Interesting idea... I must confess I never considered Riptide to be any form of a mystery, nor his existence as a new character to be suspicious. Riptide's narrative purpose so far was to help build the M.T.O concept, with some comic relief. He was also one of the few Lost Lighters whom could travel back in time without causing a paradox, due to him being an M.T.O with a compatible spark type. To say he's done nothing is an exaggeration. And the fact he's new might just be a reflection of Roberts need for a bit of freedom. Existing characters have baggage. That said, him being a Mauve Shirt would make a lot of sense, given what happened to Ambulon.
honestly alot of that could have helped...and it goes back to roberts doing the self indulgent stuff not focusing on the story points that would matter. you've addressed a lot of compaints...fleshed our froid and sunder not just showing up because we need a two part boogeyman. they have a small point. they infiltrate before they attack. you also gave a nice way to clean up the cyclonus getting shot up cliffhanger. you SEE cyclonus clinging to life. also, my change to your proposal would be they approach chromedome to do the mnemosurgery on tailgate but chromedown refuses since he's not awake to accept it. showing that chromedome is attempting to give it up, something rewind wanted him to do at the start. then since he refuses sunder can comes in and the rest pretty much goes as you said. it all boils down to cutting out the dragging on sections of personality ticks and swearth. swearth could be fun. but fleshing out IMPORTANT stuff is needed far more than a sitcom with holoavatars. good post pumpkin latte
Look at it this way though... that is exactly why you're supposed to like Nautica so much. She is written to be the 'quirky nerdy girl' to the degree that it feels almost disingenuous... and to the point that it doesn't feel like she actually has that much else going on, besides being the lost light's adorkable it girl. As for Bluestreak... well, to be fair, he wanted Bluestreak at the beginning of the series. Now it's a bit late, since he gave a lot of his planned Bluestreak development to Swerve instead. I agree. The story arcs have become so open-and-shut... the sense of an long-burning, overlapping, multi-thread story has diminshed quite a bit... leaving stories like this feeling far too brief, lightweight, and episodic. This is why I've been complaining that Roberts might be taking his TV series motif too far... zmog
Riptide has never performed any real story function that justified his presence. Most of his offhand joke comments were not that great, or could have been handled by someone else. The time travel thing is irrelevant. Nobody was concerned about paradoxes, because they didn't know exactly what time periods they were going to go to next. At the very least, Rung and Whirl were already potential paradoxes... I just find that Riptide is more notable for bringing nothing, than for serving a narrative function. Fortunately, we haven't seen as much of him lately. zmog
You've addressed my reasons for disliking nautica. She's not a character. She's a badly placed archtype of a "nerdy chick". She's a bad token representation of women, and she relegates all female readers into this specific "one size fits all" narrative. She's terrible. The worst part of my last paragraph? Nautica's the most fleshed out of all the female characters. My biggest problem with this entire recent development with fembots is the most important part of their character is that they're women. Character should ALWAYS be first, and gender should be second. Not the other way around because it is truly disingenuous. The reason Buffy is one of my favorite characters in fiction is because she was an interesting character. Her gender didn't matter, it was her striking character and growth that were the most important aspects about her. Her gender just served as a tiny piece to enrich her character, it wasn't the driving force behind it. It's the same thing for Ellen Ripley. She's a well rounded character. Her gender doesn't matter within the fiction, but it does serve to enrich her character in the fiction. That's why I don't like the 'default male' nonsense. Optimus prime is not defined by his gender, he is defined by all the interesting (when written well) beliefs and actions he commits. His gender has nothing to do with why I like him, I like him for his ideals and character. Honestly, the reason I didn't want inclusion of female bots more than arcee is because I saw how they were going to be included a mile away. They weren't going to be fully flushed out characters with legitimate character, they were always going to be... well what we have. Windblade has had no development or growth as a character since her first appearance. Chromia is a jealous lover that can't handle hard situations. Nautica is that nerdy chick we all think is cool, but scratch the surface and there is nothing of substance there. If you can't do it right, or if the most important part of these characters is that they're women, then you shouldn't do it at all. Arcee, for all her faults (there are plenty), at least had some interesting motivation for being the way she was. It was interesting. Arcee was finally written in such a way that she wasn't just the "girl transformer", she was a cool fucking character. And yes, I agree her origin story was terrible, it was, but the character that we got out of it? Pretty damn interesting. Now, credit is due. I am truly intrigued by Victorian. They're finally doing it right with her. She matters in the narrative. As does Nickel. Holy crap do I love nickel, in her one appearance she's had more character development than every other fembot shown in IDW.
