#if cybertron is going to be fucking BLOWN UP and the only people
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lord-squiggletits · 2 years ago
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Read GI Joe first strike (I skipped most of the human parts again lmao) and I find myself yet again disagreeing with Barber’s attempts to deconstruct Optimus lol.
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aggressively-crying · 2 years ago
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Wasp is going up against IDW Whirl! Not Cyberverse. BIG BIG difference. Your argument is confusing because half way I thew it I thought you where saying Wasp had something worse then being dismantled. I waited for you to say what Wasp had done to him that is worse then Whirl getting dismantled, having the government chop his hands off because they didn't like him going against his function, suffering depression because everyone is trying to kill him.
Sooooo..... what did Wasp have done to him???? because you did a dang good job about convincing me that Whirl is the superior poor mew mew because he gets blown up, dismantled, and everyone just generally hates Whirl.
1. I realized after posting that they specified idw rather than whirl in general. My reblog has since been edited, my apologies for misleading.
2. I think you're taking this a mite bit too seriously. The point of the contest is not about who has endured greater pain, but who is more pathetic about it. A waterlogged cat is not necessarily going through torture or even pain, but they just look so fucking pathetic about it that you can't help but feel your heart bleed for them.
Whirl, from what I have seen, is less of a sad, pathetic little creature and more like a cool uncle that's been to jail 6 times and desperately needs therapy. While has been through a lot, the difference is how he carries the suffering. Like. Being depressed and having no friends does not make one pathetic. Whirl is suffering, yes, and needs help, but he doesn't carry himself like a sad little limp pasta noodle and his tolerance for misery seems much higher than wasp's. He's more like a pissed off, wounded wolf in that he retains being a badass despite how much pain he is very clearly in and how much help he clearly needs. He gives off vibes of anger and suffering, not weakness and general malcontent.
Waspinator acts like he'd cry if he closed a door a little too loud. He's the kinda guy that would say "aheem heem whimper" out loud. The entire basis of his character is having cartoonishly shitty luck. "I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning I break my legs, and every afternoon I break my arms. At night, I like awake until my heart attacks put me to sleep" tier misery. The universe itself hates him. Every single episode he's in has him get scrapped in some fashion. He's like if the eagle got creative with tearing out Prometheus's liver every day. He is well aware of how hard he in particular is the target of constant injury and pain and he laments it at every opportunity. And on the somewhat heavier side, wasp has no friends either. Hes in the middle of a war on an unfamiliar planet with the most cartoonishly evil and despotic incarnation of Megatron Hasbro has cranked out. He gets sent out alone into battle to die by a boss who does not give a shit about him so many times but primus won't let him die <3 All he can do is mistakenly put his trust into teammates that are perfectly willing to use him as a meat shield. The only two people that were ever kind of nice to him comparatively got melted alive in a pit of lava and slowly replaced with increasingly murderous, sadistic freaks that were equally increasingly willing to tear him apart for fun. He is a sad, wet little freak of a man who has been possessed, shot, crushed, cubed, betrayed, brain damaged, electrocuted, thrown through a wall, screamed at, kicked in the dick, shredded, blown up, dismembered, flattened, decapitated, beaten, burned, buried and more, and each and every time, he has to drag himself back to the repair chamber with whatever limbs are still attached to him (if any) knowing fully well he'll have to do it all again tomorrow and nobody will care enough to ask if he's okay. Waspinator gets so few wins he actively keeps count of the shots he actually lands.
To top it off, wasp actually gets the exact same treatment as whirl in terms of nonconsensual frame adjustments. After flying back to Cybertron from Earth with nothing but his weak lil bug wings (which took millions of years), the second he got back, Megatron ripped his spark out of his shell and used it to power a new mech altogether, which wasp has no say in. He was fully conscious in the new con he was powering, but had zero influence on his actions.
Like. Wasp was fucked from day one and fucked til the end and he bumbled his way through life for the whole series. He went through none of this with a trace of grit nor grace. Waspinator is the definition of cringefail. He's a funny little guy that got fucked over repeatedly because his misery amuses the masses. He's like a plushie you pour milk on and throw at the wall as hard as you possibly can. He's the universe's stress all. Just a sad, sad little gremlin who is somehow still standing and considers that a curse.
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storm-and-starlight · 14 days ago
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eh fuck it I'm bored and I want to share so it's ghostfic dream sequences time
the old dreams are back with a vengeance: Rodion winters and the smoke on the summer winds that curled briskly away from the city and down into the Dead End -- the torches that blazed on the heights of the great arena in Tarn, that first night he watched them burn -- the great smelting pits of Kaon that roared night and day until Megatron broke the furnaces and shattered the crucibles and spilled molten metal in a river to seal the gates of the city -- and in the middle of the night he dreams of turning to look down the long narrow length of the bunkroom, full of razor edged light, to where the star drifts silently in front of the single slitted window, a lost light looking out at the place it should call home.
---
He dreams, again, of fire.
He dreams of fire, not torches or smelting pits but great pillars of white-hot flame, the kind that come from city-killers, the great plasma charges that they'd pack into basements and tunnels and underlayers and set alight to leave the world above a molten ruin, back when there were still cities left to burn and people left to care about their burning. He dreams of churning clouds of corrosive smoke, and of roaring torrents washing down the streets as underground fuel lines spark and catch like fuses, and of the lapping flames left in their wake, spilling out of empty windows and hollow doors and over the edge of the rooftop perch he's standing on to lick at his feet until he can feel the paint start to blister and peel.
Everything is burning, sending out a wash of heat so strong he can feel his internals starting to soften and melt, every breath a scream of superheated air and choking soot through fans that are already starting to break apart. There's a rumble as new charges go off, walls of white fire unfolding and obscuring the distant view of falling spires, scattering molten cinders across the front of his armor until the flares die down again. Through the rising haze he sees a flier, caught in a moment between walls of flame, with both engines blown out and the trailing edge of his wings alight, plummeting back down into the smelting pit.
With a scream that he can hear even over the roar of the blaze from all the way across the city, a rusted spire tips, and groans, and topples, sending up a plume of sparks that almost makes it look like Cybertron's stars have broken through the atmosphere, bright against the smoke-dark sky.
"It was beautiful," he says, with a voice that isn't his own, and turns to face--
--face the stranger -- the ghost -- the star, standing on the bare edge of the platform, hands clenched into fists and spoiler stretched out like it really is a pair of wings, looking as though he's only an ill-timed gust away from plummeting down into the maelstrom.
"Nyon will be--" he says again, vocalizer crackling as circuits melt, and the stranger flinches.
"Don't."
"I won't forget what you've done."
"I said don't," the stranger snaps, looking up, and the burn is reflected on his face and in his face, blazing through him, a hollowness. "Just-- just don't."
The fire washes up again, world-ending.
---
He dreams of the war, when he finally dreams: the last battle, the one that got him sent away.
The planet itself had been about as useless as planets get -- silicate rock over a long-cold metallic core, buried mechanomiles deep in methane ice with the bare spikes of old volcanic mountains stabbing up through it, covered in precarious cornices of snow. He dreams of the cold, strong enough to turn even durasteel brittle and cracking, and he dreams of the frozen needles that lanced through narrow seams and straight down into his internals, and he dreams of the familiar weight of a rifle in his hands with the skidding slide of the black rock scree underneath his feet as he squints through the whiteout for any sign of movement, core temp dropping and fingertips burning and going numb as ice crystals grow through the circuits.
He dreams of the pain, half his armor gone and the rest about to shatter, and of the triumphant roar echoing up and off the peak behind him, and of the sudden red-gold fire through the blizzard -- and of the shot, taken blind through the storm -- and loud enough to hear even over the world-ending roar of a hundred tons of ice knocked loose and racing through the valley comes Megatron's fury: "Deadlock--"
---
He dreams of this: of an alien world, and rain, and the cold slide of it over scorched finials -- he dreams of the ache of pulled cables and the strange empty lightness on his back where a rifle should be, and of tipping his head to the sky to let soot-filled water run over his faceplates and down through the cracks in his armor; and he dreams of the taste of smoke and the press of sunlight to his shoulder as the horizon smolders, and he dreams of this: of the winds that blew down from the mountains at the turn of the year to whistle through narrow streets and tug at shutters and send scattered bits of trash skidding over the stone, and of leaning against the wall by the boarded-up gaps and breathing something that wasn't smoke, for once.
---
He dreams of this: of the sticky residue of incendiary putty on his fingertips, tacky on the detonator switch, and the roar of flames that reach higher than the starscrapers, and when he wakes to the shift buzzer the narrow space down the middle of the room is empty of even the razor-edged gleam of starlight.
---
When he dreams, he dreams of the past; memory, overlapping.
He is on the makeshift stage where he took the Decepticon brand and the cause as his own, above the churn of the crowd -- on the slopes of the mountain above the battle below -- with an ache in his chest -- in his side -- with his name roared to the open sky and the howl rising in answer, a hundred voices and an avalanche roar, the golden flare plummeting backwards into the churning ice and Megatron's voice twice over, triumphant -- furious -- "Deadlock!"
---
Deadlock dreams.
There had been shelter, even in Rodion: the space behind the clinic generator where the roof overhang kept off the rain and where Ratchet would look at Drift disappointed but never actually kick him out, the forgotten culvert in the city proper where the sound of the traffic rolled down through it like a storm going by, the Decepticon safehouse where Megatron read phrases out from his work and listened when Deadlock told him it sounded stupid; the broad roof of the Acropolex with the looming bulk of the new refinery at his back, watching the lightning strike the desert; a clean white berth in a clean white room with the wind howling past the high narrow window and an emptiness that strikes him like a knife to the chest, aching--
--and when he wakes, the pain doesn't go away.
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roboromantic · 2 years ago
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I know the focus of the show is probably supposed to be about the future and humans, Terrans, and Cybertronians learning to live together in peace, but the Alex stan in me is DYING to know more about wtf happened on Cybertron anyway.
like ok ignoring for the moment the question of why the Autobot/Decepticon war started in the first place.
— Alex says everyone came to Earth via a space bridge; iirc it looked like the timeline went something like
Decepticons control the space bridge on Cybertron
Autobots manage to take it from the Decepticons long enough to get to Earth as well.
