Yeah the Functionists never became that powerfull in the main universe, it seems corrupt as the senate was it did serve as a buffer for worse. In the mainverse they where dethroned by Megatron.
In the Functionistverse it seems they eventually lost power to them.

 

Good point.
The Decepticons had an empire at one point. It would be interesting to get some comics feature in that time period. I doubt we will ever get that since Hasbro/IDW seems to have a policy that issues/Mini-series that feature in the past of the great war always have to have a "happy ending" but i would very much like to see how Roberts envisions life in that Decepticon ruled society.
I know we have seen the DJD at work in Skids flashback, but i'd like to see more aspects of that society and i kinda doubt Skids flashback was from around that time.

 

If you don't do the jobs you hate, you may not be outright killed, but you will be allowed to starve to death or freeze in the streets. And if you lack the skills or talents our society deems valuable, you may not be able to exchange your labor for enough money to buy things necessary to survive, i.e food and shelter.

And you think it's that different in our society? Careers correlate with respect, prestige, and rights and quality of life. We're not so blatant about it, but we're not in a comic book. If you are not very intelligent, you get consigned to being a burger flipper, or a gardener, or moving heavy things in a warehouse. None of which confer you with an equal status in our society, or give you equal rights (consider how our criminal justice system disproportionately affects those who are lower class, whereas those who can afford good lawyers weasel out of justice all the time--when they're even prosecuted).

Even if you ARE lucky enough to be intelligent or have other traits/skills that are rarer and more valuable, you don't have an equal shot at moving into the more respected positions in society if you're lower class. Many smart tanks in our society still have to be miners and dirt-movers, not scientists. Functionism is basically an extremely exaggerated, black-and-white, reflection of our own society's class systems and the evils of Social Darwinist thinking (that is present in both Functionism and many of our own culture's beliefs about class, labor, and resource distribution).

 

They're both very messed up in their own way. The Functionist represents everything that a society can do so wrong with like trying to control everything in life while the DJD represents what can go horribly wrong with a noble intended revolt that eventually turned into something just as horrific as the Functionists if one lost their way.

 

There is a difference between "Not going to do this because I hate it" or "Lacking valuable skills" and "We're gonna actively kill them all because they have no use".

 

Sure. There's a difference between beating a guy to death with a rock, and just coming across a guy bleeding to death from being beaten with a rock and doing nothing, letting him die. But the guy is still dead either way.

I think I elaborated on the differences in my post and explained how the metaphor works. There is no need to tell me "There is a difference" when I have already said there is a difference, and commented on the differences.  

 

There's a difference between a society being divided into stratas and genocidal policy based on periodic purposed rounding up unwanted citizen and executing them en masse all this also motivated by religion. No matter how hard you try to put a sign of equality between these two. One is imperfection of human nature, the second one is organised genocide on purpose. You're right now trying hard to pretend that a society being flawed and imperfect is equal to a combination of North Korea and Taliban.


The big difference is that even with social stratas in place it's still technically illegal to prevent someone from changing work and move from place to place, but in the state Roberts was describing it's illegal to simply change job... And probably even to quit it.

Roberts is clearly going for Orwellian vibe here and being pretty blatant about it. I'm pretty sure he was not intending Fuctionism as a metaphor to a modern day western society.

Another fallacy is that you forgot that it's about comparing DJD to Functionism, so it's about taking both things as they are in universe. At the face falue they're written in story. And at this value Fuctionists simply swim in oceans of corpses that DJD had yet to match despite their best efforts.

So whether you think it's metaphor or not it doesn't really matter if you are to make comparison between these two.

 

I'm not sure you have a grasp on how allegorical writing works. Things are not meant to be exactly the same in allegorical writing: that would defeat the purpose.

An Orwellian vibe? You mean that thing that so many people are worried about right now, with the increased amount of spying and surveillance of citizens in much of the world, and the decreases in privacy? So TOTALLY unrelatable and irrelevant to readers in modern day Western society right now  

As they are in-universe? How funny you should say that. Perhaps you could point to me the "oceans of corpses" that the Functionists (metaphorically) swam in in-universe. You know, as opposed to the alternate universe Functionist Universe.

Anyway, I believe I made it quite clear in my post my personal reasons for finding the DJD scarier than the Functionists. Who has the higher bodycount does not matter when it comes to my personal belief of which is scarier, because my fear is not based on those stats, nor did I invoke any such reasoning to explain my belief.

Hopefully that clarifies some things  

 

I doubt the OP is about the Functionists in the main timeline, because under the Senate they never were more than a mild ideological excuse. That's the first thing.

Second thing, the closest thing to the parable about modern society is the Senate and their order before the war. Consumptionism and showbusiness used to steer the public attention from what's wrong and the practical impossibility to change one's ocupation included. Sure a miner could try, write and publish... Just to be set in their place by police thugs. But that's the Senate.

