#the background is ripped out of the first episode

[uinferno]

I've had this in the back of my mind for a while now and finally got around to cranking it out.

[sskk-manifesto]

Ep 6!!!

[lay-z]

Kinda kinky, but made it domestic and fluffy. (I guess, idk...) Also, very long for some reason, sorry. MINORS, DNI! 18+ !!! Pairing: F!Reader x Simon 'Ghost' Riley Warnings/Info: Established relationship; domesticity; fluff; consensual smut; masturbation kink; praise kink; some dirty talk; explicit language; cussing

It's Friday evening, barely past 8 pm, inside your apartment in the private 141 apartment complex on base.

After a late dinner – homemade lasagna with fresh ingredients, because you always thrive to get something proper other than MRE's into Simon's and your own system – you and your boyfriend are sprawled out on your large deep brown leather couch.

Cuddling, resting, and relaxing after a tough week of training and "important" briefings on duty.

The atmosphere is filled with contentment and coziness, while the delicious smell of lasagna and the fresh shower steam wafting into the open living space from the nearby bathroom, still linger in your shared apartment. The lights are off, except for the vanilla-scented candle you’ve lit on the white sideboard and the flickering lights of the TV screen illuminating the spacious room.

With the both of you now suffering from a food coma, Simon is laying on his broad back, taking up nearly all of the couches’ space. One muscular arm tucked behind his head on the armrest casually, the other hand playing with a few strands of your hair on the back of your head, his eyes half-lidded and glued to the large flat TV mounted on the opposite wall, currently playing the first episode of Band of Brothers, after you two had finally settled on something to watch – something you'd both enjoy.

Meanwhile, you're laying between his spread thighs, draped over him with your cheek resting on his lower stomach, your right hand rubbing slow, soothing circles over his lax abs with your flat palm and tracing the many faded scars while his tight black shirt is rucked up to his chest; his belly now slightly round and full, sporting a food baby, and thus not as hard and ripped as it usually is.

You can hear his stomach work as your ear presses against his pale skin, his gut already processing the food and sounding like a bunch of whale calls while his strong heartbeat fades into the background noise like a steady drum. It's an odd concoction of sounds, and you swiftly find yourself paying more attention to your boyfriend's bodily functions than your favorite war show playing on TV.

"What's so funny, eh? We're laughin’ at WWII now?" Simon asks eventually after your second quiet snicker to yourself, his deep voice sounding gruff and heavy with beginning fatigue, though it still carries that familiar dry, deadpan humor of his.

"Nope. Nothing," you reply with another breathy chuckle, patting and caressing his lower abdomen reassuringly. Perhaps a little bit too close to his crotch this time.

The sudden movement makes his muscles flex below your palm, and a low groan escapes Simon's slightly parted lips and both actions immediately trigger something within you, like a house cat being taunted by its owner moving their hand below a blanket.

"Don't... don't do that, luv," he chides you gently, cupping his free hand over yours to keep it still on his stomach, "Gimme another good thirty minutes, and I'll rock yer world." Simon tells you, stifling a yawn.

While he keeps your ministrations at bay with his mammoth hand, you prop yourself up on your other elbow with a small pout before you wordlessly begin peppering wet and hot kisses along his belly, down to his naval and lower abdomen, inhaling his masculine scent greedily while your nose nearly digs into his milky, scarred skin.

"Bloody hell, lass – don't, I –" Simon protests half-heartedly, sucking in a sharp breath, before another low groan slips past his lips as he shifts his body beneath you.

"Watch the damn TV and let me do my thing.” You mutter against his skin, though there is no bite behind your words, only teasing and affection – and burning determination. You two didn’t have any time nor strength for sex all week and you suddenly feel like making up for it now.

A low grumble vibrates in his chest in return and you know he wants to object again, but then he doesn't, because Simon is low-key just as horny as you are – he was just trying to be mindful, thinking you’re too tired to engage in anything sexual with him tonight.

"Always so goddamn bossy when we're alone," he mutters instead, clicking his tongue in mock exasperation, though a small smirk tugs at the corner of his scarred mouth.

“C’mere then, lovey,” he murmurs in his deep, gravelly voice, swiftly pulling his black T-shirt over his head and letting it fall down on the fluffy carpet next to the couch haphazardly, before he audibly pats his now bared chest in silent command with the hand that was previously tucked behind his head.

He needs to feel your lips on his first; ease in to this slowly before he might come too quickly; it’s been a week after all and Simon is only now realizing how tight his balls are.

However, you shake your head with a cheeky smirk, nuzzling the tip of your nose into the coarse dark hair of his thin happy trail, feeling his muscles flex at the sweet touch, before lifting your head to gaze up at him through your lashes.

“I wanna suck you off, baby. Can I?” You ask in a sultry purr, almost innocently, batting your eyelashes at him as you tug on the waistband of his grey sweats, pulling at it playfully before letting it snap back against his skin.

A rough groan escapes Simon as he watches you play with the thick hem of his pants and he already knows, despite his stamina, it will be a quick first round tonight; he’s way too sensitive and you know exactly what to do to drive him wild with lust. That familiar heat of arousal is already pooling into his gut and making his blood rush south.

“If I say no, what’re ye gonna do, hm?” He counters gruffly, biting back a sly smirk; his dark eyes fixated on yours, burning and molten and filled with desire and curiosity – because he rarely denies you anything, if ever.

“Maybe I’ll just do it myself,” he adds after a beat of silence, “Make myself feel good.”

Simon can practically watch how you process, assess, analyze his words in the span of mere seconds, but then your pupils dilate comically large, like a cartoon characters, and a foreign look appears on your face, one he’s never seen before. His heartbeat accelerates and he grunts lowly as you push yourself off his stomach to sit back on your haunches between his spread legs while the soft leather of the couch creaks and shifts as you move.

“Okay,” you retort in a breathy, deadpan voice, your eyes never leaving his, “I’ll watch.”

Simon instinctively shifts on the couch as well, propping his large upper body up in a reclined sitting position when he hears that you mean business. His dark eyebrows raise slightly at your unexpected reaction – the fact that his joke-proposition seems to excite you so immensely. His cock twitches and throbs inside his boxer briefs in return.

His eyes roam over your curves briefly, noticing how your braless breasts rise and fall with heavier yet slow breaths, nipples already peaking behind the fabric of your tight black crop top. You’re clearly aroused and Simon is sure he can smell you already, sweet, slick and warm and, most importantly, all his.

A pleased growl rumbles through his buff chest, until he remembers what exactly made you react this extremely.

"Yer into that?" He asks incredulously, brows drawing together in disbelief and curiosity, though if he's honest with himself, Simon is not surprised in the slightest.

You always encourage him to be more vocal in bed, make sounds, let loose. The dirtier, the better. Plus points if he sounds like a goddamn caveman claiming you; grunting and groaning in your ear while his fat cock is buried inside your tight cunt up to the hilt. You always love that.

"Yes," you answer curtly, squirming in your seat already. "I used to watch blokes jerk off and fuck their pocket pussies all the time on the Hub. Looked up the biggest, buffest lad and imagined you being the one doing it." You confess bluntly, a wicked smirk creeping on your lips as his big doe eyes grow even wider.

"Pff, seriously?"

Simon tries not to show it too obviously, but that is, hands down, the hottest and most flattering admission you've ever shared with him. Gods, he bloody loves your bluntness.

"Yes, sir." You nod enthusiastically while he snorts and rolls his eyes in mock annoyance.

You only ever call him Sir off duty when there's a deeper meaning behind it – a plan.

"So... you – you wanna see that, innit? Wanna watch me have a wank in front of you and look all pathetic while I could also just...fuck you properly instead?" Simon enquires with a hint of sarcasm, scratching the stubble at his chin as he studies your beautiful face appraisingly, still obviously hesitant about the whole idea.

"Uh-huh," You nod again, smiling at him with a certain twinkle in your eyes, like a child finally receiving a toy it always wanted but never dared to ask for. “Please.” You add for good measure, tilting your head to the side in a playful manner.

Simon quirks an eyebrow at you, his eyes flickering over your pretty features to make sure you're really not messing with him. He's never done that before; it has never occurred to him that anyone would want to see him do that.

Masturbating has always felt pathetic and awkward to him; it's a means to an end to him and especially those Combat Jack’s are the worst. Feel sad and horny, jerk off, feel sad and empty afterwards. Done deal.

But how can he ever deny you that particular pleasure when you've always been so good for him? So incredibly patient, caring, and loving despite all his flaws and issues; way before you've become a couple, even.

"Fine. I'll do it," he finally huffs gruffly, his own heart skipping a hard beat, his brows creasing together in a slight frown while he can't hide the obvious tent already sporting in the front of his sweatpants at the sight of your beaming smile and sparkling eyes after getting exactly what you want – again.

"But ye're not allowed to touch me...or yerself. Understood?"

Oh.

Your nostrils flare as you exhale sharply, drumming your fingertips along his clothed thighs as you narrow your eyes at him, pondering briefly.

"Yeah... okay... sounds like torture, but... the fun kind." You agree reluctantly, giving a small shrug, though you quickly notice that his strict order only fuels your growing arousal and excitement. It’ll be like watching your own personal porn after all.

Simon moves his knees then, a silent warning to get your hands off like you agreed to, and you retrieve your hands from his thighs with a tiny snarl that makes him chuckle darkly while you rest your palms on your own thighs instead.

“Be my good girl then and take yer top off, lovey. Show me yer pretty tits, yeah?”

Yet again, a violent shiver runs down your spine as soon as Simon gives you another order in that deep, gravelly voice of his and you don’t hesitate to obey his request – peeling off your tight crop top to reveal your breasts to him at once and dropping the piece of clothing next to the couch, your skin flushed with arousal and carnal desire for him.

“Like this?”

Simon hums deeply in approval, his pink tongue darting out to wet his bottom lip, like a wolf licking its chaps, while his whiskey-colored eyes darken and gleam an inky black as they drink in your gorgeous, bare upper body, now only illuminated by the soft candlelight and the flickering lights of the TV screen, still playing Band of Brothers. You look like an absolute goddess and his fingers itch to reach out and touch, flick his thumbs over your perky nipples just the way you like it, squeeze and grope your tits until you mewl with neediness.

But, alas, he doesn’t.

“Aye, just like that,” he grunts out, shifting and adjusting his position until he’s comfortable on the couch and has a good view on you. “Bloody perfect, you minx.” He adds thickly in a low murmur.

