Dominic wrote:Super heroes are still supposed to be people, albeit people with fantastical powers. Alien space robots are....fucking alien robots from space. Saint James has taken the "TFs are just like people thing to whole new depths.
The association is that the fandoms for "gay alien space robots" consists largely of the guys who read fiction exclusively because they cannot function in reality. Like I said yesterday, it is the same thing that the ED stereotype mocks. And, rather than write something to disprove it, Saint James is playing in to, and affirming, that stereotype. ("Yeah, it is true. And, that is a-okay!")
Protip: ED mocks everything for being gay, including superhero comics and ED.
Transformers have been shown to have romantic relationships many, many times before. How is this different from any of those other times? It’s not nearly as gratuitous as, say, Blackarachnia and Silverbolt’s snogging in Beast Wars (alien space robots kissing like humans do? That’s pushing it more than a technically-genderless robot offering his spark to save the life of his technically-genderless robot life partner).
"Gay people" as a story element is still grounded. "Gay robots" is "if you need to identify with fictional space robots and need them to be 'out there" as much as possible, then this is the book for you".
Really? I’d say showing the characters in a relationship, reacting similarly to how we expect people in a relationship to act, grounds the book more than it pushes it into ‘out there’ territory.
Because, even allowing for the book being about a bunch of slackers, drifters and lost souls, it is fucking aimless. For example, issue 12 had a scene establishing that one of the happiest moments in Tailgates life was Minibot movie night. And....uh...why is that important? Seriously. I get the feeling that scene was planned when Saint James originally wrote the Minibot movie night scene. But, I cannot tell you why it is important.
Seriously. "Tailgate was happy then."
Who? The? Fuck? Cares?
Okay, now how did you miss that? The scene was initiated by Tailgate doing ‘happy-place’ therapy to calm his nerves before the battle. This illustrates that he’s not nearly as comfortable with combat as the other, yes, blood-drunk Autobots on the mission, and underscores his inexperience despite his age (highlighting his Rip Van Winkle nature) as well as his less combat-oriented function (bomb disposal, which pointedly comes into play later in the issue). Showing that his ‘happy place’ is being around his new friends (making a point of it being a movie viewing, not a more interactive activity such as a game or something, but an activity which specifically is just about BEING AROUND people and nothing more) shows that in his short time with these characters he’s grown attached to them as something that he can turn to in place of being worried about combat, and serves to contrast with similar newcomer Whirl, who despite a similar situation has not come to care or depend on any of the other crew-members at all, directly illustrated in the issue’s final scene, wherein Tailgate specifically tries to get Rewind out before the bomb explodes, while Whirl locks him in to die as a casualty of carrying out his misguided agenda against Cyclonus. It all ties back to the major themes of this book about how people deal with being lost, isolated, and misplaced: Some, like Tailgate, establish connections and friendships and immerse themselves in those bonds as a comforting environment, while others, like Whirl, reject the connections of others and sacrifice them for momentary self-satisfaction (with Cyclonus falling somewhere in-between, notice how he regularly bounces between Whirl and Tailgate in this issue and others leading up to it).
All that from a SINGLE PANEL that you wrote off as just being stupid because you somehow can’t accept robots watching movies.
Saint James has some talent for dialogue. But, that is no longer rare in the comics industry, and there are guys who do it as well or better. The bulk of his talents seem to lie in the fact that he is writing TFs and having them do stuff. But, he has no apparent ideas.
He has ideas, he’s just too eager to get them out there with little concern for actually doing anything with them. He’s hanging too many guns on the wall just because they look cool and not because he ever intends them to go off anytime soon.
Why is it worth my time to read about aimless space robots doing nothing? Yeah, Tailgate likes his buddies. But, why do I care? Swerve is funny. So what? The whole point of this book is to showcase the characters while they....get showcased? Why is this worth my time and money?
I’m in the same boat as you, in that I feel like Roberts is wasting too much time playing with the characters and not enough time getting to a point with them, but I do genuinely believe that there will be some interesting payoff down the line (issue 12 was pretty much all payoff, and I was grateful for it), plus it’s not nearly as offensive to me as it apparently is to you, so I’ll be sticking with it for the time being. It’s just four bucks a month, after all, and it’s not *angering* me or anything, just trying my patience a bit (okay, a lot, sometimes).
And now, we get shipping. (Yeah, tying two seemingly unrelated characters together is more or less what shipping is about.)
Chromedome and Rewind aren’t ‘unrelated’ though, they’ve been established as partners since this book began. It’s not like they just hooked up in the last couple issues because Roberts read about fans shipping them on some forums or something either, this relationship has back-details going all the way back to those first issues, we’ve just been peeling back layers of it (enhanced by the extenuating events of the issues as they mounted) until we as the audience were simply made aware of this ‘life-partner’ thing.
Again, step away from/out of the comics for a second. Why is Saint James bothering to write this?
Because really exploring how Transformers function in a relationship like this in the situation they’re in is something that hasn’t been done before, and he wanted to try something new? (Say what I will about the guy, he’s clearly making a point of doing something DIFFERENT with this book. It’s practically a Transformers sitcom at times.)
If other writers play the Autobots up as being even morally grey, there are complaints. Saint James writes them as blood-drunk monsters, and nobody seems to mind. (I am fine with some Autobots being blood-drunk, but I would expect the fandom to be more consistently against it.)
Only complaints I ever saw were Anderson being uneasy with Prowl being portrayed as underhanded and morally-ambiguous in a setting/situation where it’s supposed to be peace-time with characters respecting a lack of factional bias (he feels Prowl should be taking a high road or be ‘better than that’), whereas the Autobot raiding party in MTMTE is going to rescue prisoners from defiant Decepticon war criminals in an open combat situation (rather than the politically-motivated assassinations Prowl carries out). Plus it’s made up of guys like Whirl, who has never been presented as a paragon of virtue.
Other than that one instance, I have no idea what ‘complaints’ and ‘free passes’ you’re talking about. Are you able to link to any specific comments on other forums?
