some random question I thought of in my head
They are kinda both. In the recent IDW comic runs, Decepticons originally wanted to overthrow the Functionists. The Functionists were the ruling class of Cybertron who enforced the ideology that a bot’s alt mode (what they transform into) should determine their occupation. This lead to a stratified apartheid society where the intellectual class was better off than the manual workers’ class.
Megatron was among other things a philosopher and political thinker but because of his alt mode he was forced to work in a mine. He secretly writes and disseminates theory. At one point he even says “religion is the engex of the people”. So the Marx parallel is apparent.
The problem is that Megatron also wants to exterminate ALL organic life for reasons I didn’t look into. This is one of the main points of contention with the Autobots. Later in the timeline he is portrayed as extremely sadistic and bloodthirsty. So he is clearly not a character that one should be sympathising with. Decepticons in general are ruthless, brutal and destructive.
So it looks like the idea behind them is a liberal’s understanding of communism with a fascistic angle thrown in?
Weirdly enough later they give Megatron a redemption arc where he esentially turns remorseful and good which seems completely out of place.
This is an example of the theory that Megatron writes: https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/images2/3/36/Towards_Peace.jpg
Damn, even getting some trans vibes there. Which I guess makes sense.
No surprise that they have a villain make reasonable points, but then also have to have them randomly want to murder everyone for no reason, pretty sure it’s illegal if the villain isn’t like that in lib fiction.
I remember in a DC show, wonder woman fought the vietcong because they made them in the show rape a bunch of women.
This is an example of the theory that Megatron writes: https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/images2/3/36/Towards_Peace.jpg
That’s the most based thing I’ve ever seen a car say. Meanwhile Optimus Prime cooperates with the USA military.
I understand the sentiment and I realize that Transformers is unfortunately stamped with the marks of neoliberalism like most entertainment media, but in the comics and movies, Megatron 70 percent of the time is a douchebag megalomaniacal maniac that wants to destroy non-organic life or commit genocide of the autobots, despite his token occasional criticism of the autobots. It unfortunately makes sense for the autobots to tacitly tolerate working with the U.S. military.
The IDW timeline is very weird. If you read More Than Meets the Eyes, you see his origin and what he is like in the present and it makes no sense how or why he was a bloodthirsty genocider in between those periods.
The writers had the baggage of the countless past iterations of the franchise where the war is defined in very simplistic good vs. bad terms. I think they just chose to ignore its deeper implications. I don’t mind it though because it makes More Than Meets the Eyes a great read if you are not irked by the inconsistency in the continuity
that’s the most based thing I’ve ever seen a car say
we have nothing to lose but our chocks
He’s not a car but throughout the franchise’s history he transforms into many different things: A gun, tank, jet, helicopter, etc
I think they’re just kinda stupid frankly. The goal of their faction is to destroy the Autobots, after that they don’t seem to have a real plan except cull the weak.
I have the same question but about batman
Batman is the ultimate right-wing power fantasy. A Billionaire who beats up poor people on the streets because the law/government is too corrupt/weak/incompetent to deal with anything. What had you conflicted about this?
There’s a lot of varients of batman from movies and comics, so there’s the more obvious than the other
This is from Dark Knight Returns, which is probably the exemplary work for Batman’s political message.
Most or at least many Batman fans have a love-hate relationship with TDKR. Not that it disproves your point. I think its an enjoyable story but its outdated and has some really shitty aspects to it.
I think a lot of Frank Miller’s subsequent work, and the whole “dark age of comics” that TDKR spawned has soured people on the original.
A technical question, off-topic, I am viewing this in Jerboa on my phone, how do I expand the image to read the text?
I don’t think the classical archetypical Batman is inherently right-wing, or should be considered right-wing. I grew up with multiple incarnations of Batman, and I find that those who claim Batman is “just” a billionaire who beats up poor people to be misunderstanding the crucial context and nuance, not arguing in good faith or missing the forest for the trees, even if I don’t completely disagree with their arguments.
Many of Batman’s villains themselves are/were capitalists, bourgeoisie or their enforcers and bootlickers and agents of them, namely Penguin, Simon Stagg that themselves treat the working class and poorer people as garbage and relentlessly exploit, manipulate or abuse them.
And while many of Batman’s villains have extremely sorrowful mental issues, most of them are of the disgusting and vile and sadistically cruel mindset of “if I can’t be happy, no one else can!” or “everything sucks, so I should be able to kill people!” and are straight up no-exaggeration irredeemable monsters, like Riddler, Mad Hatter, Joker, Calendar Man, Professor Pyg, Hush, Victor Zsasz.
For every working-class villain that’s screwed over by capitalists like Mister Freeze, there are villains like Firefly.
Of course being a billionaire is disgusting and irresponsible, but those who criticize Batman for this don’t have any real solutions, and just seem to be complaining for the sake of it. Is Batman supposed to give away billions of dollars to various aid organizations to feed, house and clothe the entire Gotham population? Is he supposed to become a revolutionary communist that tries to insert himself into the general population to overthrow the Gotham government so that way when Gotham becomes socialist, they can be invaded by the trillion-dollar U.S. military and their puppets?
In real-life, it costs billions of dollars a week for a city to operate in even just a week, and I don’t see Batman ushering in a national communist revolution anytime soon.
There is plenty of criticism to be made of Batman and superheroes, but it always annoys me when the criticism is the same old surface level “rich white billionaire beats up poor people because he’s sad and nuts”
It seems we are approaching the situation from two different perspectives, you seem to be asking how within the fictional setting, a Billionaire character could go about making positive impacts to combat supervillains, and within his own constraints, perhaps he is doing all he can. But I am talking about the very concept of Batman as a literary work of fiction.
The authors chose to write their stories from the perspective of a Billionaire, they chose to write their villains and create this setting where the most idealized reactionary vision of individual excellence can be portrayed. The core of the issue with Batman stories is how they build the world around him in order to justify his actions. The villains in Batman are always irredeemable, and are repeatedly sent to prison or asylums only for them to break out again and cause problems, pushing the reactionary idea that there is no such thing as rehabilitation for those who have done wrong. The government and authorities in Gotham are meant to look pathetically corrupt and incompetent, not because of the inherent trend of the capitalist system to prevent it, but because they’re all devoid of agency and submissive to organized crime, which is absolutely not how police corruption works in the real world, police are not weak, they are overwhelmingly powerful, and that is where their corruption arises, this is another blatantly reactionary view.
And to top it all off, there is the one single aspect of Batman that stands out to me over all the rest, and that is his technological superiority, which never goes questioned. The idea of a supercomputer database which knows everything about what happens in a city through the control of mass surveillance is the stuff of horror for most people. But only should it fall into the wrong hands, most reactionaries will cry out in horror at the thought of mass surveillance if the “wrong” government is the one doing it. But in the stories, Batman has this very technology all to himself, and its shown as a good thing, because he’s the enlightened, incorruptible individual who deserves to wield this power. I think even in the dark knight films they touch upon this, and it makes you wonder, why does Batman keep all this to himself? Its because he is placed in a world where only he knows best, and everyone else cannot be trusted. When you think about that, its hard to not see it as the peak of right wing fantasy.
I agree with your points, I think you’re right in that I was speaking from more of an in-universe perspective, but I feel that admitting its from an in-universe perspective is unfair to a piece of fiction. I do tend to prefer Watsonian explanations over Doylist ones.
To each their own, interesting idea to discuss regardless.
David Graeber wrote this about the last movie in Nolan’s Batman trilogy: https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/
the decepticons are maupinitesWhat if the decepticons watch the infrared show in their free time
