#literally the next time we meet brig he's back to himself and the doctor's like

[moreaugriffins]

Y'all ever get frustrated at how a piece of media handled (or didnt handle) a specific thing, that you wanna write a fanfic on it because even your shitty little fanfic would be better than what the piece of media did?

Well I listened to The Scream of Ghosts the other day and OH BOY-

[thanksjro]

MTMTE #21:  The Sound of Breaking Glass, a prose story- James Did, in Fact, Put That Baby in That Robot

It’s after the fight with Tyrest and his goons, but before Cyclonus stabs Tailgate with a sword for medical purposes. The portal has stopped working, Skids isn’t making any sense, and Rodimus is about to do one of the scariest things you can do as an adult person.

He’s going to make several business-related phone calls.

Perceptor trying to be funny is the oddest take I’ve seen in a bit. I was completely unaware that he had a sense of humor.

Rodimus is looking pretty rough from that nonsense he pulled in the space-crucifix, but he doesn’t want to bother Ratchet, since Tailgate’s still looking like he’s gonna bite it at this point. Besides he’s still got work to do- he fully intends on getting the space bridge back in working order.

The bridge, unfortunately, isn’t making it easy for him; thing’s falling apart and bursting into flames at random intervals.

Rodimus wants to make the last few days at least somewhat worthwhile, a sentiment that Minimus catches onto, and doesn’t seem to agree with. What would it mean, if they were able to say “well, Tailgate, half a religious order, and the concept of trust in the law are dead, but at least we got to finish off our road trip in record time!”? Food for thought, Minimus, I’ll give you that.

Brainstorm runs through the room like a maniac, over the metaphorical moon about something, as he interrupts the conversation. Once he’s gone, Minimus asks about his outer shell, I guess because he feels naked without it. As he collects his belongings, Rodimus brings up their earlier conversation, and reaffirms that he wants to make up for what’s happened. Minimus acknowledges his words, but doesn’t really offer anything in return.

Back over on the Lost Light, we get subjected to a title drop.

Rung is meeting Fort Max in the hollowed-out remains of Swerve’s, because his office is full of corpses. This is a sort-of continuation of their conversation in the brig, where Rung forgave Fort Max for being a big part of why he got shot. They have a brief discussion about where Max’s head is at, and whether or not he’s ready to get back into the workforce after the nightmare hellscape that was Garrus-9. Rung seems to think that the fact that Fort Max is considering his mental health in the first place is a good sign, and offers his services should he be needed.

Too bad they’re going to have to tele-con, since Fort Max is being sent off the ship for his new job.

Over at Rodimus’ office, Rodimus considers hiring Atomizer to redecorate his pad- even though they seem to have very similar tastes when it comes to paintjobs- because he just isn’t feeling the sick flames and hot pink interior anymore.

I see Rodimus is taking the “no fun allowed” route to personal growth. Wonder how long that’ll last.

He has a think about the last conversation he had with Drift before he threw him off the ship, the memory laced with “Overlord murdered a lot of people because of me” guilt. Drift hadn’t been thrilled about the prospect of Rodimus’ inquiry, and made that much known, then volunteered to be the scapegoat. Rodimus hated this idea, horrified by the idea of letting Drift take the fall for him, after all the work he’d put in to try and be liked by people after the whole “Deadlock” thing.

Then Drift revealed that he’s got another reason for not letting Rodimus get kicked off the ship.

Back at Swerve’s, the man himself has made an appearance, interrupting the meeting between Rung and Fort Max, and proceeding to make a fool of himself by way of slapstick. It’s okay though, because he’s too high on actually feeling good about himself for once in his miserable life to feel physical pain.

Rodimus more or less insinuated this exact idea back in issue #17, and it made him so upset he was about to close his bar completely down over it. Good to see our robot Pagliacci bouncing back so nicely.

Brainstorm enters the scene like a vengeful spirit, and I guess Rung and Fort Max just disappear into the aether as he has a little chat with Swerve. Turns out that someone went and took a peek inside the super-secret, possibly-sun-destroying briefcase Brainstorm keeps on his person at all times, and he wants to know who. It was probably a little easier to swing than usual, given that Brainstorm had given up the springs on the clasps of the thing to help break everyone out of moon jail, and he probably had to take at least a little time to recover from his soul halfway evaporating out of his eyes.

Swerve makes a joke, because he has a lot of trouble handling serious situations, then we get confirmation that Brainstorm kidnapped a fucking zygote from the moon.

Brainstorm has a baby inside him.

James, I’m begging you, we can’t keep doing this.

Later, Ratchet’s checking on Tailgate after his stabbing/stabbing repair/cybercrosis cure injection.

Swerve what the FUCK do you think you’re doing with that medical biowaste?

Minimus comes in, looking very silly, as he’s having a heck of a time putting the Magnus Armor back on.

Minimus would like some help getting dressed, and, because clothes for space robots seem to skew more towards body parts than anything else, he’s come to the best doctor on the Lost Light.

(Nobody tell First Aid I said that. I fear his wrath.)

Ratchet is surprisingly handy with the Armor, and it’s revealed that he’s known about Ultra Magnus actually being a completely different, much smaller guy, since the very start.

