#bc brainstorm's attempt to fix it is so at right angles to a reasonable response and ALSO so intensely motivated by care

[decepti-thots]

so as a natural consequence of working on "sometimes the sun shines" ch2 i have been re-reading a lot of the CD/RW stuff from both pre- and immediately-post Overlord to try and get a refresher on both characters, and especially Chromedome because the next chapter is from his PoV.

and it's really reiterated to me that I think CD has a very odd character arc compared to almost all full-fledged arcs in the comic, and honestly compared to a lot of similar serialized narratives. not in a bad way, I really like CD's canon arc and it fascinates me! but looking it over has made it a lot clearer to me why i think CD is a character a lot of people in fandom have, over the years, understandably found slippery and difficult and often very hard to latch onto as "relatable".

prior to Rewind's death during the Overlord incident, those two characters function as a unit on a narrative level really strongly. i've described them before as being almost like satellite characters for each other at the same time, and that's absolutely true IMO- but i actually think that CD has this going on even more than Rewind does.

on an out of universe/narrative level even things that don't initially seem to include Rewind as a motivating factor for CD, like say The Overlord Thing TM, are still very much there because it puts those two characters into direct conflict. like, CD himself is not motivated to do that because of Rewind, but the goal of the comic in making him involved is very much to set up a scenario where CD is indirectly but very meaningfully culpable for Rewind's eventual death at Overlord's hands.

(this post is about CD rather than Rewind but the opposite is definitely mostly true here as well for him: the entire "lost conjunx" subplot is there as a plot device to drive the CDRW conflict, and Rewind mostly gets a nod as the one a little less purely defined by this dynamic because he does one really big thing that isn't related to CD when he chooses to shoot Megatron in Elegant Chaos.)

none of this is a criticism to be clear, this is an absolutely valid way to develop the characters, but almost every other major character has some combination of: a) multiple characters they interact with to develop, b) ways they develop that are mostly driven by themselves as individuals rather than in communication with others, and/or c) they uh, basically just don't get an arc so it doesn't apply.

the point where this becomes sort of weird for how this works for CD's arc as a whole is, in fact, the part where Rewind dies. he dies! he stays dead for kind of a long time. to me when I read it back in trades it never feels like it's all that long, but actually, Rewind dies in issue #15 and doesn't come back via the Rewind 2.0 thing til issue #33. 17 issues in a serialized comic is fully a year and a half in the format it was originally intended for, and it's a large chunk of pagetime where CD is now existing as an independent character without a foil like we see up to that point (and, for that matter, after Rewind is "back").

now, one way the comic deals with this is sort of just to push CD more into the background following to resolution of that arc for a while, which is par for the course for MTMTE and especially early MTMTE; as an ensemble piece it will often dedicate some focus to a character for a bit, give them a small narrative resolution, let them fade into the BG for a bit, and then cycle them back out later if need be. so this doesn't stand out too much as egregiously weird once Rewind is gone.

but CD is hardly gone completely, and the narrative is still following him and how Rewind's death changes him in the following issues and storylines. it checks in on him pretty regularly, and of course by the time we get to the Slaughterhouse arc it ramps this up as a kind of foreshadowing to the fact we're getting Rewind back (well. we're getting a new Rewind, anyway).

there's a really obvious narrative arc a reader is likely to predict as set up by Rewind's final message, and CD's decision following his viewing of it to, for the first time, not address every instance of grief in his life with ill advised mnemosurgery. namely, that This Is An Arc About Moving On, and any future CD stuff will be about that.

which is not at all what this stage in CD's arc turns out to be in the leadup to Rewind's eventual return! not even a little bit! CD canonically completely backslides into a horrendous depression to where he's basically non-functional and everyone is really worried about him. to the point where this will later explicitly be Brainstorm's motivation for changing his plan in Elegant Chaos from "get Quark out alive" to "stop the entire war before it happens". CD learns absolutely no lessons about moving on in this part of his arc, he just barely manages to hang on long enough that he makes it through to where Slaughterhouse happens.

far from the "this is an arc about moving on from grief etc" arc that I think a lot of readers would expect from the setup and standard narrative tropes initially deployed following Rewind's death, this is where CD is at when we get to that arc:

CD's arc is one that is not at all a linear progression about moving forward and getting "better". it seems that way initially when CD makes the very important decision not to use his needles on himself after speaking to Brainstorm, but by the time we get to Slaughterhouse, it becomes very apparent his arc is one that involves significant backsliding.

i'm reluctant to guess at how much of this is deliberate on the part of the writer, and how much is the natural outgrowth of Roberts always knowing that this story included Rewind coming back in some fashion. if you know the arc is going to be picked up with Rewind later down the line, the shape of your plans will inevitably look different, since knowingly waiting to pick that up will wind up folded into how you structure that arc if you plan it in advance.

but it's kind of an unpleasant thing to wade through, in the sense that it's very emotionally uncomfortable to witness a character just... not get "better" like you a) want them to and b) have kind of been trained as a reader to expect from a story like this. it's really not very conventionally satisfying, and while it never gets too bleak, especially since Rewind2 happens directly following this very obvious low point, it brings some of CD's most difficult character traits into sharp relief. namely, that he is a character who struggles to grow under his own steam. it's not very satisfying to see someone basically be handed the "you need to be able to live and improve for yourself" lesson and under horrible circumstances, prove to not yet be able to actually take that onboard.

I always think it's notable that there's a line in Slaughterhouse which puts the Rewind of the other LL on a similar footing at this point too:

the difference for the readers, of course, is that we sit with this mindset with Rewind for a few panels, rather than the much longer period we've seen it impact CD for at this stage.

anyway. I think this backwards momentum is a part of what can make CD feel like a difficult character to get a clear hold on compared to a lot of others in the cast, because trying to track his arc can be trickier. and also because while it's a very realistic depiction of depression, it can be kind of hard to get a handle on when trying to translate that into a more conventional set of narrative storytelling tools. while it's true that most conventional narrative arcs have a "low point" well into the story, they're usually things that are reflected externally rather than by the character like, gradually backsliding into chronic depression.