Decepticons on the Lost Light from the start

Mar 30, 2014 19:00

So, I have been thinking about this interview with James Roberts, and two bits really struck me: http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-news/comics-16/new-james-roberts-interview-writing-transformers-mtmte-and-more-179313/

"With Cyclonus and Whirl, I wanted characters who were more Decepticon than Autobot, even if Cyclonus is non-affiliated and Whirl ( Read more... )

fandom: idw mtmte, writing: thoughts

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Comments 10

earthscorch March 31 2014, 12:41:36 UTC
That's all way beyond my knowledge...

Just wanted to say I'm sorry I've been dragging my feet about stopping by 2k5. I've been meaning to, but I've kind of gotten anxious about it.

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lunatron April 1 2014, 13:48:11 UTC
It's okay. You have to do what makes you feel comfortable.

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dragoness_e April 1 2014, 00:52:43 UTC
I like your analysis. Still waiting on parts 10-12 of Dark Cybertron from my comics store, though I did sneak a peak at scans of #10.

I want to know when they are going to pick up Misfire and the rest of the scavengers again. Those guys were fun.

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lunatron April 1 2014, 13:55:31 UTC
Thank you!

I'm noticing that Roberts has a bad habit of putting guns on the wall and then forgetting about them and then coming back to them after he's lost the original momentum of putting the gun on the wall...

The Scavengers are sort of symptomatic of some of the problems, though. It's like they realized, "Oh, this is Transformers, and we don't have enough Decepticons doing anything," so the Scavengers are thrown in for a bit and then lost out of focus.

The Scavengers are also explicitly coded as rejects and otherwise abnormal Decepticons. They aren't typical rank-and-file - because Primus forbid that the typical rank-and-file be portrayed in a narratively sympathetic light.

The Scavengers also do nothing aggressive against any actual Autobots - and befriend the first Autobot they meet, because Primus forbid that sympathetic Decepticons do anything aggressive against the precious, darling Autobots!

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dragoness_e April 1 2014, 21:13:36 UTC
Y'know, that almost sounds like old-school "Comics Code" writing--the villains must never be sympathetic, crime must never appear to pay, etc, etc, etc. ...except they go and make the supposed "good guys" just as villainous as the bad guys... just a different badge color.

I blame current politics--for the Land of the Free, we've got an awful lot of very unfree crap going on. It's going to get reflected in our fiction.

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lunatron April 2 2014, 00:09:37 UTC
I think that they wanted to make the Autobots "deep" - so they went the easy route and made the Autobots evil instead. This is not the same thing as actual depth of characterization. Now, a handful of evil Autobots and a handful of grey Autobots could make things interesting if and only if the other Autobots were portrayed as quite heroic, by contrast. The problem is, IDW coasts on nostalgia, and it doesn't show its "heroes" being genuinely heroic nearly often enough.

Anyway, so I think that they realized that they made their Autobots a huge pack of jerks who don't understand how to handle prisoners, so they... sort of shoved the Decepticons off to the side, because if they showed normal Decepticons being remotely sympathetic, it would make the Autobots look even worse?

This whole problem started with Beast Wars, though Beast Wars wasn't quite so bad about it.

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ravynfyre April 8 2014, 03:03:25 UTC
slowly catching up with stuff here and there...

omg, I love your brain-thinky-things. These are all such incredible ideas! You should submit scripts to IDW.

Just imagine Needlenose in a passive-aggressive rivalry with Perceptor. It would be a thing of beauty. Needlenose would be a perfect cheerful amoral engineer.

Didn't we do this? ;)

No, seriously, I want to see this so bad. The only thing that would make this better is if Spinister were there, too, and Perceptor got into the whole passive-aggressive rivalry with the two of them over engineering *and* snipering! (okay, so with BOTH of them there, there may be a bit less "passive" and more outright "aggressive" in that rivalry... whoops.)

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lunatron April 20 2014, 19:37:48 UTC
I really miss talking to you. I hope that you are doing okay!

Thank you for your kind words.

I am glad that you approve of Needlenose and Perceptor in a passive-aggressive rivalry!

The IDW portrayal of Spinister is that he is a complete idiot but also a skilled surgeon, because we're not done with the trope of the idiot savant yet. :| I'm not really happy about it, because there are dozens of characters who had weak or no toys bios that Roberts could have used as blank slates, but no, he used Spinister. I understand that IDW is a new continuity and that characters aren't the same, but at the same time... there was no reason why he had to use Spinister there, for that role, at all.

In any case, IDW Spinister isn't a sniper, so Perceptor cannot get into a sniper war with him. :|

But otherwise... threesomes. :v

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