Sorry If I'm Bothering You. I Came Across Your Blog And It's Rare For Me To Find Someone Critical Of
Sorry if I'm bothering you. I came across your blog and it's rare for me to find someone critical of idw (I feel the same). Can you tell some of the problems you have with them? It's okay if you don't want to. Just happy to know I'm not the only one (My friends are huge fans of idw).
Hello, kindred spirit! I'm sorry that I'm not answering the question so quickly!
Well, it's nice to know that someone is also unhappy with IDW and wants to know more about it! Get ready, this will be the opening of Pandora's Box.
Out of a million of my claims, I will try to build a constructive list.
1. IDW does not build lore of the universe. They didn't have enough for this for 17 years or whatever they wrote comics. What kind of innovations, adequately embedded in lore, do we have? What lore did we get? No, we don't really know anything, neither the origin of transformers, nor what's going on in the universe, the rules change at the click of your fingers.
A couple of egregious examples.
Explanation of female transformers. Experienced IDW authors for 3 or about as many retcons could not explain it all, which is why the whole fandom got mad, tired and asks not to explain anything at all, so as not to see idiocy anymore. That is, they give the authors the right to be lazy, but more on that later.
You can say that it's really "everything is complicated and explanations are not needed, female characters have the right to exist!". They have, that's not the point.
This problem is solved simply — there is no need to explain the female characters, you need to explain why Cybertronians, in principle, have a humanoid form. That's all, any explanation from this point justifies both female and male, and androgynous, and any other, as well as all kinds of genders. As an example, Primus has seen enough of the variety of organics and made his creations roughly similar. All. I had to sit for 10 minutes to come up with this, and this is not the most brilliant idea. The IDW authors had 17 years, they didn't come up with anything.
Another example is Conjunx Endura. I understand perfectly well that the authors of the comics wanted to appeal to the fan base writing fanfiction. But you need to be able to do it correctly. You can't just take a phenomenon invented by fans and shove it into an official work without any explanation of this phenomenon inside the lore. Especially since many fanfiction writers do it! You can find works with such beautiful and logical explanations that it seems ingenious. But the IDW authors are above any explanation. And yes, there are not always explanations in fanfiction, but we compare non-professional writers who post their works on the Internet for free with experienced authors of an official work that is sold for money. Who should put more effort into their work?
I'll just explain. For us humans, romantic love seems obvious, but it's not a particularly common evolutionary invention. If an intelligent species evolved from some elephants or killer whales, then the priority would not be a pair, but a kinship relationship. There are a bunch of animal species that don't create pairs at all. So how and for what purposes does such a phenomenon as Conjunx Endura exist in the society of transformers? They do not breed in pairs, they do not have any very harsh living conditions where a partner can help with survival. Something from Primus? Some kind of "power of love"? Who knows, the authors don't care, the fans of couples are happy and draw tons of art and write tons of fanfiction, and they don't need more. And I understand that in the original very first cartoon we were shown that Cybertronians know how to love. But this is a cartoon for children, of course there will be no details, these comics are designed for an older audience who can understand complex explanations.
Age-related burnout is something like a disease ending the life of a transformer. What do we know about it? After what time does it come? For what reason? What is it like? And why should the reader know this, it is there and that's it.
Similarly, for all IDW's love of violent scenes and cutting transformers into pieces, we don't really have a single image that normally shows the anatomical structure of a Cybertronian. They didn't even bother to come up with names for body parts. When I needed to find names for the most basic body parts, I found about 10 fan interpretations for each and 0 official ones! I'll repeat it. THEY HAD 17 YEARS TO DO IT!
About changing bodies and genders to more suitable ones. Again, it is too directly written off from humans, although we are talking about alien robots. Humans have biological and socio-cultural reasons for this. How does it work for transformers? Different types of sparks were canceled by the retcon, so it is impossible to talk about some kind of accordance. Just fashion or aesthetic preferences? Well, that's something. But why, according to this logic, we were not shown examples where transformers change their alt-mod, because they felt that it would be right? No, it's too difficult, because the reader is too stupid and will not understand the allegories or signs of alien psychology of another intelligent species. Again, I'm not against it, but while it's clear how it works for humans, everything here works on the principle of "because".
And these are the biggest examples, but with the little things and everything else, it's about the same. These comics don't build the world, you don't want to dive into it, because almost nothing is known about it, except for a short period before and during the war. It's unclear how it works.
