This seems far too much like a false dichotomy. Sometimes a disability is inseparable from someone's personality, and not everything has to have a label slapped on to it in order to make it 'representation'. A person with a personality disorder might easily identify with any number of characters from MTMTE.

Heck, going the other way, you could even try to argue that Grimlock isn't explicitly 'disabled' because his condition is closer to someone who is recovering from a serious accident.

 

Why are we discussing Personality amd physical disabilities .....
I dont see how thsts a problem :/

 

How does ADHD factor into this other than when talking about Misfire?
So far you've complained that Grimlock is basically brain dead but we don't see anything from his perspective, he's brain dead, what kind of perspective does he have when his brain is so far gone that he doesn't even react to the world around him anymore?

And on top of that, I have ADHD (just a mild form), my brothers both have it, one of them incredibly extreme to the point that he had to take high doses of Ritalin to have the attention span of a cat.
All three of us are dyslexic, I'm the lucky one because the only way that affects me is with spelling and not reading like my younger brother.
None of us are bothered whenever we see a criminally insane character being as ass, or a disabled character being treated like crap by a villain or morally gray character. You know why?
Because it's f**king fiction, and none of those character traits are about us.

The way you're explaining this makes it sound like I should be personally invested in Springer because we've seen him fly a space ship once and I too have piloted a vehicle (in my case a car, bicycle, motorbike, scooter, and a go-cart). Or in a French character because we're both from the same continent. Why the hell should someone who's in a wheelchair because he's had an accident and his legs don't work be offended by how Grimlock's treated? It makes no sense.

Oh and autism? That's your personal excuse to be offended? So let me get this straight, your brain is wired in such a way that makes you a little bit awkward but lets you pick up on teeny tiny details and suck up information way better than "normal" people. But when a character who's brain is destroyed is mistreated by his mortal enemies, you get offended? How? You're not even similar to Tyrest, or Rung. How do any of those offend you?

I've known someone with Autism, I've sat next to him at school, he was a bit socially awkward, not much more than me though, the biggest difference between him and me was that studying for him meant "read the relevant chapter of the school book, then surf the internet and get caught up on manga and anime, then spend the rest of the time on 9gag". Dude spelled out the urls of 10 posts on 9gag every day to me, from memory because writing them down "takes too much time and effort". Never did he get offended by disabled or crazy characters in fiction, if he would have he wouldn't have recommended the manga and anime he did.
Only time he got offended was when people acted like dicks to him because of how he acted.

Wow, seriously, the way you react, makes me think I should have committed suicide a long time ago due to all the evil German or vaguely German characters I've seen in fiction.

Oh yeah, something else I want to add:
Remember back to the first story with the Scavengers when they found Grimlock, what was their reason for taking Grimlock with them? It was "if we take him back an it was us who won, we'll be treated as heroes for capturing such a high priority threat. But if we arrive and it'S the Sutobots who won, we might be able to buy our freedom by saying that we saved one of their own!"
On top of that, they hoped that he and Tarn would kill each other.
Does that soun like good natured guys who help people from the goodness of their hearts?

 

I thought Grimlock had a robo-lobotomy, not a disability... shouldn't it be considered an injury... or is it actually a disability?

 

I think we had seen is a physical recovery. Other than that page with Misfire or so we really have not seen much of Grimlock interactions in what he thinks or speaks. I am not sure it is purely physical. Krok said he was improving but still mentally not there. We really don't know what is wrong.

 

This is in danger of coming across a bit like "Some of my best friends are black/gay". Everyone's different, and autism is just a label (albeit a helpful one). There's no sense in being presumptuous about what someone else has gone through or is still dealing with.

I disagree with Da_Razorsaw's analysis, but I also think your rejection goes too far the other way in suggesting that there are no parallels people can legitimately read in whatsoever.

His argument about the treatment of Grimlock isn't so much to do with how the Scavengers are treating him as it is how he is treated authorially, ie. as a character who isn't given agency and whose perspective is never central to the story, who is effectively treated as a 'prop' rather than a character. As I say, I disagree with this analysis but your rather angry post here completely misses the point.

 

I think it is physical. In Maximum Dinobots, Grimlock was totally fine and I don't think Roberts would throw away canon.

 

No it doesn't, he's neither my best friend nor do we have any contact. He's also the only person I knew personally with autism, he's my personal experience. I'm simply calling out the BS, like I did with the ADHD.
The point is, his autism does not correlate with Grimlock's lobotomized brain.

I could just as well say the same thing because of my contitions and the shit I have to deal with personally.

