#there is lore to this that i might share later if people are interested

[zoroslost]

One Piece Warrior Cats AU: Doffy, Cora, and Law

Doflamingo cat naming progression: Joker -> Spiderstrike -> Spiderstar

(chimera solid chocolate and golden chinchilla pattern)

Corazon cat naming progression: Corazon -> Silentpaw -> Silentheart

(golden chocolate charcoal classic tabby)

Law cat naming progression: Snowkit -> Deathpaw -> Deathomen -> Snowheart

(Lilac oceloid spotted tabby with white patches due to scarring (due to hair-loss from illness))

[gothwineaunts]

Wow, hello!

So, I was actually feeling pretty motivated to write this post yesterday. But things have gotten exponentially worse, and I admit the pressure is getting to me. There seem to be a ton of expectations surrounding what I should be saying here, in order to… I guess, absolve myself? As if there’s a checklist people want me to go through to perform the “perfect” creator apology. But, I don’t see the point. I care a lot about this community and I think you deserve something a lot more sincere than some hollow chat-gpt apology. I understand that that’s foolish, on my part. Things are done that way so often because they work. But what you’ll find throughout this post, is that I’m kind of an idiot about some things. I’m stubborn and hard-headed and a little bit pretentious. And so, what I’m planning to do here is to simply tell you the truth about what happened. No cherry picking. All my mistakes, but also the context that goes with them. And at the end, my formal apology. This is a long and winding tale with a lot of characters. I’m going to be sharing some usernames as we go, in the interest of clarity and transparency. You’ll understand why with the context. But please do not seek these people out. Don’t pick fights with them. It will only make everything worse, for all involved.

Cool? Cool. But first I need to address the elephant in the room. This will probably seem like irrelevant drama at first, but this is the nuance and background that I wasn’t adequately able to articulate the night before last. In more ways than one, this is a story told in twos. The first set of twos is you, the readers. Who you are, and what you’re hoping to find out in this post.

1.      The overwhelming majority of you, are earnestly wanting to understand what has happened in the Nevermore Discord. You are concerned that I am not who you hoped I was. You are disappointed, and I understand why. To you, I am so sorry. I want to say that things are not as bad as they seem, but that is not for me to decide. You will need to draw your own conclusions from the words I write. And I understand, whatever you choose to do next.

2.      And there is a small, but incredibly vocal minority of people who are absolutely living for this. They are spreading complete fabrications with no screenshots to speak of. Horrible, horrible accusations. People who are more excited about watching a dumpsterfire than they are about the series that brought them here in the first place. I’m not going to attempt to cater to those people in this post. Because nothing will ever be good enough. Everything that can be taken in bad faith will be taken in bad faith. It would be pointless. But you’ll see them in the comments and reblogs. This is a known group to not only myself, but many others. I will share some of their names in a later section so you know who to watch for. They will make a lot of noise around this post because they’ve been trying to make something like this happen for actual years. And now that I had a genuinely concerning response that good people reasonably want me to explain, they’re lunging at the chance to throw absolutely anything at the wall. It’s parasocial levels of hatred. This is some deep and horrible lore.

The next set of twos is how two things can be true at the same time. And that is exactly what is going on here, in this situation. Let me be really clear, because I don’t want either truth to be lost in my explanation as they are intrinsically linked to one another.

1.      I did a downright terrible job explaining myself in the Discord when people started asking about crimson. I can give you all kinds of contributing factors for this, and I might later. But none of them really matter. It was incredibly careless of me to use “egging them on” and “cried wolf”  to describe what I understood. At the time I was really laser-focused on expressing what happened as simply and quickly as possible because the channel replies were paused and I felt like everyone was just waiting for me to be finished with my message. But after stepping back, I immediately understood how badly I messed up, because of course these idioms are routinely weaponized against survivors of SA and CSA. That is not how I intended to use them. It was an unfortunate case of one thing looking and sounding like another thing. Incredibly ham-fisted and irresponsible on my part. To the survivors who read my words and felt that it echoed their past experiences, I’m heartbroken that I did that to you. That lapse of judgement was a betrayal to both you and me. I don’t know where my head went, and I’m just blown away by my own lack of awareness in that message. So for that I am and will continue to be sorry.

2.      The second thing that can be true is that, while you are all absolutely owed an explanation and an apology, there are also some people amongst you who are using this fuck-up on my part as a springboard to take me down.  These people have been trying to get a call out post to pop off about me for at least a year, and they have been very quick to jump into the reblogs and comments about this very serious topic with complete lies and slander. Just, anything that might stick to the wall. We’ll address this later on as well. But please understand that me discussing the harassment I’ve faced from these groups is not at the expense of me also owning up to my faults and taking the proper accountability.

And the last set of twos is one I’ve alluded to in the first sets, concerning a pair of toxic side-servers that ran adjacent to the main Nevermore Discord. Completely unofficial cliques. And invisible to myself and Flynn and our mod team. We were eventually made aware that both of them were breaking laws and Discord ToS in ways that leaked into our server and affected our members negatively. As such, both groups were mass-banned. And the cliques are the ones running a majority of the discourse you’ve been seeing here, because while they are formally banned from the discord, we have absolutely no say in their participation on Tumblr. Now, keep in mind. Both of these groups were uncovered after crimson was banned the first time. That’s important later.

Clique #1

My understanding of the first group is that it started as a gaming server for people who met one another through the Nevermore Discord. I don’t know when or why it started being used to talk shit about other readers, but I do know that it got really vicious. And it was sort of an open secret for long before I knew anything about it. I found out after that there were a lot of people passively in this server, just observing. It was that much of a spectacle.

Now, this clique had been pretty rude. Like they’d try to start fights with me in the discord fairly often, both in the Patreon and free spaces. But it wasn’t grounds for dismissal until we found out about the baiting and the alts.  These people had a lot of grievances, but one really united them: they were extremely upset about anyone who would ship Prospero.

Many of you know, that Prospero is an aromantic character, canonically. And you may notice that canonically, he has no apparent love interest. But this group wanted to make sure other readers were not thinking about Prospero in relationships, or creating ship content of him for any reason on the grounds that it would be considered a “proship.” I told them (and I stand on this) that it’s not up to them to police the thoughts of other readers, and that aromantic people have widely varying lifestyles and experiences and do not need to be infantilized that way.

This turned out to be a bad move on my part, because it brought with it an onslaught of alt accounts coming in and "innocently" kicking up what I now refer to as the “prosp-aro” debate every time they had the chance. But because of this and what a common occurrence it was, we started being able to pick out the alts. And we realized that this group of people had been using the same alt accounts with different names to antagonize certain readers they’d decided they hated, and it had gone on for a long time.

I did a lot of investigative work in dms trying to figure out who all was responsible for the harassment, and settled on a list that was vetted by three different people who knew about the clique. And all three of these people insisted that, while Laci was in the group and in a lot of the screencaps saying pretty dubious things, that she was good people. So I believe them, and let Laci stay. This group was banned on April 3, 2024, and contained the following users:

-          lilnatx (nat)

-          suitino (sushi)

-          jj_the_jet_plane (layden)

-          rivsticks (jasper)

-          atheimee (athena)

-          jinxs.com (lanx/jinx)

-          smartestginger (nico)

-          thereallandofbugs (bugs)

-          rosienemui (rosie)

These were the names they were known by on the Discord. I don’t have the Tumblr accounts tied to these identities. But some might be the same. I know a lot of them are here.  It should be noted that jinx was later unbanned due to pressure from Laci that they had been banned in error, after the fact. We allowed them back in after a few days as a favor to Laci since the situation seemed like it was very stressful for her. This would prove to be yet another a mistake since, as you have probably seen in the screenshots from the night before last, jinx rapidly escalated things to another level while I was trying to figure out how to handle crimson’s unbanning and subsequent rebanning an hour later.

Clique #2

Phew. Still with me? Great. The second group we needed to ban was one that actually started long before the first one, but was a lot smaller and comparatively more subtle. This group, to my knowledge, cropped up around the time that ep. 39 of Nevermore was released. (11/10/22) We knew about this group but not who all was involved in it or in what capacity for a very long time. They would consistently post things on Tumblr trying to start a scandal. I recall posts alleging that we were racists, or SA apologists, or that we were sending death threats to a random confessions account.

To be clear, these allegations are completely false. This clique will say anything. Like a recent post one of them put up during this discourse said that hiwi (our mod) is both a r*pe apologist and a childhood friend of mine and that’s the only reason she hasn’t been banned. Hiwi is absolutely nothing of the sort, and I have never met her in person. In fact, she lives on the other side of the continent.

Now, this clique is a little different than the first. The first, to my knowledge, was a group of friends that got toxic and felt morally superior about their opinions and it all kind of got away from them. The vibe was a little catty, I guess. Gossipy. But this clique has more of a stalker vibe. It’s dark.

They’ve had it out specifically for me for as long as I can remember. And some of them (at least one, at all times) would subscribe to our patreon, both to sow dissent in our stream chats and also to leak literally all the content back to the others, including me talking about random shit like what I ate for lunch. Just so they could like. Laugh about it, I guess. I’ll never understand why. [Editing note: because in the final moments of proofreading this post I see one of these people has made some master post about what a terrible person I am? A lot of those screenshots are from Patreon channels and the guy STILL has them laying around. I’m telling you, they stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.] 

The biggest grievance this clique had is that any ship with Montresor is an “SA fetish ship” because to them he is a r*pist because of how he made Ada bark (?) and since Montrada is canon, that means we are supporters of SA, and that Morella and Ada should be together instead. Listen, I’ll level with you, this one baffles me. I don’t even know how to begin to untangle it. But if you see a lot of vitriol about us being SA apologists from these users, it’s because Montresor exists. That’s pretty much it.

You can ask them for screencaps ‘til you’re blue in the face, but unless they build fake ones from the ground up, they’re never going to be able to back up their wild claims. Simply put, they’re provocateurs, and they use the scariest words they can to whip people up into a panic.

We became aware that they were leaking patreon content when one of them was caught publicly referring to things that were being said behind a paywall when we knew they weren’t a patron. It unraveled from there.  People who knew about their antics shared screenshots and information with us, and we finally realized the scope of the clique’s hatred and banned whoever was even left in the Nevermore Discord. But they continue to be active in the community on tumblr. You’ll have seen them around. They were banned on 5/11/2024 and the names involved are as follows (again, a mishmash of discord names, nicknames, and tumblr accounts):

- percy (gremlinguy145 on tumblr)

- queenmorningrose (annabel-lee-nevermore on tumblr)

- spoopycactus630 (spoopy-nevermore-dump on tumblr)

- grif/horrorshow (conscience-grim on tumblr)

- unreqiknizd

- duke aralt (westofthestyx)

- eden (sapphic-mad-scientist on tumblr)

- priemium

Again I’d like to reiterate. The point in sharing these names is not to incite any sort of response against these people. But they are folding themselves into the fray and doing what they can to whip everyone else up into a mob, and all as we’re talking about a discord server that they have been banned from for months now. The above context is also relevant for the next section, which is why you’re all here in the first place.

What the hell happened with Crimson?

I hope it’s not confusing, but now we’re going back to 3/14/2024, before anything I just outlined above had come to light. The cliques were quietly doing their harassment and baiting and raiding and whatever-the-hell behind the scenes, but Flynn and I and the mods were blissfully unaware of how bad it was getting. We get a dm from Laci. The same Laci who was part of Clique #1 and was rescued from being banned with the others by her friends outside the group. Jinx’s friend, who managed to get them unbanned as well. You have probably seen these screencaps already, but I will show them to you again, just in case.