2. The authors obviously like Decepticons and don't particularly like Autobots. And they try very hard to hide it behind the so-called "gray morality". The authors tried so hard to suggest that the Decepticons are not so bad, but at the same time, because of the rule of coolness, they left their actions far beyond the point of no return, when the arch of redemption can no longer work in the work.
I will explain this with the most striking examples.
Megatron. How the authors protected him with all their might. The fact is that the authors adored Megatron so much that they tried to give him everything at once. Megatron must be a cool destroyer who staged genocide on Cybertron and on other planets. But at the same time, he should personify a "misunderstood hero who fought for a just cause." Megatron throws from extreme to extreme. Then he orders to kill all living beings in the universe, and then he changes on the move and decides not to kill anyone at all, doing absolutely nothing to save his comrades. (Time of MTMTE and Lost Light events). He defected to the Autobots only out of self-hatred, and not because of regrets about his actions. He never says that he feels sorry for the murdered Cybertronians or the inhabitants of other planets.
And the authors are trying to emphasize this, then through Rodimus, who almost licked him and promoted the point of view that Megatron (the leader of the Decepticons) is not responsible for everything that has happened in the last 4 million years. Or through Whirl, who began to blame himself that it was because of him that Megatron started all this, as if Megatron could not think on his own.
But apparently the authors didn't have enough of that, so they introduced a Functionist Universe to show how bad it would be for Cybertronians without a revolution. After all, screens instead of heads are much worse than the genocide of their own kind and the deaths of countless living beings on other planets.
I am sure that even the authors introduced Holomatter technology to draw a hot humanization of Megatron. You just compare his drawing and the drawing of others.
The authors had 2 options — not to make Megatron a monster so that it all worked, or not to follow the path of his justification. For such an image that turned out, the only redemption is death, any textbook of screenwriting skill will say that. What did we get? An inarticulate, unsatisfying ending where we don't even know if he was executed or not for all his crimes that he didn't really atone for. In general, it is very interesting to send a galactic criminal essentially on a cruise initially instead of a normal punishment. The inhabitants of the affected worlds especially liked it, I'm sure.
Starscream. Of course, they could not ignore the audience's favorite. How not to give your beloved Starscream the crown and the status of ruler. Despite the fact that before that we were shown him as an incompetent leader who brought the Decepticons to an incomprehensible extent in the absence of Megatron, but no one on the planet remembered this when he became ruler. No one in the galaxy was unhappy that the second in command and accomplice of the intergalactic genocide became the ruler. Because the authors wanted a Starscream in the crown, which in the end did nothing but argue with Windblade, and then in the end unexpectedly committed a heroic act during the fight with Unicron. What led to this? Nothing really, it's just that the authors love Starscream, why explain.
It's about the same with Soundwave.
Thundercracker. The kindest Decepticon. Who was not happy with Megatron's actions, but still obeyed them, whined to himself, and only at some point the authors remembered that they needed to make him good. And one act was enough to declare him so. And even humans accepted his residence on Earth, which should not be, since his one act is not enough for everyone to take and forget who he served and what he did before. But add a dog, and everyone will stop paying attention to it, because it's all so cute.
Well, just look at all the "positive decepticons" who still hate organics, who do not particularly repent for their actions, but the authors present them to us as "good guys".
And what about the Autobots? And now they are partly defenders of an unfair regime.
About what was done with Prowl and Star Saber (here is my post about it) I can only keep silent. As far as I know, the comic book author at least hated Star Saber, so he made him like this.
It would seem that here it is grayness, there are no good and bad. But, as we have seen, the "good" Decepticons are not as gray and good as they are presented. But they showed us good Autobots, right? We'll see.
Tailgate is at first a good autobot, who, because of his strength, has become some kind of hysterical, driven by momentary inadequate emotions.
Rewind is a good one, we won't pay attention to the fact that he used Chromedome as a tool, in fact he didn't love him, chasing after his previous partner, but we will perceive these two as a good couple. Yes, by the way, the beloved fan couple and the representation proudly called by the authors do not really demonstrate a bit of a good relationship, only use and disrespect for the feelings of the partner.
Rodimus is a good one, although he is an infantile egoist who, after a moment of enlightenment, returned to his previous behavior, and treated everyone badly except our beloved Megatron.
And really good characters like Skids can be killed and forget about their existence.
But we have a bad Getaway, which could be an excellent example of gray morality, since he was initially right, but the authors could not allow this, so they turned him into a caricature villain and killed him.
