#I'm so happy the fandom prefers the movie over the show

[xdarkeningkrystals]

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskyist, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITAH for hiding my fanfiction hobby from my husband?

I do not think I'm the asshole here, but a few friends online have told me I am so seeking an outside opinion. I (32F) have been married to my husband (35M) for almost 9 years. We have a good relashinship with the average amount of disagreements over the basic stuff (financies occasinally, planning conflicts, in-laws, you get the idea) never anything big. Overall we have a very happy together.

Along with having common interests, we both have our own hobbies. For me, this is writing fanfiction. I'm what I would consider a semi-serious writer. I have well over 100 fics posted, several of which are pretty long (50k+), and pretty much all of them are very spicy (M or E rating, and all M/M). I write in my down time on my laptop and on my phone, and it's my main form of solo relaxation.

Now, here is where, according to a few online friends, I'm the asshole. My husband knows nothing about this hobby. I never talk to him about writing or fandom stuff. It's just not a hobby/interest we share. We watch some of the same shows and get invested, but he is not part of as I would put it "fandom culture". Shows and movies are something to enjoy, but he doesn't immerse himself in them like I do (he is well aware I get more invested in them than him sometimes). My online friends say that since I hide it from him, and especially since I write spicy things, I am basically cheating emotionally. Which I disagree with. My writing never interferes with us spending time together, I don't put it before him, and it doesn't effect our activities in the bedroom (I don't really think that's relevant but thought I would mention it). I am devoted to him. I just like having this hobby. They say it shows I do not trust him.

The main reason I don't tell him is not that I don't trust him, its that I simply don't trust anyone. I was bullied horribly in middle and high school (verbally and physically) for being interested in fandom things and fanfics. Since then, the idea of talking face to face about it gives me great fear and anxiety. So I just prefer to keep it to myself. He has seen me writing on my phone and asked what I'm doing, my response simply being "I write short stories sometimes," and we move on. For all I know, he has figured it out and just respects my privacy.

This is another reason they say I'm an asshole. I value my privacy and his. I'm not the type that thinks we are married and are basically one person required to share everything. We are allowed to be our own people with part of ourselves that are just for us. My friends say that's selfish and not how marriage works. (To preface, they are in relashinships where their partners' share their interest in fandom culture).

So, AITAH for keeping this hobby to myself?

What are these acronyms?

[anghraine]

thatinsufferableb-st-rd said:

@anghraine so i have read the books multiple times and am an avid fan of the movies. I enjoy both for what they are. I think the main difference is that Peter Jackson was very open about what they chose to cut and why from anything I've ever seen. They even have Sam give a nod to the book readers by saying "by rights we shouldn't even be here". No I'm not happy about what they did with Faramir and Glorfindel got jipped, and I would have lover to have seen Elronds sons but at the end of the day there were acknowledgments of what and why. Rings of Power to me has always come off as hiding from any criticism by using the shield of "well if you don't like it it's because you don't like POCs in it". To which I genuinely could not give a fuck less, like there are so many branches of elves that went different ways so that could make sense within what Tolkein established. But don't hide behind that when your writing is just "Sauron is evil. We know. And we know she knows. But we have to make it seem like she's the only one who Has A Clue so we must all try to shoo her off to make a plotline"

@lesbiansforboromir has already correctly and politely pointed out that you are doing the very thing we were criticizing in that post—intruding on ROP fan discussion to unfavorably contrast the show to the Peter Jackson films, while also applying a degree of scrutiny to ROP that the Jackson films are rarely subject to in a remotely comparable way and could not bear. Frankly, @lesbiansforboromir is nicer and more restrained than I am about this, but you chose to tag me as well, so I'll also respond.

We (lesbiansforboromir and I) were talking about being excited about costuming in S2 of ROP and disliking the fandom meltdowns over ROP's costuming looking (somewhat) different from the films' aesthetic. Since it had already come up in their discussion, I added that I'm not convinced by the anti-ROP contingent framing their seething hatred of the costuming and design as just caring so much about fidelity to Tolkien's vision. I pointed out that Tolkien fandom broadly cares far more about their preferred, film-influenced aesthetics than Tolkien's actual descriptions and gave some specific examples of this.

There's been a lot of talk, for instance, about how the universally long, flowing hair for Elves preferred by the fandom and used in the films is actually totally canon according to Tolkien even if it's rarely mentioned in LOTR proper. This is inaccurate. Galadriel's brother Aegnor is typically depicted in the fandom/film-preferred style rather than per Tolkien's description of his hair as "strong and stiff, rising upon his head like flames" (indeed, in general neither Aegnor nor anyone else is ever depicted this way, and this description rarely shows up in the lists of "no it's about ethics in adaptation" Tolkien hair quotes).

Tolkien repeatedly describes Elvish, peredhel, and Dúnadan women as wearing their hair bound up in braided coiffures with jeweled hair pieces/nets rather than loose and flowing à la the films and the fandom. Nobody cares, any more than they care about Tolkien's description of Arwen's clothing as soft, grey, and noticeably devoid of ornamentation apart from a belt and netted cap (i.e. the opposite of her highly elaborate film costuming and typically loose, unbound, uncovered hair in the films and most illustrations).

Meanwhile, my fave Faramir's hair is nowhere near long enough in the films or most art to mingle with Éowyn's as Tolkien describes. It's usually also depicted as blond, reddish, or brown rather than black as in the book; in Tolkien's LOTR, all described Gondorians have dark or black hair, with the only difference in coloring being that some Gondorians are dark-skinned and some are pale. Again, almost nobody in the fandom cares about this when they're going on about costume design and casting to reflect Tolkien's vision, and male Gondorians are overwhelmingly depicted with short or shoulder-length hair in the films and in Tolkien illustrations.

Popular depictions of Gondor, including the Gondor of the films, very rarely reflect Tolkien's description of Gondor's aesthetic as similar to ancient Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, and the Roman Empire. Film Gondor has, at most, extremely vague allusions to Byzantine architecture amidst the general and deliberate westernization of Gondor's design—as just one example among many, Tolkien's explicitly Egyptian-based design for the royal crown of Gondor is converted to a generically western European-style crown in the films and overwhelmingly in the fandom.

I then pointed out that it's been very noticeable that ROP haters tend to have a powerful double standard wrt fidelity when it comes to the Jackson films. For over 20 years, most film fans have been constitutionally incapable of tolerating even slight criticism of the films without jumping in to defend their greatness and condescendingly explain the most basic elements of adaptation. (Yes, we know film is not the same medium as text, we know changes are part of adaptation to another medium, we all know that, we all know that a word-for-word adaptation would suck and never be made, this is not new information and does not make the PJ films' every choice a good one.) Yet most film LOTR fans who vocally despise ROP display none of the charity towards ROP that they demand for the films (demand even from someone like Christopher Tolkien, a dead man the entire fandom is deeply indebted to, whose dislike of the films still leads to regular attacks on his character from Jackson film stans).

This hypercritical yet hyperdefensive tendency in the fandom is neatly illustrated by the fact that you responded to a conversation about the double standards in evaluations of ROP's costuming vs the films' to go on about how ROP is objectively bad for reasons entirely unrelated to costuming, how you're totally not racist (something nobody was talking about), and to quote you directly, "Like the show was just Bad." Truly, an incisive critique. Meanwhile, your concessions with regard to the Jackson films are mainly about extremely minor and defensible omissions like removing Glorfindel and the sons of Elrond rather than the serious and fundamental problems that lesbiansforboromir and I have with them, or even the ways they do pretty much the exact same things you're lambasting ROP for.

I mean, if we're going to talk about action hero Elves in ROP vs the Jackson films, what about the action hero-ification of Legolas in the films? He was described by Tolkien himself as the Fellowship member who accomplished the least, so super badass battle-skateboarding Legolas hardly represents fidelity to Tolkien's vision. Why should that get a pass while film-stanning ROP haters seethe about ROP!Galadriel being too special, even though Tolkien described her as one of the most special Elves to ever live and specifically as remarkably athletic and insightful?

Meanwhile, film Gimli is reduced to comic relief, the only dwarves taken seriously are conventionally hot ones in The Hobbit films, and Frodo's expressions of strength and fortitude are consistently removed to glorify other characters. Film Gondorians were deliberately designed to seem like useless tin soldiers (which they are in the films, as well as whiter and blonder than Tolkien wrote them) rather than the physically imposing and highly effective fighting force of the book. ROP imagining Elvish rituals upon approaching Valinor that aren't based in Tolkien canon but don't directly conflict with it is absolutely trivial compared to the films' handling of Denethor and Faramir.

The point is not that you, personally, are not allowed to like the films or dislike ROP despite all this. Many people do love the films, including most of my followers. They do have their strengths, though they are extremely racist and few film fans will acknowledge this without soft-pedaling it in some way (esp, since you brought it up, given the context of the truly unhinged degree of racism that has accompanied much of the broader discourse around ROP).

The point is that film fans who hate ROP are constantly showing up in our conversations to be "well actually ROP is just objectively bad, unlike the films, because the show has failings that are also in the films but it's totally different there because of the contents of Peter Jackson's soul" or whatever. The point is the absolutely glaring and obnoxiously hypocritical double standard of defensiveness about the films and obsessive nitpicking of ROP that leads to ROP haters continually going on rants to ROP fans that are unwelcome, uninvited, and usually (as in this case) irrelevant to what was even being discussed.

[meraki-yao]

A year ago the RWRB trailer popped up on my recommended videos. And I'm someone who rarely approaches new things and prefers rewatching old things or staying in certain lanes. But it caught my eye.

So I clicked on it.

And then I clicked on it.

Over and over and over again. Within the day, I could recite the whole trailer.

I didn't know who these people were both on-screen and off, I never heard about this book, I had no idea what the story is about besides what the trailer showed, but I was utterly captivated.

By the next day, I watched the trailer double-digit amount of times.

The day after that, I went to buy the book, and finished it in two days, sobbing and laughing, my heart full of warmth and sorrow and glee.

And happiness.

I've been mostly miserable since I started university. My life was bleak, hanging on a thread of stubbornness, filial piety and fear.

But this movie and book came barging into my life unannounced, and suddenly, I had something to look forward to. Every morning, I had a reason that made me want to get up: check for updates on interviews, promo, the strike; every night, I had a reason to look forward for the next day.

And through this movie, I gained so much. I have never actively participated in a fandom, this is my first. I made so many friends, found so many fan creations and analyses, wrote my own essays and fics. I found my community, my sanctuary, my support system. And through all of this, I learnt about myself and my worth as a person more than I ever had in the last 18 years.

So happy anniversary to the day this movie found me, and the day I found something to hold on to, a little star in my heart, a reason to live, a place to escape.

And thank you to every single person in the world who has made this a part of me. Thank you for giving me the most precious thing in the world: hope.

[howlingdemon13]

You could use a buddy~!

Guys, you have no idea how happy I am that this is complete! You know I'm gonna be supper obnoxious now that I can turn into a demonic ghost with mommy issues. 🤪 Anyway, some notes and thoughts on this cosplay that no one asked for and no one wants~!

