More than Meets the Eye (IDW ongoing comic)

[andersonh1]

I don't want to spoiler tag the whole post, so consider this your spoiler warning.





Don't read it if you haven't read the issue.















MTMTE #16

I’m going to say it up front: I read and watch Transformers for action and adventure, not romance and mooning over lost loves. I know we’ve got a long discussion thread about this very topic, and maybe that thread will grow after the revelations of this issue. There’s certainly more fodder for discussion. Needless to say, I’m not a fan of the oh-so-convenient love note that Rewind tossed out the door of Overlord’s cell before sealing it shut, or of Rewind’s final message to Chromedome. Or of the revelation that Chromedome has a string of dead lovers behind him that he’s deleted his memories of. These are asexual nigh-immortal robots… what exactly does love mean to them? They don’t have gender or procreation. It makes no sense. Sorry, but this is exactly where I figured adding romance to Transformers would head, and I doubt we’re done.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that Tailgate exchanged inner energon with Cyclonus, or that Ratchet is helping Drift to his feet precisely when Rewind’s goodbye monologue is taking place. Are we going to start pairing everyone on the ship off now?

Other things do take place in the issue. A lot of the series’ trademark humor has been dialed back, appropriately so for an issue about funerals. Rodimus is dead serious for once, and in a deft bit of character writing, was just as angry about the fact that he wasn’t the hero and didn’t save the ship as he was about the lives lost. He didn’t put up with Rung’s psychobabble either. His eulogies for the dead were also well-written. There’s some good dialogue in this issue that’s enjoyable to read.

Drift gets an appropriate punishment for what he’s done. Stripped of his Autobot status and exiled into deep space, he’s on his own. I guess all the Drift-haters will be high-fiving now.

And Ultra Magnus… how many times has that guy been badly wounded, to the point of death? So he smiled once and regretted it ever since, and that actually makes sense now. He has a crooked Autobadge, something he now would never do. He can’t stand dirt, but is seen trudging through the sludge on some alien planet. This guy is hard to kill. And something happens to him at the end of the issue, after yet another seemingly fatal wounding. There’s a pattern here, but if nothing else it shows that Magnus is hard to kill, and I’ll stand by my prediction that he’s not dead and gone. The X isn’t over his portrait in the cast list any more either, interestingly enough.

[andersonh1]

Roberts comments on a few of the issue's pages on Facebook, something I've seen him do on a number of occasions. It's curious that he mentions Doctor Who as an inspiration, because my feelings about making the Doctor far too human by introducing sex and romance into his life somewhat mirror my feelings about what Roberts has done to Transformers. Ironic.

https://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/? ... 938&type=1

PAGE 1: Kicking off with a very large fight in the Battle for Hell’s Point. This is a battle that has been mentioned a few times during other issues of TRANSFORMERS: MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. Why start here for this issue?

JAMES ROBERTS: I’m a fan of Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who (I’m a bigger fan of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who, but that’s another story), and I remember being thrilled at the openings to two of his grand finale-type episodes, “The Pandorica Opens” and “When A Good Man Goes To War.” In both cases you get this frenetic pre-credit sequence that tears through about a dozen mini-scenes, all of them in different times and different places, all of them vaguely (but not obviously) connected, and it really felt EPIC.

“The Gloaming” (issue 16’s story) is essentially the prologue to “Remain In Light,” and with the four Magnus-centric mini-scenes, hopping across time and space, I wanted to emulate that vertiginous rush of those Doctor Who episodes. Also, Moffat has talked about “The Pandorica Opens” being a sequel to every episode in Series 5 of Doctor Who, and I’ve always intended for “Remain in Light” to have a similar feel–lots of threads from the last 16 issues finally being tied together.

Also, all of the battles that we witness in this “teaser” are already embedded in MTMTE/LAST STAND OF THE WRECKERS lore: Hell’s Point, Simanzi and the fight for the Nightmare Engine. To date, they’ve all been referenced in passing but we haven’t actually seen them. Until now.

Finally, issue #16 is quite a contemplative, emotional issue, so I wanted to kick things off with some action. Don’t get me wrong, there are some big, big character beats and plot developments in the rest of the issue, but for those who like proper TF battle scenes–and who doesn’t–then there they are up front.

