I hope he's dead. He had enough attention in IDW.
It's high time characters like Strafe, Mindwipe or Sixshot got some more focus.

Sunstreaker was million years old, Colton is 60 years old?
Everything is relative, but not that relative.

 

The deaths of significant characters should be meaningful to those characters' arcs. That's, like, a basic rule of storytelling. There's nothing worse than a meaningless death.

 

It's not a rule, it's a conceit passed on via universities and classes.
In a war meaningless deaths ARE the rule.
And there's nothing worse than rank or survival through popularity.

 

Are... are you seriously arguing that characters should be arbitrarily killed off at random after a certain number of appearances because "it's a war"?

 

*popcorn*

 

I am.
The way i worded it was a bit confrontational, but yeah.
You want every character to go out like a hero?
Come on. That just ends up feeling shallow and conceited after a while.
You can't have every characters death be a major deal.
It just feels more natural for characters to die randomly in a war story, regardless of their popularity or role in the story.
It would be a challenge to a writer to work around a death of a key character.
She/He might not always be able to work around that event without damaging the plot if they aren't experienced or talented enough, but a good writer should do these kind of things at times.

 

I don't want every character to "go out like a hero", I just want their deaths to stem from their character traits in some way. Sunstreaker dying like a bitch because he underrestimated humans would be fitting for his character, but it wasn't presented in that way.

 

Chaos was my bloody reintroduction to IDW. Never could tell a damn thing that was going on in that book, if not for the nicer art of 31 and then The Death of Optimus Prime being what it is, I wonder if I'd be into the comics right now?

Point is, The Technobots were in Chaos!? And also the death thing?!

 

Eh. I wouldn't say a good run. They kind of ruined him in All Hail Megatron, and now they act like it never happened.

 

Why does the death of any character matter anymore? There are literal wizards running around now. So what's to stop Merklynn from going bibbity bobbity boop and ressurecting Nova Prime, Galvatron, Shockwave, Pipes, and Hunter o Nion with a waggle of his stupid fucking magic stick

 

That sure does make for an interesting story, doesn't it?

You know what feels shallow and conceited? Character deaths being random, meaningless and uninspired because "it's realistic" when literally nothing else about the whole damn universe applies that level of pragmatism or realism to itself. It's all goofy, trite, whimsical stories of fantasy and bravado and obnoxious humour except when someone needs to die, then and only then is it "real war." Because writing compelling and structured character arcs that develope to a natural conclusion is hard, but just killing off whoever you need to when you need to is easy. It's war! Characters die and you don't need to make it accomplish anything! It's a message kind of! About how gritty and harsh war and life is! Who wants satisfaction when you can have a bullshit "life lesson" about robots in space dying with pink blood?

People took the message of LSOTW so, so fucking wrong. The deaths were arbitrary and harsh in that because the entire book was about deconstructing the myth and grandeur of the Wreckers. It wasn't just the deaths that were unglorious, but the tasks and the situations and the heroes themselves. It was one part of a grander commentary on fiction verses reality. Case in point, the last conflict with whatever the evil Wreckers were. First presented as a cartoony, heroic tale of valour, revealed to be a shitshow that basically ruined the team irreparably. The likewise the titular "last stand" was little more than a desperate, frantic fight for survival. But almost none of IDW has learned from that, and instead just remembers that hey, characters died kinda pointlessly and it was edgy as fuck! Let's do it again! Forget, Yknow, the rest of the story that went along with that narrative tool, the shitty deaths are enough, right?

The moment you decide a character's death is meaningless is the moment that character becomes meaningless. When Skids died in MTMTE, I didn't even flinch. Because he was meaningless at that point. Roberts had forgotten what to do with him, or just gotten bored of the character, and wrapped it up in the most unsatisfying, unremarkable way and it showed. It had no purpose, carried no message, and did nothing but ditch some dead weight from a cast becoming more and more deadweight themselves. And that wasn't even the worst offender. Rewind back to LSOTW with Pyro's death, and while horrible and unglamorous, actually had meaning to the character. Yeah he went out like a bitch, but that's just it, he was a bitch. He was a self-righteous tool more fixated on glory than being a good person, and practically bitched out. Yet he threw himself to the wolves because he knew that's what was glorious. Not saving the universe from a dark entity whilst flying away from the resulting explosion on a hover board, but giving your own life in the hope that it saves someone else's. That's what made his death tragic, Yet fitting. Not just because it was random-edge-brutal, but because it was the realistic opposite to his fantasy, and he met it head-on. (No pun intended)

 

I rather liked that actually.
Humans experimented on him.
He grew to hate them because of it and grew desperate to leave earth.
AHM gave him more relevance and a better story than he's had before.
And i wouldn't say they pretended it didn't happen.
Those events have been shown to haunt him into the present.

