Did some quick outlining and it’s looking like G1Prowl is on to something:

• German Labor Front
  • Volkswagen
    • Type 1 “Käfer” - “Beetle”
      • Bumblebee

Remember how the G1 cartoon started with Spike hanging out with Hound, an honorable and skilled soldier with an alt mode resembling a US military vehicle?

Then, out of no where, Spike becomes best buddies with Bumblebee, a small, weak yet charismatic character with a famous “Beetle” design from a car company with a fascist history. The one that’s described as a spy in his profile but never does all that much serious espionage. The same one that in the current run of comics is a double-agent.

Is all we’ve ever known a lie?

 

I have a special appreciation for individuals than lean all the way into absurdist humor. Bravo, sir.

 

That’s not wrong. Classic Trek and Twilight Zone are frequently held up as among the best Sci-Fi works ever, and they’ve got social commentary and politics baked into their DNA. Heinline, Lucas, Asimov... all are writing works with politics and their own political viewpoints deeply baked into the dna of their work. Battlestar Galactica, classic and reboot, both have heavy political themes.

Science Fiction as a genre has always been about social commentary. It is literally the point of the genre.

 

I really don't feel like arguing about this again but suffice to say you, or anyone else, is begging to be proven wrong by making a generalized sweeping statement like that. If you want to read politics in everything, fine. But it is not an objective truth that all sci fi is inherently political.

 

Yeah, this is a common, and I think the correct take. It has an exceptionally strong start in season 1. It has strong moments in season 2, but also starts to see some dips. Season 3 (Lost Light) starts weak but it finishes strong in the end.

I suspect this stands the test of time in Transformers fiction, maybe in comics fiction as a whole. But that’s a thing we won’t know for a solid decade from now. If we’re all still here taking about it 10 years from now, I’d say that the series stood up.

 

Transformers fans hating on MTMTE is like Star Trek fans hating on Red Dwarf.

 

How overwhelming that political message is depends on the work, but at heart it always is. It ultimately involves people and how they organize and approach a situation. And how they do that, and how they react, is inherently political.

Ultimately any statement about how people organize and act is inherently political.

That may be the nature of the conflict. The definition of politics is:

The activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.​

That’s more than stances on whatever is the hot political topic, or conservatives versus liberals. That’s an inherently human thing, and Sci-Fi at its heart examines the idea that no matter how things change, people ultimately remain the same.

 

These are good points. I hadn't really thought about these examples before, and now that I have I must give Roberts credit for playing with the idea of transforming in interesting ways.

But my problem with MTMTE is that it ignored arguably the most important aspect of Transformers transforming...that they're 'robots in disguise'. Disguise rarely comes into play in MTMTE. The only time I remember it being a thing was when they used hologram avatars at a bar while their altmodes were parked outside...that was a cool twist on the concept. But in a story entirely set in space, Roberts could have played with stuff like this all the time. Encountering new alien cultures, having to find new ways to use their camouflage technology based on each culture. It practically writes itself.

I'm not going to hold up the Sunbow cartoon as an example of a fantastic use of disguises, but at least the concept came into play here and there. Most TF stories feature them going on covert missions. The main exception being stories set on Cybertron, which is why I argue Cybertron stuff works better as a backstory than a story unto itself.

 

I think you may have missed some subtext with the two post-Death of Optimus Prime monthly books. The war is over and each run deals with the post-war evolution of transformer-related themes.

One is literally called Robots in Disguise and deals with thematically similar concepts: intrigue, subterfuge, and hidden agendas.

The other one is Robert’s book and, well, it deals with more than meets the eye.

 

I’d agree they don’t play up the whole transforming angle all that much. But it is there. The functionalists and that philosophy is front and center. What characters transform into comes up quite a few times.

But what I did like is that MTMTE was the first book that I felt really explored what it meant to be Cybertronian and what it meant to survive the war. That was a hell of a thing to read and I’ll miss it.

