Tag Archives: Transformers

The Devout Decepticon: Religion in Science Fiction

It’s often considered that science and religion cannot be in the same room without a fight breaking out.  Yet, many aspects of science fiction involve belief in a greater power or veneration of something.  In fantasy it’s often a given that there will be a religious aspect, some stories even involving gods/goddesses themselves.  Science fiction hasn’t shied away from this either often exploring themes of faith, recreating history and delving into deeply religious cultures.  Yet science fiction in general is seen to be the antithesis of spirituality.  One cannot be analytically and religious at the same time.  One is said to be exclusive of the other.  Science dealing with fact and observable phenomenon while religion deals with faith and belief in the things unseen.

Many people have used science fiction to explore religion, either to deride and mock it or to question it’s place in our cultures.  It cannot be ignored that humans have an innate desire to look to something greater.  It’s shown in every culture, race and people the world over. This is often reflected in our literature.

As an avid fan of the Transformers franchise in all it’s forms I’ve noticed something.  I’m not the only one either.  Many fans have pointed out the fact that the base story line in Transformers can be compared to the Christian allegory. Optimus Prime as the Savior who is sacrificed. Megatron as the devil from the Pit bent on world domination. Being either an Autobot or a Decepticon has over arcing moral implications. The Cybertronian culture as a whole was very religious for a bunch of oversize sentient robots. They had their gods The Primes.

It was a deeply personal decision for a Cybertronian when it came to choosing a faction to join.  According to the new aligned continuity most of the Decepticons came from the working class or the slave laborers in the Pits.  Megatron promised freedom from the elitist tyranny that had existed for eon.  Then he granted it, but at a tremendous price.  Many Cybertronians looked upon him as a god, their Savior.  Others new differently.  The true Savior had to be chosen by the Matrix. The Matrix chose Orion Pax the humble clerk not Megatronus the proud gladiator.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should.  Its the same trope used in Star Wars and many fantasy novels/series. The unsuspecting and humble hero is plucked from obscurity and told Destiny awaits. Its the story of the Messiah told with metal and energon instead of flesh and blood. Star Wars had Jedi and Sith instead of angels and demons.

Religion factors heavily into everyone’s life whether they are aware of it or not.  Science fiction doesn’t gloss over this and shouldn’t. We crave a god but also fear having to be responsible to that god. Just be glad it’s not Megatron.

Without You

This week I was treated to a massive dose of sanity threatening emotional issues.  Some were happening in real life, the rest happened in two of my favorite fandoms.  I won’t bore you with my real life issues that involve being pregnant and having to move.  However, I was rather surprised by the strength of my reaction to two different story plots.  It led me to wonder what causes us readers to become so emotionally invested in characters that we weep over them as though they were real.

The first thing I realized was that each story line was excellently crafted, the characters expertly fleshed out and realistic.  The fact that both subplots that emotionally devastated me were romantic ones is nothing short of ironic.  I am not a romantic person.  Ask anyone who knows me personally.  Typical romances bore me to tears.

So how did these characters manage to drag me into the narrative and hold me there over months?  Lets look at them.

Let Your Light Shine

First I will discuss Green Lantern: The Animated Series since that was the first blow to hit last Saturday when the final episode aired. Just the fact it was cancelled after one season was harsh enough.  Then I had to deal with the tragedy that was affectionately referred to by fans as Razaya.

Razer and Aya

Over the course of the season we watched Razor grow and change and fall in love with the ship’s AI, Aya.  Both characters started out seemingly one dimensional but very quickly we were treated to various aspects of their personalities.  Razor grew from being the angry Red Lantern to a multidimensional, complex and conflicted individual.  Aya quickly went from the ship’s navigation computer to a full fledged member of the team.  Both made misjudgments  said things that were taken wrong and just generally where adorable together.  All you have to do is search Tumblr for the tag #Razaya to see how much the fans loved this pairing.

There was a lot to love about it.  It was realistically portrayed and organically developed over the length of the series.  Even the creators were surprised at how loved the two became.  So how did they achieve it?

More on that in a moment.  Now on to the second source of my woe.

Never Let You Go

As many of you know, I am a huge Transformers fan and have been reading the current IDW Publishing series Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye.    The past Wednesday the newest issue, #15, was released.  I had been dreading this issue.  Mostly because I knew the happy times were over and things were going to get bad.  People were going to die. And they did.  Horribly in some cases and horribly tragic in others.  (If you have not read the series, please go do so as from here on there will be major spoilers.  You can find the entire run on Comixology.)

