Ooh, that's a good point. There is a lot of similarities between the Dreamwave and IDW version of Shockwave. It's even worse that the Dreamwave version was handled slightly better than IDW Shockwave.

It's a shame they didn't focus on the stuff that made the IDW version unique. They touched on it a little in his final defeat but it really was underutilized. Bummer.

 

Agreed, 100%. It got very tiresome, honestly. Not what I wanted in a Transformers comic at all. I'm glad the series is over.

 

That's it exactly!

In my view, LL was a FANTASTIC sci-fi story with a lot of interesting and thought provoking plots and character reveals. That said, I'm not entirely sure it was a good TRANSFORMERS story.

It's like Star Trek: Discovery, Discovery is a pretty damn good show. It has a lot of fantastic drama and interesting characters. It's just not at all a good Star Trek story. It steps too far away from the core components/lore of the fiction almost to the point that it feels like it's set in an entirely different universe/series. Outside of the costumes and the overall shape of the ship, that story could be told as any generic science fiction drama and still work. That's not true with TNG or, as much as a departure it was from the core concept of ST, DS9 (Sisko is the man). Those shows are drenched in trek lore. TNG AND DS9 simply wouldn't work as a generic sci-fi TV show because the stories were dependent on the lore that had already been established.

That's why I think I love mtmte and have less than fond memories of LL. MTMTE was a departure from what we knew, but it still had its feet firmly planted in the overall lore that is Transformers. LL didn't, it was too much of a departure and it failed because of it. That's my view anyway.

 

That's a really good point!

//Panjumanju

 

I love Discovery, but I totally agree with you there. I do wonder if maybe they simply wanted to keep the fanwank to minimum, since so many of these fan-made Trek show pilots that came before it during the "Gap" had an eyerolling amount of fanwankery... But they went too far in the other direction.
As for Roberts, I feel the signs were there in Mtmte already. Wasn't that "everyone is a human in a sitcom" issue still in Mtmte?

 

Swearth? I checked. MTMTE Issue 43. I enjoyed that issue, but I'm biased because Swerve. He's such a magnificent idiot and reminds me so much of a lot of friends I had in college that were fun, clever, and ultimately burned out in a sad little town in the middle off Bumfrick, Egypt. MTMTE/LL was the perfect setting for Robert's Swerve.

 

Also compared to Robots in Disguise which takes place both on cybertron and earth which feels like a Transformers story. MTMTE takes place exclusively on the Lost Light.

 

Not to be a butt, my dude, but what does that mean, precisely? Transformers are giant robots that transform. Of course if you remove the robot part you don't have transformers anymore. I don't even know what you have left. Werewolves? Yoga instructors?

Also, I'll point out that MTMTE/LL didn't have humans so there's that.

MTMTE/LL was all about the social aspect of Transformers. You couldn't have had the book without them being Transformers and/or robots. However, this book was akin to having a ninja and a pirate sit down in a tavern in Singapore circa 1725 and discuss the hansatsu to doubloon exchange rates. It's all period and potentially lore accurate. However some (many) people don't want to read about that. They want to see them do ninja and pirate things.

 

They're mentally humans though. They are robots, but not robots as we know it.

 

Kinda? A lot of sci fi robots from the 70s and 80s had humanlike thoughts and emotions. Many droids from star wars for example. The orbots, too. Starriors also had very human robots despite looking far more alien than most transformers. There's also DCs metal men, Marvels own deaths head and many more besides.

The difference is that IDW went far deeper into analysis of a robot society than star wars or any other franchise ever did and decided to make them closer to people than not, with arguably compelling reasons for doing so. That's not to say other franchises don't have that capacity. Just nobody's done it yet, or nothing in big mainstream media (That I'm aware of). So in that respect i think you're right.