First and foremost, this cosplay is sort of a clonesona. I feel like (if given the chance), Beetlejuice would play around with how his clones look. Obviously on stage it’s impossible to find actors who look identical to the lead, but I like that the fandom has embraced BJ being unable/unwilling to create clones that are a 100% physical match. If that’s the case, I’m sure he throws in a more fem-presenting clone once in a while.

This doubles as a feminine-presenting form for Beetlejuice himself, too (Toonjuice has no issue changing his gender presentation at will in a bunch of scenarios, and I like to think that Musicaljuice would be the same/similar). I guess a version of Beetlejuice that’s female would be fun, but I prefer the idea of BJ shapeshifting to look and present the way he wants to (or to have fun with unsuspecting victims).

Even from the early development of this cosplay all the way back in October, choosing between a dress and a suit was like pulling teeth. I love the suit an unhealthy amount, but I wanted something distinct from other interpretations. That, and I was hesitant to lean into the hyper-sexualized looks I’ve seen from officially licensed offshoots of the character. Beetlejuice, while a self-proclaimed sexual being, doesn’t read as the kind of entity to go from generally masc-presenting all the way to hyper-sexual fem-presenting. Also, where the hell is the grime on all these fem designs???? Why does she look clean? Cowards!

I think BJ would settle on a fem-presenting form in a suit, but I also think he’s just as comfortable in a dress regardless of the pronouns/physical characteristics he’s using at any given moment. He likes his dresses and we love him for it.

Anyway-

I wanted a dress that felt “old” but not dated,so I settled on a shirt dress. They came about in the 1920’s, but didn’t become super popular until the 50’s. The cut of Beetlejuice’s suit is somewhere between modern and a style that would have been popular in the 50’s, too.

I also think shirt dresses are pretty “neutral” in that they aren’t form-fitting and they read more like a shirt from the waist up. I didn’t want anything dainty, but I wanted some movement to the fabric, and a dress does that a bit better than a suit imo. It’s why I love Beetlejuice’s first 15 minutes on stage in the trench coat. I know it’s a callback to when we first see him in the movie, but it adds a ton of secondary movement and looks cartoony when coupled with very exaggerated movements typical of a stage show. It’s why I love watching Collette especially bounce around on stage because istg he knows this (or that him growing up with the cartoon make him really lean into over the top body language and the trench coat just adds to it).

Like, look at that! Are you seeing what I’m saying? If I could animate, that would be a dream shot!

Oops, can’t go 15 minutes without thinking of the silly.

All that is to say that movement and form in an outfit, especially one for a character as chaotic as Beetlejuice, was super important to me. It’s also why I settled on long, curly hair, kept the tie, and added a bow. All of that breaks up patterns, adds movement, and is something I can put moss on. Anyway, this cosplay has a lot of little nods to the musical, cartoon, and film (but is mostly based off of the musical).

Cartoon: bugs!! Toonjuice is sometimes seen with small beetles chilling on his suit (which he inevitably snacks on). I love the idea of Beej being covered in bugs, so I felt compelled to include them on the dress and hat. It's a subtle reference, but one that I really wanted. They’re made out of scrap polymer clay and painted. Here are a few:

Film: The guide hat! It's iconic. I know that the hat made it into very early versions of the musical and promotional materials, but how it got thrown by the wayside is beyond me.

Musical: the grime and disrepair! I was heavily inspired by an early suit that is absolutely covered in moss!

I also added a lot of grime to the shoulders and hem as a callback to later versions of the suit and especially the tour version of it. I also added some x stitches since I really like the way they look on the current tour suit!

Oh, and the banjolele! Can't forget my favorite prop!

Miscellaneous: I love giving supernatural characters pointy ears and fangs, so you best believe I’m going to do the same for BJ. Slightly related, but I love the tour makeup so much. The makeup artists really lean into Beetlejuice being corpsey and I’m here for it (I essentially combine the tour and film makeup to get the look I’m after).

Oh! And snap bracelets! I remember hardcore stimming with these as a kid to the point of destroying them (then it was goodbye snap bracelets), and you cannot tell me Beetlejuice, neurodivergent-coded demon ghost, wouldn’t be the same way. Full disclosure, I had to wrap them around metal bands because these snaps are rubber and the texture is a nightmare for me, but I was determined to include them. They’re also a substitute for Beetlejuice’s watches in the film.

God/Satan, that was a lot of rambling. If you survived all that, thanks for reading!

[mumpsetc]

Genuinely Asking, (Not sarcastically! This ask comes across as bitchy unintentionally But Im genuinely asking) what do you think the themes of ii are. What the purpose of the story is. Im utterly confused by what you take from each episode. What You analyze and what you don't. Even more so how you think this obvious trick 'ending' Is good at all for the story theyre telling.

Because It feels as though you deeply misunderstand What ii is going for. What its supposed to be. Especially since you called the Relationships petty and useless? Or how you call s3 unimportant (I dont prefer s3 at all, i dislike it in fact. im a huge s1 fan. But to call it uninteresting Is confusing Now that we know what we know.)

So Im curious, What Do You think ii IS about. Why you think adam and justin and brian spent 13 years on this passion project. Because if it was for money, like you've said, why not animate for a Youtube Content farm. Why bother working on this and keeping a plot twist hidden since 2013. Why Would you go into the animation industry specifically siting II as inspiriation for it.

Not what YOU think ii should be about. You've talked about that plenty of times. What IS ii about. What Is the story trying to tell. What is the common Story beats between every single ii contestant, Civilian, and Host.

Now This is an Interesting Ask, and Thank You for Asking It I Enjoy Thinking About Stuff Like This. I Will Be Getting Personal in Response Because I Think This Ask Deserves as Much

To Address a Few Things Off the Bat: I Am a Very VERY Biased Source for a Multitude of Reasons. I Have Been Watching the Show For 8 Years and In That Time Have Picked Up a Lot of Personal and Fandom Related Baggage So I Have a Hard Time Looking at a Character Like Fan Without 8 Years of Feelings Towards Him. Also @ Your S3 Point, I've Actually Been Rewatching Recently to Properly Contextualize It in the Story as Well as View It as a Finished Product. I'm Only 3 Episodes Into That So I Can't Say Much on That Front Currently Other Than a Lot of My Older Opinions on It are Outdated and Also Made When I Was Very Very Angry Haha!

Finally on the General Disclaimers Thing, My Taste in Media is Really Weird in Part Because Inanimate Insanity. I Was Into ii From 13-15 and Then 17-Now. When I Got Back Into it at 17 I Made the Decision to Start Watching Movies and Reading More Books Because I Didn't Want to Limit Myself to ii and Stagnate in My Tastes. This Resulted in Me Seeing a Lot of Things Professionally Known as "Huge Fucking Bummers" and Generally Preferring Bittersweet or Unhappy Endings.

I Like the Fake Ending Because That's What I Typically Enjoy Across the Board. ii Having an Everyone Dies and Mephone Loses Everything End is What Appeals to Me and My Own Interpretation of the Series So I'm Happy. It Might Be Vapid and Emotionally Base But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I Think I'm Allowed As Much.

To Answer Your Actual Question Though, I Think The Themes of ii are

Existing in a Place Like ii is Damaging for Yourself and Others and Takes a Toll on Your Interpersonal Relationships

An Allegory for Being an Artist in General

There's a Few Others Floating Around Like "Forgiveness" and "What's Real on ii?" But These are the Two I Think are the Most Present and Effect Everything, and I Vastly Prefer the First Over the Second. I Think The First Encourages Interesting Character Dynamics and is At Play With Several of My Favorite Characters (Suitcase, Cabby, Apple, Marshmallow, Paintbrush). The Artist Thing Was Always There But I Just Never Really Cared for How They Executed It.

I Get What the Story Is Going For and Can Probably Atleast Make a Ballpark Swing at It's Ending. Its Steven Universe/Pixar Influences are Worn On Its Sleeve and I Get the Point I Do I Do I Do I Promise But I Just Don't Care for That Sort of Thing Anyways. Is That Unfair Towards ii? Yeah.

On Why I Think ABJ Made This? I Can't Say. I Try to Avoid Speculating on Them or Their Intentions Anymore Because I Think the OSC Treats the 3 of Them Very Strangely and I Don't Want to Be Involved With That. I Disagree With Your Sentiment That You Can't Milk a Passion Project for Money and I'll Leave It at That.

Finally, You Asked Why I Cite ii as an Artistic Inspiration Despite How Much I Dislike It. This is Funny Timing Actually, It's My Senior Year in College And We Had to Do an Assignment Breaking Down Why We Animate At All and I Did Talk About Inanimate Insanity for Mine (For 20 Minutes Too). It's a Show That Means a Lot to Me Because It Has Had an Immense Influence on the Direction My Life Has Taken. It's a Very Right Place Right Time Situation for Me and No Amount of Logic Can Override My Very Emotional Outlook on ii.

I've Been Such a Long Time Fan and I Got So Much Wrapped Up in This Goddamn Cartoon and That's Why I Talk About It, I Got a Lotta Thoughts After 8 Years. I Can Admit a Warped Perspective But This is a Casual Thing I Do for Fun, and I Trust Everyone Reading My Blog to Be Smart Enough to Come to Their Own Conclusions.

[greenerteacups]

In future film adaptations of the HP series, DH is the one book I'm happy for future filmmakers to "mess around" with as much as they like to improve the visual / story experience for all the reasons you mentioned. I'm very happy for them to do a somewhat Twilight film Breaking Dawn-esque departure. Like, instead of focusing on the trio in the woods the whole time, let's get into what the Order are up to, let's show our friends keeping the DA alive at Hogwarts, let's show the other muggleborns having to go into hiding, let's flash over to Draco suffering the worst house guests ever... like we have this expansive cast of characters, let's not waste them for the extended camping trip from hell... also the best part of HP is the wizarding world itself, so many amazing magical set pieces in the world... and we spend the last book mostly in the forest...

Speaking of which, with there being a new series adaptation in the works (with rumours of potentially more HP series to come... perhaps even a Lily Potter / Marauders/ Snape based one...) is there anything you're excited about finally seeing adapted from canon or are terrified of potentially seeing butchered onscreen?

Yeah like and also it isn't even an INTERESTING forest. Like the "children wander into the enchanted forest and face [insert monstrous metaphor for adulthood]" is one of the oldest fairytales in recorded history, with a ton of creepy lore to draw on — you could have had the kids running through mystical haunted forests of ancient Britain! Running into the ghosts of Roman soldiers and Celtic ruins and magical creatures! Forest of Dean could have been COOL.

To your other point: I'd much prefer a Marauders series to a remake of the original. I'm of the not-unpopular opinion that the HP movies are as good as any adaptation of any book can get (save probably the Lord of the Rings movies) in terms of how they balance story structure, fidelity to the text, and onscreen pacing. The cinematography decreases sharply in energy and verve after Alfonso Cuarón, and the later movies unfortunately suffer from the mid-2000s trend of desaturating the frame, but they're solid movies and like — okay, in my heart of hearts, there's a little part of me that's like. Daniel Radcliffe will always be my Harry. I grew up with Rupert Grint and Emma Watson and Tom Felton, and seeing someone else in those roles will never hit me like it did to see eleven-year-old Hermione Granger alive for the first time on that screen. Which is not a real reason. But there you go.

