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Thread: Opinion: Bottom 5 Moments of IDW's Transformers Run

  1. #11
    FatalityPitt Guest

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    If no one minds, I might just share my thoughts about the IDW comic run in this one post (save myself from answering two threads).

    Be warned, there's some spoilers!

    Things I liked:

    Breaking down Autobot/Decepticon stereotypes - One of my favourite things about the IDW comics was that it really emphasized that not all Autobots are good, and not all Decepticons are evil. A character can be a Decepticon and still be good and honorable. One of my favourite moments was during the All Hail Optimus arc where Soundwave read the minds of the humans and surrendered because he realised his actions were doing more harm than good. It was a simple moment, but it really drove home the point that Soundwave was not a loyal Decepticon because he wanted to kill Autobots and rule the universe, but more because he thought he was doing the right thing, and he never intended to be evil. Then of course there's characters like Getaway - who demonstrated that just because you're a white Autobot car who hates Megatron (who, like Soundwave, never set out to be evil in the beginning); doesn't mean you're incapable of betrayal and murder. Even Optimus Prime himself had flaws (he tricked people into believing in the Matrix, which was really just a pulse generator).

    Character depth and development - There's way too many examples to name, but some of the characters that really stood out to me were Starscream, Megatron and Slag. Starscream started off as Megatron's untrustworthy lackey (typical of G1 Starscream), but he got given what he wanted (became ruler of Cybertron), and after that he got put in interesting situations that taught him the error of his ways. In the end he sacrifices himself to stop Unicron, and doesn't complain about Optimus Prime taking the credit when he visits Bumblebee in ghost form. Then there's Megatron, which I can talk about until next Sunday, but I really like how IDW decided to make Megatron into an Autobot (unthinakble right?!) and the way it was justified. I thought it was well-done. As for Slag, we usually stereotype him as being a short-tempered delinquent, but in the IDW comics they show him as not only intelligent, but they provide some pretty compelling reasons as to why he doesn't trust authority (especially Optimus Prime).

    To sum up, there's a lot of complexity and depth in each character, and after reading their backstories, it's easy to understand why they behave the way they do. Also, they're not simple black and white characters; there's varying shades of grey.

    Things I disliked:

    Forced social progressiveness - The Chromedome/Rewind relationship was quite touching and well-done, definitely a high-point of the series. But then they later introduced more same-gender relationships (Onslaught/Blast Off, Lug/anode, Ratchet/Drift, Arcee/Aileron, etc.) which started to come of as cliche and unnecessary. I felt some of them we're out of character; like the Onslaught/Blast Off affair. G1 Blast Off to me is someone who's aloof and arrogant, and doesn't seem like the sort who'd want to get romantically involved with anyone, let alone someone who transforms into a land vehicle. think the story could have been written just as well without the romance.

    Very WORDY DIALOGUE
    - Especially in MTMTE/Lost Light, I thought the dialogue was too long. Because of my short attention span, I found myself needing to re-read almost every sentence.

    Artwork - Was a a bit hit or miss for me. I like a clean and simple manga style, but sometimes the character proportions looked too cartoon-ish for my taste. Sometimes the artwork and designs of the characters looked too busy.

  2. #12
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    Yeah. The thing about Chromedome x Rewind and Tailgate x Cyclonus is that their relationships felt more organic. These characters fell in love with each other but it just so happened that they are same-gender because 99% of Cybertronians are masculine. The same-genderness was incidental and thus felt unforced. They didn't make a deal of it.

    Subsequent ones as you've mentioned have not been so subtle (although I personally never noticed Drift and Ratchet as a couple; I thought that they'd just become good mates). I also didn't mind Blast Off's thing with Onslaught so much, as it explored the realm of unrequited love and the fact that they were both masculine was, again, incidental. While Blast Off is aloof and arrogant, he never had a disdain for ground-based modes (unlike Powerglide who pities anyone who can't fly). But remember that Blast Off's G1 profile, as written by Bob Budiansky, also states:
    "But his happiness is an act, a disguise he uses to hide his long-distance lonliness. His aloof and superior manner is a front that prevents the other Decepticons from knowing his true feelings."
    So... yeah, IDW Blast Off's persona is pretty G1 accurate.

  3. #13
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    I agree that Ratchet X Drift was too forced for me. I never saw anything other than a well developed friendship there.

    I still enjoyed Lost Light/MtMtE overall but I can definitely feel like Roberts started catering for the shippers too much by the end

  4. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by FruitBuyer View Post
    I agree that Ratchet X Drift was too forced for me. I never saw anything other than a well developed friendship there.

