Dominic wrote: Transformers is a tough medium for expressing the ideas of "a life well spent" because they live virtually forever. Rodimus' funeral setting is grand, but even it is not quite grand enough for a race that sees so much war and yet so little death. But here they at least are trying, they are exploring ideas left and right, the aimlessness isn't aimless, it's leading somewhere. If you look at this series as M*A*S*H, it works a lot better.
Imagine being a member of that species, and still having wasted your life. Think back to Swerve's musings during the annual.
Good point, although it's worse for Tailgate when we finally find out his terrible secret, but both are trying.
I slightly dislike the way Roberts has all the little guys feeling like they aren't measuring up, they're wasting their lives compared to other Autobots. The G1 cartoon had Brawn who was utterly badass, there weren't a lot of inferiority complexes there despite plenty of small guy characters.
anderson wrote: Ratchet was doing the right thing helping Drift, not trying to become his girlfriend. Tailgate has been longing for a connection to his own time, and has felt that connection to the one person he knew from that era, Cyclonus, whom he's been trying to forge a connection with because he's lonely and feels lost - Tailgate isn't even a bot of war, he was in a coma during the whole thing.
Up until this issue, that's how I read both relationships. Now, I honestly have to wonder. I hope that's still all we have. The juxtaposition of Rewind's goodbye note with Ratchet helping Drift up seems odd to me if the two aren't connected. Maybe Roberts didn't intend that, maybe it's a problem with the fill-in artist or letterer connecting two scenes that have no connection. Maybe we're meant to take Rewinds words about how Chromedome is a better person and realize that Ratchet thinks the same thing of Drift, that he's a better person, etc., and nothing else.
Before "robots in love" was introduced, I'd never have considered any other reading of the scene than the latter. Now, I have to question.
You're reading into those relationships though because you're assuming a "gay space robots" perspective and applying that outward from that dubious starting position. There's nothing to fear at this point, if we see Ratchet pounding Drift in the tailpipe then we'll know we've gone off the rails, but that seems wildly far from helping a guy who is being beaten up by the Autobots, supposedly the moral group.
Also, the way you view this, "robots in love", is certainly not how it's been portrayed IMO, we'll get into that more in a moment though.
"Lovers" is clearly what these robots in Chromedome's past are meant to be. Sure, there's no sex, but Conjunx Endura is clearly a form of sexless marriage or the equivalent. It goes beyond friendship, or it wouldn't need a special term to describe it, so there's clearly something to take things to the next level. Maybe it's the Cybertronian equivalent of best friend, but I doubt that.
People have said that I have a problem imagining a close intimate relationship that doesn't involve sex, but I'm simply trying to reason this out and ask myself what the next step is beyond best friend or girlfriend or whatever. I don't need some special term for even my closest friends, the ones I would say "love ya" to. They're friends. The only people I have special terms for are family, and Conjunx Endura sounds a lot like euphemism for "wife" or "husband". The term Roberts picked, Conjunx Endura, clearly has some higher connotation than just friend, or even best friend. It's clearly an analogue for human marriage, or as close as Transformers can get. And by implication, there's more to it than "trusted companion", which wouldn't require more than friendship.
Do you see what I'm saying? I'm not sure I'm explaining myself well. If Chromedone and Rewind were just trusted companions who loved each other, why the special term for what their relationship is? We've got a marriage analogy here, which means physical intimacy as well as emotional. But Transformers don't have that, so the whole thing just makes no sense to me. Maybe I'm hung up on the "Conjunx Endura" label as much as the romance angle.
You are explaining yourself very well, just that it's a limited viewpoint IMO. You love your family without sexual feelings, you feel close to your children in a way that cannot be bridged by mere "friendship", why is it that Chromedome and Rewind cannot have similar feelings about their "significant others"? Not every deep intimate relationship is based on sex. If you and your wife were asexual, genderless, and had no sexual feelings, but you still felt strongly about her as a part of your close family-type people, would that be "lovers" or would it be more "soul mates"? Since we've established that Cybertronians are asexual and utterly chaste, the idea that intimate relationships exist is a natural extension of friendship and loyalty, the idea that there can be people who are "spark mates" and sexless life partners doesn't come off as perverse to me. You are looking at it from the opposite direction though, you are looking at it first from the sex and expanding that idea into the "I love you" comment as if being a spark-mate automatically means they're pounding each other in the tailpipe, but that's not what is on the page, it's all about the feelings of being close to someone, about losing someone, about caring for someone as if they were a part of your own self, not about physical intimacy or even sexual contact (since sex is often not particularly intimate these days in our society).
