Do you see Thundercracker anywhere in the panel with Skywarp's weapon firing? Do you see Thundercracker being hit? No to both accounts? Hm, isn't that interesting. If Skywarp's weapon was still aimed directly in Thundercracker's face like the first panel there shows, then Thundercracker should be right there, getting his head blown off by Skywarp's weapon in the panel when the weapon fired. Yet, he isn't anywhere to be seen. There is no "Pavlovian response" to not accept a "clear chain of events", when it's what we don't see on the page in the first place, that should be there if that "clear chain" of events played out as you suggest. We have no idea how close Thundercracker is to Skywarp when he actually fired the weapon, nor where it is aimed. That makes the scene purposefully ambiguous. And that's hardly comics turning fans against their own intellects. It's a pretty common storytelling technique for misdirection. Haven't you ever seen a crime drama pull the exact same thing? You think you know how something will play out, based on a "clear chain of events", but things can still change up until the very last second that can have a profoundly different impact on the outcome.JediTricks wrote:This is not "purposefully ambiguous", except in the way that comic book publishers have created a Pavlovian response in you to not accept a clear chain of events as meaning what they are showing. If you read a book or saw a movie where this happened and the next scene in that chain of events wasn't clearly expressing that Skywarp turned his weapon a different direction at the last minute and saved TC, you'd be ripped off, cheated, lied to - yet comics have turned fans against their own intellects for how many times they've cheated death and broken the storytelling commandment of "thou shall tell a story honestly".
This isn't supposed to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, nobody hits the Infinite Improbability Drive to save the day, the audience is going to use Occam's razor every time because the most probable outcome based on prior events is how life works and how literature works unless it intently states otherwise.
Occam's razor? The simplest explanation is that they moved somewhat between the two panels it took to get from pointing the weapon and firing it. Or do you think Thundercracker wouldn't back off from a gun pointed in his face in the second or two it took Skywarp to say "Betrayer" and then fire?