#at least in the main timeline (excluding mtmte and ll)

[icypolargirl78]

can't reply to your comment to me, but yeah, i agree.

gonna be entirely honest. it's been a while since i last touched that part of idw (though i'm slowly working my way through a re read of it) so i completely forgot that the issue is call "all hail optimus" lmao. but yeah that does make it a little better in retrospect.

i actually find a lot of post phase 1 optimus to be really interesting because he slowly kind of spirals into become exactly like phase 1 megatron. at least in some ways. he treats his soldiers terribly, colonizes a planet that he was originally on decently good terms with (or as decent terms as one can be considering all that happens in phase 1), and his blackmailing of soundwave is probably one of my favourite plot points.

i really enjoy idw1 optimus because he struggles through the hero worship that zeta prime set him up for. the parts of the story where he realises that the title that he holds, the title of prime, is one rife with corruption and that he's carrying on a legacy of murders and other colonisers.

i really liked that he went back to being just orion pax after phase 1 ended and all the times that characters called him optimus and he corrected them was nice. it really did feel like he was trying to distance himself from the primacy.

of course dark cybertron took a hard left turn considering how orion chooses to go back to the title of prime after his battle with nova but i do appreciate that barber took the time to actually write optimus as someone with issues. he's a war time leader and in peace, even peace with violence, he struggles and does a really shitty job of actually trying to be the good guy that he claims to be to everyone around him.

part of me is just kind of salty that optimus dies a hero in idw1. because as much as barber does a good job of making optimus just the worst, he still gets to have that self sacrifice scene at the end and the knowledge of that kind of taints any negativity that the story views op through before. because i know on re-reads that optimus is just going to have the scene where he sacrifices himself to save the universe and everyone else is going to go back to worshiping him as a hero, which i think undermines the whole point of showing that he's a terrible leader in peace time.

of course that whole situation really only happens because of the rampant crossovers that happen in the series so who knows if that's what the writers originally intended for him to go through.

Don't make a post about how IDW Optimus is the Optimus the fandom always asks for, don't make a compilation of all the times he fits the exact personality traits/themes that people write about in fanon, don't talk about how most of the things the fandom wants from a complex Optimus are canon with IDW Optimus, don't make a list of all the ways IDW OP's story addresses the fandom's most common complaints about OP being boring or over-idolized, don't try to convince people that instead of daydreaming and making AUs and headcanons of a more problematic/deep Optimus they could read IDW and have a canon, in the flesh version of Optimus that's literally CANON with art and shit telling a story of what they thought was just headcanon/theories/alternate interpretations, don't--