#since Megatron’s monochrome and all

[quibbs126]

So I learned about the character Dion properly last night and today (I saw him elsewhere before but I thought he was a character someone made up)

I don’t know if anyone else needs this context but I want to say anyways: from what I understand, Dion was Orion Pax’s friend who worked on the docks with him and Ariel in the g1 continuity, until Megatron attacked and shot the three down. Orion became Optimus and Ariel became Elita, but Dion was never spoken of again. Some people theorize he was rebuilt too, though again, it isn’t known if he was. The most popular theory is that he became Ultra Magnus, though Ironhide was another option, and series have teased the Ultra Magnus theory sometimes

I’ve also seen some people who know of him take the character and make him D-16/Megatron (including that someone), and I really like that idea actually

I have this idea now of after the three getting attacked, the Decepticons take Dion and rebuild him into a new powerful one, while Alpha Trion does the same with the other two. Maybe he did something that caught their interest, I don’t know. But they build him and make him a new Decepticon commander who eventually leads the faction. But also they wipe his memory and reprogram him, since he was more aligned with the Autobot side, so he doesn’t know his previous identity; he thinks he’s always been Megatron, or maybe D-16 if he had a fake backstory

So Optimus and Elita think that Dion died, meanwhile he’s Megatron and none of them know it. I mean they might figure it out eventually, for that angsty reveal (especially if there was romance involved in their prior life)

I think I’m enamored by the idea right now because it has the friends to enemies, but without the actual falling out that would come with that trope. I like having my cake and eating it too

Would this Dion Megatron have a turn once he realized what he is? Eh, depends on how much crime he’s done and how far he’s fallen. Though it leans on no because Megatron tends to be the leader of the Decepticons, and with that there is a lot of crimes to atone for. Would probably end up more a Senator Shockwave situation, but you could still spin it another way if you wanted

I don’t know, I’m thinking about it now. I don’t entirely remember my points since I’m writing this in Latin class

[decepti-thots]

Oh my god please discuss the sliding scale of personhood autobot vs decepticon in the Bay movies it sounds genuinely fascinating

Okay. So. Full disclaimer, it's been a while since I sat down and dedicatedly rewatched Bayverse- I keep meaning to and then getting confronted with the slap in the face that is actually having to do it, so. This is by necessity going to talk only in broad strokes, plus you should take it with a pinch of salt or ten since my memory is a crapshoot tbh. But hey ho!

The Decepticons are interesting because they move quite freely, depending on the character, film and even moment, between a wider range of 'is this a person?' compared to the Autobots. The Autobots have two main modes: people that are mostly comparable to humans (however flat and uncared for by the narrative) and beloved, domesticated animal (again: the boy and his car-dog thing, this is mostly just Bee's role).

The Decepticons might include depictions of them as, in any given film: a person who is thoroughly Othered from human people in some capacity, a monster, also some kind of domesticated pet or creature (spoiler: that's Wheelie), or something pretending to be a person. Let's go over some of why that is, and how Bayverse creates such a stark contrast between the two factions as compared to something like G1.

The designs are the most obvious thing to point to here. People often deride Bayverse's designs as universally incomprehensible, but this elides the fact that the Decepticon designs are very clearly intended to be more incomprehensible visually. They are often more alien, less humanoid or humanlike, and less conventionally appealing than the Autobots. Indeed, I've said before that I tend to prefer the Decepticon designs in Bayverse because they lean much further into the aesthetic of noise and weirdness, and this makes it feel more like a choice; but that's not a neutral coincidence! They are designed in ways that adhere to common wisdom about what makes a character design 'appealing' or 'unappealing', what is used to present characters as 'relatable' or 'not relatable' inhuman characters to an audience of humans with certain assumed biases.

Compare 2007 Optimus and Bee to Megatron and Starscream, for example:

Broadly speaking, OP and Bee, even with all the over-engineered noise of their designs, have clear, recognisable faces that draw your attention to the eyes. Optimus' design sits as the most humanlike, with Bee's divergence from standard human faces primarily drawing attention to his muteness (which we discussed previously) with the 'gag' where his mouth might be.

Starscream, meanwhile, is more obviously inhuman by a wide margin. He has a bird face- he is explicitly animalistic! Why doesn't Starscream mirror his G1 design even a little when OP and Bee do? Partly it's because one goal of the design choices here are to make the Decepticons seem monstrous in a way which more clearly delineates the two sides than the G1 designs do. Megatron is not nearly so specific in what he evokes, but looking at him side by side with the Autobot designs, you can see how it carries over. He is broadly humanoid but lacks a lot of the definition that gives Bee and OP a more humanlike apperance, in part due to how his being monochrome makes him seem less clearly in possession of a humanlike anatomy (Bee has pecs!), plus his eyes are small and set far apart in a way that evokes certain types of animal skull. And like. He's got "horns", haha. THAT TOO. Not subtle.

But Megatron and Starscream are both shown to be intelligent, of course. They speak, they communicate, they are not shown as beasts even as their designs evoke a more monstrous affect to distance them from our human baseline. They possess some degree of personhood in how they are presented (it makes for better central villains!). But it's a personhood a few steps further removed from human personhood than, say, Optimus'. The Decepticons have (scary, inhuman) people among them- but they are not exclusively, or even mostly, made up of people the way the Autobots tend to be presented.

Moving along the line. Another Decepticon is Wheelie, who is shown in a similar way to how Bumblebee is- like a kind of super-pet, the fantasy of having a cool robot who's smart enough to communicate with you but who is still, well, your pet. His design is obviously very far from humanlike, though as he's intended to be endearing (theoretically) rather than menacing, his design more like a harmless spindly bug than a 'monster'. Bigger eyes in a deeply inhuman face: that's not a person, that's a pet that can talk to you, the movie says! Imagine, a dog that humps your leg and makes really awful sex jokes. What a dream.