And then, without a further word, Simon finally hooks his right thumb into the waistband of his sweats and boxer briefs and tugs both fabrics down until the stretchy waistbands are snug taut below his balls, right at his taint, adding some pressure to the sensitive spot. He grunts when his large cock springs free from its confinement and rests on his lower stomach, a droplet of pearly pre-cum leaking onto his dark happy trail from his blushing tip, making your mouth water on sight and a breath hitch in your throat.

The musky scent of his arousal hits your nose, and it takes all of your trained willpower not to pounce on him. No, this is special. You can't ruin it with your impatience.

There's a slight grimace on his ruggedly handsome face when he simply grabs his shaft, then his right mammoth hand wraps around his girth completely. It almost looks painful to you, but Simon bites his cheek and fights the immediate shudder of pleasure running down his spine at his own rough touch, giving himself a few slow, tight strokes.

"You're a dry guy?" You ask curiously, scrunching your nose up in surprise. You always use some kind of lube when you give him a nice hand job.

"Huh? Yeah?" Simon's eyes flicker from his throbbing cock to your eyes, then swiftly back again, shrugging his broad shoulders before stilling briefly, then he clicks his tongue in annoyance.

Great, now he feels like he's doing it wrong; something he's been doing to himself for years. It’s not his fault that his calloused hands cannot compare to your soft ones anymore and that you’ve completely spoiled him with your gentle yet firm touch; you’ve utterly ruined him for himself at this point.

“Mhm,” you hum appraisingly, practically buzzing with pent-up arousal as you squirm in your seat between his spread legs again and feel the fabric of your thong rub between your slick folds and against your pulsating clit in delicious torture.

“Spit in your fist, baby,” you advise him then, your own mouth filling with saliva at the sheer thought, completely self-conditioned, “Enjoy it for me. Relax.”

Simon nearly groans at your words, but suppresses the wanton sound again, all to your disapproval.

“Fuck –“ He grunts through clenched teeth, nostrils flaring as he's already crumbling beneath your smoldering gaze and bratty pout.

The urge to just pinch your pretty nipples in retaliation and grab you by the nape of your neck like a disobedient kitten, only to make your plump lips spread and open up over his needy cock, is becoming more unbearable by the second.

Eventually, Simon lifts his right hand, because he does want to put on a show for you, and spits into his rough palm generously.

The sudden choked whimper that spills from your lips at the lewd gesture of his makes it all worth it, tough, and Simon lets out a guttural moan this time, when he cups his leaking tip with his slicked up fist and twists his wrist for more friction.

“This good enough for you, luv?” He manages to ask in between guttural grunts and deep, deliberate breaths.

Meanwhile, you don’t even know where or what to look at as your feral eyes try to drink in and process this whole scene in front of you – his flushed cheeks, glazed eyes, how his abs and the muscles in his chest and arms ripple and flex with each heavy breath and movements, the way he works on his long, girthy cock for you. It’s still such a rare sight for you – seeing him this open and vulnerable.

If Simon would let you, you’d record and safe all of it for later.

“Yes,” you breathe out in return, voice hoarse and thick with lust and need, utterly captivated and amazed by his performance. “God, yes, baby. You look so fucking sexy right now.”

Your praise sends a jolt of hot, searing pleasure straight to his cock while Simon keeps fucking into his rough fist and his breath stutters briefly as he tries to maintain his fervent rhythm, muttering curses under his breath.

When his head lolls back against the armrest while a husky groan tears itself from his throat and his hips buck up into his own hand instinctively, right in front of you, you have to take several deep breaths to keep yourself seated on your haunches and, simultaneously, from reaching out to him – even though it’d be so easy to just…join him, perhaps fondle his balls and increase the pleasure.

Letting out another whimpery moan at the thought, your own fingers are now digging into the fabric of your gym leggings on your thighs, fidgeting and twitching restlessly while you move and roll your hips desperately, trying to find some release as your soaked thong keeps rubbing your swollen clit between your folds.

Simon can already feel how pathetically close he is and he knows it’s only because you’re watching him wank off right now, enjoying it – and praising him for it in that tooth-achingly sweet voice of yours, too.

It usually takes him so much longer to cum on his own, no matter how blue his balls are, but this is different – a good kind of different, and the tension in his lower stomach continues to rise at a rapid pace while he can barely hold eye-contact with your mesmerizing eyes when you’re looking at him like that, all aroused and needy with lust.

“’m close,” Simon huffs out, sounding like an angry bull as he bends one leg and puts the other foot down on the ground for leverage, readying himself for the inevitable.

“Play with yer tits for me, beautiful,” he requests through his clenched jaw as he watches you squirm through heavy-lidded eyes, “Help daddy come.”

“Oh…Fuck…” you practically gasp out as soon as you hear him calling himself that, and your head tilts back slowly with a breathy moan when your hands roam over your bare stomach sensually, up until they rest over your heavy breasts. You begin toying with yourself for him, groping and squeezing the supple flesh, tugging on your stiff nipples and rolling the sensitive buds between the pads of your fingers, until you’re panting for him like a bitch in heat.

While you’re playing with your tits like he asked you to, like the good, obedient girlfriend you are, Simon’s free hand finds its way slithering up his taut stomach, up his heaving chest, until it wraps around his own throat firmly, blunt nails digging into his scarred skin, tightening just enough to feel his own strong pulse flutter and thrum beneath his fingers, while he keeps stroking and fucking his cock into his tight fist with shameless vigor.

You and Simon moan simultaneously then – you at the sight of him choking himself suddenly, without warning, and he, because of all combined sensations bullying him to his peak all at once.

Eventually, his loud breathing keeps hitching, the vein in his temple protruding visibly as he keeps his grip around his throat, and your lips part with a wanton moan as you watch him climax, squeezing your tits harshly, as Simon’s balls tighten, eyes rolling back and fluttering shut and he finally comes with a guttural groan, spilling his thick, white release into his fist until it leaks and drips out from between his rough knuckles, making a mess on his lower belly.

“Fuckin’ hell, luv –“ Simon curses with a low chuckle, and swallows hard, still catching his breath as he releases his throat and lifts his head up from the armrest to look at you, feeling somewhat sheepish all of a sudden.

“That what you wanted?” He asks sarcastically, his voice all wrecked and gruff as he gestures at the mess on his stomach with his clean hand while his body keeps shuddering with aftershocks.

You need a moment to find your voice again, your heart still hammering against your ribcage just from watching him get off while your core is still fluttering and pulsing with want and a desperate need for attention.

“Y-yeah,” you admit with a few tiny nods, still blushing with arousal after heaving a deep sigh, “That was…perfect. You were bloody perfect, honey.” You utter another praise and watch his cheeks tint with a blush.

“Tsk,” Simon scoffs, shaking his head slightly, completely blissed out of his mind, “You better shut it, lass, and help me clean up this mess.” He grunts dismissively, though he’s grinning proudly.

“Gimme ten minutes, lovey.” He remarks with a wolfish smirk, the innuendo clear as he doesn't bother to tuck his half-hard cock back into his sweats, after you’ve retrieved some soft tissues from the box on the coffee table.

Making him cum now merely opened the floodgates, like shaking a champagne bottle and pulling the cork recklessly; his hunger for you has only been ignited and, boy, he is starving again, though not for your delicious lasagna this time.

When you hold out the tissues to him with an amused look, Simon grabs your wrist suddenly and hauls you on top of him again, up to his chest this time, wrapping one strong leg around your body securely to keep you caged in before he cups your cheek with his cum-slicked hand and finally captures your lips in a deep, sloppy kiss.

He knows you don't mind the mess.

[acstation206]

I messed up. /j

Introducing...

THE AMAZING DIGITAL ARCADE PARTY!

Yeah, that's right, I caved in.

Basically the exact same show except its established lore and setting is more largely inspired by archive compilations of popular vintage arcade games of the 80s and 90s such as Pac-Man’s Arcade Party, as well as the different takes within the sci-fi / fantasy genre by the likes of Wreck-It Ralph, Tron: Legacy, and Infinity Train. 

==

= BACKGROUND (in a nutshell) 💿 =

In an attempt to save their dying business, C&A developed and manufactured the first hybrid arcade game of its own kind that combined other popular arcade games and home console games with virtual reality. However, just as the company’s luck was turning around, numerous lawsuits from game companies by the likes of Nintendo and families were filed against the company for their product, from apparently “ripping-off” Super Mario Bros. in its entirety to causing many children to either inexplicably fall unconscious or suffer from amnesia after the cabinet’s headset was put on. Just then, as C&A announced they’ll be temporarily recalling the product to fix its issues, a shocking discovery was already made by investigators that would soon bring the company to its demise: the game’s AI had gone rogue, and once a human mind dies from losing one of the games in any way, they are either permanently reincarnated as a personified cartoon character of themselves or just straight up die in real-life depending on the outcome.

==

= ART N’ STUFF 🎨 =

(might wanna make a separate masterpost for that in the future but oh well)

NES Ragatha

Pomni and Caine redesigns

==

= Q&As and BOUNDARIES (sort of) 🎙��� =

"Are there any plans to make a full webcomic out of this?" - Uhhhh, mayyybe? I'm not entirely sure, honestly. While there may be a few side comics and artwork from my head I want to get out sometime, I don't really have much plans for this AU that'll be worth telling a full story right now since I feel there is plenty of things that I've yet to figure out and develop in a matter of time, particularly the setting and characters (especially considering the OG show itself has only 2 episodes out as of writing and I only have mobile apps like ibisPaint X to make this all possible at the moment).

"Can I make fanfics and OCs for this AU?" - Of course! I've seen a lot of incredible things from the community, especially in regards to alternate universes, so you're absolutely more than welcome to share whatever's on your mind as long as your heart's in the right place. I can't really guarantee I'll see every bit of it since I do have some personal biz of mine to take care of at any moment, but I'll be happy to reblog them whenever I get the chance. Just tag me and we all good. :)

"Are there any canon ships in this AU?" - Yes. Yes, there are. Well, only BunnyDoll (Jax x Ragatha) to be specific. HOWEVER, you are free to ship whoever you want here! Showtime (Caine x Pomni), ButtonBlossom (Pomni x Ragatha), it's all okay. The choice is yours, a romantic buffet! (Plus, depending on the quality of my writing, I'm not even planning to dwell too much into it for now, aside from the side comics that will.)

==

That's all for right now. Enjoy! :)

[midnight-els]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the West Wing would have been even better if they'd had a White House cat. Some headcanons bc I was thinking about it today:

Jed gave the cat a very grand, biblical name. Everyone else has shortened it to something very stupid.

Obviously all of the press and the public adore the cat. There's a minor upset in a polling themed episode when Joey confirms that once again the cat has higher approval ratings than the president. Josh is cross that they are polling on this at all.

