Then in Return to Optimus Prime, he's straight back to the statue whining he'd never be the leader Optimus was.
Poor Rodimus, saves the entire Transformers race but no one appreciates it, not the Autobots, not the Decepticons, not the intergalactic Unicron watchdog group.

 

Still better than all other Transformers comics even if it’s not good when compared to good Marvel and DC comics.

 

Agreed, despite all of the comic’s faults it’s still the best Tf fiction that we ever gotten IMO

 

IDW Robots in Disguise was equally as good as MTMTE, however I’d claim that LL was better than OP but worse than MTMTE.

 

Not shitting on Victory by having Deathy and Starsaber be henchmen to OCs lol

 

Have Megatron die at the climax of Dying of the Light. Use the Functionist Universe arc to actually explore fun alternate universe ideas (AU Orion Pax who never became a leader! Rodimus Prime as a puppet of the Functionist Council!) and act as an emotional resolution to the characters' relationships with Megatron. Leave Chromedome and Rewind and Swerve and Ten on Necroworld rather than have them tag along uselessly for the next 20 issues. Don't spend two issues on meaningless tragedy porn in the form of Nautica's memory wipe. (Possibly debut Anode and Lug on Troja Major instead of having them with an unrelated subplot in the first six issues.) Don't have Getaway arguably become a scumbag with no redeeming qualities instead of "actually has a good point about Megatron". Don't kill off Rook arbitrarily and have Defensor die like a bitch. Don't do a Scorponok mpreg story that has nothing to do with anything else.

Reveal the Guiding Hand to be racial mis-rememberings of the Quintessons, terrifying eldritch beings who engineered Cybertronians as a slave-race and are now using the Matrix map to lure them back to "Cyberutopia" to get them back; the Quintessons are also the ones who remotely manipulated the Magnificence and the Heart of Darkness in order to get the Cybertronians to come back to them. The Knights of Cybertron were the last generation under direct Quintesson control. Rung, rather than one of the Guiding Hand, is a "super-prototype" Cybertronian who transforms into a cyberforming device; he's compulsively forgettable so that the Cybertronians don't discover their origins. The finale of Lost Light would be about self-determination and not letting yourself be forced into a role by others, rather than the "uwu believe in yourself" of Functionist Primus's defeat.

 

How did u manage to fanwank something better than what was in an actual published book? O_O

 

I admit it's not ENTIRELY mine; a lot of it comes from bouncing off other people, and from theories while it was coming out that turned out to be better than how it ended up.

 

To be fair, @Boatformer doesn't have a pending cancellation looming over them. That said, It's probably more cohesive and sensible than whatever Roberts had in the kitty before the cancellation notice.

 

More fundamentally, it's a series of corrections to Robert's plots and concepts, rather than an entirely original storyline, which reinforces the view that Roberts could have benefited hugely from a better editor or a collaborator - someone to push back a bit on certain decisions. I reckon most successful writers benefit from such an arrangement, even if informally.

 

Yeah. We've been over that concept a few times here and there. I can't speak for anyone else, but I still think Roberts is a "good writer" if he's assisted with his shortcomings by others. Left to his own devices, not so much.

I kind of see him like Fisitron: great at making things that are cool and interesting - not so great at actually wielding them or knowing when or where to actually use them.

 

Restricting Robert's freedom. Keeping him on a tight leash would have stopped him from getting high from own his farts and thinking he is an incredible writer. All those pats on his back from new and biased fans didn't help either. By having the bots non-stop drop pop culture references, never following-through with something, keeping useless characters, not killing said useless characters, etc, etc and the end-result was this spectacular manure-fest we had to endure. Not enough time in the day to make a comprehensive list.

 

It had some amazing highs, pushed boundaries and injected some real fun into the universe.

But personally, I think Roberts' own TV show analogy forecast it's downfall.
It hit a magic formula, created a hype train for a few seasons, pandered to it, became a self paradoic quipfest, ultimately petered out a bit and was cancelled before he could finish it properly.

I think maybe he forgot that the source material was still what made most of us like it, plus (like the whole of idw) there were just too many OCs towards the end.

Still love it though.

 

• Less romance, too much going on.
• More focus on background and side characters. (Seriously besides Tarn, can you name the other DJD without looking up their names.)
• No crossovers with other franchises.
• If a character is dead, they stay dead. If your gonna bring them back, it kinda ruins the point of their death. ESPECIALLY if the continuity will be rebooted.
• Less original characters, as it makes the cast overcrowded and they can be replaced by existing characters.

 

I hate to say it, but after rereading the Wreckers series, it's kind of obvious where the coolest elements of LSOTWs came from. Roberts is good, but I think his 'greatness' really only came through when he had Roche there with him. Look at LSOTWs and look at every issue of LL. There is no comparison. LSOTWs will go down as some of the best fiction ever when it comes to transformers, and LL will be a divisive piece of crap that only a VERY SMALL segment of the fandom enjoyed for reasons that really didn't have much to do with transformers.

 

You can always rely on GoLion for a sensible take. The bolded part is something people here should ponder over. If your main interest in TF-comics does not stem from alien robots in disguise, fighting in a millennial long war, then you are probably in the wrong place.

P.S. Your bearded Vegeta avatar was a lot better than your current one.

 

The same could be said for a few "creatives" when left to their own devices. I think there's some kind of bell curve with this sort of thing. Some people aren't willing to go out and do crazy stuff, but they deliver a very polished, effective, by the numbers product that everyone uses and then largely immediately forgets until/unless they end up so ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist it's almost ubiquitous. Some people are just so out there that they're so crazy it works - stuff like really auteur artists that come up with super creative acclaimed movies/games/books/whatever.

Swirling around between the two extremes are varying degrees of "creative" vs. "effective" are a variety of works. Some good, some not so good. I don't know where Roberts fits in that space, but as others have pointed out, the application of some cohesiveness seems to make his writing pop a lot better and moves him out of that ambiguous morass.

 

Have Megatron not be an autobot.

 

I thought we’d left TROO-fan shit back in 07.

 

TRUE FAN 2: GRIMDARK BOOGALOO