3 Things I Hate About You
Okay, one thing about the fandom is that it can often polarise people - we often have very strong feelings towards parts of Transformers where we absolutely love or loathe stuff. So here's how this thread works...
* Choose one or more Transformers series that you have strong feelings about
* For each of these, comment on 3 things of the series that you genuinely feel but goes against your overall consensus about that series.
In other words, tell us what you like about something that you generally dislike or dislike about something that you generally like. ;)
Here are 2 for me for starters...
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- Series: Generation 1 Marvel Comics
- My Overall Consensus: Like it
- 3 Things I Dislike About It:
1. Nel Yomtov's colouring. Often just lazy with characters entirely coloured in monotone (not just background characters - just look at Xaaron!) and at other times just odd, like why is Soundwave purple?!
2. I, Goktimus Prime, find the hammy self-introductory dialogue to be rather lame. Especially when characters like I, Goktimus Prime, need to remind the audience of what my name is. :p
3. Simon Furman making Transformers a tad too human-like. As much as I love Furman's writing and consider him to be one of the best ever TF writers, he does fall into the trap that many TF writers do and that is to write the Transformers as if they're humans even when it doesn't make sense.
This was one area where Bob Budiansky was his superior.
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- My Overall Consensus: Dislike it
- 3 Things I Like About It:
1. Robots in disguise! Bayformers has given us an impressive range of licensed vehicle modes as well as other every day alt modes such as a CD player, ice cream truck, toaster etc.
2. A reasonably realistic portrayal of the military. Many other TF series including G1 showed human technology as being mostly useless against Cybertronians. But the fact is that while they may be very strong alien robots, they are not gods. And modern human weapons technology is very powerful. Bay made the Cybertronians impervious to human weapons to a point. It was explained that they have an invisible energy barrier which protects them from most harm, but high-heat rounds like Sabot rounds (which as the movie accurately explains can melt through tank armour) would be able to penetrate their shields. The Transformers are hard to kill but not indestructible. The way that the military responds to the Transformers' detected activities on Earth is also fairly realistic. And we know that many of the military set extras were actually off-duty personnel, not actors.
3. Giant F***ing Robots. One thing that the live action films are quite good at doing which most other media tend not to do is the perpetual reminder to audiences that the Cybertronians are massive. Bay is quite good at never letting the audience forget this. Because in other series there are times when, well... you can forget about this. Just look at IDW's MTMTE and The Lost Light series - they are predominantly stories which exclusively feature Cybertronians either on Cybertron or worlds that have been Cyberformed by Cybertronians (e.g. Necroworld etc.). As such, we lose the sense of the Cybertronians' massiveness relative to humans. The live action movies are told through the eyes of humans and as such we are always reminded that these are giant freaking robots.
