it from. :| Chaos2112 will remember this! Someone asked barber if we'd get any female characters who aren't psychopaths. Barber insisted that Arcee isn't a psychopath and said she was a fully developed character instead.
1) That showed he doesn't understand what a psychopath is, that he cannot see that Arcee is one.
2) It showed that he does not understand that psychopaths and fully developed characters are not mutually exclusive.
When the canon writers, like Barber, don't understand that their characters are acting like psychopaths, how are the fanfic writers supposed to learn any better? :| It's bad.
It's totally fair for you to have problems with the storytelling. I have my share of them (such a recent realization that a lot of the characters in MTMTE do not exhibit normal decision making skills)... as for telling which character is who, that is what TFwiki is for. :v (Well, art failure.)
It's fair for you to have issues with Marvel. Not everything is going to be to everyone's liking!
Grimlock... is pretty clearly Furman's favourite, so Grimlock got to do a lot of consequences-free things, as a result.
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It was actually Budiansky's Grimlock, of the "King Grimlock of the Autobots" storyline that made me go "WTF?" For some reason, the Autobots totally ignored all the oaths made during Jetfire's Autobrand ceremony some issues previous (about Autobots being free people, including free to leave) and went along with Grimlock declaring everyone traitors that disagreed with him--or left. If the Autobots actually believed the oaths Jetfire made (and they all presumably made), they would have told Grimlock to stop being an idiot and ignored his rantings. They certainly wouldn't have acted as his enforcers.
I have said that current politics is affecting comics and other storytelling ("24" for gawd's sake). I did not realize that fanfic writers were normalizing "enhanced interrogation" and such like. That scares me. I should have guess that they would, given crap like "24". After all, Hollywood taught my generation that respecting the constitutional rights of defendants was "letting crooks get away on a technicality". I had to read law blogs for a while to learn how horribly wrong that trope was.
Of course sociopaths can be fully developed characters! (c.f. Hannibal Lechter). I write my fanfic Starscream as a sociopath with a small, but larger than zero, monkeyspace (there was a useful "Cracked" article about that term and sociopaths that helped me get a handle on sociopath characters). IDW Arcee appears to be a sociopath with a larger-than-zerio monkeyspace.
Which one was the IDW writer who claimed it was hard to write stories about robot characters, because they have no feelings or relationships, thereby proving he didn't know a damn thing about the franchise he was supposed to be writing for?
I am enjoying our extended correspondence via LJ, btw.
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I haven't read it in a while, but with that story, if I remember it right... the whole point was that Grimlock had everyone *terrified*, and sometimes, people do some really bad things out of fear, when they are labouring under a bad leader. I recall some of the Autobots trying to subtly work against Grimlock. For example, I recall the Protectobots letting Blaster get away?
It's one thing to say that they could have just ignored Grimlock, but it's another thing to remember that... Grimlock's the leader of the Dinobots. Four other violent, angry guys answer to him and have answered to him for a very long time. (The Dinobots have been together for millions of years, in Marvel.)
It wasn't a case of, "Oh, I can just ignore this guy." It was a case of, "If I ignore this guy, Snarl might set me on fire."
If you look at the Stanford Prison Experiment... even normal people placed into a weird situation can start doing terrible things pretty quickly...
Also, I think Budiansky was pretty clear that what Grimlock was doing was wrong? It wasn't presented as normalized behaviour. It was presented as, "Okay, we established how Autobots usually act. Let's show how Autobots should never act, for contrast."
Anyway, yes, it is scary that fanfic writers are normalizing torture. I've seen fans argue that torturing Soundwave is okay because he's... different? Somehow? (And also that putting bombs in unwilling people is okay if it is cultural???)
Yeah, I know that you know that sociopaths can be fully developed characters. The head-bangy thing is that Barber apparently doesn't.
Mike Costa. http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Mike_Costa The quote is: "They don't have all of the basic things that humans have that motivate them and give them motivation for drama for a story. They don't really get hungry, they don't get tired, they don't have women or relationships like that [which] they value because they don’t have females that they can love; maybe brotherly love but how, they don’t have parents? They don't have religion or spirituality... you have to manufacture [these things] and that makes it very incoherent."
This is just a guy who doesn't understand how to write aliens or robots, in general? Sheesh. Or even how to write humans who lack sexual desire or adoption or Army guys who feel like a band of brothers... Seriously. Army guys manage to feel like brothers, all the time, despite not having the same parents. Also, the implicit homophobia... that quote is such a hot mess.
I am glad that you are having fun! :)
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You would be referring to when Soundwave was captured in TF:Prime? The Autobots made some terrifying threats, but they didn't actually torture him as I recall. Being a Decepticon, from a military where they do torture captives, he believed them. (My recollections may be incorrect). The writers are a little too on-board with the modern Hollywood and actual U.S. law enforcement attitude that it is okay (e.g., legal) to lie to and threaten a suspect as long as you don't actually physically torture them. Psychological torture is apparently A-OK. Me, I have these old-fashioned notions of honor and ethics, and don't think any of that crap is moral or ethical. 'Necessary evil' is a thing, and people forget that the 'necessary' part does not make the 'evil' part go away. And often, it's not even necessary... just evil. I thought that some of the Autobots were letting personal hatreds push them over the line in that episode.
I'm more disturbed now by what they did with Lazerbeak than I was then, since reading the TFWiki revealed that in the linked WFC games, Lazerbeak and the other "deployers" are actual Cybertronians with sparks. The TV series implied that Lazerbeak was just a dumb machine, a drone. It's possible that that is one of the many differences between TF:Prime and TF:WFC--maybe in the context of the cartoon, the deployer is just a UAV drone.
OTOH, nothing wrong (beyond the general wrongness of war) with sticking limpet mines on your enemy in the middle of battle, which both Dreadwing and Wheeljack were fond of. That's war--you're trying to kill people.
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