Tag: tfp

themadcapmathematician:

themadcapmathematician:

themadcapmathematician:

Comparing tfa and tfp always cracks me up bc you have this brightly colored teen titans-esque saturday morning cartoon in which tons of outrageous goofy shit takes place, and then you have a moody-lighting-filled serious series with gorgeous, intricate cgi in which a more grounded storyline and world-mechanics is portrayed and characters get graphically slaughtered on the regular and such…but even so the darker of the two is still decidedly not the second one

I mean it depends on your definition of “dark” I guess but tfp favoured “robot zombies and graphic murder” and tfa favoured a more “every single main character is guilt-ridden from some kind of awful failure and past trauma and as much as they all want to just go about their lives repressing it, its gonna show up sooner or later to haunt them and they’re gonna have to find a way to live with it and themselves otherwise it will destroy them” approach and like no offense but that second thing will always fuck with me to this very day

Another thing I think tfa did better than tfp was create the feeling of the heroes being the vastly outgunned underdogs. Tfp does better at creating the sense of “a war is going on” but tfa is a post-war series about a ragtag crew trying to upkeep safety and relations on a foreign planet, even if they dont have the full understanding or support of their home planet and its morally gray, bureaucratically-bogged down government. Tfp gives a sense of isolation and losing hope for the future, but its hard to take the idea that they’re underpowered completely serious due to the fact that each and every one of the main heroes wades through seas of vehicons almost every episode (until the predacon season that it).

Meanwhile, all of the main autobot crew in tfa are either half-trained or a older veteran medic, all of who are technically part of a maintenance team, and they have few weapons, all of which are ineffective most of the time. Every decepticon is at least two or three times their height and has far more fighting experience. you also get the sense that if something were to go wrong, the autobot government wouldnt exactly classify rescuing them as a priority, and you would be correct. Hell, you also get the sense that the cons themselves don’t see this team of janitors as any particular threat and are more annoyed than anything that they’ve actually been an obstacle for them at all. It creates a sense of vulnerability for the heroes I personally find very compelling (although tfp has plenty of it’s merits).