As in, when Tyrest first started pulling this nonsense.

He didn’t say anything to anyone because he didn’t see the point, then lets Minimus know that he’s his favorite, which gives him a much-needed ego-boost. Minimus wanders off to go put the rest of his clothes on, leaving Ratchet to pull a body out of the morgue that isn’t dead.

Later, on Luna 1, we get to see Rodimus get bummed out about the baby moon not flaring back up. It’s not for lack of trying- he’s crawling around on the ground, rubbing his face in the dirt, all while Getaway watches- but it doesn’t seem like the babies are coming back. Getaway thinks it’s weird that it just kinda turned off, but then again this wasn’t exactly a typical situation, now was it? He tries igniting the Hot Spot himself, planting the first seed of his primus apotheosis diagnosis years from now, then asks our dear captain what’s next on the agenda.

Rodimus, saddened by the loss of literally a billion lives, shakes out his pocket onto the ground.

Don’t worry, the Matrix was in there, so it was totally respectful of the dead. Fort Max rides up, playfully threatening to arrest Rodimus for littering, and we finally get to know what his new career path is.

Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord.

Also, he brought a friend.

Red Alert, jumping right back into his work, has decided to stay with Fort Max on Luna 1, to chase bad guys and help the Circle of Light recover/prepare for attack. Then he tells Rodimus to turn his phone back on, because Perceptor’s been trying to call him for a while now.

Back at Tyrest’s sweet digs, Perceptor’s gotten the communications system working, and is ready to call Cybertron. Cybertron, who probably thinks they all died back in issue #1, despite Blaster’s best efforts in issue #13 and #15. Blaster did not help with this project, probably because he was busy getting his tiddy compartment fixed.

Perceptor dials, everyone wonders what Bumblebee’s been up to, they get their hopes up, and we get one hell of a reveal for anyone who hasn’t been following along with the sister series up to this point.

Ah, that’s right, I’ve got to do a lightning round for RID, don’t I?

In the Postscript of this prose story, we meet Outrigger, a member of the Circle of Light who will be established as a big honkin’ dork the more we learn about him. He’s just run into Red Alert’s office to tell him about Tyrest having moved. This is a very odd occurrence indeed, as Tyrest was shot in the spine, and should not be able to move. 

The two of them head over to where Tyrest is being held, only to find he’s disappeared from a locked room.

Well, shit.

[katieiscunning]

MTMTE 6: Bottle Episode Bad Decisions

This issue is so damn good guys.

And like, I completely forgot it after my first read through! I do not know what is wrong with me. It’s so, so good. Just from a narrative standpoint there are like three layers of story going on at once and it’s all character development centric and oh my god it’s so good.

Okay, okay. Recap.

Last week we met Fortress Maximus (Fort Max if you want to keep a straight-ish face), a traumatised Autobot who lets his PTSD anger out via violence. We open with him in therapy- and thank god that the Lost Light has a therapist because they all need help- talking to Rung about how he ended up in his coma.

The answer is capture and torture at the hands of Overlord, a bad, bad Decepticon who held Max and his team for three years. Max is the only survivor. 

His treatment is not going well. Max isn’t willing to talk about what happened to him, and doesn’t respond well to Rung telling him that it isn’t optional.

Meanwhile, in Swerve’s bar everyone else is being variously drunk and adorable. We have Tailgate trying to bond with Cyclonus, Chromedome guessing who’s who by the noise they make when they transform, Swerve getting arrested for running an illegal bar (Ultra Magnus had to find out eventually) and Tailgate asking Chromedome about him and Rewind. 

Which is exactly the sort of question you would definitely ask about best friends. They’re such good friends.  

But there’s only time for the quickest of flashbacks- to the exterior of something called a ‘Relinquishment Center’- before Fort Max comes in and shoots Pipes.

Max takes down another few robots (all non-fatally), then runs to Rung’s office- interrupting Whirl’s therapy session. 

It’s bad timing. 

With two hostages at risk, Rodimus is obviously concerned with the most important thing; Max getting his name wrong. 

To be fair, it is pretty stupid sounding. To be more fair god damn it, you are captain. 

Max demands that the ship go back to Cybertron- he blames  Prowl for taking too long to send help to his team and wants to punish him for it. Of course they can’t do that- they’re lost in space- and even if they could, Rodimus wouldn’t because he doesn’t want to. 

As he tends to the casualties of Max’s attack, Ratchet notices a pattern: they all look sort of like Overlord.

Back in Rung’s office, Max gets curious about why Whirl was there to begin with, which means, yes! It is time for a flashback. Like Max, Whirl has been uneager to open up (a parallel which is definitely deliberate because this issue is a masterclass) but after a threat to Rung, he starts talking. 

Whirl was kicked off the Wreckers, an elite combat squad, for attempting to mercy kill a comatose comrade (remember that theme of bodily autonomy for the ucoming paragraphs).  He reacted violently to expulsion, and now, in order to stay an Autobot he has to get treatment. He points out that he and Max are pretty similar (I told you I told you), which Max reacts poorly to.