Sufficed to say, we were immediately alarmed by the information Laci shared in her DM with us. Now, I want to be very clear about this because it’s been lost in the game of telephone. What Laci outlines in her dm to me, were the events that occurred between six users (including crimson) in a group chat with minors. Everyone in the evidence was censored (pfp and username), as was the image that crimson showed them. When I asked, Laci agreed to give me one name of one of the minors in the dm. I’ll call them Alice, but that is not their real name. I asked if I could talk to Alice about this, I was told by Laci, no. Alice doesn’t want to talk. I was like, ok I understand, that’s fine. 

I hope it makes sense when I say that it is not feasible for us to moderate the things that happen in peoples’ dms. As you’ve seen above, the mod team doesn’t usually get involved with drama unless whatever is happening is directly affecting the experience people are having in the Nevermore Discord because that is all we can see and the only place we have any real authority.  But this was obviously a special case. We banned crimson very quickly without asking any follow-up questions, because of course we did!? I’ve seen people say I’m harboring or defending crimson or that we’re buddies but we barely spoke, ever. They were a stranger to me then, and they still are now.

But something about the entire situation wasn’t adding up to me. And I want to be clear that none of this is in any way meant to discredit csa survivors, I’m really just trying to put you in my headspace and walk you through my thought process. But I found that the evidence was just, sort of strange. Laci started her dm explaining that she found this information out because she and a group of people were investigating crimson for ‘art tracing’ which felt, to me, like a bizarre non-sequitur and totally irrelevant next to the evidence of them showing nsfw content to minors. Petty, kind of. Like I wanted to ask – why were you doing that in the first place? People trace Flynn’s art all the time. As long as they’re not selling it, it’s not a big deal.

Most of the crops are from a PC but the windows are oddly small, and only contain a couple messages at a time. Some have American formatted time and some have European formatted time. So different users, I assume? The names were blotted out, which I would understand for a public call-out but not for a private report to the mod team. Laci was not in this gc at any point in time, despite being the one to report. 

One of the users was apparently 12, to which I ask – what is a 12-year-old doing on discord at all? If we knew who they were, we would have reported the account. Discord is not a safe place for a child that age, let alone a small group chat. Along with 18-year-old Crimson, there was also a 22- and 17-year-old in the chat, which left us wondering – why hadn’t anything been done?

I had no evidence that anyone ever told crimson they were minors, and I feel if it existed, it would have been in the screencap dump (I find that sometimes a noticeable lack of key evidence is evidence in itself). No one seems to have tried to kick crimson from the group chat or report their account for inappropriate behavior. Then there’s the fact that this is a group chat. Anyone in it can leave at any time. 

Then I came across the messages that started this whole gc, and it only got stranger when I realized Alice started it, called it “Women Lovers” and created it “so we can talk about Nevermore women without having to filter ourselves” after they all reacted to a sultry but sfw drawing of Lenore that crimson had made and posted in our hideout channel. And all that made me wonder why Alice didn’t just kick crimson, if she had admin power?  Do you see what I mean? It’s just all a bit head tilty. I noticed it at the time. But I said nothing. Because it didn’t matter. Crimson, no matter what happened, exposed minors to nsfw content. And that’s on them. And I’ve never in my life defended it. We banned them.

Crimson was beside herself. She came off humiliated and apologetic, and insisted she had no idea and begged to come back to a community she said she loved. But we told her no, there’s no coming back from doing what she did.

Time passes and we uncover Clique #1. And while we figured out who the main players were, I dmed with Laci. And it was Laci herself, who tells me that it was Alice who made most of Clique #1’s alt accounts, and that it was Alice who used those alt accounts to harass people and try to get them to start fights or say something that might get them in trouble. 

And I’ll be honest with you, the mod team still didn’t think much of it, outside of – we need to figure out which accounts were the alts. So we did. We had several confirmed to us.  And those accounts were zeroing in on certain users that the clique didn’t like. At the time we noticed two notable targets in addition to the mod team. I won’t name them, it’s their business if they want to weigh in about all that. But in screencaps, they’ll be labeled Target #1 and Target #2.

More time passes and Clique #2 comes to light. As you can imagine, by now we’re feeling disillusioned, and very tired of trying to moderate shit we cannot see for ourselves. And that’s when crimson comes back to very hesitantly ask if they might be able to appeal their ban. It wasn’t until then that it occurred to us that Laci (on behalf of Alice) was the only one who ever reported anything to us about Crimson. 

And I want to just say that again. Because it’s gotten lost too. Laci was the only person who ever reported Crimson. There was not one single other person who ever sent a modmail or a dm or even a ping to anybody on the mod team. I have since (only yesterday) seen some screencaps that are rather skin crawly, but even those happened in yet another side server. Thinking on this, the mods went back through the known alt accounts Alice had used. And they found that Alice harassed crimson both on her main account and on the same alt accounts that she used to harass the other targets.

By now, Alice is banned for completely unrelated reasons. Not because of what happened with Crimson. I’ve seen that one flying around and I’m sorry it’s just not true. It’s because she was relentlessly harassing and cyberbullying people in the discord we moderate. Laci is still there, but had lost my trust, for being involved with both the drama I’ve mentioned here and more that I don’t care to dip into. It’s ultimately irrelevant. But what am I going to say to Laci? “Hey, did you and Alice, by any chance, coordinate some kind of bizarre trap together to get crimson banned from the discord because you suspected them of tracing their art?” And once again. Because I want to keep this top of mind. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t make what Crimson did alright, and it never will. Sharing nsfw content in front of minors is a disgusting thing to do. And one that we frankly are really irritating about in the moderation of the discord. I’ve heard people say that we over-moderate when it comes to art. 

But all this stuff about a “known pedophile?” If it was known, then we were on the outs. And to even this minute right now, I don’t have any conclusive evidence that Crimson is a pedophile. The evidence I have is that Crimson shared nsfw with a group of people whose ages they did not know. Which is fucking gross. It’s an adult’s responsibility to make sure they’re speaking with other adults before posting things of that nature. 

But at the time, the way I read the situation is that Crimson had only just stopped being a minor and was egregiously negligent in how they were speaking and what they were posting, likely in part due to them not being aware enough of their adult responsibilities.  And hey. I know some of you are chomping at the bit. You can call me naïve for this! This is what I’m referring to when I say that I can be a real idiot. But I feel everyone has been very quick to call Crimson a pedophile. I know this is pedantic to say, but the prerequisite for being a pedophile is “being attracted to minors.” Based on the information I had at my fingertips, I did not think Crimson sought out these minors. Crimson was invited to the gc, they did not ask to join. 

I have seen discussions about all the things crimson did to their victims since we unbanned them but I have not seen screencaps to support that whole ‘marriage proposal’ thing, and again I think it sounds a bit odd coming as a pedophilia accusation from someone only one year younger than crimson.  

But you know what? I don’t know crimson. Maybe we were wrong. But even if we weren’t, I realize in hindsight that it was a stupid decision for the mod team to give them a second chance. We didn’t have anyone to consult about what happened because all the other people in the chat had been obscured from me and I didn’t feel like Laci would give me a straight answer. 

The mods and I felt at the time that crimson, like the other targets of Clique #1, had been singled out and that they deserved another very closely monitored chance in the discord, which they said they still missed dearly. I’m a bleeding heart, alright? A total sap. I know that. But being honest with you, I felt bad. It feels horrible to be singled out and targeted. And I was probably too close to that feeling at the time, seeing as we were on the tail end of finding out the Clique #2 had pursued me so relentlessly for so long. 

So for my part, I’m sorry. I made a rash decision that was influenced by some very personal circumstances. And we should have left it alone. Based on the evidence I've seen, I don’t know if I personally would call crimson a pedophile and certainly I wouldn't call them a known pedophile, but I am regretful that we risked it either way.

When I was trying to explain all of this in the west common room channel two nights back, things had boiled over and were already getting out of hand very quickly. A lot of brand new accounts were joining the discord with one word intros just to start conflicts in the public server with crimson. Alts. Either from banned users or burner accounts. And I got panicky. One of the mods paused the messages in west common room but no one besides me was available to handle the situation at that moment. Reacts about being silenced were pouring in and I felt pressured to quickly take over and try to explain. 

In my rush, I stupidly didn’t backread more than a quick skim. And I ate shit, y’all. You saw. One thing I want to state outright. I’m talking a lot about my thoughts and my feelings and it’s because I don’t wanna speak for Flynn or for the mods. But I didn’t make this decision alone. In fact, I was dragging my feet and being really lazy about okaying the whole thing. Just because I was busy, not because I was fretting over it or anything. But I had to be pinged and then literally tapped on the shoulder by Flynn, asking me to respond to mod chat when this was being discussed earlier that day. That doesn’t change the fact that I was part of the decision. I agreed to unban crimson. Foolishly. I understand that, now. 

I hope that now it makes some more sense though, how it came to happen. I never meant to hurt anyone. My own past and present feelings got in the way, and I own that. But in the moment, my personal intention was to give crimson a second chance because I felt that they’d been targeted by Clique #1. Not to ignore anyone’s concerns or make them feel unsafe, even if those were the ultimate outcome.  

So, completely underprepared and defensive, I jumped into west common room and I just. Blew it. Totally fucking blew it. I knew it instantly but it’s hard to stay logical when people are telling you you’re vile and evil and they’re sick that they ever thought you were a good person and that they’ll never see you the same way again. My mind went blank and I don’t really remember much of what happened next. But I said what I said, and I should have done better. 

I wish there was a word bigger than sorry. I’m beside myself. I know there was probably a way to make everyone happy. To make everything okay. But I wasn't clever enough to figure it out in the moment, and it eats at me. So it’s like I’m sorry for my poor judgment and my terrible choice of words, but there’s another layer where I’m also sorry for not matching how wonderful this community is with how wonderful (or well, unwonderful) I was two nights ago. I promise I am going to work harder to be better for you all.

Again, to every victim of SA and CSA, my heart is with you, more personally than you might realize. I don’t think I could have handled my explanation in a worse way. And I’m so so sorry.

Moving forward, I am also going to take an enormous step back from moderating and participating in the discord in general. I feel like a lot of this happened because I was still treating it like it belonged to a smaller fandom, like Shiloh’s. But realistically, I don’t have time to both moderate and make the series itself, and I really dragged my feet on being honest with myself about that. And for that too, I apologize. We’re going to get more mods, they’re going to have full control of the moderation, and Flynn and I are going to do what we love more than anything in the world and just make Nevermore.

I understand if you won’t be there for it. This is not a flattering picture I’ve painted for you. And you’d be well within your rights, to decide not to give us another chance. But it's been a pleasure to lurk here in this wildly talented corner of tumblr. And I’ll never forget it. <3 Yours truly, -Kit Trace

[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.

[thomas-jefferson-miku-binder]

Queer League of Legends Champions (with explanations) - Part II

Check out Part I

Confirmed Pansexuals – Twisted Fate

Twisted Fate was always speculated to be part of the LGBTQ+ community due to his, uh, flamboyancy. The sentiment that he felt something more for Graves was always there, portrayed in their stories through regret, friendship, and loyalty. The Boys and Bombolini color story officially confirmed him as queer, making TFGraves the faces of Pride 2022. This year, he was also seen with the pansexual flag in official pride art, with Riot finally labeling him. It's worth noticing a cute detail (that I doubt was intentional) where his card deck's colors form the colors of his flag!

