To me, one of the most funnest concepts and having the most potential from the IDW comics was the scavengers; a rag tag group of decepticons who were like the loser version of the guardians of the galaxy. In a time when many fans are demanding a break from the status quo series, focusing on the same war on either earth or cybertron, i feel like the scavengers can be that new concept. Either in cartoon, comic or movie form, i think they would work very successfully.

I for one liked the original group of lesser but existing characters rather than quickly killing one off just to shoe horn in a random original one. I would love to see the original crew(krok, crankcase, flywheels, misfire,spinister), but would not be appose to recasting the crew with similar bots. if i had my pick i would go with mostly underused or forgotten bots, mostly from the unicron trilogy since it never gets a lot of love. In the scenario i would have the crew as demolishor, cyclonus/snowcat, slipstream, mudflap, thunderblast and tidal wave as a member and the ship.

anyway, how do others feel? would you love to see the scavengers story revisited, and if so how? do you want the original cast or a new one and who would it include?

 

Not particularly, but then, I never liked them to begin with - to me, they were as a bad as any other Decepticon, just real incompetent at it. You have the Scavengers using that one Autobot as firewood, then Krok executing him, then when Fulcrum verbally tore into the DJD, he didn't oppose the Decepticons' genocide of organics at all. They're not good people, and they're not people I would want to read or watch.

 

They were fun characters. No they are not good people. They're still Decepticons with a grey sense of morality at best. But its the writing that made them worth reading; who they meet, what they do, what happens to them. I think its wrong of you to impose any sense of honor or nobility upon them and find them lacking when they clearly display none, as they were never intended to have any in the first place.

 

It's funny for about half a second in concept and then it gets old and ridiculously unfunny, especially how Roberts wrote them. Every time they showed up was an irritating waste of space.

 

My only question is...where's Detritus? He seems like a natural fit being a Decepticon-aligned Junkion.

 

granted but the concept has merit if written right. the prob with IDW is everybody was written as being morally grey or ambiguous

 

"Fun characters, but not good people" sounds like an oxymoron when I'm supposed to be rooting for them. As it is, I was rooting for them and the DJD to destroy each other. It's kind of like the Iran-Iraq war - you wish they both could lose. As for it being wrong of me to impose any sense of honor or nobility, I don't think so. I kind of like my protagonists to have a sense of common decency. The Scavenger didn't even show that in their inaugural issue - they were vultures, scumbags who happened to be up against monsters.

If written right. As you said, IDW was too obsessed with ambiguity and moral greys. The fact that they had Autobot MTOs instead of having that particular abomination be Decepticon-exclusive. all while trying to make Megatron's backstory sympathetic says everything about their sensibilities.

 

I will say, I fully agree with you about having good guys do things like create what are essentially child soldiers. Instead of making me care about both sides, it makes me care about...well, neither side, since they're both kind of awful. It's like, "Can I take Tailgate, Rung, Nautica, Bumblebee, Beachcomber, Mirage, Blaster, Ultra Magnus, the Protectobots, Ratchet, and I guess maybe Thundercracker, put them somewhere safe, and then let everyone else destroy each other? Because right now, I don't care about what happens to most of these individuals." I don't mind villains with sympathetic traits if handled right, and in a wartime setting some good guys would have to do things that wouldn't seem pleasant or be considered 100% morally acceptable in times of peace, but the way IDW handled it often made me lose interest in both sides.

 

And that's why writers have to be careful, not just with their shades of gray, but with how they portray their characters in general. You just paraphrased the eight deadly words of writing, what every writer ought to dread: "I don't care what happens to these people." And if that happens, the audience goes away and consumes something else.

Speaking of the muck that IDW ran the Autobots through, I was reading through Sandstorm's IDW entry and I couldn't help but think that he had the right idea - plenty of bots on both sides committed horrible crimes and got away with it, and the Republic of Cybertron was a sham run by a war criminal who worked for one of the setting's Biggest Bads - there was no other way that the people Sandstorm killed would have seen justice.

 

Yeah, when extrajudicial killings seem like the most sympathetic choice, you know you messed up somewhere....
I think I may have had something of a similar issue with Prime. While it wasn't as bad as IDW in the "both sides are interchangeable" department, it had a lot of grim moments that felt like they were mainly there just to be "mature" or "edgy", and that made it hard to care about what ended up happening-especially towards the end of Season 2. With Prime, I was like "Okay, so Bulkhead, Ratchet, and Smokescreen, I guess, can take Agent Fowler and all of humanity to another habitable planet, Knock Out, Breakdown, and Soundwave can migrate to, I dunno, the G1 cartoon universe or something and be bad guys there, and the rest of the cast can fight out their stupid, pointless, depressing war over a mostly-dead Cybertron forever."

 

If we never saw the Scavengers again I don't think I'd even notice.

And that says... a lot given the characters I do remember.

 

like i seaid, if written right. like in my original post, if done similar to the lines of the guardians of the galaxy, who in their own movie were all petty scummy on their own, came together to be to do some good while still being sketchy and morally questionable. things like GOTG, firefly, final space or any other series or shows with randos coming together

 

One of the problems with Roberts’ take on the Scavengers was the characterization. Most of the characters were obscure, so it makes sense why Roberts chose to reinvent them, but it felt like he didn’t choose the right characters. For example, Spinister. That name alone doesn’t fit a bumbling fool who is allegedly the most unintelligent Cybertronian in the universe.