There's also the problem of the genre pivot — the first few movies are obviously children's films, and a whole generation of millennials got to grow up as they gradually changed to Y/A films. But how many children are going to be watching a full season of a HBO miniseries? And how many adults are going to watch that miniseries and then complain it was underwhelming because, again, it's a children's series? It would be better, in my opinion, to start over with the Marauders, whom you can write into adventures that more naturally fit the pacing of a TV show. You can also start with them at like, age 14, which would solve the problem of years 1-3 essentially being about kids in middle school. Unlike HP, nothing happens that we know of in the first 3 years of the Marauders Era that's plot-essential, so strong writing in the pilot and a carefully chosen flashback or two could easily set the stage for a series starting in Year 4.

What I'm nervous about is the contingent of fandom that would expect it to be essentially a TV adaptation of All the Young Dudes, which — while it's an all-time legendary work of fanfiction, like all-time, incredible, wonderful story — does not much resemble what I think HBO writers' room would come up with. ATYD is a slice-of-life bildungsroman about Remus Lupin, and most of its stakes come through emotional tension — you can really easily transplant it outside of a magical setting, and you lose almost nothing. A Marauders show would be an action-adventure series modeled after the Harry Potter books, and it would need an episode-by-episode plot. In ATYD, Remus's development is the engine powering the story. That's not enough in a television series pitching itself as an action-adventure fantasy story, and I don't think the HBO team would be bold enough to depart from genre in this respect. After the failure of Fantastic Beasts, the execs are probably going to clock "Harry Potter show without Harry Potter in it" as a major business risk. Sowhile I'm open-minded and eager to see what the creatives would come up with, I wouldn't envy them the job of having to build out new personalities and arcs for characters that fans have already grown quite attached to their self-designed interpretations of.

It strikes me, too, that Rowling has never gone back to the Marauders as a potential vein for more books, even though she easily could have. She clearly doesn't mind dabbling in the HP universe, and the Fantastic Beasts movies show she's happy to bring the audience back to Hogwarts when she wants to. But for some reason, Harry's parents has always been a little too close to the original series, and I think maybe there's something in her that's afraid of revisiting that period — like if she fucks it up, she's damaging something directly connected to the books that made her famous, cheapening them. Or maybe she just doesn't want to write those stories. Who knows!

I do know that the most important name in that show would be the writing credit, because JKR has demonstrated (1) she isn't great at writing original stories for the screen, and (2) it's really easy to fuck up the pacing of a TV show, and if you don't get the pacing of Harry Potter, then you're not going to adapt it well. The HP books are essentially mystery novels that turn into spy novels. If you don't have that — if you think you're writing a high-fantasy epic from the jump, as the Fantastic Beasts writers seemed to believe, and as the Cursed Child writers seemed to believe — then you're going to write something that doesn't feel like Harry Potter, and most people will notice, even if they don't understand why.

[self-indulgent-paw-patrol]

Ask game for Skye?

Aw yes our beloved tiny Cockapoo XD

My first impression - Why is there only one female pup and why is she so much smaller than the boys-- Is she a Cocker Spaniel?? Could've been a bit bigger...

My impression now - "Thank you Mighty Movie for giving her some lore and anything at all other than what little the show gives us"

Favorite thing about that character - She's one of the only three characters who are girls in PINK that I think the color actually fits them really well, instead of just color coding girls with pink just because. She DOES look good in it, it fits with her actions and general behavior, just as well as all pink/violet shades she wears with other colors for highlights. It may sound of not much importance, but pink is a strong color, not a "feminine" color. It shouldn't ever be "lowly/lazily coded" for girls just because girls, it can and should be used by anyone, as long as they get it. Don't see pink as "feminine/gay" color, see it as "lighter red, passion, fire, love, care, nurturing, protecting". Someone who takes others under their wings and care for them, protect them, fight for them. Skye is persistent, she cares, she's passionate, she's always giving it her all and some more. She deserves the pink color.

Least favorite thing - Being the only girl in the main team when there's a demand for female rep makes it so she's exhaustively OVERUSED to the extent of shading out other pups who would be more suited for certain kinds of rescues, kicking them out of the scene only for being males and their need for showing more girl power. I've been missing Everest showing up more times, heck she lives just close to them, it's closer than Liberty, at least they wouldn't need to overuse Skye so ridiculously much...

Favorite line/scene - This scene lives rent free in my mind

Favorite interaction that character has with another - That moment in the first movie when she went to pick Chase from the rooftop and bring him back down to ground level. I think she could understand he was panicking and made sure he would hear her voice, state her intention and next moves "I'm coming to get you" so he wouldn't be caught by surprise, she asked what happened, made sure he would know people were safe now and he could let go and go with her, she was a total darling there. 10/10 emotional support pup.

A character that I wish that character would interact with more - Chase and Liberty. First I miss Skye and Chase being absolute dorks together, second I loved Skye's dynamic with Liberty in the Mighty Movie, with the two often talking and throwing shade at others or being generally sarcastic to make each other laugh

Another character from another fandom that reminds me of that character - Uran, from Tetsuwan Atom, specifically the 2003 anime version - you might know her as Zoran, Astro Boy. But the American dub for that anime literally changed EVERYTHING to the point if you watch the anime dubbed and subbed, you feel it's two entirely different stories. "Zoran" was nothing like "Uran", they managed to change and reshape her personality in such a way they're literally two completely different characters, so I'll be precise and say I'm talking specifically about the Japanese Uran character, not the dubbed Zoran character.

A headcanon about that character - The show gave me nothing to develop ideas about her, sadly. So I don't have any interesting headcanons to go about- just that I believe she loves strawberry bubblegum scented shampoo lol

A song that reminds of that character - "Defying Gravity"

An unpopular opinion about that character - I prefer her movie verse over the show verse. I can't feel a "personality" in the show... She's cool, but if it wasn't for the movie, I feel like we wouldn't ever have anything to work about her at all?? She's just-- always happy, likes to play Pup Pup Boogie, flies her 'copter, is afraid of eagles. Isn't it weird that I just listed four things about her and still feel like I don't have much to work with her at all??? The only friend I know who has her as his favorite pup told me it's because she's the flight rescue pup - he's hyperfixated on aircrafts. It's not for who she is, only for her being the one to fly 'copters/jets. It could be ANY pup instead of her. That's just freaking SAD. The Mighty Movie wasn't perfect but at least it gave her SOMETHING ELSE if you get what I mean now.

Favorite picture - I didn't get there in the show yet but this is my favorite outfit of hers already, hands down. She looks hella cool.

[ladystarksneedle]

What happened to Liv? 😭 I know you two are close I can’t find her blog anymore 😭😭😭😭

Hey anon! Thank you for reaching out. Liv decided to deactivate or delete her blog after all the hate anons she received. It was a pretty pointless debate, if you'd even call it that at this point, with her getting very vile and personally attacking anons to the point where she felt this wasn't a happy place to be sharing her thoughts, to which I absolutely agree with.

Since you've brought up the topic that was the shortest answer I could give you above. If you are interested in reading more I'll expand below the cut, as I have a lot to say.

This whole thing started about a fictional character, Michael Gavey, who hasn't appeared on screen or will appear for 64 seconds and sparked a debate on whether you should write or read or plainly consume fanfiction about a character who hasn't been properly defined.

Now it could have remained that. A debate and I personally see things from both povs

This is a post I agree with as a writer.

Here

I'm an amateur, I've just begun writing but my style or whatever I'm finding, matches the one mentioned above. I need visual cues and I need to see and analyse a character more if I ever consider writing about him so yes, I personally would not write about a character I haven't completely analysed or who hasn't appeared on screen yet.

As a reader however, I have a different perspective. I love spoilers. I like knowing things beforehand and going through them in my head before reading a book or consuming media. Its fun to go "oh what I pictured turned out to be quite close to what's being shown here". The accuracy or near accuracy gives me a boost. I'm happy when I feel like I analysed or thought about a character similar to what I see later on. It shows me I understood the creator and what they were trying to portray even before seeing it. Gives me a "we are maybe on the same wavelength" feeling and thats fantastic.

That's why I can see a similar perspective to authors and creators already writing fanfiction for him before they've seen the movie. They have an image in their head and they want to be creative and show you how wonderful their imagination is. What's wrong with that? I have many moots who've written lovely stories that I want to read and I probably will.

Coming back to the point, what I don't understand is why people decided that these were such drastically opposite views and decided to sling hatred at whoever didn't conform to their idea of consumption and creation of media.

Why was there a need to send hate to a creator who said she didn't want to read or write as yet just because she wanted to get to know him better before doing so?

Why was there a need to harass writers who wanted to write and express their feelings being all gatekeepy over their work instead?

And why was there a need to constantly continue this anon responding and giving them traction all over again. It should have been shot down long before a fellow creator was forced to leave this site for good. We're all friends here why can't we be civil and respect each other's opinions.

A post stating your preference is not calling the other out. It is simply that, stating your preference and we as a fandom need to stop clinging to crumbs and overanalyzing stuff like this and use them for call out games.

Look at his pretty face and analyse those crumbs instead.

This is supposed to be fun, please continue to letting it be fun for others too.

That's all.

[crusherthedoctor]

💜🤍🖤💖

💜: Which character is way hotter than everyone else seems to think?

mfw I'm Guptill89. He was too based for his time.

Anyway, to be a little more... let's say tactful, I think Elise has a pleasant design that was simply let down by '06's in-game cutscene models. Shahra has a pretty design too, but I've never seen anyone mock hers compared to Elise. If we're counting NPCs as well, I like Hualin's design too.

In general, I think a lot of the game character designs manage to be very aesthetically pleasing... with some exceptions like Silver. Whether they're going for awesome or cute, they're usually nice. :> This is why I get really annoyed when people go "nah, these designs suck, let's make Sonic a real hedgehog and give Rouge a realistic bat face", as if they learned nothing from the original Sonic movie design.

🤍: Which character is not as morally bad as everyone else seems to think?

Already answered this, but I've got another one: Mario.

It's not as common nowadays, but for a long time, Mario got demonized up the ass and was constantly painted as the true villain. This would usually come in the form of being an abusive brother to Luigi (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), or oppressing poor innocent Bowser (ignore all the things he's done pls).

🖤: Which character is not as morally good as everyone else seems to think?

You guessed it, it's Eggman.

"He's not so bad deep down" No he isn't.

"He wants to avenge Gerald" No he doesn't.

"He likes Sonic" Respects him as an opponent, hates the shit out of him as a person and would still gladly kill him without regret. Game Eggman is not Boom/X Eggman.

"He doesn't want the world to be destroyed" Because he can't conquer it if it's not there, and as shown with the Bad Futures in CD, he doesn't care what potential dire state the environments and their inhabitants are in as long as they serve him, with the only exception being his own personal quarters (ie: Metropolis in Forces). Not exactly signs of an altruistic person with good intentions at heart.

