inflatable dalek wrote:I think they actually did desert in order to go after Shockwave (in that they were supposed to be somewhere else and doing something else), it just wound up for being for longer than they thought. I think teaming up with the Monsterbots was also a no-no.
The Monsterbots can't have been
that bad, surely? I mean they're free and clear to hang out on the
Lost Light now, so obviously they're not considered Grimlock-tier criminals.
I don't remember if the Dinos had other orders at the time, but I'm pretty sure Optimus had told them specifically to stop chasing Shockwave, so at the very least they'd disobeyed orders and done exactly what they were told not to do. But on the other hand they were right and they took Shockwave off the board for four million years, so by the usual fictional standards all should be forgiven.
inflatable dalek wrote:Grimlock did get the others a pardon though in exchange for taking a jail term himself, so it's not unreasonable Impactor would get the same. You know, back when we had a half-sane Duly Appointed Enforcer.
I still can't quite wrap my head around what exactly Fort Max is enforcing, anyway. First of all, he can't be "duly appointed" because Star Saber is the
actual duly appointed replacement for Magnus. Secondly, Tyrest is a crazy person so why are we enforcing his laws? Thirdly, the Tyrest Accord mainly has to do with trafficking Transformer weapons tech to aliens, so why is the enforcer running around playing space sheriff? Fourth, it was a wartime accord that bound two warring armies that technically no longer exist. And fifth, Tailgate repealed the damned thing anyway!
inflatable dalek wrote:One minor niggle is the recurrence of an old problem: It semed to take no time at all to get from Debris to Earth, unless we've got a massive gap between Kup using his Jedi powers to wake Springer up and Arcee finding Verity it can only be hours at most (and that includes the time it took for Spriger to explain things to Roadbuster and Impactor and then to calm Guzzle down). I guess it's just in the neighbourhood?
What makes it stand out all the more is that in the last Wreckers series it (reasonably, IMO) took them months to get from where they'd started to G9. Even if Earth and Debris are close by, there's no way Kup could go there and back in the time it took for Arcee to make the trip from Earth orbit to Alaska.
zigzagger wrote:Oooh, I very much do
And I know my iteration of Prowl in the TFA RPG made you.... err,
uncomfortable sometimes.
Right, but that's what a morally ambiguous character is
meant to do. The problem is that IDW Prowl isn't ambiguous in the slightest. He's blatantly, transparently evil to such a ridiculous degree that I can't believe Optimus tolerated his horrible antics for four million years.
zigzagger wrote:To me, it felt like a natural, logical progression from the officious, by-the-numbers prick that we met back in Infiltration.
One issue I have with this take on the character is that I just don't see what you see here. When we met Prowl in the IDWverse he was a walking rulebook with a stick up his ass, not especially smart, tactical or cunning. I could maybe see him being pushed into becoming the sort of character he is now, but the modern books operate on the assumption that he's been that highly-important, vicious amoral puppetmaster for millions of years, and I just can't reconcile that with the boring, unimpressive guy that he was in Infiltration.
Plus, the head of the Autobots' secret intelligence agency should be hidden away in the most secure bunker you can build. he most definitely should
not be rotting away on an alien backwater with only a handful of troops to protect him. If he'd actually been the bigwig that the new crop of writers say he was, he'd have had a gigantic target on his back.
zigzagger wrote:But as you say, after passing from Costa, then to Barber and Roberts, all the subtly was completely lost. Prowl's is barely short of being a villain of the mustache twirling variety these days, and I have to wonder if that was ever Roche's intent.
I'm pretty sure it's not, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the right circumstances Prowl would have made a fine villain. I really liked the setup of Prowl in the early issues if RiD, when it looked like he was just losing his grip without a war to fight and trying desperately to control a situation that was simply beyond him. That would have made for a very interesting turn for the character, but we all know how that turned out.
Afterwards I think IDW overreacted (or maybe misunderstood) the readership's disappointment with how that arc turned out, because it was then that the switch got flipped to "totally evil" and he started rolling with the Constructicons as his own personal goon squad. And it was all downhill from there. It's like somebody at IDW HQ read the reaction threads and said "Well, they wanted Prowl as a bad guy, so lets give them Prowl as a bad guy!"