Confirmed Queers – Ahri, Ekko, Evelynn, Ezreal, Kayn, Nidalee, Renata Glasc, Samira, Taric, Udyr

Ok, this is a long category. Here we have every champion we know for sure is queer, either through external confirmation (Ekko, Ezreal, Kayn, Renata Glasc, Taric), in-game dialogue (Nidalee, Samira, Udyr), or basic lore (Ahri, Evelynn). Let's start with the first group.

Throughout the first half of 2020, Riot released multiple chapters of a Pulsifire color story focused on Ezreal. It explored his relationships with numerous champions of the universe, but especially Ekko. The subtext was strong in this one, and the writer later took to Twitter to talk about how tough it was to have queer stories be censored when working for IPs, not so subtly mentioning Ezreal and Ekko after doing so. Even though Riot might not have agreed with making the Ezko relationship undeniably romantic, their love for one another is still an important part of the story, not to mention that it was the creator's intended vision to begin with. 

Renata Glasc was confirmed as sapphic by one of her creators when sharing concept art of her design. Checking the link to the original post, they seem to have deleted the excerpt that mentions it, but people took screenshots before they edited it, most likely because of Riot. Taric, on the other hand, has been speculated to be queer since forever, although the motives are not that pure. Many people saw this hairless, beautiful man that likes jewels and was like, "Huh, that sounds kinda gay," which was the common dudebro mentality of the fandom at the time of his release that caused a lot of homophobia within the player base (more than usual). They weren't wrong, seeing as Riot did include Taric in official 2023 pride art, but he was not seen wearing or holding any flags. After all, it would make sense that he likes everything—and everyone—beautiful. But either way, both Taric and Renata are non-specified queers.

Shieda Kayn is a weirder case. I thought a lot about whether I should even include him in this category at all. There are many accounts of people affirming one of Kayn's writers pictured him as having fluid sexuality, but since then, wherever it was posted, it's gone now. I do believe it since we can still find Reddit threads on the subject, but the original source is nowhere to be found. I still decided to put him here, but take it with a grain of salt.

Moving on to our next category, we have Nidalee, Samira, and Udyr. Samira flirts more than once with Elegant Edge in Legends of Runeterra, and her attraction for her is not subtle. As far as I'm aware, she's never expressed interest in men, but we can't say for sure whether she's bi, pan, or gay. Nidalee and Udyr have had speculated romantic interests in other champions for a while now. Nidalee with Neeko, Udyr with Lee Sin. Nidalee and Neeko's story was first portrayed as one-sided, with Neeko rejected by her friend, prompting them to part ways. On the other hand, the addition of both champions to Legends of Runeterra explored their relationship once again, with the two reuniting and Nidalee finally realizing she did love Neeko and simply didn't know how to deal with it all those years ago. A love song, Shine On, even accompanied the update, which narrates their story beautifully. They have many romantic voice lines now, both in LoR and League.

With Udyr's rework, people started realizing he digs Lee Sin through voice lines expressing how he misses his "old friend" and that he's "loved twice, left twice" (which applies to his relationship with Lee Sin). Besides, his design includes memorabilia he exchanged with Lee Sin when they parted ways. It is also important to mention he's had a wife before, so he swings both ways. I think the context gives more than enough clues for us to safely say Udyr is queer. 

Ahri and Evelynn are spirits/demons that prey on their victims (regardless of gender) through charm and seduction. Ahri is essentially a succubus, and Evelynn is the Demon of Agony, with desire and lust being important parts of their characters. It is also worth noting that Evelynn is genderfluid/agender, taking the form of anyone (or anything) that might lure her victims. So their lore essentially confirms them as not straight and not cis (on Evelynn's case, at least).

[lightningonatether]

Why c!endersmile were actually friends

ALTERNATIVELY TITLED: my crazy thesis on two bad bitches with not a single moment of screentime fueled purely by my own insanity

ALTERNATIVELY alternatively titled: to all loreheads please be nice i dont usually lorepost. feel free to engage though

So my return is courtesy of litchi, who mentioned c!endersmile like once a month ago, and got me thinking about them so hard I couldn't just walk away.

Namely, litchi reminded me of a few theories I have concerning c!endersmiles relationship, that I developed back when i was watching the SMP live. This might make my recollection of some events a little fuzzy, but everything should be canon compliant cause I was thinking about all this as I watched.

I was already watching ranboo pretty regularly at the point the prison arc started, I cant resist a really weird guy with horrible debilitating anxiety. I already thought the whole hearing dreams voice in his head was really interesting, but as the prison arc evolved it became clear that ranboos relationship with dream wasnt just some hallucination inside ranboos head and actually had some substance.

My theory really started to develop into what it is now with the explosions on the prison roof which led to the lockdown and tommys death; these were confirmed to be set by ranboo in his enderwalk state. He was one of the only people online at the time, ranboo found tnt in his inventory afterwards, and I think dream also told sam he knew ranboo did it at some point, although I can't find the exact stream.

At that point it was obvious that enderwalking ranboo held a different set of beliefs, alliances, and likely more memories than the "awake" ranboo we saw most of the time on streams, and was acting against amnesiac ranboos wishes. The explosions above the prison along with the reveal that ranboo had been regularly visiting dream in prison confirmed that dream and ender!ranboo were some sort of allies.

At the time, my assumption was that ranboo had simply made an attempted prison break. It wouldnt be a stretch to assume, if ranboo had visited regularly, that he would have noticed the poor conditions and tried to break his ally out. However, after the confirmation of the staged finale, and a better look at cdreams motivations(wanting to provide protection for punz, separating himself very publicly from his only known ally to keep them safe) the idea that enderwalk ranboo, an ally of dreams, would go against dreams explicit wishes to stay locked in that prison began making less sense.

It would only make sense if either:

enderwalk never knew about the plan or

enderwalk knew about the plan but went against it anyway

1 is a very tempting explanation. c!dream rarely lets anyone close. even punz, who knew the plan intimately, wasn't aware of dreams true motivations to bring the server back to a peaceful time before conflict. but..... it didnt sit right with me.

Two reasons for this: I know some people may have stopped watching/never watched ranboo lore, but towards the end of the prison arc, ranboo began seeing flashes of "lessons" appear on screen. These lessons all had that utilitarian and paranoid feel a lot of dreams actions/reasoning have, like "dont trust anybody"(paraphrasing, thats just what i remember the core of that message being) or "never hesitate to gain a favor from someone, you can use it to get something from them later". anyone remember technos favor to dream? It was heavily implied these lessons were meant to be from dream, directed at c!enderwalk. This would mean the two spent a significant amount of time together. not only that, dream was sharing his *life philosophy* with ender!ranboo. thats not just something dream would share with anyone, and implies a close allyship at the least. its almost like he was teaching a pupil. yeah, sure, some of his lessons were a little fucked up and weird in that dream sort of way, but he was looking out for the kid. and it seems that enderwalk wasnt hesitant to act on those lessons either. he promised to keep a shulker safe for foolish, gaining a favor, and didnt sign a single one of those prison visitation waivers, on top of sam discovering they were corrupted into enderian when he checked LMAO.

This alone would be enough to persuade me enderwalk HAD to have been let in on the plan, at least so he wouldnt cause any problems (such as trying to get his ally out of prison).

but the other reason is... ranboos stated philosophy against conflict. he doesnt like sides, he wishes they wouldn't exist. I remember watching a stream and nearly jumping out of my seat when he told chat he just wished the server could just be one big happy family! because that is nearly word for word what a bunch of loreheads were saying about dreams motivations at the time(and now obviously lmao). if we keep in mind their contact for those "lessons", ranboos visits to dream in prison, AND the fact that dreams and ranboos motivations coincide on a level even Above dream and punzs(punz seemed to have been unaware of and also not particularly motivated by dreams wish for peace) i cant really imagine dream not letting this guy in on the plan.

which leaves us with 2) ranboo tried to break dream out against dreams wishes.

Maybe ranboo was just an ally and chickened out after he saw dreams mistreatment in prison and went against the plan, but... dream missed him after sam barred him from visiting. he asked sapnap to deliver a note to ranboo(just a smiley face, likely with the hopes of triggering an enderwalk) despite fearing for his ally punz enough to lock himself in prison. it feels reminicent to how dream sounds when he comments on george not visiting him once. like he missed a friend despite trying so hard to separate himself from the ones he'd had.

Maybe ranboo tried to break in because he saw a friend being mistreated, and couldn't leave the plan stand.

And that kind of makes sense doesn't it? that dream, someone whos paranoid about how peoples connection to him puts them in danger, would choose an amnesiac who spends most of their time terrified of dream, and wouldnt remember any of his plans or their friendship to use against either of them in the first place?

[beifong-brainrot]

Using the Avatar state scenes as an example and saying this is katara relationship with aang is so vile 🤦‍♂️

https://www.tumblr.com/sunandmoongobrrr/662596151677190144?source=share

Ugh this take again. It honestly always exhausts me to see this because the thing about Aang going into the Avatar state is that it is, at it's core, a defence mechanism. Aang goes into it in life threatening situations, or otherwise, incredibly distressing situations. I've even pointed out its similarities to panic attacks:

Katara is an incredibly empathetic person, and she is able to emphasise with Aang's pain. Because a) she's just that type of person and b) her and Aang share the trauma of genocide and loss.

Katara's interactions with Aang when he is in the Avatar's state aren't based around tempering his anger, but providing comfort and reassurance. It almost seems that Katara just reminding Aang that she is there and that she cares is usually enough to calm him which makes sense. Because, at the core of it, Aang's greatest pain, likely the root of most of his nrgative emotions is that he is the last airbender. His people are dead, have been dead for ages. He is alone, the last of his kind, and it destroys him.

Aang: [To the winged-lemur.] You, me and Appa; we're all that's left of this place. [Looks at the lemur.] We have to stick together.

Enter Katara, who reassures Aang that she is with him, that she cares, that she won't leave him. Because she sees that he is hurting. She hugs him as normal people hug their friend when they are upset, and later, when their relationship is more established, it's just enough for her to make eye contact with him and remind him that she's there.

Katara : Aang! I know you're upset and I know how hard it is to lose the people you love. I went through the same thing when I lost my mom. Monk Gyatso and the other airbenders may be gone, but you still have a family. Sokka and I! We're your family now!

And I truly don't think Katara does this out of a sense of obligation or fear. She does this because she sees her friend, and later, romantic partner, is hurting. And she knows that pain intimately. So she offers her comfort. Of her own free will, because she cares.

Katara : Do you remember when we were at the air temple and you found Monk Gyatso's skeleton? It must have been so horrible and traumatic for you. I saw you get so upset that you weren't even you anymore. I'm not saying the Avatar State doesn't have incredible and helpful power ... but you have to understand ... for the people who love you, watching you be in that much rage and pain is really scary.

I think the emphasis on "the people who love you" is important here. Katara isn't afraid of the Avatar state itself. She is saddened and scared for Aang, because she knows he is in pain. And he is someone she loves, be that platonically, or romantically.

Side note; I always found it so cool that when Aang went into the Avatar State in the Avatar State episode and wreaked havoc on general Fong's base, Katara, who was literally in the middle of it, remained completely unharmed.

See, the theme with Avatar is that holding onto anger and pain can be incredibly self destructive. We see this, of course, with Zuko, but also with Aang and Katara.

Of course, we're shown how one's anger affects others, but we also see how painful it can be on oneself. Which is a very poignant theme that isn't often explored.