I really can't think of a single character that was enjoyable. Not necessarily morally clean, but at least not disgusted. Maybe this is just my opinion, but I hate almost everyone in this line of comics.
3. Authors hate human characters. It's simple, the whole storyline is on the Earth. Humans are stupid and evil bastards who thoughtlessly fell for the Decepticons' trick, fought against the Autobots and tortured them. Yes, humans can do terrible things and most likely would have done something about it, but it feels like there was no place for humans in the vaunted "gray morality". Even if the authors have a teenager's brain with all this "humans suck!", they could try to make a good story. What did Spike do to deserve such a character portrayal? By being annoying in a cartoon? That's not an excuse.
4. Terribly boring MTMTE and Lost Light, a soap opera at its worst. Most of this sprawling plot could be spent on really interesting things.
5. The ending. No comments. The only plus is that it's finally over.
6. Reboot is just boring.
7. Shattered Glass — thanks them for remembering, but it doesn't even match the original, either in the image of the characters or in the plot. The plot is so-so.
8. Last Bot Standing is just some nonsense with an incomprehensible morality, an incomprehensible premise and some crazy image of random characters.
And all this is only a small part of my claims, which I was able to quickly recall.
You can say, and many will say, that this is unfair, because other works on transformers are no better and suffer from the same problems. And I will agree. But there is one detail.
Most fans do not put other works on the pedestal of the best media on transformers. Therefore, I have no complaints about other comics from Marvel or Dreamwave, because they are treated adequately. But there is such a rush around IDW that I'm tired of seeing endless proposing to put every character and every solution from these comics into new comics/cartoons/movies/games. I understand that compared to other works, these comics seem cool, but they have a lot of problems that should not be repeated. You need to come to something new, and not take the most popular and think that this is the key to success. Earthspark is going down this path, and it doesn't look good anymore. But if everything is covered with a sad Megatron and blue flowers, then everything is fine. And this is not so.
Perhaps not everything was bad, the beginning was promising and even interesting, but all this quickly turned into some kind of nonsense, fanservice and fulfillment of the wishes of the authors. In the end, I'm glad that their license was taken away from them, and I hope that the following authors will not rely on these comics in the future.
I don't like IDW for the reasons outlined above, but I hate these comics for the way the fandom treats them.
Thank you for wanting to hear me and perhaps listening to what I would like to convey.
More Posts from Rosehen96 and Others
ok last thing. but what people fundamentally need to get through their heads is the significance of gaza fundraisers not being the same as like mutual aid when you're helping someone get groceries, because it is a genocide. there is insane deliberate scarcity and prices are unmanageable, because there is nowhere nearly enough for everyone, so only people who can pay can eat. and what positioning individual fundraisers as the only course of action does is quite simply give a tiny percentage of random people whose fundraisers take off the ability to pay those prices while thousands of others can't. and every one of those thousands of people without a fundraiser is suffering through the same inconceivably horrific reality. it is giving a few completely desperate people out of hundreds of thousands a slightly more favorable position in a horrific war economy of imposed scarcity. and what grassroots community kitchens do is try to mitigate in some small way that inconceivable hierarchy of who can pay and who can't, by stretching ingredients as far as they can last to cook meals at large scale and give them out at no cost. and obviously people are still going to send money to their friends and families because this is hell what else are we supposed to do but please just think about that before promoting endless individual fundraisers as somehow the most ethical way to help
Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.
Let me teach you too.
The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.
The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.
There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.
Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.
Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.
That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.
The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.
The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.
From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.
Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.
Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)
By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.
In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.
Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.
Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.
Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.
In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.
As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.
At least, that was the plan.
Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.
And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.
They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.
They were very wrong.
He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.
He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.
He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.
Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.
As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.
The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.
But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.
About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.
Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.
By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.
That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.
Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.
(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.
Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.
Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)
Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.
Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.
Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.
Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.
But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.
Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.
Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.
It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."
(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.
It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)
Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.
It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.
Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.
Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.
The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.
Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.
That is how this conflict came about.
A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.
And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."
As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.
Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.
Do you ever think of silly stuff like what if G1 Megatron was suddenly replaced by Prime Megatron?
Just starting with the size difference, for example. G1 Megs is 6m/19'8", Prime Megs is 10.5m/34'5". And he's not boxy!
Yes, yes I do. G1 level of Megatron antics in TFP would be just. Downright lovely, like here take this short man who has the wildest of schemes.