There is one chair in the Oval Office that is The Cat's Chair. The staff know not to sit there as you'll get a. covered in fur and b. screamed at by an irate cat trying to force you off. They never warn any of their least favourite congresspeople about this.

The cat wanders around in the background of episodes, often being chased or petted by the extras.

The cat is not allowed in the situation room. The cat is always in the situation room. They had to come up with a special bug detecting protocol for the cat in case anyone tried to take advantage of this.

Ripped from the headlines plot about a congressional investigation into something related to the cat, based on the incident about Clinton's cat's postage.

The cat LOVES Air Force One. The Secret Service do not love having to get him on board or captured to get back off.

Leo and the cat are best friends. They're basically this meme. Leo's the grandma. Jed is the mom.

Aside from Leo, the cat loves the secretaries best. They always have lots of treats for him in their desks. Debbie is the only one he doesn't get on with; she has resorted to using a plant mister to spray him when he tries to get on her desk.

Josh thinks he and the cat are archenemies. The cat hasn't paid more than 2 seconds notice to Josh in his life.

CJ and the cat are archenemies. CJ was very pro-cat until she caught it fishing in Gail's bowl one day. Now she's at war to keep it out of her office. She's still trying to convince Danny to write a piece exposing the cat's dark side to its adoring public. Carol is very tired.

Sam wants so badly to be best friends with the cat. The cat thinks he's trying too hard. Will ends up exactly the same way.

Toby and the cat have never properly interacted and both are very happy to leave it that way.

The cat is supposed to stay in the residence during big events. Abbey stopped enforcing that after he got out and scratched Lord John Marbury when he picked him up against his will.

The cat has a secret service code name. One time, the code names are changed and an overenthusiatic reporter tries to break a story on the first lady's 'unusual activity' by following what he thinks is her code name. It's the cat's. CJ dines out on this for weeks.

The cat occasionally goes missing. The secretaries and Charlie have a recurring B-plot where they have to go and recover him. Somehow, the cat has always ended up somewhere relevant to the A-plot.

The cat properly goes missing after the incidents with the Thanksgiving turkeys and the goat in CJ's office (aka prime cat territory). Each time she claims she'll be nicer to the cat when it returns. Each time it lasts about two days.

Margaret thinks the cat has psychic powers and frequently provides warnings based on her interpretations of 'the signs'. Usually she's right.

The cat somehow makes off with the final edits for the state of the union one time (of course they were only handwritten on one piece of paper). Chaos ensues.

Jed tries to send the cat to Manchester partway through the series. After large-scale outcry from the staff, press and public he is returned to the White House. Unfortunately, after a couple of months as a barn cat he is even more badly behaved than before.

The cat is in both Jed and Abbey's official portraits.

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskyist, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[hminnj]

Unckuna/reader (he's very dear to my heart), mostly uncle nephew banter tbh, i needa get dividers lowkey, very short lil drabble

-

Sukuna thinks he's lost his mind.

He means it figuratively, obviously. But at this point he's sure he should've physically lost it already.

His nephew- of which he is currently babysitting- is currently on his couch, not a care in the world, half empty family sized bag of chips that was unopened not too long ago (fatface), kicking his feet like an adolescent boy in love, greasy fingers on the remote, and scrolling through youtube shorts on the tv???

Oh and worst of all he forgot to mention, the brat is wearing shoes.

The fact that he's even related to this thing makes him want to kill everyone else in the room and then himself.

"Itadori Yuji..." Sukuna seethes, it takes everything in him to not rip the brat's skeleton right out of his skin. He thinks it would be easy, if only a certain three people would let him (a shame, truly).

Yuji spares him a glance (the disrespect).

"Oh whats up unc"

"And what do you think you're doing?" The older of the two walks over and blocks the view of the tv, glaring down with his hands on his hips.

Yuji stares for a moment before opening his stupid food hole (as Sukuna describes it), "Have you ever seen that one meme, no one looks good from below? Well you're the version where they-"

Sukuna promptly picks him up by his foot, shaking him as a few chip bits fall off Yuji's shirt, "I literally just cleaned the house you freeloading fiend. Have you seen what a mess you've made?"

"You clean the house everyday you freak. Now put me down! I swear I was gonna clean up afterwards anyways." Yuji attempts to wiggle his way out of Sukuna's grip, he gets nowhere (predictably).

"Brat. You don't even know where the vacuum is, were you planning on picking them up one by one?"

"Ugh you're such a housewife, if I didn't know any better I'd assume you- MMM"

The sound of the code being put into the front door quickly stops Sukuna who shoves his free hand into Yuji's face, effectively shutting him up as well.

Sukuna grins when he sees you walk in, holding Yuji as if he were a first place catch for the annual bass fishing competition.

The sight makes you pause and contemplate your life decisions.

"Sukuna... put Yuji down, all the blood's rushing to his head."

Yuji is dropped immediately.

"OWWWWWWWW"

Your eyes trail around the living space and then back to the two children, "Does someone want to explain what's happening? And why there are shoe tracks in my house?" You make eye contact with your husband (who practically regresses 15 years in age when your nephew is around), he looks at you then uses his middle finger to point at Yuji.

Said boy, still recovering on the floor, whines, "Mann why can't I have a cool wine aunt and normal uncle?"

"Yuji if I were a wine aunt I wouldn't even be your aunt. Now are you gonna clean up this mess or should I make you?"

"On it! Whatever you say ma'am!" Yuji scrambles away after saluting and then pops back up from the hallway, realizing something crucial.

"Where are the cleaning supplies again?"

You sigh.

.

Yuji's finished with cleaning when he joins (intrudes, in Sukuna's words) you and his uncle on the couch, another episode of criminal minds running in the background.

You've changed from your work clothes into something more comfortable, snuggled into Sukuna's side as you start, "You know, if Spencer existed in real life I'd consider leaving you for him."

The tattooed man can only cringe in disgust at your behavior, "We're literally married, woman. You would leave me for that??"

He gives you and the tv an incredulous look. You can only giggle at his reaction, "You're like a child sometimes." His disapproval worsens, and you consider continuing to tease him but go with your better judgement (before he decides not to cook dinner, even though he always does anyways).

"I'm sorry hubby, forgive me?" Sukuna scoffs but accepts the affection anyways, he always does.

Yuji's voice interrupts the moment, "Ew you guys are so nasty (his parents are way worse), but speaking of children... when am I gonna get a cousin?"

The young boy can only watch as you two glance at each other then back at him, casually dropping an "Oh, Soon" then moving on completely. It takes him a second to process.

"WHAT."

-

unckuna my love

reblogs & comments are greatly appreciated :]

thank you for reading, have a blessed week

not fully proofread or edited

[noctxj]

hanahaki disease “… in which the victim coughs up flower petals when they suffer from one-sided love. It ends when the beloved returns their feelings, or when the victim dies…”

part i / part ii / part iii / part iv

˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚. ˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚. ˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚. ˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚.

agent who slowly withdraws from poly!tf141 after the first episode of bloodied flowers (realising they’re in love), from declining offers to relax in the rec room, accompany them to the local pub, or even working out in the gym to sparring.

agent knows that they’re not being subtle, see’s the guys try and figure what is going on with them. but agent refuses to let them find out—never.

agent who finally manages (after ensuring they wouldn’t hack up another flower) to file a notice, a formality really, to john— captain price, for their absence in the oncoming month or two. as there are no current operations needing agents’ immediate attention, its an opportunity for agent to get their other affairs in order after months being on base with the taskforce. 

john— captain price, briefly glancing at the document before focusing his ocean blue eyes to search agents (tired) face, a frown creasing between his full brows.

pleasedontlookatme—

whatdoyousee—?

the captain getting up from his seat to circle around his desk to stand before agent, his scrutinising gaze trying to catch agents downcast eyes.

pleasejohndont—

“this wouldn’t be about you pulling away from us recently hm?”

bullseye— 

agent could feel a thorn piercing the walls of her throat, their jaw tightening in response. a reaction john notices, his face softening as he reaches out to tip agents chin back to finally see his now gentle imploring eyes.

soblue—

“just don’t forget to come back to us, okay little love?”

little love. a pet name that simon (proudly) started to refer to agent amongst the taskforce (and no one else, lest they meet ghost in the middle of the night) while the others also followed suit—

“or would you rather shorty? or tiny even?” simon had smugly responded after seeing agents offended (blushing) face.

ugh that big oaf of a man, not everyone needs to be the size of an industrial fridge—!!

johnny and kyle chortling in the background, seemingly forgetting they’re suppose to be supervising the recruits’ training.

the pinch of another thorn dragging up their throat throwing agent back into the present.

“of course, captain.”

lies.lies.lies.

⋆.✧̣̇˚.

agent whose kept a mental list of contacts who owe them favours, a debt that is finally being repaid: to find a cure for hanahaki disease. from the highest level of power and prestige in society, to the lowest trenches of the underworld. over the course of a few weeks, one by one, each contact falls short of delivering. but agent keeps digging. keeps searching.

there is never nothing. there has to be something somewhere. someone must have at least thought— until finally a contact (old friend) provides them with a lead. 

a doctor whose dedicated their life in medical research of hanahaki disease, searching for a cure— whispers that there is a cure. they’re located halfway across the world. but that doesn’t matter to agent, they’re leaving within an hour; flight booked and travel bag already packed.

washing the remnants of blood down the sink drain, tears wet on their cheeks. the episodes were happening more frequently.

agent is running out of time.

⋆.✧̣̇˚.

“… it can be cured through surgical removal, but when the infection is removed, the victim's romantic feelings for their love also disappear…”

agent feels drained as the doctors words echo in their mind even hours after agents abrupt appearance in the doctors office. one look into agents (desperate) eyes and the doctor already knew why they had come, offered tea to soothe their throat (wash the metallic taste away, even if temporarily).

agent immediately coughing out both the tea, then one bloodied rose— then two— three— and finally four, as agent reaches to rip the tangled thorns from the back of their throat, ignoring the screaming pain of thorns dragging out of their mouth and past their stinging pale lips. 

the doctors face stricken with worry and sadness, trying to wipe the blood from agents face and hands; disposing of the thorny flowers in a sterile bin. the doctor concluding that agent does not have much time to deliberate if they wish to proceed with the experimental procedure. an incredibly invasive surgery that may not completely cure the victim; follow up surgery’s may be required. 

being split open from larynx to diaphragm, sown back together, only to be split open again if a single flower is coughed back up.

agent acknowledges this. pain is pain after all—

whats more to add to the pile?

˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚. ˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚. ˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚. ˚. ✦.˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚.

tric’s notes

added some dialogue in this part compared to the first part. unedited, also like the first part. i know nothing about the complexities of surgery (google images my saviour) so don’t try to make sense of it haha.

thanks for reading!! ♡︎♡︎

crossposted on ao3 (same username!)

