#i usually tag the ship as minimegs on this blog

[transingthoseformers]

An evil shattered glass Megatron and Ultra Magnus fic is in the works

So far, it's not looking pretty for Megatron

[decepti-thots]

Pardon me, but after reading though your blog, could you go into detail about why you hate the megamins/megamags pairing (megatron x minimus/magnus). No judgement from me. I think you may have a post about that, but I can't seem to find it. I love reading your analyses.

I do think back in… I think late 2021 I wrote a little about why it's my nOTP, but I doubt I tagged it (good manners, y'know), so sure, I'll talk a little about it for you, anon; thank you for asking. Let me just cut it so the minimegs likers can go about their day happily (hi friends <3), haha. And thank you for the kind words!

First off: I consider this a functionally canon ship, which influences my feelings on it a lot. It's something I'd describe as subtextual but largely unambiguous; it never explicitly gets quote-unquote "confirmed", but I think that to assume it's not present in the text in some form requires a degree of deliberately reading against the grain, tbh. It's unresolved, inexplicit and largely peripheral compared to e.g. CDRW, but it's hard to deny its obvious canonicity IMO. If I can point to Chromedome/Prowl as being obviously present despite the technical lack of confirmation, it'd be wildly inconsistent to claim otherwise for Magnus/Megatron, I think.

This matters for my purposes because I really dislike the way it manifests in the comic and what it narratively does. I've usually avoided talking about my ambivalent feelings about the execution of MTMTE Megatron's arc on this blog because of historical unpleasantness for both me and several close friends, but I've probably discussed it enough by now longtime readers (or backreaders) of my blog have inferred. You know, the ambivalence. Haha. In itself.

I think a lot of the Megatron/Magnus dynamic represents a kind of reliance on narrative shortcuts to try and force reader engagement with the Megatron arc Roberts is writing that, unfortunately, came to exemplify for me the formal shortcomings of that arc, and the more… not just "this didn't work" elements but actively "this is annoying now" stuff. When we first see them interact in MTMTE very early on post-Dark Cybertron, it's actually a set-up I find really interesting. I think theoretically at that point, they're very very obvious characters to put together, because Magnus is a character who is unusual in that he really does feel like someone it makes sense to have be scrupulously fair to Megatron despite the latter's actions and his own personal grudges. When you have Magnus argue "technicalities" during his trial because shut up, the law is the law and nobody is excluded from a good legal defense, he's the kind of character who you can really believe thinks like that on the Autobot side. At the same time, he's someone whose scrupulosity also means he's really unable to reconcile what Megatron has done- there's that early POV shot of his little HUD where he puts notes in about who he's looking at through the armour that shows he has one for Megatron reminding him of what terrible things he's done, and the early "Lost Light insider" insert where it's shown people on the ship have seen Magnus yelling at Megatron because of how uncomfortable he is with Megatron being co-captain. This sets up a potential interesting dynamic where Megatron in MTMTE has all these things he's done and represents that Magnus is intractably morally opposed to but all these little personal traits day-to-day he likes which could have been a very interesting contrast to explore as a conflict.

…but it's not a conflict that gets played out. We jump, quite quickly, to "Megatron and Magnus are the only two kinda uptight rule-likers who understand each other among all the chaos", with only perfunctory gestures at the core and very large moral quandry this ought to present. The entire middle section of this conflict is implied but never shown, and it's something the reader is expected to just sort of gloss over as probably existing in theory but there's no room to show it. That's not even quite it actually. It's almost like a timeskip, where it acts like it happened but there's no room for it TO have happened, and we never see it happening; suddenly, they're just in this ambiguously has-feelings-for-the-other space where the audience understands the alluded-to conflict underpins what makes the tension theoretically interesting but it's never actually shown. It's shorthand we never see, and it drives me nuts because it's not something you can get away with reducing to shorthand with how incredibly central that tension actually is to the attempt to convey Megatron's arc convincingly.

What bugs me about this more is how this exists, IMO, as a shorthand for the broader issue of defensiveness about the fact that many people were not onboard with Megatron-as-captain in a straightforward way. There are characters in MTMTE that are like… let's use Rodimus as an example. He's beloved by many and disliked by many others, because he's an engaging, complicated, abrasive, sympathetic but asshole character who fucks up royally in ways that go way beyond the flaws of many protagonists in comparable series. What makes Rodimus work is that it understands that for every person who loves him (hi) in all his abrasive glory, there will be readers who simply don't, because he is abrasive… and so it makes the story interesting even if you do not like him because of his glaring flaws. It's not interested in "convincing" the people who dislike him, because it is confident enough to deliver a story where if you don't like Rodimus, the narrative will still give you stuff to engage with. Same with Whirl, actually. Whirl is terrible and morally difficult, and if you never quite get on board with his brand of assholery, you still find something to enjoy in how the narrative presents him, so it never feels like it needs to "fix" people who are not quite onboard.