Firstly, where’d the Earth-side space bridge come from? I would assume someone woulda had to have flown over there in a spaceship and built it at some point — maybe Quintus? In IDW1 iirc space bridges were basically introdced to Cybertron by the Quintessons; having Quintus make it could be a nod to that and also explain the presence of the Emberstone on Earth.
or idk maybe it’s like a Minecraft Nether portal and it just generates the other bridge when you first use it    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway I’d’ve thought OP et al woulda had to fight Decepticons the second they arrived on Earth, but maybe they didn’t bother defending that side since they thought the Cybertronian side was secure. Or maybe no one really “controlled” it, it was just discovered and both sides immediately started fighting over it for some reason? and the Decepticons fled through it, pursued by the Autobots?  Did anyone even know where it went? why’d the Decepticons go to Earth in the first place; was it an accident? and if so why not just immediately go back to Cybertron lmao.
 At any rate, the Earth side of the bridge seems to be under Autobot control.
For whatever reason, Bee comes to Earth. Did OP ask him to come for backup? Did something happen on Cybertron to force him to flee? We don’t know.
Likewise, Bee’s shown fighting Starscream as OP, Elita, and Jazz (who in true G1 fashion apparently turns into Ironhide upon arriving on Earth?) beam over to Earth, which means Starscream either came through the space bridge after the Autobots gained control of it — did he manage to escape the Autobots on the Earth side? or did they also leave it undefended until he came through and they were like “whoops we should do something about that.” Did he come through at the same time as Bee?
Optimus blows up the Earth side of the space bridge and the war “ends.”
Optimus says Megs has only been working for Ghost for 15 years, so either the space bridge got blown up a lot later than Alex made it sound like or maybe they were at “peace” but Megs was still leading the Decepticons until something (Dot?) changed his mind. Like I know he said he saw that Optimus was willing to do whatever’s right to protect his people no matter the cost blah blah blah but. if there was a 15 year gap between that and him starting to work for Ghost then.
Optimus says something to the effect of “As far as we know, the Cybertronians on Earth are the last of our kind.” I would assume this ties into why Bee came to Earth; they don’t seem to have any way to communicate with Cybertron, so word of mouth from someone who left later. Is anyone even around to do anything about the Cybertronian side of the space bridge??? I wanna say Shockwave is usually the guy left behind but who knows
We also don’t know WHY Bee is hiding from Ghost iirc??? I’m also a bit confused about the Terrans hiding from Ghost bc Optimus Licherally told Ghost to send a truck to pick them up. that’s how they ended up getting kidnapped.
It’s kinda funny that Agent what’s-his-face doesn’t immediately recognize Bee like. I know that the last they heard of him he was probably a Beetle but still.
Also the FUCK happened on Cybertron to make them think they’re the only Cybertronians left??? Are we gonna get colony planet stuff? More importantly are we gonna get any Junkion stuff PLEASE this would be the PERFECT show to bring them back and update the “speaking TV” bit into speaking via memes. The kids can translate for the very confused adults and/or we could have a funny reveal where like idk, Megatron is actually super up to date on the latest in Internet culture.
Anyway going back to history, Mo’s textbook has some......interesting phrasing. The cover says “A brief and incomplete history of Cybertron, the Autobots, and the humans on Earth that live among them.”
Like it’s straight-up saying Cybertron=Autobot. It uh. sounds VERY biased unless maybe Volume II is supposed to showcase the Decepticon side of things.
Also saying “The humans on Earth that live among them” sounds to me more like the Autobots run the planet and humans just live there; I think we almost always see things framed as Cybertronians living among humans instead.
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side note: I’m wondering if that’s supposed to just be abstract textbook art or if it’s showing Cybertron, its two moons, and a sun.   the two moons and sun are kinda not a constant throughout the franchise, though I think 2 moons is generally more widely accepted because of TFTM
If/when we see more of Cybertron I hope that like the last post said it’s more “fun and alien,” I really loved how Cyberverse had a lot more going on than just. plain grey metal with stupidly tall buildings. All we’ve seen of it afaik is from Alex’s story, which was rather obviously Not what it would look like if they go to Cybertron later in the show, and a picture of the planet in this same textbook.  speaking of Alex’s story it’s very funny to me that his wife is Megatron’s bff but he’s still like ~ooh the cruel and dastardly Megatron~ sjdfhdjkshkg
speaking of human companions don’t we see Spike with Bee for a brief second? whatever happened to them and will we see maybe a Hot Rod/Rodiums and Daniel friendship at some point??? They also mention Dot working with the Autobots and we see what is presumably her with younger versions of the kids but like. Optimus says it’s been 30 years since he started working with Ghost so they’d be at LEAST 30 by now.  I’m gonna chalk that up to it being part of Alex’s story and not evidence of what actually happened
There’s a lot of references to a Battle of Burbank (I think? the wiki’s not up to date yet and I don’t feel like digging through episodes to verify the name) Most important is Megs is reminiscing about fighting alongside Dot in this battle.
Wheeljack does mention that Cybertronian traditions aren’t really doable on Earth
Speaking of that reminds me of that Rescue Bots episode where they try to celebrate All Spark Day and THAT reminds me I really really wanna see some Rescue Bots stuff. are you kidding me they’d be PERFECT for this series.
OUGH ALEX MEETING WEDGE AND IMMEDIATELY BONDING OVER THEIR SHARED LOVE OF BEE........... Twitch and Whirl would also get along super well            
anyway I don’t know that they’d actually like, all show up on the show but it’d be cool if like, idk the Malto kids became friends with Cody and Frankie or st.
Side note but I’d also be curious to see who all is a member of the Rescue Bots. The original four almost certainly, but they might wanna keep Blurr a little closer to his G1 counterpart. As for Salvage, High Tide, and Quickshadow......who knows? Quickshadow’s not really a Rescue Bot per se, and what with her being a James Bond kinda character, I could see her being a part of like, Ghost’s British division or st.
 I want Nightshade to meet a nonbinary human (who uses neopronouns please and thank you) so people who are okay with it because ~robots don’t have gender~ or w/e can’t use that as a cop-out
I’ve been rewatching Earthspark to find stuff for this photoset (gifset? haven’t decided) I wanna make so here’s a couple fun background things I noticed
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thanksjro · 5 years ago
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The Transformers #26- Chaos Part 2: A for Effort, Trailbreaker
Issue #25 isn’t relevant, either to this project or to the Chaos storyline. Prowl investigates Scrapper’s murder, and things get messy in terms of connecting the dots, he’s attacked, it’s all very dramatic, we get that one panel where Prowl ruins a man’s barbecue.
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Let’s move on, shall we?
The entire Chaos storyline is co-authored by Roberts and Costa, so I won’t be mentioning it further. It’s not like this is an especially long storyline anyway.
Getting back to where we left off, that big nasty Kimia laser is coming down, but it’s not targeting the Autobots. It’s hitting another part of the planet, and Optimus thinks it’s high time they found out just what’s going on here. He orders Silverbolt to follow the laser, and the entirety of their aerial division shoots up into the sky, including Cosmos. I guess all these guys have been here this whole time. News to me, but okay.
Sunstreaker and Drift get put in charge of finding a base of operations, while Cliffjumper gets paired off with Wheelie for a scouting mission. Once they’re done unloading all the crap they packed in Omega Supreme, Rodimus will fly him back up into orbit to try and deal with the threat in the air while everyone else is on the ground.
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Trailbreaker, you do one fucking thing. What is this confusion about your role in any of this?
Rodimus and Trailbreaker get up into orbit without much fuss, guiding the aerial team.
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Yeah, I could see them needing some extra eyes here.
Down on the surface of the planet, Wheelie is dragging Cliffjumper around, much to his chagrin. Also Wheelie’s got a gun. I don’t know where he got the gun from, considering he’s been running around with nothing but a slingshot and a synth for the last several issues, but he’s got a fucking rifle now, and he’s pointing it straight at Galvatron. He misses, but not by much. Pretty impressive for a guy who’s not seen a gun in a few million years and went full Castaway.
Of course, with that shot, their cover is blown, and Galvatron sends his troops in the direction that the gunfire came from. Cliffjumper calls Optimus to tattle on Wheelie, and Optimus’ team heads their way.
Meanwhile, up in space, the aerial forces are making short work of the Sweeps. The hard part is going to be getting into Kimia so they can turn off that laser.
Speaking of Kimia, let’s check in on some of the guys who work there, why don’t we? Lightspeed and Nosecone take stock of their current situation, and it’s pretty darn grim, to put it lightly. They’re stuck in the same room as a power generator for the particle cannon, with only a few blasters and some experimental bomb nonsense between them. The room around them lights up, signaling the power-up sequence for the cannon. That’s no good!
Good thing Trailbreaker’s here! Surely his forcefield-creating abilities will save the day!
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Oof. That’s rough, buddy.
The damage to the planet can be seen from space. Cybertron’s got maybe enough fortitude to take a couple more hits like that before it either crumbles or going hurtling off into deep space. Since they can’t contain the particle cannon blasts, they’re going to have to destroy Kimia.
Rodimus isn’t really a huge fan of this plan, seeing as there are probably still folks alive inside the facility, and he can’t stand to sacrifice others, even if it is for the greater good. Gee, I wonder why.
That was sarcasm, by the way. I know it does’t translate well in writing. The reaction we’re getting from Rodimus here is probably due to him having had to blow up his home town to keep his fellow citizens from being used as ammunition and batteries in weapons of mass destruction, so that others might live. That kind of thing tends to sit pretty heavy on one’s soul. We’ll see more of the complex that event gave him in MTMTE.
Back on Kimia,  the cannon’s warming up for another shot, and communication breaks down, as Lightspeed and Nosecone pack on the explosive charges and get ready to blow Kimia up themselves, and Rodimus prepares to slam into the facility with Omega Supreme. Optimus just kind of sits back and listens to this whole thing go down. Kimia explodes, as everyone down on the planet watches in awe.
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Ironhide, people are dead.
This pisses Galvatron off pretty severely, and he pulls Jhiaxus- yeah, he’s in this story, don’t worry about it- away for further nefariousness.
Rodimus lands/crashes Omega back onto the planet, with a wounded Trailbreaker. He asks where Optimus has gotten off to, and Sunstreaker tells him he and Ironhide fucked off somewhere, which causes Rodimus and Drift to share a look. And what a look it is.