PAGE 2: We learn that Hell’s Point is a ship, and Ultra Magnus wasn’t always the character that he’s been shown to be during MTMTE. Here, he’s just a warrior like his fellow Autobots. Is this a part of his history that you’ve been wanting to show for a while? Was writing the scenes more fun than a Magnus scene on the Lost Light?

JAMES ROBERTS: I’ve treated Magnus in a very particular way since issue #1, playing up the stiff, rules-obsessed, “can’t-have-fun” side of his character. As we saw in issue #4, in his conversation with Rodimus, he’s struggling to cope with postwar life. His peculiarities – purging ostensibly unimportant words from his vocabulary (like “fun” and “relax”), insisting that badges are straight, arresting people for minor infractions – are his response to conditions that he’s simply not capable of coping with.

What I’m saying is, he wasn’t always the “joke” (to borrow Overlord’s insult) that he seems to be now. There’s a reason why he’s regarded by some as the Autobots’ greatest warrior; there’s a reason why he’s such an effective enforcer of the Tyrest Accord. In these first few pages, we see Magnus the Warrior, unencumbered by the personality traits that have come to the fore since the war ended. It seemed appropriate to remember him as he was, given what’s going to happen over the next few issues…

PAGE 3: Magnus (note the crooked badge), the Duobots and the Powerdashers (yes, you heard me right!) are getting ready to battle when yet again Magnus is taken down. Powerdashers haven’t had much done with them in almost 30 years of the franchise. Had you always wanted to get them in somewhere and show them as more than toys?

JAMES ROBERTS: Truthfully? I saw that Simon Furman was playing the super-obscure character card well in TRANSFORMERS: REGENERATION ONE and I thought “I’ll have me some of that.” Also, we’d seen Zetar in issue #9 (in an advert for bodygloving), so – much like Rotorstorm’s appearance on Page 4 – it was another opportunity to mix in some callbacks and continuity nods. Shock and Ore are there for the same reason.

Of course, the biggest link to a previous issue – and a deliberate one – is the reappearance of Torque, the Decepticon k-class officer seen in the opening and closing scenes of #8. Although it’s literally just occurred to me that no-one will realize that the Decepticon bomb with “Ultra Magnus” written on it is Torque’s alt mode, because I edited out that part of his conversation with Fulcrum in issue #8. Oh well.

PAGE 4: Another flashback where Ultra Magus suffers at the end. What’s your thinking with these flashbacks? Is it to demonstrate that we might not know the character quite as well as what we thought?

JAMES ROBERTS: The Autobots and Decepticons have been fighting for millions of years, which means there’s scope for change in how they approach the world. But the purpose of the flashbacks, aside from what I said earlier, was to show that Magnus has been through the wars and usually finds a way to make a comeback. Is that going to happen this time round…?

PAGE 5: The badly injured Magnus is being looked after by Ratchet, Swerve and Tailgate. We’re dealing with the fallout from issue #15. Having done so much with Ultra Magnus so far during the series, was it hard for you to mortally wound the character as you did?

JAMES ROBERTS: Not as hard as it was to kill Rewind in issue #15! What I find interesting about Magnus being on his deathbed, out of commission, is what it does to Rodimus. How does Rodimus cope without the voice of reason by his side? The rest of the issue, and much of “Remain in Light,” focuses on that. Yeah, that and a billion other things…

[Dominic]

I flipped through it. I am spoiler tagging the plot point in the quote. Everything else is open.

Spoiler

Or of the revelation that Chromedome has a string of dead lovers behind him that he’s deleted his memories of. These are asexual nigh-immortal robots… what exactly does love mean to them? They don’t have gender or procreation. It makes no sense. Sorry, but this is exactly where I figured adding romance to Transformers would head, and I doubt we’re done.

The best way to look at this is to step back and look at the comic from the outside.

Roberts is writing a series where the TFs will know love. And, a significant portion of the fandom (I suspect including a significant number of people who cannot step back and look at the comics from the outside) are eating it up.

This book is catering to them.

Some people might argue that it is a question of the franchise maturing. It may be similar to the awkward stages that DC went through in the 80s and that Marvel went through in the 90s. But, it is also catering to that part of the fandom that has long sought deep emotional connections for and with fictional characters.

That is why we are getting "Transformers: sorta gay space robots".


I agree that it does not make sense for alien space robots to have the same emotional and social needs as people, even in a soft sci-fi setting. But, that is not the direction that Roberts is going. He is basically writing a fairy story, or something more akin to Greek mythology where the magical pixies are really just like people, and that means that the readers are not really alone (even if many of them may well be cut off from reality).