Oh things won't go well on the g1 with TFP Meggsie, he would be a damn force on the battlefield if he chooses to be. Or, conversely, he straight up just adopts the g1 decepticons because I say so and actually runs this army well (... Well comparatively well.) and chooses not to fight the g1 autobots because they seem to practically spawn in and it would be a slaughter.
They're so little🥰
“This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself. Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack. This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying “Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as the problem.”
—
The Bully’s Pulpit On the elementary structure of domination
David Graeber
(via argyrocratie)
So I’ve been thinking about rational vs. irrational character decisions.
An irrational decision is great when your story is driven by your character’s personal flaws and struggles, and for crafting situations where your audience knows that these decisions are unavoidable because they are perfectly in character. Having your characters be perfectly able to solve their problems if they weren’t, y’know, themselves, is so very hard-hitting, and can be a fantastic part of a narrative.
The downfall with irrational decisions is that it can make situations seem less dire or make your antagonists seem less dangerous. If your characters are falling over themselves and their own personal issues, then it’s hard to show how the external problems in your story pose a serious threat, because you can’t demonstrate how they’re hard to deal with if your characters aren’t making solidly competent attempts in the first place.
Rational decisions are great for stories where most of your problems are external, like your characters trying to build a spaceship or infiltrate the bad guy’s lair. It’s also key to any horror writing, where you need your characters to be competent in order for your danger to be credible; if your audience spends the entire time wondering why your protagonists aren’t doing very obvious things to solve their problems, it’ll be a lot harder to get a properly spooky atmosphere going. But if your characters are only ever making the most optimal, logical choices without ever struggling, they won’t be very compelling, so just like with irrational decision-making, there’s a time and a place for this.
Ideally, you want some combination of both rational and irrational character choices. And maybe even more importantly, whatever choice a character’s making needs to be one that makes sense for them given everything you’ve already shown in the narrative so far. If the decision feels forced or contrived, then it doesn’t matter if it’s rational or not, because it’s not a choice that fits with the rest of the story.
But, yeah, ultimately, both types of character decisions are useful tools, and it’s less about one or the other being right, and more about both of these tools being useful for different types of situations.
I can't lie, I find it very odd that posts cautioning people against donating to individual* campaigns and promoting the idea of supporting mutual aid efforts and community kitchens in Gaza can rack up 10k+ notes--while a post promoting a community kitchen (that I can personally vouch for) struggles to get 1k notes, and has barely pulled in a couple hundred dollars over the past week.
I actively try to avoid using guilting tactics in fundraising, but this is weird to me. It's like people are using these posts as an excuse not to do things they already didn't want to do anyway, rather than actually taking their recommendations on board...
*In my experience, these campaigns often support large extended families + their neighbours
MAQMAP is a community kitchen aiming to support families in the Mawasi Al-Qarara area.
SUPPORT A FAMILY FROM 🍉🍉 TO SURVIVE THE HELLISH CONDITIONS.
Hello everyone, I would like to share with you a campaign for a family in Gaza. The people in Gaza have experienced much hardship, and are still in need of your urgent aid and attention, the people of Gaza still demand your voice, and most importantly donations. I hope their lives still matter to you, and you will help them out. Imagine living in a tent for over a year, starving each day, wondering where you will get another meal. Imagine being cold and wet each night. Imagine being in constant fear and suffering great trauma. Imagine having your home and income gone. That is a reality for them. You wouldn't like this, who why stay silent on them? Please raise your voice for such a crisis!!
One way you can help is by DONATING to this fundraiser, not enough donations are coming in for sustainable living, and their conditions worsen each day, their lives can really he helped by a simple donations, the amount really does not matter your donation is valuable no matter what. Even 5 dollars offers so much hope and is better than nothing. Please, have some humanity and help a family out!
26% goal raised.
"Hello, I am E'taf Al-Qataa,I'm from Gaza, Im34 years old ,I am a wife and a mother of five children. and I am communicating with you with a heavy heart and on behalf of my family, consisting of seven members, including 5 children. We were trapped in the devastating situation in Gaza. We were urgently seeking evacuation to Egypt after enduring more than 200 days of displacement and hardship. I seek to help them urgently and provide them with the minimum requirements. The occupation demolished our beautiful home and took my husband’s job and his car. I was displaced and was able to escape the scourge of war to Egypt, after fleeing to Deir al-Balah in Gaza and tasting the bitterness of displacement and losing a lot. Today, I find myself in a situation I never expected. The conflict in Gaza has left my family in desperate need of help. And here I did not find any money for the family’s expenses after the occupation managed to take away everything we had and we went back a lot. This war took our livelihoods and our factories, and we are struggling to survive."