 

Which is why it’s not called Robots In Disguise. More Than Meets The Eye - thats what the book is all about. Robots in Disguise? No, that’s that other book.

 

Whether it was RID or mtmte, neither were really about Transformers.

 

Robots in Disguise hasn't had any worth in any Transformers fiction.
In G1 the Autobots were known by their alt modes, the Decepticons alt modes were mostly useless given they were guns, tapes and often 'unidentified aircraft' requiring a USAF response.
In Beast Wars the giant bugs and dinosaurs were a dead giveaway in the Pleistocene Period and once transmetals entered the scene, they were redundant.
In Armada they didn't even venture into populated areas much, Energon - redundant, Cybertron - it came up but mostly like Armada.

 

Sorry, but Transformers might have been about giant robots at war in 1984, but since then we’ve had countless cartoons, comics, books and films, not to mention half a dozen reboots, each with its own mythology and continuity, straddling two centuries. To say it’s “about giant robots” is like saying Lord of the Rings is about destroying stolen property. I mean, even the original cartoon was about so much more than that: it depicted conspiracies, interracial conflict, internal power struggles, sexism, to say nothing of the effect of constant, unremitting war on an environment. (Shockwave’s presiding over a more or less dead world, don’t forget.)

Also the original Star Wars movies were highly political. You don’t think a story about a brutal military dictatorship being defeated by ancient spiritualism and their own hubris isn’t political? You think Empire Strikes Back doesn’t have something to say about the ends not justifying the means through Lando’s attempted deal with the Empire, or making the point that your chosen family can mean more to you than your blood relations? In Return of the Jedi, what is Luke’s continual refusal to fight in the face of the Emperor’s goading if not a commentary on pacifism versus militarism? (Mind you, these days Luke wouldn’t be able to do that without the sweaty, basement-dwelling trolls calling him a cuck.) And if you discount the obvious message about redemption through a return to core values, what the hell is Vader’s heel-face-turn about?

This is a movie series that features literal space Nazis. Of course it’s political. You may not have been aware of the politics at the time, just as you’re largely unaware of how your own opinions and biases are reflected in your own work (because no matter how hard you try, they will be if you write long enough,) but the politics is there nonetheless.

 

My understanding is that the majority of the end of Season 3 was written/outlined around the time of S1 which probably also explains why - for the most part - it’s percieved as a “return to form”.

 

Season 1 is incredible, probably my favorite piece of fiction ever. Season 2 starts off so strong but hits some frustrating low points, including one heartbreaking moment that was immediately erased and resolved in the opening pages of the following issue, that kind of ruined a lot of good will Roberts had built up. Season 3 is all over the place and so rushed that I didn’t really feel emotionally invested by the time I got to the final issue, which is a damn shame.

I still love that series as a whole, but damn is it frustrating. On par with Transformers: Prime.

 

Very good illustration here of the difference between productive disagreements and the kind of pointless trashing of the books that leads to this board becoming a battleground. Let's stick with the former.

For me, that's not the single most important aspect, but I concede that it's been written deep into the franchise from the start. It was also a big part of what got me on board the IDW continuity in the first place. I bounced off Dreamwave (even War Within) pretty hard because it just seemed to be a typical fighting factions story, but Furman's Infiltration played up the idea of the Transformers already being on earth, undetected, and that seemed far more interesting to me.

But thinking about it, 'robots in disguise' has limited scope for storytelling. The Bay films demonstrate this aptly - on top of being just generally badly plotted, all the time the Cybertronian characters are in vehicle mode they're just boring. There's only dramatic tension when they're forced (or choose) to adopt their robot forms.

In a comic this causes even more problems because the art depicting alt modes rarely, if ever, gets to transmit anything bordering on emotion, or any dynamic between specific characters.

Roberts' solution - to lean heavily into holoavatars - is completely understandable, even if it creates plot holes. Essentially, this is an as yet unsolved problem at the heart of the franchise - you either quickly leave the whole disguise thing behind (Prime, -ations, Marvel), or give most of your screen time to human characters (Bayverse), or you use the transforming trait as a way of playing with and developing other sci-fi concepts (Roberts).