This is what Aang was trying to communicate to Katara in The Southern Raiders. And this is what people like this, who commented under OP's post don't get.

Oh, something crazy? Like for example going against her entire morality and do something she might regret for the rest of her life? That type of crazy? Hell, look at how strongly "The Southern Raiders" ties back to "The Puppetmaster", an episode about a victimised Southern Waterbender driven to near madness by her grief pain, and rage.

Aang isn't stopping Katara from feeling anger, he's trying to make sure she doesn't do something that will weigh on her and compromise her morals and ideals, because he knows how important they are to her.

Aang: The monks used to say that revenge is like a two-headed rat viper. While you watch your enemy go down, you're being poisoned yourself.

Hell, he even supports and believes in her, letting her take Appa and believing she would make the choice right for her. Which she did, in the end.

Aang: I wasn't planning to. This is a journey you need to take. You need to face this man. But when you do, please don't choose revenge. Let your anger out, and then let it go. Forgive him.

And no, I don't think he was trying to save face, since he has never had a problem disagreeing with Katara before, for example in the Avatar State episode, where he followed his sense of duty as the Avatar, despite acknowledging and valuing her criticisms of the matter.

Aang and Katara's relationship is one of mutual support, particularly in helping alleviate each others pain, since they are both genocide survivours, both lost a parental figure to the fire nation, both value their cultures and desperately try to perserve them etc.

I think some excellent aymbolism of this can be in how Aang tries to help Katara with her dismay and discomfort around losing her mother's necklace, something she's expressed was very valuable to her due to her loss. First by making a symbollic replacement, and then risking himself by retrieving the necklace from Zuko.

I also genuinely enjoy that in both of these instances, Katara put the necklace on herself? Like it would be so easy to just make a cliche meaningful scene where Aang puts it on her and "proposes" but theres almost something more appealing to me of Katara taking the necklace from Aang and putting it on completely on her own.

Katara does not need Aang to calm her down when she's angry, because, with the exception of the Southern Raiders, her anger is usually benign squabbling which is completely normal 14 year old behaviour. Wheras for Aang, his anger usually rears its head on rare occasions when he's in deep distress.

But Aang is there to comfort Katara, to bolster her confidence, to support her, make sure she's having fun almost whenever she needs it.

These are just a few examples of Aang providing comfort to Katara.

These actions may not be as bombastic and awe worthy as Katara ripping Aang out of a state of deity like power, but they are nonetheless important to Katara and make a big difference.

Aang and Katara's live language with each other is providing comfort, in any way they can. Be it by alleviating anger and pain, making the other feel good about themself, or connecting over the horrific genocides that brutally deprived them of their loved ones. You know, just normal couple things 💗

And this is where I could slander Zutara, but I'll simply tactfully say that Zuko... prioritised things other than Katara's comfort and happiness.

Also, incredibly rich that one of OP's examples of Aang going into the Avatar state out of anger was in the comics. OP neglected, however, to include the scene leading up to this where Aang is extremely calm and nonconfrontational until Zuko grabs Katara and refuses to let go of her despite both Aang and Katara telling him he's hurting her and then attacking Aang after Aang knocks him away from Katara.

Like hun this is not a good look.

And another point I'd like to raise is this persob in the comments who apparently watched the show blindfolded.

why are we still here just to suffer etc etc. Like have you folks even watched the show why do you have beef with a twelve year old who commited the crime of loving a girl his age. If you're that fucking upset about it you can just not have him do that in your mind palace you don't have to pick violence.

Aang is a genuinely amazing character who deserves so much more than what his haters say. It's fine if he's not your fave character I just don't understand why people have to be dicks about it.

Genuinely the only good thing I get from examining this type of bullshit rethoric is that it lets me inspect Kataang more closely and find new things I genuinely love about it.

[mielkae]

Reasons flower husbands could be exes in your ranchers fic that aren't "scott was a toxic abuser"

I always have a hard time reading fics that make scott an abuser because he's one of my favourite characters, but I also get that writers might wanna include past flower husbands into their fics. So here's an inexhaustible list of reasons flower husbands might have broken up before the start of your fic that don't involve making anyone the bad guy:

They realized they were better off as friends

Maybe jimmy only thought he loved scott romantically because he was so caught up in the attention. Maybe scott just fell for the first guy who showed an interest, and later realized it was just infatuation. Maybe a romantic dynamic just never seemed to work as well for them as a platonic one. Who knows? There are plenty of reasons dating might be the wrong answer for a pair that just seems to mesh perfectly as friends.

Incorporate it into your minecraft lore

K so this one isn't conventional, but I've seen the idea come up a few times in fics and I really like it. Maybe relationships don't always carry over from server to server. Maybe it's not uncommon for a relationship between the same people to take different forms across different servers at the same time. Maybe not every version of scott knows every version of jimmy, and they don't always remember the servers and intimacies they've shared together. Maybe starting a new server is generally considered a refresh, and it's normal for old relationships to be broken off so new ones can form. The possibilities are endless!

They're trying to do the right thing.

This one's a bit angstier, and would likely still result in some hurt feelings on both sides. What if after double life, scott sees how much jimmy misses tango and remembers how well the two clicked. The two were soulmates after all, and all he wants is for jimmy to be happy. if he can't be the person to bring him that happiness, he'll give him the space to be with someone who can. Or maybe jimmy feels himself falling for tango in double life, and believing himself to be unfaithful, he breaks things off with scott to at least spare him the hurt of being with someone who doesn't love him enough (operating under the assumption that jimmy is a bit of an idiot who doesn't realize he has two hands).

[lu-is-not-ok]

Timekilling Time Trailer Frame by Frame

That's right. The second trailer for Timekilling Time is out, and I'm gonna go through it frame by fucking frame. I've always done this for story-related teasers and trailers, just not on Tumblr. So, might as well do it here for once.

First thing after the logo of the event:

We see a view of a T Corp street. The visual effect over some of the silhouettes if very interesting, especially considering it's almost completely unseen on the more working-class looking people, while being very extreme on the one person with color. Some sort of visual cue showing how much 'Time' currency everyone owns perhaps?

Judging by the golden accents and clockwork motifs, seems like a T Corp official dealing with one of the workers. The official does mostly match the outfit one of the T Corp collectors we see in Canto 4, so we might be seeing some more intricacies of whatever their job entails in this Intervallo.

The transition between this and the ID showcase is a glitchy effect, interestingly enough.

Project Moon why the fuck is Ryoshu's dialogue so goddamn blurry here? Whatever, we'll get back to that line later. Let's focus on what we can see.

Ryoshu is getting the 00 Identity, and is an Event Reward, meaning you'll be able to get her through grinding the event itself. Also, in case the pattern on the bandana wasn't already a dead give-away, then the name of the identity will be - we're dealing with the Yurodiviye again.

This has. A lot of lore implications. For one, we know from Canto 2 that the Yurodiviye are no longer confined to just District Y, but the fact that this is a confirmation they exist in District T as well means they are far more widespread than we might think.

Also the role they seem to take on is very interesting as well. In Canto 2 we learn of them as being a Syndicate that has connections with a bunch of other Syndicates in District J, but in here it seems like they're more official than that? We're talking straight up detective stuff, with the previous teaser implying the people we'll be working with are actually officially recognised by T Corp. Just what the fuck has Sonya been doing?

First look at event combat. Unsurprisingly, we're in the streets of T Corp. Interestingly, we're fighting the human T Corp Collectors we got to see in Canto 4 but didn't get to fight. Does that imply some sort of inner conflict in T Corp? Like I said above, the previous teaser implied the detective work we're doing is for T Corp's interests, why are we being impeded by other T Corp officials?

Looking at the Skill animation, Ryoshu's Skill 1 is two coins.

Skill 2 looks like maybe three coins?

Skill 3 is definitely three coins, and that is Very Much a Tremor Burst sound effect on the last coin. We got the Tremor baby!

Finally, some readable dialogue! Doesn't give us much, but "Shake down the loaded pigs..." shows us that even in their new role, Yurodiviye still despise the rich and focus on redistributing wealth.

Also, hi Hong Lu! You're here early! We'll get to you in a moment.

Let's talk about Ryoshu's guard, as the trailer very nicely shows us that's what Ryoshu is using.

"...and share the pilfered time with everyone." Yup, just as I said, redistribution of wealth.

Anyway, Ryoshu's guard seems to have a sort of Assist Attack mechanic to it, causing her to follow up with an attack of hers after Hong Lu's own attack. This Defense Assist Attack appears to be two coins, with a Tremor Burst on the second. Already looking very interesting as an ID.

Good lord Project Moon, what is it with the unreadable Ryoshu dialogue?! At least this one is slightly legible. "Pictures? Hmph, fine-snap away. Just make sure to get all the blood splatters." This combined with the post-uptie art showing an overlay of a camera with a shattered lens gives the idea that the Yurodiviye are somewhat well known I think. Enough to warrant taking pictures of.

Aaaand here's man of the hour! A 000 Identity that will be in the Gacha - District 20 Yurodivy Hong Lu. Same faction as Ryoshu, and the fact that we are definitely dealing with a Detective archetype here, again, it brings Yurodiviye's spot in T Corp into question. Are they going to be the people we help out, or are they the bad guys we'll be catching?

There's a lot to unpack here. First - "Hmm... What an amateurish finish... They must've been really pressed for time." - again with the Hong Lu identities utterly unphased by violence! What is the deal with him! The fact that he comments on the murder scene in terms of 'finish', as if judging a piece of art, is extra suspicious considering we've got Ryoshu as the other Identity here. It also has a weird connection to Sign of Roses's Observation Log, where Hong Lu starts describing it as if it's an art piece. Something is going on here.

Next, probably the least important part - new Hong Lu hairstyle! This is the first time we get to see Hong Lu with a low ponytail, as opposed to his usual high ponytails.

Finally, something I'm sure everyone has been talking about since the first teaser we got of this Identity - the marks under his jade eye. That is very clearly a T, again seemingly marking him as connected to T Corp itself in some way. Add to that the uncanny resemblance those marks have to the barcode mark under Alphonso's eye, and we've got one hell of a mystery. What the fuck is his deal!

Another look at event combat. A different area of T Corp + a return of the more robotic looking T Corp collectors. I repeat, why are we fighting T Corp collectors if we're working with T Corp on this case? What the hell happened?

Anyway, Hong Lu's Skill 1 seems to be a two coin, and I believe this is the same animation as in the Ryoshu Defense Skill showcase, meaning we got a potential early peek at its Sin Affinity - Gloom! Doesn't bode well for this Hong Lu story-wise!

Skill 2 is a three coin skill.

"Okay, let's think. How would I do this, if I was the killer? I just have to slowly think it through, and..." Now, this doesn't have to be that deep, but this line combined with the previous one where Hong Lu judges the murder scene as 'amateurish' feels... just the slightest bit sus.

"...Hehe, I suppose I'll find the truth sooner or later, hm?" He's the worst. I love him. Anyway.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THAT SKILL 3?

First, the animation start with Hong Lu spitting out the stick he's had in his mouth, which is followed by a flashy either one or two coin skill with a Tremor Burst, which is then followed by that same eye sparkle effect that signifies SP healing in the Liu Identity and Dieci Identity. SP heal on stagger? SP heal on Tremor Burst? Fuck if I know.

That eye is definitely sparkling. Project Moon please give us eye lore.

Also, the background is very interesting. The visual style and slight transparency makes it feel like a sort of replay of events. Is that what his eye allows him to see? Just straight up visualizing the murder?