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Optimus is running around in his semi-truck mode, and apparently he and the Matrix are on speaking terms again, as he lets Ironhide know that he’s got a feeling in his jimmies that some serious stuff is about to go down, and the Matrix is going to be integral to things going in a way that’s beneficial to the Autobots.
Meanwhile, Megatron is attempting to figure out what the hell’s going on outside by talking to Omega Supreme, but Supreme just grayrocks him. We get a positively horrid view of Megatron’s chicklet teeth as he says he’s about to head out.
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Now, you may be thinking, surely Megatron couldn’t escape from his full-body harness with the built in shock collar attachment, to which I say: He’s the main antagonist. Give it a minute.
Garnak is trying to keep Trailbreaker comfortable, chatting all the while, until Sunstreaker hears something he can’t seem to identify.
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Good lord, they’re like spiders. Everything’s on fire, everything is trying to kill you, and there are giant-ass spiders. Cybertron is Space Australia.
Turns out these awful little things are cutting Megatron out of his bonds, as he laughs maniacally. Outside, Cliffjumper and Wheelie are getting shot at, like, a LOT. Cliffjumper is less calling and more begging and pleading for backup at this point. Help does come, but not from a source he’d like.
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I guess the spiders snuck him a little protein powder while they were springing him loose.
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brandxspandex · 7 years ago
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TF IDW reread: Monstrosity
I recall Monstrosity was my favourite instalment of the Autocracy-Monstrosity-Primacy trilogy, and upon rereading it I think that is going to remain the case. It’s a fun story featuring batshit crazy Decepticons, swarms of beastly monsters, dire and deathly places, and Megatron being a BAMF. Watching Megatron transform into Garbage King of Trash Planet and go on a quest of self-discovery with his riddle-spewing pet Quintesson in tow was quite entertaining, and it was the kind of setting and storyline where Livio Ramondelli’s artwork is quite appropriate. The Quintesson, Pentius, was a fun character, even if there was pretty much no explanation for any single thing that he said or did. He was like some sort of spirit-guide/sensei character who guides another character on a journey towards enlightenment, only instead of guiding Megatron towards enlightenment he guides him towards a greater clarity of evil…which I guess is enlightenment from some people’s point of view. There is no clear reason why he does this, although he is a historian, and some of the cryptic things he says are somewhat reminiscent of Metroplex’s comments to Optimus about the cyclic nature of history and Optimus’s role as a recurring player in it. Maybe Pentius recognised Megatron as another one of those major players and wanted to see him fulfil his destined role, or maybe he just gets his kicks out of encouraging people to be evil, who knows.
Quintessons are also established as having (green) sparks in this series, which raises questions about the nature of Quintesson life and their connection to the Transformers in the IDW continuity. If I recall there are some continuities in which the Quintessons are descendants/creations of Quintus Prime, so maybe that is true of this continuity as well. The fact that the end of the IDW continuity means we’re going to miss out on the opportunity to properly explore this version of the Quintessons is one of the many things about the reboot that makes me thoroughly upset.
The current Optimus Prime series established that Junkion was blown up in the war between the Autobots and Decepticons at some point after this, but turns out that at this point Junkion was just a goddamn shard anyway, so not much of a loss really.
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Autocracy made Megatron look like a little bit of a chump (and the Decepticons clearly agreed, given their decision to get rid of him), but Monstrosity quite pointedly reaffirms his terrifying badassitude, while making him look outright sane and heroic next to the nutcase that is Scorponok. It could be said that Megatron (somewhat thinly) veiled his desire for endless violence behind a motive of social change, but Scorponok didn’t make the slightest effort to disguise what he was after, and took it WAY up to 11. Scorponok basically wanted to turn Cybertron into what Junkion already was, and after getting banished there Megatron seemed to decide that he’d had quite enough of that. I guess that what Monstrosity ultimately establishes is that while Megatron has most definitely fallen to his bloodlust (energon-lust?), he hasn’t gone completely loopy; he still has goals beyond simply killing things, or at least still believes he does. I find it kinda weird that Megatron’s character arc on Junkion is meant to be about becoming truly monstrous, yet the whole story is also about establishing him as a much better alternative to Scorponok. In fact he seems less villainous and nutty when he gets back from Junkion than before.
Then again, Megatron’s “revelation” on Junkion is that what he truly wants is dominance, “the only truth in existence”. Perhaps the contrast that the story was trying to establish between Megatron and Scorponok is that while Scorponok was basically “chaotic evil” and wanted to create a primordial wasteland where only the strongest survive, Megatron wanted to establish a more ordered evil, with himself at the top. That being said, I can’t believe that Megatron wasn’t to some extent driven by the same sort of lust for violence that seemed to motivate Scorponok, as there are several moments throughout the continuity that heavily imply/basically outright state that Megatron was more interested in killing than actually winning the war. However, I guess that while Scorponok was nothing but that lust for violence and twisted might makes right philosophy, those elements of Megatron’s character were somewhat tempered by other aspects, such as his desire for absolute dominance. I do wonder how much of Megatron’s desire for dominance stemmed from the moments he had felt helpless, like on Trepan’s table, which spawned the desire to never feel that way again.
We saw Starscream being pretty damn critical of and fed up with Megatron in Autocracy, which seems to culminate in him helping overthrow Megs here. That being said, it’s not made clear how much say Starscream actually had in the coup – whether he was one of the first people calling for Megatron’s blood, or if he watched Scorponok blow the heads off anyone defending Megatron before deciding to play along. Either way, it doesn’t take him long to start hitting Scorponok with the same sort of criticism he had recently been levelling at Megs, although he also offers some pretty valid advice, and even tries to break up in-fighting between the Cons. It just seems like he earnestly wanted the Decepticons to be successful in doing what they set out to do, but unfortunately for him Scorponok was everything he seemed to hate about Megatron concentrated and amplified.
I guess we don’t actually know for sure if Starscream was Megatron’s SiC at this point, though his interactions with Megatron certainly made him seem as much, but either way it’s interesting that he just lets Scorponok take command. It comes across as though he initially wasn’t actually that interested in being the leader at this point in history, but rather preferred an advisory role from behind the scenes. Unfortunately none of the leaders he gave advice to were interested in listening to him. While I think there are a number of factors underlying Starscream’s eventual ambition for leadership, I tend to think that one of the most major factors was the fact that all the other leaders he followed continuously let him down. He was fucked over by the Senate, Megatron, Scorponok, until eventually he thought “fuck it, I’ll do it myself”.
He doesn’t seem quite at that point yet however, as he doesn’t use Scorponok’s raging incompetence and unpopularity as an opportunity to seize control of the Cons himself, and he looks outright delighted when Megatron shows up again to take power back from Scorponok, which is a great scene by the way:
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I love how Megatron’s silhouette makes him look like fricking Dracula or something in that panel.
Anyway, Megatron is understandably upset with Starscream after this, and promises him that they would discuss his role in the coup, which is something we never get to see. I find this really frustrating given that Megatron and Starscream’s relationship is made up of many more questions than answers, and this seems like it would have been a major turning point between them assuming this was Starscream’s first major betrayal. I have to wonder what went down between them after this so that Starscream not only survived, but maintained his major ranking in the Cons. I could imagine Starscream arguing/pleading to Megatron that Megs had constantly reiterated that the leader of the Decepticons must be strong and indomitable, so by discarding Megatron in favour of another leader after his defeat, Starscream was only following the doctrine Megatron wanted him to follow. If Megatron was won over by this argument, I wonder if this could have been the beginning of their dynamic of Megatron keeping Starscream around to challenge him and so give him the opportunity to reaffirm his dominance as leader. I also wonder if this is around the time their relationship turned violent.
Assuming Starscream’s initial loyalty to and idolisation of Megatron was genuine, and I’m inclined to say it was, it would seem that this initial “positive” stage of their relationship was over by this point in time. But was their relationship as simple as an initial, relatively short positive period in which Starscream was loyal, followed by a really long, horrible period in which Starscream was treacherous? I’m inclined to think it was more complicated than that. Starscream may have welcomed Megatron back in Monstrosity just because he could be used to get rid of Scorponok, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Megatron’s strength and determination in returning from Junkion and reclaiming the Decepticons had restored some of Starscream’s eroded faith in him. I could imagine Starscream going through another period of loyalty to Megatron after this, although it probably wouldn’t be as strong as his initial loyalty, and their relationship would be tainted from that point on by Starscream’s betrayal. I bet their relationship would have gone through a number of such phases of Starscream warming back up to Megatron to some extent before souring to him again and trying to get rid of him, but with an overall downwards trend as their relationship for the most part deteriorated. In fact, we kind of saw another instance of this at the end of All Hail Megatron, if I recall, with Starscream saving Megatron’s life shortly after he had attempted a coup.
Also Scorponok noted that Megatron had apparently kept Starscream at arm’s length (something Starscream puts down to Megatron not having much trust for politicians, an explanation that makes a lot more sense now that we know Starscream used to be a senator even before the Decepticons), but this seems like a kinda odd thing to say given that Megatron apparently made Starscream his SiC, trusted him with a number of important duties, and had him alone by his side several times. If Starscream’s early passionate fixation on Megatron hadn’t just been for show, then maybe he wanted to be emotionally close to him as well (not necessarily in a romantic way if that’s what you assume I mean…although also maybe that) but Megatron kept his distance in that respect. If that were so, I wonder if that could have been a contributing factor towards Starscream’s attitude towards Megatron going sour.
Meanwhile poor Optimus Prime has been contending with Dai Atlas’s bitching, and to be fair I guess he kinda has a point; Cybertron was a bit of a shitshow so perhaps packing up and leaving was a reasonable thing to do. On the other hand, if your solution to all your problems is to pack up and run off to someplace else and start over, you’re never going to achieve much. The vision of unity that The Matrix granted Optimus when they bonded makes him pretty insistent that Cybertronians ought to all stick together. I imagine that Optimus would have felt that Cybertronians leaving the planet and scattering would have also amounted to them abandoning each other, and he didn’t want to leave anyone behind, as illustrated by his refusal to give up on the Dynobots and their monstrous predicament.
Optimus does however wonder if he’s just jealous of all the people leaving Cybertron’s problems behind while he’s stuck there dealing with it all, which is really sad because that’s pretty much the same sort of sentiment of frustration with his position of responsibility that he expresses 4 million years later in The Death of Optimus Prime. So Optimus was done with the position of Prime from more or less the day he got it, and he’s probably been sick of it for the entirety of the 4 million year war. Honestly when the continuity ends I really hope he gets to survive and quit all his responsibilities and go and live somewhere way out of the way of any drama and just like…garden or some shit.