"He hasn't done anything seriously terrible like the other villains" Sure, if you ignore the time he fired a missile in a populated city. Or the time he enslaved an innocent alien race. Or the time he showed absolutely no moral grievances over Infinite's sadistic antics and only punished him for being a fuck up. Or the time he broke the planet into pieces... twice. I'm sure his repeated attempts to kill children as young as Cream can also be handwaved away.

Eggman is every bit as messed up as Black Doom, Erazor Djinn, etc. Him acting goofy and some (key word: some) of his actions being presented in a semi-comedic light should not invalidate that, especially when Surge - the so-called Forces game changer according to Evan Stanley - lost to a Motobug and tripped over some bolts.

💖: What is your biggest unpopular opinion about the series?

"All of them" might as well be my catchphrase with how many times I've said it.

I'm serious though, it really does seem that I'm destined to be at odds with the rest of the fandom on virtually everything now. I absolutely hate it. It is not fun in the slightest. You wanna know why I was so happy to join in on all the Vivian gushing when the TTYD remake came out, aside from already loving Vivian as a character anyway? Because I was starting to forget what it was like to actually be on the same wavelength as the majority of a fandom on anything. That's how monumentally unlucky I am with my Sonic preferences.

The characters who are super popular tend to be the ones I'm either indifferent to or straight up dislike, while the ones I vibe towards tend to be largely ignored (Ariem) or criticised for *checks notes* not being reptilian enough (Trip). The most recent games (and comic) that prove We Are So Back are the ones I can't stand, while the ones that actually had my investment are either ignored or placed alongside Colours and Forces as the new Worst Sonic Game of All Time for the heinous crime of having some flaws, by people who unironically white knight '06. There's also the neverending fandom push for Sonamy and all the attention it receives, whereas I remain unconvinced by its alleged chemistry more than ever. And of course, you can compare how I see Eggman VS how the rest of the fandom sees him.

I used to think my fandom status was a tragedy. But now I realise... it's a comedy. *puts on Sonudis facepaint*

[elvisabutler]

i've had no love like your love

summary: both you and professor presley would like to forget about the incident between you two and you do while still occasionally falling into each other's arms when spending time with one another. the two of you finally reach a breaking point. fandom: elvis presley | elvis ( 2022 ) rating: m pairing: professor! elvis presley ( big daddy flavor ) x student! female reader word count: 9487. i got a little carried away. warnings: big daddy elvis. elvis using a walking stick/cane. implied praise kink. student and professor relationship ( everyone are of legal age ). religious talk. elvis being ill enough to miss class. unrequited love that would be requited if people just opened up their mouths. oral ( f receiving ). use of psalms in inappropriate ways. bunch of tears. mention of physical abuse/hitting/being kicked out of houses. use of the nickname belle for the reader. use of the derogatory name jezebel. mentions and beginning of impersonal sex like in my hearts already sinned. thigh riding. author's note: so i'll warn you ahead of time you've got to get through a lot of words of sadness to get to their happiness in this but it's worth it. i'm honestly super glad this got the reception it did since when i posted the little teaser/trailer as my last kinktober piece i thought this was hella niche and didn't think anyone would like it since it's big daddy elvis and it's a professor au. but y'all have seemed to absolutely adore it and it makes me happy. this is not the end of them since i've got an epilogue ( purely happy, i promise ) and honestly, if anyone ever wants me to write more of them ( case in point, the ask i got about a movie night with him and belle ) or i have an urge to i probably will. and y'all know the drill, pick your elvis poison, this is written with real elvis in mind but you can imagine austin elvis. and previous parts are here to be read in order: 1 and 2.

There's one thought- or a series of thoughts- his mind keeps cycling back to, that keeps rolling over and over in his head as he looks at the door you just left out of. Gossip isn't something he normally cares about but when he heard your name, he couldn't help but listen in properly because when it came to you he couldn't help it, he never has been able to help it. 

"She's going for Presley? That religious- he won't give her the time of day like that. She's too impure for him."  

"I've heard that's why she wants him because come on man, you know he never has gone for a student. Why not have the Tour Guide show him what he's been missing? Besides she's already spending all that time in his office and wearing his jacket half the time. Bet she's gonna fuck him before Thanksgiving break. Then she'll be free."  

"Two in one semester-" The calculus professor whistles. "Next semester she'll be begging for an orgy at this rate." 

He's not dumb, contrary to what his teachers back in the day might have thought. No, he's not dumb but sometimes he prefers to see the best in people, sees the parts that other people might overlook. Maybe it's just from his upbringing or maybe it's from how he was treated in the music industry but he likes to think himself a good judge of the character people might otherwise keep hidden. And with you he had thought- he had thought there was something there. Something you had hidden away amongst your conquests as ill advised as they might have been. You were- you felt like the sort of person who could be taken care of while still taking care of him. You felt like coming home or like God himself had dropped an angel in his lap. The idea that he was just another man- another professor in your long line of them stung. He knows he's not a great catch any more, that he's not nearly as pretty as he was even two years ago, let alone when he used to perform on stage or was in the movie picture business but you didn't seem to mind. You seemed to enjoy him, unless he had read everything wrong, had read your lingering glances wrong. Unless he had read your reactions to his very presence wrong or how you would smile just so in a way he recognizes from some women.

If he hadn't have read this situation wrong and you had actually enjoyed his company and cared about him at least in some small part the way he cared about you, why had you answered yes to his test. Why in God's green Earth had you told him that you just wanted him to be another professor you fucked? The answer should have been that you wanted to fuck him as a person and not just- him because he was your professor. You didn't need to charm him like this- to worm your way so comfortably into his heart in a way Priscilla had and how Linda had as short as their relationship was. It's- you didn't need to play with him like this- you didn't need to be cruel.

Maybe the best thing for both of you would be to pretend none of this happened. Pretend that everything was normal and that he hadn't seen how your pussy looked in underwear that was barely there. Pretend he hadn't seen you arch your back for him. Just pretend he hadn't had you against the desk in a way that was so far from how he planned. That's- that should be what he does. You were still perhaps that good girl, that wonderful woman he thought you were, you just needed to be reminded of it continuously. Maybe he just wants to be selfish and have you in his life in whatever way he can. God, he was getting to be stupid and silly as he got older, wasn't he?

Love makes you do stupid things, you've realized this more than anything with El- Professor Presley. With other men, with other professors your brain and your heart seemed to actually be in line with one another, seemed to remember that these were flings and while their outcomes led so much to be desired you could file them away as business transactions. Business transactions that allowed you to avoid worrying about your grades if you were sick or if you had too much going on at one time. You figure it's your own fault for taking the challenge Noelle had offered you. Figure that you brought this on yourself despite knowing that you had seen the man for years now from afar and thought that he was the most attractive man you've ever laid eyes on. Thought his waistline- much as it occasionally fluctuated was perfect at damn near any size but you had a special place in your heart for his size now. You should have known your heart would believe one thing- would feel one thing while your brain would try and remind you that this- this couldn't ever be more than whatever it was. You hadn't even needed to do it, hadn't needed to take the chance on sleeping with him because you were fine when it came to his class, never missing a class or a discussion or anything that had him lowering your grades. Yet, you had to be selfish, had to ruin the relationship- the friendship you and him had with each other. You had to ruin him as a person, didn't you?

The man who had sex with you against his desk that day wasn't Elvis Presley, Professor Presley, whatever you wanted to call him. He wasn't the person you had fallen so deeply in love with that your heart ached and twisted and threatened to fall right out of your chest at the mere idea of losing him for good. He was something- someone else entirely, someone who you didn't recognize in the slightest but maybe that's who he always had been, maybe that was the man you had fallen completely in love with over the semester. Your brain hadn't bothered to entertain the idea of a life beyond this semester but you think- no, you know- that your heart had other plans. Your heart dreamed of a life with you at his side at Graceland during the summer and on the breaks at night. It dreamed of a life with you in his lap and his head in yours. You just dreamed of a life with him come whatever may be.

That dream is still in your heart as much as your brain knows it's stupid and silly and a forgone conclusion at this point. Yet, you can't stop yourself from still wanting it from pining for the mere idea of it. You can't stop yourself from taking his jacket you still have and wrapping yourself in it after you come home from that day- that absolute mess of an emotional day because that mere idea of a life with him. A life where he comforts you and wraps his arms around you when you find that life is too much or when he finds that life is too much.

Maybe that's why you don't back away, maybe that's why you let yourself continue on debasing yourself in a way that you're practically mortified to realize. Or maybe it's because after that day things go back to normal. He acts like the man you fell for, acts like the man you could see some form of a future with and could dream of living the rest of his days with. Still, you choose to believe that it's worth it, that this is all you're ever going to have of Elvis. God you wish your brain could just call him Professor Presley or Mr. Presley but when you're in his office talking about what had happened in class or the lesson plans he had for the next one he always insists on you calling him Elvis and it feels so natural rolling off your tongue. It feels like it's meant to leave your mouth in sighs as he brings you pleasure and with fondness that you can only have with someone you love to the ends of the Earth.

You should have known better, you should have known better because you might be strong, you might be the sort of person who can hold herself up with or without praise that Elvis sprinkles into your life. You're the sort of person who shouldn't do this, who wouldn't do this for anyone else if it wasn't him. You should break it off, should give yourself a clean break but he's always there and he's right there saying the words you want to hear. He's there acting like he's supposed to and you find you can't even grieve for the loss of him because he's not gone, is he? No, he's right there in front of you, almost mocking you in his actions and how they conflict when you're up against his desk, his cock sliding in and out of you with such obscene squelching and squishing because he knows how to touch you in just the right way that has you groaning against the coolness of the desk. He knows how to touch you in just the right way that has you so aroused you make a mess of whatever you touch. The times you're just on his thigh because he can't get it up- not for lack of want, but because of his body betraying him like everything else seems to- those times always end in him with a suspicious wet spot that makes him glad he's got on black pants to hide the stain you've put there from riding him.

Things feel so impersonal, such a stark contrast to the actions of both of you around the times you do these things. You're adults and yet the concept of talking about what happens- talking about how you two fall into some natural rhythm of companionship only to have it stripped away the moment one of you climbs on top of the other or the moment he pats his thigh for you to straddle- is so alien to either one of you. When you've fooled around with the other professors even when it came to the worst exits you were still able to look at them, still have that element of attachment when you would be with them up until the point where you were kicked out and where you were slapped and yelled at and chased out windows that had you breaking your ankle. With Elvis it should be the same, you want it to be the same because maybe if it was you could- it would be easier for the two of you to talk. It would be easier to not feel like this is a business transaction and that as much as he'll be the man you started to love before and after it, he won't be that man during the act. You'd say you felt used but how can you be used if you're also using him. It's silly and embarrassing and it wears you down after each time even though you always crave it just a little bit because it's all you feel like you can get of him like that. You want more than his companionship, his praise and his subtle touches on your shoulder and his laughter. You want every single bit of him you can have. You're grasping at whatever you feel you can get and you don't realize he's doing much the same thing.