And let's not forget the dialogue line. "Hm... let's think about what we should target next." This is. Ominous. Again, we know very little about why Yurodiviye are involved, but judging from Ryoshu's dialogue lines their core motivations haven't changed. What does it mean for them to 'target' something? Are they faking being detectives and just framing people to get their 'Time'? It is notable that the title of Hong Lu's Identity never actually refers to him as a detective or anything of the sort. Just what are they scheming?

Another glitchy transition out of the ID showcase section. Glitches seem to be a recurring theme for this Intervallo.

Anyhow, time for the event enemy showcase!

We got another look at the T Corp collector guy from the ID showcase, not much to say here.

Next up we've got... Oh! That's a Yurodivy! Looks like regardless of the faction we'll be actually working with, we'll be making enemies with everyone! That being said, it's exciting to know we're finally seeing the Yurodiviye in combat, even if it's just a very specific branch of them. The chance for a future Sonya fight or Sonya Rodya ID has risen due to the fact we're seeing this faction in action!

T Corp collector guys from Canto 4, yup, we've seen that earlier as well.

And here we are. In a split second frame. That is the character that Hong Lu's Identity is based on! Not much else to say on this because it's such a quick snippit, but it again puts Yurodiviye's role in the Intervallo's story in the question. If we don't start off working with them, why are they appearing as detective types? If we do start off working with them, what happens to make them turn on us?

Fascinating.

Also, another glitchy transition.

Alright, there's a lot to talk about here. First off, the CG in the background - what the fuck is going on.

Dante and Hong Lu (in his detective garbs) are looking at Meursault in... some Zero Time Dilemma looking ass contraption. Meursault has his arms crossed, the contraption connects to his head, and there's a T Corp logo on it. I honestly have no idea what to do with this information.

Next up - the dialogue line and character sprite silhouette.

"We observed a large-scale, unauthorized temporal leakage phenomenon... which shot you up the progressive Time Tax bracket due to the immense amount of time leak." Uhhhh, I understand what those word mean on their own I guess. My only guess here is that this is the work of Yurodiviye in some way. Looks like Limbus Company is gonna be dealing with the fallour of this temporal leak, whatever that entails.

The character silhouette itself... doesn't give us much. A secretary of some sort? One of the T Corp officials giving us a job? Hard to tell.

Again, a lot to look through.

First we got a view of the whole room the previous CG is taking place in, including office desks and a shitload of clocks everywhere. We're definitely in some sort of T Corp office space, that's for sure.

"Isn't it absolutely brilliant? The very concept of 'killing time'. They're not slowing down or speeding up time; they're eliminating it completely, just entirely yanking it out of circulation." Hmm... Again, hard to say much about this line with its lack of context, but it certainly does seem interesting. All of T Corp stuff we've seen thus far does rely on things like speeding up or slowing down. The TimeTrack upgrade in LobCorp lets you speed up time. The L Corp time loop and the R Corp hatchery compress time so that what takes a long time inside takes less time outside. The Warp Train collects the time of its extremely long travels to sell to T Corp. Straight up deleting time seems very different from what we've seen thus far.

Also, the matter of the silhouette - whoever it is doesn't seem to be the same person as the Yurodivy we see in the split second frame, so whoever this is likely has no connection to Rodya or Sonya.

...This might sound a little out there, but I feel like this would be the perfect opportunity for Project Moon to pull out their own version of Sherlock Holmes. It almost feels like a waste to not include that reference in a detective themed Intervallo.

And now for the biggest surprise of them all from this Trailer - Faust is getting a WAW E.G.O. The name of the E.G.O itself is Everlasting, and the Abnormality it's based on is the Time Duck from the Mirror Dungeon event, also known as the Abnormality that gives the E.G.O Gift Melted Spring.

Not much is known about the Abnormality, as its MD Event primarily connects it to the Duck-Rabbit Illusion, where you have to tell it whether it's a Duck or a Rabbit in your eyes, with the Abnormality fleeing if the answer isn't confident enough.

"How does it appear, my form in your eyes? Perhaps within the clockwork of time the answer lies?" First of all- nice rhymes. Second of all - this is a direct reference to the MD Event, but also very interesting with regards to Faust herself. There's a lot about Faust that shows she lacks self-awareness, with her describing herself as someone who only speaks when asked and doesn't talk much, when in reality she goes on endless tangents without prompting. Add to that the Council of Fausts theory, and it makes the idea of her seeking the opinion of other people with regards to her identity resonate quite intensely.

Also, I'm pretty sure more than enough people have made comparisons between Everlasting Faust and Eileen the Church of Gears leader, but it has to be stated that there definitely are some parallels here. Again, further adds to the Council of Fausts theory, as it would make Everlasting Faust a mirror to Eileen. Eileen, who controls the gears in her head, and Faust, who is controlled by the gears in her head.

Oh, and the E.G.O is Tremor as well. Because why not. At least Faust has a good Tremor Identity already, so it works well.

Putting this here for the woman likers.

Corrosion time. For one, Faust takes on a distinctly bird-like form here. Not sure what exactly this means in the grand scheme of things for the E.G.O's meaning just yet, but it does feel important to note.

"Thus. You cease to move. Trapped in the stopped time. For eternity." ...Hm. There's a few ways this can be interpreted. If we ignore the time-related references and treat them as something only connected to the Abnormality, it gives us the idea of Faust being trapped. Being unable to move on her own, likely due to her extreme ties with Limbus Company and/or the Council of Fausts.

However, adding the time motif into it makes it more interesting. There's a lot of ways one can be 'stuck in time' and unable to move forward. One is a literal time stop Za Warudo style, and another is being trapped in a Time Loop, being unable to make progress due to always being reset and thus ceasing to move for eternity. Both feel relevant to Faust when it comes to what little we've learned of her 'goal' from her original character PV.

There's something Faust is seeking above all else. Some piece of knowledge that is nigh unobtainable. ...But what comes after she reaches it? I think the Corrosion line alludes to exactly that.

If it's a Time Stop scenario, that means that once Faust reaches the unreachable she will just. Stop. There's nothing left for her. She'll be trapped for eternity knowing everything she wished for but being unable to keep moving forward, because there'll no longer be anything for her to move towards.

If it's a Time Loop scenario, that means that Faust's constant push towards the unreachable is an inescapable loop. Once she learns what she wishes, it won't be enough, and she'll just repeat the process again. Stuck in a cycle of reaching everything, coming back to nothing, and reaching for everything anew ad infinitum. No movement made in the process, because she always comes back to square one.

Either way, it doesn't bode well for her.

On another note, the animation fucks severely, and there's another glitchy transition.

Time Georg. Sorry. Actually not sorry.

Seriously though, we get to see another view of T Corp streets, this time with one of the factories in the background and, funnily enough, the fucking Big Ben. We really are in London.

"An average T Corp. citizen has about 20 to 28 hours in a day, but you might also run into people like him; people with plenty time to spare. Because he has so much surplus time, he can afford to condence 40, 50 hours into a single day." Looks like the 'Time' currency doesn't just act as money - you literally can use it to manipulate your time scale. If you're rich, you can do like L Corp Time Loop and make yourself experience more time than everyone around you. It's also notable that the average T Corp citizen can go as low as having less than 24 hours in a day. Guess that explains why people are so desperate that they try to steal 'Time' from each other - their days literally get shorter than more debt they have.

Also, who is this 'him'? Who is this mysterious man with so much ''Time' he can have double his daily hours? I wonder if it's the fully colored man from the first CG of the trailer?

Hey it's the same factory CG from the previous teaser! Nice to know we're still on the track of visiting one.

"And to people with fewer hours in a day... it'll look as though he's moving two, three times faster than them. Someone with that much time could pick their nose in the blink of an eye before anyone even has the chance to catch them in the act." Yup, this explains the visual effect in the first CG. People with a lot of 'Time', who can have more hours in a day than other people, straight up look like they're moving so fast they leave behind after images.

Also, this very much feels like a commentary on how the rich can get away with things just because they're rich. A man rich with 'Time' can get away with unsightly behaviors just because he moves so fast people can't see him do it, just how real life rich people can get away with crimes because they have enough money to not care about fines.

Another glitch transition.

We get to see the iconic CG from the Roadmap, this time in washed out T Corp colors and in all its glory. God I'm excited for seeing more of these goobers.

After we get the logo again, not only do we see the glitch effect, but the music completely cuts out.

What follows is a constantly glitching out text with a background noise that gets louder and more discordant as it goes on.

"Can't wait for what won't come."

"Now is the time for action."

"All those time-killing bastards..."

"I'll..."

Hmmm. Curious and ominous. The presentation of these words does not bode well for the fate of whoever is speaking them, but the content makes me even more interested.

Because... this is Yurodiviye we're talking about. Sonya's whole thing was that he kept reading and learning about theory instead of actually acting until after Rodya commited murder, and even then his personal actions within the group seems confined to establishing connections with other Syndicates and delegating duties to others.

So to have someone who opposes the idea of sitting back and waiting so vehemently in the same Intervallo as Yurodiviye coming back into the spotlight... It is certainly interesting, don't you think?

Alright, that's all for the Trailer! Holy shit I'm excited for this Intervallo.

[infiniteanalemma]

Nobility in Baldur's Gate

Edited to add: I never expected my silly, niche post to get as much attention as it has! I'm giving you all forehead smooches! 😚💋 I've gone through to clean up some things up as I've found new information. I also added a list of nobility that I've found in game and other sources to the end of the post. Thanks, y'all! I'm glad I'm not the only one to wonder about this stuff. Good stuff in the reblogs, too!

Baldur's Gate has dug itself deep in my brain, so I apologize to my poor mutuals who didn't follow me for BG3 content getting this onslaught of posts. Please bear with me until my hyperfixation wears off. 🙏

Now, I'll admit up front that I'm no expert in DnD lore*, so if I get things wrong, please feel free to correct me or just add in stuff I may have missed. I'm going off of what I've found in-game and my Google Fu skills.

That said, I do know enough about DnD to remember that Baldur's Gate nobility are called patriars, and that there are only a relative handful of actual patriar families. I was thinking about my "canon" Tav, Velassa, and her background in BG3. She's a modified OC that I plunked in-game during Early Access, so I made her a noble. It was just part of her existing character that I didn't think too deeply about. It was only after I starting playing that it occurred to me to wonder what exactly "a noble" is to a native Baldurian.

That got me digging a little more into the current state of the Baldurian nobility as of BG3. I don't know who--if anyone--needs or wants this, but I put this together for myself and decided to share it for anyone else who might be interested. I realize that this is probably pretty niche and it's rambly and long af, so I'll put it under a cut.

So, for starters, here's a list of all the patriar families, including "fallen" houses that are barely hanging on: Belt, Bormul, Caldwell, Dlusker, Durinbold, Eltan, Eomane, Exeltis, Gist, Guthmere, Hhune, Hlath, Hullhollyn, Irlentree, Jannath, Jhasso, Linnacker, Miyar, Nurthammas, Oathoon, Oberon, Portyr, Provoss, Ravenshade, Rillyn, Sashenstar, Shattershield, Silvershield, Tillerturn, Vammas, Vannath, Vanthampur, and Whitburn

From what I've gathered, Exeltis, Provoss and Ravenshade are all more-or-less destitute. Also, the Szarr family (Cazador's family) were patriars, but were believed to be entirely wiped out. No living descendants makes them a dead house, rather literally. 😏 (No, I'm not sorry.)

