this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
31 points (94.3% liked)
Comradeship // Freechat
12 readers
1 users here now
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They are kinda both. In the recent IDW comic runs, Decepticons originally wanted to overthrow the Functionists. The Functionists were the ruling class of Cybertron who enforced the ideology that a bot's alt mode (what they transform into) should determine their occupation. This lead to a stratified apartheid society where the intellectual class was better off than the manual workers' class.
Megatron was among other things a philosopher and political thinker but because of his alt mode he was forced to work in a mine. He secretly writes and disseminates theory. At one point he even says "religion is the engex of the people". So the Marx parallel is apparent.
The problem is that Megatron also wants to exterminate ALL organic life for reasons I didn't look into. This is one of the main points of contention with the Autobots. Later in the timeline he is portrayed as extremely sadistic and bloodthirsty. So he is clearly not a character that one should be sympathising with. Decepticons in general are ruthless, brutal and destructive.
So it looks like the idea behind them is a liberal's understanding of communism with a fascistic angle thrown in?
Weirdly enough later they give Megatron a redemption arc where he esentially turns remorseful and good which seems completely out of place.
This is an example of the theory that Megatron writes: https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/images2/3/36/Towards_Peace.jpg
That's the most based thing I've ever seen a car say. Meanwhile Optimus Prime cooperates with the USA military.
I understand the sentiment and I realize that Transformers is unfortunately stamped with the marks of neoliberalism like most entertainment media, but in the comics and movies, Megatron 70 percent of the time is a douchebag megalomaniacal maniac that wants to destroy non-organic life or commit genocide of the autobots, despite his token occasional criticism of the autobots. It unfortunately makes sense for the autobots to tacitly tolerate working with the U.S. military.
The IDW timeline is very weird. If you read More Than Meets the Eyes, you see his origin and what he is like in the present and it makes no sense how or why he was a bloodthirsty genocider in between those periods.
The writers had the baggage of the countless past iterations of the franchise where the war is defined in very simplistic good vs. bad terms. I think they just chose to ignore its deeper implications. I don't mind it though because it makes More Than Meets the Eyes a great read if you are not irked by the inconsistency in the continuity