Nope, still just abominably lazy storytelling and characterisation.
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Originally Posted by
GoktimusPrime
But then... I suppose that if any Decepticons were coming to Earth as refugees or not wanting to partake in the war any further, then they could either defect to the Autobots (as Jetfire and Wheelie did) or declare neutrality.
*cough*Sideways*cough*
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Originally Posted by
GoktimusPrime
Jetfire and Wheelie's defection illustrates that it's not a 'racial' thing but, as Jetfire put it, a conscious choice to be Autobot or Decepticon.
JMO but this is why I like the determinist G1 cartoon Quintesson civilian/military hardware origin story better - as well as the potential for both 'races' to complement each other ('cons go out and gather resources through conquest, 'bots stay home and keep the planet running) and avoiding the IMO hamfisted 'divine/supernatural origin' BS, also allows for more interesting moral questions: can the 'cons be blamed for being warlike if that's their basic nature? It also means that those who do defect will have greater impact due to the comparative scarcity & going-against-their-nature bit a la BW Dinobot, and that the Autobots' conscious choice to fight becomes that much more impressive (as well as giving a logical reason for the 'cons being more powerful, since the bad guys are generally supposed to be more powerful from a story POV).
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Originally Posted by
Tober
Two buildings fell down about 10 years ago and we still haven't heard the last of it... <runs>
:eek:...:D
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Originally Posted by
RageOnTheRoads
I mean if Bay actually cared about the characters he was portreying...(snip).
Bwahahaha! Fun drinking game idea: every time you see a lame d**k/fart/balls/drug joke take a swig...just make sure you don't have to drive afterwards.
Seriously, how much did he and the writers get paid for this again?
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Originally Posted by
RageOnTheRoads
Prime gestures to the fallen and helpless 'con. "Ironhide remove his spark and put it with the others." (or something to that effect, written by someone who could actually write.
Ironhide: "Aww, Prime..."
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Originally Posted by
RageOnTheRoads
There, easy. Wouldn't take much to write it into the story, and It would actually have had Prime in character. Some simple dialogue and no whining fandom. :D Or alternatively they could have gone with what's in the comic and again no one would be complaining.
Even simpler solution: have Mr "we could kill the humans/I accidentally blew up a planet" Ironhide kill him, then have Prime tell him off for it. Both Prime and Ironhide are still in character, the 'bots are still shown to be badass/acting within the realities of war, and Bay gets his gratuitous death jollies. It's not like they didn't already have an established boticidal maniac to use, but noooo...Prime's not hardcore enough!:rolleyes:
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Originally Posted by
GoktimusPrime
+ Acquiring land to construct this prison. I don't think the Autobots own any land on Earth - they appear to be wards of the U.S. government and I don't know if they'd be able to hold real estate in order to construct a gaol -- again, would probably involve land ownership by an Earth government who would oversee its construction (and thus gain an insight into Cybertronian technology).
A secret base in an abandoned warehouse.:p And they could use the bodies of their fallen foes to construct a spark-holding machine like the Prime-corpses-hide-the-Matrix or let's-harvest-dead-Jetfire bit.
I'm really enjoying this.
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Originally Posted by
GoktimusPrime
The movie origin is kinda like that too - the Transformers who became Decepticons under the leadership of Lord High Protector Megatron were soldiers in Cybertron's defence forces and fought in the front line. Optimus Prime and the Transformers who became Autobots were relagated to more 'back seat' duties such as guarding the AllSpark and conducting excavations and doing scientific research etc. Ironhide was part of the advanced defence forces and would've been part of Megatron's Decepticons, but early on in the piece he felt morally conflicted after the Cybertronian military reorganised itself as the Decepticon army, and defected to the Autobots.
RE: Defiance.
Really? Cheers, I didn't know/remember that. That makes the Movie backstory a bit more bearable IMO. Now if they can just dispense with the magical Allspark and include transformation as an 'evolutionary quirk' I'll be set. Oh God I'm thinking about this way too much again...damn.
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Originally Posted by
Lord_Zed
The only problem with that origin story is it doesn't explain why all the TF's spontaneously get individual personalities with which they make those conscious choices. If the TF's were all just tools that decided the Quintessons were bad then wouldn't they be more like Skynet at the Quintessons are John Connor. :D
No Wi-Fi on Cybertron?:p
Seriously, I'd be going for a slow evolution of individual personality through acquired experience a la the Puppet Master (and to a lesser extent the Tachikoma) from Ghost in the Shell. Other examples would be R2-D2 and C-3PO (Children of the Jedi has a good example of this when C-3PO talks about his feelings towards memory wipes), or 'Andrew' from Asimov's Bicentennial Man. Prime retained his memories of being Orion Pax, as did Galvatron from Megatron, so it's quite possible the pre-Transformers would continue developing as they were recycled and upgraded by the Quints, and if I was being offlined and brought back over and over again 'cos my creators were too lazy to build more 'bots I'd get pretty ticked sooner or later too. Likewise, A-3 and Beta's group who started the rebellion were basically a small, rag-tag splinter cell of revolutionaries rather than there being a spontaneous mass uprising across Cybertron.
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Originally Posted by
RageOnTheRoads
But it would be just as easy to imagine that the highly advanced aliens could posses technology that removes the spark from the body, and then stores the raw energy and memory on a small device no larger than my thumb nail.
Floppy disk or nothing!:D
This is fun - I hope you never change @Gok 'cos there'd be no-one to quibble with.
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Originally Posted by
GoktimusPrime
Or alternatively don't come to Earth! What other reason did Demolishor and Sideways have for coming to Earth other than to partake in the war there? If they no longer wanted to fight, then why not just go AWOL and hop off to some other part of the galaxy where ya know, there are no Autobots? If they felt the Autobots were unfairly persecuting and hunting them - then leave! Don't want Optimus Prime and his Autobot-human lynch mob to hand your butt back to you? Stay the <expletive> away from Earth! :)
They're soldiers, they were obeying their leader's orders. When they got there they found their leader was killed, so they settled down, laid low (with Demolishor playing big daddy to his fellow refugees), and waited on some new leader to show up and tell them what to do next. As far as why they were summoned here in the first place goes, weren't they coming to help retrieve the legendary AllSpark, their 'source of life' and sustaining/ potentially reviving force of their home planet (and race/species)?
Shades of G1 Dead End in Five Faces of Darkness 3 really - death through starvation or death through combat.