Third thing, in the Functionists "what if" timeline a single mass recall is more than DJD ever did.

DJD are a group of thugs who could do anything because Megatron put them into this position. It's not even them what's any unsettling, but the regime behind them. Just like communist political officers, without the state behind them they don't matter. The one thing that's making their doing more scary than pre-war Senate thugs is just that they had free reign for longer.

 

Data Sticks?

Not just the Mass Recall of them in the Functionist Universe, but it was stated that Data Sticks were once one of the most common alt-modes to the point that they were basically enslaved.

It's still unclear over whether or not Rumble and Frenzy are part of that class, but Rewind seems to be the only one we've seen in modern times.
Every time we've seen any other Data sticks, it's been a flashback.

Beast alt-modes, like Ravage, Laserbeak, and Buzzsaw, (And presumably Steeljaw, Ramhorn, Overkill and the other Cassette Beast that we've seen), were also pretty low on the totem pole. There's a reason that Ratbat's reformating into a Beast cassette was a Punishment for the senator.

And then there's Terminus' treatment.
Instead of trying to save and rebuild him, Functionist logic left him to be abandoned because he wasn't worth the cost of repairs.
Same issues noted that when Messatine was being evacuated, The miners were told they could be evacuated after all the important bots, and if there was any room left.
It's been stated a number of times that the Manual class was the first to fully embrace Decepticon ideology, and There's probably a good reason for that
So from that we can make the assumption that the Miners/Manual Class have also been dying in large amounts.

And then there's the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy and the fact it's edited every time an Altmode goes extinct.
Started in the 700s, and we don't know where it's at at this point.

The Functionist of the "Prime" universe have a sizeable body count, it's more subtle.

 

Your earlier statement seemed to imply that you don't believe deaths due to inaction (i.e the government failing to save people from preventable poverty-caused deaths) count in their body count. Could you clarify whether you would like to count deaths due to inaction? Because that supports the point I was making earlier: that many people die in our own world because they don't or can't do valuable work. Just like under Cybertronian Functionism. And presumably, under Cybertron's current government, which appears to be capitalist and contains poverty-filled ghettos.

I'm sorry, but I don't share that assumption. There are many reasons to rise up and revolt beyond "we're being killed". Oppression and inequality do not have to be heavily fatal to breed discontent. (I don't disagree with your assumption. I just don't think we have enough evidence to say that one way or another).

Sure, data sticks might be rare now. That's hardly proof that the Functionists killed them in-main-universe. There are a number of factors to explain why they're rarer: Constructed Cold bots alone would make that happen, since they're highly unlikely to be deliberately put into Data stick bodies. There IS a natural death rate for Transformers, and simply never adding new Data Sticks would ensure their numbers would eventually decline. Add if you add in the higher rates of starvation, lack of access to medical repairs, shelter, etc that come with poverty and lower status, then you further explain their rare numbers.

I'm perfectly alright with holding governments responsible for deaths through inaction in this discussion: this supports my idea that Cybertron is an allegory for our own society's class systems and issues. So far you can only show that the Functionists could have "swam in an ocean of corpses" by counting death through inaction. By the same reasoning, many governments in our own world are also swimming in an ocean of corpses.

 

The DJD are like a small group of serial killers, roaming around the country picking and choosing who they target. Scary, yes... but in the end you can fight them. You may even win.

The Functionists? They are Nazis. Simple. They are the power and what is even worse than what they can do to you is that they can, through that threat, get you to do their work for them to turn you into one of them.

 

DJD="The Inquisition from warhammer 40K"
Functionists= FUCKING NAZI'S
Do the math
Also the "Recalls" are essentially remote firing squads

 

The DJDs were losers who needed an ideology to give their lives meaning. So they ran with it when Megatron gave it to them.
The Functionalists, while awful, are masters of their own destiny. That certainly makes them more interesting characters than the DJD.

As for which unnerves me more? They both do. I'm a student of history, and history is littered with the crimes of both groups. Loser thugs who did unspeakable things in the name of an ideology that have their lives meaning and zelots who oppressed the masses in the name of control. They're both irredeemable piles of scum. So lacking a "both" vote? I voted DJD, as they unnerve me a bit more due to the "zealous loser thug" thing.

 

The Functionists scare me more. The DJD are a group of horrible, awful professional torturers, but even when they attack a large group, the group has the option to fight back as seen in the

Spoiler

Dying of the Light

storyarc. While they are pretty much undefeatable, you can fight against them. You at least have a chance.

The Functionists enact government sponsored murders, and as a result, have "law and order" on their side. For instance, if you were being attacked by the DJD and decided to run and get away, to try to escape, you have a slight chance. You can't run away from the Functionists unless you leave the planet and how easy would that be?

