Tag: transformers

Ratchet’s tale of the war’s backstory makes no sense pt.2 – Orion Pax

“There was a time, back on Cybertron, in the twilight hours of the golden age, when Optimus and Megatron were not sworn enemies.
do you recall when I mentioned that Optimus wasn’t always a prime?    well, he wasn’t always Optimus either.he was once a clerk, in the iacon’s hall of records, named Orion Pax.“

the show itself never explain whether that’s a low or high position, but his close relation to alpha trion, the importance of the archives & the information he has access to suggest that it’s probably the latter and it’s definitely higher class than his original job as a dock worker 

– so while g1 had both Megatron and Optimus come from about the same low level of society, showing that a person choices are what makes them who they are rather than their upbringing – we get a lowly gladiator who obviously becomes the bad guy and an intellectual from high class – who became the good guy.
"but as he learned more about Cybertron’s past he grew increasingly concerned about the present corruption in high places and inequality among the masses.”

Ratchet is being almost disturbingly vague here – corruption &  inequality don’t really tell us much about the situation at hand – is it just that some people had to work harder to support themselves? or were there actual people starving to death in the streets just because they were created a certain way? what?

The Roman names make it quite likely that Cybertron is based on the Roman empire so it’s pretty clear Ratchet is probably referring to slavery, so we are off to a great start..(at least it’s probably not ethnic cleansings like in the idw comics…)

I want to believe the reason Ratchet doesn’t go into detail or sound very concerned about it is that he talks to children and not because he doesn’t care about the mechs who suffered at the hands of the council. 

sadly the fact that he refers to the time as “the twilight hours of the golden age” basically implying that the years of “corruption & inequality” were still part of a golden age that only ended with Megatron’s rising suggests that’s probably not the case…

part 1 – preface

sidenote

just something i wanted to make clear

I just want to add that despite how much I might rant about the backstory – I love Ratchet as a character- he is one of my favorite Autobots in any continuity he is in.

that doesn’t mean he is perfect. he is very (understandably) biased and makes for a really unreliable narrator in this case.

plus the writer didn’t really seem to think this story through…

Ratchet’s tale of the war’s backstory makes no sense pt.1 – preface

this is something that has been bothering me for a long time – almost since my first watching of the series, although my most recent re-watching made me stop to think about it in more detail & realize how completely impossible & illogical it is.

to explain how little sense it makes, I’m going to quote the whole story as Ratchet tells it in “one shall rise part 3″ and then try to break the story to its part. the more I got into the backstory, I found that even though it is a relatively short story(Ratchet tells it in about 3 minutes) – I had so much to unpack the post got too long so I’m going to break my commentary into several posts and I hope you’ll enjoy them.

btw, yes. I am aware that tfp has some book/games that explain the war’s backstory, but I have no way of getting them, so I’m going to go by what the show itself tells us and my own logic

part 2 – Orion Pax

sidenote

I started writing a post about the mess that is Ratchet’s backstory for the war on Cybertron, but as I wrote down the story and started writing my thought about it it became very very long (over 1000 words so far) so I’m wondering: do you think I should finish writing the whole thing in one post or cut it down to different points I find interesting in multiple posts?

I’ve started re-watching tfp again today, and I found a lot of things I liked, and plenty of things I hate – and didn’t really notice or pay attention to when I first watched it. so expect possible rants about it in the near future….