[daughterofyore]

George and the Pond.

King George x f!reader

[[Queen Charlotte (Netflix)]]

category; heavy smut, fluff, angst (lil bit)

wc; 2,249

music inspired;- apocalypse

a/n:: George has a manic episode by the pond, you manage to calm him and he’s so thankful for you he fucks you to show it :)

TW!: NSFW, George porphyria episode (Venus), heavy smut, breeding kink, Good ol fast sex

Venus begged George to find her. She pleaded with him to search, to save her. She was his one true love. She needed him! He ran through the palace grounds, in the distance behind him there was a cacophony of shouts, someone begging for him to turn around. It was Venus’ ex lovers, surely. They didn’t understand the love they shared, the adoration of their coupling. Her beautiful, pale skin and blemished face. Glowing like a fading star against the ebony blanket of the night sky. An infinite amount of white blazing stars surrounding her like a halo in all her glory. Oh, how he longed to be by her side. How he dared to get closer to her. He needed to feel her glow upon his skin, so without a moments hesitation he ripped his clothes from his skin. Silk pyjamas made of the finest lapis lazuli blue discarded into the mud of the pond. He raised his arms to her, crying for her to join him on this mortal plane. For the goddess of love to bless him with her prowess. He could feel her compassionate deposition seep into his very pores, touching his bare, sculpted body. Casting shadows along the dips and ridges of his muscles.

“George!” You cried out to him, watching as he bared his body to the entire garden. Reynolds raced ahead of you, reaching before you could. You were still adorned in your glittering evening gown. Made of a deep fiery scarlet, as if it was made of the last embers of a great fire. Silver lining cascaded down its centre and bodice, elaborate lace adorning the contrasting peachy cream underskirt. It flew around you as you gathered the skirt into your arms, heels clicking off the cobbles and then sinking into the finely kept lawns. You stumbled and struggled to reach your husband, you could see his eyes glistening as he stared at the planet Venus. He cried of his love to her, his devotion. How is it I don’t receive that love? You scoffed, a moment of clarity as you were still unsure as to why he acted this way. You had suspected it for some time now, his comings and goings from Kew. The secrecy surrounding him and the protectiveness of not only Reynolds but his mother too.

Your voice was like an arrow through the fog, piercing the hazy clouds in his peripherals. Venus seemed to fade into the background as he spun to look at you. You weren’t Venus, you were you. Shining brighter than she ever could. As he watched you approach, the sparkles glittering from your dress enraptured him. He felt himself falling in your direction, before a voice called him to turn around. Venus, competitive as always. She challenged you for his attention. He laughed incredulously, how lucky was he to be fought over by the Goddess of Love and her rival? Reynolds stood at his side, begging helplessly for him to return to the castle. He gathered his clothes in his hand, looking at him with a pleading gaze. Continuously he requested for the King to go inside, tried to reason with him. You knew you had never seen this before but maybe, just maybe he would recognise you.

You reached his side, letting go of your dress. It fell on his feet and pressed into his calves. He turned to you, eyes wide, hyperventilating. “You won-“ He whispered looking at you, as if it was the first time he truly saw you. He turned towards the sky, laughing. “You lost Venus! Imagine that!” He returned to face you but upon seeing your worried expression, his celebrations halted. “How come you are not happy? You have won, have you not?”

“George, it’s time we go inside now.”

“What, why? The night is beautiful we-“

“George, Venus has lost this game but I would prefer to celebrate with you indoors.” He stood very still for a moment, dark brows scrunching together as he tried to concentrate and discern exactly what you were implying. His brain felt jumbled, mixed and confused. Like he wasn’t allowed to understand, as if there was a black alabaster wall separating from the here and there.

“I wish to stay here. Let’s celebrate here.” You paused and gazed at him, studying him carefully. You spun to Reynolds.

“Cover the windows and leave his clothes here. Ensure nobody enters these grounds or can see us.” Reynolds pressed his lips into a thin line before muttering a ‘Yes, your majesty.’ He left, grabbing Brimsley by the elbow and guiding him indoors. You turned back to George, your husband. Your king. You rested a gentle hand on his chest, and he stilled. He sucked in a devastating shaky breath before raising his arms to hold your shoulders.

“You, you saw- oh, wife I- oh I am so sorry.” His eyes began to water, a new clarity crossing them. His face slackened, now an evident frown replacing his once maniacal smile. You hushed him, gently guiding him to your chest as you snaked comforting arms around him. You held him in your embrace, rubbing soothing circles on his back as he let silent sobs escape him. He sniffled, clutching onto the fabric of your dress as he eventually sunk to his knees. “My dear I am so sorry, I am sorry I have avoided you. That I have tried to hide I-“ He couldn’t get his words out but you put a comforting hand on his head. Intertwining your fingers with his brown locks, you gently massaged his scalp.

“Do not apologise George. I understand you. I am here for you. Come, let us lie and look at the stars together.” You smiled at him, holding his hand and laying on the lawn. He tentatively lay beside you, he finally noticed his nakedness and his hands rushed to cover himself. You once again shushed him, grabbing the many layers of your skirts and draping them across his waist. “No need to worry about what I have seen before darling.” You chuckled, trying to lighten the mood. He smiled, sucking in a breath after as he looked to the sky.

“I could be married to a pompous wench right now, who wouldn’t give a damn about me. Who would run in the opposite direction if she saw what I did tonight..” he turned his head, gazing at you. You met his eyes and smiled. “Yet you stay, you lie with me. Why?”

“I believe I see myself in you. Trapped, misunderstood.” You took a shivering breath. “Sometimes all we need is a little kindness and a show of stability. I wish to be that for you.” His eyes began to glaze, he sucked in his bottom lip as it began to quiver.

He turned on his side, a new light coming to his eyes. Slowly he raised a leg to bend at an angle across your thighs. Bracing himself on an elbow he gazed at you. His face inches from you. “I do not know what I have done to deserve a woman such as you.” Slowly he lowered his lips to yours, kissing you softly. You reciprocated it, lips merely mingling before he slipped his tongue across them, asking for entry. You obliged, parting your lips as his tongue slipped by. He licked the bottom of your teeth, before dancing around your tongue with his. He sucked on your lip, biting it gently and sucking the sting away. You gasped, a hand travelling up his side. You could feel his muscles shiver at your touch, he manoeuvred over you, straddling your hips. His cock pressed against your stomach, hardening. His hands travelled up your sides before reaching your breasts. They were secured behind the corset of your evening gown, yet he managed to push a hand down its front and grope one. He massaged it in his hand, loving the mass and softness of it. His kiss deepened, he peppered them along your jaw and to your collarbone. Reaching your cleavage he looked at you mischievously, recalling his hand and replacing its absence with long, sensuous licks across the top of your breasts. His tongue travelled over them, then between. He licked up from your cleavage to your throat, to your lips. Kissing you again before he backed down, grabbing your skirts.

“And I you, my queen.”

You were breathing heavy, barely able to control the growing heat intensifying between your legs. A steady throb as it begged for attention. Your core tightening in angst of what was to come. This was what your wedding night should’ve been, but you didn’t care. This, this was better. Laying on the cool grass beneath a bright moon and stars that reflected off of a still pond. This was bliss. George hiked your skirts up, laying them across your midriff. He bowed down again, grabbing your pantyhose and pulling them down to expose bare thighs. He looked at you over the mound of skirts, smirking. “Are you alright my love, may I continue?” You nod, breath escaping you. You peered up at the stars between the foliage of the cherry blossom tree. George dipped his head between your thighs, gently pushing them apart. He kissed and nipped at the sensitive skin, licking the sting away again once more.

Agonisingly slow he made his way to your centre, licking over the underwear covering you. He raised a hand, rubbing a finger between your folds and feeling the wetness seep the fabric. He grinned, pushing a finger into you and watching you arch your back. He kept the underwear on, watching you squirm as he teased you. Ever so slowly he retracted the finger, dragging it up and pressing it to your clit. Your juices soaked the fabric now, it clung to your very shape. You jolted at the contact, the pressure on your clit making you pull away. He grabbed your left leg, putting it over his shoulder and gripping your thigh to hold you in place. He spread you with a knee, continuously exploring you over the whimsy barrier of your panties. You moaned, trying to move but he held you firmly in place. “Are you ready wife? Ready for me to take you?” You nod feverishly, his ministrations have built a fiery ache in your core. Begging for his attention. Your cunt wept as it pleaded for him to enter it, to give it attention. George smirked, gently taking your hands and pulling you up. He stepped behind you and made short work of the lace up your back. He quickly pulled the dress off, then the undergarments until finally you were bare before him. He smiled, standing back and admiring you. “My beautiful wife, in all her glory.” His eyes were ravenous, without a moments hesitation he was back between your legs. He kneeled, grabbing your hips he hoisted you into an awkward position, your legs dangled above his shoulders while you lay only on your shoulders and head. He held you in his grip, his lips placing tender kisses across your cunt. He licked, slow as of tasting your every essence. His tongue slipped into you, to which he began to lick inside you. He left it begging for more and turned his attention to your clit again. It throbbed for him, and he knew it did. He wrapped an arm around your leg, balancing your ass against his chest as he spread you with two fingers. He began to taste you, sucking on your clit. He nipped it, sucking it better straight after. You squirmed in his grasp but he still held you firmly, refusing to let you move. He lapped at your pussy like a thirsty dog, drinking you up. He turned his attention back to your clit, sucking intensely on it. You moaned, cried out his name. He seemed to only grow more excited and you could feel his length pressing into the small of your back. He sucked, and sucked, and sucked until finally the growing tension ruptured. You screamed his name, yet he continued to suck and lick you through the orgasm. You were trembling at the end, and he lay you down, kissing your stomach. He looked up at you as you threaded fingers through his hair. “I’m going to put a baby in you, my queen.” He smirked and you swore it nearly undid you again. He sat back on his knees, his cock long and hard as it stood. He grabbed your hips, pulling you towards him. He grabbed his dick, rubbing it’s tip along your slit. He pressed a firm hand down on your stomach as he slowly pushed his way in without any warning. You stretched, moaning around him. His sheer size pushing you close to ecstasy.