Government sponsored evil is always more dangerous and awful, because you have no one to turn to for help (unless you have a super secret underground rebel group, but with the Functionists' ability to literally see through the eyes of it's citizens, the chance of that is slim.). The fact they are willing to mutilate citizens publically to show they were not "going with the system", and then the fact they had to bring in another form (flatheads) because there were so many empurata victims people were getting used to them speaks volumes about how terrible they are.

 

They have recall devices installed in the populace. You, in effect, are constantly carrying a loaded gun pointed at your head, that they can fire whenever the government decides to.

So you need to leave the planet and invest in a signal blocker or surgery.

 

There you go, that's even more horrible.

 

But in a modern capitalist society, when you can't work or won't work, your head isn't exploded off your body. People aren't made obsolete in a sociological sense in the functionist system, they are LITERALLY made obsolete. Ghettos are not a product, they are a constructed entity where everyone must live with the terror in the back of their mind that someone is either going to come in one day and gun every single one of you down, or will press a button and literally kill every single person like you is going to die. Millions in an instant. If you want to use a modern comparison, it's far more like russian Stalinism and the gulags. You referenced the difference between the Functionist universe and the main universe. But the Functionist universe WAS going to be the main universe. It's literally what it was evolving into without Megatron. He prevented them ever getting the traction they would have had. Even in the main universe, they were perfectly happy to irradiate infants to see if they could make them "better". It's a terrifying system that sadly has a lot of similarities to what we've seen in the last century.

Not only that but one of the key selling points, perhaps only selling points, of capitalism is self-determination. In theory you try to be anything you fight for, regardless of your race gender or social background (I emphasize in theory). Functionism doesn't just determine where you are socially, it literally decides on the day you are born what you will spend the rest of your very very long life doing. Tailgate was mad a janitor when he was 2 weeks old. No dreams, no hopes, not even the effect of "well if I could escape to XYZ I could have a life". There is no escape, there are no refugees. There are no stories a hundred years later of defectors who went on to be truly brilliant and renowned. The functionists own the entire planet. There is ZERO reason to hope. And the best scenario if you try to fight the system is that they disfigure you. That's the BEST outcome. Not only that but where you can go, who you can speak or be friends with, what TRAIN you can use? If capitalism it's the very worst of it we've seen in the days of things like American segregation expanded onto an industrialized scale, and removing any chance of figures who would rise to speak out and fan the flames of revolution (giving that the entire point of the FU is that people like that never stood up when they should have)

One of the scariest scenes in MTMTE has nothing to do with the DJD or brains in the mouth or torture. It's Minimus being asked to show his alt mode despite the fact he had ID from before he left the planet saying he was a valuable person. He'd gone away as someone who mattered, that being a minesweeper mattered. He's come back to a world which is beginning to finalize its isolation. Going forward there will be no wars (in their eyes) and no use for such a skill. So Minimus is now someone who is asked to show his alt mode regardless of ID, and be questioned as to what it is. What use is it? Excusing the dramatics of the story, Minimus has a ticking clock above his head because very soon he's going to be seen as the new disposable class and he might very well be killed. That's horrifying.


The DJD are the secret police, but the police is nothing without the party behind them. We've had a thousand thousand people like them and whats ultimately terrifying about them is not their actions but the society that they are a product of. 5 broken people cannot compare to an entire societal structure that is built to not only trap you in their perception of your value but is free to determine whether that value means it's worth more if an entire subculture doesn't wake up in the morning. Even the DJD are in broad terms worthless without the Megatronian Decepticon ideology behind them. They operated for all of...4, 5 years post-war before they got taken out? The only reason they were able to take down Black Shadow is because they had a very temporary fuel source created by time travel nonsense (Tarn with all his upgrades could defensively hold his own against Overlord. He did no damage and Overlord didn't stop grinning the entire time). Without the frame work, groups like that are doomed to either the fringes where everyone is against them or destruction. They can't survive for long as just "5 guys and a torture chamber".


No. I've read your argument and just looking at our own history, whether you want to look at the British Empire, Facists, Communism, Capitalist dictatorships whatever...when someone can do more then just hurt you and yours, or horrifying you, when they can control your life or your mind. When they literally can change your soul before you are even conscious. When they OWN you, in a way you can't even conceive of defying, in a way that is so complete and inescapable...that's unnerving. That's literally giving me goosebumps just thinking of it.

 

Agreed. As scary as the DJD were, the whole "being OWNED" is, in my opinion, so much much worse. Where do you run to for help? Who saves you?

 

The Functionists.
the DJD are 5 guys that can be killed.
Functonism is a way of life, a form of racism and mass delusion. and if recent elections are anything to go on, that's a force more powerful than any weapon.