It has to be impersonal because if he looks at you he doesn't trust himself to not fall to your knees and worship you like the angel sent from on high he believes you to be. He calls you Jezebel because that reminds him how you wrenched his heart from his chest and twisted it in your hands. Staying away from you isn't an option because outside of when you two fall into each other's arms you feel like his- feel like third time is truly the charm on women he adores to the ends of the Earth and that you could be the one he spends the rest of his life with- however long that may be.

However long that may be is always on his mind the more his stomach gives him issues or his body feels like it's breaking down more and more. Should try and get everything in check, try and cut out some things maybe but he's never been the most disciplined in anything that isn't religion and even then he knows he falls off that wagon on occasion. He has to miss two more classes and on one of the nights he can't sleep, his stomach contorting in on itself and his bones feeling an ache he can't shake he wishes you were there. Your presence that one night, curled up against him after he had woken up and found you on the couch only to carry you to his bed had been some of the best sleep he'd had in such a long time. You might not have healed all his ills but you served to be a balm he couldn't help but crave on this night.

The thing about him missing is that he can't know- he doesn't know that you notice the second it's Joe up at the front of your class again and you swear you want to throw up. Your stomach drops so far out of your body that it might as well be in the core of the Earth. Elvis wasn't here again which meant something- some part of his body was acting up again. Maybe you shouldn't have been on his thigh after the last class, maybe you should have just let it be one of those times when you just talked and relaxed with one another and not let it turn sexual. No- No, it would have happened regardless, after all, the last time he had missed you and him hadn't even done anything other than talk. That was before- you wouldn't dwell on it, if this was anything like the last time he'd be back come next class a little more worn down and needing perhaps more company and a bit of help but he would be fine. He's always been so larger than life and so strong that there was nothing to worry about.

Except- he doesn't come back after that first class and he misses another one and you had been lulled into a false sense of security thinking he was alright when no one including Joe was there early. No, instead you had Jerry coming in almost five minutes late telling everyone that class was canceled since anyone who would take over for EP was a little occupied and as nice as he's heard everyone was- he's a business professor- an economics one- not a religious studies kind of guy. You don't expect people to be loitering outside of the class, figuring that much like any college students they'd be rushing to the library to study or to their dorms or apartments to sleep. You wish people had done that, wished the two people you come upon would have done that.

"He's gonna be dead in a year if that, man." The student- James you think- says, rolling his eyes. "My brother had him last year and he missed one class, we're on what, our third?"

"Third and the Tour Guide wearing his jacket. Maybe that's why- she's drained him." The other laughs quietly.

"She hasn't worn it since the middle of October, no, she's already moved on. Wouldn't be surprised if he passed her along to his little Mafia." James pauses. "Whatever the case- he's dead next year. If he even gets through the semester. Sucks, man, he wasn't the worst professor."

There's a part of you that wants to hear what they have to say, hear how they want to blame you for Professor- Elvis not being here but you can feel your heartbeat rushing in your ears and feel your eyes welling up with tears you can't- you refuse- to shed in front of people and find yourself pushing past them, your boots thumping on floor as both of them laugh just a little realizing you had been listening to them the whole time.

They had to be wrong, they had to be wrong because as sick as maybe Elvis was he wasn't- he couldn't be that sick. No, they were just- joking around, they had to have been. Maybe they knew you were there the whole time and just said it to mock you, after all, you know it's truly no secret that you are his favorite student and were even before- the incident. If they were right though, that meant-that meant after this semester he was gone. You'd never hear a story about how stupid some of your classmates were or about hear him sing like he had that one night again. You'd never share another set of snacks and a drink with him. He'd be gone and you'd be- He'd be gone and the world would feel a little bit dimmer.

The idea of a world without Professor Presley, a world without Elvis swirls in your mind that weekend as you force yourself to do your schoolwork. Ignoring it would be so easy and you could just curl up with his jacket and with your favorite book or in front of the little television and just pretend you hadn't heard any of that. Any time you think of doing that, though, you hear a voice that sounds suspiciously like his with a little backing of a voice that sounds like yours in your mind reminding you that you should do your work. So you do and you eat and you do everything you're supposed to that weekend as you try to avoid thinking of what the other students had said. It's hard but you manage well enough. Monday comes sooner than you'd like and you find yourself dreading entering Elvis's- Professor Presley's class. You sit down in your normal spot though, your eyes shut as you try to relax and burrow yourself into his jacket as you do.

His cane taps against the floor and a breath you hadn't realized that you were holding comes out of your mouth in a rush. He's here, he's alive and he's going to be teaching class today. You bite your lower lip as you hear the taps stop right behind you and feel Elvis's hand grasp your shoulder, just as warm as it always is. You hear his voice rumbling, even with so much exhaustion coloring the tone about how he's glad to see you where you’re supposed to be and you look up at him to see something in his eyes, something that feels like a spark of the man you've fallen for completely this semester. Maybe- no, you don't dare hope fully.

Class feels like a blur and while there is a debate as per his usual it's much more subdued with you barely offering input and him still feeling a little too rough to really force some excitement into it. A part of you wants to just head straight to your other class and not entertain the idea of going to Elvis's office but as you start to leave you hear the tap of his cane following you and hear his voice.

"Y/N." He starts, his eyes roaming your top half and settling on his jacket. "Gonna see ya in five minutes?"

The word no is on the tip of your tongue, you should say no but you've been so worried about him that you nod slowly, adjusting the straps on your bag and it earns a small smile from him as he walks off slower than normal but still seeming just as strong as normal with the tap of the cane. It takes you a little longer than five minutes to reach him, almost as if you're too nervous to really go to his office but when you get there the door is wide open and you see two drinks on the desk and you settle yourself onto the couch.

Talking- even with everything- comes so naturally to the two of you that you hardly realize how you both shift closer to the other as you talk. You hardly realize how you're close enough that you can feel his body heat against your side and that he feels the same thing. This is how it always seems to start since the Incident, with you two moving closer and closer until you're in his lap and today is no exception. Except, maybe it is because you're wearing his jacket and you saw a glimmer of something in his eyes that tell you maybe there's something there. That maybe the person you want to spend all your time with is still there underneath everything. You don't know when you decide to hook your leg over his thigh, thanking every god you know that he has a tendency to spread his legs even if there's no reason to and you hike up your skirt just a hair as you start to grind against his thigh, facing him as you do. Your hands move to try and cup his face, try and pull him closer to you before you feel his hands on your hips manhandling you to face that opposite way.

No. This- no, this isn't- you want him but not like this any more. God you can't- why was it so hard for him to let you just look at him when you do things like this. He was gone for two classes and you were so worried but he won't look at you. You're wearing his jacket and he noticed and he won't let you look at him. Your body can't help itself, still grinding a bit as you try and maneuver yourself back to facing him only to be stopped time and time again by his grip. It's not punishing and it's not going to bruise- you hope- but he won't let you turn. He won't let you turn and his mouth starts to spew words that make you want to curl up in on yourself.

His mouth hisses into your ear. "The Jezebel doesn't want it this way? Doesn't want my thigh today? Too good for me?"

You snarl, tears starting to form in your eyes out of sheer frustration and anguish rolled into one. "I never- I'm not saying that, I just- Elvis, please, let me look at you." Your body starts to contort in positions you didn't think were possible as you continue to try and face him only to be brushed aside.

Words are leaving his mouth, you hear them faintly but you finally just launch yourself off his thigh, chest heaving and eyes fiery as can be. Your legs shake at the sudden loss of his thigh that had supported you up until now but you stand your ground as best as you can. "No, I'm not- We're not doing this, not like this, I- What have I even done to deserve this? This- God, I don't even know what to call it. This joke? This playing with me like this?"

"Playing with ya like this?" He barks, heaving his body off of the couch and moving to stand in front of you, his blue eyes stormy as anything you've ever seen in your life. "That's goddamn rich comin' from ya. Lil Miss Jezebel. The Tour Guide. The Harlot who-"

"Don't!" You shout, not even caring if anyone outside in the hallways can hear you. "Stop calling me that! I'm not- You wouldn't call me a good girl if I was any of those things!"

"They're- They don't hafta be seperate, darlin'!" His emphasis on the nickname is punctuated by him inching even closer to you, his words getting lower as he starts to hiss them. "Because you're most certainly a Jezebel, climbin' on me every chance ya get. Actin' like your God's gift to men wit' the others. Tell me, that new professor, t'one in the math department-"

"What other- Is this about-" Your thoughts jumble as they try to catch up with what he's saying. He's calling you a complete Jezebel and asking about someone who doesn't even exist to you. Your chest heaves as you push yourself into the little bit of space between you, your pointer finger pointing at his chest. "The new professor? The one I had to ask for help for because he's the only math professor who hasn't tried to come onto me?"

"Do- Do I look stupid to you, Jezebel?" He asks, almost as if he's afraid to say your name. "I heard from the other professors-"

"You could have asked me!" The words are spit out of your mouth and you can even see a bit of spittle flying onto his face. It brings you a sick sense of satisfaction to see how his already angry face slides between pure shock and more anger. "I thought we were friendly enough to do that! I've been to your house, Elvis!"

The noise that comes out of him before he can even get words out is truly defined as a snarl and a growl in the truest sense of the words. If you hadn't known any better you'd have thought you were arguing with a wild animal. It startles you to the point where you back away just a bit, not because you're worried he'll hurt you- no he's never been that type even with everything- but just because it's your natural instinct in the face of something like that. Despite that, he follows you, moves closer again even as his voice roars leaving his mouth. "You've been in my bed, Y/N! My goddamn bed! Curled up next t'me like ya belonged there!"

You duck away from him, almost as if to escape feeling very much like a cornered animal. He's not going to hurt you- he won't because he's not like- he's not like the rest of them but you can't defend yourself if he pins you down with his body or his words. His eyes follow you like a predator stalking prey even if you both know you've never truly been prey to him or perhaps anyone else. "That's exactly my point! Why wouldn't you just ask me?"

"'Cuz ya'd have lied!" His answer is slurred, the anger truly getting the better of him as he moves to cage you against the wall, only to have you slide away again.

"Not to you, Elvis!" How could he even think you'd lie to him about something like that? That you'd truly lie to him in general? "I've never lied to you!" You hadn't told him things but you had never lied, not a true and honest lie.

"Haven't ya?" He doesn't move this time, instead choosing to stare you down. "Tell me, Jezebel. Did ya just wanna fuck me so ya could tell everyone ya did? How ya got me when I haven't fooled around with a student in all my years and I haven't fooled around with anyone going on at least a year? Or was this just ya bein' sweet on the fat ol' man?"

The flinch that comes from you is unexpected and you look down at your body wondering if he shot you or slapped you and you didn't realize. There isn't a mark on you, no blood showing, no handprint making a mark on you. There is just you wishing he would have slapped you or injured you in some way because maybe it would hurt less than the words he had just said. It would hurt less than the accusation he's just thrown your way. You do not cry in front of people, you refuse to, knowing tears never make things better when you're caged and yet you feel your lower lip starting to jut and your nose starting to run before you shake your head. It's- he's not- he is wrong and you need to prove that to him.

