I'd argue the cheapest and laziest way to establish stakes is to kill off minor characters. Killing off major characters shifts the dynamic of the book and creates suspense in these supposed life-or-death situations. We're going into the fourth issue of this arc now and it's difficult to muster anything but apathy for the continued scenes of "OMG! We're all going to die!" while the precedent tells us that they will not. Besides which, it's neither creepy or weird to want some payoff to all the relentless foreshadowing to deaths in this arc: ignoring the fact that it's literally called "The Death of the Light", even the preview synopsis-es won't shut up about "not everyone making it out of this one alive!". At this point it's almost insulting our intelligence as it's not like RiD tries to establish itself as a comic with an "Anyone can die" policy whilst the actual book couldn't be further from that, it's pretty much exclusively a MTMTE and SOTW thing (the latter of which actually lives up to it).

Also, your examples are five minor characters (two of whom were introduced VIA their death) and two character from the other book.

 

Not that I remember, but it's likely that Nautica was the one with the who gave Rung the first edition of Towards Peace.

 

The major/minor dichotomy doesn't really matter as much as how much you've been made to care about the character. For me, the Pipes and Trailbreaker deaths hit hard - with Pipes, it's because it's firmly established already how much of a bum deal he's gotten out of life. With Trailbreaker, it's the fact that he was building towards a character arc, being brought to the foreground, coupled with what his death meant to Megatron, for whom he was something of a project.

As to the lack of dying elsewhere, I agree that it's a problem with the solicits and the staging of the cliffhangers. I don't hunger for more deaths - I'd much rather Roberts just dialled back the melodrama. Cyclonus' "Goodbye, little one" was rather egregious - he's not a melodramatic character and if he didn't know he was dying, it makes no sense for him to say something like that. The line should be cut from the trades, imo.

Then there's Megatron's "I think this is the end" from issue #50. Megatron says that? Really? A weepy, resigned proclamation of doom that turns out next issue to be completely silly, because he knows full well that Tarn will follow a bizarre set of rules that will give them plenty of time and hope to concoct a plan. Change it in the trades, I say! A more sober assessment of the threat would work perfectly well in its place.

The actual resilience of the characters / low to middling threat levels I'm absolutely fine with. It's a space opera - I don't expect Game of Thrones with Robots. Roberts doesn't like killing off his main characters for shock/drama, and that's fine. It's just the hyperbolic framing of events that's troubling, especially when most of the reader base are probably more interested in the character interactions than big plot twists.

 

That's basically it. I wouldn't really have a problem with him not killing off characters if we weren't constantly made to believe that he does. I enjoy MTMTE thoroughly, but it's almost like we're being told to like it for or expect it to be something that it's not.

 

I'm wondering if they couldn't put the organics through the teleporter one at a time, as they now have a virtually limitless supply of energy to do so thanks to Ten's idea. (sorry if someone also brought this up)

I have no hard-on for death, if anything I have the opposite effect. I got a limp noodle for death. Killing characters in modern fiction more often than not is cheap and just takes away potential for future development (unless of course said death is the natural conclusion to their development) like how Prime just threw away perfectly good Decepticons who couldn't have backstories and character growth but didn't. Because they died.

What I do want is for books to have the tone they think they do, and to not jerk the reader around. Constantly dangling the threat of death and doom in front of us and never acting on it is cheap. How many times have we had the threat of a mass-slaughter as a promotion for an issue? Remember when Overlord showed up, and it was built up to be something big and horrible, called "Slaughterhouse" and he killed a total of five people? (three of which we had never met, one was barely a character, and the other actually just sacrificed himself) Or the time we found the Lost Light ravaged with everyone horribly murdered and it was all completely undone? (in fact we actually got a character back from the dead)

No, I'm wise to this routine. Worse, I'm numb to the whole thing. It's just an empty gimmick and I'm out of empathy for it. It's lose-lose. Whatever characters do die, if anyone even does, I'll not even give a crap since I know it's just part of the gimmick. But I don't think anyone will, because again, it's an empty threat we've been told countless times before. Hell, so far the DJD have lost more people than the Lost Light crew have in this arc. (Y'know, red guy. He had a dog or something. He turned into a thing, y'know)

Cannot agree more. That's probably the worst of it all.

 

Actually, "Slaughterhouse" was the name of the alternate Lost Light arc and it it did kind of make sense in context, considering it was about an alternate crew that had all been savagely murdered, although that arc had it's own problems with misleading seeing as the synopsis warned that it wasn't for "the easily heartbroken". The Overlord issue was called "Under Cold Blue Stars".