    I still enjoyed Lost Light/MtMtE overall but I can definitely feel like Roberts started catering for the shippers too much by the end
    I wonder if that decision came from him or the editor. I also noticed that Roberts' English started getting sloppy like Barber's, which led me to wonder if it's the writers or editor who keeps on screwing up on spelling and grammar. Either way it still makes IDW look bad (literature should be literate!)

  5. #15
    bowspearer Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
    Things I disliked:

    Forced social progressiveness - The Chromedome/Rewind relationship was quite touching and well-done, definitely a high-point of the series. But then they later introduced more same-gender relationships (Onslaught/Blast Off, Lug/anode, Ratchet/Drift, Arcee/Aileron, etc.) which started to come of as cliche and unnecessary. I felt some of them we're out of character; like the Onslaught/Blast Off affair. G1 Blast Off to me is someone who's aloof and arrogant, and doesn't seem like the sort who'd want to get romantically involved with anyone, let alone someone who transforms into a land vehicle. think the story could have been written just as well without the romance.
    I'd actually describe it more brutally:

    Woeful universe building in favour of patronisingly misogynistic, racist and homophobic tokenism!

    And yes, when a writer decides that female characters, same-sex characters and characters from racial minorities don't deserve the universe building required to make them fit within established cannon, then they are essentially treating characters from those groups as nothing more than their genitals, the genitals of their partners and the colour of their skin.

    So much for MLK's famous remark of:

    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
    This was what turned me off IDW in the end: forced social progressiveness, which I consider to be blatantly shallow and tokenistic and utterly devoid of any kind of the quality universe building required for representations of any kind of quality. What really highlighted that for me was Mairghread Scott's disgusting and baseless "misogyny" attack on Simon Furman and the way universe building took place under the initial Furman run as opposed to how later stories in the run completely contrasted it in quality.

    I loved the Dead-Furmanverse; ok, so Revelations was a bit rushed and the pacing should have been handled better, however from a universe-building perspective, there appeared to be a clear and concise bible there, whether one was actually written down on ink or not. I especially loved the way Arcee was handled as such a tragic and idenitifable character. Furman realised that with how he was approaching Cybertronian xenobiology, female Transformers weren't a natural fit, so of course, he makes gender one of the experiments of the Josef Mengele of the IDWverse Cybertron - Jhiaxus. That then profoundly affects Arcee in a way where you both want Jhiaxus to die a bloody death and want Arcee to find her peace. It was something which drifted more into harder science fiction and was a fascinating idea. In fact, the interesting flip side was that the only reason that the rest of the Transformers were male, canonically speaking is because Arcee's RNA was modified to female, which by point of difference, automatically made every other Cybertronian male; had Arcee been made male for example, then it would have made every other Cybertronian, including Optimus Prime and Megatron, female.

    Likewise the whole Gorlam Prime idea was brilliant regarding the Dead-Universe and I honestly think it's some of Furman's best work ever.

    In fact one of my criticisms of Bayformers has been that it would have been much better had it adapted the Dead Furmanverse.

    Sadly what we got under Scott and Roberts was a massive drop in the quality of universe-building and the baseless nastiness from Scott towards Furman was a dark foreshadowing of that.

    Scott's criticism of Furman was essentially that in making Arcee an experiment gone wrong, he was somehow treating women as "abominations" and thereby being misogynistic. The fact that the Transformers weren't even human to begin with and had a radically different form of reproduction to humans (making her entire criticism of Furman both baseless and unintelligent), didn't even seem to register with her.

    I'd argue that one of the big danger with writing for alien races is that people anthropomorphise too much, to the point where the author forgets that they are writing about an alien race and whether the interactions and events happening to those characters even makes sense. A great example of this being done right was way back in Marvel Issue 1, when Bob Budiansky had the Autobots having the lightbulb moment that it was humans, and not machines which were alive on Earth. A romantic scene between men and women on the big screen was a complete anathema to the Autobot scouting party observing the drive in was another great example of this.

    Contrast that with IDW as of around the end of Dark Cybertron. It's all well and good to want to give certain groups representation and discuss certain issues, but it needs to fit with the race or established universe you're dealing with; we have the issues around gender and sex we do, because were a species which is bisexual and bisexually reproduces.

    A species which androgynous, for example is going to have different sexually based social issues than those we do and in fact an interesting question science fiction has posed and has done well with posing, is what happens when two species with entirely different biological sexualities and therefore sexual norms and customs based around those sexualities interacts; a great example of this is the Star Trek TNG episode "The Outcast", which though not seeming to please either side (some attacked the way Soren was treated at the end of the episode while failing to recognise how unfavourably it was portrayed, while others such as Jonothan Frakes felt it didn't go far enough).

