#but how many people care about IDW OP for who he actually is? hardly any

[lord-squiggletits]

It kinda sucks how Optimus Prime is a character who people (in real life) expect to be so Indubitably Good All The Time that they immediately shut down and refuse to acknowledge him whenever he does bad things or fucks up. Like I don't think I've seen any other character in this fandom get the same instantly negative reaction/never talk about him ever treatment that IDW Optimus gets.

Like, it's either him being a cop or the annexation of Earth. But instead of actually engaging with the story and going "so how does being a cop affect the way he treats and is treated by others" or "what led Optimus to annex Earth and how is this a reflection of his ultimately heroic ideal to treat organics as equal to Cybertronians despite the historical racism of his species"

people just instantly shut down and go "oh he's an asshole, he's stupid, he's not my Optimus, he's a bastard, he's edgy" etc etc and refuse to even like fuckin talk about him

It's so incredibly childish lmao especially when the IDW1 continuity in particular is already rife with characters who are also assholes that do stupid/regrettable things but people have no problems talking about/analyzing their stories.

My kingdom for a fandom that's willing to talk about IDW Optimus without immediately shutting down and just going "he's bad he's a bastard he sucks"

[agent-chugway]

It really demonstrates such an appalling lack of media comprehension that a significant number of people feel this way about IDW Optimus. (In other words, OP is 1000% correct.)

IDW Optimus isn't an archetype, he's a person. That's the general IDW approach to all the characters. People are complicated and real life is complicated--it's not like trying to play the good or evil route in a video game where you get instant feedback about your choices or they're clearly color-coded for you (+5 good person points!). There are also many things in life that are not thoroughly good or thoroughly evil, because nuance exists.

More recently, a lot of people who engage with media have developed this bizarre reactive black-and-white thinking that doesn't mesh with stories or characters that go beyond simplistic ideas and values. This is the central fallacy behind anti-shipping and discussions of "problematic" media: the inclusion of an element in a story doesn't equal the endorsement of that element.

People who create stories do so for a number of reasons, including grappling with and exploring personal or societal issues. This has always been the case and isn't new. In order to achieve this, it's necessary to include those issues, otherwise it's impossible to examine them in any way.

The narrative tells us that Optimus was a cop. The narrative also tells us that Optimus is flawed, has made mistakes, has even done some fairly questionable or outright bad things. You need to consider the whole picture in order to understand what a story is actually telling you. The message of Optimus being a cop isn't "cops are good, actually," the message is that the world contains more nuance, and it's important to view and interact with other people with that understanding. IDW also very clearly develops the theme of no person being inherently good or inherently evil. Autobots can do terrible things. Decepticons can be caring and helpful. Megatron can examine his choices and work to be a better person. Pre-war, Ratchet continues to work for the government and the Senate even after knowing what happened to Nominus, even after understanding the corruption that exists. Drift did really horrible things as Deadlock that he may never be able to atone for. And yeah, Optimus used to be a cop, and it's hardly the only thing he's done that we might be uneasy with.

In life, you don't get to know beforehand whether your choices or actions are correct. There's no indicator hovering in the air to show you which option is morally pure. You only get to make that determination in hindsight, and even then it might not be so clear-cut. People move through life doing their best and trying to make the best decisions they can that align with their values. Those values--and the decisions that are available to them--are influenced heavily by many circumstances and societal factors over which they have no control.

I am begging people to learn how to think about what characters and stories are trying to tell us. Story elements don't exist on their own in a vacuum. The way we're meant to understand them is encoded in the rest of the story, and you can't just pull out a single element to consider isolated from all context. IDW Optimus being a cop is actually a really good feature of the story and is in keeping with the type of person he is shown to be throughout his life. Rather than telling us what we should think about cops, it tells us what we should think about Optimus himself.

Thinking about IDW Optimus again and the fandom's aversion to even acknowledging he exists bc he's a cop or whatever and like. Most of the time people literally just replace him in fic with some white bread knockoff archivist/librarian, not even bothering to keep in IDW OP's personality (which just bolsters my theory that the problem isn't him being a cop the problem is that he's too multifaceted but I digress).