Once he was in he let loose a shivering sigh, looking back to you. “Are you alright my love?” You nodded, placing a hand on his as it pressed into your stomach. He could feel the faint mass of his cock in you, it turned him on even more. Slowly, he pulled out and pushed back in again. Keeping a slow and steady rhythm till you had adjusted. Once he could feel you relax, he began to pound into you. Growing in intensity. Gasps of air escapes him each time he fucks you. You were a moaning mess, barely able to breathe. Your breasts bounced up and down at the ferocity he pounded into you. His balls clapped off your ass, sounding through the garden. You felt like you were in heaven. He looked up at you and grabbed one of your breasts, squeezing it. He pinched your nipple, pulling it slightly as he fucked you. You were in ecstasy. Every inch of your being burning, yearning for his touch. He grabbed your hips, spinning you around to be on all fours as he stayed inside you. He gripped your hips and continued his merciless fucking. “George! Oh fuck George-“ You screamed for him, moaning his name.

“I’m going to cum inside you pretty queen-“ He moaned your name, deep and guttural. “And watch you grow with our child, our heir.” You cried out for him again, and it was all he needed to slam himself into without mercy, he reached a hand around you, rubbing your clit with no remorse. It was so intense you couldn’t think straight.

“George I- George I’m going to cum!”

“Do it, do it for me my queen. Do it together.” He moaned above you, continuing his ministrations. The pair of you cried out, heads thrown back in ecstasy. You orgasmed, and he spilled his seed into you. It’s warmth spreading through your core. He stayed in you for a moment, breathing deeply. You were gasping for air below him. Eventually he slid out, pulling you down to lay beside him. He held you close, running a lazy hand up and down your side.

“My beautiful Queen, fucked by the garden pond.”

[procyonloser]

Adam wasn't certain when it happened, if it came from growing up in a devout family or not, or if something else sparked his imagination as a young boy, but from early on, he'd been obsessed with the idea of the biblical Adam. Of course other biblical figures stood out more, and most people viewed Adam and Eve as simply a cautionary tale, a Just So story - but not Adam.

He saw a wide world of untold stories, of suffering and hardship, of tests of faith, of love and loss, all in a world that had no other people to speak of. Adam was captivated by the concept, and maybe it was because of his namesake, but he felt a sort of kinship with the Adam figure. Responsibility and loneliness, but duty over all else, Adam sympathized with that.

He'd started drawing, just little doodles at first, that turned into comics. At first it just rehashed the story of Adam and Eve, but he started to embellish it, to bring more life to them, and eventually to imagine what their lives must have been like. It'd been a big hit at his private Christian highschool, but Adam didn't expect to make a living off of it. Still, he kept drawing into college, turning it into an episodic comic about the life of Adam.

He wasn't expecting a major Christian publisher to contact him when he was only 21.

Over the years, First Man grew in popularity, he'd even gained a good amount of followers from other religions and backgrounds. Adam of the comic was essentially an action hero, but with more heart - dealing with his flawed but devoted wife, the loss of his first two children, and surviving a world before the flood. It gave Adam the freedom to think up all sorts of demons and fallen angels for comic Adam to face. Comic Adam was tall, handsome, ripped, talented, perfect.

Adam stared into the cramped airplane mirror, scratching at the stubble on his chin. Adam was tall, sure, but he didn't think he was exactly handsome, more average in the face; he wasn't ripped, and didn't even think he had muscles under his stomach anymore, not after years of sitting at a desk drawing and doing nothing else.

He was far from perfect, and the stories were beginning to weigh on him. He'd just completed the most major arc in his entire comic, after over 7 years of writing, comic Adam had died an old man. While some thought that was the end of the series, Adam had a sequel planned, of Adam in heaven, an agent of God with the original angels.

But Adam needed a fucking break, he needed a vacation. It was tearing him up inside, he hadn't even believed in God in about 3 years, but fuck knows he hadn't told his publishers that. The longer he drew Adam, Adam began to feel less and less... Himself. It felt wrong, it wasn't just that he'd sacrificed his social life or chances at any relationships, it just felt more and more fake.

Adam dragged a hand down his face, before exiting the bathroom.

He dropped down into his aisle seat next to a mildly annoyed looking British women, that eyed him up and down. The bags under his eyes, his unkempt hair, the fact he was in sweatpants and flip-flops on a plane.

"You're flying into Ankara?" The woman asked after a long few minutes and Adam gave a grunt of acknowledgement.

"Then to Adiyaman." Adam said simply, knowing it would be quite the trek across Turkey.

"You may want to... at the very least, put on a proper pair of shoes." She said, and Adam rolled his eyes. It wasn't his first time here, though he'd never been outside of Istanbul before, but no one gave a shit what was on his feet. They were usually more astonished he was over 6'5 than anything.

"Eat a bag of dicks," Adam grumbled, before popping on his headphones, only briefly remembering the good Christian boy he'd been when he'd started his comic.

But it was at the heart of why he'd come here. To Turkey, to the Euphrates River in Adiyaman. Adam's fascination with biblical Adam, with Genesis, with Eden, never really went away, even as he grew more nihilistic and angry at the world. He'd dreamed about visiting here for years, because Adam, deep down, knew that this area was Eden. The whole of the area, from where the Euphrates began and ended in the ocean. The garden was only a piece of the much larger area of Eden, and he'd been waiting years to come here, to see it with his own eyes. To feel the history dripping out of every rock face and curve of the river.

This was where humanity began.

Adam handed his bags over to the clerk in the Ramada he was staying in, because of course they still had a Ramada in the middle of Turkey. Adiyaman so far was... It wasn't exactly small, but half of town seemed like it was in the process of being built, and the streets were lined with cars that looked old to Adam. But, it didn't matter, he wasn't there for that.

Adam sighed loudly, wanting to get up to his room to pass out in bed for maybe the next day. He'd pressed the elevator door close button, but at the last minute, pale fingers curled around the metal, and the doors slid back open, revealing a rather short man. He was wearing an interesting suit, and was at least a head shorter than Adam, but there was something about how he used the space around him that made Adam look him over cautiously.

"Going up?" The man said, with a half smile.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "... You American? Canadian?"

The man shrugged a shoulder, "something like that."

Adam had no idea what the fuck that meant. Why be cagey about that kind of question. It was a simple answer.

"What brings you back here, Adam?" The man askedv pleasantly enough, changing the subject.

"The Euphrates, the archaeology in general. It's a tax write off vacation for my work." Adam answered, not understanding why he was bothering to tell the guy all that.

It didn't sink in until after he got off on his floor, that the man knew his name.

And Adam had never been to Adiyaman before.

[larissasgirl]

I always love seeing new writers! Could I request some fluff with regina and insecure reader??

I will never let you go again

Welcome to my first storyyyy my guys! I was surprised at how easy it was to actually write, I hope this is what you had in mind! I'm sorry if there is any mistake :-)

You thought you had a pretty good reading of the situation, but now, you weren’t sure where you stood with her. Your first encounter with Regina wasn’t exactly what you’d call love at first sight. In fact, she had insulted you, ripped your heart out and left you at the border of Storybrooke to walk home. But then, you slowly warmed up to each other. It started by acknowledging each other, then politely smiling at each other if you’d come across one another in the little town. Then, it was dinner invitations, drinking apple cider on her couch and deep conversations until the early hours of the morning.

And now, you were feeling so unsure, so insecure. It led to locking yourself in your apartment, thoughts racing through your head. In the past two weeks, Regina had been distant, too distant. You didn’t understand why she had texted you earlier this morning to cancel your usual dinner at her place, or why she wouldn’t answer any of your messages and calls. Truth to be told, you were heartbroken. Surely enough, this wasn’t just an innocent friendship to you. You knew she wasn’t the Evil Queen anymore, that she wasn’t this person that got described to you many times by the citizens of Storybrooke. She was the proof that anyone can change. She was fierce, something you had always admired about her, and you had always pitied anyone that ever got on her bad side, knowing you had once been there, as her strong personality mixed with anger was sometimes scary. You had seen her beautiful brown orbs shine with fire, and despite your heart screaming at you to fix it, to fix your friendship or whatever it was, your head had eventually won the fight. You had stopped calling. You had stopped showing up on her doorstep, knocking on her door only to be met with silence even though you knew she was home. If you were being honest with yourself, her message from this morning was your last straw. You were too broken to continue fighting. 

You felt as if your light has gone out. You’d only got out at crazy hours in the evenings, when you were sure you wouldn’t meet anyone, or at least, very few people, and especially not her, to get some groceries and cheap wine to drown your sorrows. You knew your eyes were constantly red and puffy from crying over someone who so clearly sent a message without literally doing so. Regina didn’t feel the same way than you did, and there was nothing you could do about it. So should you hang on to something that would only extend your pain? 

So instead of giggling with Regina like you would do usually every Friday night, you found yourself sitting on the couch, and old episode of Friends running in the background as you were having yet another glass of wine, hoping it would lure you to the sleep you craved so much, but couldn’t find as easily as before. You were wearing an old hoodie with gray sweatpants, an outfit you had gotten at university during your studies. You could feel your legs falling asleep from being crossed for such a long period of time, but you didn’t bother to move them, concentrating on the tingling sensation, hoping it would somehow take over your sadness. 

Halfway through the bottle, you heard a knock on your door. As your posture straightened up, the blanket that you had draped over your shoulders slide down, the cold air making its way to you even with the hood you had folded on your head. You weren’t really in the mood to see anyone, especially on yours and Regina’s evening. Your mind was working slower as usual, a result of the alcohol you were consuming. Yet, you shrugged and decided to ignore it, pretending you weren’t home when your mind was still clear enough to tell you that the lights were on, that the tv was loud and that the person behind the door probably noticed all of that too. Yet, another knock came to your ears not long after the first, and you knew whoever was there had no intention of going away. You figured it was either Emma or Snow checking on you, both knowing how hard you’d been taking Regina’s silence. Knowing it wouldn’t be easy to send them on their way if you didn’t answer the door, you sloppily got up from the couch, cursing as you bumped your calf into the table in front of the couch as you made your way to the front door. 

You didn’t get a chance to open your mouth to say you were fine, as the person standing in front of you was the one that was clouding your mind for the past two week. Your eyes locked with hers, and you noticed that she was still wearing her work clothes, a silk white blouse tucked into black pants, a beige coat keeping her warm from the cold air of the night. You noticed that she was also evaluating the state you were in, her eyes going from your sweatpants to your hoodie, to the wine bottle that was resting on the table behind you, her gaze softening as her brown orbs met yours again. 

“Hi,” she began softly, as if she was scared you’d break, as if she thought you were as fragile as glass. And truth to be told, you did look like you would, like you were holding on by a thread. 

You opened your mouth to answer, only to close it again, no words not coming out. “Can I come in?”, her voice cracking as she cleared her throat, fidgeting with her fingers as you noticed the black leather gloves she had on.