    Therein lies the problem. It's almost like the whole thing came about the egos of the writers first and universe building and respecting existing stories dead last. There was no credible attempt at universe building which made the Transformers being a bi-gendered species a possibility (which by the way, puts the universe building of the IDW comics at a level which is inferior to the continuity nightmare which is the Sunbow G1 cartoon), and therefore makes all their attempts to address issues like gender representation, same-sex relationships, marriage (heterosexual or same sex), etc essentially a square peg they've tried to ram into a round hole. Heck even the introduction of a multiverse with different versions of some characters, would have been sufficient universe-building to make the issues and representations they wanted fit with the IDW-verse.

    Likewise when they redid M.A.S.K. they wanted racial minorities more represented so they rewrote the character of Matt Trakker, rather than simply having this be a "sequel" set 30 years later after the original M.A.S.K., which could have been one of the earliest initiatives off-shooting from the Skywatch program and have "Matt Trakker" be a codename at this point, which now belonged to the son of Hondo MacLean. Heck, if you really wanted to make things interesting, you'd have had something horrible happen to Scott Trakker and in a massive fall from grace and stab to the feels with a serrated knife, have him become the new "Miles Mayhem".

    And yes, I am saying that minorities deserve to be given quality representation as opposed to tokenistic representation; any argument to the contrary is simply patronising bigotry.

    Skillful writers build universes which fit the stories they want to tell and the issues they want to raise like a glove to the extent that they feel inevitable when they do arise. Ameteurish writers ignore universe building and the existing source material and much like a child terribly failing at putting a puzzle together, they try and mash issues and characters into a universe they they simply aren't designed to mesh with. Sadly, with IDW in the later half of its run, universe building was very much amateur hour.

    That's not to say that there weren't some interesting ideas in there - the ideas about hotspots, natural vs "aided" birthing of transformers (ie forged vs constructed cold) and functionalism were brilliant ideas - in fact I don't think the whole functionalism issue was ever used to its full potential (ironically to make many of the social commentaries they were trying to make).

    However it is abundantly clear that either the writers storytelling ambitions exceeded their universe-building abilities or they were unable to get far enough out of the way of their own egos to make use of the universe building abilities they had.

  6. #16
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    It’d be okay for “same-sex” relationships to exist in these made up stories as long as there’s an explanation for it that you feel is good enough? This is pretty insulting.

  7. #17
    FatalityPitt Guest

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    @ bowspearer

    I wrote a longer response to your comment, but the site failed on me and I lost it, so here's a short re-written version:

    One aspect I didn't enjoy about IDW's take on Transformers is that I felt like it shoe-horned a lot of current real-world politics into the stories. I didn't feel like it needed that, especially since it's a science fiction story about shape-changing alien robots from space. I wasn't sure how to express this earlier without offending anyone (there seems to be a lot of lefties on this site).

    Anyway, one reason why I like science fiction and fantasy is because it's a form of escapism for me. When I read comic or watch a movie, I don't like being reminded of real-world problems or issues because that's what I'm trying to escape from when reading the comic or watching the movie.

    There were a lot of LGBTQ themes in Transformers towards the end of the run, and even though I am supportive of LGBTQ causes; I didn't need to see so much of it in a comic. It's good that it was acknowledged via Chromedome/Rewind, but beyond that, I felt like IDW editorial were flashing it in my face.

    Just my 2 cents. Enough about the comics!! It's over... until the relaunch later this year... It never ends, does it?

  8. #18
    bowspearer Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by Paulbot View Post
    It’d be okay for “same-sex” relationships to exist in these made up stories as long as there’s an explanation for it that you feel is good enough? This is pretty insulting.
    So demanding that representations of minority groups respect them as people rather than dehumanise them as characteristics, is "pretty insulting"? Last I checked that was the soft bigotry of low expectations, so you might want to check your own bigotry - internalised or extrernalised.

    Ultimately storytelling representations which treat groups and issues with the respect they deserve, work from the basis of an internalised or externalised dialogue of "What group or issue to I want to represent? Is the existing universe and are the existing characters a natural fit for these groups and this issue? No? Ok, so what do I need to do to make them a natural fit as opposed to making them shoehorned into it?"

    The ST:TNG episode I cited was an example of doing this the right way; the IDW comic series as of Scott and Roberts was an example of completely failing in that process.

