I think it's less wanting a bloodbath and more wanting the characters to be under threat.

Take a look at who's left of Team Rodimus. Which of these characters is really under any form of danger at this point? Which of them even can be?

Now, I'm also in agreement with you; I don't want any of these characters to die because I like all of them, but I should also be worried for them the same way I was in Dying of the Light.

 

No one wants the characters just to be 'killed off', but if the dramatic weight of the story hinges on mortal peril (as it often does in MTMTE), then the reader must believe the characters actually *are* in mortal peril. In the same way that spoilers can ruin a story, knowing full well that certain characters are completely safe impacts on the dramatic tension.

The deaths of Ravage and Skids goes some way to restoring Roberts' initial reputation as unsentimental (which added a lot of enjoyment to the books - remember keeping your fingers crossed that a favourite character would make it through an arc? Remember believing for a moment that Cyclonus threw Whirl into the smelting pit, or that Cyclonus had been gunned down?) but it's somewhat counterbalanced by the way the peril was amped up to insane levels for that arc, only for most of the Autobots to end up engaging in fisticuffs and surviving, like the opposite to the ending of Butch and Sundance.

Roberts suffers from being compared to Roberts. I think that's where most of us are at. I remember believing Rung was dead, then Red Alert was dead, then that Ultra Magnus might be dead, and being truly shaken, hoping there was a way back for each of them. Lost Light is a decent adventure so far, but I can't see anyone important biting it, or even being seriously injured, and it makes the Functionists look less ruthless than Sunbow Megatron - cartoon villains for a cartoon caper.

 

Ah I understand this. I enjoy this sort of feeling in movies. However, not in comics which runs on and on. It's rather unsustainable.

I guess I'm just not interested in long fictions whose main thrill lies on that. That's always been a thing I dislike about MTMTE. Too much dependence on shocks. There's only so much you can shock someone before they tire of it.

To me, this doesn't work. It got nothing to do with sentimental or not. When a character was killed their development was terminated. They stopped matter much to me save for some sentimental values. But no amount of flashbacks can make them relevant anymore.

I either care about a character or I don't. If I don't, whether they die or not doesn't affect me, meaning no thrill. If I do, I will be unhappy if they were killed, because characters are a main reason I read a comic, and there are only so many I really care about. Each one of them being killed devalue the book down a notch for me. If the story itself is not super meaningful, I'll drop a book if I detected that's the author's way to hold reader attention.

I almost dropped the book because of Ravage, but I saw on JRo's twitter that there were exceptional circumstance, so I gave that a pass. Then before that there was Trailcutter, but that's some copyright issue, rather out of the writer's hand. So far these are the two I cared about he had killed. Others like Ambulon and Skids' deaths doesn't impress or interest me.

Guess it's just different tastes then.

 

Yup.

If the stakes weren't constantly life-or-death, we wouldn't be so critical of the heavy slant away from the "death" part in any meaningful capacity.

I agree completely. After about the third death fakeout, I was getting annoyed. Now the threat of death is constantly being dangled but we're no logner gullible enough to keep trying to swing for it.

I think the last death to really piss me off was Trailcutter's because of how embarrassingly immature it was. It felt almost like, pardon the redundant expression, a bad comic book. Like when Batman was made gritty and psychotic under Frank Miller, and blood and disfigurment was everywhere, it felt like that level of cynicism towards the source material was on display there. The good-natured, selfless hero is hideously mutilated and murdered by the cringingly overpowered, hyper sadistic villains who just kill because killing is funsies. It was difficult to read because of how much it felt like a child's attempt at shock horror with their silly toy robot characters. It pushed me right out of the book that a Transformers story would go for such shock imagery without even the tiniest bit of self-awareness or ulterior motives, and in a book that felt like the entire running theme was that there is little if any black-and-white in these morally grey times, it was shockingly simplistic. I thought it was going to be our first glimpse of the DJD as more than just mad dogs, but that never materialized. It was so, so un-MTMTE.

 

I didn't when it happened, but Cyclonus' fake-out was enough for me to understand someone dropping the book then and there. I hate the phrase "insult to your intelligence", but I really did feel insulted for letting myself feel emotional over Cyclonus' "Goodbye, little one," and Tailgate's subsequent grief, only for a month to pass and to find out it was just Roberts faking everyone out again. To think after over 40 issues and years of writing this comic, he knowingly repeated a serious storytelling flaw of his, because he knew he would get an emotional reaction out of it without actually having to take any risk.