Dom
-and this is why I am skipping this book.

[Shockwave]

I agree that it does not make sense for alien space robots to have the same emotional and social needs as people, even in a soft sci-fi setting. But, that is not the direction that Roberts is going. He is basically writing a fairy story, or something more akin to Greek mythology where the magical pixies are really just like people, and that means that the readers are not really alone (even if many of them may well be cut off from reality).

And see this is really where you're missing the point. People don't read or latch onto characters because they are alone and are looking to get companionship from a book, they do it because literature is about telling a story. And to do that the characters have to be relatable. Because the story is an allegory. A metaphor. The robots aren't literally "robots", they analogs for human beings and in telling a story with those characters, they have to have human traits or the story gets lost and that's when you get shitty writing (like the movies). I mean, you yourself have said that you read stories for the commentary the writer is saying about something in real life so why is it so hard for you to grasp that to do that the characters have to have humanity or they don't work as characters?

I think part of the problem with "gay" (I'm emphasizing that particular word for a reason) space robots is because the Transformers are asexual and the real problem that I think people are having with this is an inability to separate sex from love. And I think that's largely because the mainstream media has so heavily associated the two that we as a society almost can't separate them. We live in a world where we're constantly bombarded with the idea that sex = love and vice versa when that's really not the case. The two can exist without each other and that's what's happening here. They can't be "gay" because they don't have sex and gay is an exclusively sexual distinction.

Shockwave
-What the heck does "look at it from the outside" mean?

[Dominic]

The two can exist without each other and that's what's happening here. They can't be "gay" because they don't have sex and gay is an exclusively sexual distinction.

I understand what you are saying.

But, to anyone other than a dedicated fan, the best way to describe MTMTE is "gay space robots", which really sounds like fanfic (even to some fans).

Shockwave
-What the heck does "look at it from the outside" mean?

Look at it from "outside the story". Think in terms of the real world logic used to make decisions about the comics, not the on-page logic of the comics.

[Shockwave]

See and that comment really illustrates what's wrong here. The fact that this one aspect of a larger story with several other plot points overshadows the entire book to the point where you can ONLY describe it as "gay space robots" is really telling. Apparently the TF fandom isn't mature enough to handle this level of story telling without degenerating it down to that and that's really sad. And really doesn't that by extension kind of lump you in with the very fans you're trying to disassociate from?

As for approaching this from outside the comic... no. It's not that I can't do it, I don't want to. See, that's also the other point I was trying to make in the "emotionally stunted" thread, that I really think you do nothing but that. I would rather focus on the story on the page in front of me because I really don't care what decisions went into making it. If the story is good and gives me what I want out of it, that's all I'm concerned with and that is how stories should be looked at, MTMTE included. I mean, think about this in terms of movies. Dvds put the behind the scenes and "making of" and commentaries on dvds as EXTRAS because they're not the main story and not what the audience generally cares about seeing. They're interesting sure, but it's an afterthought, it's not the main event. It's like saying that when WWE is on tv they should forget the ring and just air what's going on backstage. No, they shouldn't. Again, that's not the main event. What's going on in the ring is and that's where the audience's attention should be. And that's how it should be with MTMTE as well, you read the story on the page rather than busy yourself with why or how it's there.

[Mako Crab]

Dom is like a film critic. Or a film snob. Likes to have his intellect engaged. Does not like to have his emotions manipulated by a mere piece of fiction.

[Shockwave]

Dom is like a film critic. Or a film snob. Likes to have his intellect engaged. Does not like to have his emotions manipulated by a mere piece of fiction.

Well then he really shouldn't have given up on this book so soon or for so... trivial? a reason. As I'm about to illustrate (cause there's a LOT going on here).