Megatron feels like a character the narrative quickly becomes defensive about occupying a similar role, IMO. It can't quite abide the idea some people will just never be cool with his redemption arc and offer that same ambivalence in a way that allows the story to accomodate such divisiveness. It becomes very reactive to on-the-go fan criticism in a way that ultimately undermines it far more than any inherent conceptual flaw in the idea, because it comes to devote more and more effort to like, course correcting rather than playing in that space. To bring this back to the issue of shipping, Magnus becomes a kind of mouthpiece for this, where his sudden shift to "we went through all the implied difficult conflict and now this Objectively Moral character is on board" becomes a way to be didactic; two really obvious examples for me are the on-the-nose bit in the second Functionist Universe arc where Minimus turns to the camera like Well I Don't Think He'd Betray Us, and the really bad post-FU bit where his exaggerated description of Megatron's assumed betrayal as a kind of reactionary thing Rodimus exploits is blatant commentary on people who were not a fan of that arc. It goes from a potentially interesting conflict to a way the comic leans on preexisting reader opinions on other characters to hammer home there is One Right Way to feel about a contentious element of the comic that I simply can't enjoy, and which especially serves to reduce Magnus' character to a mouthpiece for someone else's arc. I would hate it even if it were in service of my actual ships, frankly! If the comic had done that with him for Rodimus, I'd go from OTP-ing rodimags to resenting it in a heartbeat. I just find it poor writing, and with so little in the back half of the comic to do once his original arc is concluded in "series one", it comes to dominate Magnus' arc in a way I so dislike it makes me unable to even try to play with the Magnus/Megatron dynamic in fandom.

The thing is, the degree to which this becomes baked into the moment-to-moment canon makes it difficult for me to engage with it outside the textual elements I find frustrating. If it was less canon, I could play with it in ways that turned it into a more interesting transformative fandom thing, but the presence of it in the canon as a driving part of that arc narrows my ability to do so without feeling like I'm disregarding the text, something I do not enjoy in fandom spaces. It becomes too central to ignore, and since I dislike what it does and represents in the canon, I can't enjoy it. (By contrast, the comic's inability to actually zero in on a real definitive Megatron-Rodimus dynamic paradoxically means that in fanwork, I really enjoy playing with the space that failure leaves, and I have a lot of fun filling in the gaps that failures in the writing leaves me to work with.)

…All this is admittedly a little compounded by a bias due to the fact that the broader fandom for Magnus/Megatron was, historically, very obnoxious. From the fact people in the fandom were virulently awful to people who did not like this plotline (multiple friends of mine were- and in one case, still are years later- directly harrassed due to this at points) to the fact that it's been presented as Morally Superior to other ships by people in the fandom starting shipping wank, the fanwork culture around the ship has only exaggerated this impression to the point I just can't engage with it without feeling a little rasp of annoyance. (And also there's the issue of Megatron/Magnus stuff often having some of THE worst takes on the already fraught issue of Magnus' OCD in my opinion, but that's another post, probably, lmao. Which also involves the role Rodimus plays there, haha. It's not just my personal shipping bias, it's an issue much more broadly, including in the canon. Alas.)

What it boils down to is this: the writing for these two in canon is some of the laziest in canon, to me, and I find it impossible to engage with them outside the very present canon material, so I just can't enjoy it. I can actually do a lot with the various bits of Megatron's arc I find lacking with OTHER characters whose interactions with him are less textually clear. Rodimus? Oh, yeah. Loads of room there, just to name an obvious example. It's totally workable, especially as someone who prefers to react to canon I find unsatisfactory with "how can I make this interesting to me". But the Megatron-Magnus stuff is too… present. I cannot find the wiggle room. And so I really dislike it, and tbh, it's a shame to me that nowadays almost all of the little MTMTE Magnus character work discussed is in the context of these two, because both characters are better served IMO by exploring their arcs separately and with other characters.

tl;dr: if it was fanon I would feel able to expand on it in a way that let me make it more than the issues that exist in canon. but as it is, i find canon so restrictive i struggle, so i can't even enjoy it in fanon, especially since because of how this stuff works by default of course the fans of the basically-canon ship are building off the canon i am so dissatisfied with; there's just nothing for me there when of course the people who like the canon ship like that canon. so. anyway s/o to all my minimegs friends, of which i have a few, you all won and i love you.