but that's not fair to people that like women like that or to more a point...women that are like her....not for nothing but it almost feels like these characters are designed to be the way they are to relate to people with similar personalities so you can quickly fall in for a favorite to follow. and how many people have anything actually going on on the lost light anyway? everyone is basically an archtype...broody loner....cocky cowboy...strictly by the book...naive child....psycho...smart ass. the main cast is basically all one note. EVERYONE is the token lost light someone so why is nautica expected to be any different? and yea...he wanted streak at the start to be swerve...and got swerve instead...however, that doesn't change the fact bluestreak could have easily been riptide this whole time. nothing he's done needed to be riptide except one panel of him sitting in the water in alt mode and a stupid aquabat joke.
Yup. I kinda wanted to like Nautica, but given how obvious is what she is and why she's written this way... I can't. It's hamfisted as **** On the other hand, she's not enough to dislike her either. I can honestly say that I don't dislike this character. That's good, I suppose? Better to not give a **** than to dislike? But if I look at IDW fembots, I think I still find her and Windblade more bearable than the rest. Arcee has her good moments but I'm honestly tired with her one-note deathwish angry grrrrrl act. Swift looks like a cool character, but she's not around for long enough to have an opinion. Chromia's just an imbecile. The rest... Are kinda background crowd for now.
So I reread this thing today and have a few questions, maybe they've been answered but I haven't seen them asked before. Why turn out the lights? None of these powerful war machines have night vision capabilities built in? Why not have some of the characters turn into their alt modes and attack Sunder? Ultra Magnus alone should be able to fuck Sunder's shit up royally just being a truck. Why not use the holomatter avatars? 200 of those dudes scaled to Sunder's size should be able to do the job, especially since the've proven to have mass. Ratchet did catch the cure using his avatar so it must have mass to do that. Why not turn off your eyes? They all, or the vast majority, have built in guidance systems for there alt modes. Couldn't they use those to fight? Things like these questions make me feel like the writing is just getting sloppy.
You forgot to ask why Sunder's eyes were even working when it was clear that they are just blue beads not connected to his head in any way. To this point every time when TF eyeball was drawn removed it was a camera-like device and had clearly visible optic "nerve" cable. Seriously, things like that make you think that the worldbuilding here ain't that good at all when authors (not exclusively Roberts fault, it persists across all writers) constantly forget to use mechanical aspects of TFs in their stories. And don't start about holoavatars. That's basically Robert's writing bitten back by his overuse of this MacGuffin. Since Swearth you can basically ask "why to not use holoavatars?" about every story. =]
See, where you are going wrong is the attempt at applying logic. You are right of course, but the TF universe itself is so glaringly inconsistent they might as well have magic wands. Not saying that I don't enjoy the fiction, but the details are tragically inconsistent. In terms of Alt-modes, I am not even sure that we get a character transforming on screen anywhere close to once an issue, maybe 1 in 5? Seems silly for a being that could do that just as you or I walk. I don't know.. Save yourself some grief. Don't ask.
That wouldn't surprise me at all. Good lord that would have been so much better. Is it wrong I want James Roberts to see this on Twitter, should I tweet him about this.
