Del Toro makes movies that look like something that stepped out of dreams or nightmares.
Predacons and Insecticons get special attention. With gleaming carapaces and dagger fanged denta. They twist and stalk and skitter on screen. Even the Autobots and Decepticons are a little more feral.
Megatron and Optimus fight with swords from the start. An epic clash of titans over laid with dramatic music scores that make you want to get up and fight as well. WIth well thought out speeches by Optimus and Megatron who is scarily charming.
Both are eerily handsome.
Starscream is elegant, sleek lines and flaring wings and swinging between cooing softness and shrieking rage that scares you badly enough to want to hide. Soundwave’s monotone over laid with the faintest reverb really makes you wanna hide.
The humans don’t over take the story line.
It’s a box office hit with nicely timed screen cuts and angles and dramatic moments paired with a little occasional tongue in cheek humor with an actual over reaching story arc that makes you walk out feeling good on what you watched.
Me: Listen okay del Toro’s Transformers are a Thing I can already see in my head sweats they all have teeth and Wayne Douglas Barlowe designs are used for some of the weirder Predacons and everything feels vaguely magical because it’s so dang beautiful and colorful. I’m incorporating del Toro’s Transformers aspects into Matrix like. I gotta. I can’t not.
TinyFiestyRosieKitten: YESSSS. It is beautiful with a good story line and kick ass action and deep heart felt moments. There are a lot of teeth.
Me: “Spike” Witwicky or the stand-in therof is a younger girl, who represents the human viewpoint, but she is not portrayed as necessarially innocent nor in dire need of protection. The humans don’t overpower the plot becuase the few human characters there are (and there’s a hard limit, like, maybe a handful of named humans, at best- the rest are generalized) are part of the plot, a seamless portion showing Optimus’ quick connection to earth and desire to protect all life- not just his own. Optimus is shown as conflicted- his own desire for peace clashes against his instinct to fight- to defend others.
Me: Megatron is given equal parts sympathy and horror in the history we see of him- the decay of what was a justified revolution that turned inwards and cannibalized the better parts of itself to become stronger. Megatron who knows and carelessly accepts that he has become a monster, and who has decided it suits him far better than trying to be better ever did.
Me: None of the bots are self-gendered. A human calls Arcee a girl and tries to explain it and the cybertronians get confused and laugh about it. Careful modulation gives the majority of them decidedly gender-neutral or ambiguous voices. When there’s no humans around, they don’t speak english, and instead Cybertronian is layered and crackled and shown translations in subtitles- or you do the clever thing where onscreen it displays as running a translation program, thus implying that the audiance POV is physically present as an observing force capable of translating.
I happen to reallylike Tranformers Animated. I own both AllSpark Almanacs and around ten of the toys (to be fair, cmyoung gave me about half of them because he’s awesome like that) and the first two seasons on dvd (because they don’t appear to have season 3 dvds and that makes me so mad). I really like Sari Sumdac – haters to the left.
What I don’t like about Transformers Animated is how closely it sticks to the Smurfette Principle. There are no main female Autobots except maybe Arcee who is basically a plot device not a full character, and the only major female transformer at all is Black Arachnia. It’s even more frustrating because I get the feeling that they tried to be more inclusive than former Transformers series. The (for lack of a better term) NPC robots in the AllSpark Almanacs are more evenly balanced gender-wise (don’t get me startedon robot gender btw). So what gives?
Well, apparently there was supposed to be a female version of Red Alert on the main team. Who was later changed to Ratchet, who I like but I can’t help thinking I might of liked Red Alert more. And I’m going to give the creators a bone and hazard a guess that it was sexism higher up – probably the merchandise guys spouting some “female toys don’t sell!” stuff. That being said, it still whomps.
I like Red Alert’s design. Maybe make a couple of adjustments or two – but I like the way she looks. I’m even going to jump forward and say she should have elements of the original Red Alert’s personality. By that I mean that I kinda like paranoid characters and I rarely see paranoid female characters and think that would be great.
Anyway, this post was originally supposed to be about my Dream Transformers Team but I got sidetracked so let’s get on that.
Optimus Prime – a given as Team Leader
Female!Red Alert – as described above, filling the role of Team Medic and Team Gruff Paranoid Cynic
Arcee – Pretty much her Transformers Prime incarnation which I adore and want to see more of – as Lancer and Fighter
Bulkhead – as the Heavy Fighter and also because I really like Bulkhead
Bumblebee – as Team Heart I kind of like TFPrime and the movie’s incarnation where he seems really sweet yet funny.
I could also see: Blurr (who could easily be genderbent) as the Speedster and Gets-into-trouble guy (mixing his personality with TFA’s Bumblebee) and Jazz as the Arbitrator (because these guys would probably get into loads of arguments).
