That’s a good point.

 

I quoted all of the above because together, they describe what worked about the whole arc. As @Wreckie said, Megatron went a long way. A long long way. He went farther down the path of redemption than comics usually allows a character to go. I was actually glad the IDW G1 continuity was ending, as it meant we wouldn't get a reset that had him return to evil. He went so far down the path of redemption that he couldn't reasonably return to villainy, and it was very impressive.

As @ScientistSkids said though, you don't just do the things Megatron did and get away with it. He was able to avoid justice initially due to legal red tape and the desire by the Autobots to look respectable over getting justice. In the real world, there were real questions raised about whether the Nuremberg courts really had the authority to try the Nazis. No one cared because the world as a whole knew the Nazis were a unique evil and that justice had to be done, legal details be damned. The Autobots were so obsessed with how they appeared to the NAILS that they let Megatron hang the trial on a technicality.

But for Megatron, that won't be the end. The Mutiny on the Lost Light happens for a lot of reasons, and the fact Rodimus is a crap captain for most of the book plays a part. But Getaway has a much easier time recruiting people because NO ONE on the Lost Light initially trusts Megatron, including Ravage. By the end the only people who do accept Megatron are so few in number they manage to fit on the Rod Pod together. And when Megatron returns from the Functionalist Universe, Magnus and Rodimus don't initially trust him either. When they defeat the Functionalists Megatron ends up finally facing a trial and (probably) getting executed. Not only that, for all the good Megatron does, he still can't open the morality lock on the Matrix of Leadership. Megatron is never fully forgiven or redeemed.

@Focksbot hits on why Megatron goes as far towards redemption, and why he ultimately is accepted by much of the main cast. Literally everyone did bad stuff in the war. IDW's take makes it clear that both sides went very far down the road towards war crimes. You have people literally born into life to be soldiers (yes, creating child soldiers is a war crime). You have carnage on an epic scale everywhere. You have incidents like Impactor slaughtering prisoners of war. The Aequitus trials exposed that many of the most corrupt Cybertronians pre-war had gravitated right into the Autobots ranks and kept acting awful throughout the war. Megatron slaughtered billions and committed countless war crimes, but in the end no one felt clean coming out of the war either.

One of the big themes of MTMTE was that this was a ship of people who'd been through some crap, done some crap, and were trying to find peace afterwards. Megatron is in a lot of ways the ultimate embodiment of that idea and it explains a lot of why and how things played out the way they did.

That said, there were problems in the execution. Megatron completely takes over Season 2 and the book suffers for that. Season 2 is ultimately weaker than Season 1, and the book doesn't recover from it even with Megatron off the scene until sometime near the end, ironically right around the time Megatron returns.

 

It would be different if he had started as an Autobot, and hadn’t done conducted millions of years of war crimes against not just his own species, but against others as well. We are talking about full scale genocide on a scale we’ve have never experienced.

IDW Megatron was an absolute monster, and while redemption can be found for monsters, their personal redemption doesn’t negate society’s laws, and most of his crimes are against not just societal laws, but natural law as well. Some actions have consequences. You could truly make an argument OP’s refusal to condemn Megs and most of the Decepticon leadership (Soundwave, Starscream, Shockwave, Overlord, Black Shadow, Tarn) was as much a breech of ethics as IDW Megs continued existence.

He can be a complex villain, but making him a casually sympathetic one is dangerous. IF he were an Autobot from the start, it would be a different discussion.

 

Keep in mind, even after his redemption Megatron is found guilty of his crimes and (likely) executed.

 

Honestly I think having Megatron die at the end instead of Optimus might've made his redemption more valid

 

True! But by the Galactic Council, NOT by any Cybertronian. And that was after Hot Rod straight up PERJURED himself for IDW Megs.

 

It’s strongly implied he did. If Megatron didn’t get executed then he was facing life imprisonment as a spark, arguably a fate worse than death.

I believe that what finally sells the Megatron redemption arc is how it ends. He still can’t open the morality lock on the Matrix and he doesn’t escape punishment for his crimes. Despite how far he comes, despite saving the universe and leading a peaceful resistance against the functionalists, he never completely escapes it.

 

He shouldn't have gotten that little field trip on the Lost Light in the first place. If he were truly repentant, he would have kept his guilty plea and faced the music. Instead, he plead not guilty just to spite Starscream (and got off, which when combined with Starscream's presence in the new Cybertronian government shows just what a sham the post-war government really is).

Having a repentant Decepticon aboard the Lost Light could have worked, but Megatron's exactly the wrong Con for the job.

 

That people even got this dramatically wrong idea of thinking that OldIDW Megatron could be even remotely likeable shows how badly deranged was this continuity at the end of its lifetime.