 

Why are you acting like this is about LSOTW or should be about LSOTW?

It's just my own little selfisch impossible wish about the writing in IDW or other fiction.
For writers to take the deaths of characters seriously.
Fot them not to kill characters only when they are unpopular or when readers hate them or they have the wrong color of skin, hair or eyes, or because they are to alien, or because they want to make some cool statement or because they want a death to have meaning or send a message.
Writers should not kill fictional characters gratitiously.
Characters should not die left and right from some diseases in a historical novel.
But characters should die randomly in these kind of stories because it is a war.
Not because it's edgy, but because those are the kinds of things that happen in a war.
Death in fiction should not be something anyone should get to decide or use to their convenience or as a tool.
It should be something the writer Is forced to deal with as much as the characters or the audience.
Having said that i know no writer is going to challenge themselves like this.
Nobody is going to role a dice and adapt their plans for a story to what fate dealt them.
But it would make for less favoritism in writing and that's what i would like to see.

None of that has anything to do with Skids dead (Skids was never a fanfav, he was liked but he's no Arcee or Bumblebee. Skids was killed because Roberts wanted to have Autobot victims - which was the right decision - and he had the wrong deco.) or Sunstreaker (Sunstreaker was a fanfav and this thread is testimony to that, so i don't lament Sunstreakers dead, but ultimately he was killed to make Colton look badass. That is the only reason apart from perhaps Barber also wanting to kill a character that would upset a lot of people.).
Neither death was part of an arc, they did not have any narrative purpose or meaning.
I do not completely agree with the choices, the purpose or the execution in both cases, but i think these deaths are a good thing in the story.
Exactly because they serve no narrative purpose and have no meaning.
They feel organic and natural and that is how deaths (and the distribution of social position and strenghts and weaknesses) should occur in fiction imo.
Not because of how readers feel about a character or wether they have the right color of skin, hair or eyes, or because they are alien or relatable or because a writer wants to make some cool statement.
These things should be random.

 

I dunno, I think Sunstreaker being laid low by someone trying to commit genocide on the Cybertronian race, when Sunstreaker was complicit in the very events that lead to Colton deciding this needed to be done in the first place is pretty good at bringing things full circle.

If Sunstreaker is dead, then it definitely needed to be stated more explicitly, however.

 

I think this is all the more reason why he isn't. I'm not automatically assuming he's dead... but then again I'm also not automatically assuming Razorclaw is dead, and that one is a little harder to get around.

 

I kind of doubt that Razorclaw is dead, because Hasbro probably wants IDW to help sell their POTP Predaking.

 

i didnt even realize i was supposed to think sunstreaker was dead rather than temporarily inconvenienced by techno-organic magic ninja

death doesnt mean anything in comic books

or real life

 

Maybe. But, like, without some kind of acknowledgement of that (even just a mention of Sunstreaker's involvement in AHM during First Strike) that doesn't really come across.

 

Sometimes deaths mean something, see Sideswipe, Bumblebee, Shockwave, the Jumpstarters, Ironfist, Tarantulas, Hunter O'nion etc.

But sometimes characters die for stupid or horrible reasons where poor judgement or being in the wrong place to say something at the wrong time brings it about, see Trailbreaker, Nightbeat, Rotorstorm, Tailgate (implied), Kup (Infestation), Galvatron. These deaths can also have poigniancy, Trailbreaker's aftermath, Rotorstorm showing not everyone will make it out etc.)

Not everyone gets a glorious death, but to put it in a crossover is in poor taste IMHO as not everybody is up for reading them. I still haven't read Revolution outside the MTMTE issue as I don't care about the other properties or the characters.

To put a character death in a crossover after being a prominent figure in fiction for over 10 years is distasteful.

 

im sorry but, it was really important for sunstreaker to die, to sell comic books

visionaries comic books