Trailcutter's death wouldn't be terrible for me, had it occured at like the end of the season, or even later on in the future. The first few issues of season 2 set up Trailcutter with an entire arc for development, as well as a unique sort of kinship with the former leader of the Decepticons. His struggle after losing his crutch, and being forced into a position of authority could have made for one of the best character arcs of the entire series. But instead he gets killed off before any of this actually takes into effect. Why even bother shutting off his booze chip? Why bother promoting him to security director? These character moments didn't factor into anything in the end. Not to mention Trailcutter's opening line in that issue about him starting his new life makes no sense in context since the chronology of events at this point of time takes place the very same day he has his little episode with Megatron. What might be the worst part about it is the fact he died so that Megatron could eventually use his forcefield ability against the DJD. But like, that just betrays the whole point of who he is, which is that he's not "just" the forcefield guy, despite everyone labelling him as such. What does he die for? He dies so that somebody else can use his forcefield. It's just such poor treatment of a good character. Just... argh.

It's still stupid that Skids is the only major character to die in MTMTE. Ravage too if you want to count him, but then Ravage never went through any sort of arc, either.

 

Let's first say MTMTE mattered to me in many ways, one of which is that it showed a mercy to humanity and its many fallacies. All its characters are deeply flawed, sometimes downright unlikable, but they were almost always showed worthy of compassion, and has the ability to grow. The summit is Whirl. I've said before that IDW has made me like and care about characters who I would never like before. Whirl is a prime example. This is one of the biggest reason I love MTMTE and IDW G1 in general.

A friend once told me she thought it in this way: it is not that the hero is punished for doing good, but that the value of good deeds are independent of whether the hero is rewarded for it. That the DJD killed Trailcutter doesn't demean Trailcutter in anyway. Sometimes, the good guys just don't win. And that is a thing not often depicted in comics.

Killing Trailcutter did revealed DJD's cruelties, but I think this itself is no problem at all. They are already sadistic bastards anyway. I can totally see them do something like that.

I think the problem with DJD is that the author simply dislike them too much to properly develop them. Their characterization is sufficient to show that those seeminly sophisticated sadists are nothing more than pathetic jokes. However, it undermines some other points JRo wanted to make: for anyone who are not beguiled by their appearances (let's admit they are at least pretty) and hiked-up mystery, they are really worthless as characters. Then when Megatron killed them, it didn't feel as significant as it should have felt.

That said, what you said almost reminds me of that parallel story arc in DC just a few years ago where Joker and Batman was merged into one. I was appalled by such disrespect to the character and what he represents. I didn't read it, of course. But that DC thought it was worth publishing disgusted me to no end. I don't think JRo had ever sunk to that level. And I hope he never would. I believe he is above that shits. But he does have a tendency to rely on shock values and take smug pleasure in manipulating readers' emotions, sometimes needlessly.

 

I totally agree with you on how it doesn't make sense to kill Trailcutter, after all the set up. I think it's because he wasn't set up to be killed initially. I remember I heard somewhere it was legal difficulties that made idw thought just too much trouble (changing his name was part of the struggle). And so they decided to cut him off. I don't blame the writer for things like that, but that doesn't make it any less sad and frustrating for me.

 

I rather liked Trailcutter's death. We cared about him, had seen him make some change, and it was that much more of a punch to the gut. I didn't take it as "the DJD are mad dogs" so much as "they are Decepticon Special Forces who just woke up and found a hostile enemy in front of them."

Although it would be interesting if they took a prisoner of war. What do Decepticons do with POWs?

That annoyed me. The fakeout with Rung was awful mostly because we got his recovery back-filled in a short story, and we should have got a bridge issue between his waking up in Shadowplay and him being just fine on Hedonia. But the fakeout with Cyclonus was really wrenching. And I'm not sure that Cyclonus has fulfilled some really amazing purpose ever since. It would have done more for Tailgate to let him stay dead or damaged.

 

And again, even if all these fake-death characters were actually killed, what is so good about that? What is so interesting about death that it worth being depicted over and over?

Besides, eventually there will be no more well-liked characters left to kill. Killing characters is not a clever way to even just aim for shock value.

 

If I could back up for a sec...

Do we have any confirmation from source (say, Alex Milne posts here, he would know) that Trailcutter originally wasn't going to be killed off but IDW essentially overrode Roberts?

If that's the case I can hardly blame him for being pissed, not to mention perhaps why some of the other mysteries etc seemed so abruptly resolved, but it seems so far fetched...

 

First I've heard of it. Which doesn't mean *anything*, but I feel like it would have been more well-known.

I'm curious just how much Dark Cybertron fucked up some of his long game, and how much he shifted due to it. It's all speculation ultimately.

 

I think the problem is more 'there was a fakeout,' rather than just 'they didn't die.'

I.e. if they weren't going to die, don't wink so heavily at their death (the Cyclonus thing for example).

For the threat of death and existing deaths to be dramatic, people need to actually die... but ideally, this should be a very small number. The more fake-deaths you have, the more the batting average drops and future death-setups become less believed.

