I'm not seeing a lot of love here for Riptide, but he was my favourite of the wholly new characters.

//Panjumanju

 

Like the most: Tarn, Vos, Nautica, Verity, Velocity, Rung, Windblade, Pet, Kaput, Nickle, Ambulon, Pharma, Sunder, Ratbat (he's been reimagined to such a degree that I'm including him here), Fulcrum (I love the Scavangers!), Minimus Ambus, Hunter,
Are OK: Drift, Aileron, Anode, Strafe, Blackrock,
Dislike the characters, but wouldn't want anything changed: they were crucial to the story and provided a rewarding experience. I just didn't like them: Kaon, Mistress of the flame, Froid, Tyrest, Pyra Magna, Roller
Dislike and could do without: Helex, Tesarus (underdeveloped, to the point that they were kinda generic), Lug, Centurion,

These are my opinions. Not that I would have removed any, though perhaps I would want a few dislikes written in a different way. Then again, it's not my franchise.

 

Is there a master list of IDW original characters/characters who first appeared in fiction in IDW anywhere? No wiki article?

I enjoyed these a lot. I think Anode and Lug could have done more, but I really enjoyed the repeating joke of "what is Anode doing in this new place? Oh, trying steal something." Drift's quasi-New-Age outlook was just so funny, especially if you were one of those who raised an eyebrow at the ridiculous anime tropes in his character before.

I'd love to see the same characters in the hands of some other writers, or in different types of stories. I think Roberts did great stuff creating them, but his cast was so huge that few characters really got an ideal workout.

Let's start by saying that this is for @Focksbot & @ProtectronPrime and everyone else can skip this:

So "Mary Sue" meant a very specific thing within the context of Star Trek fanfic? It was a mockery of teenage girl self-insert fic where a young ensign solves all the problems and gains the love of Captain Kirk. It still technically means that, but it gets slapped all over basically any audience surrogate, which is very different. Rather, the Mary Sue, the website (which rejected all my article pitches about female Transformers, grrr), has a great point that perhaps Star Trek attracted Mary Sues because holy shit is Kirk ever a Mary Sue.

But for this to work, we must agree that:

A Mary Sue is a type of audience surrogate.

Rung is not an audience surrogate, so he's not really a Mary Sue. He's an author surrogate, as Protectron points out, but I'd argue that's something completely different.

He has none of the hypercompetent hallmarks of a Mary Sue. He's got special insight into the other characters, but he's not the most competent in combat--all he did in Dying of the Light, after all, was dig for a while and find a bomb. While he identified Minimus Ambus's true personality, there's no indication that he saw the particular truth of why Overlord was there, or that Terminus forced Megatron's hand in the Functionist U.

Audience surrogate characters are different than Mary Sues. Outside of literary fiction, where you don't really need audience surrogates, most genre fiction identifies elements of the audience and creates characters the audience can identify with. Cheetor in Beast Wars, Bumblebee in Animated, Arcee in Prime, are all designed for the older child/preteens the shows were aimed at. Young and hotheaded with a good sense of humor, but also designed to make mistakes and learn from them.

"Making mistakes and learning from them" is a crucial point where an audience surrogate differs from a Mary Sue. A Mary Sue wouldn't be too vengeful like Arcee in the initial Prime episodes, to the point of endangering her comrades. She would, by definition, never make mistakes.

I see no evidence that Rung is also an audience surrogate. He's not especially competent, at the center of any story (although in the background of all of them), or representing the audience in a certain way, save for his predilection for collecting toys. What's more, he's never really the "in" to a particular story, or rarely to any scene, except maybe when he head-shrinks Megatron.

He could be the author self-insert. That is different, though, as the author self-insert tends to be tricky and only really functioning as such when they make metacommentary on the story itself, which Rung rarely does. As a psychiatrist, a lot of his sequences are built around listening and asking probing questions to get Megatron, Rodimus, or others to give us interesting information germane to the story.