Seems kinda weird that the Dynobots were trying to avoid getting too riled up to stop hulking out into their monstrous alt-modes, but had also been involved with the Decepticons via the gladiatorial death-matches; surely gladiatorial death-matches would be a sure-fire ticket to hulking out. Maybe that’s why they didn’t go through with joining the Decepticons; if death-matches weren’t gonna do it, a revolution just might. On the other hand, given that The Dynobots joined in Optimus’s uprising against Megatron, and that Scorponok pointed out that Grimlock’s “fatal weakness” is compassion, maybe the Dynobots left the Decepticons because they noticed that the movement had got a bit shit. The dynamic between the Dynobots is pretty endearing; they’re like a bickering but incredibly loyal and loving family.
So Trypticon was manufacturing monsters in his innards…doesn’t that kinda make them his babies? Certainly seems to be further evidence that Titans can produce life of their own. Also, what’s the deal with Trypticon and babies? In his first appearance he’s making all these monster babies, then in his more recent appearances he’s adopted a bunch of babies. Is that just IDW Trypticon’s thing? Everyone views him as this horrible, terrifying monster that does nothing but wreck death and destruction, but in actual fact his just wants to have a bunch of babies and see them grow up strong and healthy with pack lunches and name labels on all their stationary.
On a final note, let’s all laugh/cry at the first panel of the series:
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qutemag · 7 years ago
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The movie guy reviews: Transformers -- The Last Knight
Article by Benjamin Harkin
Here we are. Every critic relishes this review, and many online have already let forth the torrent of bile that Transformers: The Last Knight deserves. Every Transformers movie I go in hoping I’ll be somewhat surprised that the movie reaches a baseline of ‘okay’, and bar maybe the third one which was brighter, more colourful and contained John Malkovich, every time I walk out frustrated and despairing. People say Michael Bay is an auteur – an auteur of what? Glorified tech demos? Showing off what the Industrial Light & Magic team can do? Because that’s all these movies have going for them. This is evident with the multiple aspect ratios, that’s right, IMDb records this movie showing three different aspect ratios, and another place thought the trailer had eight. You have black bars darting all around the image as the movie crops itself to fit around funky new cameras Michael Bay wants to toy with for the sponsorship. It is the weirdest, most distracting shit to see a movie switching aspect ratios all the way through for no discernible reason.
The film feels like six films meshed into one, or perhaps six plot threads focus-grouped into oblivion and smooshed together in a way that made some executive in a high-backed chair shift lazily in their seat to turn off the preview footage and say “fuck it, that’ll do” for the three editors to hastily clip together in something resembling a two and a half hour film. There’s the scene with a post-apocalyptic New York, ravaged after the climax of Transformers 4, with Transformers living in hiding of the anti-Transformers defense force set up to catch them, now that Optimus Prime is paralysed, orbiting the earth in a shell of his former self. Some foolhardy boys break into a ruined stadium with a giant jet engine ploughed into the field, saying self-aware bulldust like “we’re kids, we always get away with stuff!” Yes, that’s a fucking line in this movie. And not the worst by a mile. Then prowling the streets, looking under rubble, they run into a Transformer hiding itself under scrap. Couldn’t radar easily detect the hulking masses like Transformers for the military to destroy? Apparently fucking not, if a Transformer hides among some rubble, that’s a-okay. The kids then run into a girl, a strong-willed, adventurous-sounding 14-year-old who’s making her own way among the debris jungle and a close friend to this Transformer that gets mortally wounded by a fighter jet trying to save the kids. And do you think Bay uses this setup to anchor the film with a young heroine, make a movie that takes a U-turn on everything that the hypermasculine, Megan Fox-ass loving, dumb as a post joke-making crap that has defined his Transformers series? Fuck no, all the boys dialogue towards this girl is along the lines of “wow…she’s hot!” and “Are you single?” Fucking gross and sad is all I can say. Michael Bay can’t wait to get started on the explosions, objectification, and immaturity. The young girl doesn’t do anything of note in the movie, hell, I can’t even remember her name. She gets sidelined at the halfway point, literally left behind in a junkyard with her BB-8 rip-off robot. Michael Bay instead wheels out the contractually obliged Megan Fox stand-in to be the impetus for Mark Wahlberg to do something in the movie and crack a few lines about how single they both are. Wahlberg was probably given acting advice to approach the character by showing a face in deep thought over how utterly hot it would be if he and the Oxford tour-guide Megan Fox stand-in lady banged with the Transformers watching.
“Are you single?” proves to be a theme in this movie, more than any kind of motif or any of the half-mumbled prattling about values that Optimus Prime manages to heave out of this exhaustingly mind-numbing, overbloated movie. Characters are defined by whether they’re single or not, not whether they fight for honesty, or freedom, or love, or caring for friends, or whether they want to be friends with giant robots. Nah it’s the fact that Mark Wahlberg and Megan Fox stand-in in this movie are on steroids and the camera treats them like they’re perpetually posing for Tinder. Characters from earlier in the series, like John Turturro, make manically unintelligible appearances to rant about doomsday situations. A physics scientist gets laughed at when he tells the president the world will end in roughly three days. Optimus Prime manages to awake himself out of being basically a dead robot to shoot himself somehow across the galaxy onto his home planet of Cybertron, which he knows was destroyed but fuck it, why not go there for refuge? And why not fall back to earth if you’re a dead shell of a Transformer? Nah, the logic in this movie is adverse to science or plot logic, or continuity, or good filmmaking, his dead body can float across the galaxy instead! Cybertron is now run by some Sorceress Robot Woman who twists Optimus into getting Cybertron fixed as a planet by colliding it with earth to suck up the planet’s core. Fucking who knows. Cybertron somehow flies across the universe in the time it takes this movie to skim across five other unresolved plot threads, like why Mark Wahlberg has a spiderly amulet thing that’s super powerful and what he is actually supposed to do with it, or what the whole deal was with the three-headed dragon robot that appears at points throughout the film, or why Megatron wants to break out his mates Suicide Squad-style or why the humans are willing to work with Megatron who was the bane of everyone for the previous four movies, or why John Goodman’s cigar-chomping Transformer gets blown up by rockets and falls over, presumed dead as the camera cuts to a new scene, then he just randomly reappears later on, or why Bumblebee fought Nazis in WWII. And the location used for the scene of Nazis being blown to smithereens, full with Swastika banners draped over the looming building? That my friends is Winston Churchill’s house. I’m sure Britain’s favourite wartime leader, known for everything Hitler was not, span so hard in his grave he tunnelled to the earth’s core.
Stanley Tucci plays a drunk Merlin in a flashback to the Dark Ages, for reasons never fully explored, despite being another character in the present for the previous movie. The Great Tucci Retcon. Oh and there’s Anthony Hopkins too. A wisened masterclass of an actor, made remarkably awkward and a total caricature for a man who used to be Hannibal Lector. He’s in this, 110% for the paycheck. Bay makes him say ‘duuuude’ and ‘that’s a bitch-ass car!’ because it’s cool to make grandpa say hip things sometimes. He has a robot butler assistant who’s also a borderline homicidal maniac for reasons that are never explained. He also has a WWI tank Transformer who has ‘robot-dementia’ or whatever which is an interesting concept far too intriguing for a movie this unforgiveably terrible so the Transformer is yet another sidelined idea in a litany of focus-grouped half-baked brain farts.
The entire movie is unfunny, every joke (and there are heaps, all undercutting the otherwise dead-serious grit and aimed at the lowest denominator possible while conscious) hits like a fucking sledgehammer wielded by lemurs on crack, rushed in delivery, painfully without any semblance of cleverness or wit, the setup too predictable and the payoff so fucking moronic, with editing so poor in timing that a joke about the butler robot playing the sweeping Transformer themes on an organ to give the scene a gravitas was completely lost when Anthony Hopkins cranked his sad, demur grimace up to the butler so slow you could’ve gone to the bathroom and back and the joke would still be playing out. I’ve said it once after Pain & Gain and I’ll say it again: Michael Bay cannot direct comedy and he shouldn’t. For whatever reason the gift of a funny bone doesn’t materialise in the filmmaking process.
The fight scenes are meh. Every one lacks any weight because frankly you don’t give a fuck about any of this while watching. You don’t care which Transformer fights which because they’re all so underutilised and shallow that you could probably get more pizzazz in banging your stapler against the computer mouse on a slow day at the office. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how half these scenes of metal clunking against metal were storyboarded. And they don’t mean anything either, Transformers are rarely shown actually being killed, and yet the ones shown dying without any fights or lead-up (because the editing is god-awful and rushed) are full on bleeding weird green blood which is probably too violent for a young kid, which is where this gritty, dark-looking, yet oddly cartoonish spaghetti-works is squarely aimed.
I should probably end this review somewhere. This sounds like a good place. I could go on and honestly, part of me felt the usual catharsis of a critic tearing a big-budget Hollywood mess to shreds, and giving the finger to this kind of spiteful, audience-hating focus-grouped piss that flows through the summer action blockbuster gate from time to time, but another part of me doesn’t feel that catharsis. Instead, a part of me feels a silent rage, because I know this review, or any other review, or any of all the people who happen to see these movies for what I could only describe as sheer self-flagellation and tell everyone else it is complete garbage, it won’t stop Michael Bay making Transformers, and it sure as hell won’t stop the franchise. Somehow this is what gets bankrolled over those millions of other screenplays of what could be great action blockbusters. Michael Bay has said he’s stepping down from the Transformers franchise, but that’s what he always says. Paramount have two more Transformers movies lined up for the next two years, they see this as being able to grow out into yet another expanded universe franchise with Bumblebee getting a spin-off movie. I know this is useless, this review. It’s just words screamed into a void, a void of producers and executives running endless focus groups, workshopping the movies through too many editors and writers and camera lenses for maximum 3D so everyone can spend the biggest amount of dollars possible. Because this is the thing: Michael Bay doesn’t care. Mark Wahlberg doesn’t care. Anthony Hopkins doesn’t care. Maybe the digital effects people care. All the people involved in this production, they watch the finished product and I’m sure that no matter where they thought their part was going, they were a little deflated and depressed by it too, especially the fifth time around, but they can forget about their shame at the end of the day. Because they’re all getting their paycheck and a contract for Transformers 6, and you’re doing yourself out of the $20+ you spent to see this rotten film.
