Post traumatic stress syndrome

 

I wished we would get a Decepticon view or have one depicted more sympathetically...and no Jetfire, Wheelie and Brains don't count. They became Autobots more or less.

Agreed.

 

yeah.. i think you're missing the whole idea of the threats these villains pose.

you also have to understand that the world, at least today, isn't a place where people are going to just learn to tolerate other people.

take ISIS for instance.. do you think there is any middle ground between them and the rest of the world? nah, they'll kill people simply to prove a point. they're trained at an early age to devalue human life.

now, how are those types of people stopped? how is the idea of them, more importantly, stopped? there's no reasoning with them.

add gigantic alien robots to the mix.. ones that have been at war for MILLIONS of years. that's a long, long time. do you really think that after millions of years of war, megatron is just going to agree to stop his tyrannical rampage? i mean, he attempted to destroy the human race not once but three times.

sure, megatron wants to save his species.. but at what cost? the cost of another species? prime wasn't willing to do that. not only wasn't he willing to destroy another species to save his own, but he was willing to help protect the humans from the war that was brought to their planet.

as for prime's personality.. i don't see how his personality changed without any explanation.. there was plenty of explanation.. from the capture of bumblebee, to the US withholding information, to the US telling prime and the autobots to leave earth, to lastly, cemetery wind killing the autobots and melting them down for their metal.. so, how is it that prime just "changed without explanation"? ..

perhaps if the origins of transformers had been completely changed and there wasn't a 30 year history, they could've ended it differently.. but the way i see it, the only way to truly end a war that has been lasting this long would be death. lets not forget that megatron actually killed prime. and through three movies prime only killed megatron once.. he didn't kill him in the first movie, the second movie he took out the fallen, and in the third prime finally killed megatron.

look at the first movie.. prime didn't want megatron to destroy the earth so badly that he was willing to sacrifice himself to save it by telling same to put the cube into his chest.

 

I think Autobots aren't "heroes" in the movies, at least not after i've thought about it.

I see them mostly like Rebels/Survivors in a war that died as soon as they got to earth. On earth, they mostly wanted The allspark, so they could get rid of it, to prevent Megs from controlling another species, so that any other species wouldn't need to suffer like the Transformers did. They protected earth because humans were innocent, at least when looking from TF perspective. As soon as that POV changed, they got angry, as they had lost many friends when protecting a race that treats them like crap.

Optimus also didn't trust the known merciless mass murderer who was saying that he wanted to rule again while holding a loaded shotgun. I'd say the kill was justified, but the way he finished him was a too over the top.

They might be heroes to the human race, but not to their own kind.

Decepticons, on the other hand want to exterminate the rodents on their new temporary home, until they realized they could use said rodents to rebuild their main base, without caring about how many of these rodents may die on the progress. Megs wanted to save cybertron after ruining it, and plans to returning on his former duty as the dictator of the now rebuilt home.

Also, Movie optimus wasn't ready to sacrifice Earth for cybertrons well-being.

( I did write the post at 2 am, so it might not be as thought through.)

 

I think the Autobots are heroes through and through. Humans can be villians because they are easily tempted by greed and fame

 

That seems to be the basis of it: terrible writing. Regardless of the threat villains pose, it's extremely lazy to just kill them off with each film. I mean, we rarely (never really) get to see the Decepticons' POV. Whenever we do, it's always played up so evilly and monstrously. We don't see that human angle of them, which the Decepticons do possess despite the terrible things they do.

 

Decepticons are hardly the first group in fiction to be a threat. Perhaps the Joker didn't have the means to destroy the entire planet but Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight was still a threat. Batman doesn't say screw it let him fall and die, Batman goes out of his way to save a blood thirsty villain. By saving even the villains Batman stands out as better than the villains.

After the American Civil War there were people screaming for blood and yelling hang them all. But Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman knew more killing wasn't the way to lasting peace.