I'd argue that there are some great stories that have a huge mass of audience surrogates, like the first Song of Ice & Fire book. A Game of Thrones is a very tricky thing to pull off--eight viewpoints, almost all of which work as some form of audience self-insert. Teenagers and young adults will be drawn to Arya, Dany, Sansa and Jon; adults will be drawn more to Ned and Tyrion. *counts on fingers* And Catelyn. *counts on fingers.* Bran is the only character I don't see as an audience surrogate for anyone old enough to read the book. Martin's success is partially due to the fact that he manages to juggle a lot of different viewpoints, many of which serve as different audience surrogates. (Till the fourth book, at least. I don't hate the fourth and fifth books, but he shouldn't have broken his formula of -1, +2 viewpoints.)

Tyrion is a little bit of an author surrogate and audience surrogate at once, as Martin has pointed out, but he's obviously neither a Mary Sue nor a mysterious all-knowing character because his life is shit.

Roberts tries a large cast without one obvious audience surrogate, to some degree. Swerve, Drift, Ratchet, Chromedome, Rewind, Velocity, Anode and others are all presented as audience surrogates at different times. Never Megatron, though, and never Rung, as far as I can see.

If I were to pick the main audience surrogates for MTMTE, I'd pick Rodimus & Nautica, and I think that's why Nautica sometimes came off as a bit Mary Sue--which may have been part of why Roberts vivisected her memory of Skids and left it as a gaping emotional hole, to try and reduce too much of the Mary Sue-ness. But both of them tend to be at the center of stories, to be energetic, capable, intelligent, but also make a shit-ton of mistakes.

Basically, this is a long rant to say that "Mary Sue" has essentially become meaningless. It's meant to apply to characters who are 1) hypercompetent 2) blatant audience surrogates for one particular demographic watching/reading the piece. Marketing rarely goes after one particular demographic anymore. YA books are read by everyone, even if teenage girls are a bit overrepresented. Fantasy novels are read by everyone, even if they get discovered often by 12-year-old boys. Characters like Rey and Finn in Star Wars are accused of being Mary Sues but they have enough setbacks, flaws and interesting character arcs that I'd argue they're just audience surrogates.

Rung never fulfills that basic quality of being an audience stand-in, so he's not a Mary Sue. He's occasionally an author surrogate but most of the time he's just a weird and interesting character.

IN CONCLUSION... I spent like an hour on this post when I was supposed to be writing something else.

 

Lot to chew on there! I appreciate the position, but there's a bit of a logic hiccup here.

I don't believe "Mary Sue" means "audience surrogate".

Remember where the term arose from: fanfiction. Mary Sues were traditionally OCs, and referred to self-insert and/or wish-fulfillment characters.

Like you've described, an audience surrogate or audience identification character is designed to place the reader in the same position as the PoV character. This is generally so that the reader has a guide or foothold in the story. As a result, a Mary Sue by definition is not an "audience surrogate" because it's a surrogate or wish fulfillment device of the author. One of the reasons most Mary Sue characters are so reviled is in part that they're utterly alien to any other party than the author and often ruined pre-existing works. The term as devised was not really meant to refer to largely original works.

That said, Mary Sue is a term that's evolved (or devolved) over time, so it's not much of an assailable error. It started as one specific thing, and now has metastasised (by what could loosely be described as geek culture) into basically "a character that wins at everything with minimal to no effort", i.e. just crappy writing. Whether that's a protagonist, antagonist, side character, self-insert, audience surrogate, whatever, it's just poor form. This is just sloppy application by angry fans that hate something. I suspect that someday Mary Sue will be the literary shorthand for "asshole" because it's basically becoming a slur that's applied to whatever someone doesn't like.

However, long running franchises are interesting insofar that you can have something that approximates a bona-fide old school Mary Sue. The author can start introducing "original characters" to the canon, which is where the analysis of MTMTE/LL begins.

One of the things I tried to do in my discussion with @Focksbot posit that there's a bit of a range here. On one hand, you have your traditional "bad writing" style Mary Sues, the kind of characters everyone makes fun of. You know who they are - the ones that appear in Harry Potter fanfiction and have names like "Raven Mystery Crystal Starshine", have a half-unicorn/half-dragon patronus, and the body of a genetically blessed 22 year old at age 17. These are the characters you're talking about - the ones that "never make mistakes" and have no flaws.