"Just being sweet on the fat old man." You can't help but laugh, the cacophony of emotions threatening to tear you apart at the seams. "Do you- Do you hear yourself? I- What is it, Elvis? Am I your Jezebel sent to what ruin your little God Fearing self? Or am I just some Jezebel who's sweet on you? Or are you going to tell me I'm both? That I'm not good enough for you? Too used?"

You see his jaw tighten and you worry if you've said the wrong thing. You worry that he's seen how you look like you're about to cry and something is going to go wrong but he just takes a step closer to you, his cane tapping on the floor just once. His head tilts just slightly to the side. "I know what I said, lil Jezebel. I know that you've been actin' all sweet, actin' like you're worthy of the nickname Belle. Worryin' 'bout me. Comin' to my house, gettin' me into bed but when I worry 'bout ya, put ya in my bed next to me, ya leave me alone. Then I hear t'boys. Hear what the lil professors you'll eventually fuck gotta say about ya. Ya just playin' a lil game wit' me, ain't ya?"

You bite your lower lip as an answer before you take a deep breath as you start to head to the door, trying to open it only to realize at some point he's locked it. You could unlock it but you feel the need to turn around and defend yourself. "That's- Elvis. No. No- I- I wouldn't- I honestly like you!" You don't dare say love because if he thinks this low of you he's not going to want to hear it. "I care about you! I- You haven't been here for almost a week in actual days counted and I've been worried. They're making jokes about you dying and that idea terrifies-"

He cuts you off as he takes another step and you hear another tap of that goddamn cane as you find yourself moving up against the wall, realizing you can't move. "Stop. Lyin'."

"I'm not- Elvis- I'm not! Why can't you- I'm I wouldn't lie to you about something like this. I wouldn't lie to anyone like this." You want to be strong, you want to fight more but it's as if he's saying everything exactly to hurt you in just the right way. He's saying everything that just cuts through any defense you have for it.

It finally starts to weigh on you, finally starts to drag you down into the depths you were trying so hard not to fall into. He- he won't understand either because of his own choices and stubbornness or because the idea is foreign to him. The idea that you were terrified- you the girl who is so strong that you've taken something that should be an insult and wear it with a bit of pride or at least wear it in a way that lessens its effect- is so foreign it truly refuses to penetrate his brain. At last that's the only thing that crosses your own mind as you feel cornered. You feel trapped and like- you feel like something is finally breaking within you. That this, out of everything you've had thrown at you is what's broken you. The wall behind you reminds you of his solid form except it's all wrong, it's so cold that it can't be him. He's standing in front of you, blue eyes raging like a hurricane and his body coiled like a tight spring, his cane holding up his leg as he moves forward to cage you in again and that's it. 

Your body sags against the wall, using it to remain somewhat upright as you slunk down to the floor, unshed tears congealing in a hard mass in your throat. You try and swallow only to have something again to a low groan or small whine escape your lips. This- he's broken you, you've been so strong only to let this stupid man who you shouldn't have even gone for in the first place break you. This stupid man who was- who felt so different and like he held every promise for happiness in the words he spoke. In the praise he gave you. In the way his body felt like it was made to hold you and touch you in ways you yearned for.

"Jesus-" His voice sounds crushed above you and for some reason there's a part of you that feels a victorious delight in the fact that you've made him sound like that. Made him sound as anguished as he's made you feel for weeks. As anguished as you feel thinking of him dead. “Y/N- Get up- Ya g-gotta stand up darlin’.” 

No you don’t, hell you don’t even trust that your legs would let you stand up at this point, as much as you feel them minutely shaking. No, you’re quite content to stay on the floor, feeling almost catatonic in the way your mind is focusing on everything about the past semester. You try to close your eyes as if that will make the tears that are threatening to fall go away when all it does is make them slide out the corner of your eyes. That's the final dam bursting as more follow even as you don't want them to. All that’s in your mind is every moment he’s touched you, every moment you’ve walked next to him, every moment when his eyes were like sapphires glittering as he looked at you laughing over a bottle of Pepsi while you waved your hands talking. You remember every hint of praise that had your mind going a little fuzzy and had you shiver for a want of more. 

"Anyone ever tell ya how insightful ya are?" No because even if you paid attention during class and did the readings and made the grades they didn't care. 

"Ya ever thought about teachin'? Though the debate was a goner till ya put it back on track." That was nothing, just you wanting to make sure no one lost the point Elvis was trying to teach.

"You've been makin' this semester a goddamn breeze."

Perhaps you had but for what? For him to be missing class and looking half strung out or exhausted when he came back? In all the time you had spent together he hadn't even hadn't even told you what the problem was- what took him away from you and from a job he loved. Maybe everyone was right, maybe this might be his last semester teaching and look what you’ve done- you’ve made it so his last hurrah is being known as your last fling or just another fling in your series. The thought makes your stomach roil at doing that to him- doing that to a man that God help you- you had fallen head over heels for to the point that you wanted him at any cost and in any way you could get him. 

"You're- darlin'- you shouldn't b-be-" He has to stop himself from talking, feeling an old stutter starting to rear its ugly head. His breath comes out shakily as he tries to focus on you, focus on how your shoulders are shaking with tears and how he did this to you. How he's done something that's irrevocably harmed you. He hadn't wanted this, not even at his most angry has he wanted this. "Don't- don't cry. Goddammit, calm down. God, why'd ya hafta get on the ground."

You look up and for a brief moment there’s a flash of fire in your eyes, a pang of pure annoyance at what he says. "I'm sorry to inconvenience you once again! Make the great Elvis Presley have to get down on the ground. Put him at the Jezebel's level. Leave me down here where I apparently deserve to be."

"Ya know I didn't mean it like that! Goddammit Belle, jus' meant my knees-" He has to take a deep breath, slow and steady and shut his eyes as he gets down to your level before he opens them and cups your cheek, trying to be gentle even as you flinch a little and shake your head. "This- you s-shouldn't be cryin' like this." Not over him and what he's done. Over everything that's been done from the very start. "Ain't worth it."

More accurately he ain't worth it.

"I don't know anything when it comes to you, Mr. Presley." You pull away as your tears start to fall even faster. "I am crying like this over a man who thinks I'm- Don't call me Belle, don't call me that like you did when I was leaving you in your bed. Don't act like you care." After all, he doesn't, he can't because who would care for you and feel the way he does about you. Believe the things he does about you without giving you a chance to explain. "I'm just a harlot. I'm the Tour Guide of the school who now even you get to say you've slept with. You've still got it."

"Darlin'." His voice is pitched lower, almost as if he's trying to talk to a skittish animal. As if he's scared if he talks any louder he'll spook you and that you'll run away for good. "I-I never said I didn't care. W-Wouldn't've put ya in my bed that night if I didn't. Ya looked- ya looked freezin' 'n i couldn't stand it." He pauses, his features darkening for a moment. "Then ya left in the mornin' 'fore I even woke up."

You had left in the morning. You had left that morning because every time you stay at someone's house, some professor's house it's always ended so poorly. The way his face darkens as he tells you that makes your body shiver even as his jacket- that for some ungodly reason you still have, that for some ungodly reason you couldn't get rid of- tries to keep you warm. The anger he has makes you think you were right to avoid him that morning- he- but if he cared, if he meant to put you in there- then you should have stayed. He wanted to wake up to you, wanted to have you burrowed into his side. It makes you freeze.

Elvis looks at you and sees how your body tenses up, sees how you're frozen in place and he frowns as you start to speak. "When I stay in the morning, it's not pretty, Elvis. I- I didn't want you to be the same."

His hand clenches into a fist as he shuts his eyes. His breaths are slow and measured for what feels like an eternity before you see him unclench his fist and look at you. "Ya mean how the Chemistry professor's wife would have beaten ya black and blue if she had gotten a real proper hand on ya? 'Stead of the shiner ya had for a week? Or how ya busted yer ankle hoppin' outta tha' one history professor's window. Ya want me to go on?"

Something blooms in your chest at him telling you about those times. You hadn't even met him when any of those times happened. Sure, you had seen him around campus but he didn't- couldn't have even known your name. You open your mouth, tears still falling but slower as your body tries to calm you down. "You- You shouldn't know about-"

"'ve got eyes don't I?" He responds, as if that explains everything. "Y/N- Belle- I noticed ya before ya ever stepped foot in my class. And they talk, darlin', oh do they talk."

It's then that you look away, almost ashamed at knowing that he's always known about you actions. It is absolutely no wonder that he called you what he did, why he believes you to be what he's called you. You have to pause before you speak, trying to gather your thoughts, rubbing at your eyes as you do. "And that's- that's why you've been- if you've heard all the stories and do know about me then I guess you're not wrong in calling me Jezebel. Just adding you to my long list. But- you- when that's what happens when I don't leave- why do you think-"

His voice takes on an edge of frustration you think, or maybe it's genuine hurt. "Ya really think I'd've done any of that to ya? Ya think I'd do any of that t' someone 've been callin' Belle in my mind 'cause I sometimes look at ya n' I can only think of that damn word in French?" He moves to stand up, his knees and other joints cracking just a bit. "Get up, darlin'. I- just trust me this once and get up."

A stubborn part of you wants to stay on the ground, just sit there and stew in your tears and feelings but when you look up at him with blurry eyes you can't help but heave yourself off the floor and plant yourself just close enough to him that you're looking into each other's eyes if you look up through your lashes. "I- Elvis-" You start to speak only to have him cup your face and the warmth of his hand juxtaposed with the calluses on his fingertips has your eyes fluttering shut against your will. He's not supposed to be this soft, not to someone- not to the person he doesn't care about, the person he's only roughly fucked while pretending it didn't happen afterward. "Don't."

When you say that word he pulls away his hand and you think he's listening to you, think that he's doing what you're asking him to do only to hear the next words that come out of his mouth. "Blow your nose, Belle." His hand that hand left your face, had left your cheeks came back with a handkerchief, monogrammed with a cursive EP. He doesn't necessarily shove it under your nose but it's a near miss even as he kisses your forehead. "I'm not moving it from under here till ya do, Belle."

"I'm not a-" You start before looking up at him and realizing despite his comforting air no part of him is doing this because he thinks you're a kid. No, he knows you're a grown woman- you're a grown woman he wants to be with until his dying breath. "I can hold my own handkerchief."

His lips stop in the middle of attempting to give you another peck on your cheek a slight chuckle escaping him. "Would ya quit bein' stubborn? Tryin' to comfort ya and you're tellin' me ya can hold your own handkerchief. 've been a goddamn asshole let me show ya 'm really a good southern gentleman at heart."

"Southern gentleman don't act the way you did." You shakily exhale, realizing that he's trying to comfort you, trying to place small kisses on your face as if that is solving anything. You shake your head. "Southern gentleman don't play with people like that."

"Darlin', trust me, the older we get, the more every single Southern gentleman does." He pauses to look down at you, his blue eyes narrowed. "I try t'be a gentleman but Lord knows 've got a temper wit' a wrath that rivals God himself. 'N I think I took that out on ya. I- I'm- Ya wounded my pride, alright? Sayin' what you said when I asked if ya wanted me t'fuck ya. I know- I know I can get a woman, but I don't- It's usually more of one night stand or somethin' that's lackin'-" He rubs at his neck. "Care. Doesn't have that tender lovin' care I need nowadays more than I did when I was younger."