Now, we learn that Wyll's father is Ulder Ravengard, the Grand Duke. This brings us to the first point: There are four Dukes, known as the Council of Four, and the Grand Duke's job is to be the tie-breaker.

Traditionally, one of the Dukes is also the highest ranked officer of the Flaming Fist--that's Ravengard, who was a Fist promoted up through the ranks. Wyll tells us that his father was born lower class, and quite a few of the patriars seem to scorn him for that. The other Dukes are Belynne Stelmane, Dillard Portyr (more on him later) and Thalamra Vanthampur (more on her later, too). Of the four, two are patriars: Portyr and Vanthampur. We don't know much about Stelmane's past, except that she was a brilliant businesswoman, politician and--as we find out later--member of the Knights of the Shield. Apparently, you can't buy your way into the patriars, but maybe you can buy your way into being a Duke.

Skipping ahead a bit, when the player shows up to Gortash's coronation, there are a group of mostly patriars sitting in the boxes leading up to the front of the room. I'm listing them by seating arrangement, with box 1 and 2 being the left and right closest to Gortash, and 3 and 4 being farthest. (I don't know what, if anything, the seating arrangements imply. The second box has eight people, compared to four for all the rest.)

Lady Ailis Belt, Baron Callem Bormul, Lord Rugger Shattershield**, and Lady Alia Durinbold**

Lady Ruth Linnacker, Lord Sarken Eomane, Lady Freida Oberon, Lord Raylen Jannath, Lord Myer Ravenshade**, Lady Madeline Whitburn, Lady Beatrice Provoss, and Duke Dillard Portyr

Lady Winstra Hullhollyn, Admiral Peil Hullhollyn, Lord Randolph Vammas, and Lady Eshvelt Guthmere

Lord Milon Tillerturn, Lady Silifrey Sashenstar, Lord Petric Amber**, and Lady Haeril Birch**

Here's some pictures of the nobles sitting together. (Sorry for the terrible quality! I slapped it together for my own reference. 🙈)

The characters marked by ** aren't human, which is interesting because the information I found said all the patriar familes are human except the Shattershields. Myer Ravenshade is listed as human if you examine him, but he has a dwarf model. That might be a mistake, but I'm including him anyway. Alia Durinbold, from a presumably human patriar family, is a wood elf. Again, this could be a mistake, but unless Larian winds up changing it, it could mean that interracial marriages that once may have been looked down on are now becoming more acceptable. Petric Amber is also a wood elf, and Haeril Birch is a high elf.

Those last two are interesting because they are the only ones in the boxes who aren't patriars. If not for them, I'd have assumed the coronation was simply a demonstration for the patriars alone. Their inclusion means this is something else.

Digging around, my conclusion is that all the listed people are members of the Parliament of Peers--a 50 person advisory party to the Council of Four. However, what I found says that it's pretty rare for all 50 to attend meetings, and the usual group is between 20-30. There are exactly 20 named individuals listed, plus a group of unnamed "patriars" standing at the front.

Here they are, for what it's worth:

One thing I noticed here is that most of those listed here are Lord/Lady, but there are three other titles: Duke, Baron and Admiral. I've already talked about the Dukes. Looking into the patriars, the Hullhollyn family are notable for having a fleet of ships, so it makes sense that one of them would be an Admiral. That leaves the Baron.

I couldn't find anything about what it means to be a baron in Baldur's Gate. Going on real-world peerages, a baron/ess is generally the lowest "rank" of nobility. Basically, it's someone who was an official landowner (usually of an "important" bit of land) under the feudal system. Well and good, I suppose, but presumably all the Lords and Ladies of the patriars own land within the city. This particular Baron is also a patriar, but given that one doesn't need to be a patriar to become a Duke (normally a higher peer than a baron), that may not mean anything.

(Apparently, the term "Duke" was originally meant somewhat jokingly. That said, it still carries the weight of a title even if not the conventional one.) We don't see any other titles between Duke and Baron, so what does that mean?

This isn't canon, but my assumption is that it means the Baron owns important land outside of the city. This would make sense for Baron Bormul, given that the Bormul family apparently have investments in silver mines and vineyards. Assuming they own the mines/vineyards, that may make those lands "important" enough to the city for their owner to earn a title. Alternately, the Bormul family also has counterparts in Amn, so maybe baron is an Amnian title that got passed along. That's getting a bit far afield for me, though. 🤷‍♀️

Anyway, among the group at the coronation, pretty much everyone supports Gortash becoming Archduke, with the exception of Lady Sashenstar (an old woman who really isn't too impressed with this commoner) and Duke Portyr, who expresses some hesitation at the whole thing.

Duke Portyr is interesting here. Except for Ravengard (who is thralled and conducting the ceremony), Portyr is the only Duke present. Now, Stelmane is already dead, so that explains her absence. Vanthampur is also missing, which is interesting. Portyr first, though: he was Grand Duke before Ravengard. He's the one who re-instituted (Edited: and originally created!) the Parliament of Peers to make the day-to-day decisions of running the city, and ceded the title of Grand Duke to Ravengard. He's described as being conflict-averse, so it makes sense that he'd go along with Gortash's coronation, even though he's clearly unhappy about it. Also, the current leader of the Fists is also a Portyr, likely still Liara Portyr, the Duke's niece and Ravengard's second-in-command.

Thalamra Vanthampur is an interesting character, too. She's the head of the Vanthampur family, and part of the Descent into Avernus story. Apparently, she's the one who got Ravengard to go to Elturel before it sank to the Hells, intending to take his place as Grand Duke. From what I read, she also conspired with the Dead Three's cults to murder people in a bid to discredit the Flaming Fist. (The murdery bits were undoubtedly left to Bhaal's cult.) We never do find out anything about Thalamra Vanthampur in this game (I assume that's probably cut content). (Edited: She is mentioned in one of the in-game texts as having been killed, which was one of the possible outcomes of Descent into Avernus. Larian chose that as their canon, just like the fate of Elturel and Zariel.)

The only Vanthampur we do meet is Carnelia Vanthampur, who is in the Guildhall and describes herself as "a peer of the Parliament". She's willing to work with either the Guild or the Zhentarim. Nervously of course. Also interesting is that, on the Bloodstained Parchment hit list, is a Varri Vanthampur, whose gravestone you can find in Candulhallow's Tombstones shop, reading: "Varri Vanthampur. Unwanted in life, welcomed in death."

Interesting, hm?

Also on that hit list is Fridrik Hhune. The Hhunes apparently have links to the Knights of the Shield, from what I looked up--the same group the Emperor led with Stelmane. The only Hhunes we meet in-game are Blaise and Gheris Hhune, two of the werewolves in Cazador's ballroom who are brothers according to the dev notes. With them is another werewolf of a different patriar family, Duver Rillyn. This suggests Cazador has been going after members of patriar families, which sort of fits with what we know about his plans. We really don't find anything else out about them except that they consider Cazador to be their master and Astarion says they're new.

We also can talk to a Flaming Fist who mentions that Hurlbut Hhune is the father of Henrietta Hhune, who used to be secretly engaged to the Fist in question, only for her father to decide to arrange her to marry fellow patriar Derque Rillyn, who the Fist describes as "a major arsehole."

That conversation is interesting for a few reasons. For one, it tells you that arranged marriages within the patriar are a thing. Also, this Fist is a Manip (essentially a Sergeant) who can't ask the other Fists for help because "the Fists don't mess with wealthy patriars, they've got the Watch to back them up." That's aligned with what Devella can also tell you: "There are patriars on the murder target list. I'm oathbound to secure them first, so I'll be heading to the Upper City next." If you say that the Fist should protect everyone: "Not from around here, are you? We're in Baldur's Gate - this is just how things work."

This brings me back to my original issue: what is a Baldurian noble? The patriars are canonically nobles, of course, and they're undoubtedly seen as the "most important" of the nobility. From there, it's not much of a stretch to say that anyone who has earned the title of Duke is now a noble, even if they aren't patriars. I'd go so far as to say anyone on the Parliament of Peers (and their family by association) is a noble^, given that non-patriars Petric Amber and Haeril Birch are considered Lord and Lady. The information I found about that is that there are approximately twelve non-patriar members. If Amber and Birch are two of them, that leaves another unnamed 10.

^Edited: Looking at the dates, I realized that the Parliament of Peers is a very recent change to Baldurian governance. Duke Portyr originally created it after the three other Dukes on the Council of Four were assassinated. It was clearly meant as a temporary measure, but my guess is that the patriars liked having more official say. Not to mention the non-patriars who managed to get a seat. This has all happened within even the youngest of Tav/Urges' lifetimes.

Personally, I'd also assume that branch families of the patriars probably also count as nobility. By branch family, I mean those that marry out of the main line but whose ancestry stems from a patriar family. From what I've seen by naming conventions, Baldur's Gate seems to use patronmyic lineage--ancestry is generally passed to the sons, and wives take their husband's surname. So, if a daughter marries out of the family, she'd no longer be a part of her father's family lineage, but still would be considered nobility. These branch families likely still maintain powerful influence and connections from marrying into wealth, which would make them a good political/financial choice of marriage alliance, despite no longer having the main branch patriar family name. These families are also probably the ones most likely to find a place on the Parliament, too, but likely have to jockey for position if their "representative" dies (or otherwise leaves) and a new opening in the Parliament is created.

If you've read this far, as a treat you can have some crappy close-up portraits of the nobles at Gortash's coronation, grouped together in their respective boxes. 😚

* For what it's worth, I'd count myself as a casual DnD player. I have some knowledge of DnD--I've played BG1 and 2, Planescape: Torment, along with some general cultural osmosis. I've had friends who played the tabletop version, but for one reason or another, I've never played it myself.

[exhausted-archivist]

Early Game First Impressions

I have some thoughts and critiques about it from at least an early point.

So far, being 28 hours in (and I just got my 4th companion so the time I've been in the game isn't really indicative of my plot progress) I have some general thoughts. None of them are spoilers, but to be safe, I will keep them below the cut.

Please note, these are my first impressions. I'm doing a mostly blind playthrough and I'm mostly sharing to start a dialogue but also document my feelings. Please be respectful of that and others who may comment. Also my comments on armor/clothing is going to be a whole seperate kit and kaboodle.

My main focuses based on priority to me:

Combat

Flashing accessibility issues

The Bloom effect

Character creator

Photomode

Writing (General)

Dialogue and Banter

Maps and Quest Guidance

Food Lore

Combat, Accessibility, and Bloom Render

So far my biggest complaint is related to the combat. In terms of general enjoyment, this is one of the most enjoyable combat systems in the series for me. The flow is nice, I like the UI, overall a solid 7/10 for me. Except for one thing: I hate button mashing, I cannot handle it for too long, it is a large part of the reason I've never played through dao again. I found that da2 and dai really found a nice middle ground with it. But with datv, the issues are that if I press and hold, it will charge attacks and not continuously fire them off like in the previous two games.

I also don't like how frequently my companions bark at me in combat. Lucanis yelling "Move Rook!" while I'm stuck in a corner or something has thrown off my timing and is also just kinda annoying at times. Something I also don't like when I'm trying to explore but more on that later.

Additionally, I find the rebinding of keys is way too restrictive. It is hard to find a calibration that works, it doesn't solve the button mashing, and it isn't any better for mouse and keyboard. The fact that (at least last time I tried) I couldn't rebind the keys from ASWD to the arrow keys is a huge miss to me. So, while I find combat engaging and fun with a nice flow, button mashing and the key rebinding for combat are a big con. Particularly from an accessibility standpoint.