(Transformers: The Last Knight is currently showing.)
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medicalmurdersaurus · 8 years ago
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Three Ounces Of Whoop-Ass
Upon rereading Swoop’s wiki, I have come to a conclusion. Everyone should be thankful that he is an ambitionless, absentminded child because, unless you’re a Phase Sixer, Swoop is canonically capable of turning you into a featureless pile of gore.
He’ll murder Devastator. He’ll murder Megatron. Give him your address and he’ll murder you too.
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JUSTICE RAINS FROM ABOVE
From day one, I’ve down played how strong Swoop is. It’d feel wrong (and boring) to have him casually reach over and remove someone’s upper half from their lower half. However, when you look at his canonical actions, he is a mindbogglingly strong gore-machine. 
Here are my 5 favorite #nerfswoop moments.
War of the Dinobots - Swoop & Snarl vs Grimlock, Slag, & Sludge
The older three Dinobots are tricked by the Decepticons into beating up Optimus Prime. Despite being OUTNUMBERED, a FEW HOURS OLD and NOT FIGHTING TO KILL, Swoop and Snarl fight Grimlock, Slag and Sludge to a standstill. 
This isn’t a fluke. A similar standstill happens in Dinobot Island Part 1.
The Cool Episode 3 - Swoop vs Lugnut 
When Lugnut and Soundwave attack Dinobot Island, Lugnut gets WRECKED in a 1v1 with Swoop.
Battle for Earth - Swoop vs Devastator
Swoop shoots Devastator in the face, KILLING Hook and Scrapper instantly. Then, he cuts Mixmaster and Scavenger IN HALF with only his sword and a grin. This actual birdbrain cut Devastator up into goddamn sashimi. 
Decepticon Hijack - Swoop vs Megatron
Swoop shows up mid-battle and Megatron takes a shot at him. The pterodactyl is enraged so he drops a bomb that has the strength of 5,000 pounds of explosives.
Do you know HOW BIG of a boom that is? The Mythbusters used 800 lb of explosives to make a cement truck go away. They used 5,000 lb to make FUCKING DIAMONDS.
I don’t care what anyone says. Megatron died. Unicron would need a dust pan to put him back together.
Battle Drive - Swoop vs Megatron
In this Choose Your Own Adventure book, there is an option to have Swoop attack Megatron, Laserbeak, Blitzwing, Starscream, Bombshell and at least half-a-dozen other Decepticons. In that ending, Swoop takes out Starscream with a missile and then shoots Megatron’s fusion canon, which BACKFIRES and TEARS HIM IN HALF. Without a leader, the Decepticons fall to the Autobots.
You read that right. Swoop turns Megatron to pulp in TWO different books.
The only reason the war hasn’t ended is because no one has told Swoop to rush Decepticon High Command yet. Get on that, Prowl.
MAN, AM I BAD AT MATH
At first, it might sound redundant to hype a Dinobot for being strong. Except there is NOTHING to Swoop. Look at this loser!
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Other than movieverse Frenzy, I cannot think of a male Cybertronian character thinner than him. TFP Starscream and Soundwave are definitely close in size but, to me, they look broader in the chest. In the absence of a TFP Swoop, it’s hard to make a definitive call.
Regardless, this boy is TINY. Yet, he tears through Lugnut, Devastator, and Megatron like wet tissue paper. 
AIRSPEED VELOCITY OF AN UNLADEN SWALLOW
Everyone jokes about Skyfire being the Autobot taxis but, as far as I can tell, Swoop is the one hauling everyone around.
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Some of Swoop’s passengers aren’t particularly surprising. No one is blown away by the fact he can carry Wasp or Bumblebee. What is shocking is that Swoop can catch and carry other Dinobots.
Who thought this was a good idea? Exactly how much lift do you guys think pteranodons have? Good lord. Those assholes aren’t light!
Swoop has more than raw lifting power too. In his marvel incarnation, Divebomb (pre-Dinobot Swoop) is a member of the Elite Flying Corps, a best of the best Autobot fliers. There are only five spots open to the entire Autobot army and he got in. Booya!
HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU
Even if Swoop doesn’t actively participate in murdering someone, odds are that he’ll outlive them.
In case you aren’t familiar with the Beast Era cartoons, the short version is that the G1 universe continues until, in the far distant future, Autobots and Decepticons are replaced by their descendants, Maximals and Predacons.
In Tales From The Transformers: Beast Wars: Reaching The Omega Point, an ancient warrior known as the Veteran thinks about how he’s lived long enough to be a figurative dinosaur. The Last Days of Optimus Prime confirms it. This dad-joking asshole is Swoop.
Seriously digest the implications of this revelation.
Swoop is such an UNREAL BADASS that, despite Cybertron’s history basically being nonstop interplanetary wars for millennia, future generations hear “the Veteran” and instantly know who is being discussed.
He isn’t A veteran. He is THE Veteran.
Swoop outlasts basically everyone from the Great War, which means he is a de facto expert on the subject. People are going to give serious consideration to ANYTHING he says about bots and cons who fought in the war. There is no way that he ISN’T intentionally ruining people’s legacies with “fun facts.”
THE FATAL AMERICAN NEED TO HAVE A GOOD TIME
Swoop is harder, better, faster, stronger than the overwhelming majority of Cybertronians. The only reason I mentioned Phase Sixers at the top is because I can’t PROVE that he could take one of them on. But I wouldn’t have thought he could blow Megatron into confetti twice so who really knows?
Swoop could almost certainly bounce around, blowing everyone up into chunky salsa if he felt like it. So why doesn’t he?
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IMO, deep down, Swoop just wants to have fun. Murdering everyone, everywhere would require way more work and planning than he cares to put into it. Seriously, this loser forgets that transforming is a thing. He is not a thoughtful person.
There’s no ambition there. Just a desire to have a good time. And thank god that Swoop’s idea of fun involves annoying LIVING people!
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tfw-no-tennis · 4 years ago
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mtmte liveblog issue 12
lets do itttt
I love nick roches art...he draws rodimus so twinky, its a delight
ohhh I forgot abt the non-linear storytelling this issue. bangin
rewinds feet don't even touch the ground hhhhhh tiny
i fuckgin love that panel of skids talking abt briefing vs debriefing, everything both he and rodimus say is just golden
I love hearing tailgate tell completely made up stories from his primal vanguard days, that slaps storytelling-wise
HHHHHH and the fact that tailgate’s happiest memory is movie night at rewinds ;_; gosh
lmao I love whirl kicking down the door 
OOOOH and then the time skip!!!!!!!!! I fucking love non-linear stories
jesus, swerves whole face being gone is still disturbing
magnus rlly is a grade A badass. I forgot he has missile shoulders
rodimus saying ‘wham, bam, in the van!’ is my fuckgin favorite hvbsdhhfbhdjkf that's my son right there
cd saying that rewind is allergic to ultraviolet light [eyes emoji] remember how UV light is the only way to see mnemosurgery marks? that little detail must be in there for that ‘cd did mnemosurgery on rewind’ plotline that jro didn't end up doing (thankfully) 
I love how mtmte came up with a name for cybertronian marriage :) that's the kind of lore I want baybe!
also rewind and cd hhhhhh they....the og canon gays...confirmed outright in issue 12, which is so early on, considering!...its a beautiful thing. I will talk about the representation in mtmte Extensively throughout my reread since this is, yknow, Just The Beginning when it comes to canon gays - which, again, what a beautiful thing!
actually I'm not done. thinking abt the fact that this issue came out in 2012 and also this is freaking TRANSFORMERS of all things - a long-running franchise whose primary audience is adolescent boys - is extra amazing. augh, the representation! it gets me man.
ok, so, the story! jesus poor cyclonus
chromedome riding on the trex guy hbhsjkfbjshdf dude. I choose to believe that that’s his go-to tactic here bc he’s probably pretty terrible at fighting. idk how canon that is but I just see cd as the type of dude who cant fight well at all, regardless of how many fights he’s actually been in
minibot squad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm really interested in the little we see of general cybertronian attitude towards organics - obvs the decepticons think very little of them, and the autobots generally believe all life is important, but the post-war attitude seems a little more grey and I like that 
tailgate!!!!!!!!!!!! I love tailgate SO much. the way he volunteers to defuse a bomb that he has NO idea how to defuse, and the way he lies so quickly and casually? fucking love it 
and then he takes all of his bomb disarming cues from rewind, who ALSO isn't a bomb disposal expert by any means - like, tailgate risks both his own life and everyone else’s, just because he wont come clean about his real job - that's some [chefs kiss] characterization right there, I love it
augh I love how he prompts rewind, who of COURSE would have some idea about this as an archivist, for help, and rewind doesn't have any idea that tailgate’s even more clueless than him
but tg, being a generally good person, still tells rewind he should proooooobably stand clear - just in case!!!!! 
and then rewind whips out some marriage issues and tg is like ooookay then lol
cyclonus just stabbing people w/his hands....icon
whirl quoting the raw ass line ‘you, who are without mercy, now plead for it?’ nice
swerve. WHY would you point a gun AT YOUR OWN FACE. especially a gun made by BRAINSTORM. why did anybody let swerve handle firearms if this is how he does it. actually, why did anyone give swerve a gun after the thing w/rung. jesus yall. so not only are hipaa laws basically non-existent on cybertron, but gun safety is a rarely-taught thing as well. no wonder yall have issues
so cd must not like cyclonus bc cyclonus was the one who attacked kimia, where cd worked. right?? am I remembering tfwiki correctly? lmao 
OOOOF cd saying he was born w/out innermost....I cant remember, is it canon or just extrapolation that that isn't true, and rather it was that cd gave all his innermost energon away w/his previous husbands and whatnot, but he doesn't remember since he forgot about them? either way, oof
all the functionist history stuff is so INTERESTING...I could read an entire comic about just like, pre-war when the functionists were just taking over
tg saying he hates dominus - is that that tweet from jro where somebody asked him why tg said that, and jro basically said ‘he’s petty and jealous’ lol I fucking love it. I love how a character like tailgate, who is very ‘pure’/innocent, has flaws as well
cd has a good point - its hard to kill tfs. so, that makes it extra fucking depressing that cd was seeking out death to that extent
gahhhh the whole rewind-dominus thing is so INTERESTING - I love how vague things are...we only hear about dominus from other people’s perspectives; mainly rewind who clearly thought highly of him, but he’s obviously biased, so it’s hard to tell what dominus was REALLY like, especially with the unavoidable power gap between rewind and dominus...UGH its so interesting
oof, the whole dynamic of cd thinking that rewind cares more about dominus - dominus the ghost, and finding out what happened to him in general - than chromedome himself, is just so Ouch
and the fact that cd thinks that the SOLE reason that rewind is going into battle is so he can look for dominus, but tg makes a good point - rewind is likely also worried abt cd’s safety, especially after dominus disappeared how he did - rewind is probably terrified that the same thing will happen w/cd, bc rewind cares about cd just as much as he cared/cares about dominus, but cd cant see that. AUGHHHH the Complexity!! mannnn
HHHH and like I adore that this first gay couple we get isn't perfect, and that's OKAY bc they’re not The Gay Rep, we get plenty of other gays with their own 3-dimensional relationships....augh bruh it Gets me ok
AHHHHHHHHHH THE OVERLORD STUFF. AUGHHHHHH
who was that talking to cd?? I don't remember....it must've been drift, I think? or maybe brainstorm...