Care. Oh, you had been so- you both had been so stupid. Your eyes flit up and you notice how vulnerable he looks just in this moment and you swear it takes your breath away. "Elvis. I didn't- I thought you were trying to make me beg." A pause. "I was trying to what I thought you liked. I didn't- You've never been- No one else has made me feel like you make me feel."

So loved, so proud of, so everything under the sun. There's a reason your heart and your brain had wanted to spend the rest of his life and your life together. Being with him felt right when you stripped away everything that's been happening.

Elvis is silent for a moment, almost as if he's debating his next words or actions even as he still places another kiss to the crown of your head and uses his thumb to wipe away tears that keep falling and holding the handkerchief by your nose. He finally puts the handkerchief away, freeing that hand and using it to cup your chin. He tilts your head up just a hair so that you can see his eyes shining with what you think might be unshed tears as his voice becomes so gentle it twists your heart. "What d'ya want from me?"

"Everything." You choke out your answer, your voice scratching and sounding so raw when you do that you almost want to hide. "I want to be with you after this semester. I want to dance with you like we did that night. I- God- I want to wake up with you every day until one of us dies. I just want to be yours."

At your last words the tears start falling in earnest again and it breaks something in Elvis a little, seeing you cry after that confession. He doesn't waste a second before pulling you into a soft kiss, using his grip on your chin to make it easier. You want more but he's pulling away and placing kisses on your forehead and your cheeks, chasing after the tears in a way that's so gentle you'd think it's fatherly but it's not- it's just him allowing you to be a human again. Allowing you to be more than just the harlot or the Jezebel. Seeing you as the person he's always thought you have been before the Incident and even after the Incident.

"Ya mean it?" There's a small part of him that curses how he sounds asking that but he needs to hear it from you. Hear that you're being honest and truthful with him about what you want. "If ya gonna change ya mind I need t'know right now."

You sniffle and shake your head. "I mean it! I want to be with you and only you. I've only been with you since that day. Haven't flirted or anything. I want to do my work on your desk, want to curl up on your couch with you just- I want you. I want you, my Elvis, my Big Daddy because you're- You're the only one who's ever treated me like more." You pause, taking a deep breath. "Like I'm worth getting to know beyond just my pussy. I can't- I don't want to go back to a world where I don't have you. Where I'm not able to kiss you and be with you in whatever way I can. Where I can't fill your house with-" You stop yourself, because that's too much, that's not something you're admitting to him right now. "I just I want you. I'm not changing my mind, if I was going to I would have the second you didn't give me back my panties, Elvis. When you were so mean and hurtful and-"

He cuts you off with another kiss, this time a little less gentle but still nothing compared to what he wants to do to you. His teeth nip at your lower lip just a bit and you can't help the whimper that escapes you as he pulls away your mouth trying to follow his. Looking in his eyes, you see something different, you see the overwhelming lust, the blown pupils threatening to overwhelm his blue eyes but more than that you see a man who looks so in love with you he might as well keel over with the sheer force of it.

"Feel like an idiot for missin' out on that. Gonna keep kissin you like that for as long as i can. Ya realize that." He pauses as his eyes rake over your form. "Get on the desk, Y/N. My sweet Belle." His emphasis on the nickname, Belle versus Jezebel is the only thing that reassures you he's not planning on doing anything rough. That he has a plan for you to look at him while he does- whatever it is. You take a minute to hop up, sniffling once again as you rub at your eyes. Your emotions are still a mess but you can- this helps, you think.

Elvis grunts, using the cane and a grip on your knee to help ease him onto the ground right in front of your legs, right in between your legs as his hands dance up your thighs. His gaze is on you, full of promise and want as his hands inch further up and up until he reaches between your legs, one hand moving to cup your pussy while the other grabs your hip and pulls you a little closer to the edge of the desk.

"You been payin' attention in class?" He asks as you can't help but whimper a little at the feel of his hand covering you like that. "Specifically this one? What we talked 'bout at the beginning?"

Your head nods slowly as you shiver, feeling the fabric of your underwear being pulled lower and lower down your legs. "You mean psalm 51? What about it, Elvis?"

"Think ya can recite it by memory?" The words of his question are punctuated by kisses up your legs, starting with your calves before moving to knees and then to your thighs. He bites softly causing you to clench them together around his head before he mumbles a no. "While I'm here between your legs."

It feels like a challenge and it causes a curl of arousal to shoot directly between your legs as your vagina clenches around nothing. His hand feels the movement and you can feel the smirk of his lips against your skin before you answer as he puts one singular finger inside of you. "I can." You sigh out your answer as he curls that one finger your arousal making it easy for him to.

Hard doesn't even begin to explain how it is to try and speak- to try and remember the psalm as you feel his tongue flick against your clit once, twice, before moving down to your folds. Another finger has joined the first and you can feel them inside of you, following where his tongue traces. His licks and strokes are leisurely done, almost as if he wants to drag this out, wants to go at the pace that you're speaking when all you want to do is have your orgasm that you can feel brewing but when you stop to take a breath, so does he. It's infuriating right until the midway point when you say "grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me" his mouth wraps around your clit, sucking and even giving you a small nip as his fingers curl against your g-spot. It shouldn't be enough to help you cum, it shouldn't and yet you feel your toes curling and your thighs tightening around his head as he hums in satisfaction. Your body shakes, grinding against his mouth even as his free hand tries to keep your hips from moving. Your thighs don't unclench until he taps at your leg and even then they still shake as he pulls away, mouth glistening with your release as you try and pull him up for a kiss only to have him continue his attack on your cunt.

You keep reciting, feeling as if that's what he wants you to do despite how your voice shakes and how you whimper the more sensitive everything becomes. You cum again by the end of your first full recitation, panting with your chest heaving. There is a thought in your mind to tell Elvis to stop, that you need a break but even though you are starting to feel over stimulated, the way he's looking up at you as his mouth does sinful things to you, as he teases your swollen clit with his fingers and his mouth more and more stops you. His free hand moves to lock fingers with the one of your hands that isn't winding through his hair, yanking and earning growls the more you speak. The intimacy of it all has you nearly sobbing tears of joy this time, not the tears of sadness you had been experiencing. You feel yourself cumming in a way that's unfamiliar as you stutter out the words "my tongue will sing of your righteousness" and Elvis has to pull away, a chuckle escaping him as you see his whole face might as well be covered in your release. It takes him a moment to recover but you swear you hear him talking about squirting when he kisses his way up your thigh and back to his task at hand. When you finally finish the psalm the second time your body is shaking and his tongue and fingers and everything are so overwhelming that when you attempt to start the psalm for a third time you say the first words five times.

"Daddy please, let me cum. Please, I've been good." The words are whimpers when they leave your mouth as you try and grind and get to that edge.

"I know, Belle, been so good, taste even better." He mutters against your clit.

That does it, that has your hand clenching his and your other pulling his hair as you grind on his face, practically smothering him as you cum. The sheer intensity of it has you thumping backward on the desk, trying to catch your breath as your legs shake and you hear him speaking against your thigh. You catch bits of the word holy and jezebel and God and you feel a warmth settle in your body that you can't quite explain. You use your hand to pull him away enough that you can understand him before you ask.

"Are- Are you talking to God- thanking God for me?" The concept boggles your mind but it's so touching at the same time that your heart threatens to burst at the idea.

"Think 've been thankin' God for ya since I first saw ya, but 'specially since I saw ya in my class. My holy- My sweet holy Belle." He winces at the crack his knees make when he gets up and leans both on the cane on the desk when he finally stands up. "None of 'em deserved ya 'n I'm not too sure I do but- 'll try to deserve ya."

Your hands move to cup his face, marveling in how he nuzzles up against your palm before you smile, pulling him in for a soft kiss. "Trust me, Elvis, I think you're the only one who ever has." You nuzzle at his nose before pulling away. "How about you let this pretty little sinner, this harlot, this Jezebel take care of you. I don't have a class and-"

Elvis cuts you off with another kiss before he nods. "Only if Big Daddy-" He looks at you, reminding you that yes, your nickname you have for him snuck out. "Gets to take care of his pretty lil sinner, his Belle, and help her wash away all those sins."

The light in the smile you give him could power the whole of the campus for months if you could bottle it up. You slide off the desk a little less gracefully than you mean to before nodding. "Lead the way, Elvis." A pause. "I love you."

"Ain't I the luckiest man for it too." He adjusts himself in his pants, hoping you don't notice that there's a bit of a wet spot on them where his cock should be. "Love ya too. Come on now, never did get to show ya Graceland's shower in my room."

taglist: @elvisgirl35, @butlersluvbott, @lokis-right-femur, @godlypresley, @steph-speaks, @lindszeppelin, @eliseinmemphiss, @thatbanditqueen, @venus-haze, @lrd98, @ab4eva, @blurredcolour, @butlersxbirdy, @notstefaniepresley, @holyastronauts, @vintageshanny, @powerofelvis and @ellie-24 and i think that's it? i don't know and apologies if you got tagged twice, i trusted a copy/paste.

[spicysix]

20 Questions for Writers

I was tagged by @missberrycake thank you lovely ♡

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

38!

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

115,027!!! that's so many words

3. What fandoms do you write for?

currently, only Stranger Things. before, i've written for a bunch of RPF - McFly, The Maine, One Direction. don't think i had ever written for a show/movie before

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

crush crush crush - steddie X reader

fuck-marry-kill - steve X reader

it feels like i'm going home - eddie X reader

now i'm ready to start - eddie X reader

love sneaked in with the smell of you - eddie X reader

i find it very funny that my top 5 (actually, my top 9!!!) it's all reader inserts. didn't think they'd be popular at Ao3 hah

5. Do you respond to comments?

i do!!! currently i have a lot of comments to answer to, because i've been a little away from fandom and specifically from writing since last year, and haven't found it in myself to answer them. but i will!!!!! someday

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

me and you (we can't lose) [eddie X reader] definetely. canon compliant. that's all needed to understand lmao but some of the drabbles for my Forever Halloween Challenge are also very angsty and gory

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

basically all my other fics have happy endings, so that's a hard thing to answer lol i think it's relative

8. Do you get hate on fics?

never did, thankfully!

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

i've only ever wrote one smut scene for going home and nothing else in english. in portuguese, i've had a series of three short smut fics that i never finished lol. it's not my thing and it's hard for me to do it because of the language barrier in english, i feel insecure about it. i just prefer writing pure fluff in general

10. Do you write crossovers?

never did, no, cause it's usually not something i like to read as well

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not that i know of

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

also not that i know of but that would be so nice if done with permission!