You simply nodded, opening the door for her to see the mess your apartment was. She had the decency to not say anything, knowing you were always a tidy person, even if the sight of the dirty dishes piling in the sink, the empty pizza boxes sitting on the counter and the pile of clean clothes unfolded resting on the kitchen table made her jaw clench. You knew she loved order over chaos, which is why you always tried to keep your place clean, but you didn’t think she’d actually witness the mess it was right now. Regina knew she was the reason for this, for the state she had found you in. She was no idiot. She had noticed the way your smile got wider every single time she’d walk in a room, the way you’d always pick the seat right next to her at Granny’s even if the one in front of her was available, the way you’d always hug her a little longer than anyone else. And she knew she did the same. Her day lightened up when she’d catch a glimpse of you, if you name would light up her phone, if she’d hear your voice or your laugh. And knowing she was causing you so much distress was breaking her heart even more than it was already. She made her way to the couch, her eyes never leaving your frame as you did the same.

“I’m sorry,” she simply stated, as you took the furthest spot possible from her on the couch. Her heart sank a little, jealously hoping you’d still want to be next to her, to be close to her. “I’m sorry I canceled our evening together.”, she muttered the last part, not trusting her own voice.

You closed your eyes, trying to keep the tears at bay. You couldn’t look at her, you couldn’t bear to see her expression as she would tell you it was a misunderstanding, that you were simply very close friends. Yet, you knew this conversation had to happen one day of another, so you’d rather it be now, while the wine was making it seem like a cushion you could rest on as it would unfold. You braced yourself for it and opened your eyes, choosing to fix your gaze on the side of the blanket that was messily unfolded in front of you.

“Why?,” you managed to whisper, your voice cracking at the end, as your grabbed the corner of the blanket, fidgeting with the edge. You felt Regina move from her seat, causing your heart to beat even harder in your chest. She instead sat right next to you, her now glove-free hand resting on top of yours, stopping your movements. She then used the other one to gently grab your chin, lifting it up slowly so you’d meet her eyes. You noticed she had taken off her coat, but you didn’t have the strength to look away from her gaze, her eyes piercing into yours. 

Your breath stopped once again, seeing the remorse and the hurt that was shining in them. All you wanted to do was to wrap your arms around her and hold her, to make all of it disappear. Yet, you couldn’t, your own pain a reminder it was her who had been avoiding you, and not the opposite.

“I got scared,” she hesitated before continuing, noticing you were sitting still and that your eyes hadn’t left hers. This seemed to give her the bravery to continue. “I-I want what’s best for you, Y/N. I love spending time with you, I look forward it every day. I wake up and my first thought is you. I go to bed and my last thought is you. I-I’m in love with you and it scared me,” she blurted, her cheeks tinted with a soft red color. “I don’t know what I thought. That maybe if I distanced myself from you, it would go away. But I missed you so much. I was sitting at home by myself, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you, about our evenings together…If I hadn’t ruined everything”, she continued in a low voice, her grip on your hand tightening, as if she was scared you’d run away, that you’d slip from her touch and reject her. Yet, it was like you were hypnotized by her, as if she had put a spell on you to keep you still, your mind registering her words one at the time, almost jokingly slowly. 

“I have been avoiding you because I got scared to have fallen in love with you, but being without you is an even scarier feeling,” she confessed, her eyes swelling up with tears. You had never seen Regina so vulnerable, despite the closeness of your relationship. And almost as if you were being remotely controlled, you felt your hand free itself from hers, making her gasp, probably thinking she was indeed right and that you were rejecting her after her past actions. Instead, you caught the tear that was falling on her cheek, causing even more to make their way down her beautiful features.

“I thought you didn’t want to be near me anymore”, you finally confessed to her, tears falling on your cheeks as well. You took a deep breath, preparing yourself for the confession you were about to make. “Since I’m not a hero, or anything, really”, you mumbled, shaking your head, trying to put some orders in your thoughts as your deepest fear was finally out in the open. 

She cupped your face, wiping your tears with her thumbs as she pressed a soft kiss on your right cheek, so softly that it felt like a feather was brushing against your skin. You closed your eyes under her touch, the one you had been craving for ever since you had realized you had feelings for Regina.

“You’re not anything, Y/N. You’re the woman I love,” she whispered, her lips brushing against your skin as she spoke, smiling softly as she heard a soft sight coming out of your lips at the contact. You weren’t aware that you did. Your mind was blank. You couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Was she really saying she felt the same way you did all this time? That it was a misunderstanding? And she had kissed your cheek? You had hugged before, but you had never felt the softness of her lips on your skin, which truthfully didn’t help with registering the situation. It felt like hours when a minute probably went by. Regina’s lips were still brushing against your cheek, her eyelashes tickling your skin every time she’d blink even if her posture was completely immobile, as if she wanted to take in the closeness she had with if you’d decide to move away from her. The chaos in your heart was instead replaced by relief, by disbelief for the words you had been craving to hear for so long.

Finally coming back to your sense, you grabbed the hands that were still resting on your cheeks, moving your body so your forehead was now touching hers, your noses brushing against each other.

“You love me?” your voice sounding so small, so foreign to her ears that she was scared words would fail her, as she simply nodded. “Don’t ever do this to me again,” you whispered, smiling softly even though she couldn’t see you. Regina instead had other idea, wanting to see your face, wanting to read the depth of your mind in your eyes, as she distanced herself from you to do so, wrapping her arms around your neck in an attempt to keep you as close to her as possible. The frown on her face was quickly replaced by a smile matching yours, pure adoration written cross her features as light seemed to have returned to your eyes.

“I could never,” she stated, shaking her head, her perfume reaching your senses and embracing you, making you feel calmer, safer, loved. “I’d rip my own heart out.”

“Don’t do that, “you giggled, biting your bottom lip in the process. “I love you too, in case you were wondering,” you beamed at her, your mind finally catching up to what had just happened, the weight on the world having finally being lifted off your shoulders. The smile she gave you then completely turned your world upside down, the kind of smile that made your knees go weak, making you thankful you were sitting down. You were living for that smile, you’d do anything to see it, to have it directed just at you. 

Regina moved a piece of your hair away from your face, her hand resting on the back of your neck. Your skin felt on fire, your heart threatening to jump out of your chest. She glanced at your lips for a second, and you did the same, licking your lips in an automated gesture. She slowly leaned forward, giving you enough time to move away if it was your wish. Instead, you closed the distance and met her lips. Goosebumps rose on your skin as she gently pulled you towards her, as if she was afraid you’d disappear, her arms wrapped around your neck as yours found their way around her waist. The kiss was gentle, even more than you’d have imagined if possible, but yet, so passionate, filled with all the emotions you so desperately tried to express to each other. She eventually pulled away, leaving you gasping for air, as you immediately thought that you wanted to kiss her again and again for the rest of your life. She had her eyes closed still, a soft smiling playing on her lips, and so you leaned in again, making her giggle as your lips met hers, this time only lasting a few seconds, an attempt to convince yourself it was really happening. As you pulled away, she brushed her nose against yours before kissing it. 

“Now that it’s settled,” she chuckled, getting up from the couch and pulling you with her, “Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow, we have some cleaning to do,” she grinned as she motioned towards the mess around you, as you rolled your eyes and got up to give her some clothes for the night, Regina never letting go of your hand.

[lillypad-monopoly]

Wild Life Episode 5 Thoughts

(Except I'm insane about Martyn's ep)

LIFE SERIES TRIVIA is DIABOLICAL! The watchers literally being like "how well do you guys know your pain and suffering?" (also sorry only winners remember theory truthers)

The way Grian and Scar are such bitter ex-soulmates that Mumbo has to point it out is hilarious. (also them getting even and saying "Just like Third Life" hurt my heart)

Grian not remembering iconic moments from his own series is so funny. What do you mean he only knows Martyn beheaded Ren with an axe from fanart? Grian gaining possession of the Red Winter Axe was a whole plot point.

MUMBO FIRST OUT! IN SESSION 5! The canary curse is broken for real now guys but at what cost.

Grian standing on the ruins of the tower by himself going through the five stages of grief over Mumbo's death as the sun rises in the background is a gorgeous piece of fanart waiting to happen

Martyn you didn't need to start the episode by talking about how Ren is providing for you, you're asking for the shipping at this point 🤣

MARTYN YOU DO THE LORE OFC JIMMY AND TANGO WERE OUT FIRST. Also REN YOU WERE LITERALLY IN DOUBLE LIFE. RIP Ren/BigB we know where his true loyalties lie

THE TWO NICKLES MEME BREAKING CONTAINMENT I CAN'T

Ren inviting BigB to join the RenWood Mound alliance WITHOUT REMEMBERING DOUBLE LIFE is so insane I don't even know what to say.

OF COURSE SCAR REMEMBERS THE DESERT DUO FLOWERS I'M GOING TO BE SICK

Martyn and Ren saying they're going to be boat bros. This has been coming since last session but I NEED Joel and Etho to call them out on it

"We're boat boys," MARTYN INTHELITTLEWOOD WHEN I CATCH YOU-

Etho yelling for Bdubs to hit him so they could test if the wildcard affected damage and then Tango going "smack me harder~" in the background was diabolical. Suuuure you guys are all PG.

Etho sitting in a boat for Joel to jump over him feels like some boat boys relationship symbolism I'm not smart enough to explain

So Etho is currently living with team BET, but allied with the Four Gs, and in the family with Gem and Joel. Wildcard Etho is so back!

Of course Impulse immediately remembered the clock question.

Joel boasting about how he immediately knows all the questions is peak Joel form and I would expect nothing less. It is kind of warranted though because everybody else is waffling on the simple ones.

Joel is now two for two on unquestioningly trusting Etho only to have something bad happen to him and not even being mad about it what is wrong with this man 😭

Does Joel have the censor bleep on his keyboard or did he just straight up start swearing at Tango and know they would both have to censor it in post to get the effect that he was also making the noise?

Scott's gone from a creaking fanboy to a body horror situation and I'm living for it (also considering he's agreed to "go wild" this session--am I sensing a Scott corruption arc?)

Scott cutting directly from saying he and Jimmy were never married even though they called each other husbands to a scene WITH Jimmy was kind of an insane choice

Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss Girldad has been confirmed by Scott as the actual reason for the 4Gs. I still think Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss ImpulseSV is funnier but good to have an official ruling

Scott giving up his life for Pearl and them being good natured about it and calling it therapy! I love them so much!

Lizzie being the only person who's not exicted when a trivia bot spawns is so funny. Even the other players who weren't in all the seasons don't seem to be as miffed by them as she is.

