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earthstellar · 2 years

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how would you go about doing SG bumblebee/goldbug? i have a few of my own thoughts but i’d love to hear yours :0

Thanks for asking! :)

There have been a few slightly varied depictions of SG!Bumblebee/Goldbug, but I'll just take a general approach here and not fixate too much on any one story. :)

It's been a while since I've read SG content, and I've never done so with too much of a focus on Bumblebee specifically, so please take all this with a grain of salt as I haven't had any time to go back and re-read the relevant content! :')

Bumblebee: A Basic Character Trait Analysis

With Bumblebee in the main canon, we can isolate a few common traits across almost all of his various appearances:

Friendly

Fairly outgoing if shy or awkward at times

Young (by which I mean, inexperienced or less experienced than others)

Highly motivated and energetic

Brave / Curious (he's a scout, so this makes sense)

Cares about others / his team mates

We tend to find these traits endearing!

In fact, this is why Bumblebee is often the "child audience appeal" character, and features so heavily in merchandise and advertising!

It's also why he could carry his own solo film; It is easy to believe such a character would be willing to engage with humanity, overcome any fear/hesitancy with a wide-eyed honest approach (literally, they have redesigned his model several times over the years to emphasise his optics to hammer this home visually), and he's least likely to come across as scary to younger kids because his inquisitive and open nature comes across as friendly and non-threatening-- Even though he's a giant robot from space.

But then!

In Shattered Glass, we tend to see him depicted as:

Ruthless

Disinterested in others for the most part unless they serve a purpose for his goals

Highly focused (could overlap easily with highly motivated) but only when he takes personal interest

Far less of a team player unless necessary

Cunning but willing to abandon a plan or situation if he deems the risk to himself or his goals to be too great

We tend to find these traits intense or even off-putting; SG Bumblebee comes across as more selfish or manipulative, and a lot is lost from what we find interesting, compelling, relatable, or enjoyable about his original universe counterpart in this trait-swap.

(Personally, I think we never really got a Shattered Glass style episode in any animated media at least in part because Bumblebee is mostly the "kid-friendly" character, and doing SG Bumblebee might be considered by Hasbro to be too jarring or potentially genuinely upsetting for the target younger audience for them to ever commit to greenlighting a legit SG episode.

Among other reasons, lol, but Bumblebee is usually specifically used to appeal to the youngest children watching any TF media, so I can see how they would want to dodge this potential concern.)

Why This Is An Issue:

Generally, in the context of the SG comics, this is why Bumblebee/Goldbug can be a little off-putting or outright unlikable for some people.

We don't really see him as being Bumblebee anymore, even an alternate universe version of him, because his core traits are just totally removed and swapped out.

Like I said in my other SG analysis post, in order to relate to the characters and continue to accept them as different versions of characters we are already familiar with, at least SOME recognisable elements of some core traits needs to remain.

Otherwise, they become just a little too far removed, and we stop being able to really see them as who they are supposed to be a mirror image of. They start to become new, different characters altogether, in an unfamiliar universe, which doesn't work when the unfamiliar universe is, well, unfamiliar-- We have no connection to it, once the characters lose our interest or become too unrecognisable.

This isn't universal, of course, but this tends to be one of the problems with Transformers SG content in general; I love the concept 100%, but there needs to be a balance with the trait-swapping.

Some Possible Ways to Address SG Trait Swap And Make It Slightly Less Jarring: Bumblebee Edition

To retain more of a connection to Bumblebee as he appears in the SG universe, it would help to retain more of his original universe traits of genuine curiosity or sense of wonderment, carried over from his main universe counterpart which we are more familiar with.

Not only is Bumblebee a scout, so he does tend to exhibit a personal and professional curiosity-- This is why he is often the first bot to run into human beings when looking around or exploring a populated area for the first time.

But also, we associate curiosity with youth, and therefore with some degree of innocence.

While SG!Bumblebee/Goldbug is very experienced and more "hardcore" as it were, it would still be nice to retain this genuine kind of curiosity as a personality trait, rather than a professional trait.

Sure, he knows professionally that he needs to stay behind cover, or shouldn't ask questions. But personally, he is curious.

He wants to know, he investigates even when he maybe shouldn't and discovered some things as a result, or maybe we get a brief moment where he is less motivated by underhanded selfish goals and instead is primarily motivated purely by an interest in something that catches his eye, something he's spotted before anyone else has.

We could get some moments where his motivation is not something underhanded or cruel or conniving, but rather, just a little innocent curiosity. Just so we could see that we can recognise something in this character, so there's a little hope that comes up-- Oh, maybe he has the capacity for some good, maybe somewhere inside his spark there is something untouched by his outwardly aggressive behaviour, etc.

And while this may not be the case in whatever story, it is an engaging thought for readers/the audience to have. We still want to think there's something more under all that toughness and selfishness;

And that makes sense, because it adds some interest and potential depth to his character.

By which I mean, a common problem with SG is often that the characters are so obviously and overwhelmingly evil that they come across as one-dimensional villains, rather than alternate universe versions of characters we care about.