Speaking of accessibility, while the accessibility for the game is robust (but for some features an okay attempt for a first attempt) not being able to adjust the flashing rendering is the second biggest. That is a major accessibility thing and one of the bare minimum features I've come to expect in most games. Now while at present it hasn't been too bad for me since the prologue, I do not know if it will be an issue again later on. The flashing paired with the way the bloom renders, makes the game very migraine triggering if I'm not careful.

So on the note of the bloom, it is another big con for me because it messes with my eyes. While I can remove it in photomode and see what it looks like without it, I think it could have done with less bloom and still looked good. I do like how it has an almost Dishonored texture rendering to the people. I am curious if they pushed it a little harder if it would be more interesting visually and make the bloom more effective. Not only that, but I see the vision, I appreciate it, but not really friendly to me. Which is okay, to be clear. This is one of those things where the vision is great, the execution might not be universally loved, but it is good. Sort of like Arcane (though not to that level), I will never be able to watch it because of the flashing. But I know it is still an amazing show.

Character Creator

Now, in terms of the character creator I think they could have pushed things more. I'm over all very impressed and I love what they did, the variety and extremes you can push are amazing. From a technical standpoint it is gorgeous, and I overall rate it 8/10.

On a minor point, I do wish we could adjust eye size/shape independently of the head morph as well as change the mouth shape. I also wish there were more extreme limits to the body morph. While there is an okay range for what we have, I do wish I could make a heavier set character than I have, whether they're more muscular defined (think Bull and his almost barrel chested build) or someone who is just heavy. But I also wish I could make someone who looked like Isabela in da2 proportionately. I do get some of the criticism that cropped up, though I think the way most of it was presented/worded was exaggerated because the bust and glute sizes weren't "hollywood" style.

But my biggest issue with the cc is there is not any true dark skin tones. They do not go dark enough, they get close, but I couldn't make anyone who looks like several of my family members or oc skin tones I have. This is a major con for me, because they were heading in the right direction and then fell disappointingly short. I think it likely has to do with lighting, to which I seriously think they need to work on learning to how to light darker skins. I think they also need to learn how to make and layer darker skins. They have the basics down, now they need to push it further.

I also have to speak towards the fact that it seems with the bloom rendering and this art style, they did not push things hard enough to allow us to play older characters in appearance. And because all non-important npcs are made with the same cc as rook, we are pushed to having a very small visual age range for the game. Wrinkles do not appear well or strong, and it is disappointing to say the least. It has always been a weak point in Dragon Age.

Connected to these two points, but on a much more minor note, I think having complexion cover skin texture, freckles, dark circles, birthmarks, and acne was too much. They should have had 2-3 selectors for that - and this might be a rendering, technology issue. But not being able to be freckled and wrinkled or have dark circles, falls short, and it especially impacts being able to create an older Inquisitor. This also touches on the imbalance of which they aged femme presenting characters vs masc presenting characters, but that is another post.

Moving onto the last point I have thoughts on, is the hair. While they definitely improved in the hair options, they still lean heavily one way or the other. Especially with the offset of non-qunari getting 88 hairstyles and qunari getting 33. While we no longer have 50 shades of bald, and they heard our thoughts on hair and horns being connected for qunari, the large gap between the two categories is unfair. Especially given the fewer textured options for qunari and the even fewer length variations. It also looks like some were removed from what we saw during marketing. I've also seen the call for bangs, while they aren't something I usually desire I do agree the few bang choices are a notable.

Photomode

I'm going to be blunt with this one as it is the most cosmetic of them all, I feel like there could have been more options. I love we got it, but it's pretty bare bones comparatively with others we get.

I think looking at Horizon (Zero Dawn and Forbidden West) would be a good reference for a strong photomode. CP77 if they went further. Being able to add different effects/filters or even remove some depending on where you're photomoding would go miles. Being able to remove dead enemies (that you didn't kill) would also be nice. But I think the biggest thing is the limited range that the camera can be from Rook. It likely has to do with rendering range, but I think they could have pushed it more. That's all. I've been living in photomode though, using it near constantly to be honest. Just a qol thing.

The Writing: General, Dialogue, and Banter

Off the bat, I find the writing of this game to be the most Dragon Age between Inquisition and The Veilguard. The series has always been campy and quipy. It is the same semi-serious stuff I've expected from BioWare. I do think they have improved in some areas, stayed the same in others, and got weaker in some.

One of the things I think BioWare, especially the da team, has always struggled with is hitting the sweet spot that doesn't isolate new players but also doesn't aggravate lore nerds or long time players. DA2 I think is probably the best of the series at that. But with datv, I find points of aggravation with the wording, just like I did with Inquisition when I went to replay it after having started the series from The Stolen Throne and playing all the way through to Inquisition again. I cannot decide if they have gotten better or what, however I do think the glossary is an excellent addition. Even if I argue with some of them haha.

A clear point of improvement for me so far is the line summaries. I find they are better than dai, though there are some misses.

In terms of banter, I think I'm starting to see what people have been talking about in terms of its substance. However, I don't think it is unique to datv. Rarely has banter effected anything outside that moment, especially for da2-dai. I've only played dao once so I don't know if they tied banter into main story more or not. For me, banter not having substantial effect outside the moment isn't surprising, and I don't know if that is something I was hoping would change or not. This one I think might change as I play.

I also get what people are saying about the banter erring on the side of toothless, but I only see that in like comparison to da2 where companions were brutal with each other. I would say it is the same level/as close to dai. But I'm still early and don't have all the companions. So another thing that might change when I play further.

Maps and Quest Guidance

They did a really good at fixing the dai overcorrection of maps from da2. They're compact, relatively easy to navigate, and so far a distinct lack of bears!

Though while they pulled back on one overcorrection I feel in turn that they overcorrected on the guidance/party direction banter in response to the loud feedback of dai not having enough guidance. This touches back on the companions yelling at me while I'm exploring, or the persistent markers and pop ups. While turning off some of the UI/setting elements greatly helped, and I have heard that it gets less demanding further in, it is a con for me.

Delving into maps though, as someone who is fixated on maps I have thoughts and feelings over the area maps as well as the map texutures the display as setting design. So far, I'm dissappointedwith the set design ones. I haven't seen any new ones, they reuse the map released with the Tevinter Nights and then the first Thedas map they've used since dao. Now those aren't inherently negative, but I like maps and I was hoping for more, especially at the beginning.

Food Lore

Okay, I know this is last and I said I listed these in like priority, but this one was a HUGE point for me and I wanted to end on a positive note. The food lore so far is rich, it is clearly done with some thought, there are more varieties, and I am thrilled with what I've seen. It is rich, indepth, they've added a lot more than I thought they would. So far, the location I've found to have the most rich lore is Treviso. With a nutrition specialist and Julia, the fruit merchant who's husband is allergic to alubia carilla (black eyed peas). It is something so small comparitively that makes the world so rich. I've been compiling and collecting, and I have been flooded with people sending me screencaps and dialogue snippets (without spoiling anything) and I am so overjoyed and appreciative.

[thefivekins]

Another interest check!

Hi! Putting out some tentative feelers for a ga’hoole/warriors/wings of fire-inspired bird rp over on discord.

The past few days Ive been tossing around ideas for an original worldbuilding xenofic setting again. I still have ways to go on the development side of things but I wanted to see if I could garner some initial interest first. With that being said, here are some goals:

- start out small(er) and expand (unless this concept really takes off and I get a lot of applicants). I will want mod and development teams no matter what. Applications will be presented for both and presented for general players later on.

- partial-sandbox setting. I plan to make a lot of lore, different kingdoms, history, etc. Some of which I would gladly accept collaborative work on by players and development team alike!

- ttrpg elements in the form of classes and skills. I don’t want anything convoluted, just basic features that will help distinguish and fortify your characters in certain events. Might be fun to do gamemaster-led sessions as well.

- keep it engaging! Have activities for character development outside of rp, do events, make fun chats, etc.

- overall creating an rp environment with the help of others in the community with hopes of lasting! I will frequently look for input and suggestions. I think a major issue Ive had with past projects Ive tried to run is that I didnt leave enough room for constructive collaboration when it came to story, so, Id like to change that. I want people to go off and do whatever they want with their characters in the world!

I have a lot of thoughts swimming around regarding this that I can’t put into words yet so hopefully the above is enough to pique some interest! Please like/comment/share/ask if you would be up for joining. :-)

If this gets enough interest I will turn this blog into one for the bird rp!

[jojo-ker06]

The people have spoken and they want:

✨️ORION LORE✨️

(WARNING: Might be longer than the Wishmas lore)

Normal Form Human Form

Introduction and Family:

Orion is an 17 year old prince from the star kingdom Estrellania.

Despite his parents ruleing over the kingdom of the deceased star-king Galaxius, they are not related to him. When King Galaxius was defeated in war with Rosas, the kingdom went to them since they had been friends and Galaxius had no wife or children.

Orions parents are King Aster and Queen Luminara.

(Family picture from when Orion was 7)

They once had a happy family life until the queen left them. She told her family that she would go down to earth to "settle things" there and promised the then seven year old Orion that she would return soon. But she never did and this caused his father to become very over-protective of Orion. King Aster stopped believing that his wife would ever return, but Orion didn't. He just knew that she couldn't be gone forever. Even though he wants to go to earth to search for his mother (and to maybe explore the earth after finding her), his father won't let him leave his home because he's too worried that he'll loose his only son and another person he loves. So call it luck for Orion (or bad luck for his dad) when Asha's wish knocks the star prince out of the sky.

Powers and other things:

All stars share the same abilities: Flight, the power to take on a human form and the form of a round little star, talking to animals and making things fly with stardust. But Stars who come from royalty have a bonus power: healing wounds with their tears.

What's also special about the stars is that they're born with a special power. It can be: controlling light or making animals actually talk, to name a few options. But royal stars are born with two special powers. Those can be common ones (from which I've mentioned two), but it could also be rare ones like: viewing things trough mirrors made by stars, shape-shifting into other people, to change constellations, and other things.

Stars don't unlock their full power potential until they are 18. So while they're not 18 yet, they can't use their powers too long because it exhausts them too much. Orion will turn 18 later in the story, but I'm sure THAT'S totally not plot relevant or anything😅.

Orions two special powers are:

-being able to change sizes while in round star form.

- Something else I won't reveal yet because it's super plot relevant (and I still want you to be interested in my rewrite and not get bored lol)

A little fun fact about his plushie-form: While he's in it, he can't really communicate with humans. The thing that humans hear when he's talking while in that form is little squeaks (like a squeaky-toy lol)

It is also this form that Morado (the pet cat of the royals) loves to hunt. Morado really loves shiny objects and that's what Plushie-form Orion basically is to him. There will be little chase scenes between the two, where Morado wants to grab the little plush and Orion has to escape. Too bad his dust makes things fly lol.

Emotions and reactions:

When feeling different emotions, Orions light changes according to his feelings.

When in his normal mood, his light is and warm bright, but still not eye-hurtingly bright.

When extremly happy, he shines VERY, VERY bright. You would probably need sunglasses if you meet him like this lol.

When sad, his light dims down.

But if you somehow managed to get him super angry, and I mean, smoke-coming-out-of-his-ears-angry, then his hair turns into fire and he becomes filled with cartoonish rage.