Lizzie's flaming snail arising out of that hole while smiling is potentially the funniest thing I've seen all day. Why did it look like that 🤣

[alpaca-clouds]

Analyzing the New Nocturne Trailer

Alright: I promised some folks yesterday to make an analysis for the new trailer - so I am going to do just that. Fair warning: this will not have a whole lot of historical details, because I think there is just not enough about historical context in this trailer to talk about that. So more... general influences and speculations.

We start the trailer off with Emmanuel standing by a grave during what is either a night or still the eclipse caused by Erszebeth. It is impossible to say. Sadly, there does not seem to be any name on the gravestone (if it even is that), so it is hard to say who it could be. Someone on a server speculated that it might be the empty grave of Tera's sister (I doubt she managed to drag the body from Russia to France), which I could see. It could also be that we learn something more about Emmanuel's backstory.

From all we got implied, Emmanuel joined with the Knights Hospitaller when they were on Malta, so he was not with them in Jerusalem. We can also say that he is Frenchman. So there is something going on with him giving him the background of him and the hospitaller.

Something else of note: This grave is underneath a Wisteria tree. And Wisteria's are connected either to youth/something new or it is a symbolism for a deep devotion. The latter probably fitting rather well with Emanuel.

Next we have these few frames of Erszebeth in her lion form fighting Richter. Something that is interesting to me in this one: It almost feels here as if Erszebeth has no control over her power. Which would make sense, because it is heavily implied that she stole Sekmet's powers by drinking from Sekmet.

I am spitballing here, but something tells me that Olrox has drunken from Quetzalcoatl in a consensual way (almost guessing it was so that a dying god could live on), while in Erszebeth's case it was more an act of colonialism of some sort.

We have next these two very short flashes. Richter down on the ground and bleeding - and then Tera attacking. The trailer of course implies that Tera is implying a Richter who went down. But the background is different. Tera is somewhere in the forest in what appears to be some celtic ruins (more on that a bit later), while Richter is on some city street.

I am fairly certain actually that the Richter scene is fairly late in the season.

We then have the eclipse ending. I am very interested to know the context of this. It seemed in season 1 as if Erszebeth wanted to keep the eclipse just eternally to protect her vampires - but maybe she also understands that she cannot do that given she has also human followers.

We also see Maria (probably in the company of everyone else) hiding out at some ruins.

If I was going to hazard a guess, this is a scene within the first 5 minutes of episode 1.

We have then a few quick shots of first Richter, Annette and Alucard together. Then one of Richter fighting what is clearly Drolta. And then one... that could be either Drolta or Tera from the clothing. Though given that Richter has the same ripped off sleeves as in the Drolta fight, I am gonna assume it is Drolta.

This goes doubly, because the background here is the same as in the fight of Alucard and Drolta later in the trailer.

The we have another grave scene with flower imagery. In this case we have Juste in front of a grave. Once more there is no name to be seen on the grave, but I have seen a lot of speculation - based on what happens in the game - that it might be Lydie's grave, while Maxim is either a vampire or a werewolf now.

We will see, I guess.

There was also a discussion on the server on what the tree was. Is it plum or cherry. I am gonna say, this is a Kanzan cherry tree, given that the stigma is not as pronounced as it would be in a plum flower. And the Japanese cherry tree is obviously a symbol of fleeting youth and fleeting beauty.

Then we have a shot with Erszebeth mustering her new army. Notable about this is that Erszebeth is back to her normal vampire form in this shot - and that it seems now that she has a whole lot more night creatures now. Has Emmanuel figured out how to createm ore night creatures, or if she has found another way to acquire night creatures. We will see.

We have also several scenes of our main characters in this building. There are several shots of this. And this does not seem to be Tera's home, given that the windows look different, if I am not fully mistaken. So that leaves us the question: Where are they here? Who allows them to stay with them?

Then we have these shots of Alucard on a warfield surrounded by soldiers. We see later that they are fighting against the vampires lead by Drolta, who is not dead. (I might note: As I said. I told y'all that Drolta was not dead. It was obvious.)

Notable about this scene is that Alucard is surrounded by Republican Soldiers. So soldiers who are loyal to the revolution. While at this time the royal soldiers and the revolutionary soldiers wore fairly similar uniforms, the hats are notably different.

So we can tell from this, that our heroes manage to get the revolutionary forces up to Machecoul. I am wondering how that is going to happen. Who will get this support?

Either way, I am gonna hazard another guess: This is from the last two episodes of the season.

Something that seemingly also happens on the battle field is Alucard attacking these three figures. All three are dark-skinned and Alucard attacks them. Two of them also clearly wear ancient egyptian garbs. And that implies they are somehow connected to Sekmet, either through Drolta or Erszebeth. I am really interested to see what is up with this.

I said this before: The reason I was fairly certain that Drolta was still alive was two fold. One: Drolta is Katie Silva's favorite character. lol Two: Drolta is clearly very heavily connected to how Erszebeth has gotten access to the blood of Sekmet, given that we know that Drolta was a priestess of Sekmet. So she kinda has to survive given that she will be important to understanding Erszebeth. :P

I am still somewhat wondering whether she will be loyal to Erszebeth and such.

Then we have some shots of Richter and Annette fighting some night creatures (though one of them might also be Drolta in a monster form - we will see - given it has the same tail as her, and hooves). One of the fights is happening in the church again.

Then we have this scene of Juste and Tera fighting. Again, this is a celtic place, given the stones - and I am fairly certain that this is the same place where Maria has her little revolutionary meeting in episode 1 of the first season. We had those celtic stones standing around there as well. Which is obviously interesting given the themes of colonization and the fact that they have been colonized as well.

It is obviously also interesting that Juste is fighting Tera - clearly to take this from the kids.

Something several people have already noticed though is that Tera in these scenes seems to be under some sort of control. Her eyes are flat and empty.

I might also remind you though, that we have so far very little information on how vampires and fledglings work in this world. In a lot of vampire media it also is a theme that fledgling vampires in the first months/years of their life being fairly hard to control and more animal than person. This might be a possibility here, too.

It could be that Tera is controlled by Erszebeth, but it could also just be that she is a fledgling in a sort of blood frenzy or something like that.

Then we have this scene with Maria and Seiryu in the church. It is clear from Maria's gaze here, that she is either in a deep shock, or really, really angry. From all we know she never summoned Seiryu before. And we see also that the portal she summons Seiryu through is nothing like the other portals she uses which are light and golden.

However, this portal is a lot like the one we see on the poster that went around yesterday, where a bear comes through the portal.

Now, I am fairly certain that with the summons they go with the same direction that I and a lot of other writers use: The summons she is using are somehow connected to the otherworld, which in this probably connects not only celtic spirits and fae, but pretty much similar concepts from all around the world.

But the thing is, as I said: The bear usually in East Asian mythology is a shorthand for "a god". And of course dragons in Asian mythology are also minor gods. And I am going to assume that this does tie in once more with the theme that we clearly have: Divine bloodlines. This is a divine bloodline as well, that ties Maria to the Asian spiritual gods.

But she is very much not in control over those powers yet.

We know that she never knew how her magic worked. She explains that much in episode 2 of the first season. And given that this is so clearly a theme of Nocturne... Yeah, that is going to be tied to that.

Then we also have this shot of Drolta and her knew outfit. I will be honest, I have nothing much to say about that. She once more has the horns - and again: Drolta is not a vampire, she is a succubus. And as such we do not know what kind of rules might apply to her.

As you might notice on the screenshot above: It is fairly bright in the background. And she does not use anything to protect herself from the sunlight.

Then we have another scene of Olrox holding back Mizrak, which is notably the only time we see either character in the trailer. (It should be noted that Edouard, my baby boy, is completely absent from the trailer. Q-Q) It is fairly hard to say what the context of the scene is. So far I do not see anohter scene with a similar background, so it is really hard to say.

Some part of me is going to assume that Mizrak might be the reason that the revolutionary forces are there for the big battle. But that is once more just me spitballing. He just seems to be the most likely character to get those soldiers there.

Then we have several scenes of Drolta fighting. Some of the shorts show her on the battle field, some of them are her and Alucard (who shape shifts into a bat swarm during it). And once again: I am fairly certain that the earlier scene of Richter on the ground happens in the same scene of Alucard and the shape shifting here.

Again: I am going to assume that Drolta will probably show up in episode 3 or 4 again, after the fakeout death, and that they will have some bad fights against her and Erszebeth, and that the revolutionary forces will show up for the finale of the season. That would make the most sense from a writing perspective.

Lastly we have also this shot of Richter. This also probably happens in the context of the Drolta dight, as it is fairly clear he looses his sleeves in that fight.

But yeah, that is so far all I could get from the trailer.

Cannot wait for season 2.

Also: I am very sad that I did not get to see my baby boy Edouard. Where is my son?!

[deadguywalkin]

sam+seb+alex hcs,

cw nsfw at the end, eds, disorders, and the likes

mdni with this post because i will be dropping some extra nsfw stuff here , or just don’t read/interact with the last bit

sambastian:

they baby each other WAAAYY too much. randomly holding each other’s faces and cooing at each other and getting sad, peppering each other’s faces.

i stole this from someone but they probably cried the first time they had sex

so so sappy. they’re just so lovesick for each other. 

sam is bigger than him but insists on sitting in his lap

in the middle of the night, waking up ‘baby… baby..’ ‘..what?’ ‘nothing. i just love you.’

comfortable silence. sam always feels a need to talk and entertain people, but he feels at peace with sebastian since he already tells him everything and doesn’t have much to say beyond that.

sebalex:

‘__kg of protein…… i need to eat you’

alex thinks he’s the cutest thing ever. sebastian thinks alex needs to fuck off

‘you’re so babygirl’ ‘shut the fuck up’

alex is still scared of sebastian. he’s still always going to be slightly scared of him

they don’t understand each other, but it gives them so much more to love learning more and more about stuff they’ve never heard of before

hugs from behind and whispering into ears

sebastian has trouble remembering to eat, alex always seems to have something on hand and remind him

samalex

they’re SO boyfriends who constantly hype each other up

*sobbing* ‘i love you.. bro’ *tears in his eyes* ‘broski.. i love you too.’

just so much praising each other and telling each other how awesome they are

so much cuteness aggression. they’re just squeezing and crushing each other constsntly

sam is in every single comment section of every one of alex’s instagram posts gatekeeping him. ‘EVERYONR LOOK AWAY THATS MY MAN!!!!’

sam/alex + sebastian

hugging him from behind and kissing him

carrying him just to piss him off.

sebastian steals their clothes. but they let him because he looks really cozy

pinning him down and biting him. forcefeeding him affection and kisses, nomnomnomnom

constantly grabbing at his thighs or waist

he’s so tired and unmotivated, has depressive episodes from time to time. they like helping him out.