Or look at Star Wars and Avatar the Last Airbender cartoon. All Luke's friends and even his mentors said you have no choice you have to kill Vader. But Luke is the great hero by finding a way to victory without killing Vader. On Avatar the Last Airbender everyone said Ang must break his no killing moral to kill the Fire Lord, yet Ang finds a way to stop the Fire Lord without killing even though the Fire Lord had no qualms about killing Ang. Great heroes end up being something more than the Punisher or "kill them all".

 

That's a pretty good way to look at it. it's very morally grey the movieverse as a whole.

 

Well, here's the way I see it:

"I am of a race of practically immortal beings who can survive injuries that'd maim and or kill your species if inflicted in a similar fashion. Me and my men have been at war with our counterparts for a majority of our lives, who attempt to harness anything that would benefit them, and destroy whatever they cannot control...

"I hold back when I fight them."

 

I think as Transformers fans we tend to see Cybertronians through our own view or project our societal norms. Part of it is due to the comics and cartoons portraying Cybertron as some organized society with a Congress or some hierarchy. My belief is that the movie-verse Transformers are probably more "tribal" or "primitive" so they are govern by norms that we would consider horrific. "Murder" Prime and the Autobts are still a just and wise group of bots, like all other incarnations, but they operate on a different set of norms that is considered ok in their world view (but could make sense to us if we sympathize).

 

I don't mind the "kill them all" Optimus. I did at first, but that was because the Cons became so incompetent and weak by that point, It became more of a slaughter than a battle.

 

JEEZ !!! FINALLY !!! I THOUGHT I WAS ALONE IN THIS !!!

Here here ! Optimus to blame  

Well, we're stuck with Face-taker Prime for three movies, pretty sure we can't blame the writers now.

I say we HUNT down whoever made Mr. Cullen uncomfortable. AND TAKE THEIR FACE(S) !!!!!!!!!

Kick out Ehren Kruger. Hire you !

dude it's not even that. It's execution when they're down.

Except Megatron, I liken him to a sick dog. An ugly sick dog. It's just kinder to put him out...............or maybe not, considering he's STILL not dead !!!!

 

The whole defense of the Movies and their sociopathic, genocidal, aggressively contemptful and apathetic-towards-anyone-who-crosses-them protagonists is premised on the notion that the movies take a more thoughtful, nuanced look at war. But if that were the case, no one would have qualms over it. Sure, some would say it'd be too dark, and maybe that'd be fair, but that's not what we have.

These movies take one of the most silly, childish approaches to war in the entirety of the Transformers franchise, which is almost solely comprised of children's infotainment. I mean, yes, the good guys in, say, the G1 cartoon are pure paragons of virtue, and there's no strategy or tactics and no one gets hurt, but the movies decide to be incredibly irresponsible by showing their good guys commit brutal atrocities, and do the wrong things, and do what's necessary in favor of what's right, and never question it.

Seriously, Optimus performs two battlefield executions in these movies, and it's never brought up by anyone. He's never like "I hate having to do this, but I have to," and no one's ever like "The hell, man?" It's just treated like this totally normal practice, and moreso, we as the audience are supposed to be thrilled and find catharsis in it. Pretending that the movie's automatically deeper because of it's conclusion, when we're never asked or meant to think about it at any point, is the height of pulling something out of one's ass.

On top of that, there's the brutality and the weird, weird ass things the characters say during fights, and the fact that no Autobot in the movies is ever satisfied unless they have a clear enemy to direct their endless fountain of contempt at. Which there's never actually been a real argument for other than "It's a war! Yeah!", which is a profoundly meaningless statement. Real soldiers don't rip out enemy spines and tear off faces, and if they do something like that, it's either an act of pure necessity or a war crime, not standard combat procedure.

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Saturday morning cartoons geared for an audience of 10 y/o's is governed by different rules then a live-action action movie with a target audience of everybody.

I'm okay with the "It's a war! Yeah!" premise for a 3-hr long movie. The other options would be to either spend an hour on flashbacks and exposition or hang a lantern and both those options have flaws also.

Atrocities, war crimes, sociopathic, standard combat procedures. Ah, this is where things get dicey. One can argue who are we to apply human views such as these onto a giant alien robotic civil war but the flip argument is how can we, as humans, not apply human morals? Problem is that we as humans can't even agree among ourselves.