whirl :’) I mean, we find out later that its kinda his fault that rewind was blown up, but still, him putting his own life at risk to save rewind...aww
cyclonus be nice to tg, he’s trying to give you his cool baja blast innermost energon
CYCLONUS BE NICE :( :( :( 
we gotta have our slowburn, tho....OOOOUGH
hhhh and then cyclonus like, realizes how much of a dick he’s being and goes back to help tg.... ;_; 
cyclonus my man u are lucky that tailgate is so forgiving
and then we have whirl and cyclonus, which is another relationship i LOVE. their development is just...[chefs kiss]
cyc just grabbing tg by the head and YEETING him out the door...lmao
cyclonus’s extremely detailed threat to whirl came at like, the WORST possible time lmao 
alternatively, rewind unfortunately asked the worst two people for help at the worst time
also alternatively, tg defusing his first bomb ever based on instructions from another amateur was maybe not the best move
and of course whirl just deciding to lock cyclonus (and rewind whoops) in with a bomb lmao
the requisite to joining the lost light is that you have to be a complete disaster of a person, on some level 
cyclonus shielding rewind ;_; 
fucking love how they managed to have a cliffhanger w/the bomb going off, despite us seeing exactly what the outcome of that was earlier in this very issue. brilliant
ah, issue 12, the issue that officially canonized the gays and introduced us to a whole bunch of worldbuilding on cybertronian relationships. i love it! plus we have some fascinating backstory and some cool character stuff, and relationship development for tg and cyclonus. awesome stuff!
up next: humansona business! oh fuck yeah
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lord-squiggletits · 2 years ago
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The thing about Elegant Chaos being an “anti It’s a Wonderful Life” for Megatron per JRO’s words makes sense. Because Megatron spent most of his life as an imperialist warmonger whose death toll is in the millions to billions, he eradicated and cyberformed multiple planets, it’s an objective fact that a universe without him existing would be a better place. That’s a really good thing for someone as egocentric as Megatron to learn.
Except then JRO wrote in the Functionist Universe almost immediately after, a universe in which Megatron not existing directly leads to a theocracy of monstrous proportions, in which literally insane shit happens like “people’s heads get blown up in the street if their alt mode is declared defunct” and “there are cameras implanted in people’s eyes so that they become part of the surveillance state without even realizing it” happens. So this completely destroys the (rightful and justified) idea that Megatron made the world worse, and instead makes LITERALLY AN ENTIRE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE REVOLVE AROUND MEGATRON’S (NON)EXISTENCE, completely undoing whatever criticism of Megatron was present in the narrative of Elegant Chaos.
And then, JRO also proceeds to make the Functionist Council racist xenophobe colonizers as well with the whole “they decided organics have no function therefore need to be exterminated,” which further destroys the idea of “the universe is better without Megatron existing” by basically saying, well if Megatron hadn’t decided to go out genociding organics, the Functionist Council would have just done it instead.
So the equation we’re left with is “Megatron exists = free Cybertron, organic genocide” and “Megatron doesn’t exist = enslaved Cybertron, organic genocide.” Making it so that all of the sudden, Megatron and all his shittiness is some sort of necessary evil that has to exist because without him Cybertron would’ve been so much worse of a place. Like, Megatron colonizing organics was the ONE THING that couldn’t be justified and JRO still managed to fuck it up by giving the Functionist Council the same evil trait. So now even Megatron’s unjustifiable evil doesn’t belong to him, it’s diluted by the Functionist Council who’s worse in every way, and Megatron gets to play the hero by fighting against them instead of you know, doing anything for the people in THIS universe which HE helped mess up.
And then of course Megatron gets to go to the Functionist Universe and LARP being a revolutionary again, getting a free do-over card, an entire planet that sees him as a hero, and people praising him for “saving billions of lives” in a so-called heroic action that ONLY EXISTS because JRO wrote the entire universe to revolve around Megatron. Autobot Megatron made almost zero positive impact on THIS universe and was completely detached from all the messes he left in the wake of his defection to the Autobots (Galvatron, Earth, the plight of the Decepticons left on Cybertron, etc etc).
Like I’m sorry but for all the hype that people gave MTMTE Megatron, for all the fact that I appreciate a more humanized Megatron who gets a more detailed backstory.... his redemption arc is nowhere NEAR as good as people say it is. As soon as I stop taking the plot at face value and scrutinize it further, all I see is an incredibly flimsy narrative that does a lot of last minute presentations of villains who are even worse than Megatron in order to make Megatron seem heroic in comparison. And of course this comes at the cost of a ton of other characters in the narrative as well, which just makes Megatron’s placement in MTMTE/LL even more glaring and unsuitable.
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lord-squiggletits · 2 years ago
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Speaking of the Metzen trilogy and people not liking it for bizarre reasons, one time I saw a conversation here on Tumblr where someone claimed something along the lines of “During Monstrosity, Optimus tried to arrest the Dynobots instead of letting them leave Cybertron to manage their condition and that’s why I think he’s an asshole.” And that’s just not fucking true because it takes a bunch of individual events out of order and completely warps the context just to make Optimus look like shit lmao.
The Dynobots were trying to leave Cybertron because of their uncontrollable, violence-/rage-fuelled alt modes, but the only people who knew that were the Dynobots themselves (and us, the readers). The reason Optimus tried to arrest the Dynobots is because they were raiding one of the last large-scale energon refineries on Cybertron that was still functioning AND which was the only source of fuel for actual millions of people. The situation from Optimus’ end was that he got an emergency broadcast from this very fucking important refinery that it was under attack by Decepticons (since they also showed up to raid the same refinery). So like, no fucking shit Optimus tried to arrest the Dynobots, he’s the leader and head of security of the Autobots in the middle of a full blown civil war, trying to defend one of the last stable food sources for millions of people, and he had literally no way of knowing that the Dynobots were only raiding it to get enough money to flee Cybertron so that they wouldn’t put people in danger.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
When Grimlock decided to say “fuck it, I’m a monster, I’m going to just blow up this refinery since I’m just such a horrible and violent person that everyone expects the worst of” in that very same scene, Optimus is the one who talked Grimlock down from it by saying that Grimlock may be hurting, but blowing up the refinery would hurt innocent people, and Grimlock doesn’t want to do that. AND IT LITERALLY DOES MAKE GRIMLOCK STOP (although the refinery is blown up by Skorponok anyways because he’s a chaotic evil dumbass but I digress)
And then Optimus doesn’t even stop the Dynobots (or anyone else, for that matter) from leaving Cybertron! He does digging into the Dynobots’ case files from when they were members of the Primal Vanguard. He asks Kup about what they used to be like. He ignores the suggestion that it would be easier to kill the Dynobots so they don’t harm anyone and instead directly approaches them to say “You don’t have to quarantine yourselves on a random planet out of fear of your alt-modes. I have scientists on my side who can find a cure for your condition.” The Dynobots appreciate Optimus’ offer, but leave anyways (with Optimus again doing nothing to stop them btw) and only return later as surprise reinforcements in the battle against Trypticon, no doubt convinced by Optimus’ faith in them when even they didn’t have faith in themselves.
And by the way, the following story (Primacy) shows that Optimus did keep his word and instruct his scientists/medics to find a cure for the Dynobots, which succeeds.
Optimus was literally one of the only people helping the Dynobots during that entire arc. He’s only antagonistic against them for the first ~3 pages they interact with each other because he met them in the middle of a crisis they were partially responsible for, but from the time he talks Grimlock down onwards he’s basically the only person that cares about telling them they don’t have to be/see themselves as monsters. The interactions between him and the Dynobots are literally a shining example of Optimus being the optimistic, never-gives-up-faith, willing to give anyone a chance hero that he IS and that people want him to BE. But somehow people found a way to twist that into him being an asshole anyways???
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thanksjro · 5 years ago
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Eugenesis, Part Six Scene Four: Xenon Info-Dumps For Five-And-A-Half Pages
Alright, back to bullshit.
Galvatron is being a rude little turd to Xenon, calling his robot collection old and dusty, but Xenon’s too wrapped up in the Quintesson/Cybertronian lore to be bothered. Ultra Magnus just wants to know what the fuck he’s done with the Matrix.
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You heard the man, out with it.
So, back when the Quintessons first started out, they were known as the Progenitors- yeah, I know- a quasi-organic race who went from caveman-level intelligence to full-blown hard sci-fi sons of guns at an incredibly rapid rate.  
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Problem is, they didn’t get any further than that. They tried, sure. They tried real hard, for millions of years. Then, once their inspiration had run out, they started looking to other races to try and figure something out.
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This just in, god is dead and James Roberts killed him by turning him into a glorified OS.
So, P.R.I.M.U.S. is encoded onto these geodes, and they become sentient. Sometimes they think they’re god.
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Just like everyone else in this story.
Now that the Quintessons knew about these little god-doodads, they wanted one for themselves, to try and reverse-engineer the secret to immortality. They hired some guys called the Weavers to nab one for them.
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This is some serious nerd shit, y’all. Galvatron agrees with me- he’s never even heard of any of the things Xenon’s droning on about. Neither have I- this is all Roberts at this point.
