Yeah, that book also failed to deliver and live up to expectations.

 

The past seven years of IDW TF started with an interesting premise (given the historic failure of communism and the continuing failure of liberalism, what is to be done?) but ultimately went nowhere. It would have been better if everything had ended with Dark Cybertron.

 

They should just not do events anymore. I can't remember any event or crossover that did not suck. It all went downhill with dark cybertron. But also that infection crossover sucked, where they killed Kup and it was even canon.

 

It would have been a sort of downer ending (what with Dark Cybertron ending more or less on everything else failing), but yeah. I'd probably have been ok with that too.

I won't sit here and say that I have the best taste ever, but even without extremely harsh words, I don't think Unicron was well written at all. The plotline was extraordinarily weak - random alien seeks revenge by building the "ultimate doomsday device" offscreen and everyone has to deal with it? There was so much lore, so much history, so many dangling plotlines that someone could have pulled on to come up with an ending, and they decide on a left-field storyline. This is highly suggestive of someone just whipping out a broom and trying to sweep it all away as quickly as possible.

Honestly, I think there was more than enough character and plot building that we could have had a character driven action plot - something we honestly haven't seen since Furman tried with the G1 comics and possibly G2 - with superior writing and characterization. While the concept of "'Til All Are One" can be stretched out to Prime extending the idea that we're all united in our mistakes and pain to Purple Unicron Guy, it seemed like the sort of denouement that paid an enormous disservice to fun characters that sacrificed themselves on the way to that ending to me. If the story in and of itself had been far more metaphysical (like LL had been), I'd probably be singing a different tune. I suppose the irony is that LL actually got the action-fueled ending whereas Unicron/Optimus got the talky, hug-it-out ending.

In other words, some of us do get it. And we still don't like it or think it was any good.

In all fairness, IDW's Transformers has been all about "misleading". Post-furman, a lot of the things they did was all about things not being as they seem. At least half of the major plotlines were the result of "Surprise/Secret Shockwave". The ones that weren't were based on "Everything You Know About The Past Is Wrong". So while Unicron saying "I hunger" was sort of a bait and switch, it was a small one at best. Expecting Unicron to be a traditional Unicron in IDW is pretty much the "not getting it" @Jalaguy was talking about. If that's what people are upset about, then yeah, they're definitely not getting it.

The worst part about Unicron in my opinion was that he came out of left field for me. I'm sure someone will point out that the seeds for his appearance lay peppered throughout the books. That might be true, but this sort of oblique storytelling gets frustrating for me. This is the literary equivalent of someone pouring out a random pile of trash on the floor and expecting me to know what you did last week. While on many occasions a skilled author can plant clues that clever readers to find, if done sloppily or lazily it becomes nearly indistinguishable from someone that just tossed a bunch of stuff all over the place for years and decided what points were salient and which weren't after the fact when they come up with their "brilliant" last minute ending.

After spending a lot of time on this board, my opinion is that IDW's biggest mistake was drinking its own Kool-Aid. There are zero things wrong with trying to be creative, innovative, progressive, intelligent, engaging, and responsive. However, it's when you start to believe that you're REALLY GOOD AT IT is when you start to fall victim to things. You start needlessly complicating things and gleefully watching your dedicated fan base go crazy trying to figure stuff out. Watching people get invested in your creative work is the most exciting gratification an author can have. At some point, though, you start turning into this mad builder that is more invested in building than coming to a conclusion and you end up with the Winchester Mansion rather than a home someone can actually live in.

I think Unicron specifically was a prime example (no pun intended) of a group of people that realized that all their attempts at "cleverness" were not serving them very well given that they were now being rushed to an ending. That's just me, though.

 

......What's worse, the people who didn't like this series or the toxic fans attacking the people who didn't like this series?

I can state my opinion about this mini series w/o bashing the people who loved it. I generally just state my opinion and just move the h3ll on...

At this point I don't even care what the small minority of defenders of that mockery have to say. My only thoughts are "good for you".

Because the reality is, if Optimus hugging aliens in order to kill God like Transforming planets was such a profound idea after all that build up, then it would've had better word of mouth and sold more....PERIOD!

Done with this discussion.

 

*Snorts*

Well, it looks like you can't.

Funny how in the end again there are no fans more toxic than what MTME/LL. Especially with all this hoping and then complaining that the event didn't use the gimmick devised for their favorite little book that all this time was unconnected to the OP and Unicron plots.


Yeah, the event wasn't anything breathtaking but it simply wasn't for you so move on maybe?

And better to not compare it with the disappointing drag the LL finale turned to be...

 

Wow, what an easy answer -
the toxic fans who didn’t like the series and are immature/juvenile about how they voice it
*and*
the toxic fans who liked the series and are immature/juvenile about how they voice it

Are equally terrible. Surprised this even needed to be asked; I would have taken it as a rhetorical question, but rest of your post implied you didn’t know that this was the answer.

