Just read #1.

It seemed a little slow for a first issue. I'd expect them to do something more attention grabbing, but it was really just three fairly dialogue-heavy scenes. It still more-or-less worked though.

Rubble seems like a fun character, though for some reason, I did assume he was a she for the first few pages, until they specified otherwise. His bubbly and overly-curious personality may get annoying if not kept in check, but he seems okay for now.

Not a big fan of the whole Optimus and Megatron being old friends angle, never have. I'm not too annoyed by them going that way with them, just a preference of mine. I can let it slide.

The murder was a bit of a shock. I'm kind of annoyed that that character is gone so early on, but I guess that's the point. They wanted to make an impact, and they did.

The art's pretty good. Nothing to write home about, but it serves its purpose. I've got no complaints.

All in all, it seemed like a good enough start. Not really enough meat yet for me to really form a full fledged opinion, but it's got me interested and I'm definitely eager to read more.

 

I had a look into this - couldn't find as many people complaining as there were people urging calm, and those who were angry seemed to be specifically angry because

Spoiler

Brainstorms

is considered an LGBT character. There's a precedent of writers killing off gay characters for shock effect, so people are somewhat understandably sensitive about it.

I know, I know, he's not the same

Spoiler

Brainstorms

.

 

Yeah, in amongst the various pitchforks being waved around, there is a reasonable argument to be made here. Kill Your Gays is a terrible trope that’s right up there with fridging, IMHO.

Also, if you contend that

Spoiler

Brainstorms

isn’t gay in this reboot universe, then in that case you’ve got an example of ‘straightwashing’, which is also frowned upon.

I’d like to give Ruckley the benefit of the doubt here: it’s carelessness on his part, rather than maliciousness, I think. He wanted to kill off a fan-favourite, to make a big impact, but inadvertently ended up irking some readers , especially LGBT+ ones.

The reactions to this have been mixed - anywhere from ‘who cares, there are more important things in life to complain about’ to ‘Ruckley is a monster who should never write for Transformers ever again.’

Hopefully the discourse here will be a little more measured!

My own personal view: I can see the complainants’ point and agree to a large extent, but some of the more outraged reaction I’ve seen has veered into the excessive.

Hey, that’s Transformers fans for you!

 

I haven't even finished issue #1. It's a bit slow, but we'll see.

 

I liked the world building, and the differences between this and the old continuity, looking forward to more.

 

If they're gonna be mad at him for that, then they should get mad at Robert's for doing the same thing for all of his gay couples too.

 

An okay issue. Didn't wow me, didn't upset as well.


A small crowd being offended for no reason because the people love being offended these days over the perceived issues of their own making.

Nu

Spoiler

Brainstorms

=/= MTME

Spoiler

Brainstorms

with these two only sharing being derived from the same G1

Spoiler

Brainstorms

.

 

Having thought about the whole

Spoiler

Brainstorms

thing from a few angles, I just don't think it was a good choice. Putting feelings aside, I think the best way to be critical of the decision is to look at it from the perspective of a storytelling choice by the author.

Outside of the context of the story it's just a bad decision all around. Killing a character that was beloved by IDW's core fans so unceremoniously as to kickstart a murder plot is a surefire way to alienate a great swathe of potential fans. People are going to compare this

Spoiler

Brainstorms

to the previous

Spoiler

Brainstorms

no matter what, and Ruckley really should have considered that. I had no interest in retreading the same ground immediately in this continuity, so I don't consider myself too acquainted with that number, but as a choice it just seems to lack foresight. The fact that he's an LGBT character, while obviously unintentional and mostly harmless (given this is just the first issue, and I'm sure some positive representation will arise in time), does warrant legitimate criticism from that particular community. Again, Ruckley obviously just didn't know, but it does also add to what an unfortunate choice this turned out to be.

Next I think you have to ask why

Spoiler

Brainstorms

was chosen to be killed over any other character. Some have made the argument that because he's a named character that people know while not being an A-lister per-se, it has a greater effect on the readership. I disagree. We don't meet Brainstorm in this issue, making any sympathy surrounding his character non-existent for those who are diving into this series isolated from the previous continuity. He is just a body in this story, that's all he is and all will ever be, likely. Considering how emotionally detached much of this dialogue is, I'm not expecting a deep funeral scene coming up. They could have easily made this a new character and I don't think the shock would have been diminished. I mean, there wasn't really any shock to this development at all since the creators said the plot would kick off with the first murder in centuries, so we knew this was going to happen either way. Even in the comic itself we pretty much know

Spoiler

Brainstorm's

going to be dead before we see it since Windblade immediately picks up that something bad happened here. Next, in term of the choice of

Spoiler

Brainstorms

, what is going to make him so special that people in universe are going to care about his death?