One pairing I’ve spoken about before, Chromedome and Rewind pretty much took center stage this issue.  Mostly due to Chromdome’s involvement in the accidental release of the unstoppable and extremely deadly Overlord.  In a scant thirty minutes the entire crew of the Lost Light is subjected to his murderous rampage.  He is only slowed when Rhodimus utters a trip phrase that Chromedome had implanted in his subconscious.  Fortress Maximus, having been released from the brig by Rung, drags Overlord back to the temporal prison he’d escaped from.  It is at this time that Chromedome decides that having the Phase Sixer anywhere near them, even in a prison cell, is too close and goes to jettison the cell.  Except a sword is preventing the mechanism from closing.  Rewind, Chromedome’s life partner, sacrifices himself to get the doors closed and ends up trapped in the cell, floating in space with Overlord.

The phrase that will come back to haunt Chromedome forever.

It’s at this point that Chromedome realizes that Overlord is going to kill Rewind in the slowest and most painful way possible and does the only thing he can think of to spare his lover any more pain.

This panel still makes me tear up.  These two had a very long history together, had been by each other’s sides when they faced death, fought together, with each other and generally behaved like any other loving married couple.  The writer, James Roberts, skillfully wove their relationship into the narrative while developing their personalities and backstory.

Forever and Always

In both of these cases the writers took great pains to make sure the characters were realistic and relatable  None of the characters are human.  Yet we the reader/viewer find ways to identify with them.  Maybe it’s Razor’s rage and inability to control it or Aya’s need to be accepted as her own person.  Or it could be Chromedome’s desire to be useful.  Or even Rewind’s desperation to keep Chromedome safe and healthy when his line of work is so dangerous and mentally detrimental.  It could be all or none of these things.  Either way, most of us have faced something similar at some time in our life and it is by tapping into this that the writers help us to understand and sympathize with the characters.

They created people, not just characters.  Each of them had their own motivations, goals, dreams and flaws.  They each acted and reacted according to what happened around them, just as we all do.  They had emotional, sometimes visceral reactions that ended up leading them to make wrong and in two cases, deadly choices.

We as writers must always strive to give our reader as much emotional input as possible in our stories.  It would be a disservice to our readers to do other wise.  We owe it to them to help them not just empathize, but sympathize with our characters.  Too laugh and cry along with them.  In doing so we build not just an artificial world, but a reader who is capable of much greater sympathy out in the real world.

I’m Not Male, I’m Not Female, I am Me.

Our perception of gender is tainted by the media, by what we are told is feminine and beautiful and strong and masculine.  Strong and feminine aren’t supposed to go together just as beautiful and masculine should not.   Right?

Wrong.

Gender bias is just that bias.

bias

As recently brought out in the article Gender Dichotomy is a Fairy Tale We Have Been Telling Ourselves to Sleep at Night on The Mary Sue  Anika Torruella addresses the difference between being physically male or female and being mentally male or female.  Surprise, mentally there is little to no difference, other than things we are conditioned by society to think is gender appropriate.  She quotes a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Men and Women Are From Earth: Examining the Latent Structure of Gender,” headed byBobbi J. Carothers and Harry T. Reis, who are from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rochester.  Their goal was to “provide empirical evidence that sex and gender are not the same thing.”

So what did they find?

‘122 unique indicators from 13 studies comprising 13,301 individuals provided later, Carothers and Reis point out “clear empirical evidence to support the belief of researchers who see psychological gender differences in dimensional terms”. In other words even among those with strong and unambiguous gender identities, men and women do not exhibit all the characteristics and behaviors expected of their sex and “may also display some of the characteristics and behaviors associated with the other sex.”’

So in other words when physical gender is ignored men and women are remarkably similar.

Well I could have told you that.  And so could James Roberts, writer of the IDW Publishing comic series Transformers: More than Meets the Eye.  He’s done a masterful job at writing physically gender-less characters while still allowing them to have multidimensional personalities that either gender could identify with.  This was beautifully illustrated in Issue #13 as I will explain in a bit.

That Giant Gun Totting Robot is Female?

When you have no gender and do not identify with either gender having someone try to fit you into one role or the other can be infuriating.  So why do we do it?  Why must things that ‘look’ male automatically be male and vice versa?  Can we not choose what we feel best represents our psyche.  For myself personally, I have never identified fully with either gender.  Intellectually, I know what biology says I am but that has never affected my self-perception.

