In the G1 series, after the movie, Starscream ends up using Unicron to regain his body - did this convolution ultimately diminish the subliminal horror, of Starscream's story in the 1986 movie, especially when Hot Rod fights Galvatron inside Unicron?

 

Subliminal implies there was something unstated that gnaws at the deep, primal fears in the human unconscious.
But being shot and disintegrated into literal ash is pretty surface level.

It’s like trying to psychoanalyze Batman Forever to tease out some new meaning. You can’t, easily, because the movie is shallow as a puddle and literally tells you what everything means.

The connection being… ?

 

It's been like 2 months and I still can't figure out if the OP is genuine or this is all some sort of elaborate gag or experiment.

 

The manner of Starscream's death is the evidence, in a sense. Ironhide and the other Autobots die in a way that's fleeting with reference, or with symbolic gesture. But Starscream dies in an extravagant way, with the implication being his disproportionate reprisal. Disproportionate reprisal is a reference to Unicron.

 

You know, you read the opening post. And you think maybe this time it makes a little bit of sense. Then you read the reply, and all logic goes out the window.  

 

I'm honestly dumbfounded that the OP still isn't banned; they literally speak in gibberish and riddles and refuse to elaborate anything of what they say.

 

This guy. I think somebody got a thesaurus for their birthday and it came with a lifetime supply of superfluous commas.

 

A thesaurus should be unnecessarily wordy but still make sense. This is like someone who showed up for the first day of an introductory course on literary/film analysis, got the notes package with a syllabus outlining the schedule according to concept (thus providing concept names and terms without any actual explanation or understanding), and thought "I've learned everything I need to from here." walking out of the classroom within 5 minutes.

It's not quite pure word salad, but it is a string of concepts thrown together without any real attention to whether or not they provide any value when expressed as a sentence. It's actually kind of close to what I would expect out of plugging transformers terms into one of those AI/turing test chatbots that's been primed to fake literary criticism.

 

Yeah, but talking gibberish isn’t something you ban people for.

 

We'd have a pretty short user list if it was.  

 

You’re saying his death implied his eventual return? Sorry, but no. There are such things as subliminal text, foreshadowing, and implication; none of which are used anywhere during the entire scene, where Starscream dies. His “extravagant death” as compared to all the other characters that were quickly killed is in direct relation to his importance as a character. Starscream is simply more important to the story than someone like Gears.

Disproportionate reprisal (or return) implies that Unicron (or even Starscream in your example) came back bigger and better than before. Which they didn’t. You’re talking only about the Sunbow cartoon, so let’s take a look at their resurrections:
Starscream conned Unicron into giving him back his original body. He didn’t get an upgrade. And his return ended with him getting blown up and sent drifting through space. Likewise, while Unicron still functioned, he was reduced to a head and was never fully brought back. Nothing disproportionate about these returns.

 

You actually hit the nail right on the head, by saying that Starscream is more important than Gears and Ironhide (presumably, you're including Ironhide in the commentary); with Starscream's ladder of succession, over Ironhide, there is the subtext of Starscream's horror of absence, from the rest of the movie. In using the term "succession", Starscream is meant to be upheld as a figure of virtue, thus, in this context, as a literal meaning of virtue, hence why his absence from the rest of the movie is a horror story.

When you say, that Starscream is more important, the instance is one of the very word important being self-deceptive, as in the word important belongs to Starscream, despite Starscream being a Decepticon.

To clarify: when I speak of succession, earlier, I recognise that it's my own term in the discussion. I however use the term of the conviction that it is inherently connected to Starscream's presence in the story

 

The further down the rabbit hole we go the more indecipherably weird this is getting.

seriously man, it's just a cartoon to sell toys. While I'm not averse to picking at the construction of the story from a technical standpoint (I've made like 10 threads so far out of doing so in between large runs of flippant sarcasm and throwing-popcorn-at-the-screen, Mystery Science Theater style razzing and heckling), this utterly excessive attempt to impart grandiose meaning, intent, symbolism, allegorical weight, or other subtextual nuance and texture onto the stories just does not work. ESPECIALLY in G1, where the bulk of the writers have admitted that penning its scripts was mercenary work of the highest order, with them slapping together stories with little regard for anything other than it being workable in animation and being done in the shortest amount of time possible.

Starscream's death is flashy a) because it makes for a big, dramatic, shocking scene that the audience will talk about, and b) if there is any subext, it likely goes as far as "let's show that Galvatron is not to be messed with and is a serious threat by having him obliterate the guy that tried and failed to kill him like 7 or 8 minutes earlier" and that's probably it. You don't need to dig much deeper than that and the more you try the more it just looks awkward and uncomfortable as everyone frowns and struggles to come up with a way to engage meaningfully with a post so dense in Intro to Film Studies rhetoric that it's close to collapsing under its own ponderous weight and turning into a black hole of confusion.

 

This isn't the first time that clip or some derivative of it has been posted on one of his threads.  

 

If I frown any harder while trying to decipher most of those posts I'm going to end up going cross-eyed.

 

I’m dumbfounded as well. Either this guy is a troll or he has a mental disorder. Either way, the mods need to do something about him.

 

That or he doesn’t use Google Translate.

 

You could just put him on ignore. *shrug*