    Here's the thing - no matter how much you might what to shut your eyes, plug your fingers in your ears and scream out "lalalalala I can't hear you!" the fact is that genre exists and writing in genres has certain requirements to make something work in that genre. Pure fantasy has completely different requirements than science fiction for example and even in the Sunbow Cartoon, with the continuity nightmare that it was, there were countless examples of there being a science fiction approach - be it the Cosmotron which needed replacing to save Prime's life in Divide and Conquer, the crystal and the artificial fix for it in Fire on the Mountain, Cybertonium in Desertion of the Dinobots, the entirety of The God Gambit, the origins and original functions of the Transformers in The Five Faces of Darkness, and so the list goes on. With the comics, even when you had the fantastical like Primus and Unicron, there was still a passable, quasi-scientific explanation for Cybertron and Unicron's physical actions after their Astral Plane battle, being either a psychic phenomenon or the result of it. Beast Wars ratcheted this up another level yet again, with the way things like shell programs were handled and even the Vok were portrayed skillfully as a a race of highly advanced beings engaging in high science, who felt no need to explain their actions to the Transformers, any more than we might feel the need to explain our actions to an ant or a fly.

    Like it or lump it, the Transformers has always been scifi and so that means that there are certain requirements there in terms of genre and an objective means of judging something within that genre.

    The fact is that IDW comics fail as Sci-fi. Same sex relationships and heterosexual relationships would, and, in the case of the later, did work in the Sunbow Cartoon, Beast Wars and Beast Machines, because the Transformers' biology and/or their base psychology which directly resulted from that biology, was organically conducive to and compatible with it. Nothing about the physiology or psychology of the Transformers in the IDW-verse is even remotely organically conducive or compatible with such representations and neither Scott nor Roberts was even remotely successful in putting in place things to change that - presuming that any serious effort was even put into doing so to begin with.

    What the IDW comics under Scott and Roberts have shown is that some writers shouldn't be allowed to touch stories on alien races in a science fiction genre - with even a 10 foot barge pole, to borrow that old turn of phrase.

    Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
    @ bowspearer

    I wrote a longer response to your comment, but the site failed on me and I lost it, so here's a short re-written version:
    I always copy and paste what I type before hitting send for that reason now, so I can completely empathise .

    Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
    One aspect I didn't enjoy about IDW's take on Transformers is that I felt like it shoe-horned a lot of current real-world politics into the stories. I didn't feel like it needed that, especially since it's a science fiction story about shape-changing alien robots from space. I wasn't sure how to express this earlier without offending anyone (there seems to be a lot of lefties on this site).

    Anyway, one reason why I like science fiction and fantasy is because it's a form of escapism for me. When I read comic or watch a movie, I don't like being reminded of real-world problems or issues because that's what I'm trying to escape from when reading the comic or watching the movie.

    There were a lot of LGBTQ themes in Transformers towards the end of the run, and even though I am supportive of LGBTQ causes; I didn't need to see so much of it in a comic. It's good that it was acknowledged via Chromedome/Rewind, but beyond that, I felt like IDW editorial were flashing it in my face.
    Which is sadly the problem with bad storytelling and why it does more harm than good. Good storytelling should be able to impart something without someone feeling like it's being forced on you. Good story telling should be able to speak about issues, while not only doing it in a way where you don't consciously know it at the time, but you still feel like you're getting that escape.

    Bad storytelling will make you feel like you're being hit over the head with a sledgehammer to drive the lecture into you.

    The first people to notice are always going to be the ones who are heavily into a genre. Those who will notice after are those are more casually into a genre or tend to be quite forgiving when it comes to bad writing to genre and/or have a tendency to heavily anthropomorphise. The last to notice and who will probably always defend it, even after they are the only voices defending it, are the ideologues pushing that very agenda and the fans who treat said properties like the way hardcore fans of sporting teams treat those teams. The irony of course, in the case of crappy writing, is that those very ideologues become guilty of the soft-bigotry of low expectations in response to attempting to combat that very bigotry, and so their entire position becomes quite hypocritical, which they are sadly blind to.

    Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
    It never ends, does it?
    Ironic that you paraphrase that line when responding to me, given my past actions lol.

  9. #19
    FatalityPitt Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by bowspearer View Post
    Ironic that you paraphrase that line when responding to me, given my past actions lol.
    The irony is totally unintentional. Apologies if it came off that way. I was actually referring to the comics

    It never ends. When one G1 continuity reaches its coda, another one starts. Like an endless loop!

    Personally, I'd prefer Hasbro/IDW to move onto something beyond G1 - like the Beast Era, or perhaps the Unicron Trilogy (without the cheesiness of the anime).

    But at the same time, who can blame them? Everyone seems to love G1 and Hasbro needs IDW to continue printing out the 32-page toy commercials, to get readers to buy characters that they might not have liked before reading the comic.

  10. #20
    bowspearer Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
    The irony is totally unintentional. Apologies if it came off that way.
    No need for apologies.

    Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
    I was actually referring to the comics
    So was I, specifically the G2 Marvel comic - specifically the letters page of it and how I'm sure it'll never end for other readers

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