I think you're just focusing on the extremist a-holes who do that. There's always going to be that extreme psychotic part of every group so we shouldn't forget about that. Also no one here is asking the TF books from IDW to be like War and Peace. It's just having the books be nothing but rock and sock em robots 24/7 isn't going to sustain the series in the long run. There has to be some depth and development to go along with it like with political themes and complex character development.

 

i'd still flipping LOVE if someone could point out to me exactly where these "heavily political tones" are because im not seeing it and damn i'm starting to feel like i'm reading the version of IDW from a different universe or something

 

I think "politics" is code for the gender stuff. No one seemed upset about the apartheid of forged vs. constructed or functionalism.

 

Before I start, can ask yourself a question? If you had to say, where you would you say you fall on the socio-political spectrum? I would venture that if you say you fall left of middle, internal bias prevents seeing things that others see (just as it falls right of middle for me, and a lot of my own internal bias influences me). We as humans have a hard time seeing within the blindspots caused by our own biases and beliefs, and I think a lot of IDW writers, while well intentioned, are not able to account for their own bias and it comes out in there work. A lot of it came with Roberts' stuff, and small things added up to a lot over time.

A lot of people got up in arms over the Transformers being gendered thing, and that occurred at exactly the same time gay marriage was a big deal in the news. To avoid the dead horse of "he/him vs gender neutral" debate, just know it was not a nice topic to be around. People debated at length about Arcee and forced sexual transition, and about if robots could be gendered. While it was a Hasbor mandate, the way it was incorporated at the time, came across as a way of adding the writer's opinion to a place it didn't need to be. A lot of it was Hasbro wanted to sell girl robots to girls, and that's okay. IDW really had to do a lot of backtracking and fumbling around to get fembots into the story, and for a long time all the "girl" robots had large breasts, hips, and smaller facial features, as well as being physically smaller than most of the "male" characters. Further, IDW's adamant refusal to answer how the colony's kept genders while Cybertron didn't, caused a huge mess. It was almost as if they were forced into the story without actually thinking about how to really do it, especially since none of the "old" characters self-identified as female. That one was small potatoes, though really, except for the other thing it introduced: romance.

Romance isn't bad, and romance between two characters is okay. I really don't care. However, the whole "Chromedome/Rewind" thing got to a point where it felt like Roberts was trying to shoehorn his social and political stance into a comic book (in a lot of the same way Marvel was criticized for suddenly making Iceman openly gay). Wherever people fell on the spectrum of politics, at the time, to a lot of readers, it truly felt like Roberts hijacked MtMtE to tell the story of his social views, and by extension his politics, because politics became so intertwined with social debates. It felt, for a while, that the story surrounding MtMtE was less about the Transformers and more about "gay robot lovers." And adding to that was the strange fact that there were male-male romances, and there were female-female romances, but there no male-female romances. Sideswipe and Arcee and Skids and Nautica were close, but not lovers like Chromedome and Rewind, or the other fembots Roberts introduced. Because IDW insisted upon making new female characters, while leaving all of the old ones male, it really put a bad taste in people's mouths if they didn't agree with the rising surge of support for gay marriage. If you google, "Rewind, Chromedome, news" you come up with dozens of hits talking about how socially progressive it was, more than they were talking about the story. As a result, almost overnight, MtMtE blew up in the LGBT community, and that's okay. What's not okay was the way Roberts pandered to it on twitter and interviews. They were gay, so what? Why did that matter more than the story? What made more conservative readers feel isolated was when, despite letters to the editor, or tweeting at Roberts, or posting here, they got vilified. "Homophobic" got thrown around A LOT, especially around here (sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly). Does every character need to be a robot version of All-American white male cisgender Captain America? Absolutely not, but don't forget, just because some is one of those things, they aren't a bad person.