And it's annoying because you could totally write IDW Optimus as not a cop while still keeping his canon personality. You just have to realize that the reason IDW OP became a cop in the first place is because his formative experiences when he was young shaped him to basically have two priorities: 1. To help people and 2. To do it by being on the ground actively doing something about the bad things happening to people.

IDW OP would not be a fucking librarian or archivist because even though those are noble pursuits that can help people and change the world, and Optimus is educated/smart enough for the profession, he wouldn't be satisfied just teaching people or spreading information about activism or social-historical studies or whatever. He's a mech of action: he needs to be doing things right now, in front of him, to people he sees/interacts with in his own eyes, improving society with concrete actions rather than indirect action or abstract inspiration.

So basically the alternate job ideas I can think of for IDW Optimus are something like being a firefighter (or any first responder really) or even whatever the equivalent would be to international charity organizations, those ones that send volunteers across the world to do stuff like build housing/infrastructure or distribute food or whatnot. I mean I can't imagine that the equivalents to these things would be exactly the same in IDW Cybertron, so you'd have to get a little creative with it, but these are just some ideas of jobs that would fit IDW Optimus' personality while still filling the niche of "not a cop" for people who are just that opposed to it.

Though I think the revulsion against coptimus is annoying in general tbh because IDW is already a continuity that rejects the idea of easily defined good/evil people or groups. It feels like people really want Optimus to be a good person in a very sanitized and academically approved way, so he has to be nice and squeaky clean but also like, a perfect leftist who knows theory and holds the most progressive opinions on every single issue....

There is no room for the idea that good people join bad institutions, there's no room for the idea that the reason people think cops are good guys who help people is bc of the government propaganda everything is saturated with. Hell there's even later issues of the Optimus Prime series by John Barber where Optimus like, MULTIPLE FUCKING TIMES, is shown in flashbacks grappling with the fact that he as a cop/Zeta's regime that he works for might not actually be improving society like they say they are, and dealing with the fact that he feels more like a lesser evil compared to the Decepticons (perhaps not "lesser" at all).

It's like there's this idea in fandom of like, fictional media and opinions on media having to strictly adhere to progressive ideals at all times. So people just go "cops bad, this character is a cop, therefore they suck" without being willing to engage with the idea of like. IDW OP is born wanting to fight injustice and protect people -> a good way to protect people is to fight the people who are hurting them and committing crimes -> surely following the law is a reliable moral code to guide him in this -> becomes a cop because he's been indoctrinated into a society (much like our own) where he was told that the state/the law exist to protect the people and being a cop means you get to fight bad guys that hurt people. There's really so many interesting concepts there that could be (and CANONICALLY IS) explored about how good, well-intentioned people can be led to harmful actions simply because they have been fed the idea that the things they're doing are good/helpful/noble. Which is especially important for a character like Optimus, I think, who has a cultural icon status as The Irrefutable and Perfect Good, so it's really important actually to use IDW Optimus as an example of how even the most noble people you know have held problematic beliefs or done bad things at some point in their life. You know, because no one is born perfect and ideologically pure, and in fact society is constructed in exactly a manner to make people drink the kool-aid and believe that the systems designed to hurt them/others are just a normal, if flawed, society.

I mean the writing in IDW literally has Optimus deal directly and indirectly with the harm he's done as a cop and how people don't/didn't trust him because of that. I don't know what the fuck else this fandom wants if the source material literally saying "OP realizes that cops suck and he hurt people and earned their disdain by doing the things he did" doesn't stop them from going EW cop bastard sucks and is the worst Optimus. Like the narrative barely stops short of outright saying ACAB and Optimus himself would agree with this sentiment.

At that point, the collective fandom beef with IDW OP isn't because he's a cop and the narrative didn't do enough to condemn that. The problem is literally just that people don't read and don't care

TLDR: Consider the fact that good people can do bad things sometimes especially when living from birth in a corrupt society that thoroughly disguises its vices/oppressive structures as completely normal parts of existence