"The text's politics must be sound while it's aesthetic is ruthlessly committed to goofy as shit science-fantasy" is trying to have your cake and eat it too. Further, this is a bar that most pop culture would fail to clear.

 

I feel like if it was handled better than a lot of people wouldn’t be so hostile to it, and honestly it’s kind of sad,IDW mtmte is my favorite tf fiction and for it to
Go so down hill is disappointing

 

Hostility to a text that is so utterly harmless as a fucken tf comic is hermenuetically thin as piss on a hot rock.

 

These days didn’t really exist. While there are certainly times that writers might seem to focus more on a narrative than worldview, this is often the result of the reader’s worldview align with the material.

There are some caveats here. The comics code was limiting in terms of writer creativity and some of the best stories that came out in those times are famously from comics that ran without the stamp. Additionally, some editors are simply going to keep things safe in order to appease the board and money-men, but most of these editors and eras do poorly.

Seriously though, go back to the earliest days of comics. Superman is punching out slumlords for a reason.

 

As people often do in these conversations, you're ignoring the audience's agency - as if we have no power at all in the ways we react to things, or prepare ourselves for an encounter, or deal with any negative emotions that are prompted.

It's just very unlikely that anyone would find the politics of MTMTE/LL difficult or jarring if they paid attention to and brought an open mind to modern discourse. You can chuckle and move on. It's not controversial - maybe a bit cheesy, is all.

The inclusion of female and trans characters could be said to be more disruptive to the story, but only in the sense that it's part of a more technical flaw - Roberts dropped in too many characters anyway, and struggled to distinguish many of them from one another in tone.

The hostility comes from those parts of the audience that are, for whatever reason, trying to shelter themselves from the real world issues that are flying about, and come to sci-fi fiction with an expectation that creators won't play with anything that reminds them of these issues. I really think that expecation ought to be dropped.

 

Well we we shouldn’t have real world human politics in transformers but that wasn’t the only problem, mostly it was the bad writing towards the end

 

At the end of the day, it’s a transformers comic. That’s a comedy in of itself. It’s basically super aids to the already dying industry.

 

That's a fair point, but personally when I read fiction I'm looking to escape or get away from whatever is going on in my life. I don't read to go "ah yes, this is a great point about [hot button issue]." If I wanted opinions on those issues I'd just go on Twitter. Or anywhere on the internet.

 

One would assume that the spirit of this rule does not extend to the discussion of fictional narratives and from whence they may derive.

That being said, I don’t think there is much about mtmte that is explicitly political. Instead, because the comic is intimately written, readers will form close attachments to characters and what those characters subjectively represent.

As I see it, Roberts is clearly interested in social justice and perhaps is informed by critical [race/gender specifically] theory. This element of the writing, however, is not inherently political. In fact, it could be seen as a philosophical and social approach to art that aims to bypass politics altogether.

The other concern I see here strikes me as a confusion between politics and language use itself. Specifically it seems to me that readers are assuming rhetoric that is used politically is then unable to be untethered from those politics.

That said, there is clearly a great deal of political philosophy discussed in the IDW transformers comics. However, I see very little of that occurring in mtmte with the exception of the functionalist arc, which is really only a continuation of the basic political conflict established far earlier in the comics.

A transformers story need conflict, and mtmte has plenty. Rodimus even lists many of them off in a speech toward the end of lost light. Which ones are you finding explicitly related to polarizing views of “hot button [political?] issues”? I just didn’t see it.

The one thing I’d grant off the bat is that the story becomes so clunky, confusing, and muddled in some arcs towards the end that I could see where the only way to make sense of anything is by filling in the blanks. Still, I never found myself thinking that any conflicts in mtmte had any noteworthy real world counterparts beyond the typical factionalism that is basically the foundation of transformers from the beginning.

 

Wasn't talking about MTMTE specifically. Focksbot was saying that in order to legitimately read any science fiction you have to assume and accept there will be politics inserted.

 

But that’s not really what they said. They said that readers shouldn’t have an expectation that authors will not utilize concepts in their creations that might remind consumers of contemporary real-world issues. Their post doesn’t mention politics at all.

 

The full post suggests otherwise.

 

What I'm saying is that that escape or avoidance of "real world human politics" isn't objectively feasible. There may be issues that you're simply not sensitive to as political issues, and hence feel like a kind of escapism, but that's usually a matter of subjectivity.

To go back to Star Wars - if your country was under military occupation when those films can out, there's no way you wouldn't see them as having an overt political message. Or take the example of Bambi - the original text was banned in Nazi Germany because it was considered to be an obvious metaphor for the persecution of Jews.

 

So you say it's objectively impossible and then list examples of subjective interpretation as evidence.

 

I think the issue here is that Focksbot is trying to talk theory (critical and literary) to you, while you’re just trying to order a hamburger without a bun or pickles.

 

So you're basically telling a moderator that a rule they explicitly enforce daily doesn't apply in an instance where it explicitly does solely because you interpret "the spirit of this rule"? Your stay here may be fairly short...



Long story short: there's a drastic difference between random consumer interpretation and writer's intent. Once again, in MULTIPLE place, Roberts spelled that intent out clearly and concisely.

 

Genuinely unsure of what this is supposed to mean, lol.

 

I don’t really understand your question. My post suggests that there is a difference between a political discussion and discussing the conflicts within the narratives of transformers fiction.

For example:

X: What is Megatron’s motivation and why did he start the war in IDW transformers?

Y: We can’t talk about that because it is political.

X: Surely we can?

Y: Unfortunately not. Megatron’s ideology is far to similar to texts on political economy from the 19th century but perhaps I’ve said to much.

But the primary focus of my post was to point out that while there is philosophical content in mtmte (of course there is), there are only a small vocal group that choose to identify it as political, or at least to any noteworthy extent.

I am, once again, not a member of that group. I don’t have any interest in discussing politics, nor do I think mtmte is a political text.

It means that you want a hamburger ordered to your specifications but someone out there is arguing that it’s not a hamburger without a bun and pickles.

Physical versus metaphysical.