Another issue was the way both Barber and Roberts have portrayed religious belief/faith in their characters. Is Primus a deity worthy of worship? Absolutely not, but that doesn't mean faith can't be portrayed as a positive. Name the truly devout characters: Cyclonus, Skids (before he's killed), Drift (and his monastic order), and Star Saber. None of those are exactly positive portrayals of faith, and one is an the extremely negative - almost offensive - portrayal of religious zeal. "Primus hates you" can effectively be translated into "God hates you." For people who have faith, to whom faith is an integral part of their daily lives, that's a giant middle finger. And while there ARE religious people who take that attitude, to portray the overwhelming majority of people of faith is inaccurate. Even Drift, who is probably the most devout of the bunch, doesn't come across a genuine, but rather the butt of the joke, especially when paired with Ratchet, whose disdain for faith knows no bounds and is never confronted with a positive version of faith to challenge his unbelief. The atheist is given a pass while those of faith are not. Also religious, you have OP. The "good guy," and yet you see him deliberately using his fellows' beliefs to his own gain. Good intentions, but a terrible, TERRIBLE crime. The guy who carried the Matrix and professes to have been in the presence of his deity, and his solution is to manipulate his followers. That stings because to those who believe in something. That is a slap in the face because it says, without trying to understand faith, that religious belief can be used to manipulate people, which part of a much larger line of thinking used by some atheist philosophers when trying to debunk faith. It presented one side of the argument, but not the other.

Lastly, and also somewhat a faith thing, I think Roberts' personal ideas of good and evil soured a lot of readers, or at least the value system he introduced in MtMtE. First, he makes one of pet characters (Chromedome) a hero, despite this weird scene where Chromedome more or less admits to mind-raping Prowl. Was Prowl a turd? Yep, absolutely, but that doesn't jsutify CD's actions. It's never mentioned, never addressed, and if we've learned anything in society, it's that overlooking a crime like that is just as bad as condoning it. Second, Roberts portrayal of Megatron's redemption, while not overly political in and off itself, wandered dangerously into a realm it shouldn't have. Redemption has its roots in faith, and that whole arc set a lot of people's teeth on edge because of how it was handled. It made a monster be tame after going out of the way to tell us just how bad he was, and then made his turnaround and acceptance onto Lost Light easy. It made it cheap, and for a lot of people, that was not okay. In a lot of faiths (and not just Judeo-Christian ones), redemption is costly, and it's messy, but here it was made into something that could be neatly wrapped up in a tidy little bow and said "yeah! Good Autobot Megatron!" I don't know Roberts, and I don't know what he believes or what he thinks beyond what I read in the book, but I can say, from the outside looking in, it feels an awful like he was trying to write about something he doesn't understand. People long for authenticity, and this part came across as incredibly inauthentic.

So, in conclusion, please let me ask one final question. What if the shoe was on the other foot? If Roberts had only written heterosexual couples, how would you have felt (not mocking, but honestly, how would that have made you feel?)? Similarly, if Roberts had written all of the characters of MtMtE as devout believers in whatever, wandering the galaxy with the sole purpose of spreading their good news, and then Star Saber showed up, not as a religious zealot but instead as militant atheist hellbent on killing any believers, how would that have made you feel? In either of those instances, would you have still be interested in reading?

 

At the end of the day, all I’m really looking for is to be entertained from a $3.99 comic book that comes out once a month (referring to lost light).

At the end of the day it’s a comic book made to entertain.

That’s why I won’t drop lost light at all or criticize it all that often.

If the couples in MTMTE were heterosexual, then cool. I never noticed or thought about chromedome and rewind being homosexual until the extreme blow up in politics the last 3 years. It didn’t feel out of the ordinary.

If star saber was an atheist, then fine.

What other people do is make things more than they need to be.

 

I got into IDW TF because MTMTE & RID were cool. But they were really only cool for the first two or three years. So I don't mind that they're ending. I don't know if I'll be following the reboot, unless it is of similar quality as MTMTE S1 or Scioli's TF vs Joe or something. I have pretty much no interest in a return to the roots of the franchise. The last time I thought the G1 cartoon was actually good was when I was 10, and I didn't read comics at all when I was a kid.

 

I don't have time to get into a lot of this diatribe, but I'm gonna flag up the religion thing real quick. How is Cyclonus's faith not portrayed positively?