Let me ask you this, if you had a horrible accident and permanently lost the ability to have sex or enjoy physical contact, would your significant other's role in your life be lessened, would they become no more than a friend do you? I doubt it.
You're extrapolating backwards from the assumption that a life partner must mean a sexual partner, instead of extrapolating forwards from the stated fact that Cybertronians have no sex so a life partner can't be a sexual partner; your foundation for the relationship is starting from that wrong place, and I think it's because you're afraid that foundation will build into a sexual intimate relationship between the characters.
I'd be shocked to see bot on bot action. Seriously. Even now, I'd be shocked.
As would I, but I'm not reading these pages expecting or fearing that it may be just around the next page-turn, and it seems like that's where it is to you.
Drift participated in the scheme, so he has to accept what he's done. Taking the fall for the others is a problem though. Surely Chromedone, Brainstorm and especially Prowl deserve just as much, if not more. I'm not saying otherwise.
Chromedome is far more to blame than Drift, assuming Drift is actually the one participating in the scheme. Chromedome even admits it, he got lazy and sloppy and let the genie out of the bottle. Mourning is no excuse for not getting twice as much as Drift caught.
I've always thought that one of the ways the old series succeeded in making the Doctor "alien" was by pulling him away from human emotions and attachments, at least during certain portions of the show. And having him uninterested in love or romance or sex was certainly one way to do that. Moffat has certainly gone back in that direction, but the Doctor is still more human now than he was during the classic series. Still, it's an improvement on RTD's handsome action hero who swoons around the galaxy falling in love with his assistant and kissing girls every other week (and yes, I know I'm exaggerating the frequency!).
How sexless could the original Doctors be when he kept picking hot female companions to travel the breadth of time and space with?
Not seeing your argument re: 10th Doctor & Rose, it's not like he was trying to bed her. And he rebuffed Martha the bland, good enough.
Yeah, I agree. Moffat's done some good work on the show, but the quality has been going downhill. JNT stayed way too long, let's hope Moffat doesn't do the same.
Blame the BBC for keeping JNT around until the show was killed to death. Moffat I hope will be shown the door before that happens again.
G wrote:Do that many of us really believe sex is an inherent part of romance...?
In our western society, the modern norm has been to equate romantic love with physical love, as if romantic love was the tool to gain physical love. Philosophically, there are many schools of thought, but look at Freudian thought where it's all about getting one's rocks off, too many people accept that as a truth blindly. Still, I won't use the concept of romantic love in this discussion, it's a loaded concept that muddies the points made in the book, I find it unnecessary.
Shock wrote:Do that many of us really believe sex is an inherent part of romance...?
Yes. At least I do. We're animals. We have instincts and one of the biggest instincts is the urge to mate, to reproduce and propagate the species. All the pheromones, the dating, getting to know someone in a romantic way is all geared towards that end. It was even recently scientifically proven that love helps with procreation (it causes physiological changes in the woman's reproductive system that help facilitate it). So yes, falling in love in a romantic sense is directly linked to the sex drive and without that, what else do you have besides a really close friendship? I mean, when I meet a woman that I'm interested in, it starts with the sex drive. Because the first thing I've noticed is that she's physically attractive and someone I would want to have sex with. Now, we have evolved to the point of courtship and dating and actually getting to know people that we sleep with in order to form a bond deeper than just sex but it does start with sex and therefore sex is a pretty promenant component of it. At least that's how it is for our species and maybe this is where the "alien" nature of Transformers becomes relevant to the story.
Most animals don't have romance, many animal species populate out of the desire to procreate, some of them procreate almost exclusively out of rape. Romantic feelings are more than just sexual desire, sexual desire can often drive one to romantic feelings but they are not necessarily inclusive of each other in the human condition. Eventually the sex drive dwindles in many humans as they age, does that mean they stop loving each other, they stop caring for each other and being emotionally intimate? No.
Now, having said that, I want to now address Anderson's questions about what there is beyond friendship and I have to counter with the question: What about people that never get married? You're married and have kids and that's great, that all makes sense and is normal to you. I'm 38 and still single and staring down the very real possibility that I will never get married. In that case who would be my "Conjuncta Endura" except for one of my best friends? And it would stand to reason that said friend would also wind up being next of kin etc, etc...
What if you get a roommate and become emotionally intimate yet not sexually intimate? That's a "life partner" in its own way.
G wrote:Try starting as enemies instead. Works in anime.
Mind you, so does a lot of stuff.
Yes, that's a great foundation, one of fiction's most horrible contrivances, let's keep perpetuating the myth that can ever work. EVER. Also, wear a cup when you try it.