Orion actually rarely gets angry in any way. Not just because he's a peaceful and optimistic person but also because he himself thinks that he'd be useless without his happy mood. He made himself believe that he can only be usefull if he's always helping others and is constantly happy, because wishing stars are always supposed to be helping those in need and don't require help themselfs. He puts himself under pressure and is always talking himself down for the tiniest flaws he made or makes. Instead of talking about it, he puts a smile on and continues to offer his help to others but never wants help for himself because he made himself think that that makes him weak. He knows that it isn't true, but still, it scares him.

He also dosen't cry infront of others and does it when he's completly alone. I plan to add a scene where Asha, not being able to sleep, accidently finds Orion crying. Before that point it was always Orion who comforted her and listened to her, but now Orion is the one talking and Asha is the one listening.

And that's it for the lore about Orion! I hope you enjoyed it, didn't get too bored while reading and liked the little sketches I made✨️. Have a great day/afternoon/evening/night! 👋

(Tagging Time: @starss-artss @spectator-zee @rascalentertainments @your-ne1ghbor @dangerousflowerpanda )

[rengerines]

i could never be normal about chiscara, like ik they are very unlikely lore wise but idgaf!!!

pre irminsul arc they’re two people who find love and warmth in such a cold environment. the fatui are a distinctly distant organization, and the harbingers are clearly not very close (eg. childe and arlechinno voicelines ab eachother). the only thing connecting each of them is the mutual goal of collecting the gnoses for the tsaritsa, but the way they all go about this is vastly different from each other, and this connection can be rather weak when compared to their personal goals, usually treated as a sort of after thought in a lot of the later archon quests (and clearly some of them js don’t gaf ab the tsaritsa *cough* scara defection).

so i really like the idea of chiscara connecting despite this, and also the thought that they have to sneak around about it too. obviously, they’re not exactly *good* for each other. they’re fatui harbingers, both with more than a few screws loose. but they’re still capable of caring for each other nonetheless.

considering their situation, and the two of them as people with their baggage and all that, i doubt they ever got past a weird sort of fwb-situationship-not-dating-but-probably-in-love relationship, but i still think they were somewhat aware of their mutual romantic feelings, they would js never label it.

post irminsul arc, i think about them two ways.

obviously in canon-verse, they’re doomed. childe is born and of teyvat, he’s not gonna be going against teyvat’s founding principles and remembering scara so easily. he’d need someone to tell him, either the traveler or scara, and both are unlikely to do so. the traveler would js not know to, and scara isn’t the type to seek childe out.

in this case i see scara silently yearning like crazy for a man who doesn’t even remember who he is. it’s interesting, as even when they were ‘together,’ scara was constantly telling himself how bad of an idea this was, and here he is now suffering the consequences. their love was real at some point, but scara is doomed to be the only one to remember it. it’ll eat him up from the inside out until he forces himself to move on. if childe decides to visit sumeru at some point, maybe for fun, maybe on business, they might talk, and it would all hurt that much more.

however, through some weird canon-divergence shenanigans, i can see post-irminsul chiscara, in a world where childe somehow remembers, building a proper relationship of sorts. they could never have a perfectly ‘normal’ relationship, childe’s still a fatui harbinger, but they could have some semblance of a cute domestic life when childe’s off work. i’m thinking rare mornings waking up together, and scara reluctantly introducing childe to sethos, only for them to get on so well and cause him both a headache and for his heart to swell. i see scara, childe and nahida sharing a meal together, nahida listening intently to childe talking about his family, and later nahida telling scara that she’s happy for him. they could one day visit childe’s family together, and scara would feel out of place but slowly adjust to all the many children around him. i think teucer would adore him, maybe even more than childe, which would drive him crazy. scara would hold it over his head constantly, and they’d bicker and kiss afterwards. the two of them could love each other properly, they’d get a second chance post-irminsul. all that has to happen is for childe to remember.

[maddy-k-reads-all-day]

I've been thinking A LOT about Amanda 2 and all the lore and trying to figure out some things. I gotta do some more analysis but here is what I have thus far:

First we have some things are now my headcanons:

Rebecca had some slightly morbid interests as a human. The whole thing in the first tape about her sharing trivia about the isle of dead dolls and Jack the Ripper. They aren't "demonic" things like what Kate and the others talked about in the first tape. Amanda couldn't have gotten this trivia after being put in the tapes... so the only way I think she knows this stuff is because it was an interest of hers as a human. Plus, in the image of Rebecca we get in the first game, her fashion sense is kind of goth. With the black sweatshirt and the choker. When we think of "cheerful happy go lucky girl" we don't usually think black sweatshirt and choker. Doesn't mean she wasn't one. I just think that she might've had an interest in this type of stuff long before she was Amanda.

Hameln funded the kids corner in the library.

Now here are some of my theories...

"Peter" might have been working for Hameln. He seemed very against the group speaking out or doing any action against Hameln. He might've been like a spy keeping an eye on them to make sure they didn't learn too much or something. One thing that struck me was when he told everyone to take a break and come back to it later, it sounded like the same thing the Hameln worker had said in the recording booth in the first game. Suspicious. That said, it could also just be that he was worried about Caroline's safety since David had already gone missing and that the thing he said was purely coincidence. It's not that strange of a thing to say when the tensions in the group were so high.

In the first game, Amanda sends a package to Kate's house. Wooly seems like he really wants her not to send it. In the second game, Kate's house gets burned down. Johanne says that the people from Hameln had found her address, while Johanne blames herself for this, I don't know if it's really her fault. It's not like she literally told Hameln where Kate lived right? Maybe they found out because of the package Amanda tried to deliver. If that's the case, Wooly might not have been in the wrong here.

As for Wooly... he's going to need his whole own post tbh.

[melancholymarrow]

Heyyy idk if this has been done before, but I went crazy and made a very detailed Howl's Moving Castle AU for Gravity Falls :DD

(Sorry in advance for the lack of arms. Drawing arms is like the bane of my existence hhhhh)

Lore for the au below cut

Basically, Fiddleford is Sophie, and Stanford is Howl. Fidds is like an engineer, but he wants to be an inventor & experiment with mixing magic and tech.

Ford, better known as The Great Wizard Stanford, is both a sorcerer and a scientist. When he was younger, he swallowed a star, making a deal with it. In exchange for great wisdom and power, Ford traded his heart. When this happened, the star's soul split in two. One latched on to a piece of Ford’s soul, taking his heart as it's vessel. This entity is Cipher, who appears as a ball of blue fire with a small yellow triangle with one eye in it's center. Cipher is Calcifer in this au. Because this part of the soul merged partly with Ford's, they share/swap some personality traits. Cipher has more of a conscience than og Bill, and Ford is a bit more vain about his appearance (he magics his hair blonde for a while at the start of the story).

The other part of the star's soul became a human-appearing demon. He named himself Bill, but most know him as the Demon of the Falls. Bill worked closely together with Ford for a time, but ended up betraying him and showing his true colors. After this, Ford fought Bill but ended up fleeing when it became clear he would lose the battle. He's been spending years trying to find a way to defeat Bill so that he doesn't hurt many more people.

The mystery twins take the place of Markl in this au. The Stans are just their uncles in this au, not great uncles. Shermie is their dad, and he's away fighting in the war. The twins were sent to live with Stanford when the war started so that Ford would keep them safe and also teach them magic.

Stanley takes the place of Turnip Head. Stan had been pretending to be Ford for a while to scam people, and Bill accidently tracked him down instead of Ford. Bill was pissed when he figured this out and cursed Stan to be a scarecrow. Fiddleford, when he was leaving home after he'd been cursed, found Stan stuck in a bush. He'd thought he could use the stick as a cane, but quickly found out it was another guy with a curse on him. Stan had been stuck in the bush for three days and could tell that Fidds had also been cursed, so he decided to help him out. Stan gave Fidds his 8-ball staff to use as a cane and led him to the moving castle.

I have wayyy more already thought out if y'all are interested at all. Might post some art of other characters in the au later.

[piningpebbles]

the dream smp journey: attempting to make the lore of the dream smp more accessible.

so back when i first wanted to get into the dream smp i had absolutely no idea where to start. i asked some people and they told me pretty much “look up dream smp + [insert youtuber name] and start there” and so i did, but i quickly came to realize how much i was missing from the story by not seeing all the different points of view.

so i decided to make my own playlist.

it was just for myself at first, but as i got more obsessed with the story, i also gave the link to some friends of mine so they could have the full experience, and they loved it. so i kept updating it.

my goal was to try and make a capsule of the entirety of the lore on the dream smp across almost every single POV, because while i do appreciate those who make recap videos, they always miss something and it’s usually with peoples’ POV who aren’t considered to be “main characters” which sucks because one of my favorite things about the dream smp was how everyone was their own main character with their own individual storyline you could get invested in.

i’ve seen every single video in the playlist, and did my absolute best to discern what should be included and what didn’t need to be. 

for instance, while i personally enjoyed streams where they’d just goof off, this is a lore-centric playist so i didn’t include all of them unless one of the jokes or such gets mentioned/becomes important later on. or if there is a lore event happening but two people have almost identical streams to one another then i decided between the two of them which one to keep. or if the cc themself made an edited version of their experience, i would decide whether to go with that or keep the original vod

it’s far from perfect. i tried to keep up with it as long as i could I STILL HAVE VIDEOS IN MY WATCH LATER THAT I PLANNED TO ADD but simply put while the dream smp storyline got longer and longer it became harder to keep up with. i watched pretty much all the streams when they happened but failed to update the playlist accordingly so right now it has almost everything up until ”Hitting on 16.”

i always wanted to finish it before i posted it, but i’ve been seeing people talk about how they miss the experience of watching the dream smp and while i obviously can’t provide the full interactive experience that the dream smp offered as it came out, i knew i couldn’t just keep this in my back pocket and thought i could at least offer a good chunk of the experience for you guys to still be able to keep!

here’s the playlist, spanning over 300 videos.

there’s also a semi-canon playlist (not nearly as thorough) for events that get mentioned by the cc’s a lot or are just cool to have and i wanted to include them somewhere so here it is also!!

to go along with it i also made a masterpost (can you tell i love making lists) which is what every single video on the playlist is supposed to be (and was last i checked, but videos get taken down every so often so there might be a couple missing here and there).

i hope to update this one day and have it fully finished, but with my schedule (full-time college student babyyyy) and simply the hundreds of hours of content i’d need to sift through it just seems impossible (and frankly just really intimidating) to challenge alone right now. so i also wanted to give this to the community to maybe be able to do what i couldn’t!

my hope with this is that if someone in a year or two (or whenever really) is interested in the dream smp they won’t have to sit through recap videos and instead can watch the real thing in a single playlist connected to the doc. my dream is for the masterpost and the playlist to go hand-in-hand, being like a guide people can follow that would also link to other moments and lore that is saved but just not avaliable on youtube, so we don’t have all these moments just lost to time.

i want to make this collaborative, i’m hoping this will maybe spark others to share what videos/moments they have saved and stored with each other for the dream smp and maybe together we could complete this thing somehow!! make the playlist and masterpost i dreamed of (the one right now is scuffed, but at least it’s something). the dream smp is one of my absolute favorite pieces of media out there and i want to share this with people but (as you can probably tell) i have no idea what i’m doing!! any step to help make the story more readily accessible is a good one, though!

i know i’ve missed things but i’ve done my best. and while not the perfectly polished thing i hoped it would be when i sent it out to the world maybe it could be a good building block for the community to use. so please share this!! reblog it!! all that jazz!! i want this to be for everyone!!

anyways, this is a long post. but the whole reason i got into the dream smp in the first place was because of the awesome fan content i saw and this crazy and creative community and i want to be able to give back, if i can.