 

Yes, I didn’t like Spinister being completely reinvented like he was. The others had the personality they should have only in more depth.

I was hoping for a Scary Movie Doofy like reveal where the dumbest character was actually the much more intelligent and manipulative than he portrayed himself as. But no. Roberts played Spinister straight.

I don’t mind the Scavengers having a dumb character on their team. He should have been replaced by someone who has zero established personality. There are a lot of characters in Transformers who would fit that criteria.

 

While I think there's a good idea for a story in there, it seriously needs to be more self-aware than what Roberts did. He always seemed to conveniently forget how the Decepticons were a genocidal faction of bigots and that it doesn't really matter how 'justified' they were in their descent to radicalism, they were radicals that crossed the line. Without a doubt there'd be Autobots who cross the line and have morally questionable methods, but at the end of the day the Cons are worse and IDW always seemed to forget or underplay that fact.

IDW failed miserably in their quest to try and paint the war with a lot of grey because all they really did was go out of their way to present the Autobots as often corrupt and evil and the Decepticons as good bois who dindu nuffin. It's also a bit eyebrow raising when they take the kingpin of hate and genocide and make him into a sensitive soul who was just misunderstood and pushed to the brink.

Similarly, Getaway. They took someone who was ultimately right about all his scathing critiques, despite his very questionable methods, and when he reappears he's an incompetent and irrational buffoon because that's probably what Tumblr wanted to see rather than what made a better story. Roberts has been rather open about how Getaway was used as a strawman that would voice the totally wrong and not at all accurate criticisms levied towards him in regards to Autobot Megatron, but he was mostly right, as were the others who took part in that mutiny.

The whole thing could've been a self-aware commentary about how so many just began reading MTMTE because of shipping, relationships and not really caring about the larger lore and universe it took place in and just looking to consume media with similar superficial elements, and they often viewed MTMTE in a vaccuum where Megatron as just another cinnamon roll for them to write cute, vapid headcanons about where nothing he did in the past really matters. A slap in the face reminder that he's not some charming sad old man with a cat, he's possibly one of the most evil beings to have ever existed, and to make it crystal clear: there are more that hate him than are indifferent or like him as a friend, and there's a valid reason for that. Welcome to the world of the Transformers, this guy you seem to wanna hug and ship with x or y is actually a really awful guy and is basically responsible for a majority the maladies their species face.

Now granted Roberts does eventually put Megs to death, even though it's gutless, reserved and off-screen but he was sure to give Getaway a nice gratuitous death scene that I'm sure Tumblr adored.

Honestly I could rant for hours in regards to what IDW did wrong with everything, it's a treasure trove. Also when I say "self aware" in fiction I don't mean cringy Deadpool winking at the camera and doing fingerguns, I mean stepping back for a moment and thinking about the larger context and setting of a universe.

 

This is really my biggest problem with MTMTE/LL, if something stops going the "nice" way so to speak then characters are just flanderized or rewritten to make it work. Getaway was a smug asshole even when he kicked Rodimus' posse off the ship but he was justified and right. The most unrealistic part of the series was that the addition of robot Hitler to the crew didn't result in countless assassination attempts or the entire crew fucking off as soon as they heard about it. There was an interesting storyline going with Getaway and then as you said, nope, suddenly he goes from "we didn't sign up to be Hitler's therapy group" to "rargh I brainwash or kill anyone who doesn't like me, also I'm destined to be Prime". I never liked the Scavengers but the same thing happened to them too, they went from this surreal look at the lower ranks of the Decepticons and why some people signed on to "aren't they just precious?" because apparently not being ruthlessly evil all the time = being cute and fuzzy and getting into low-rent "Friends" plots.

 

I used to say that the Furman run was the only salvageable thing about IDW1, and that the only thing I'd like to see is Furman pick back up where he left off.

I've had a change of heart, though. As absolutely lackluster as the entirety of everything after Maximum Dinobots was, I don't think Furman could get that lightning back in the bottle given his time away from the universe and the flow being broken. So my answer now is that I don't think ANYTHING should be brought back from IDW1.

 

Still a better series than IDW2, even at the same number of issues in.

 

I never like Gateway (and was glad that he had died), but despite that he does make a good point. Grant he could have only Megatron be killed while the others are left alone. I don’t maybe like send Megatron to a different planet and the rest somewhere else.

 

Didn't realize there was so much trouble with IDW 1. I thought painting it morally grey gave us a way to at least see the conflict from everyone's point of view, whether you agreed with those views or not. And I think a lot of this goes back to that heroic good vs evil theme that is seen so often in cartoons. Yes it's a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it's war. It's not simple, and the Autobots are going to come out dirty too. With that perspective, I could definitely see the series feeling very muddled.

On the Scavengers, were they good people? Not really. I did, however, find them entertaining and wouldn't mind seeing them again. They've got a decent dumb humor thing going.