I agree... I mean, I'm not that keen on Victorion, but however her components merge into one personality, she does fill out the role of the 'imperious spiritual demagogue kingmaker' nicely, rather than relying on 'girl tropes' to get by. Yes, but whether or not you 'like' girls like that is sort of irrelevant. Nautica's value shouldn't be measured in terms of how 'attractive' she is to us in human terms... I'd like her to bring more to the table in terms of being a well-rounded character. In that sense, it's not like she's the worst example out there, but for a new character who gets as much panel time as she does, the standards should be a bit higher. I dunno... I don't think that having characters who "feel just like me" is as important a draw as having a variety of different and interesting characters who are NOT just like me. I think that 'audience proxy' characters can be problematic if they're too overtly drawn... it often feels a bit like pandering. I think they've accumulated more personality in the first season, which helps. The "new guys" that came on in Season 2 don't feel nearly as compelling, despite attempts to make them so. You could dump Nightbeat and Riptide into space, and I couldn't care less. Nautica needs to step up a bit and acquire a bit of depth to stay off my cut list. As it turns out, the most recent issue of Sins of the Wreckers just confirmed that TFs do in fact have a full suite of detection tools. I think the issue is more about Sunder seeing YOU, rather than you seeing Sunder. It may be a one-way thing... since it mostly reflects his ability to "see your sins" and then mess with your head. Well yeah. Holo-avatars are a huge problem... they pretty much literally break the universe in really obvious way, and half of that problem is due to Roberts being way too carefree with them. I am however willing to accept that Sunder might have 'special' eyes. That at least makes sense, sort of. Sadly so true. zmog
Afterall, it's attempts at audience proxy characters that make humans so reviled in TFs. They're that same thought process of "relatable" characters amongst the cooky and oddball. The entire set of S2 newcomers could be dumped and I'd not care, in fact I think that'd enhance the story. For one we could get back to the characters we care about like Rodimus who is so, so desperately in need of something. That's what I find so frustrating about the newcomers. It's like people/Roberts think the old cast was somehow stale or had their stories concluded when they didn't. They were still compelling and I was still super invested in their ongoing stories, then they're suddenly shoved aside for a bunch of nobodies who've yet to have substancial development aside from superficial qualities and mugging for the camera. The best parts of season 2 are the ones that deal with the old cast, because the new guys are so boring. SOTW is everything I wish MTMTE was. I really need to get caught up. And people wonder why I hate that issue.
Well that's just stupid. Roberts continues to go down hill for me. I'm honestly collecting this book out of habit now, as I've been displeased for months. I find Not-RID so much more satisfying for the last year or so, as it's not just about weird and quirky ideas but moving the plot along.
Weeell... Sort of. It makes sense. Very "sort of". Still requires more suspension of disbelief, or just not caring, than usual. Who made it? Froid? But he's not a surgeon... Anyway, I kinda dislike when plot hangs on special MacGuffins unless they're some kind of big game artifacts and we're just playing Lord of The Rings or Matrix Quest. And it's all just to have this incredibly silly over-the-top cartoony psycho villain who can magically kill people by looking into their souls. Mnemosurgeons are a good idea, but now I kinda feel like Roberts managed to write a mockery of it. For the sake of grimdork. Sunder as a character is seriously overdoing it. He kinda comes more borderline silly than scary. Trying too hard, I suppose... Now, Overlord in LSoTW - this is scary psycho. Casuality of killing and not giving a **** about it. Coming from a fairly normal looking bot who's not a drooling weirdo. Also, this idea with TFs turning into spheres of loose metal bits and cables... Are they Bayfromers now? Shouldn't they bodies be more rigid? It doesn't even makes sense in-universe. I'd understand them tearing their limbs off trying to transform, or ejecting internal organs, but I think the way this idea was implemented simply wasn't very smart. It wasn't a good issue. It just wasn't...
This. While I like how Roberts describes the characters, I liked most, beside the mystery and fun stuff, that Rodimus and his band were on an adventure. And now we seldom see those characters. Also Rodimus does not develop at all. And where's Drift? Or is this all stuff for Season 3?
Yeah, do it. Definitely some good stuff. I don't wonder at all. Y'know... I could actually see that happening. It doesn't seem that stupid to me. He's mnemosurgeon who clearly had himself altered to boost his capabilities (or to enhance an outlier ability), so that he can read and edit your memories from a distance. I don't see why eye-contact would be necessary for that (plus he has that radar dish thing on his head). And what would probably require special eyes as well. Who knows how long Sunder had been working on himself? And with Froid operating codependently as his 'procurer', it makes sense that they would have some kind of weird arrangement or system worked out. The removable eyes are a story conceit, it's true... but it's not actually that much of a stretch, considering what is known and not known about the situation. That I can handle waaaaaay better than personality ticks and holomatter. He IS borderline silly. I think that's due to a number of factors though... including the artist's inability to generate a genuine mood, the story's rushed, slapdash construction, and the fact that Sunder's threat quickly degrades into farce. And I mean, we already have the DJD... Sunder isn't far off from that. But it's true, he does sort of feel like a flashy, watered-down variation on Overlord's theme. Your suggestion also works, but it didn't bother me that much in this issue, because I can accept a certain degree of weird, epecially if it's tied to some kind of exceptional circumstance. But yeah, realistically, people should have been turned into hideous, chaotic messes, not neat inside-out spheres... less of that and more like John Carpenter's thing, robot style. I still agree that it wasn't a good story arc, but I don't think the above reasons are actually where the critical problems were. zmog