The Weavers brought back two geodes to the Quintessons, who promptly hid them away until the Masters cooled off a bit, since they were a little miffed about the thievery and whatnot. Then they noticed a couple problems: A) the geodes were encrypted to the moon and back, and B) if you so much as looked at the thing wrong it would purge the Lifecode completely.
Didn’t Optimus throw this thing at Unicron a couple times? Maybe the geode just doesn’t like you, Xenon, ever thought of that?
In order to decode the geodes, the Quintessons needed massive computers. Y’know, like God. But before they could really get a head start on that, the Masters’ nanobot enforcers showed up, blocking out the sky like a giant swarm of angry wasps. They wrecked shopped on Quintyxia- the old one, not the new one- and the Quintessons ran for it. They headed for the planet where they’d buried the other geode, but something went wrong with their hyperspace drive, and they didn’t arrive until two million years after they’d set off.
They dug for the geode, hit something metal, and that’s when the quakes started. The Quintessons left, thinking the planet was unstable.
At this point, Magnus is begging Xenon to just get on with it.
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The Quintessons headed back to Quintyxia, to find that their lush, green world had been turned into one made of metal. Cybertron. Quintyxia is Cybertron. New Quintyxia is Quintyxia. It’s like that time Prince named himself the Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
Of course that leaves the question of why the nanobots didn’t just destroy the planet instead of… doing whatever they did to make Cybertron Cybertron.
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So, Cybertron is a planet-sized computer, tasked with the sole purpose of decoding the meaning of life.
You know, I remember reading somewhere- and don’t quote me on this, because I can’t for the life of me remember where exactly- that Roberts has never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now, either he’s lying- which I don’t know why he would, the guy loves references- or this is just a weird thing the collective brain of the English population does, where they all jump to the same ideas in absurdist sci-fi.
When the Quintessons showed up on Cybertron, they were met with the results of the cracked Lifecode- the first Transformers (but they couldn’t transform, that was a thing that developed alongside the war.) They couldn’t do much of anything, really.
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Well, now we know where the protoform babies in IDW come from.
The Quintessons, not ones to squander an opportunity, decide to use these fragile, helpless proto-beings as slaves.
Yeah, the Quintessons have kind of been the worst since day one.
They build brain modules, stick them in the ground- Seedlings, Xenon calls them- and watch as the planet wrapped living metal around them and built bodies.  
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The Quintessons get pretty good at making the Auto-Bots, and get to a point where they’re drafting up blueprints for each solitary one. Blueprints that Xenon apparently kept, since he’s got all these copies in the pods right now.
If you couldn’t tell already, we’re going with the “the Quintessons made the Transformers” creation myth.
Of course, you make a big enough species, they’re going to need some corralling- that is, if you want to be an awful, controlling, overbearing parent. And the Quintessons definitely wanted that. So, what’s one to do?
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…Look, it’s not that I necessarily disagree on a base level, but-
Xenon, you fucking neckbeard.
Because the Quintessons forgot that religion is not a one-set-outcome game, they were surprised to find that it had given their creations hope and will, things you really don’t want your enslaved masses to have.
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The Covenant drove off the Quintessons, then fucked off into deep space to spread the message of Primus, with Maximo at the head of things. Maximo was the leader of the Cybertronian Empire and Megatron’s progenitor in the Marvel UK comics. They did leave someone behind to keep the masses within the faith- Primon. He’s important in the comics, just trust me on that.
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Oh man, we’re finally getting some answers.
Xenon admits that the Quintessons didn’t come up with everything; there were parts that they just straight-up ripped out of the geode’s owner’s manual.
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Oh. Well. That’s… underwhelming. Xenon’s really just dumping the entirety of the Cybertronian religion into the trash at this point, isn’t he? This info-dump has been going on for five pages, and we still aren’t done.
Turns out that kill switch code was pulled from the geode too- 4/11.002983712 is its serial number. That’s like if you called your dad by his first name and then immediately died afterwords.
But whatever happened to that second geode the Quintessons buried on the other planet?
Yeah, that turned into Unicron.
Turns out the virus that wipes the Lifecode from the geode messed up, and made the geode want to kill literally everything in the universe just for being alive.  
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Well, isn’t that all just fine and dandy~!
Because the Quintessons didn’t realize what Unicron’s whole deal was at first- the vore-planet had learned how to lie at some point before they met up- they worked together for a time.
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At this point the Quintessons had gone from being quasi-organic to something more cybernetically-dependent, so that might have also made things a little difficult in the baby-making department. Or not. I don’t fucking know, things are just happening at this point.
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MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU KNOW WHAT BOOK YOU’RE IN
THERE WILL BE NO HAPPY ANYTHING
Storytime’s over, back to the present day. Xenon’s going to take these podded robots and populate New Quintyxia with them. They won’t fight, they’ll be actual, normal people who don’t wage war.
Xenon must have gotten some new glasses, because that’s one hell of a rose-tinted worldview he’s got there.
Ultra Magnus at this point just asks for the Matrix back so they can go home. Xenon says “nah, but check this out tho” and powers on the pod-bots.
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Xenon, that’s gross. Don’t make Galvatron and Magnus watch you be weird with the power of granting life, man.
All the robots wake up, stand, and stare up at Xenon, who’s floated up to the ceiling on his power trip. They… aren’t supposed to do that.
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Turns out the Matrix is a friggin’ liar, and only promised power because it’s actually Unicron in there. Well, damn.
Galvatron shoots Xenon. Good.
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Shoulda sprung for the waterproofing on your Uggs, Mags.
Galvatron’s on a roll, now. He aims at one of the zombies and fires, and they all go down, thanks to their interlinked minds. Crisis averted, I guess.
Magnus, though not happy with Galvatron’s wanton destruction of innocents, has bigger fish to fry at present; he’s convinced that the Matrix is still inside God. Boy oh boy, is he wrong, but the narrative demands he at least tries. He sticks his hand into the computer, up to the shoulder. That’s not good heavy-duty machinery safety.
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Well, shit. He’s been possessed by a higher power.
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You know, now that I think about it, there’s a good chance that Xenon putting the Matrix into God messed up the killswitch code, and that’s why Prowl had to use a wasting disease to try and end it all. Not really relevant at this exact moment in the story, just a thought I had.
Galvatron, having had enough mystical bullshit for one day, shoots his arm clean off, severing the connection. Magnus drops like a stone, and Galvatron bolts as everything starts coming down around them.
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Oh no, Magnus is gonna be our first victim, isn’t he?
Magnus follows after Galvatron, leaving his arm. Hope he doesn’t run into any aqua fortis on the way back to the Trident, because his Pretender shell is beat all to hell.
Then Xenon pulls himself together and stops being dead.
Sigh.
This was ONE section.
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thanksjro · 5 years ago
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Polyhex Wars, Book 3: It Is NOT The Greater Kindness To Blast A Guy’s Limbs Off As Opposed To Killing Him
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Megatron is running away, because Starscream has decided that he’s no longer going to be bound by petty things like death. As he goes, he sees Hound and Courier, still under that girder and unconscious- I guess you had to be awake to get teleported by Optimus.
Where is Megatron even going, though? Well, he’s just jumped into Primus’ mouth, where he’s keeping the nuclear power source for these planet-moving rocket thrusters. The door- or mouth, rather- shuts behind him, but not fast enough to keep Starscream out.
Over on Platinum Mountain, Optimus is addressing his men, not quite sounding himself. Also everything’s on fire.
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Nobody’s terribly affected by all this, only seeming to have noticed because Optimus pointed it out. He goes on to say that the Autobots share blame in the carnage before them, and that it was time for the war to be finished. The way he phrases it concerns Prowl a bit, Because he refers to the group as Transformers, but neglects to include himself in that group.
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Hot Spot’s been dying for over two hours at this point, he can’t possibly be doing THAT badly.
Optimus repairs him with no more than a tender caress with the back of his hand, because him being space-Jesus is becoming less and less of a joke as this story goes on. With that, it’s time for the Autobots to finish this thing.
Down below, Hound wakes up and frees himself from under that girder. Courier also wakes up, and Hound suggests they try to leave the chamber through the mouth of god. You know, where Starscream and Megatron are. But it’s not like they have a whole lot of options at this point, so they make their way over.
Inside the Cave of Wonders, Megatron’s taken the initiative and hooked his fusion cannon up to the nuclear power, and is ready for Starscream. Which is good, because here he comes!
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That would be the depression, Starscream. Don’t worry, everyone gets a taste of it when Roberts is at the wheel.
Megatron fires, and the resulting blast atomizes Starscream. I guess we’re just not gonna get to what his whole deal was in this.
Not that we’ll really have time for it anyway, because Megatron, in his infinite wisdom, accidentally set off the countdown to blast-off. Not your best work, Meg. Not your best work. He immediately jumps on putting in the cancel code, which is 7000 digits long. It’s gonna be close.
Because things aren’t going haywire enough already, Optimus has the sudden realization that Megatron isn’t here, and if he wants to do this right, he’s got to defeat the leader of the Decepticons. Using his magic- because it’s fucking magic, he’s got magic powers now- he locates Megatron.
Megatron’s nearly done with the code, and then he is teleported to Platinum Mountain.
Whoopsie doodle!
Because Optimus is about to doom everyone on Cybertron, Megatron starts screaming at him. Optimus tries to fix it, but it’s time for the consequence of his actions to come forth, as he doubles over in pain- soul pain.
The worst kind of pain there is.
This isn’t a metaphysical stubbing of the toe either- it goes on for a while. Things aren’t looking so hot for the Transformers right now.
Back in the Primus chamber, Hound and Courier are nearly through to the mouth, having cleared most of the rubble out of the way. When they get inside, it’s immediately obvious that things are about to go down if they don’t do something. So they get on doing something.
There’s a countdown within the narrative structure here, and it makes itself known every time something of note happens.
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Like right here: Hound just got shot as he tried to disable the countdown. Oh gee wiz, wonder who could have done that…
Courier, how does it benefit anyone, much less the Decepticons, to have these thrusters go off when they aren’t finished yet? Could this betrayal not wait a literal two minutes?
But I guess if you didn’t reveal yourself here, Hound could never find it in him to do the one thing he’s been holding himself back from.
Which is murder.
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But Autobots never, ever kill! Isn’t that right, Hound? Or, at least, it was.
Wait, no, Courier’s still alive. He tackles Hound, and proceeds to have his legs blown off. Again, Courier, like an actual minute. Just stop killing people for a MINUTE.
