Because Wilder, Lander and Diver from Punishment would have added so much to the IDW continuity? You can't have a murder mystery story without victims. I'm thankful that they are the Masterforce characters and not the identical U.S. characters though. I imagine they were intended to be the U.S. characters but were changed to be the Japanese characters. Thats fine by me.

I think Fireball in Punishment was supposed to be Vroom but was made a new character because Vroom doesn't have a Japanese equivalent and they didn't want to kill off Vroom. I'd rather have had the artist draw someone else. They did kill off Skram though. Any potential story people think he still had can just be easily transferred to another character.

 

Unfortunately, "this thread" does not seem to be a vaild answer, so I'll kill off Cy-Kill in my headcanon just to annoy TFWiki.

 

I know this contradicts what I said earlier but I want Chromia to die.

 

I'd have the DJD attack the Lostlight, 'reinstall/reboot' Megatron against his will into becoming the tyrant dickhead again then Megs escapes with the DJD BUT NOT BEFORE KILLING TAILGATE AND REWIND as they blow out of there. Thus causing Cyclonus and Chromedome to go full on KILL BILL in a uber revenge story. Also causing fan outrage. :>

 

Overlord and the DJD just can't be considered badass or feared if they don't get to kill anyone. Killers have to be seen to kill to make them killers.

Last Stand of the Wreckers wouldn't be as good as a story as it is if nobody died in it.

 

I would kill off Spike and something else annoys me. Badly written characters mostly.

 

I'd never kill off anyone (or at least, anyone from existing continuities). Hell, I'd promise on the letter page of the first issue "I will not make you care about someone only to rip out your heart. I'm the anti-George Martin."

 

Indeed. Death has to mean something, you can't just kill them off for no reason and with no effect on, well, anything.

You can only set a map of when characters will die if it truly is a part of the plot. People can't just die to add to the body count.

Beast Wars is an example of a story doing deaths right… eventually. Mostly in the third category you mentioned. Terrorsaur and Scorponok were killed just to make space for the Fuzors, of course, and it just sorta… happened. Then later, (the writers knew they'd have to kill someone, so they began carefully planning this one) there's Dinobot's death, which needs no further explanation.

Then Beast Wars killed off half of its' main cast in its finale, but almost every death made sense and had an impact. Tigerhawk's was flimsy since he'd just been introduced only to be killed, but even that had impact since all the joy from finding Tigatron and Airazor again was squandered as we lost them again, this time for real. Inferno and Quickstrike died to show Megs' batshit insanity, Rampage and Depth Charge died as the conclusion of their arc. Dinobot II was… well, flimsy too, but I'm sure a smarter Beast Wars fan can explain it better than I.

Beast Wars wasn't perfect, but it handled its' deaths pretty well for the most part, with gravity and with respect for the story and characters.

EDIT: As for how I'd handle it in a story, I'd probably keep the main ensemble pretty small to focus on the cast and flesh them out - though Roberts and other writers know how to do that for a large ensemble, but a smaller cast is just my preference. With a number of recurring characters to keep the universe the story is set in feel alive.

 

Oh man Tigatron and Airrazor's deaths in Beast Wars really annoyed me...one of the fews thing I didn't like about the show.

wasted way too easily and the sad part is no one really cared till Tigerhawk showed up. :/

 

I would focus on them being machines and being able to be repaired/rebuilt. Death for an AI is meaningless.

 

War is over and all bots have to get a 9-5 job to keep the energon on the table. My comic will focus much like Cheers on Swerves Bar and his regular patrons.

 

I'd write a story in which Unicron wins and the scattered Autobots are hunted down across the galaxy by the Sweeps. Needless to say, just about everybody dies.

 

Not all Transformers can be repaired. Remember Ratchet's anguish about not being able to repair deactivated Autobots in the Marvel comics on several occasions?

 

That's really edgy man.

 

I know that, but at least have the option. I just don't like them overhumanized.

 

I'd kill off the annoying characters :

Rattrap
Tailgate
Nautica
Windblade
Riptide
Minimus Ambus or at least get rid of the stupid facial hair
Starscream
Spike
Blackrock
Waspinator
Hellbat
Bombshell
Bob


Okay I'm just listing the characters who annoy me in idw

 

Aside from Spike and Hellbat and maybe Blackrock.

How are the rest of the characters annoying?

 

In a way, death can be meaningless. A good writer can reverse a death however it happened and still make it believable within the context of the story. But that doesn't mean it should always be done. Doing it too often and the story just becomes ridiculous.

Death in comics is just a way to write a character out of a story without making them disappear without explanation. Where is Impactor, Springer and Grimlock? They aren't dead or even referenced to anymore, so in the context of the story, they may as well be dead even though they haven't been killed.

On the flip-side, death doesn't have to write the character out. If I were writing a story, a dead character would become a prominent character in flashbacks to a time when they were alive. I read an X-Men comic, "Chaos War", where dead X-Men characters continued to live on and have their own adventures in heaven or wherever it was they were. This is an idea I would take for Transformers. perhaps for dead characters, the "Well of Allsparks" is an actual place where they have form and sentience, as when they were alive in the real world.

 

I'm fine without that, though. Remember, I'm the dude who doesn't like humanization, mysticism or Sparks in TF fiction. Hell, I really don't like facial hair or roboboobs. If I rationalize them to be sort of like old school Cylons, built by another race, then I can overlook beards and boobs.

 

I always though it's very ironic that mechanical characters in TF books are, per general, more likely to stay dead after being killed than human characters in superhero books.

Unless they're Autobot Primes, of course.