It's not possible to justify or forgive Megatron, or believe in an even the tiniest speck of redemption for him, just because "everyone did something bad in the war".

Because for Megatron this "something bad" was starting it all and then following with wiping of the entire species. The magnitude of it overshadows everything else, except maybe for Shockwave's doing.

It doesn't matter if the writers tried making Megatron likeable.

Megatron and Shockwave are the root of all evil in this dead continuity. Think about it. Let it sink. They're the original reason of all the other characters making questionable things. The cause and effect chain starts at these two.

And that's enough. The idea of Autobot Megatron was plainly idiotic.

 

This exactly.

 

Yes. This is exactly why a redeemable Megatron, especially this Megatron, is utter nonsense. The funny thing is, James Roberts captured who he was back in Chaos Theory, Part One. In Megatron's own words, "Understand this. So long as you stand in my way - so long as anybody stands in my way, I will respond by killing. Murder on an industrial scale. Because in the final analysis, I would happily wade through a river of corpses, chest-deep in rust and grease and engine oil, just to crush the spark of the last Autobot standing. And I would do so not as a means to an end, no. I'd do it, Prime, because it would give me pleasure."

That is Megatron. That bloodlust, that sheer disdain for life, that unrelenting drive, that is the core of his character. I've never cared for villains who were well-intentioned extremists, or who had tragic pasts, who expect sympathy even as they're causing others pain. They're a pack of whiny, ineffectual, muddled losers, especially when compared to the ruthlessness of someone like Megatron, who looked at where he wanted to go and paved his path over the corpses of billions, unclouded and unfettered by anything other than his own ambition. He's a villain who owns up to it, and would rather remake the world in his image than admit that he's wrong.

 

I strongly suspect you didn’t read IDW G1 because if you did you’d know this statement right here is objectively wrong. The IDW take makes it abundantly clear that Megatron and the rise of the deceptions was a reaction to the corrupt Senate and the lineage of the Primes. Optimus and his struggle with that legacy is a huge plot thread of the IDW narrative. The idea that Megatron’s uprising was entirely justified (though what follows isn’t) is a big thread through the run. And it’s why during the war Megatron has no qualms at all about what he did. What he was overthrowing was so bad it justified anything he did and he was convinced Optimus would just be more of the same.

As for Shockwave he never gets redemption. We do come to understand him, but he never gets redeemed.

 

Everything prior to DoOP runs counter to your argument, especially AHM. The -ations, the Phase Sixers, the interplanetary slaughter of organic life, LSotW (the merciless slaughter of the Autobots across the galaxy), the death camps, laying waste to Earth - that’s all Megatron. OP’s struggle wasn’t with a bad legacy of the Primes; it was living up to their lineage, and dealing with the corruption of Nova Prime in the Dead Universe by D-Void. The bad Primes came AFTER DoOP. They are all introductions to TF lore in the last five years, and all in Phase II. Megatron was a not writer prior to MTMtE. In Megatron: Origins, he was a rabble rouser who murdered people, who stood in his way.

The problem is readers forget DOoP was a soft reboot, and the decision was made to put Megatron on Lost Light and let Roberts write him in a sympathetic light. The problem with the second season of MTMtE and LL. They gave Roberts a character who was a monster and he tried to turn him into a teddy bear. The other problem was that Roberts wrote something that was so incredibly different than what had come before that what was written previously was almost entirely forgotten. It’s why a lot of the readers who came aboard during that run had such a hard time connecting with fans who’d been around longer over Megatron’s so-called redemption. New readers didn’t have Megs’ legacy or his franchise history and instead saw a wounded soul because that’s what Roberts was allowed to write in during his run because of the soft reboot, even if it ran counter to everything that had happened before.

 

A lot of good points made in this thread, and while I like it, I definitely understand the opposition to it. My main issues with it actually stem from Dark Cybertron.

The less is said about that sham of a crossover the better, but it really jumped the gun with making Megatron wake up and then immediately become an Autobot. MTMTE course-corrected by Megatron resigning himself to his crimes willingly, but entirely without any form of self change or reflection. The interpretation I took from that was that he just wanted to be punished without any form of improvement, and he certainly wasn’t redeemed. Then Starscream roasts him, and Megatron initially sets off on the ship to fix his legacy before getting iced, again without any intention of improvement. As the voyage goes on, Megatron interacts with more people he’s hurt and that’s when he begins to really reflect in my eyes. That’s when he begins to change. But even then, he only really interacts with like 7 people, and though he may redeem himself as a person in their eyes, the vast majority of people still hate his guts. Plus, as soon as he gets left behind in Lost Light, even those friends question their belief in him immediately (although I kind of attribute this to Lost Light’s awful writing), so it’s clear not even his friends believe in him when they can’t see him. Finally, he still gets imprisoned for life (narrowly avoiding the death sentence), and while he does get to go off with his friends, that’s the only reprieve he really gets, because he hasn’t really gained too many friends besides the crew of the Rodpod either.


