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decepti-thots · 4 months

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☕ MTOs & specifically what do you think they were going for with that?

MTOs are an interesting narrative thing to me in the sense that they really are so localised to only one part of the canon; they're very clearly Roberts' idea and only really matter, inasmuch as they do matter, in MTMTE. It's pretty clear to me that's the case for one specific reason: they'd actually fit SUPER well into the narrative arc of exRiD, especially early-to-mid RiD, but they basically never come up! You'd think 'neutrals and soldiers stuggling to cohabit socially and politically' would be prime fodder (lmao) for taking advantage of a narrative about mechs born of and into war coming back to a civilian life on a planet they really don't know. And yet.

What they're doing in that comic, in MTMTE, is a little headscratching to me at times. It feels, to be honest, somewhat like worldbuilding put in to make the texture of the backstory of the war feel grander than IDW had really managed up to that point in actual on-panel stuff, without a lot of thought when doing so in the moment as to the knock on implications going forward. MTMTE does this a few times, tries to use vague gestures at important sounding stuff to bring a greater sense of history and depth to the war in the face of the actual stuff we saw in phase one being. Mmmm. Basically just twenty dudes we already know shooting at each other across parking lots. LMAO.

(Sidenote: I know for a fact Roberts watched original flavour nuWho, and this is PEAK Russell T Davies doing worldbuilding when he was on Doctor Who, and I fully believe he was cribbing from that playbook. Every damn episode RTD would make them just sort of say stuff about the Time War that made it sound incredibly vast and textured and complex but which, crucially, never made any actual fucking sense. Good examples of stuff like this would be the Crucible, the Simanzi massacre, etc. This is, to be clear, a neutral observation, not praise or criticism per se.)

I say this because MTOs should probably be a bigger deal in terms of the impact on our cast, and their outlook on life and reasons for joining the quest, than they wind up being. An MTO is a character with no experience of living in peacetime at all, likely no experience of Cybertron, no sense of kinship or home necessarily to the planet they came "back" to. All of this provides a really clear motivation, given the implication most surviving non-neutral Cybertronians are now MTOs due to huge numbers of deaths, to join a quest like the Lost Light's! But it tends not to come up much, and I think it's because it wasn't really part of the plan. Later on, there's room to slot in some details here and there- Riptide talking about his experiences with being infodumped at by the 'training' comes to mind- but it takes a while for the comic to come back round to that.

The two big exceptions, of course, are Getaway and Brainstorm. The idea is definitely interacting with their characters more, though again, it... tends to come up later. Especially for Getaway, who I'm not convinced was originally conceived as an MTO, but had it slotted in a bit later as 'well that works' stuff tbh. (And it does, so that's fine!) Which leaves Brainstorm, who lies about being forged to throw off suspicion, who it's implied never got the time of day from Quark in a way I wouldn't be surprised we're supposed to assume is some kind of remaining bias, perhaps. Who didn't see a future for himself 'back on Cybertron' and so concocted a very weird plan to avoid having to. Who never got a choice about his 'side' in the war, and wound up with no real loyalty for anyone.

I think if there's any avenue I'd have liked to see more about MTOs via, it's Brainstorm. I wish there'd been more room to focus on that instead of (I'm so sorry shippers) his thing with Perceptor as the way to talk about his sense of inadequacy, tbh. What did it feel like, lying to Chromedome about remembering a pre-war life he never got a chance to experience? Being made to shoot people and be shot and escaping the fate of having that be the only thing he ever knew by the skin of his teeth? Not being able to imagine an end to the war, so all he wants to do is save one guy and run off with him as a pipe dream? That seems like the character where a lot of this stuff should naturally lie, to me. And I think it's a shame I've seen very little talk in fandom about it!

#ask meme

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