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

also no. i think i'd have a bit of a hard time, but wouldn't be opposed to it

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

i'll say that nothing has ever got me as much as Steddie before. i've always been a reader insert girlie, besides the first fics that i've ever read (Jemi - joe jonas X demi lovato) fics, i'm pretty sure Steddie was the only characters ship that i've read and got completely obsessed over

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you will?

your sweater (up over your head) [stonathan]. this fic is very special to me and a personal challenge in many ways, and i'd love to finish it someday but i'm not sure i'll get back to writing ST, so it's a hard chance

16. What are your writing strengths?

i'd say dialogue! it flows very naturally to me

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

description. haaaate describing things, scenarios, clothes, faces, animals, whatever. i think i'm really mediocre if not entirely bad at it

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

if it's through someone's specific POV, i'm in favor of writing as the character understands it - so if they understand the language, keep it translated and just describe that it was in another language; but if they don't understand, then don't translate either. then you can either put it on a note or make the character who said it translate it. but also, if it's too big of a text, i think it can be annoying. so, mostly short phrases it's good

19. First fandom you wrote for?

McFly rpf reader insert

20. Favourite fic you've written?

ahhh that is such a hard question, i love all my fics so dearly. but i'm gonna go with going home because it's my first and only finished long chaptered fic, and all the research i did for it and everything else involved in writing it that made it a bit more special

Tagging (no pressure): @marvel-ous-m @hbyrde36 @stellarspecter @starryeyedjanai and anyone else who sees it and wants to join in!

[fandomsbyladymelodrama]

No pressure on this, but I wanted to ask if you'd like to tell me about one of/some of your favorite Christy scenes, and the things you like most about it/them? I can't singlehandedly revive the fandom on here, but it's such a joy to talk over this show with other fans!

I didn't realize until recently how thoroughly the Neil/Christy relationship informed my romantic preferences in all the media and writing I've done since watching it in my teens. Older, scholarly man/younger, determined woman, some kind of angst in the man's past, a need to change things for the better as an intrinsic part of the woman's character, a taboo element that stands in the way of the relationship... Even in the slash pairings I love so much, there's still so many elements of it!

Hey filmmakers, don't think we don't notice that you frame these two with Christy on a step/incline half the time to de-emphasize the height difference...

Oh my, oh my. Okay, first, let's be real. I've been waiting for an ask like this since 1994 (baby Tumblr wasn't even born yet 😂) so get ready for some major Neil/Christy feels that I've been suppressing but also diligently-tending-in-the-background for 30+/- years. THEY. ARE. PERFECT. Top-shelf OTP bottle, for sure. You understand, right? Of course, you do. We've discussed. But yeah, I feel the same way about this show/book/pairing influencing and informing both my writing style and romantic preferences in fiction over the years. Happy to admit it. Yes *raises hand* 1000 times yes. Hello, my name is ladymelodrama, and the fact that CBS so cruelly stole resolution for Neil/Christy from us forever (I'm not counting the PAX movies, I'm just not) is a crime against good television everywhere and will haunt my Christy-loving bones until I'm dead and buried in the ground deep enough so's the critter's can't find me, as Little Burl or Creed Allen would say. Anyway, you asked about Neil and Christy and favorite moments and since I can't just pick one...

I have a proposition to make :) Let's trade fave moments until we run out of them, maybe? No pressure, of course, but this is me mostly unwilling to commit to my Top 5 Scenes until I finish my rewatch, and even then I'll probably change my mind a couple times 😂 But here's one that I'll discuss in detail today and which I like to call the "Will This Do?" scene aka "and then they both smiled their little smiles at each other and lived happily ever after. The end." <3

(Credit to @heatherfield for this gif, and bless you, friend, for continuously shipping the same pairings as me - makes my gif-hunting so much easier haha <3)

So why do I love this scene so much? Oh, you know. Margret's dress. Objectively, it's gorgeous (the woman had style, even if she had no heart). And hey, it only coded Neil/Christy as endgame from the first episode, no big deal. Plus it was one of the softest moments in the whole show and THE WAY THEY SMILED AT EACH OTHER. Ugh. Soffffffft. I'm mean, you're seeing this too, right? ;) Meanwhile, I'm sure David is over here in the corner...doing what David does best XD Lurking. Always lurking.

(and, based on the pic I chose, maybe taking notes on how to have better chemistry with Christy? - "Dear Diary, Neil MacNeill is kinda the worst, have I mentioned?" 😂) But in all seriousness, what I love about that scene (and the exchange of smiles, in particular) is how there's an honest-to-goodness, my-spirit-just-spoke-to-your-spirit bit of humanity happening there. I die for those moments, little and quiet as they may be. It's just so...SOFT. They don't know each other yet. Not really. There's no romance at play (other than what I assume might be mutual physical attraction, even if Christy would never let herself go there. Not on her first days in the Cove) so it's more a budding friendship that we're seeing and friends-to-lovers is one of my favorite things? (Jorleesi, Jisbon, Siegfried/Audrey, Obidala, Red Cricket, Dickon/Mary much?). I also really enjoy when she comes down the stairs looking all pretty-in-lavender with her hair down (still lolling at your comment on that detail btw because...c'est vrai 😂) and "Oh no, David, it's so late...how will we ever get to Lufty Branch in time?" "Not we, Christy." (exactly, David, you're getting it). Too bad she has to spend all afternoon in this rustic cabin with a plaid-shirted, barrel-chested, brogue-speaking, moody mountain man with inside pain for dayssssss. Oh the everlasting horror XD

So yeah, so much to love about this scene (and the entire convo in the cabin afterwards and him plucking her from Theo prior to the whole dress thing - guy helps girl down from horse = I'm in love 😍). To witness the very beginning of their arc (okay, Part II of the beginning, but the doctor was busy with brain surgery during Part I, so you know what I mean) and to have the actors play it so, so beautifully and in an Appalachian setting that's just misty and magical and to die for all by itself... Mmmm *chef's kiss* Your turn, @darsynia <3

[plasmasimagination]

Hey hey, I hope you're good.

I saw your match up event and i wanted to participate in it.

So:

Fandom: Honkai: Star rail

Preference: male

Pronounce: she/her (bit I can go with they/them)

Characters I don't want to be paired with: Sampo, Welt (not that I don't like them)

MBTI: intj

A virgo by sun, à sagittaurus by moon and capricorn by rising sign.

I'm1,63 meters tall and I have blue/grey eyes, with a really dark blue circle around the iris. and middle lengthed brown hair (stopping a little over my boobs) cut in a butterfly cut, but without bangs. And I'm wearing glasses and have quite a lot of moles on my skin.

I really love lollita fashion and hats. But I have the problem of beeing chubby and the most things don't fit me (but I have the luck, the fat is equally distributed and still having the sandhour like figure, if you understand what I mean(I hope so)). Because of that I'm overthinking myself and I'm kinda insecure about it.

In general, I overthinking pretty much everything and think about everything twice or thrice before I say it and what people think about me and if I did something wrong (especially if they act like something pisses them off), but for the people around me, I'm looking pretty chill and that I would have no problem to talk, with someone else. And if I know the person (even just a little) I can show the chill nature of mine. With strangers, I'm panicking inside and for almost every situation I have like a folder with answers and reactions. But when I know the person good enough I can even, be your partner in crime. Want to solve Sudoku? Want a battle with water guns? Want to take over the world? I'm in. In all of them. Even jumping off of a cliff-.

But I'm afraid of heights.

I would eat almost everything you give me to eat. The exceptions are seafood (fish is okay, but not raw), spinach any type of meat except chicken and maybe pork.

Things my friends say about me, that they can talk about everything with me (and I'm still the second choice *sniff sniff*).

I love to take photographs and to write (especially poems) and to show them to others. But thing is: I don't have many people to show them to. My parents are not always happy to see what I've did and I have like six friend, that I don't want to bother, because they have other things to do.

I hope I haven't forgot anything this time.

Thank you and have a god day/night!

HI THERE SUGAR (*ˊᗜˋﾉﾉ

HM HM HM, my writer instincts are tingling....and your matchup issss.... ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶

.

.

.

DAN HENG

Introvert and introvert that got stuck together and now literally fit with each perfectly

Anxious X calm

He doesn't like talking much, but will talk with strangers for you, he wouldn't want his sweetheart to get troubles over such a preventable thing after all!

Write poems? Show them to Dan Heng please...that man might not tell you but he does appreciate you showing it to him and is genuinely interested in your writting

Also you have little march 7th running after him so you get her in the pack too, so talk about photography with her Will ya?

I like to imagine that you guys would enjoy to just sit around (probably in his room or smth)

Sometimes in silence, comfortable silence. Sometimes you chat about something, sometimes you just do something together (write, watch a movie, etc).

And those are the moments he enjoys the most, being comfortable with you, and just enjoying your company.

[lordshroom]

HOLY SHIT WHY ISN'T ANYONE TALKING ABOUT THE TMNT X BATMAN II COMIC????

Okay now that my clickbait title has baited your attention, some context. If you're in the TMNT fandom, you probably know about the Batman X TMNT crossover movie. This movie was based on a six issue comic series that ran before it. It's not a one-to-one adaptation: most notably the TMNT turtles are from the IDW verse and dimension hop to Gotham unlike the movie where they already live in the same world.

The comic then got two sequels: "A Knight in New York" and "Crisis in a Half Shell".

And I like the first comic when I read it a few months back, I prefer the movie but it was still a really good comic run. Recently, I got the two sequels.

Now that I have read them, I am surprised I don't hear more people talk about them. Particularly the second comic, "A Knight in New York." Like, it has some really good Donnie angst. And the internet loves Donnie angst!

Warning: Spoilers/ way too long summary below

Very, very, very, long story kinda short. Donnie is feeling self-conscious about his physical abilities and how much he relies on his tech. He's weaker than his brothers and needs to be saved by them all the time, and it makes him feel useless. Yes, he's a genius, but he still needs his brother's help to carry out his plans. On his own, he's nothing.

But he remembers how cool Batman is, how he's both strong and smart, the perfect package! But in an attempt to talk to him, Donnie and Bane swap places for a week. And it only takes Bane a week to conquer New York City.

When Donnie, Batman, and Robin get back to New York, Donnie's devastated by the destruction he's caused. It only gets worse when Bane beats Splinter into a coma. When the gang gets back to the lair, Donnie suggest they use venom to enhance themselves. Batman and Leo say no, that it's too dangerous and they can't cross that line.

But Donnie doesn't listen. He sneaks out and takes the venom, apologizing to his brothers and says that this is the only way. He hulks out and decimates Bane's Foot's Bases ( because by the way, Bane took over the foot). Donnie's about to kill the very Foot Eliet that mocked him for being weak at the start of the story before Batman and Leo burst in to try to calm him down.

During the fight, Donnie vents about how frustrating it is to be so dependent. But now he's powerful and can do everything on his own. He doesn't need Leo's pity anymore, he doesn't need anyone.

Leo and Batman get through to him by showing him Baxter's modified Venom formula, which Donnie finds an exploit in that they can use to cure it. Leo says their true strength is each other. They work best as a team, and they all need each other.

Of course they beat the baddies and Donnie prove's he's still a ninja even with all his tech, and happy endings all around.

Like, hot damn, what a neat arc that I'm surprised nobody talked about before. I do think overall the sequels are weaker than the original run, but there are some cool elements in there, like this arc.

Also the third run has the Batman and TMNT universes mix in the most fanfiction way possible. Like-

Need I say more?