He's a devout believer who fights for the heroes, and there's a whole scene about him denouncing Star Saber's twisted interpretation of their religion, and drawing on his faith to give him the strength to prevail, which he does. Star Saber literally exists in the plot for the sole purpose of being a religious villain to contrast against Cyclonus the religious hero.

And then in season 2 we had Tarn, an atheist villain who executes somebody for the crime of starting a religion, so uh...

 

That's true - but it's also true of literally every other writer. The question here is: what's *particularly* political about Roberts' work? The reality is that the only reason modern writers are seen as particularly 'political' is because the audience has become more politically diverse (or fractured) and instead of just seeing their own politics neatly reflected back at them, a la every single West vs. Communism metaphor in pop culture ever, they now find that writers may actually offer a point of view that jars with their own.

So when you say, for example -

- Hasbro/IDW couldn't avoid that debate one way or another, because keeping your cast entirely male-coded is *also* a way of adding the writer's opinion. There is literally no way to be neutral. The best a writer can do, if he or she seriously wants to avoid 'politics', is to work out the most skillfully 'little bit of everything' position they can, and put that into the books, so that most of the audience subliminally think the writer's view lines up nicely with theirs.

All of your criticism basically amounts to the writers and editors taking a position on certain topics that doesn't line up with yours, and discussing that position openly when asked about it. The idea that comic books today are somehow more didactic - that they push their morals harder than previously - is demonstrably absurd. Pick up any silver or golden age superhero comic and you're likely to find a tonne of speechifying from various characters about the rights and wrongs of certain situations, far more blatantly and less subtly than in MTMTE or any modern comic I've seen.

If you want a modern politically conservative comic, by the way, pick up Saga, which seems to go out of its way to present violence as justifiable when it comes to defending the nuclear family.

 

This. I really enjoyed Regeneration One but wasn't sold on the Autobots just abandoning the Ark for 20+ years, especially after Grimlock was so adamant in locating it in #76. Also, I don't think the Decepticons would have been stored on the Ark after the Underbase War.

How about a reboot picking up right after Marvel's US run incorporating the UK stories? There are tons of possibilities. I'd like to see an Autobot force try to locate the Ark and confronting Megatron/Shockwave while Bludgeon's Decepticons battle the Autobots on Cybertron. End tangent.

 

i love this whole "how would you feel if the shoe was on the other foot" thing
like uhhhh
have you consumed any form of media ever created in the history of the western world? until extremely recently, historically speaking, a character being anything other than straight and cis was considered A Risky And Dangerous Move, if not entirely straight up taboo and occassionally worth a lynching. until stupidly recently - like within the last literal handful of years - the only trans characters were without exception monstrous psychopaths, villains, sob story cautionary tales, or punchlines. that's it. i could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of positive portrayals of trans people that have reached more than a niche lgbt market even today.
it is hilarious
absolutely god damn hilarious
that we're here in 2k18 arguing in novella form on a forum about giant robot toy commercials because characters being gay, or having TWO PANELS in a six year long saga mentioning a single time that they're trans, is somehow beyond the pale and the author forcing unpalatable beliefs on their audience.

let's be real here - Optimus Prime is a dude. You can't walk that back. You can't go "yeah 35 years of using male voice actors and calling them all 'him' twelve times an episode don't count because actually robots don't got the peen" ---- i mean you can, and i'm learning rapidly that apparently people do, but it's unbelievably disingenuous.
[speaking of disingenuous, how callous is it to complain about getting fembots, and then a paragraph later, also complain about there being no het romance? not sure where to start untangling THAT knot.]

It's just like @Focksbot said [i'm so glad you're on this site by the way thank you] - there is no way to be neutral. no matter what choices you make in the stories you tell, it's going to reflect not only yourself but the world you live in. If you keep your mid 80's cast of forty assorted dude robots punching each other despite the obvious changes in society, you're sending explicit messages to girls. If after that you then go "sure they act in all respects like humans in funny suits and they can make jokes and talk in metaphor but they don't have relationships" you're sending some pretty damn explicit messages to the gay community, no matter how many times you insist it's not homophobia.
"nothing against the gays, they're just not allowed to exist in my universe!!" right, just so you know, we can see you sweating.

how can opening up a franchise, letting more varied people feel seen and represented, possibly be a negative thing?
no one is being pushed out. everything else is just as it always was.
if minorities being included makes you feel excluded, that is YOUR damage.