Compare to Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks-- she is dead before the first episode begins, but the rest of the episode shows the sheer fallout of what this death does to a small community, particularly considering how Laura was considered an incredibly popular teenager who did a lot for a lot of people in this community. Of course she continues to be developed as we learn more about the darker side of her life, and a movie ended up being made with the purpose of granting some dignity to the character, but I don't think any of this will be seen with

Spoiler

Brainstorms

in the coming issues.

Spoiler

Brainstorms

is depicted here as an energon processor living on the outskirts of the main Cybertron metropolis. This event would not be remotely serious in universe if the whole "no murder occurred in centuries" thing wasn't established by the solicits (which is still a nonsense piece of worldbuilding to me tbh). And that still has nothing really to do with

Spoiler

Brainstorms

as a character. Because really, the average Cybertronian isn't going to make a fuss if someone manning what is essentially an oil processing plant worker was killed miles from civilization.

Spoiler

Brainstorm's

personal circle will grieve, and an investigation will occur, but again, this can be applied to any character. If this death is serious enough to drive the entire conflict of, what is being teased as, a large-scaled story, then why didn't they just depict someone like Sentinel Prime as the deceased? Someone actually important that would warrant Ascenticons or whoever to get involved.

Overall, a story shouldn't rely on the popularity of a character in another series to create pathos. It's just not good writing. Because his death has reasonable cause to alienate certain fans, the choice to use

Spoiler

Brainstorms

over an OC seems like a bad play to me entirely. He's not the same

Spoiler

Brainstorms

, but that's part of why it comes off as such a bad decision to me.

Oh, and there's also the whole "

Spoiler

Brainstorms

is not going to appear again in this continuity for any writer to pick up" thing.

 

MTME

Spoiler

Brainstorms

is an LGBT character.

G1

Spoiler

Brainstorms

didn't qualify as neither LGBT nor Straight because of never having any relationships.

Nu

Spoiler

Brainstorms

is some kind of a non-entity of whom at this point we don't even know if he had any relationships in life... Or if Cybertronians have this kind of relationships at all.


It's essentially a small group of MTME fans raising the issue thinking that all things ever revolve around the characterisation from a now closed series. It's a problem as artificial as it gets.

 

Some of them are. Roberts got plenty of stick from this section of the fandom whenever he pulled a plot twist that could be interpreted as punishing or shaming a minority repping character.

Yeah, I agree with this take. I'm not particularly cut up about it, but it seems like a confused move - like the crawl text at the start. The whole tone seems to be less "Hello, new readers!" and more "How do you like me now, old readers?" From a new reader's perspective, there's absolutely no reason why

Spoiler

Brainstorms

couldn't have been Mindbend or Headspin or Einsteinotron and been designed to look like more of a doctor/engineer-type character. In fact, a design like that would make more sense, since they could then be far more sure that the body at the end is indeed the named character.

 

I agreed for the most part, except for this particular point. Straightwashing? Why is that what people can get up in arms about, when these characters weren't even LGBT in the first place? It's always seemed to me that you can take as many straight characters as you want and turn them gay and that's to be celebrated. Looking at Brainstorm, Ratchet, Drift, Prowl, Chromedome, Rewind, Tailgate, Cyclonus, Arcee, Aileron, the list goes on. Now we have a whole new

Spoiler

Brainstorms

with no new history to him, and people are defaulting him to being LGBT with no reason other than it was the version they liked. My goodness there's got to be a balance here, because this whole mindset of harping on people who aren't happy with a character being made gay while at the same time insisting that a character who wasn't should be is past ridiculous.

There is absolutely no issue with killing

Spoiler

Brainstorms

off, beyond maybe people wishing they could see more of him. He was a favorite in the old universe, this is a new universe and it's okay to move on. But to say that this whole new version of him dying is killing of LGBT representation is complete nonsense.

 

"diversity" key word here.....That really worries me that it will turn out like some sjw bullshit

 

If a character doesn’t have a place in the long term plans of a story, why not kill them off?

The bigger crime is for a character to not appear at all imo. There are many characters who did not appear during the run of the main idw continuity yet they saw fit to create characters we have never seen before and will never see again instead of using an existing known character.

