got a request for megatron watching cartoons with tailgate so of COURSE I went with g1
I’m a huge fan of James Roberts’ work in the Transformers universe. I think the above three panels do a good job encapsulating why.
The first panel comes from The Transformers #22, “Chaos Theory, Part 1,” published in 2011. It’s a flashback sequence to Megatron’s first time in jail, as he’s being questioned by a Cybertronian police officer named Springarm. The second and third panels were published just a few days ago; they’re from More Than Meets The Eye #32, “Twenty Plus One.” Without spoiling too much, Nightbeat (some combination of former hostage negotiator, judge, and detective) is trying to solve a spat of mysterious disappearances, and wants information from Megatron to help prove or disprove his working theory that all of the victims were created the same way.
The first thing I like is Robert’s consistent depiction of Megatron. Four million years (and three writing years) separate the pacifist miner from Tarn and the bloody-handed-tyrant-cum-captain, but Megatron’s response has stayed the same, for the same principled reasons: Cybertronians ought not be obligated to divulge information concerning their creation, because that information can easily be used (and has been used!) by the state to segregate Cybertron.
It would have been easy for Robert’s to let Megatron divulge his creation process in the latter scene, and pointed to this change as a sign of character growth—“it only took four million years and the death of 100 billion sentients, but Megatron has come to realize that it’s okay to answer some questions. He’s learning to trust, and he’s learning when information disclosure is important.”
But Roberts didn’t take the “character growth” cop out, and this gets me to the second, and more significant, reason I like the juxtaposition of these two scenes. Beyond Megatron’s response, look at what else has stayed consistent: in both situations, a well-intentioned police officer is asking Megatron for deeply personal, definitional information. And in their own way, Springarm and Nightbeat’s differing response help explain (and justify) Megatron’s refusal.
In the first scene, Springarm apologizes for asking the “old,” irrelevant question concerning creation type—but his apology didn’t stop the police officer from asking the question in the first place. Springarm asks his question out of an unexamined reliance on tradition, and a seeming ignorance as to how the mere continued inclusion of questions of creation is proof (particularly to Megatron) that the Cybertronian state has not “moved passed” apartheid.
In the second scene, Nightbeat makes it clear that he emphatically agrees with Megatron’s refusal—but that regardless, Megatron needs to divulge this information, because lives are at stake. There’s no reason to doubt Nightbeat or his intentions, but the point still stands: an upholder of the law is evaluating what constitutes necessity and justice, with no eye to how the information he wants will be ultimately used.
The larger point is that in any specific case—Springarm, Nightbeat, even and especially Orion Pax—a man a Cybertronian might be good and just and principled, but systems are, by their very nature, corrupting influences, and these systems have and will use matters of race creation to divide and control the populace. This is where Megatron’s opposition springs from. And if Roberts had written Megatron as answering Nightbeat’s query, it would have been a sign that Megatron’s concerns were, on some level, misplaced—that the state doesn’t mean harm, that you should trust it to use personal information in limited ways, to the betterment of all society. And for all of his many, many faults, Megatron is right to doubt that.
(Post script: Megatron’s consistency also returns to some of the ideas brought up in The Transformers #22 and #23—specifically, if the war has fundamentally changed Optimus Prime and Megatron. Prime concludes that he has stayed the same and that it’s Megatron who has lost his way. These scenes make an interesting counterpoint.)
gastrophobia