Finally read the latest issue and apparently the whole series up to this point hasn't just been about aimlessness but has been leading up to the very deep themes in this issue. This issue (and in hindsight, a lot of last issue) is an exploration of death, loss and the stages of grief. Tailgate is shown representing the stage of denial, refusing to accept Ultra Magnus' death, even though the Dethklok says otherwise (more on that later). Rodimus is representing anger, shown to have practically destroyed his quarters and even threatening Rung. Pipe's final words last issue is a haunting recap of all the things he'll never be able to say to his friend (I forget who he was recording a message for). Chromedome's conversation with Brainstorm reveals that Chromedome doesn't actually deal with death at all. He apparently uses his nmemosurgical abilities to just turn off a switch in his brain where he doesn't remember the loss and therefore doesn't have to cope with the loss. In that context, Rewind's "love letter" doesn't come across so much as a plea to not be forgtotten, almost as if he knew Chromedome's tendancy to "flick the switch". Tailgate accidentally winds up in the field of the dethklok and sees how long he has to live. It will be interesting to see how he handles knowing when he's going to die (this would be akin to someone who feels perfectly healthy getting told by a doctor that they have 6 months to live. What would you do with the time you have left?). I look forward to seeing that question explored a lot more in the next few issues. Also, there was some stuff with Ultra Magnus, showing several of his battles, which really kind of served as a sort of eulogy to the character. The fact that he's missing may mean that he's regained conciousness and maybe just decided to saunter off to cross a few things off of his bucket list. Or maybe not. We'll have to wait and see.

I have to say, that I am happy to see the comic tackling such adult/mature issues and to explore them so thoroughly. This is usually the kind of commentary one would expect from an episode of Star Trek (in fact, Trek has explored death and loss quite a few times over the years). I think this issue really goes a long way to answering JT's question of whether the FRANCHISE itself has become emotionally stunted and the answer here is a solid "no". Roberts is clearly writing for an adult audience capable of understanding and dealing with and perhaps some who may have already dealt with such issues in their own lives. Now if only the fandom can get past "Gay space robots" we might actually be able to discuss the real themes in this book.

[BWprowl]

Shocktrek, you pretty much hit all the major points of things that work for this issue, and I generally feel you're more qualified to talk about this book than I am (I don't HATE it, but I am frustrated by it to the point of ambivalence more often than not). I might discuss some points later. For now though, I just want to say that I amusingly only just now noticed that the word 'fandom' is a portmanteu of 'Fan' and 'Dom'. Heheh.

[andersonh1]

Finally read the latest issue and apparently the whole series up to this point hasn't just been about aimlessness but has been leading up to the very deep themes in this issue. This issue (and in hindsight, a lot of last issue) is an exploration of death, loss and the stages of grief. Tailgate is shown representing the stage of denial, refusing to accept Ultra Magnus' death, even though the Dethklok says otherwise (more on that later). Rodimus is representing anger, shown to have practically destroyed his quarters and even threatening Rung. Pipe's final words last issue is a haunting recap of all the things he'll never be able to say to his friend (I forget who he was recording a message for). Chromedome's conversation with Brainstorm reveals that Chromedome doesn't actually deal with death at all. He apparently uses his nmemosurgical abilities to just turn off a switch in his brain where he doesn't remember the loss and therefore doesn't have to cope with the loss. In that context, Rewind's "love letter" doesn't come across so much as a plea to not be forgtotten, almost as if he knew Chromedome's tendancy to "flick the switch". Tailgate accidentally winds up in the field of the dethklok and sees how long he has to live. It will be interesting to see how he handles knowing when he's going to die (this would be akin to someone who feels perfectly healthy getting told by a doctor that they have 6 months to live. What would you do with the time you have left?). I look forward to seeing that question explored a lot more in the next few issues. Also, there was some stuff with Ultra Magnus, showing several of his battles, which really kind of served as a sort of eulogy to the character. The fact that he's missing may mean that he's regained conciousness and maybe just decided to saunter off to cross a few things off of his bucket list. Or maybe not. We'll have to wait and see.

I have to say, that I am happy to see the comic tackling such adult/mature issues and to explore them so thoroughly. This is usually the kind of commentary one would expect from an episode of Star Trek (in fact, Trek has explored death and loss quite a few times over the years). I think this issue really goes a long way to answering JT's question of whether the FRANCHISE itself has become emotionally stunted and the answer here is a solid "no". Roberts is clearly writing for an adult audience capable of understanding and dealing with and perhaps some who may have already dealt with such issues in their own lives.

Nicely put. I hadn't really looked at the book this way, but I can see where you're coming from, and I think I largely agree with your take on this particular theme.

Now if only the fandom can get past "Gay space robots" we might actually be able to discuss the real themes in this book.

Yet another reason I'd prefer that the topic of "Transformers in love" had never been introduced. It was always going to generate discussion, to the detriment of the other things that are going on. But it can't just be ignored, and so it sucks all the air out of the room. The can of worms has been opened, and it can't be closed.