Dominic wrote:Getting shot by one's colleague would reasonably imply that some body is off the team.
No, it really wouldn't. It would imply nothing of the sort. It would imply only an interpersonal problem. Skywarp has no rank to make such determinations.
Also I hate the art in those Ongoing panels, yuck.
Shut your damned mouth.
You can pretend all you want, but it won't change the ugly faces and wonky overall art there.
-not sure how one can use a back write to support that something was not back written.
They are not talking about the narrative of AHM or of a specific author, they are talking about it as a singular "ongoing Transformers" narrative beyond within the IDW G1 ongoing continuity. I don't think it's seamless either, but not for the reason you're citing, for the "no damned sense on the damage and then Thundercracker is a different personality on the other side" reasons.
Shockwave wrote:The other funny thing about having shown this to my Mom is that when I asked her if she had seen the same thing in an episode of "All My Children" (which was the soap opera she watched) she admitted that she would expect the character to have survived or to come back later.
Yeesh, that really puts this in perspective. It's as quality a storytelling medium as a soap opera.
Gomess wrote:Everyone is technically right. This of course is just how I learned it, but...
A retcon is where you explicitly contradict previous continuity, usually justified through absurd explanations. A backwrite is just where you go back to fill in an open space in the story without *necessarily* contradicting continuity... but probably still in a clunky way which makes the previously open ending less interesting. Your mileage may vary.
But IMO, Thundercracker's survival is a backwrite (and a sigh-worthy piece of drama castration at that), but not a retcon.
(Yes, I've been catching up on RiD too!)
IMO, a retcon doesn't need to explicitly contradict previous continuity, it is "retroactive continuity" so it can either retroactively alter the past or merely try to fit in gaps. I find it generally awkward either way as well. The idea that "retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past" is definitely more the former than the latter but I think fits both usages.
In my opinion, a story should be written well enough that what happens in it is clear to the reader, unless the author is deliberately aiming for ambiguity. It shouldn't be necessary to know "what he intended" from his own extra-textual words. Everything we as readers need to understand the story should be right there on the page, with no room for misunderstanding. The fact that it so often isn't clear is a problem with writers and with editorial. THEY know in their head what's supposed to happen, so it's not always apparent when they aren't communicating. It should be. A good editor should catch things like that.
We shouldn't have to argue Thundercracker's fate. If he was intended to be dead of a headshot, that ought to have been made clear, not left to inference. Given the medium we're reading, and how well aware we are of the tricks comics pull, there's no reason for McCarthy or his editors to have leave his fate unclear in any way, except to leave it open for the next writer to fill in the gap and tell us what happened.
I agree with everything said here right up until the idea that what's on the page in AHM #12 isn't narratively enough to convey the intent, and that's why I blame the medium. Only in comic books (and soap operas) is the narrative presented in that story not enough to convey a character's death. A book or a play or a TV show where a character is set up with those same scenes and then not seen again in that story is a death scene. In comics and soaps, it's an excuse to jerk around the audience because they've come to expect that there is no reality and no death in those media.
We'll be having this same conversation down the road when Rewind reappears. Dom and JT will insist he was dead and we're reading a back-write, while I'll be insisting that I knew it was a good possibility that he'd survive. There's no use railing against comics and saying "it shouldn't be this way". It's too late for that. We know how they work, and we'd better be saavy enough to read them accordingly and not make assumptions. Yeah, we need to see something as definitive as Pipes' death to be certain.
I fundamentally disagree that there's no use in railing against shoddy problems of the medium. If we keep lapping it up without saying anything, how is it supposed to get better? Should we go back to Silver Age sidekick antics and no dangers whatsoever too? Should nothing ever change at all, we should just accept that the medium is lazy and sloppy and has no hope of aiming to do better? This is the sort of thing that drives consumers away from comics IMO, that some shit is unavoidable and can't do better. The interpersonal character writing in MTMTE is much more nuanced than a 1960s comic and we pay a premium for that, why is it we can expect better writing in some areas but not others?
If they can convincingly give a reason for Rewind surviving, I'll accept it, there were several factors at play which could be exploited (he's in a time dilation field, he's surrounded by an indestructible Decepticon), but if it's just "he's really fucked up and we fixed him" or "he got reborn by some local natives' magic" it'll be extremely disappointing.
Will anyone be surprised if Pharma turns up again? He fell off a roof and Ratchet got his hands. But we didn't see Pharma die, did we?