 

I thought the issue where Overlord broke out pitched the next issue as such, not necesarily the title, just the "up next" bit.

 

Interesting enough though the solicit for 15 (which Swerve quotes verbatim in the issue) starts off with "Death in the ranks!" In the singular so if anything they were low balling us with that one

 

There was stuff about Rung getting her books a few issues back wasn't there?

 

I can't help but feel that Tarn is the only bot under pressure at the moment. A victim of his own stupidity and predictability now that he's lost direction. The lost lighters wrested with the dilemma of saving their own hides versus those of potentially innocent organics for mere moments thanks to the generous sunset time afforded to them by their naive captor. A magic fortress and hollow world offering them a wealth of opportunities isn't a morale sapper after all, who woulda thunk it?

The main source of drama that offers any stakes IMO is how far can Tarn humiliate himself in front of Megatron? Will he find redemption by protecting Megs from mean old Overlord? (the arc seems mostly concerned with unraveling Tarn, presumably to reveal his noble identity).

 

Really? Were there pics? That's exciting.

This was the worst. I was shocked when I picked up the next issue and it was just hand-waved away. Even if Roberts intended it to be obvious to us he wasn't actually going to die, there should have been some serious in-universe exploration of what happened. A conversation between Cyclonus and Tailgate, Tailgate asking about the four rites again, anything... instead, a big meaningful escape scene, shootout, culmination of two seasons of relationship building, fake death scene, and then... nothing? Tailgate becomes the hulk, and the scene was just glossed over.

This is what really embittered me to the "fluff" issues like Swearth (which I didn't mind TOO much at the time) and the ridiculous Thunderclash dance party funeral (this not so much). If he hadn't spent so much time screwing around with "filler," we could have actually seen the fallout for this scene. It feels like Roberts has been really bad with follow-through this entire season. I still like the comic, but I keep getting built up only for things to fall flat at the peak of the action, scene after scene.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot that they never followed up on Tailgate's proposal at all.

And yeah, the pointless fluff really sucks when you realize how many character plots have been dropped or stalled because of it. Rodimus is a total joke, completely going back on his development from Remain In Light, and we're only just now exploring Autobot Megatron after like a year of nothing. It's so mismanaged.

 

Yes. ExRiD has more deaths of major characters that stick- Ratbat, Metalhawk, Bumblebee, Jhiaxus.

And it does have it's own fakeouts- Wheeljack, for example.

But it doesn't regularly milk fakeouts, and they're mixed in with real deaths of characters in the same tier of importance, so the impact is different.


Though to be fair to MtM, I doubt last issue was a fake-out!

 

Honestly, MTMTE has gotten a bit too soap operaic for my taste - too much filler, too many intertwined character relationships, too little actual plot unraveling.

And as much as I hate character death, when it happens, it should matter. Fakeouts are getting out of hand.

 

While I can see why people don't like Rodimus going back on what he said in Remain in Light, it doesn't bother me so much because it's believable that the character would do that. You have Rodimus, a character who is pretty much defined by being immature and egotistical, promising to make amends to his crew because he feels guilty for his passed actions only to lose his job to Megatron of all people. He took what Ratchet said to heart and no longer believes he owes his crew anything in comparison. It makes sense.

I do disagree with you saying that we're "only just now exploring Autobot Megatron". Most of Season 2 has been focused on Megatron's character arc.

 

I agree completely.

I think Rodimus will legit get his shit together....or so help he god.

 

Has it, though? Because I can't really recall many significant chunks. There was Terminus, kind of. And something else I think. We've got little dribbles of information and exploration here and there, but for the most part he's just been around. The biggest development was him swearing off of violence, which just happened a few issues ago, and came almost out of nowhere.

All of Megatron's development has been in the back seat of other stories until now, and that's really unacceptable in the grand scheme. That's literally messing with one of the fundamentals of the brand and not capitalizing on it. They could have been doing great things with it and it's all been so small and barely noticable.

Except it isn't, because supposedly Remain in Light changed him to be a better person. That was the entire point, that he wasn't going to regress back and was actually going to make a change for the better that would stick.

Basically nothing Rodimus has done has counted for anything because his entire story has been about change, yet he hasn't changed.

 

That's simply not true. Almost every issue includes something to do with Megatron's continued development. I'm not sure what you're expecting unless they literally forgo all other plots and characters in order to focus solely on Megatron, rather than have the plots relate back to him like what they've been doing to this point.