I am going to use the comic I mentioned earlier to illustrate this point.   I’m going to use two of the characters in Issue #13.   First will be Whirl, second will be Ultra Magnus.  If you are unsure why I am using Transformers, its for the simple reason that they have no gender.  They are not male or female or anything in between.  They do not reproduce sexually (at least not in the established canon, fan fiction begs to differ).  They are giant, non-organic, intelligent life forms.  (For more on their interpersonal relationships see last week’s post.)

A little backstory:

In issue #13 of IDW Publishing’s Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye the Autobots of the ship Lost Light are on shore leave on the planet Hedonia.  Being giant metal beings, they are not always welcome by the smaller organic beings who squish easily.  Sensitive to this, a few of them agree to adopt holomatter avatars in order to scout out locales where they will be welcome to come and unwind for a bit.  The program they install to adapt these avatars has been upgraded so that their avatar more closely represents their personalities.  Which makes sense because the risk for being misunderstood would jump considerably if you were uncomfortable with, or misrepresented by your avatar.

Rhodimus explains the new avatars (MTMTE #13)

Rhodimus explains the new avatars (MTMTE #13)

Probably the biggest shock to fans was the fact that the sometimes rather insane and violent Whirl had this for ‘his’ avatar.

Autobot Whirl’s holomatter avatar. MTMTE Issue #13

In case you are unfamiliar this is his actual form:

Autobot Whirl

That’s right.  That bot that the Transformers wikia describes as  ‘ . . .a rather reckless fighter and can take damage because of it. He’s okay with that, because he absolutely LOVES his job . . .’ has what looks to be a preteen girl for an avatar.  A very tomboyish girl who obviously loves her weapons, but that’s Whirl.    Honestly, I love the fact that his avatar is so fun.  It’s obviously a perfect reflection of his personality, forget anything about it being a girl.  He didn’t choose this avatar.  The program, after analyzing his personality, chose it for him.

On the other hand we have Ultra Magnus.  He is first and foremost a soldier.  His loyalty and self-sacrifice are tempered by his reluctance to form close bonds with anyone.  That and his strict adherence to rules and regulations to the point of being obsessive compulsive.  Magnus chose his own avatar.   He chose the likeness of the one human he felt closest to who just happened to be female.

MtMtE cover issue #13

Ultra Magnus is front and center of the cover looking quite sexy with his avatar.  (Love the power pose he’s got going on.)  Those who have followed the comics will recognize the woman.  For this post her identity is not important.  What is important is that Magnus respected her enough to want to use her likeness to represent himself.  He was not concerned that she was female.  I’d wager that thought never occurred to him.  To him she was simply a human he admired and called a friend.

Maybe They are on to Something

So why do we get so hung up on the male/female dichotomy?  Why does it matter so much in our daily interactions?  Why can’t we just see people as people instead of their gender?

It goes back to what I said in the beginning, we are conditioned to think this way.  We can, however, unlearn it.  And a good way to start is by realizing that just because I look a certain way doesn’t mean I’m going to behave a certain way.   Just like with the Transformers.

Blindsided

The Age of the Anti-Hero has been long.   Some credit George Lucas and Han Solo for popularizing the trend that had started first in literature.  Some literary anti-heroes are Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein;  Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby;  Gollum from J. R. R. Tolkein‘s Lord of the Rings series;  Batman created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger; Dexter Morgan from Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (also popularized as a tv series).

Basically an anti-hero is a hero who sees morals as more of a guideline than an absolute.  They are not averse to breaking laws and bending rules to reach their stated goal.

So what lead to the downfall of the traditional hero?

People wanted someone they felt they could relate more closely too, not some moral ideal.  They wanted a hero that was gritty and as morally corrupt, or at least questionable, as they feel themselves to be.  This trend has spawned a great number of vigilante types in fiction and movies.  While they (usually) make for interesting characters, the type has grown stale and overused due to ceaseless repetition of the same tropes.

As any of you who follow this blog know, I’m a huge fan of villains.  Anti-heroes amuse me because they are pseudo-villains.  Now this is not to say that there aren’t some that I don’t genuinely like.  While they are a grittier, more true to life hero than say, Superman, they still have their issues.

So it was with much surprise and a little chagrin that I realized I had found a true hero that I’m completely in love with.  Let me explain what I mean by true hero and then I will discuss my adoration of this character.