 

A diverse cast doesn't make a story inherently good. But the presence of a diverse cast has been politicized, so now if a book is marketed with diversity as one of its selling points, you cannot criticize it without being accused of being hateful towards whatever minority is represented within its pages. Your criticism is then deemed harassment, and the politics advocated or expressed by the book are then claimed to be the only thing which can protect people from such harassment.

It's all very stupid.

 

Ah, come on - that's just not true. We've been laying right into Visionaries on this forum, and no one has accused anyone of that.

What you do see is a book which is marketed as having a diverse cast, or with a minority writer or artist, immediately getting slagged off before anyone has read it, just because people find are offended by that kind of marketing. The Visionaries title is a case in point - it's bad. It deserves criticism. But people were angry about it before they'd read a single page, just because a few of the characters are race-swapped and the writer is trans. In the preview threads, some of the users on this site were incredulous that the rest of us could agree that the writing wasn't up to snuff, but that we *didn't* therefore agree that Mags was an obvious 'diversity hire'. For them, it seems, any time a minority writer does a bad job it must be because they're talentless and only got their job through political correctness. And that *is* a hateful attitude, frankly.

 

I'm sure whatever example I could give you would somehow warp into my being homophobic (I'm not straight, friendo).

Again, attacking me instead of my point is part of a problem.

The comics are more concerned with pushing a narrative than telling a good story. There is a reason the numbers are in the toilet.

Maybe you should try some growing of your own.

Again, I don't have a problem with progressive ideals in my comics. I ENCOURAGE IT! The problem is that the current crop of writers are having an incredibly hard time of telling a GOOD STORY while also writing progressive characters.

I am an ethnic and racial minority that is also VERY sexually open personally *wink*. The stories are bad. It's that simple. My original post still stands.

And no one is saying it's a bad thing to have a more diverse cast. How you're arriving at that is strange. People don't like the bad comics. They don't have a problem with progressive characters. There is a difference.

Oh, and Apollo and Midnighter are two of my favorite comic book characters. It's strange that two characters that have been around since the late 90's have been better written than almost all of the poorly conceived characters the current writers at IDW have created.

 

There indeed is a reason: Revolution and the renumbering!

 

Is that a contributor? Sure. It's not the only reason. People were complaining about season two of mtmte.

 

I don't think Visionaries was promoted that way. Mags Visaggio never claimed that making lionguy black suddenly made her book good all by itself. But Aubrey Sitterson is still tweeting about how having a fat Samoan lady and a gay dude on the cover of his G.I. Joe book made it good because it pissed off somebody on a facebook group or something.

 

I think you're eliding a lot of stuff here, for convenience's sake, but it's far too reductive. Let's agree, for the moment, that the comics are bad. What has that got to do with 'pushing a narrative'? Plenty of conservative and politically oblique comics are bad. Plenty of agenda-pushing fiction is good. Isn't it in fact the case that the quality of the story doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether or not it has left-leaning politics front and center?

And speaking specifically about Lost Light, how many of the issues really have to do with Roberts' politics? Anode was dropped in as a reader surrogate character for the start of the series - a misguided attempt to ease new readers in. She's annoying because of her attitude - that she's trans is really neither here nor there. The hugely disappointing messiness of Dying of the Light had nothing to do with any 'agenda' and everything to do with Roberts trying to do a balls-out action story with lots of twists.

Also, you say 'no one is saying it's a bad thing to have a more diverse cast', but that is kind of what you and others are saying. You're saying it's a bad thing if the writer makes too much of a thing of it, because that somehow detracts from their obligation to tell a good story. A lot of the argument on this is pretty zero sum - implying that too many gay robot relationships somehow intrinsically takes away from the story proper.

