#There's no need to contrive up an entire ex-slave sobstory on him and try to pass it off as canon to make him interesting

[singingcicadas]

Every time I see something along the lines of "Megatron was a slave because he was oppressed and forced to work in the mines, forced labour is slavery and oppression is slavery so what happened to Megatron was obviously slavery" a question mark pops up in my head and it's so fucking funny because. Social studies. History. Basic literary analysis skills.

Like I'm gonna be assuming whoever's in the 'Megatron was a slave' camp is talking about idw1 and tfp b/c those are the only two continuities that have Megatron coming from an oppressed background in depth. If it's idw1 then how could anyone miss the obvious communism reference in Megatron Origin? (Guaranteed it's a loose, twisted, villifying, Western-lensed, not-very-good reference, but point is that it's OBVIOUS and unmistakably RECOGNIZABLE.) Workers' revolt ring a bell? It's the first issue in the collection volumes so even if people run out of patience without finishing anything they should have been able to at least get through that before, y'know, making unfounded claims about canon. And the stuff I'm talking about should've been evident in the first chapter. Were the miners upset because they were forced to work in the mines? No, they were upset because the government was closing the mines and laying them off and replacing them with automation; they were upset because soon there would be no mines left for them to work and then they would starve.

'Slavery is forced labour' yeah but uh that's only one facet of it. Forced labour because of livelihood: 'I have to work here b/c it's the only job that's available to me and I have no means of obtaining the skills/licence/opportunity for a different job or bettering my circumstances, if I quit I'll have no income/food/shelter and starve out on the streets' is fundamentally different from forced labour due to state institution of ownership over people: 'I have to work here because I am the private property of the facility owner and am forbidden by law to leave or quit.'

Does anyone like, not see the difference between the two scenarios? Only the latter would be slavery since it has the defining characteristics of 1. legalization of the ownership of people and 2. restriction of liberty. In concurrence. The first scenario's just describing what every fucking exploited worker/peasant/wage-earning lowclass commoner in the world looks like, it's called proletarianism. It's a completely different class category in a completely different social structure that's in no way interchangeable or confusable with slavery unless you want to say that communist revolutions were done by slaves and every wage worker in the industrial revolution was a slave. why not go back further while at it and serfdom can be slavery feudalism is slavery indentureship corvee conscription are all slavery lmao way to rewrite history.

For the people who's only read MTMTE and nothing else there's even a specific scene in there that says this 🔽

This is talking about Rewind. The text literally gives us what used to be the equivalent in Cybertronian society and it's clearly not Megatron's class. And why was Rewind's class equated to slaves? Because they were considered disposable tools, not sentient people. The Ambus Test helped them get rights by proving their sentience as people, which further proves that they don't keep sentient people as slaves.

If it's TFP then did anyone notice that Megatron started as a miner but met Optimus as a gladiator? If he was so absolutely forced to work in the mines as a slave then how was he allowed to leave?

This is how Covenant of Primus describes Megatron going to work in the mines. It's "the only opening available to him". It doesn't say that he's assigned a master at birth and was legally obligated to go work in that opening on pain of punishment. Just implies that he'd be out of a job and income and would probably starve if he didn't. There's still an illusion of choice, of free will.

The closest thing Aligned had to slavery was the Quintession occupation era but the Covenant also spent a whole section talking about how it started out as a mutually beneficial relationship with the Quintessions presenting themselves as the more advanced race and Cybertronians eagerly accepting them as 'masters' (honourific term, not literal) in a pseudo colonizer-who-civilized-the-indigenous-barbarians-and-used-them-for-cheap-labour dynamic which got more and more exploitational as time went on until the Cybertronians had enough and drove them off. But even during the peak of occupation the Quintessions were still careful to give Cybertron the pretense of sovereignty. It was the Quintessions who introduced them to the electoral system and inaugurated the office of the Prime in the first place. The illusion of free will and equality was always there, despite everyone knowing otherwise.

Exodus is extremely clear in describing Cybertron as a birth-defined caste system with rigid hierarchy and little mobility. So that's exactly what it is. a caste system. Not a slave society. There's a reason they're different words, they're different concepts! I don't get why people would feel the need to replace one with the other, does slavery sound better? edgier? Is the purpose for making Megatron an ex-slave to have his backstory sound more tragic? to induce more sympathy? idc people are free to headcanon what they want but at least have the decency to refrain from framing it as canon and bashing other characters with it? Stuff like 'oh Optimus was so selfish/naive/entitled/stupid/insensitive/traitorous/opportunist/privileged to accept the prime title in front of Megatron the poor ex-slave' nevermind that Megatron had repeatedly expressed a desire for taking power through whatever cruel means necessary and was perfectly eager to become prime when he thought he was the one going to be chosen? Nevermind that the council offered up a chance for implementing all the social changes they wanted through legal means with the least amount of bloodshed and Megatron threw it all away b/c he didn't get to be in charge, by committing murder on the spot? Nevermind that 'Megatron the poor ex-slave' is a massive bigoted racist who looks down on Optimus' job and is disgusted by minicons and combiners and insecticons as well as being a devout believer of 'survival of the fittest and the rest don't deserve to live' -type social darwinism and a domestic terrorist happy to blow up factories full of his own caste members and places full of innocent people? Nevermind that Megatron and Optimus already had a deep rift between them because of Megatron betraying Optimus' trust by lying about his role in the bombings and Optimus already recognizing that their methods were never going to match up b/c of Megatron's disregard of innocent life and Megatron never really trusting Optimus anyway? As if making Megatron a slave somehow excuses all of that and pins all the blame on Optimus.