I would also want to see Inferno in the Deceptions because I love Inferno and I think he’d make a good counterbalance to Starscream in the way that Lugnut does (I also love Lugnut).
The point is I really wanted Red Alert to be on the the main team. Also that I am not very good with G1 or G2 stuff. And I overuse parenthesis.
@pollution-of-subterranean-waters and I were discussing Megatron and Optimus’s moral approaches in TF Devastation, and this led me to a certain question that I want to ask you, dear followers.
So while Megatron prioritizes Cybertronians and Cybertron over all other life forms, Optimus sees the bigger picture and prioritizes life in general, caring for all living beings in the universe. Which makes me admire him a lot, since this approach takes a remarkably open mind and a lot of love.
However, there is an important detail: both Optimus and Megatron are leaders of their people, which means that safety and prosperity of their people must be their first priority; their position puts a huge responsibility on their shoulders, they are entrusted with their entire species’ survival and culture (no matter if they were chosen or took that power on their own). And from that point of view, Optimus is doing a very dubious thing: he puts this responsibility aside in favor of others.
Imagine if there was a situation where Earth leaders had to decide: either sacrifice Earth and save10 other inhabited planets – or see them destroyed and save our planet.
Would it be morally correct for the leaders of Earth to sarifice the people they were chosen to represent?
Must a leader be loyal to the group that they lead, or to some higher moral standard? And where is the line? Like, aggressively conquering and annihilating other people to get more riches is bad without a doubt, but if it’s a question of survival?
I am genuinely interested in your opinions on that topic, so feel free to share them if you want.
Soooo, that pic I had earlier, I finished… took FOREVER to do the line art in this thing. but hey! after half a day its done!
I was thinking this is sort of like after recovery rodimus comes to check up on magnus, and they’re kinda like secret friends or something o3o so he’s all like “hang in there big guy”
(Okay, um, Homestuck is not a fandom I’m really familiar with. I had to go and ask Leggy what a pale crush is, so you’re not really getting an AU, but a deleted scene–when Strika proved, and then swore, her loyalty to Megatron, and he realized he had more of a friend than a new subordinate in her. Warnings. Robogore in particular. Megazarak showed up and he is not a happy thing.)
@crazyfanatic97 had an idea for a steampunk version of Transformers Animated (a la “Hearts of Steel”) so I drew some variations of Victorian outfits (and one flightsuit sort of thing) for Sari Sumdac
1. Less Earth, more Cybertron. As fun as Sari and Isaac Sumdac are, I’m far more interested in the extensive worldbuilding that was put into TFA’s universe, from the spies to the Council to Rosanna. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to include similar elements, I think – have a human vessel crashland on Cybertron, chased by the Decepticons, and have Optimus’ crew be the first one on the scene to help the humans carry the AllSpark away, or something.
Or something. I haven’t thought this out, but basically get it set on Cybertron. I came for robots, for non-Earthlike settings, and there’s still room for exploring Sari as Megatron’s daughter.
2. Second change: actually explore Sari as Megatron’s daughter. This could have been fascinating with the whole Autobots not thinking Decepticons are at all good, but them adopting Sari anyways, not to mention everything about Megatron and Isaac’s relationship, and just – there was room for so much more, here, and it was squandered.
3. This is a more franchise-specific change, but: actually examine the status quo of Decepticons bad, Autobots good. TFA had the most obviously gray morality Autobots, what with the dystopia it was presented as, and it didn’t comment on this at all! It also cheerfully slapped the Decepticons with the “we want to destroy everything because” stick, even if they left in the painful bit in the Decepticon oath – they want to go home. That’s their motivation. Dig into that, and give us – heck, if they can’t even fathom Megatron being a nuanced character, surely they could’ve come up with a Decepticon who could’ve had a redemption arc? I’m just sayin’, those are popular. And it would’ve dovetailed with #2, too!
4. STOP KILLING PEOPLE. “here have a tasty, tasty glimpse of drama as Blurr discovers his trusted boss is a Decepticon spy, with all of the drama and hurt that implies, and whoops no nevermind back to Earth and the human drama” godsssss and don’t even get me started on the finale. SO MANY UNNECESSARY DEATHS
…
well starscream can stay dead, that was the most fitting end for him after making so much trouble. i mean. unless they’re gonna give him a nuanced character, let him go.
5. Blackarachnia. Let her embrace her evil side. Let her flirt with becoming good and actually becoming good. Just. For the love of pete please stop the evil female femme fatale trope and kill it and let her develop a personality instead please please please
Bonus: Here are five million human characters and supervillains. Somehow they are more compelling than the roughly ten robots we have in this show about robots. How. Why.
Cybertronian Database 