class and transformers: some thinky thoughts

[redthedragon]

I really wouldn't mind a return/turn to g1-style working-class Autobots and career-soldier Decepticons rather than having everything be IDW2005/Aligned/Bayverse/etc career-gov-track Autobots and working-class Decepticons instead.

Like, from a personal standpoint I don't like the politics of it much but also frankly it's just not that interesting. As much as I kind of hate "divine right to rule" as a mechanism personally and politically, it's a lot more interesting for Optimus Prime to be the like benefactor of a benevolent god from a rank not well suited for it raised to a position he was unexpected to do well from- like Rodimus Prime would be, later- than it is if he started out as someone picked and groomed for the role. It makes the Autobots more "everyman" type characters if they're all or almost all people who had a day job and stepped up to the fight after it was established that the Decepticons were bad news, and I think it'd re-inject some real menace into the Decepticons.

Like- I don't want everything to be Transformers Animated. I'm not overly attached to the world of Transformers Animated (not enough blood knight characters for me). But you cannot deny that the warframe-Decepticons vs janitor-Autobots setup makes for a much more compelling cast of "relatable" good guys than Coptimus Prime backstories and Elite Soldiers TM everywhere.

I genuinely think there's room for both kinds of stories in Transformers. I just want to see... more... where Megatron is allowed to be anything other than "goodguy uprising leader unfairly maligned by guvmint who subsequently Turns Evil because [waves hands] Bad".

(For better or worse, I liked where IDW2019 was going with the Ascenticons/Decepticons too, but even then I didn't feel like it had the kind of class split I'm talking about. Optimus and Megatron were both the same kind of leader. Whereas, like, in the G1 cartoon and TFA they did do a lot to like code a bunch of the Autobots as "lower class", and they sort of haven't done that in a while.)


1) it brings back the difference between the Constructicons and everyone else if you leave the Constructicons in. It's interesting. The split of "guys who do manual labor are mostly on the Autobot side, aside from these guys, several of which are super fucking mean" appeals to me personally. TFW your politics are shit and you want to kill people but you're a creative. Scrapper's life is so hard, what a fucking tragedy.

2) It means you can cut loose and put real blood knighty guys on the Autobot side too but then they stand out as literally a different Kind of autobot which lets you have DEPTH!!!! IT GIVES DEPTH!!! this is a genuinely mineable line, please give me Ridiculous Autobot Bloodknights who used to work in plumbing or something but got a gun and decided to never go back. Cliffjumper and Sunstreaker holding hands like "yeah we would've considered joining the 'cons, honestly speaking, but they were really hostile to us for where we came from and now everyone is glad to have us but you KNOW they talk about us behind our backs"

3) Soundwave, off-the-shits-efficient military tactician, is way scarier than Soundwave with any other backstory at all. Even if he was playing glorified military computer I want him to have been an experimental military build. Having him just have popped out of the ground like that in IDW2005 and been recruited to be a senator's aide was like, interesting, but I simply think it would be way cooler if we actually dug into what it means for every Transformer to have been built for a purpose and then broguht to life rather than having them just happen instead and Soundwave could've been built for such devastating, glorious purpose. and then decided to continue following that purpose by killing his bosses and joining megatron. you see the vision? do you see it?

4) oh fuck i have to write this au don't i

5) Jazz should've been a senatorial aide plucked from the streets and manually given new, worse Devastating Glorious Purpose and shucked the chains so hard that no one can ever trust him again, except for Optimus (also recipient of new and worse DGP) who understands exactly how trustworthy he is and in fact that his penchant for finding loopholes and deliberately vanishing is proof he's reliable. This jazz could be so slippery it would hurt and play the games in the open as proof he's not playing the game at all. Oh my god I have to write this. I will die.

6) Now I just want to think of a plot. Fuck. Back to theoreticals.

7) I really think most of it is already basically in the text if you choose to look for it. I just want it to be more explicit, to be kind of enshrined in the text. Good people do constructive and/or blue-collar work, bad people exert control over others through violence, and our bad guys come from the "doing control over other people with violence" jobsets and the good guys come from the "making things and making life easier for other people" jobsets. I think it can get worryingly close to "if you're built for one job that's all you can do" but that's why there SHOULD be exceptions, and characters that come from one brand but go to the other side anyway- but I want that ALSO to be explicit, rather than left up to implication. Really I think the biggest difference is where Optimus vs Megatron are from and who their sides are meant to be fighting for.

8) Hasbro will never give me the anticapitalist workers-against-government content I crave but I wonder if you could pitch "retelling the American Revolution via robots" to them or something. Optimus Prime recieving the blessing of Primus and rising up against the yoke of the Cybertronian government with his band of underclass rebels in search of equality and freedom against the Decepticon-controlled government is also pretty close to (parts of) Sunbow canon- that's pretty strongly implied to be the case in the intro episode, at least. Anyway I want that.