Killing Cyclonus isn't necessary, but either killing him or not faking it is better than doing a fakeout. The scene in question was a great death setup scene... with no payoff because it wasn't actually a death setup, so we'd have been better off without the scene, it was empty. Or alternatively, it *looked* like Cyclonus is going to be shot fatally and then Tailgate leaps in the way and surges- so instead of thinking 'dead Cyclonus sacrifice,' we think, 'Cyclonus almost died and oh no is Tailgate in danger what's up with that surge?'. A mystery rather than a goodbye.

High death stories have a lot of problems, but so does high fake-deaths. One or two real deaths plus one or two fakeouts is fine because then you really don't know, but once fakes begin outpacing reals everyone gets an air of invulnerability on them that doesn't go away even in deadly situations.

 

I think, on this point, we're really all on the same page. It's not that we want to see characters killed off, but that as you say, MTMTE has been overly dependent on mortal peril and violence, and it simply doesn't gel with long-form narrative - not without consistent genius-level plotting.

Essentially, any author faces a stark flow diagram. Do you want your narrative to contain frequent threats of violence? If yes, then either you make good on those threats with grim regularity, or you're going to end up writing a Saturday morning cartoon.

On some level, and because of his humanist sensibilities, Roberts wanted to tell a story about characters growing and surviving together - a parallel to modern, real-life struggles - and that's what you and many other MTMTE fans are responding to. But again, glancing at the flow diagram, if that's the kind of story you want to tell, and you also want your action scenes to be effective, then you simply have to be *sparing* with them. Rampant, super-powered killers every few issues is, again, going to take you straight into cartoon territory.

I totally get where you're coming from - since I was very young, I have always been tempted to close the book or turn off the TV after a favourite character is killed, and this is particularly the case when I feel it's because the author didn't have enough respect for their creation.

But on the other hand, it can be done in such a way that the character's arc is neatly closed down, which I think was the case with Rewind's death, or it can be done to serve a greater and more necessary storyline - which I think sums up Trailcutter's death. Yes, he was cut off mid-way through his own story, but it became an absolutely crucial part of Megatron's own development.

Key factor: humans can be killed off in any number of quick, efficient ways. Transformers generally need to be hacked to pieces or obliterated to die properly. The only thing that really marks this differently to any number of well-handled character deaths is the brutality, and that is in part necessitated by the rules of the fiction. You pretty much had to see his brain getting crushed for it to count in the way it did.

Agree with these two points:

For me, Trailcutter's was the last death that felt well plotted. Skids and Ravage both seemed to be the result of some sort of (mis)calculated need to maintain threat credibility, as a result of the Dying of the Light arc being strewn with mad, powerful villains.

There's a reason people keep saying they want to go back to the Lost Light, and that's because the conflict between Autobots, despite not being based around extreme violence, is FAR, FAR more interesting than the conflict between plot-armoured goodies and disposable baddies. Roberts needs to give the baddies a rest and start building the book around interpersonal conflict again.

 

Man, Trailcutter's death was fantastic. The DJD are sadistic, hypocritical murderers; it was perfect. Of course they'd slaughter the Autobots who helped them out. Of course Tarn would justify to himself that it's not really his fault that they slaughtered the Alt-Lost Light. Of course Tarn would kill Kaon for making him look weak in front of Overlord.

I love the DJD so much and the way they met their end as terrified cowards was exactly how it needed to be.

 

I've kind of stopped caring too. This was about Rodimus using the Matrix shell to follow a map to find the Knights of Cybertron. What happened to that?

 

He broke the Matrix and had to get THUNDERCLASH to help him out.

Speaking of, what's up with THUNDERCLASH assisting the mutiny? He's too pure and noble and better than Rodimus to do that.

 

Not so, we've had plenty of characters die in fairly subdued ways. Hell, headshots still kill in this universe (unless you ass-pull that the brain was undamaged)

Plus, it is fiction. And there's no rules, not even for a second.   They don't need to die in any specific way, as they can die however you want them to. Shot or stabbed through the spark, decapitated, etc. They can make up whatever they want to amke these mortal or survivable. They could've just shot Trailbreaker in the head Nightbeat-style. In fact, even that's not consistent. Sometimes a headshot is a clean hole, sometimes a head is a pressurized glass jar full of grape jelly that splatters everywhere like a fourteen year old wrote it whever it's hit. Sometimes a Spark is a delicate thing that can snuff out from a glancing blow, sometimes you can be reduced just to a spark and survive. It's all bullshit because it's not real.

In fact I've really grown out of silly robot blood. Like when Star Saber was stabbed in the eye and it gushed out. Why would a robotic eye have any sort of liquid in it? Wouldn't it be more like a camera? If that's Energon, i.e. fuel, why would it be in the eye and not converted to energy before reaching it?