he just likes sitting in their laps while doing whatever and letting the bigger guys engulf him

has to do all of the thinking for them. they always shut their brain offs when they’re around sebastian so he has to make sure they’re not walking into poles

‘sorry, they were dropped on the head as babies.’ he says while apologizing to whoever sam or alex are talking to

literally cannot handle how horny sam and alex are. they are insane

sam/sebastian + alex

always sitting in his lap. he’s so comfy

‘ah.. long day of work…… i’m exhausted. time to shove my face in this himbo’s titties and exhale loudly’

reassuring him quietly with soft pecks to his face

they hold his bicep when walking with him

they steal his clothes a LOT and he would love to retaliate but unfortunately he would rip their clothes 

they’re so gentle with him. everyone thinks he’s tough but they know how fragile and sweet he is and they just think he’s so baby

alex has some kind of body dysmorphia and gym related eating disorder. they always remind him to eat normally and not body check so much, checking in on his meals a lot and making sure he’s not eating some weird gym rat concoction

doesn’t get their music / music taste but is happy to listen anyways

alex/sebastian + sam

sam comes home and is immediately like ‘mmfffjfghgf….’, dropping his head on their thighs and they immediately know to start playing with his hair, no questions asked

constantly yapping to them. cannot shut his mouth. they like the background noise though

token white boy, very confused when they shower him with spanish and korean pet names and compliments

>> 

🏈: ay, mi querido, sam💗

🦇: 내 아기 🖤

☀️: .. uh-huh

needs so much attention and love. very high maintenance boyfriend

he’s just the sweetest ever. he loves holding them and listening to whatever’s bothering them. he’s the type to focus on everyone else’s problems as he ignores his own

adhd boy. he needs help staying on task with whatever he needs to work on. 

plays his old acoustic while close to them, singing to them. they love it

completely nsfw hcs beyond this point !!!!!

samalex have definitely researched how to properly suck tdick

sebalex ‘missionary so we can continue arguing’

alex’s abs are just. they’re just feral over them

sam has a perfect ass, no kidding. skater boys and their beautiful asses….

so much ass grabbing. these three cannot keep their hands off of each other

sam was definitely alex’s first cis guy

sebastian with his eyeliner running down his cheeks ………yes

have to mention again.. sam is SO whiney and cracky, he’s so vocal

alex is low and mildly vocal but can have a twinge of sounding desperate at times

sambastian fingering/mutual masturbation…. while holding each others faces lovingly and cooing at each other (based off of crispy’s trans seb art)…… save me…………

samalex:

[lurkingshan]

(Different anon) I agree with and understand your points re: ~why you watch GMMTV if don't like??~ and why the question is/feels hostile.

But taking the question itself in good faith as "why do you (should I) keep watching shows I think/know I will not like based on how others have been handled?" in the genuine spirit of "explain like I'm 5 because I don't understand the lingo and background but want to understand the concept, how would you explain it to people not as into/knowledgeable/etc BL and the history of GMMTV?

Hi anon! This is an interesting question, because it depends so much on you as an individual and what makes you happy.

I think there is often a misconception that people who post critical meta are having a miserable time and torturing themselves with media they hate, but it's just not true. For folks like me who enjoy thinking critically, this is how we have fun. When I love something, I want to rip open its guts and see how it's all assembled. It's what stimulates my brain and gets me excited. And when I don't love something wholeheartedly, I am interested in figuring out why. I've often had the experience of watching something that I know should be working on me, and if it isn't, that creates an intellectual puzzle that I find very satisfying to solve. Why isn't it working, and what can that help me learn about storytelling? This is also fun for me.

Another misconception I often see in fandom is that if you like something, you can't have negative thoughts about it and you have to pretend it's perfect to be a good fan. Nonsense! Being a hater is fun, especially about things you truly love. I'll give you a really concrete example: Bad Buddy is one of my all time favorite shows. It first aired three years ago and I still think about it nearly every day. It's a show that stimulates my brain but also hits me straight in the heart. But I do not think it's perfect and I get a lot of joy from thinking about the parts that did not work (Wai's redemption, that stupid fake out in the finale, all of episode 9) and making fun of it (have you heard that PAT GOT SHOT??). This, too, is a form of love and source of joy.

So with those misconceptions addressed, why do I keep watching shows I suspect I won't like? First, because you truly never know until you try, and I like to be pleasantly surprised. Two of my favorite shows of this year, Cherry Magic Thailand and Knock Knock Boys, shocked the hell out of me. I went into CMT deeply skeptical only to be charmed against my will and so impressed by how they adapted it, and I went into KKB expecting it to be like 95% of weak Thai pulps only to realize its writing and themes were stronger than they had any right to be. If I stayed away from all media I thought I might not like, I would have never had the amazing experience of watching and discussing those two shows live with friends who also loved them.

Second, like I said above, I still have fun examining shows that are not quite working for me, and sometimes I am compelled by the ambition of shows even if I don't think the execution is serving. A great example of that is The Sign. I wanted to support that show because of who was making it, and it had so much early promise that when it fell apart halfway through, I stuck it out to try to make sense of what went wrong. In cases like that, I like to figure out what a show thinks it's doing, what it's actually doing, and where the disconnect is. It's a fun puzzle for me to sort through such an ambitious mess of a show. This is why, btw, I am never really moved by fanwanks to fill in gaps in story and characterization. I understand why others enjoy fixing shows in their brains and then pretending that's what they actually saw, but it's not what motivates me. My goal with shows like this is not to get myself to like it no matter what, it's to figure out why I don't like it and what could be changed to address that.

Third, I care about ql as a genre, and I like to be aware of how it's evolving and be part of the collective experience of watching it. QL fandom is tiny and I like to know what my friends are talking about! I can't watch everything because there is simply way too much content these days, but I like to watch or at least pay attention to most of the big buzzy shows to track trends and see what's getting the fandom frustrated or excited. I didn't watch We Are because I knew enough about what it was doing and who was involved to understand it was not for me, but I did pay attention to reactions to it. Watching Jack & Joker with Thai bl fandom right now is some of the most fun we've had since Only Friends killed our spirit. J&J is directed by my parasocial frenemy Tee Bundit, whose shows often frustrate the hell out of me and whom I have ripped to shreds on this platform many times over. But I'm not gonna let that stop me from having fun with this new show, because Joke is The Moment and we're all in this together.

So truly, anon: whether or not you should be like me and watch things you may not like or continue watching shows you don't think are very good depends on what motivates you. You should figure out what is most fun for you re: media consumption, and do that. You can seek out people who enjoy media the same way you do, and also befriend people who think differently if you want to learn from each other and don't mind a bit of productive discomfort from time to time. I have gotten better recently at recognizing when I'm just getting nothing out of a show and dropping it like a hot potato (because some shows are not bad in an interesting way, they are just bad), or realizing which shows I will like better on a binge (usually the ones with terrible pacing, that is not as tortuous for me when I can just watch it all in one go). You gotta do some testing to figure it out.

All of this has all been a really long-winded way to say you should do what makes you happy, and don't assume that just because someone else's happiness looks different from yours, that it's wrong.

[lover-of-mine]

Hello and welcome to me being crazy about colors in media. Again. I feel like during season 7 there was the whole blue and yellow thing going around Buck and Eddie and I offered the theory that it could be like the blue and green thing, but for queer couples, since the show tends to use that color combo with Hen and Karen (here's that post if you want to see it), until @stagefoureddiediaz told me about a trend in media as a whole to use those two colors for queer coding, she mentioned red, white and royal blue and heartstopper as more recent examples but that this has been going on for a while. I'm gonna be honest, I don't watch a lot of movies, but the other day tiktok started to show me clips of Crush, it's a queer high school romcom, I had it on streaming, I was bored, I sat down to watch it, the movie is ridiculously blue and yellow, like, it's almost funny, I'm not gonna write a meta on that, if you get curious and watch the movie, there are blue and yellow elements to pretty much every scene, just pay attention lol. But that got stuck in my head and I was thinking about Love, Simon, and well, that movie also uses blue and yellow elements, in a more subtle manner, but it's there, rwrb also has details, like the lighting or color of ties, the same way they hide pride flags with elements of the scene. I never watched heartstopper, so I can't comment on that one.

Why am I telling you this? Well, if this is a pattern in media in general, then we have ourselves a solid theory. Crush and rwrb are more recent movies, crush is from 2022, rwrb is from 2023, but Love, Simon came out at the beginning of 2018. This makes the choice of making henren scenes blue and yellow very interesting.

You know me, I'm the blue and green person (extremely detailed meta on the blue and green), but I turned off the blue and green switch in my head and was going around wondering what counts as yellow. Because if we count warn lighting in general, the way it reflects in the background, Buck and Eddie are constantly surrounded by blue and yellow elements. There's a lot during under pressure, including the way the dialogue during the ambulance is "Practice rounds have blue caps, gold caps are live." while we have blue and yellow lights in the ambulance ceiling.

The blue and yellow elements are real, but while making my buddie in every episode series, I was watching season 3 with the blue and yellow goggles on, and I realized the lights behind Eddie during the tsunami are very much yellow, along with the blue tents and Eddie's uniform.

And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

They even have blue and yellow beers.

So the blue and yellow during season 7, has to mean something. For both of them.

And with the way that Buck, Bothered and Bewildered is a blue and yellow episode, I kinda wanna say that the blue and yellow IS about queer themes.

But the reason I'm making this post is actually more insane than just making this point again. Buck and Eddie have 2 undeniably blue and yellow scenes before season 7. Scenes where they are dressed in blue and yellow. And those are very important scenes in my humble opinion. Because the first one is the will reveal.

This scene is one of the most important buddie scenes. And that makes the colors here very interesting if we add things like the way they wanted to make Buck bi in season 4 but fox didn't let them, and this scene reads as a love confession anyway. Having Eddie in blue and Buck in yellow could very much have been the way they found to add more significance to the scene.

But there's also the way that Eddie's shirt is to yellow the same way Buck's is to blue during the presentation of the couch theory (rip you will always be famous), which is, again, a choice, we also have the notepads Eddie and Chris are playing with are yellow and the beers are also yellow, and the way Chris is a blue element.

Everything here keeps getting me more and more convinced that they will go canon while in blue and yellow, not blue and green like other couples, because green is both their breakup colors, if we count the conversation with Kim as a breakup.

And personally, I think we can, because by my own standards, their first conversation is blue and green.

So buddie going canon in a blue and yellow scene makes more sense because it would be unique to them.

This is a very long way to say, let's be on the lookout for both of them wearing blue and yellow lol.

That's all for today, if you reached this, I love you 💜