 

I get where you're coming from, but I disagree that 'robots in disguise' has a limited scope for storytelling. They just have to find clever ways to implement it so it doesn't get old. The Bay movies definitely tend to keep the TFs in vehicle mode too long. But they also have some clever uses of disguise. Frenzy using his radio mode to sneak on the plane. Alice disguising herself as a human to get close to Sam. Bumblebee infiltrating KSI. The characters finding Jetfire in a museum. Soundwave posing as a gift car to Carly. I'm not going to argue that these were executed fantastically, but they're all neat ideas that find clever ways to use disguise.

They don't need to keep the TFs in vehicle mode for extended portions of the story (like Bumblebee in the 2007 movie). There's tons of opportunity for using disguise that wouldn't require that. I mean, look at Toy Story. Similar concept (the characters have to pretend to be inanimate objects), but those movies spend plenty of time developing the characters. But if you made a story omitting the "pretend to be a toy" angle, it would feel like a key component was missing.

I could easily see a whole series devoted to "space disguise". Like, picture all the ways the Transformers could blend into and interact with the Star Wars galaxy. I'm not literally pitching a Star Wars crossover, but take that visual and apply it to new worlds and alien cultures. It practically writes itself. For example, weren't there giant aliens that tower over the TFs in MTMTE? It would be super interesting to see a story where the Autobots have to infiltrate a base on a planet populated by those aliens. They'd have to impersonate toy cars or household items or something. It would be fun and potentially really funny.

And just to clarify, despite arguing against MTMTE, I don't hate it by any means. As I said in my other post, I do give Robers credit for doing some out-of-the-box stuff with transformation. And he's clearly a man who loves the characters and lore. I think that's where his passion lies, whereas my passion for Transformers lies more in the concept of disguise itself (and seeing how TFs integrate into other cultures). I get that MTMTE wasn't supposed to be what I described above. But even incorporating stories like that once or twice per season could have gone a long way. If he had incorporated disguise more, I'd probably consider MTMTE a nearly ideal TF story. It would hit basically every checkmark for me. As it is, I do think it's good, I just see a lot of missed potential.

 

I will apologize before-hand for citing such an old post, I know there's at least 10 more pages worth of comments left, but I'd like to address this as someone who's not born or raised in the USA but had consumed your media all my life.

As someone from Latin America who grew-up watching American Cartoons/Movies and Anime, I never cared about representation in the media I was consuming, and neither the people (fans or otherwise) who I've interacted with IRL. This type of mindset is very typical of Americans and sounds more like blaming your own low self-esteem problems into the world around you.

As long as the story was entertaining and the characters were interesting, that was all that matter to us.

Excuse me if that came off as a harsh comment, but English is not my native language and I don't feel expending 20 minutes mincing my words while trying to write this post.

As for the topic of this thread, I enjoyed MTMTE at first, along with RID, it felt to me that it was introducing interesting concepts and characterizations to the overall world of Transformers and how a post-war(ish) Cybertron might look like. Sadly after Dark Cybertron and subsequently Lost Light it felt like the story was focusing on a never-ending loop of aimless quests and silly jokes.

 

I'm not American; I'm British. And I believe what you're saying, but I also believe the many people (not just from the US) who have said it personally affects them. I don't think this has anything to do with low self-esteem either; people are sensitive to different kinds of positive and negative reinforcement. The lower numbers of women and minorities going into creative industries is an indicator that lack of representation may have a statistical impact.

To pick a slightly different example, schoolboys in the UK are currently dropping far behind girls in every school subject across the board. That's just a statistical reality. Now, can you find successful boys and men in every area of industry who will tell you they've never felt held back, and don't feel let down by our educaton system in any way? Sure, you can. But that doesn't mean that boys aren't being held back by something.