This could be interesting. Edit: I hadn't read the solicitation for this issue, so it was new to me when I saw it advertised at the back of King Grimlock #2.
Just read it and loved it. Favorite character in the spotlight with some background The ending was just so Starscream That's as far as I'll say for the ending to avoid spoilers
What Starscream is really like. So far I'm liking what this Starscream is really like. Oh and Cryak Spoiler: ugh telling stories of genocided and murder to a young Starscream is really sick. Maybe she was always kinda twisted and being a "disembodied spark" made her worse Poor Starscream having to face what his mentor was really like and he was actually willing to save her at first. Really nice one-shot. 4 stars.
So while I find the name for the story to be rather clunky, and the reference made me roll my eyes more than anything... I enjoyed the story. There's some genuinely unsettling dialogue choices and concepts here, Dan Watters? Well done mate.
The much-needed Spotlight: Starscream! His depiction is somewhat different from ongoing but in a good way. It added more depth to his character beyond egotistical power-hungry perpetually-running-fifty-schemes-at-once soon-to-be backstabber. I really like the premise of Starscream landing in trouble with Spoiler some non-Decepticon/Autobot related entity and this story delivers it quite well. The cover creeped me out a lot more afterwards. The description for that was grotesquely vivid and the panel art complimented the writing well. I was genuinely Spoiler: It's puberty grossed out at being in an organic body . I can't believe I never thought about what kind of bot raised Starscream. Considering that because of Cryak he's accustomed to traversing difficult terrains and has extensive experience in exploration, I wonder if the "Fire in the Sky" backstory is something that might happen. I didn't really get the ending though, mainly Cryak's last monologue.
Just finished this, great one shot the notion of a non organic body horror story I found really interesting and a great fresh take.
I liked it a lot! Only part I kind of cringed at was when Cryak was like "Ohoho, that's right, I'M narrating this." Otherwise it was cool to really get into the differences between Transformers and organics, while also noting the similarities between them and humanoid primates, and in turn using that to inform Cryak's, and in turn Starscream's, characters. It's also just an interesting story that takes things that are universally human and with a change of perspective turns our mental and physical faculties into these horrific things. Transformers always had that opportunity to shift how we get to look at and interpret lifeforms, and might have dabbled with the idea in some throwaway lines before, but I think this is the first time we've really gotten into it, and I'm all about that nasty bad shit. I'm not sure whether the narration made it "scarier" or more effective or not. Maybe it did, but the way the opening narration was framed maybe it wasn't needed for the entire book. It puts the reader with someone, like Cryak, instead of just leaving us by ourselves to witness this happen to Starscream. This might have actually made the audience feel safer than they would have been otherwise, but I know these aren't universal rules to horror or tense storytelling. At the same time, some of that narration is juicy as hell in articulating the horror of what's happening to Starscream, so I 'unno. EDIT: REVERSE BODY HORROR! That's what this can be called. That's so neat, if anyone knows about any stories with a similar concept please share.
Literally TFA Blackarachnia and Sari Sumdac. The former was forcibly mutated into a techno-organic against her will, and is slowly going mad as a result, the latter is a Transformer who was raised believing they were a normal human.
They had no real issue with being techno-organic tbh. Not fundamentally at least. Blackarachnia maybe a bit at first, but the body-horror aspect wasn't really examined in that show the way it is here.
God this comic went hard on the horror and I'm shocked that it did. The art really escalate the tension and the horrible what ifs and cosmic hell that the series sets up. The expressions on the poor creatures face really give you the feeling it's the worst feeling.
Slightly bummed at this because about ten years back I wrote a story where there's an energon accident and Starscream's mind ends up in a human body and he has to track down his robot form (sat in jet mode in an aircraft graveyard). He learns a lot about being human, mostly that it's gross. He eventually finds and steals the jet and manages to fly it away, but then crashes because his human body can't deal with the flight manoeuvres he used to perform as a robot. At which point the jet suddenly transforms and the twist is that Starscream's mind wasn't actually transferred to the human body, but duplicated to it instead, and the robot Starscream had gone into involuntary stasis from the shock to his spark. The story ends with robot Starscream, disgusted to discover a filthy human sat leaking various fluids all over the inside of his cockpit, squishing the terrified human Starscream under his huge metal foot.
On the contrary, Blackarachnia despised being Techno-Organic, and her entire character was warped around the idea of somehow, someway, understanding her current form and trying to find a way to reverse it. True, the show writers may not have focused on the body horror that much, outside of the brief transformation scene when Elita is bitten by the Aracha VII spiders, but then again it is a children's show, and body horror might not be the best thing to expose a 10 year old to.