We generally don't get to see SG Autobots do anything other than be comically evil, unnecessarily cruel or violent, etc. and it winds up falling a little flat because it removes a lot of the complexity from these characters as we know them through their original universe counterparts.

Case Study: Star Trek Mirror Universe

I'm going to pick DS9's mirror universe, because there's a great example of this, good and bad.

A great example of "Trait Swap Balancing" (as I call it) is Kira, in the mirror universe episodes.

Kira, in the main universe, is a victim of violent oppression who obtains a position of relative authority on board a previously occupied space station which orbits her home world, out of a personal desire to oversee the restoration efforts and ensure her people are not taken advantage of by Starfleet immediately after the prior oppressors are made to leave the station, as she does not initially trust Starfleet to act on their promises or remain within their agreed upon limited remit.

Kira, in the mirror universe, is a collaborator and secured her position of power through political finesse and social manipulation, running the same space station in the mirror universe but as a singular representative of her planet's position in the oppressive interplanetary collaboration, lording her power over Federation indentured slave labourers as an Intendant.

Why is this so effective?

The audience doesn't totally hate Mirror Universe Kira, because we see that even in this universe, she is revealed to have some doubts about what is going on and the collaboration she is an active participant in once she is pressed further, and her emotional stability is obviously in question; She copes primarily through lashing out at others and engaging in overly-personal manipulative behaviour.

She is unstable in her position, and we get a sense eventually that she isn't as happy with the situation as it first seems. She believes that collaborating is her best chance to spare her people the worst of it, even if it means subjugating others, and this appears to be a root cause of much of her personal instability.

Thus, she retains some critical traits from her main universe counterpart, we recognise this as being the same character at heart, who made very different choices (choices which appropriately mirror her decisions in the primary universe).

She retains her love for her people, and we find out that her motivation in both universes is actually the same: She wants to keep her people safe. In the main universe, she did this by fighting against her oppressors. In the mirror universe, she attempted to do this by joining her oppressors.

So, there you go!

Even though Mirror Kira is awful, we don't hate her. Because we can see where her outwardly evil actions and harmful behaviours have a basis, deep down, that is rooted in a trait which makes us like the main universe Kira: She's trying to do good for her people in both universes.

In the Mirror Universe, this took a terrible path, and her behaviour and actions are oppressive and evil; She is still willing to go along with it in the Mirror Universe. The trait reversal is still very much present. She is still a "bad guy" in the Mirror Universe, very much so.

But we can still recognise some critical key traits from the main universe Kira in her, so we don't start to see Mirror Kira as another character entirely, we don't experience any disconnect there despite the extreme differences in their behaviour and thought processes...

And as a result, we can believe that this is really a Mirror Universe.

We don't have to like Mirror Kira. In fact, we're encouraged not to. We just have to accept her as a mirror universe counterpart to her character in the primary universe.

And retaining those core traits, as differently as they manifest in the mirror universe, is a great way to make Mirror Kira more interesting and familiar to us as an audience--

--Because we can see that yeah, this is the same person. Just different.

Comparing DS9 Mirror Universe to Shattered Glass

Compare this DS9 Mirror Universe example to a lot of the currently available Shattered Glass media, and how the characters are "trait reversed" in many of these stories.

Do you feel you can see any of the "liked traits" of the original universe characters present, in any way or to any degree, in the SG counterparts?

If so, in what situations? How did these liked traits come out, and how did it affect their decision making, if it did at all? Was this engaging? Did it help you recognise the character as more relatable to their original universe counterpart, or make them more definitively recognisable as being a mirrored version of the more familiar main universe version of the character?

If not, how might retaining certain liked traits help provide some character depth or improve recognisability of the SG version of the character? What are ways in which the SG character might become less "flat" feeling or more rounded out by the inclusion of some element of a likable trait or two from their original universe counterpart? What are some ways an SG character could retain some recognisable likable traits while still being suitably evil?

Just some questions to consider!

I think one of the main reasons why a lot of people struggle to get into the Shattered Glass media, despite the great concept behind all of it, is that the trait swap is just too much of a 100% trait swap, and we don't really get to see any recognisable traits underlying any of their actions, behaviours, or thought processes in the SG universe.

Of course, this is just my assessment of things; I hope this was an interesting read for you, and I'm sorry it took me a few days to get the time to type it all out! <3

#shattered glass #transformers #long post #reply #transformers analysis #tf sg #sg transformers #maccadam #maccadams #character analysis #tf bumblebee #sg bumblebee #goldbug

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gldngrl7 · 3 years

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Bridgerton - My Take

Words cannot express what it’s like to wait 20 years for to see something you never actually thought would get made and then have it turn out as wonderfully as it did. This is not spoiler free and these thoughts are just going to spill out as they come to me:

Casting is spot on. So happy! I did not find a single character disappointing, and when a character didn’t match my mental image from the book I usually like the show character better.

Costumes are amazing!

Francesca is STILL the forgotten Bridgerton! Where is Francesca??? Also apparently forgotten? Felicity Featherington, the youngest daughter of the Featherington clan. Maybe they’re keeping her locked in the nursery because she must be even younger than Hyacinth.