However, there are more subversive ways to have a "Mary Sue".

Consider this: let's say I rewrote Star Wars, only this time it's from the perspective of a behind the scenes character who never interferes with the storyline. Let's make him a young boy with Space Asthma, a missing leg, and terminal cancer which means he'll be dead by Episode 6. He never heroically saves Han and Chewie by jumping out in the middle of a stormtrooper battle or anything. However, I re-write each scene so that he's magically fixing the Millennium Falcon so that it always works when Han needs it to by hiding in the floorboards and playing with wires or secretly slipping Han Solo special drugs in his Space Coffee so that he doesn't die when frozen in carbonite. However, when something bad does happen, it's because Wheezy didn't make it on time - he's made a mistake.

I think it's clear that Wheezy is a Mary Sue. I've robbed Star Wars of all it's agency because I felt that Solo and the gang needed to be taken down a peg. Everything everyone does, all their victories or losses, are the result of Wheezy. However, he's failed, has flaws, and is by all accounts pathetic.

Now Roberts is not a terrible writer. He's done things that I find boring or annoying, but he's hardly awful. He's proven time and time again that he's clever. That's why I can't say for 100% certain if Rung is or is not a self-insert/wish fulfillment OC.

My original points regarding Rung were:

• Rung might be a stand in for Roberts. Roberts "devised" a lot of the mythos of IDW's Transformers, including several massive concepts like Information Creep. Rung is part and parcel of the mythos of IDW's Transformers. Rung CREATED information creep.
• Rung has two "superpowers", including one that comes from a flaw that's not really a flaw. First, he regenerates. No other Transformer to my knowledge can do this. He regenerated from massive brain trauma, too. This power was never explored. As someone pointed out, it has some limitations and he might be able to die through physical trauma. However, it effectively makes him immortal and unkillable because his second power basically sets it up so he'll rarely if ever be in a situation where he'll die - he generates a field that makes people forget he even exists. So in short: he's obscenely hard to kill, and any vendetta anyone could even remotely have against him is immediately erased.
• Mary Sues are known for their "feats". Either they routinely outperform the rest of the cast, or the plot cannot progress without the Mary Sue's intervention. Rung sidesteps most of that, and that's not surprising. Roberts is not an unskilled writer. However, he tipped his hand at the end - the Lost Light Crew could not have defeated Functionist Primus/Cybertron without him. In other words, but for Rung, everyone would have died. He was essential.

So to clarify: Rung is NOT by any stretch of the imagination Princess Raven Blackwater Dragonclaw McHotness with laser eyes and the power to make every man in the tri-state area pass out due to raging erections or Punch Rockgroin, strangely beefy and magnetic hero of Space Mutiny. However, he might be Robert's wish fulfillment self-insert.

I'm not trying to vilify Roberts. Rung was entertaining for the most part, and pretty harmless. Again, he was well written enough to not be a giant foam-finger waving pain in the ass (Anode and Lug seem to have taken that particular spot for most fans). However, IF Rung is a stand in for Roberts.... well, he's also god. A weak, anemic god, but a god nonetheless with several powers and abilities that make him fairly special and irreplaceable. MTMTE/LL (and Transformers as they stand in IDW) literally would not have happened without Rung - and what better way for a longtime Transformers fan to integrate themselves into a franchise they love so much?

 

Nova Prime.

 

I feel like I enjoyed some aspect in every new character added in. While some of them didn't go the way I wanted in one way or another, I feel that I would welcome back almost all of them for another shot. In fact, it's the ones that I feel were flawed that I'd probably like to see again the most so that another writer and another setting might do them better.

 

I mean, she's a leader/hero from a world that worships Primes who finds out that the only current Prime is not a believer in his own title.

I do feel like she needed more in terms of resolution, but she has very clear and explicit motivation. And was around in the comic a few years.