Maybe I should be offended that half of the Decepticons are jets, because the Germans had the first fighter jets, which obviously means that the creators behind TF think that all Germans are evil, and can fly and turn intongiant robots and steal energy.

 

I get what you mean. You're talking about projecting, right?

 

I think you should be more offended because G1 canonical alt mode for Megatron was not just a gun, but a standard issue sidearm of the WWII german army.
Surely Budiansky meant something.  

 

I left that out because it's quite obvious for everyone with half a brain to see how problematic that is.

 

Now you're just being absurd - that's not Germany.

That's Space Germany. Also known as the Principality of Zeon.

I thought the canonical alt. mode for Megatron was actually that Walther P.38 custom from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?

 

But if you have a black version...

And what about the evil undead Samurai Decepticon who also turns into a main battle tank of the Japanese Self Defence Forces? Man, that's even more problematic...  

Ok, not really. I'm just joking here.

 

You mean the evil undead Samurai Decepticon, based on the traditional imagery of noble warriors whose swords are almost as famous as they themselves...and named after the action of beating the crap out of somebody with a blunt object?

I think Bludgeon's got plenty of problems already  

 

That's only problematic for Razorsaw when Hasbro does it because then it's cultural appropriation. When Takara does it it's ok. You should see him rail against non-Jews being cast as Magneto.

 

That's another thing, not only is Hasbro and everyone involved racist against Germans, but they openly hate Gundam.

Bludgeon is one of the most offensive and problematic things in Transformers.
He turns into a tank, Germans were the first to have those.
He looks like a noble Japanese Samurai.
His main colour scheme is green, white and purple which contains blue, the colours of the Italian flag.
Essentially he's the embodiment of the Axis.
And his toy is made in China by pretty much slave labor. So it exploits the Chinese just like the Japanese did in WW2.

On top of that he's a zombie and a Decpeticon, he's blatantly supposed to show that Germans, Japanese and Italians are all evil scum.

That is racist, that is sexist (because these countries have a fairly significant amount of women) and it is also ablelist (because, I believe we might have one or two disabled people). We could also argue that he's a homophobic symbol because his colours also somewhat resemble a gay pride parade.

 

The juxtaposition between Megatron Orign (where the Autobots are nothing more than thuggish pigs brutally oppressing the working class) and "Chaos Theory" (where Optimus Prime tries to appropriate the righteousness of the Decepticon cause while while sanctimoniously chastising Megatron for taking it too far) makes Op's position read as satire to me. Something clearly went wrong with the Decepticons, but I do not believe it was caused by their abandonment of liberal humanism in favor of more radical politics as MTMTE seems to be (satirically) arguing. If it wasn't meant that way, well, there is no discernible difference between a good satire and an absurd position argued sincerely.

 

Ouch.

Lmao to you both. Now I want to see a rainbow colored Bludgeon.

 

I recommend reading a solid history on Marxism, it's transition into Red politics communism and the further transitional state into Stalinism. Should clear things up a bit. Although I'm not sure what to recommend for a source I'm afraid, my library is hodge podge   I would argue the issue is not abandonment but corruption of ideals. the transition to armed rebellion is actually similar to the 1800s efforts of the IRB against the British settlers once the full impact of the Land War exploded. As is the transition of the patriotic but relatively fair minded honour bound IRB into the highly destructive and ammoral IRA. Furthermore I would argue that Optimus' move is less approbation and more afformation of the Megatron political movement and given his further actions it was Optimus placing the Autobots under the Decepticon banner pre-war until such time as the above transition occured. I would also argue that while Optimus could indeed be referred to as righteous, he is not self-righteous (which is far more in line with your description) both in what we've seen of the character and in the fact that one of the earliest developments of the war was the Decepticons achieving their ultimate goal and THEN escalating far beyond the original intent (again, tying back to the Red October link). Optimus is justified in confronting Megatron in what you would described as a sanctimonious way in that he is confronting Megatron with the corruption he allowed spread within his cause. Megatron is in fact painted in a poorer light as we later learn that much of this conversation was a staged exercise on his part to hurt Prime, which resulted in a surprise revelation of his own corruption.

I'm using the word too often but I think the issue is definitely not the abandonment of liberal humanism but the perhaps inevitable transition of liberal humanism into a corrupt repressive system when it is forced to take up arms without means in place to halt the progression of a dictatorial system. The transition from peace to peace through tyranny if you will.

as James has very much envoked Lenin and Marx in pre-war Megatron while post-war is a combination of both of Europes major dictators (Megatron's expansitionit element would have been atypical for Stalin), I think James provides a solid frame work for the understanding and analysis of both factions without satire or absurdity.