Without an ounce of interest among the lot of them.

They're boogeymen. Goofy, gimmicky monsters to spook our heroes and kill them off when necessary. They're immature, and the ultimate evidence that Roberts has no idea how to write villains at all. To him a villain and a murdering animal are one in the same. If it is human or personal in any way, it cannot be a villain and must be redeemed or excused. It cannot be both evil and complicated, which is the dirty little secret of a book that desperately tries to paint people as morally grey.

And I know what you'll say, "what about Overlord?" What about Overlord? He's no different under Roberts' pen. All he does is the play the same generic murdersong and dance with a handful of empty platitudes to seem "deep." He was only interesting under Roche's writing, but even then wasn't terribly complex or nuanced. But he was also very secondary and not so much the main conflict as the source of the main conflict. He was a tool to build a situation to test the heroes, with a somewhat interesting backstory centered around his insecurities. Which even those were ballooned out of naunce with Roberts' take on him and just made him catatonic for no reason until he realised Megatron was alive. Suddenly Overlord is a simple, one-page book anyone can read.

But what did it accomplish, exactly? What did it do for any of the characters, or the narrative?

Did it teach us anything about the DJD we didn't already know? Nope. Did it further Trailbreaker or anyone's story? Hell no. Did it show us a dark, unforgiving reality where not everything is honourable? I suppose, but we already knew that, and have been shown it in far better ways than that.

There's was just no purpose. It was just gratuitous and goofy. It's robots, based off toys, murdering eachother like in the Saw movies. What was done wasn't even as bad as how it was done. It felt more like something... oh God...


It felt like something out of the Bay movies. D: The way characters are absurdly dismemebred and disemboweled with spurts of goop and sparks everywhere.

 

I will admit that the first time I read MTMTE vol. 2, with the DJD violently torturing and murdering the wacky Scavengers in horrible graphics ways I felt the same, but now I have a deep abiding love for the Decepticon Justice Division.

Specifically, that love is for Tarn, because Tarn is the DJD. He's his own hardcore Decepticon OC with two fusion cannons and his face is a Decepticon symbol, and I love Tarn because he is a dirty goddamned liar. Tarn thinks he's complicated. Tarn thinks he's on a moral crusade to preserve the sanctity of the Decepticon mission. Tarn is none of these things; he's just a killer with delusions of grandeur, which Fulcrum basically sums up for us in issue #9 and foreshadows everything we need to know about them up until the very end of the series

That's why I love that issue where he teams up with Deathsaurus (who has the best name of all time, natch) so much. It is just page after page of Tarn non-stop lying of us about how noble he is. He cries about how depraved and evil his allies are but does nothing to stop them. He leads his cadre of brutal killers with paperwork and demerit points. He has a cute morality pet in Nickel who's basically an indoctrinated cult member. He refuses to sacrifice his team members to placate Deathsaurus (who, when you get down it, is everything Tarn claims to be), but still tries to kill Tesarus the moment he annoys him. And when we get to the final issues, where Tarn has the chance to prove his nobility, we see him for what he really is: a depraved killer obsessed with Megatron (probably best encapsulated when Swerve his the switch on the agony beam which makes Deathsaurus double over in guilt, but Tarn is completely fine and continues with trying to kill Megatron). He murders Kaon for making him look weak in front of Overlord. He begs and pleads with Megatron to "be reasonable" now that he's backed into a corner. He is figuratively and literally demasked as a coward and a failure, whose every action was for nothing.

For me, Trailcutter's death was important in that, well, it was pointless and horrible, but it was also there to bring the DJD back in a big way after Slaughterhouse (one of the best arcs in the series). To finally make the heroes encounter them and lose, to take this character who was growing and developing and cutting him down before we had the chance to see him flourish like he deserved to, and all for the pointless tragedy of trying to do the right thing. It's horrible and unfair, and that's why it was so damn good. That's how death should be; not always bloody and tortuous, obviously, but it should be robbing us of a good character we wanted more of, and that's what happened to Trailcutter; taken from us too dang soon.

If seeing your favourite toy robots brutally kill each other isn't your cup of tea then I don't blame you. It's a hard tightrope to balance yourself on, but I think the DJD did it well. Everything you criticize them for, being the Boogeyman who show up and make people die horribly, is why I love them. They freaked my balls off whenever they were on panel up until the very end, and this includes when they got a tiny robot who cleaned brains out of their teeth and mouthed off to them.

 

imagine a world where it didn't take TWO FUCKING YEARS to get back to the lost light.

 

Eh, I'm with Swerve. Who wants an ending? Let's stretch this sucker out.

Granted, you go on a journey to get somewhere, so it's gotta happen sometime.