 

I know. But I kinda felt the ending was kinda insulting seeing how Pyra Magna became the next Prime after Optimus. Also doesn't help that most people will be against Pyra Magna cause she is a character we know nothing about and trying to go against someone who stands for truth and justice. I got no idea what is going on in the comics, but Pyra Magna is being pushed to the center. When Pyra Magna gave the final speech it felt like the story was basically saying "all of IDW built up to Pyra Magna being the ruler of cybertron." She was introduced so late in the timeline.

Imagine if in Avengers: Endgame a newly introduced character. came out and just killed the villian. Meaning "The whole MCU revolved around this one character."

It didn't feel deserved. But what am I saying I am not even at Optimus Prime yet! By the way is Optimus Prime and Lost Light even good?

I feel with this new IDW reboot they can introduce all of the characters properly. Cause it doesn't make sense why a chatacter like Cosmos did almost nothing at the beginning of the timeline, Than became a major character. I feel they could introduce Pyra Magna earlier to give her a more important role.

I never read Optimus Prime... yet. But most people won't root for the reversed colored cyan colored gender swapped Optimus.

But she did have a clear goal.

 

I just didn't find her sympathetic at all. Yes, she had good reasons for distrusting Prime for how he was using her faith, but she shows herself to be kind of a power-hungry hypocrite throughout the series, like when Optimus does literally anything. She's been shown to be trying to plot against Optimus with Slide, Marissa, Prowl, whoever was walking down the hallway at the time. (Also, this didn't really come up in story but her whole goal about "spreading the light of Primus across the galaxy" sounds suspiciously like the imperialism of old Cybertron and our Crusades.)

All this inherently doesn't make her a bad character, but more space was absolutely needed to make her resolution as the new Mistress of Flame (suddenly ok with Optimus now after still hating him a few issues prior and not really seeing this change of heart or how it came about) and the last narrator in Unicron feel earned.

Just my two cents.

Really hoping you can actually have these in-depth conversations and analyses like these with character motivations in the reboot.

 

She didn't become Prime, she became the Mistress of Flame. So she's a spiritual leader to the followers of the Way of Flame, Caminus' religion.

Pyra didn't kill the villain or become the new leader.

Also, Pyra was around for 3 years and appeared in over twenty issues. Didn't just come out of no-where- at some point a character is no longer a new one that comes out of nowhere

 

I was wrong in certain areas.

I know Pyra didn't kill Unicron and finish the fight. I really didn't understand the ending cause I don't know what the ending was referring too. I know Pyra Magna wasn't introduced out of tin air, but what I meant by that was she was introduced very late into the comics.

 

Drift
The DJD
Nautica.
I don't think she got enough development to be a good or strong character, but I really like Velocity. I wouldn't mind seeing her reappear and be more fleshed out.

 

Buster Bob and D0C is my favourite! then-
Drift
Tarn
Rung
Nautica
Pharma
Stardrive

 

Was rather fond of most of the IDW original creations but Rung was my stand out favourite. I really he and the others pop up again in the new comics.

 

Yea, she was something of a minor part- "We need a doctor and Ratchet and First Aid are busy in other parts of the plot," but she had a nice design and attitude.

 

Yeah, seems like both the Autobots and Decepticons are a bit short on doctors for a species that spent billions of years at war.

 

Aileron is far and away my favorite IDW created character. She's awesome.
I think Nautica was pretty good too. She didn't get a lot of characterization, though.


Honorable mention: Drift. I hated him at first but as time went on I grew to like him (under Roberts' pen).
Victorion wasn't terrible either. I didn't like the torchbearer angel, but I thought their designs were fairly good.

 

For me, it's probably:

- Minimus Ambus
- Verity Carlo
- Drift
- Nautica
- Tarn
- Rung
- Pharma

 

A Mary Sue is a type of author surrogate, not audience.

 

Because he didn't do any Universe saving bullshit until after we had spent 75 fucking issues establishing and getting to know him first.

Showing up outta nowhere and saving the day from the start is the kinda shit Optimus "Biggest Mary Sue of them all" Prime does.