A hero is morally upright, places great importance on doing what is right and just, does everything in their power to help those who are weaker or in maligned condition, they have integrity, honor, are trustworthy and true to their word.  Their sense of right and wrong guides all they do.

I’m getting bored just explaining the term.

But I understand that this is something all of us wish we were and few of us will ever fully accomplish.  So now on to how I fell in love with a hero.

I tend to watch cartoons with my children.  My son had found a newer cartoon on Netflix that I didn’t really pay attention to until he was several episodes in.  I sat through one episode and was hooked.  At first I was more interested in the villains, but then in one episode the hero did something I found shocking.  He made a mistake, an error in judgement that resulted in people getting hurt.  And it hurt him.  He was mortified and humble in is apology.  Something sparked in my mind and I began to watch him more closely.  By the end of the second season I am not ashamed to say that I was an emotional wreck.  I won’t spoil the ending for you but it was not a typical one for a children’s cartoon.

You are probably wondering who I’m talking about.  So please allow me to introduce him:

Optimus Prime in the new Hub series Transformers Prime

Meet Optimus Prime.  At least his newest iteration.  I grew up watching Beast Wars and later Transformers Animated (which I gladly will forget, even when it first was out I got irritated with it) then along came the Bay movies.  But it wasn’t until this most recent aligned continuity (which includes 2 novels, 2 video games, comics and the cartoon) that I feel Optimus really came into his own.  His backstory is much richer and more involved than ever before with two novels explaining where he came from and how he met Megatron.  Previously, we were shown little of how Optimus became leader of the Autobots and came to wage war on the Decepticons.  In the Bay movies he’s not given much characterization other than being a warrior and the leader of the Autobots.  Transformers Prime (TFP) goes way beyond this and even allows us to see him not just as a Prime but as a person.  He has fears, hopes, makes mistakes, gets embarrassed and enraged, but through it all he is still Optimus Prime.

His first self imposed priority is to keep his team safe.  Next he does his best to protect humanity.  Life, all life, is precious to him and he even hesitates to deliver the final blow to his enemies.  He states several times that it is his desire not to kill the Decepticons but  to change their minds.  Being an Autobot or a Decepticon is a choice and one that  carries with it grave consequences.

Optimus might be humble and willing to listen to his team, but that doesn’t mean he is a push over either.  He is not above admitting his mistakes either.  In the final episodes of season one he faces one of his greatest challenges in the form of a god reborn.  Even when facing a figure out of Cybertron’s distant past he displays great courage, honor and humility in addressing Unicron.  If you do not wish to have the show spoiled for you, do not click play.

I’m sure you are wondering just which episode turned my head, so to speak.  Honestly, it was late in season two and the Autobots had just suffered a resounding defeat.  Optimus returned to base wounded and went right back to work trying to decode the Iacon database in the hopes of finding some way to defeat the Decepticons.  It was at this moment I realized just how selfless and self sacrificing he is.  Going back and re-watching the entire series I gained a much greater understanding of him and of his determination.  I gained an all new respect for him as a character once I read the novels. He’s suffered through some horrific things and had immense responsibility thrust on him.  Yet, he hasn’t given up or wavered in his beliefs.

Most heroes seem two dimensional at best.  They seem to be self-righteous do gooders, incapable of true humility even if they are self sacrificing.  Altruism while an admirable quality is often seen as a weakness by most.  Being willing to sacrifice oneself is one thing, knowing the appropriate time is another.  In the novel Transformers: Exodus by Alex Irvine, Optimus makes a very valid point about honor and sacrifice, one that I have never seen put so plainly or even addressed.  He asked a fellow Autobot what the worth of honor was if that honor led to a senseless death that could have been avoided?  It is this attitude that endears him to me.  He sees the bigger picture, he understands that having honor and pride is not enough, it must be tempered with humility and meekness.  Realizing that one cannot always win just because they think they are in the right.  Sometimes losing is just as effective, you allow your enemy to misjudge, miscalculate and overreach.

This does not mean that Optimus has not made errors in judgement or simple mistakes.  He is not infallible and he’s not make out to be.  But he accepts these failures, learns from them and becomes more determined.  He’s not afraid to apologize and admit he is wrong, to his own team or to their human allies.

There are many other reasons why I find him so appealing, but I feel that it is best to discover them on your own.  I’m still getting used to the fact that I adore the big bot.  It’s a testament to the skill of the new writers that they’ve made a hero even I can love.