He arguably follows on from a template that Frenzy established the movie before, where Frenzy was presented like his undomesticated equivalent in this uncomfortable analogy. Their designs evoke similarly inhuman vibes, where the influence is insectoid and therefore unpleasant but not super menacing. Compare the slapstick way violence against Frenzy is framed versus how even unsympathetic characters like Starscream tend to be shown in fights- it's implicitly just not violence being done against a person as opposed to like... a cockroach that learned to talk. Again: he's visually further than any Autobot from human by a significant degree, and he exists on a different narrative level than Decepticons like Megatron. In universe, no difference; but to the audience there sure is.

Then we have the ones that are just... monsters of a very beastly variety. I'd argue Barricade in the 2007 movie fits this despite ostensibly talking and showing humanlike intelligence; he speaks very differently to like, Megatron, for example, all brusque repetition that doesn't evoke someone who's done more than memorize the question, and throughout his big 2007 setpiece he's then basically treated like a predatory animal; largely silent beyond his couple memetic lines, seeming too intelligent for his form at times when we see him in alt (his alt mode being so prominent in creating paranoia really mirrors the idea of an animal stalking its prey IMO, and how scared we are when animals seem to display uncanny-to-us intelligence and thought). Barricade is not a person to be fought, he's a hunting dog let loose, the framing suggests, and the goal is to put him down before he tears out your throat. He's a good example, I think, of a single character moving between modes within a single film. He has a brief moment of personhood (for gag purposes) but easily reverts to that predator-animal template. Decepticons can be wild animals too, then.

Even further along that axis is something like Revenge of the Fallen's Devastator. That's just a big scary monster, y'all! Look at it! RotF as a film is not interested at all in the implications that this is a combiner, let's be real, so we will also put that to one side and not come up with some bullshit about how 'maybe it's because he's a combiner', like let's be real guys, RotF isn't bothering with that thematic stuff. It's RotF, that movie is so goddamn dumb. Anyway. So this:

This is a monster, not a person; that face is a maw, not a face. Proportions are all weird and truly animal-like too. A speechless, destructive monster who exists less as a person to fight and more a natural disaster to resist; and another type of Decepticon that will not find an Autobot counterpart, because Autobots are people bar a couple domesticated exceptions, but Decepticons go all over the conceptual map, with this as an extreme!

And the whole idea that a Decepticon that is not a person might be mistaken for one is of course then used for horror at one point. When we see Alice the pretender, the fear comes from how convincingly she apes being what she is not: a human yes, but also a thinking, feeling person of any description. Her true form is partly creepy for having a bunch of unnecessarily humanlike features warped into something grotesque, and does not speak after she's revealed I think. My point is that the scary part of Alice is that idea of mimicry that can't be detected, and oh boy oh boy is there some fucking subtext to that scene we could read into it. By the way. Remember how there's an implicit dick joke and oh god RotF is a godawful film I hate it so much. I know you all know this, but I do. ANYWAY. I think she'll round out our trip down the 'scale' for now.

The above is in no way comprehensive (and leans real heavily on the first two films- there's actually potentially some interesting stuff about how Megatron, specifically, changes in how he is framed going on, and arguably becomes at one point the only truly personified Decepticon character). I haven't even found a place to get into how yes, the reproductive cycle stuff theoretically applies to all Cybertronians but is only ever shown when the Decepticons are doing it, and is notoriously weirdly animalistic and visceral; they have like, egg sacs, they have a very organic but very inhuman and upsetting life cycle thing going on with their babies and all. This is extremely scattershot! And missing stuff and possibly at points a bit off base because again, I'm running off my memory here. But I hope it shows a bit of how and why the spectrum of 'person or not' is a much broader question for bayverse Decepticons than Autobots, and how it often skews further to the 'not' side by a wide margin.

And it's also very all over the place in terms of the resulting implications. Some of it has its roots in very charged stuff; some of it could be read a multitude of ways! Where the Bee post is more clearly a matter of 'here is how casual ableist assumptions play out in Hollywood blockbusters without thinking', this is a wild combo of everything from 'here's how they reverse engineered transmisogyny' to 'here's why cannon fodder in dumb action flicks is designed like this so often'... but there, assumptions about 'appealing character design' are not politically neutral. (Take the old 'bigger eyes are always the more appealing option!' thing, that's a culturally specific assumption that has all sorts of follow on discussions about orientalism, for example.) The whole thing tends back towards something reactionary at basically every turn, though the 'what' might vary.

But ultimately I think the takeaway is: the bayverse films set you against the Decepticons not through obvious ideology- I doubt anyone got a coherent idea of their aims or anything out of the movies- but by sliding the scale down to 'not human' in many ways and letting our brains fill in the rest.

[quibbs126]

Wait, I just had an idea as I was laying in bed trying to sleep

So Optimus often has a trailer with him, since he’s a truck and all. Said trailer is usually a monochrome grey, and while its usage varies, in Earthspark at least it has a big gun and other weapons with it (at least I remember it having so)

So what if: Megatron was Optimus’ trailer?

Not like in any specific continuity, like he was at one point his trailer, but merely the idea of Megatron being Optimus’ trailer in some form

I feel like there’s something there, but maybe it’s just late night brain talking. But consider it

I don’t know the specifics of what I mean but here’s some ideas I was writing in the tags

Optimus and Megatron started out with this setup, aka Orion being the front driver while Megatron was the artillery back, up until their falling out and Megs presumably getting another alt mode

Megatron having to temporarily act as Optimus’ trailer for a specific team up scenario

Megatron being converted into Optimus’ trailer after either dying or being put in some sort of stasis like Omega Supreme

And I can’t think of any more. But listen my late night in bed brain might be on to something