 

It wasn’t really “Robot Society” though: it was human pop culture for almost all of S2 of MTMtE and onward. All of the really groundbreaking lore was in S1 and small parts of S2. The rest literally substitutes Red Dwarf, Dr. Who, and Roberts’ own tastes for Cybertronian culture. Swearth proves that to the nth degree.

 

Roberts on Dr. Who? That would be amazing. I don't know how it would work, but I'd love it if they made him a writer on the next season of Whittaker's Doctor.

 

Eh. I don't like Robert's writing style at all, but he still kept going, adding more tidbits about Cybertronian life and society as he went.

MTMTE S2/LL did give us the entire time travel to pre-war cybertron/Functionist Cybertron story arc, giving us different context to important historical events. Like it or not, LL did put a button on the Guiding Hand and the Knights of Cybertron/Mederi and gave a quasi-explanation for all the action master animal sidekicks. It showed us snippets of life on Caminus, and at least part of the Amicus Endura rite. As shoehorned in as it was, it attempted to address/clarify how "transgender" works with Transformers via Anode/Lug, along with fleshing out how forging/birthing works.

Groundbreaking is one thing. Maybe the amount of 100% new stuff in LL was limited. However, being able to revisit and flesh out those groundbreaking concepts is one of the things in sci-fi and fantasy some authors absolutely suck at.

So yeah, maybe Roberts was preoccupied with making his weird ominigender/sexual Dr. Who/Red Dwarf Sitcom. That stuff gave me eye twitches and I'm pretty sure I sprained my eyeballs rolling them so hard with how trite everything got. But in all fairness, I don't think Roberts abandoned everything he innovated and I believe he did keep going with expanding on Transformers society, even if it took more of a backseat as LL came to a conclusion.

 

That stuff conceptually is really interesting though. The idea of anode and lug is really cool and easily fits into the overall lore of Transformers. They're all about changing and changing genders is an extension of that core concept. But yea. the execution that was actually presented was downright terrible.

I wish Roberts hadn't tried to shoehorn that idea into the actual book. I think a Spotlight on Anode and Lug (what happened to those) would have done a lot better than doing it the way they did.

 

It could have worked and so could have all the other stuff if they hadn’t become (what seemed), the primary focus. I know it’s an oft mentioned slam on Roberts, and that’s some people argue it wasn’t even the point, but MTMtE and LL derailed into zaniness and totally forgot about the Quest.

It felt like Tumblr became who and what’s Roberts was writing for (not that those were bad ideas, but probably not the right medium). I think the Spotlights would have been far better, as addendums to the main series, and let series be about the quest and not the wacky poo.

 

Hard not to wonder how much the compression of the series affected things toward the end. Gave a lot of things a lot less space to breathe.

 

Blame it on Robert's not wanting to cut things out even though it would helped the pacing.

 

In hindsight you're probably right.

 

IMHO the problem wasn’t in that characters imitated humans too much... It was in that they imitated what weeaboos and NEETs think humans act like.

 

I reread LL on a slow night and I think I figured (part) of it out:

1. The number of JR OCS was enormous. At one point in the first six issues you have an OC (Rung), waging war against 12 OCs, while being rescued by a crew of OCs with some traditional characters sprinkled in. Simultaneously, on the Necroworld, the majority of the story is an argument between three OCs and a battle between an overpowered OC and some traditional characters. None of that is truly a problem, except none of the OCs truly ever get fleshed out. I get all characters are someone’s OC at some point, but none of the characters really have a unique voice. IMO, we got a bunch of shallow OCs that could have been really fleshed out.

2. Everyone talks the same - snarky. They all have low grade insults and banter they trade back and forth relentlessly and eventually it becomes grating.

3. Characters’ immaturity. It’s hard to read at points because no one grows at all. Hot Rod NEVER matures; half of his inner circle spend the books doing things like running around “squealing.” That’s hard to connect with because the readers seem to take the story more seriously than the authors and the characters.

4. No one transforms on a consistent basis. For a species whose calling card is the ability to change shape, they spend a lot of time as humanoids.