#and idw op erasure is just erasing his existence completely basically

[lord-squiggletits]

It’s always very weird to me how much hate IDW OP gets in comparison to characters that are as bad or worse. Like, if hate for IDW OP was just “he’s an asshole and does xyz things,” I would get that, but the vast majority of the hate I see for him is just calling him an asshole with no particular explanation as to why. More puzzlingly, I see “IDW OP is an asshole” coming from the mouths of people who simultaneously stan characters like Pr/owl (also a cop, committed war crimes, constantly manipulates and uses people) and Mega/tron (genocidal dictator, racist against organics, generally violent and fucked up) so like???

It doesn’t seem like the problem is that IDW OP is an asshole, it seems to me like the problem is very specifically that it’s Optimus. For some reason people are just absolutely allergic to the idea of Optimus being morally gray to match a morally gray continuity. Somehow Optimus and Optimus alone is a horrible asshole who doesn’t ever deserve to be acknowledged even though the same people have no problems liking characters from the same comics who are as bad or worse? And it’s quite disappointing because it seems like in that case, it’s less about IDW OP being an asshole and more about the fact that people haven’t actually read the story and don’t care about the context/reasoning for IDW OP’s actions.

That or they just want every Optimus to be a happy silly dad or a depressed uwu dad (but only depressed in a cute and palatable way, never depressed in a way that leads to lashing out and bad decisions and social isolation), so they hate IDW OP for not being the cardboard cutout they want him to be. Instead of just... reading the OP that’s on the page and judging him based on the standards of IDW1 and the type of story IDW1 is.