 

Wow this site is a hot mess I love it.

 

I’m sure I’ve posted this in here before, but I think it needs it again:

 

Agree with your image, but it is a shame that within this universe, anyone who died fighting Unicron had to atone and sacrifice themselves for not their own sins, but those of their ancestors who are all (mostly) dead at this point.

(Not trying to critique the story, I loved Unicron and thought it was a great ending)

 

Colonialism is not an "original sin" and making white people atone for it won't purify Empire as it exists today (which is sustained not by a reactionary Western-chauvinist ideology but by a "progressive" liberal-multiculturalist one). Unicron sucked.

 

The way I see it, Unicron was a literal consequence of the original Primes' sins, but also a figurative representation of all of Cybertron's sins against the galaxy throughout history - the colonisation, the impact of the Autobot-Decepticon war, etc.

 

The Autobot/Decepticon war is a metaphor for the Cold War. The Cold War was a conflict where millions and millions of people from colonized nations were willing to fight and die to liberate themselves from Western imperialism. Unicron reduced their struggle to a temper tantrum and declared that they were just sweet innocent woobies who needed a good Daddy to give them a hug.

 

Hey wait. I've been told that discussing politics here was ground for post and thread removal.

Is that still true?

 

I don't see any point in talking about what the characters stand for without talking about what the characters stand for.

 

That was only a slightly less crappy of an origin story for Unicron than the Sunbow one.

Also, earth is now screwed in IDWverse, since they don't understand science... like... at all. Great.

 

THis. This right here.

 

The odd thing is that it has tons of action (and thanks to Milne I'm assuming, tons of nods and easter eggs throughout the series). I was behind on the IDW continuity on the whole so reading Unicron seemed like such a clusterfuck of noise with great art until I finally got caught up to speed and then re-read it. *That's* when it hit the way it was intended to, where all the story points and characters ended up landed the way they wanted it to.

As far as stopping Unicron with compassion goes, why should this be held against the story when the purity and power of the Matrix killed Unicron the first time out, both in the movie and the comics back in the 80s/90s?

 

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with hugging Unicron's inner child into complacency. In a vacuum, it's actually a pretty interesting concept. Sillier things have occurred and if you think about it, it's sort of the underlying theme of IDW's whole "postwar" zeitgeist. Finally, one of the two big names in Transformers lays down his gun and finishes an epic battle between "good" and "evil" - which in this case equates to "compassion" vs. "blind rage" - without responding with aggression. The combined forces of the Transformers more or less kept Unicron in a holding pattern while Optimus stopped the big bad by caring - in other words, they reached as non-violent solution as they could, fighting only in self defense. It's actually a neat allegory to what Optimus was trying to achieve.

The problem I (and I suspect others) have with the Unicron ending is how utterly lame the construction was. Abrupt cancellation discussions aside, IDW's endgame creaked under the weight of it's own wanton world building. The overwrought complexity built up over 13 years was summarily kicked aside for a surprise left field antagonist with a back story you could have found on the back of a cereal box circa 1984. Then, to cap it all off, the big, evil, heretofore unknown wanton death machine that exploded out of the gate with a dynamic, monstrous, almost beautiful character design was then stopped by a hug.

Imagine any long-running serial show you like - Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, whatever, and imagine that everything in the last 6-10 episodes in the final season was predominated by a vaguely hinted at, but otherwise unseen, unknown, and un-acknowledged monster that knocked aside all other antagonists - charged right up to the gates, ripped open the stronghold, and then was promptly defeated by someone singing "Kumbaya" at him. I'd shut that nonsense off.

In my opinion, it's the fact that the "hug" is a punctuation mark - a defining point of the ending, that's causing it to catch flak. It's highly visible and therefore an easy target for people venting frustrations about IDW's run to open fire upon. It's really not the hug so much as everything that surrounded the ending culminating into something that can be magnified or taken out of context to look absolutely ludicrous.

 

The part that you're ignoring is that the entire "season", as such, before Unicron ever turned up, revolved around Optimus Prime wrestling with his part in the legacy the Primes - whether he was changing things and escaling their history of tyranny and violence, or whether he was unwittingly perpetuating it. That was the Big Question, the core underlying theme of Barber's story since All Hail Optimus (and arguably even earlier).

Then Unicron shows up, a literal representation of the sins of the Primes, out to avenge death with more death.

The fact that Optimus Prime shows compassion to the man at the heart of the monster, refusing to let the cycle of violence causing more violence continue, is what underpins the entire story. It literally doesn't work without that. If you had Unicron defeated with a show of force, you would've answered the Big Question with "no, Optimus Prime can't escape the shadow of his forebears and has continued the cycle of violence" which obviously would be a pretty big downer to end the story on, y'know?

Like I said earlier in this thread, it's a question of whether you want a story that's actually about something beyond the surface-level plot, or whether you just want a big explosive climactic action story.