Those guys alongside Ruckus in this issue? Wouldn’t anyone else have preferred them to be Windsweeper and Crankcase? They don’t die, they don’t do anything, so why not have characters the reader can recognise and has some existing connection to?

 

Is anyone complaining that killing

Spoiler

Brainstorms

is anti-Catholic? Seems like a legit argument to make if people are throwing around terms like "straightwashing".

 

I know I’m not going to change anyone’s mind with this, I’m just presenting the arguments as I understand them. Playing devil’s advocate, if you will. (Besides, I think it’s an interesting discussion to have.)

How do we know that certain G1 characters weren’t at it like rabbits off-camera, or after the events of The Rebirth?!?

It’s not as if Roberts took a straight character and made them gay -

Spoiler

Brainstorms

was pretty much undefined in the Western G1 fiction. Roberts was adding to the character, rather than ditching or swapping a preexisting trait. Assuming the Nebulans aren’t asexual (and the comics definitely hint that they’re not),

Spoiler

G1 Brainstorm’s partner Arcana would likely have had some sort of sexual preference, yes? And his consciousness was bonded to that of Brainstorm’s.

There was an incident a few years back where the Harry Potter films were guilty of whitewashing - recasting an established-black character as a white girl, and straightwashing is the same sort of thing, but with sexuality.

 

If we want to go that route, Chromedome, Arcee, Hot Rod, and a few others have been shown to be hetero in the past. Granted, that's because writers kept pairing poor Arcee up with someone more than a few times. So in that respect, they have been changed. And if we wanted to get all stupid up in here,

Spoiler

Headmasters Brainstorm is also technically Catholic.

Weird, right? I do see your point, and I'll admit that the precedents set here aren't completely rock solid. As far as adding to the character goes, I'd even say that's a pretty valid argument to make. But when that same thing is added to so, so many characters? It starts to feel repetitive and annoying, no different than when a whole bunch of former C-listers are finally given a personality that boils down to "quippy." For a few characters? I'm personally not the biggest fan but from a writing standpoint, I guess go ahead. But make it so that the vast majority of your cast all has this new trait? Please no. I loved MTMTE/Lost Light, and I would have loved the finale more if it hadn't boiled down to pairing mostly everyone up (along with the fact that a lot of individual personalities got blurred too, like I mentioned before.)

 

Couple of small thoughts:

1
Ruckley stated in his podcast interview that Hasbro themselves has a pretty big say in how characters are depicted (I can't recall whether they do in the "what characters are depicted")...if this (the murder, and the character murdered) was something Hasbro the corporation didn't want, it wouldn't have happened. It's entirely possible that Hasbro themselves didn't really think too much about this. I'm going to go out on a limb to say that Hasbro probably isn't super excited by any TF character having a sexual preference, because it opens up the entire franchise to the debates that we see above.

2
I'll be amazed if "Rubble" doesn't end up becoming "Rumble" by the end of the 12 issues.

3

As an MTMTE fan, I'd tend to agree. It's probably more of a symptom that people are having a tough time letting go and the realization now that the previous continuity probably isn't coming back.

4
I agree with @Coffee that it was an ill-considered decision to use

Spoiler

Brainstorms

as the murder victim, as it ends up feeling unintentionally hostile to an earlier readership. I didn't sweat it because hey, new continuity, and this is probably attempting to get new readers rather than cater to the 2,500 MTMTE fans out there. However there are less initially damaging choices to have picked, I think. What makes

Spoiler

Brainstorms

any different a character than Perceptor, Mainframe, or any other scientist?

5
I agree with whomever mentioned the previous #1s having some serious hooks in them. This seems pretty blase and pedestrian by comparison to those. Not sure I'll be picking it up beyond 1. Definitely not *remotely* feeling the excitement I did with RiD and MTMTE #1. Then again, as a fan of the old continuity, this isn't targeted to me either.

 

LGBT Cybertronians are something completely different to LGBT humans. It’s not the same thing at all. A writer could make a LGBT Cybertronian character exactly the same as if they were writing a LGBT human character and it still wouldn’t be the same. The whole genetic make up (they’re robots, we are not) is what keeps Cybertronian gender and sexuality distinctly different and seperate to the concept and understanding of human gender and sexuality.

 

All this hubbub about murder plot really makes me wonder if any of these guys have actually read comics before.

 

Is this true or did you just stumble on the Issue 50 big reveal? FIRRIB confirmed.