They both fire on one another, and Hound gets it in the chest. Courier gets an arm blown off for his troubles. Hound can’t even stand at this point, but he still manages to clamber up the control table towards a big, shiny, red button that just has to be the right one to press.
Except it isn’t.
Hound presses the button and the countdown just keeps going. While this horrifying revelation is taking place, Courier’s decided that what’s just happened is so embarrassing he’s going to kill himself in response. How’s he going to do that? Well, I guess the self-destruct code doesn’t exist here, because he’s decided to punch the glass housing on this nuclear generator.
There’s an explosion. That’s the end of Part 3.
None of that felt terribly awkward. More unfortunate than anything. But what do I know?
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thanksjro · 5 years ago
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Polyhex Wars, Book 2 Part 2: The Role of the Waifu This Evening Will Be Played by Ammo
Previously, on The Polyhex Wars…
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Hound and company have found themselves at a docking station simply awash with Decepticons and their pods, having just arrived on Cybertron from Autobot City, all of them complaining about how Optimus’ new powers totally kicked their keisters. Some of them are wondering just where Starscream got to.
Hound's eyeing a big ol’ ship, but if he wants it, he’s going to need to come up with some sort of plan. He comes up with one, and it involves Ammo because of course it does.
Hound has a small holographic projector built into his wrist, which can do small-scale holographs- nothing too crazy, but he can disguise himself long enough to get to that ship. From there, he’ll overload the power systems for this area, creating a distraction.
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You betcha, Buster Brown. Ammo’s role in this will require the use of his alt-mode. If you guessed that Ammo turns into a gun, congratulations! You’d be right.
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Carrying straps don’t exist on Cybertron, and it’s solely so folks like Hound can slap their crushes to their thighs.
Hound’s about to head off, when he realizes that Fistfight isn’t in his direct line of sight. Blaster, when asked why he isn’t doing the one thing he’s been asked to do, brushes it off, saying that Courier is watching him. Any way you slice it, this sounds like a horrible arrangement: either Fistfight’s about to get offed, or you just left a dangerous killer with one of the smallest members of your team. Blaster, what the hell?
While Hound and Blaster are hashing it out, Courier points out an alarm system. I give it five minutes before that thing gets pulled like a fire alarm in a middle school on a snow day.
Meanwhile, up above on the surface of the planet, the Autobots have landed and are currently faced with the enemy swarming up from underground in the thousands.
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Hmm, yes, I remember you.
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Roberts really enjoys massacring the polity of Polyhex. It’s probably because so much shit is just happening there all the time.
Obviously, Optimus isn’t having any issue in this fight, going so far as to save Trailbreaker’s hide via eye lasers.
Wonder how Red Alert’s team is doing.
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Not great, if that delightfully purple prose is anything to go by.
The Autobots are being loaded into those electric chairs we saw in Part 1, And Red Alert’s wondering how it all got to this point. Like, why the hell would Megatron had set up a throne in the underground pseudo-grave of their creator god? How was he supposed to figure that one out?
There’s this odd feeling of pride as nobody begs for their lives as they’re prepared to be electrocuted- at least they’ll still have their dignity, even if they won’t have their lives for too much longer.
Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, and Red Alert trade some Shakespeare-level insults with Megatron, up until he gives the order to kill the Autobots.
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Red Alert, why do you even know what sputum is?
Back over with Hound, he’s just made it past the guard at the ship, all decked out in a disguise that makes him look like the mid-90s punk scene chewed him up and spat him out. As he’s doing his thing, the sounds of the battle above start trickling down into earshot. Hound aims Ammo and gets ready to blast the ship’s generator.
Back where the Autobots are hiding, Blaster is once again not paying attention, not realizing that Bumblebee’s being held at gunpoint by Shockwave until the guy notices that he’s not being answered. Fantastic work, Blaster.
Blaster’s communicator goes off, which, really, is just too bad, because it alerts Shockwave to Hound’s location. He points his gun-hand at the ship and fires, blowing the whole thing sky high, probably taking a few of the nearby Decepticon guards along with it.
Apparently having seen too much shit today to even process the very probable chance that Hound and Ammo are now dead, Blaster snarks at Shockwave, ignoring the gun now being put to his head to get in kissing distance so he can punch the guy in the gut. Cover blown, Blaster orders his team to start kicking ass.
Back with Red Alert, the execution’s been postponed, because Starscream’s decided to crash the party. Red Alert manages to break free of his bonds as complete and utter chaos unfolds. Seeing as the two Decepticons are currently busy trying to kill each other, the Autobots decide to take their leave. Too bad reinforcements have arrived, shimmying down ropes in the hallway- and they’re not the kind they were hoping for.
Returning to the scene with Blaster, it’s real revenge hours, as the Autobots use the rage they’ve been saving up for the last several hour on the hordes of Decepticons that are just pouring into the room at this point. They’re so mad, when Blaster gets ahold of Skywarp he immediately goes NOPE and pops out of there.
Suddenly, the flaming crater that once was the ship reveals that the ship is fine, actually, with Hound and Ammo posing all badass on the hood as Hound starts shooting for the generator up in the ceiling. This turns the lights out, and when the emergency lighting kicks on, the Autobots book it to that ship and climb aboard. They’re leaving.
Up with Optimus, it’s Hot Rod time. After almost being blown up, Hot Rod reports that the Decepticons have deployed all of their troops- and he does mean all of them- and suggests that the Autobots do the same. Optimus says that they already HAVE everyone deployed, then in the same breath annihilates a group of ‘Cons with the wave of a finger. Do you really need more troops at this point?
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Guess Swindle’s inexplicable plot-armor didn’t grow in until 2001.
Hot Rod reminds Optimus that Red Alert and Hound’s teams aren’t currently up here fighting, as if they’re just sitting around twiddling their thumbs while all this nonsense is going on. Again, do you really need more troops at this point?
Skystalker has a ship floating above Optimus currently, and is about to try and bomb him out, when he too explodes. Then Snapdragon and Sky Quake explode.
Optimus likes exploding people. Nobody tell Hound, because I’m pretty sure that kills them, and that’s just NOT the Autobot way.
Hot Rod, much like everyone else, wants to know how he does it. Optimus reiterates that he doesn’t know, only that he’s been able to do it since he got back from Limbo. Saying it out loud gives him pause.
Optimus orders Hot Rod to go do a search and rescue for the missing teams, then disappears from this mortal plane. Hot Rod, having decided he’s got going to be the one to try and parse the mystical bullshit that Optimus seems to be dealing with currently, runs off to pull together a search party, only to be crushed under Skystalker’s ship.
Hopping back a whole two minutes in time, Hound’s firing the ship’s weapons through the Decepticon forces, being an absolute terror. Blaster’s trying to figure out just how they’re going to leave, seeing as their ship’s been damaged enough to not be able to go up. After a bit of banter, the Autobots notice something standing in the port menacingly. It’s a Decepticon Imperial Guard. The last time we saw one of these guys, it thought it was god and had to get smacked around by Nightbeat’s atheism.
Figuring the worst that could happen is that they all die, Hound whips the ship around and heads for one of the massive holes in the floor that connect to the thrusters stuck into Cybertron at present. They fall in, and since that explosion destroyed the windshield, they’re subjected to all the detriments of terminal velocity. Hound unstraps from his chair and floats up to the back of the ship to see if anyone can make forcefields.
Luckily there is a guy, and his name is Blocker. Blocker does his thing, and everyone braces for impact.
Blocker’s name was recycled in the IDW prose story Out of Bullets, which was a sort of deleted-scene story that connected to Bullets. In it, he was a member of the Wreckers, and ultimately was removed from the team after he was found chewing on a dead friend’s transformation cog. Hopefully he gets a little less of a gruesome characterization here.
Over in the Primus chamber, it’s 30 seconds earlier. Whether this means it’s 30 seconds before Hound’s thing, or 30 seconds before the two minutes we went back earlier isn’t clear. What is clear is that the Decepticon reinforcements are here for Starscream, who immediately shreds them like wet tissue paper. Even Megatron’s afraid!
Screaming for help as he’s pinned by Starscream, he immediately appeals to the Autobots’ better nature, saying that he’ll abort the Juggernaut plans if they stop him from being killed. Everyone is completely on-board to just let Megatron eat it.
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Everyone except Slapdash, for some fucking reason. The Autobots run after the little idiot, all of them jumping onto Starscream, instead of just grabbing their wayward moron and bolting for the exit. Predictably, this does nothing to stop the guy, who proceeds to throw all of them, along with Megatron, so hard off of him that they imbed into the wall.
That’s about the time that Hound’s ship crashes through the ceiling and crushes Starscream. Is it blasphemy or heresy when you destroy a religious monument? Because the Primus chamber’s been through the wringer at this point.
While all this is happening, Optimus seems to be having a spiritual journey of some sort, as he finds himself in Iacon, facing the Last Autobot, a guardian of sorts put in place by Primus himself to guide the Cybertronian race if needed. Optimus is kind of annoyed to have been pulled away from the battle, but hears the guy out, seeing as he seems to know what’s going on with these powers. Also, because he’s very large and intimidating, and brushing him off is probably a one-way ticket to robot hell.
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So, because Optimus somehow became the storehouse for an entire not-dimension, he’s going to die if he doesn’t pawn off these powers to someone even more powerful than himself. Which, you know, is probably going to be a little difficult, seeing as he’s Optimus friggin’ Prime. Optimus brushes this off, ready to get back to the fight he’d been so rudely removed from.
Back at the crash site, it’s time to count the dead bodies. We’ve got Flanker, Dipshot, Counterblast and Transit. Megatron peels himself off the wall and quickly returns with his reinforcements, who I guess were just kind of standing around waiting for their boss to give the okay. Maybe they’re vampires and have to be invited in.
Starscream digs himself out from under the ship, mad as a hornet. His face is missing, which is a fun thing. Megatron orders his men to fire on him, and Starscream just wipes the floor with them immediately. Megatron then attempts to ally himself with the Autobots, just as Starscream throws a girder and pins Hound and Courier, promptly knocking them out.
Up on the surface, Optimus Prime is posing on a mountain very dramatically as he summons his troops- quite literally. All those in the Primus chamber are immediately transported to the mountain, and with that all the Autobots are gathered in one spot.
And that’s the end of Book 2.
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