That would be disappointing, at what point is there a reason to build hospitals and buildings when Transformers can survive that much without them? If they're THAT indestructible what's the point of portraying such things? Especially these nobody characters who can be easily replaced, they're not even revenue-generating characters so it's easy for them to just be dead, that's why major characters like Ratchet have friends with talented hands who just happen to turn bad and need to be killed so their hands can be donated to Ratchet.
Gomess wrote: No, come on, they could've shown a panel with Thundy's eyes blank and a smoking hole in his head and there was still every chance they'd bring him back to life. Given the medium we're reading.
There's no use railing against comics and saying "it shouldn't be this way". It's too late for that. We know how they work, and we'd better be saavy enough to read them accordingly and not make assumptions.
I cannot enjoy a media text with this attitude. If I think something's crap, I'm not gonna pretend I think otherwise.
Do Dom and I agree on this, or am I going crazy?
Everything here is so awesome!
andersonh1 wrote:Gomess wrote:No, come on, they could've shown a panel with Thundy's eyes blank and a smoking hole in his head and there was still every chance they'd bring him back to life. Given the medium we're reading.
If they'd done that, I'd be agreeing that it was a cheat and a back-write.
IMO, that's proof right there that you are arguing a "shades of gray" argument, that he's just
not quite dead enough for your tastes, you've bought the comic book mentality of "never truly dead" lock stock and barrel while others in here such as myself haven't gone as far to that side of seeing things. I don't think you ever directly addressed my question of what you'd think of a theatrical play where that scene was played out: the shooter shows anger, puts a gun in the face of the victim, the victim asks the shooter to wait, the shooter interrupts with more anger, the stage goes black, a gun is fired, and then no other scenes showed the victim in that play. So is that victim character dead or not? Do you NEED the body in that moment to believe that character is dead, that the fictional construct uses enough artistic license to convey the idea through only alluding to the grisly murder scene? If so, why is it that other narrative media enjoys that but comic books aren't in the club?
Gomess wrote:http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Dull_surprise
I have never liked it when stories seemingly kill off a character only to bring them back. I try not to read texts that do that. But, I accept that it's a pandemic in the comics medium, so I just try to shrug it off and find something positive to focus on.
It's not a very fun way to read, sure, and it probably goes some way to explaining why I read hardly any comics.
Gomess batting a thousand! This is pretty much how I feel as well, and why I mostly dropped out of comics in my teen years.
O6 wrote:Rewind was shown to get locked in an escape shuttle (or whatever?) with Overlord. His fate isn't looking good, but that doesn't mean he's dead yet. (We've talked about the "red Xs" on the cast page, so we'll see how that plays out.)
Preview pages are up for the next issue. Magnus is in it, but it's flashbacks, so we'll see.
What really pisses me off is that almost assuredly Overlord will be surviving this moment, that they've constructed a character all but guaranteed to survive whatever is thrown at him simply to be the unstoppable juggernaut, so his defeat now is always going to be temporary and thus unrewarding.
As for
Magnus, it's not just flashbacks I think, the blurb for issue 17 said that Rodimus was taking The Lost Light to the gates of heaven ("... or hell?") which suggests to me that they're going to have a present storyline rescuing dead characters.
Gomess wrote:If IDW decide Overlord has the Masterforce, who knows what'll happen to Rewind.
Could you explain that please? I am not familiar.
Shock wrote:And McCarthy's comments at the time would seem to support this: "Thundercracker's fate isn't in my hands"... or something to that effect.
O6 wrote:I still say McCarthy's intent was for Thundy to die, and editorial got in the way--his answer at the time, much like Roberts' recent answer about Chromedome and Rewind, is kind of steeped in that, "Stuff is happening soon and I can't fully explain myself right now because of it." (For example, if McCarthy had said, "I always intended Thundercracker to survive," outright, it may have been a spoiler for Costa's run.)
This idea falls pretty flat for me. The response is vague, it could easily go either way - maybe he wanted to kill Thundercracker and couldn't, OR maybe he wanted Thundercracker to survive and couldn't be explicit about that. But in either case, the idea that editorial had greater things in mind for the character rings hollow. I've not followed the ongoing, but based on what I've read about it, nothing they did with Thundercracker looks like it came from his personality, nothing needed to be THAT character, there are others which could have filled the role. Worse, they did something I find artistically bankrupt in any medium, they took a small personality trait that drove the character to take a specific action (the "Decepticon honor" idea) and they exploded it to DEFINE the character in later uses and even to motivate him in later stories -- as if characters are so bankrupt in personality that any aspect which stood out becomes their only trait, "TC made a moral choice so now he must be a moralist!"
Anyway, sounds... wait, he's saying Rewind would be turned into a Powermaster-type thing??? 
Tell me you're going to drop that link into the other thread as well. Revolution!!!