I hadn’t remembered Marina from TSPWL so having her marry Phillip was a twist I didn’t see coming. I hadn’t made the mental connection with her paramour, sir George, having the same surname. But as she drove away with him there was that dreadful feeling of knowing how that was all going to turn out, which made the trek at that much better.

My problem with the Marina/Phillip twist is that she was supposed to be a Bridgerton cousin and NOT a Featherington cousin. So, when she dies, Eloise is compelled to write her condolences to Phillip which sparks their correspondence. With the changes, I can’t see what impetus they’ll use to start their relationship. Eloise should feel no sadness at her loss since (a) theyre not related, (b) she never really befriended Marina and (c) Marina freaking tried to trap her brother into a deceptive marriage. I hope this isn’t a cross-that-bridge-when-we-get-to-it writer’s moment.

Why do the bullets get farther and farther apart every time I hit return?

Okay that’s better

Even I was surprised at the graphic level of sex. And I’ve watched Spartacus! 😂 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 and bravo for not making it all about tits and bush.

I didn’t have a problem with Anthony’s overprotectiveness, tbh. And didn’t see it as OOC. Since his father’s death he’s been the defacto father figure (he’s the only dad Hyacinth has ever known) but I think they wanted to demonstrate that he’s (a) taking his responsibility seriously but that (b) he’s way out of his depth and doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. Also there’s the irony that he will have to face off with Kate next season, who takes her responsibility of protecting her sister, Edwina, with all the same gusto — especially from him. So he’ll get to be on the other side of it. That tickled me a bit.

I tried to find the balance between empathizing with Siena while also not investing emotionally in that relationship. What an untenable position to be a woman without status amongst powerful men. How terrifying to have such an uncertain future. Even a society spinster would likely live to serve as a conpanion or chaperone to a richer relative and thus be taken care of — but an opera singer who’s value diminishes with each passing year...I can’t imagine.

Not a fan of how they demonized Nigel Berbrooke. They took a hapless, socially challenged but otherwise honorable man and turned him into a villain. Because he wasn’t written as a romantic hero perse, I never wanted him to end up with the heroine, but I was satisfied when I read that he eventually did find his match in the books. I never had anything against him.

Prince Freiderich should get his own season. Or book. Hate to see a handsome, gentle and kind man go to waste like that. Especially one that actually WANTS to marry and have kids.

Cressida Cowper, you twat. 🤣🤣 even regency period had their mean girls.

Phoebe Dyneover reminds me so much of Claire Foy in the first season of the Crown. Very similar speech patterns.

I’m not down for flipping the sexualities of any of the canon characters. But I am down with Ally-Benedict who learns to accept and empathize with his queer friends and even takes personal risks to help cover for them when necessary.

I loved that Colin asks Penelope to dance and NOT because Violet always forced him to, like she does in the first few books.

I would love for Sophie to be Asian/Indo-Pak. Casting director take note.

I almost wish they hadn’t named the show Bridgerton. Bridgerton of course has the name recognition all book fans clamor for, but if this show were to magically go on (and on) it leaves out the possibility of “How to Marry a Marquis” or “What Happens in London Stays in London”, etc... I want ALL the Julia Quinn. What’s so bad about that?

I kept my expectations low, tbh and tried to keep in mind that translating from page to screen often requires some finessing, so I’m not going to bitch about every little plot change they made to tell their story. I feel blessed that I got to see these characters brought to life.

Now for some likely unpopular opinions:

Here’s a fact: for better or for worse these books were not written for an lgbtq target audience. They just weren’t. So don’t expect more than the passing nod to the existence of gays or trans people living lives of quiet desperation in the ranks of regency society. Don’t expect them to turn Eloise and Penelope into secret lovers. They won’t. Because the people who have been steady fans, who have purchased these books every time a new cover comes out with their hard earned money, will not stand for their beloved characters suddenly diverging so far from canon. I think some divergence from canon is allowable but changing the core of the character and their romance story will likely not go well. Don’t suddenly expect Benedict to burst out of the closet just because he joins an artist colony.

Honestly, I can’t be bothered to get incensed by Daphne getting Simon to come inside of her. I just can’t. I’ll save my moral outrage for the idea that she was legally his property. That a husband could beat his wife with a cane and she would have no legal leg to stand on. That women were so uneducated about sex that men could so easily manipulate women to get what they want. That a man could toss his wife down a flight of stairs, call it an accident, be married again in a few months and the only consequence he’d face would be the whispers and side eyes from society. And, most of all, that in society’s eyes a woman’s only value was in her ability to conceive and bear children, and not even in whether or not she might live long enough to raise them!! So the fact that he couldn’t control his ejaculation long enough to throw off a woman he outweighed by easily fifty pounds...? Boo-fucking-hoo on your male privilege and vastly unbalanced power dynamic. Sorry, not sorry. She did what she thought she had to do to be of value in the society that raised her. She didn’t make the rules, she was just living by them. I’m not interested in a debate on this point. It’s my opinion and you’re entitled to keep your own - on your own blog.

How long do we have to wait to hear if we get a season 2?

#bridgerton #spoilers #netflix

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