#that entire plotline is literally a reason i hesitate to recommend barber's part of the comics to any new readers

[lord-squiggletits]

Anyways. For all the aspiring authors out there, if you want to write a really epic and cool story where character agency matters and things happen as a consequence of people's actions, don't have the epic plot twist of your story be "this character who fucking died on screen in a very unmistakable fashion actually didn't die, he just went back in time to machinate the entire history of this story, literally everything that happened including major political/cultural revolutions was his machination, everything that has ever happened ever was his doing and btw he's the antagonist of this plot line again" because it's shit writing and it basically makes the entire storyline pointless.

Like, in a lot of my IDW OP posts I've harped a lot about character agency and how it's better for a character to have agency and be responsible for some bad things happening than for them to be responsible for nothing and be boring as a result, and it's the same principle here.

If you ass-pull such a massive retcon to the plotline of your story, making it so that EVERYTHING THAT'S HAPPENED is the result of One Guy in a convoluted man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man plot, then you're just going to render the entire storyline pointless to your readers because. Okay so if everything that's ever happened is this one guy's fault, doesn't that render the actions of every other character in the story futile? Like, sure they technically made all of their choices of their own will, but the entirety of history and the circumstances of the planet were engineered by this one guy and they were all just helplessly playing into his plans so like.... Doesn't that basically make everything that happens in the story pointless?

Like. Especially since in the example I'm vagueposting about (Onyx Prime = Shockwave in the OP series), a few of the fundamental themes of the entire story center around things like responsibility, privilege, the way that good intentions =/= good consequences, the way that personal bias can influence the way that people think. Not to mention all of the crazy socio-political things going on and the genuinely touching things like, idk, a miner doing his best to change the system of Fuctionism, or a veteran from Cybertronian pre-history regretting the fact that she participated in xenophobic genocide. The entire story of IDW1 is full of BIG characters with big impacts big responsibility for what happens.

And you're telling me that the best fucking plot twist Barber could come up with for this continuity is "yeah Shockwave didn't actually die (even though he got shot in the chest by two people at once and then sucked into a black hole and got no medical intervention whatsoever) he just went back in time and IN FACT ALL OF CYBERTRONIAN HISTORY HAS BEEN HIS MACHINATION" like. Okay I guess the Primacy doesn't matter because Shockwave machinated that for his own purposes, I guess colonialism doesn't matter because Shockwave machinated that for his own purposes, I guess Nova Prime and Galvatron and the Guiding Hand and all of them just went exploring/colonizing as part of Shockwave's master plan, I guess the corrupt Senate with all its cool/underappreciated evil Senators was just all part of Shockwave's master plan, Megatron's writing and the existence of the Decepticons trying to rebel against functionism was all of Shockwave's master plan, in fact literally every part of Cybertronian history and myth and culture was engineered by Shockwave for his own nefarious purposes!!!!!!!

And his purposes were pretty much....................... "because I wanted to be evil and make people give up on hope because I love chaos" like okay bitch then why did I even get invested in this entire years-long continuity if you were just gonna pull a "actually everything happened specifically because of this one guy" plot twist on me?

Like the Functionist Universe is annoying but at least it's an alternate universe whose existence doesn't retcon THE ENTIRETY OF THE CONTINUITY at the last fucking minute of the entire story years after the majority of the comics were written, come the fuck on.