Whirl, angry enough to willingly share, tells him what made him who he is. Quick answer: state sponsored abuse and mutilation.

Before the war Whirl was a watchmaker (no I don’t know why robots with internal clocks would need watches), a job which he had to fight to get: under the Functionist government, which the original Decepticon rebellion overthrew, everyone’s life was decided by what they turn into- a sort of extreme social stratification. With a flying altmode he should have been a pilot. By proving that his skills lay elsewhere he undermined their whole philosophy. In order to get rid of him, corrupt politicians destroyed his shop, forcing Whirl to live on the streets. There he got noticed for his fighting skills and was pressed into government service via mutilation: they removed his head and hands and turned him into the lightbulb-eyed bird shaped friend know today. This process is Empurata and it is only going to get more important from here. With nothing left of who he was or the life he worked for, Whirl turned into what they wanted him to be: a depressed, self loathing, self destructive, mentally dissociated weapon. 

These are comics about robots that turn into cars.

Rodimus finally has a plan. By chance, Swerve and Rewind are making up for past indiscretions (Swerve’s being running his bar, Rewind for having footage of executions on board- apparently for documenting) by preforming maintenance on the outer hull of the ship. Rodimus radios them, getting them to head to Rung’s window.

He orders Rewind to shoot Max, but Rewind refuses. I like this from Rewind, I like that he needs Chromedome and he isn’t afraid to be vulnerable, and more than that, I like that even after four million years of war he’s not going to blindly obey an order to kill someone. 

Ratchet contacts team Rodimus and tells them this whole thing has been about Overlord, and Rewind- who still has the execution footage, including clips of Max’s crew- plays it through the window. Max, traumatised, drops his gun and Rung calms him down with a hug and some comforting words.

Then Rodimus, who is again, The Worst Captain, orders Swerve to shoot Max while he’s distracted. Swerve does, misses, and hits Rung in the head. The doctor explodes, Max is even more broken, and just to ruin everything even more, Whirl gets up and stabs him. 

Later on, Fort Max is in the Brig, Rung is apparently dead (he’s not, this is a pretty shameless false lead, Roberts should have known better, etcetcetc), and Rodimus, ever ready to push on past his last mistake, is busy talking about anything else with Drift. He’s worried about Red Alert losing his edge, that his suspicions are getting out of hand, that he’s investigating conspiracies rather than protecting the crew. 

And, as he talks, we see Red Alert investigating the noises from below the deck… and finding a captive Overlord.

So this issue is narratively awesome. It’s called ‘Interiors’, which illustrates how much impact a decent title can have. With that name you notice the thematic links: the mental interiors explored in Whirl and Max, the constricting interior of Rung’s office. It’s a hostage story Matroyska doll: people held hostage by their pasts as well as literally, ending on that stinger of Overlord, portrayed as being so powerful and threatening, held prisoner himself. And what a way to establish a character before you introduce him! One of the problems with a franchise as massively peopled as Transformers is that you’d have to be reeeeeeally up on the lore to recognise every player. But Roberts brings Overlord in via character development for someone else, making his appearance at the end shocking, even chilling. After all, we know what he’s capable of now.

I’ve spoken a little about the treatment of mental health in this comic before, but this is the first issue to really get into it and I sort of love it? I love that Rodimus is the bad guy for taking violent action against someone who’s traumatised, despite the damage that trauma has caused him to do. I love that Whirl’s self-destruction and apparently random wackiness is contextualised as being sympathetic rather than just funny and ‘crazy’. I love that Red Alert’s fears are justified and that the people who think he’s ‘crazy’ are proven wrong. Is it great that they use Max’s trauma to hurt him enough to take him down? No. Is it great that he ends locked up in the brig, confined to another interior? No. But he’s alive and he’s humanised and that’s more than you normally get.

Goddammit this is a comic about robots that turn into cars. God damn it.

If I have one criticism it’s that it feels like it finishes too quickly. Like maybe we needed a beat of Rodimus deliberately not feeling guilty after all the damage we’ve caused? Instead it’s there, but only through implication right now. But then, what’s important here is the meat- the (don’t kill me) interior of the story. The bloody, violent end with Rung getting shot and Max getting stabbed is still effective in illustrating the way that violence and trauma cause more violence and trauma. Could Whirl have comforted Max instead of stabbing him? No, because he’s too broken himself. He’s doing what he’s been reduced to doing. Rodimus’ brisk response is just an expression of the same system of action first, care never that made this story happen to begin with. So the end, while fast, works with the themes.

...

This is a comic about robots who turn into cars.

Nick Roche is back on art this issue, and it’s far more noticeable than I was expecting. Not that it’s bad- Roche is talented and brings weight and dramatic detail to the book- but I miss Milne’s more expressive faces. It’s still really good looking though, so who am I to complain?

Next time I will be reviewing all 42 pages of the annual and it will kill me probably. 

You can get on this fun train by buying the comics over here: https://www.comixology.co.uk/Transformers-More-Than-Meets-the-Eye-2011/comics-series/7279?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC90b3BSZXN1bHRzU2xpZGVy

Written by James Roberts, Art by Alex Milne, published by IDW.