9) yeah fuck it im making a plot document as we speak. This is what I'm going to do with that song title fic series. I just know it. I knew I had to write a lot of Jazz for that anyway. Motherfucker.

Comments

[comet_scout]

Honestly, everything you said is exactly why I prefer the Worker-bots vs military-cons tbh. Like, the more modern version is ok, it brought up some interesting stories, but I don't think it's more interesting or better than the old version like some people like to make it be. I also think it would make Autobot-Megatron more interesting if he didn't exactly have good intentions from the beginning. (How you said, makes characters that "break the mold" stand out more)

[redthedragon]

I can't lie, I do think "My intentions were good but my execution was so ludicrously bad that I killed a shit ton of people" is interesting... I just think having Megatron turn into an autobot in order to make up for that is kind of a boring resolution to that. If Megatron joins the Autobots I don't think it should be because he ~saw the light~ and realized they were the Good Guys, you know? I'd much rather see Megatron splinter his own faction by announcing a ceasefire and alliance than join the other side entirely with that kind of backstory. (I do think that if he started out wanting power for the sake of power and then joining the Autobots that'd be interesting though.)

Ultimately, though, the "this guy is a Good Cop and this badguy is a Gross Lower Class Thug" construction is just sort of everywhere in the media, especially when it comes to adult shows, and I'm bored of it. Give me a rando radical from nowhere with relatively low institutional power as a protagonist pwease it's more fun to have variety

[comet_scout]

Oh, yeah, I know what you mean, it isn't great of it to be The Solution or resolution to his character, I like to see it more of a compromice he isn't exactly happy with that would bring more problems down the line.

Also, yeah yeah, it's been everywhere. I think it's been popping up a lot as a counter to the old trope of the good guys always being the underdogs (I think someone once said that this version of con and bots is too much like Star Wars) But like, I think there is a reason it used to be a thing and I also wish it would make a comeback.

[redthedragon]

I think that it's sort of a reflection of the political/media landscape we live in. The media world is profoundly afraid of letting progressive movements look like the "good guys" in the context of overthrowing the government especially in the wake of the protests over the last several years re: Black Lives Matter and other socially progressive movements picking up steam. Even when the shows are about explicitly left-wing movements and the good characters are on that side, usually they shy well away from "and working against the government is good"- there's one non-establishment group of racists or sexists who get routed and then racism is Solved Forever and the government only comes under light fire at best, and in fantasy the bad guys are almost always the "progressives who went too far" rather than anyone else being that. Reflection of the times and stuff.

I think the thing that would annoy me about people calling it too much like Star Wars would be that this is... the actual backstory set out in the first few episodes of g1, pretty much... the Autobots as underdog rebels looking to find safety chased by the evil overlord Decepticons, that is. I jumped off in a few directions with this, but that whole "evil overlord vs underdog goodguys" thing was way more common in the 80s probably because of the cold war, I'd imagine? I wasn't like alive back then, so I'm just sort of spitballing, but when these tropes are literally everywhere for a specific time period that's usually a societal thing, and they really were for a while.

...though it could've just been writers piggybacking off Star Wars, I guess. But I'd be surprised. And even Star Wars was a science-fiction take on a whole bunch of general fantasy tropes about brave knights and evil kingdoms. Surely no one thinks, idk, Robin Hood stories (also rely heavily on an evil empire and a goodguy underdog) are too much like Star Wars, so the telling of it also matters.

(I swear I'm not trying to ream out the idea that it's like Star Wars that hard, I also like star wars tbh. But i think it's an odd thing to say and so I want to dig my fingers in and turn it inside out so I see what's going on with it haha).

[quetzalpapalotl]

I agree. Althought I do really like IDW1 and I'm Coptimus #1 fan (at least when Barber took the time to show that even if Orion had the best intentions ACAB is a thing for a reason, while Roberts was mmmm......) I feel like that story was already told and don't need a repeat of it. I honestly loved IDW2 returning to a more "classic" dynamic where Megatron is just clearly an expansionist in a way that feels less cartoonish and more fitting to the comic's tone, tho I would have prefered if Orion wasn't a Senator, it would have made more sense why he started so passive. But IDW2 making emphasis on everyone getting their share and all did give me the impression that Ruckley was trying to avoid class issues given the mess that was the previous continuity.

I would kill to have the autobots be the freedom fighters again, especially if they're low class and especally without the influence of cold war politics, a girl can dream I guess.