Finally, you really have no substantial evidence that this has anything to do with the sales drop-off. I think a much better reason for the drop-off is that we've had years and years of these books, with no genuine jumping-on points (whatever the marketing says) and plenty of jumping-off points where things got a bit directionless. Whenever people come to this forum saying they're interested in the comics, they have to be directed to complicated recommended reading lists. IDW have consistently resisted starting any genuinely new story in their existing universe - every single soft reboot has immediately referred to previous events.

 

can we just reiterate - Anode being trans has been mentioned ONCE. there was a very brief, two panel discussion about her transitioning [that also just happened to function as a little continuity cleanup] and since then it has not been mentioned, referenced, acted on, nothing.

Chromedome and Rewind had a real poignant arc about their relationship, true, but it focused entirely on the problems they had to overcome - Chromey putting his fingers in people's skulls too often, Rewind being dead, etc. The fact they were gay was not not even mentioned, it certainly wasn't moralised about or used as a teaching point or proselytized. In fact, their genders were entirely incidental. They were two robots in love and they just happened to both be dudes.
Can i also mention again how incredibly poignant their arc was? Genuinely one of the best written things i've ever read in my life, and easily the high water mark of fiction about giant robots. And i know a LOT of people on these boards agree with that assessment, so i'm having a lot of trouble reconciling your insistence that good story and progressive characters don't exist simultaneously.

I ask again, where's this big bad agenda supposedly being pushed?

 

The thing that bothers me is that the majority of these characters don't have anything of substance outside of their gender or sexuality. Don't get me wrong, Chromedome and Rewind were done right. They had characteristics above and beyond their sexuality in spades. But Anode? What is she? She's a barely one dimensional character that was largely disliked until it was revealed she was trans. At which point she became an integral part of the story. It feels like the trans part of the character is her most defining characteristic. That's what I have a problem with. I want an interesting, dynamic character that just happens to be trans. I don't want a trans character that is essentially NOTHING in all other aspects. It's bad storytelling. It feels like a gimmick to get readers.

Midnighter and Apollo are really interesting characters that just happen to be gay. Northstar is an interesting character that is also gay. What is Anode? A trans character. That is the distinction i'm trying to make.

When IDW is using these very important issues to pat themselves on the back instead of writing GOOD characters, it feels like they're trying to push an agenda. They're using progressive ideals to get people to read their poorly crafted comics. I want progressive characters. I just want them to be written well and have motivations outside of their basic sexuality or gender.

And yea, there are straight characters that are like this as well. I could go on and on about how I hate Sunbow Optimus. He isn't a character, he's a archetype. That's why I've always said Marvel Optimus is my Optimus.

 

Broadly speaking, I really enjoy the comics as they are now. Roberts can’t be beaten, and Barber is alright too (when he’s not having to try and work around all these crossovers, but I’ll get to that later).

Of course, I’d love to see is some fan favourite writers return in some capacity. Roche is always welcome back, be it Wreckers or otherwise. It’d be cool to see Scott make a return too after her run was cut short. And of course, I’d love to see Furman return to the universe he created. It’s been almost nine years since he last contributed to it (AHM #13), and it’s changed so much. It’d be cool to see what he would make of it all.

In terms of actual storytelling, my only real gripe is all these big, annual events dragging everything down. I love the shared universe concept, and I love all the characters interacting, but do we need to put everything interesting on hold every 12 months to tell another mediocre crossover story? Do more harmless, fun crossovers like ROM vs. Transformers. That was fun, well written, and didn’t affect the rest of the comics that were out at the time.

There’s plenty of stuff I don’t want them to do. Don’t restart the war. The complex post-war comics are way more interesting than the good guys vs. bad guys stories of old. Don’t bring back Megatron. His redemption arc, which initially seemed like a pointless gimmick, was actually one of the highlights of the entire franchise for me, and the way he was written out was perfect. I’m worried some new writer will one day take over and decide he wants baddy Megatron back and will just undo it all. No. Most importantly though: don’t reboot. I haven’t invested in 13 years of comics just for to see it all get flushed down the toilet. A reboot could honestly see me considering walking away. Please don’t do it IDW. I’m watching you Unicron...

Oh, and not really a Transformers thing, more of a larger Hasbroverse thing, but MORE ACTION MAN! Get on it IDW!