The whole Autobot Megatron arc was never about redeeming him, it was about seeing whether he was capable of change. Dark Cybertron set it off to a bad start, but I think MTMTE and Lost Light handled the actual arc pretty well. Roberts was pretty heavy handed with the “You aren’t redeemed” message; the Getaway arc and everything with the Necroworld was the equivalent of him bashing the reader with a sign that says as much. But watching Megatron change and self reflect when he had initially planned on saving his legacy, when he knows that barely anyone will believe that he’s changed regardless of how much he tortures himself - watching him reflect and change even though he knows it won’t lead to any circumstance where he will be acquitted, or even any situation where he can really forgive himself is what makes him compelling in my eyes.

 

Him being an Autobot may have been a bit much... but him being a pacifist I found incredibly interesting. I'll never forget the DJD pushing him to use both his cannon and his control over anti-matter (! something not seen since the UK comics).

 

Good take. It's pretty clear on the reread that Megatron is manipulating the system to escape a trial at the beginning. I think there's some evidence that taking up the autobot insignia is a strategic move to undermine Shockwave during the climax. The equivalent of stalling for time or taunting an opponent to get an opening.

By the end it isn't an act. But what really sells it all is how Megatron isn't fully forgiven at the end. He faces a trial that likely ends with his death. He can't pass the morality lock on the Matrix. Ultimately he can't fully redeem himself. That's completely beyond even his power or abilities. But he clearly does regret what he's done and he faces that final trial willingly, when it's pretty clear that if he'd asked Magnus, Rodimus, and the rest of the crew of the LL would have gone to the mat for him and probably broke him out.

It's one reason that the LL ending is one of my favorite IDW "endings". I still like the ending of the Wrecker's Trilogy the best as it's the most upbeat and hopeful that all this doesn't have to keep happening. But it comes across as a very honest take on the war and one of the franchise's main characters.

 

I’m always trying to be willing to accept new things, and Megatron defecting to the Autobots was something that happened just as I got into IDW. He effectively conned his freedom and he also was willing to accept inevitable execution before that until Starscream rubbed it in and his ego refused to go down being talked down to like that.

And it actually took him time to begin working towards his “redemption”. Defecting to the Autobots was purely symbolic since he was at first ready to accept execution, then it became a way to escape Starscream’s damning of him. He didn’t start to take it seriously until Skids called him out. Even his amazing scene with Ravage was more about himself, and trying to make himself feel better about himself. Skids had to make it clear he had to work for his redemption.

It helps that nobody was happy about Megs being assigned to Drift’s private ship, let alone installed as co-captain. How the hell was anybody supposed to be happy about it? As Getaway quotes later, all the atrocities he committed, he deserves to die. How are you supposed to react when you’re carrying something and Megatron barks at you to keep up the pace, for just one mundane example? Or hell, Ratchet was let in on the secret that Optimus was gambling on everyone’s lives with Fool’s Energon.

and for all that, yeah, I grew to care about Megs. I like that he hated himself plenty, and was willing to die pretty much the entire time until maybe shortly before the S2 finale. His “I was happy and you took it from me” speech was kinda silly. But Autobot Megatron storming the battlefield was awesome.

But it was satisfying to see the DJD massacred like they were by him, and I was saddened when Megs got trapped in the Functionist Universe and everyone thought he abandoned them out of cowardice or opportunism. Especially Magnus, who I read as maybe having a hidden attraction or at least affection to him due to Megs being the only person being willing to show respect for him and his by the book ways. That was really compelling that Magnus was so touched by Megs simply replying “noted with thanks” for every one of his reports that Rodimus clearly never read.

I think I’m doing something wrong to an extent by liking Megs. But I don’t know. I like him. And it burns that the Galactic Council and Prowl got away with almost certainly executing him despite everything. On paper, he deserved it and he admitted deserving worse. But it says something that I like Megs more than Prowl.  

 

Autobot Megatron is an idea that never made sense. Yes, the character was interesting as written, but the entire story was undermined by the fact that 1) I could never buy into the idea that Megatron would repent of what he had done, and 2) I never believed that a ship full of Autobots wouldn't be trying to constantly kill him. He shouldn't have lasted five minutes. It was just an impossible to believe scenario.

 

?

What autobot had a chance in hell against him? The ultimate mass killer on a scale enumerable? TF you smoking? His rep ALONE keeps people in check.

 

I don't think that's going to stop most of them from trying to kill their hated enemy. And in any case, the story was that he was on "fool's energon" and was far weaker than he had typically been. Whirl would not have been the only one openly attacking him, that's for sure.