Tho, I'm not sure TFA is the best example, but I do have a personal gripe with the way the show portrays Optimus vs his actual position in-universe as one of teh highest ranking bots on Cybertron,

(Ooops I started writing this before reading under the cut)

I LOVE THAT IDEA, that Jazz is so sexy styasfdghashl. Also re: the autobot bloodknights, makes for a fun dilemma because the Bots want to be the better mechs, but also they're fighting actual experiences military here and they can't pull their punches at a disadvantage like this, so is this behavior they should punish, allow or reinforce?

[redthedragon]

I mostly just don't like Coptimus from a like "political narrative outside exRID specifically" discussion, I feel like it makes any sort of class-discussion type themes incoherent. And ultimately I really dont trust anyone other than Barber to write Orion with any like... nuance. It definitely worked for me better when I was less- I'm gonna say "oversaturated" in IDW05 Decepticon discussions, though. As it is, I think it works for OP and I think it works for exRiD but it gets [handwave, grimace] when it gets put up against the Decepticons and especially awkward when it starts moving around to other continuities. (Ex: Covanent tried to do TFP Orion as part of the government spy apparatus iirc; that does not work well in context for that story, I don't think, and it weirds discussion of it.)

I can't really complain about Ruckley trying to tread lightly but I want a story that says the quiet parts out loud, you know? At least G1 (incoherent and weakly constructed as it was) was very explicit in going "we're the autobots and you are people who work in human construction at factories. We are your friends and we want you to build stuff, and we also do that." I guess some of it also comes from the fact that like, there are a lot of shows and books and stuff about casts where everyone has institutional power and they just kind of are boring for me... I prefer a slanted dynamic or one where no one in the cast has real institutional power. It's more interesting for me. So like, subjective taste lol.

yeah yeah yeah yeah thats the heart of it really, is i want the autobots to be freedom fighters. i kind of want to be able to root for them! I may be a villain liker but I like when the stuff is set up so I can glom onto the big scary baddies and still root for the good guys haha, and decepticon freedom fighters gone bad plots make that slightly awkward for me. i hate the idea of divine right of kings so much, primus picking a prime just pisses me off so much in concept LOL

TFA is definitely NOT the best example at all for the actual in-universe class thing, but out-of-universe the class coding is . okay to be fair its awkward and clumsy and the Constructicons get classism'd on really hard, but I feel like the autobot cast was presented very much as "we are working people like you and we do jobs like you do" even if it was kind of all over the place. Not the best example for sure, but it got at something I was trying to say OH right. They feel like down to earth and like people because they understand the kind of issues real people have, like "clocking in and clocking out" and "sometimes the government doesnt have your best interests" and "boss is an asshole"

YEAH exactly, the autobot bloodknights are a very important and valued part of the Autobot fighting force but like ????CHILL????? PLEASE???? GUYS?????? like no ones really sure what to do about them until Jazz shows up and is like yeah they're chill. look at them, they're not going to hurt you. be nice. by the way, [open threat] [salute] [leaves] and optimus is like "we can encourage them to be like that actually"

[yvannairie]

Good people do constructive and/or blue-collar work, bad people exert control over others through violence, and our bad guys come from the "doing control over other people with violence" jobsets and the good guys come from the "making things and making life easier for other people" jobsets.

Hell yeah, thank you, it's the social conservatism of it all that also bothers me. It gives no grace to the idea that most people don't exist in a state of wanting to exert power over others and if they do they're the asshole, actually. It's why I keep emphasizing that the Autobots in Aligned are conscripts, they've got things they wanna do besides being the boss of other people. I think the only way to get away from the divine right of kings subtext is to have a truly working-class Optimus.

I would also be interested in seeing the American Revolution setting of this -- hell, if they wanted to keep the refrain of anti-imperialism Earthspark has, bring back the backstory of them having been Quintesson slaves and commit!!! that way I think even the militaristic streak of the Decepticons is a lot more sympathetic, it brings back the imperialism-turned-inward vibe. Actually truly fascist Decepticons have not been explored before, and I kinda want that, I kinda want our bad guys to either truly be bad or be obviously a brother-against-brother situation against the backdrop of a bigger existential threat. As it is, they're still super underdeveloped, they're still just the bad guys because they're Bad. And make them actually good at being military, also. That's my other pet peeve. Either make them good at it or explain to me why they are so consistently bad at it.

[cleverthylacine]

In theory I agree with you, in reality it all breaks down when I come to Soundwave being evil and relentlessly so without any compassion.

that's not the man I fell in love with--

[sexytronians]

I agree. I feel like that narrative has a lot of room for fun explorations like you posted about in this post.

Also, 'the Stunticons are basically indoctrinated child soldiers' is such a concept that can have so much done with it. It to me has more bite if the Decepticons were always based in an ideology of 'might = right' rather than 'leftist revolution gone wrong.'