@yosef-gaza is vetted, number 88 I believe(do correct me if I'm wrong)
I hope our humanity will unite, and we will come together to help them navigate this tragedy and help them rebuild their lives. Thank you for being so kind.
I think, from my opinion at least, what differentiates Earthspark from other Transformers shows (more specifically recent installations is) that it took risks and even though its messages may not have been conveyed across to its fullest potential, the intention and direction are still fairly evident and less harmful in comparison to other Transformers media
Earthspark manages to balance darker themes fairly well, whilst not forgetting its primary audience are children. There are both subtle and blatant dark themes throughout the show, there is a lot of exploration regarding one's identity which is more notable (but not exclusive) to the Terran Nightshade
It makes an honest attempt to be inclusive and while it may feel a bit stunted and awkward at times, it achieved its purpose despite what may be awkward handling— I find it odd how beloved Knockout is, despite the fact that he is an offensive gay stereotype (and not really handled well as a character in general) but the scene of Nightshade, an explicit non-binary character, saving Sam in ‘Home’ is apparently too awkward and regarded viewed as good but not enough in terms of representation?
EarthSpark has Black Filipino protagonists! There is casual representation with Mo's hair bonnet and the Filipino cuisine they eat; Alex speaks tagalog at times (although I think I do recall someone on here pointing out that the dialect he used isn't accurate to his geographic hometown in the Philippines?) and there is a whole episode where he teaches Bumblebee his culture as they hunt for the WakWak! I love when Transformers and humans teach each other about their culture, it both humanizes the Transformers reiterating that they are not emotionless robots AND it gives minorities a platform to be represented in a popular franchise
Despite the fact that the Malto children seem to be almost forcibly matured by the narrative and struggling to cope with the fear and anxiety of having their family torn apart, something that BIPOC people are at a higher likelihood of experience in the real world, it doesn't forget that at the end of the day they're all children. I quite enjoy Mo as a character and her emotional maturity, she offers her older brother wisdom and emotional comfort constantly; and when her safety is at risk her younger Terran siblings ensure that they take on a protector role due to the ultimate difference that poses threat to that of a human child and a Transformer child— because the Terrans are CHILDREN!
PTSD and trauma are touched on in EarthSpark, Hashtag's autonomy is violated by Dr Meridian and uses her body to cause harm towards her siblings and damage her environment; he used her body to prove his point that Transformers are dangerous and cannot integrate with society and Hashtag suffers from flashbacks of the experience. Despite the fact that the situation between the two is not expanded on, it is clear that Megatron has hurt Starscream in the past— Hashtag (even though she has no reason to believe Starscream because Megatron IS her mom's friend and kind towards her, "therefore he can't possible have done that") immediately believes Starscream when she confronts the latter's poor treatment towards others. She opens up about her own traumatic experience with Dr Meridian and while the situation may not be the same, she was trying to establish a common ground in the fact that they're both victims
Grimlock from his time at the bot brawls and also from having been mind-controlled by Dr Meridian blatantly suffers PTSD and is triggered several times throughout the respective episode and ineffectively copes by pushing it down. It is a dangerous thing for a Transformer to be mind-controlled, let alone a fire-breathing dinobot; fortunately Jawbreaker realising that he pushed Grimlock too far steps in and manages to calm the panicked dinobot down, assuring him that he is more than just a rampaging dinobot and there is more to Grimlock than meets the eye
EarthSpark gives us a lot in terms of themes and season one was incredibly ambitious, frankly I don't think many of the other previous Transformers shows could've handled it better than EarthSpark. I don't think that EarthSpark is without fault, on the contrary I have a few grievances with it but my issue is that people (perhaps without even realising it) are showing clear bias when they critique EarthSpark. Honestly, I do think that if the protagonists were a white family that people wouldn't mind that they're so central to the story— to be honest, that aggravates me a lot because the point of EarthSpark is that the humans have a central part in the story, it's literally about Earth born Transformers who are created a pair of siblings and adopted into their family. Criticising it centering around family and the respective human family members goes against the entire point of the show...
One of the more common critiques I have seen and I do agree to an extent, is EarthSpark's pacing. However, I absolutely think that its pacing though rushed still manages to deliver a great story that went out of its way to include difficult topics to portray— as opposed to Transformers: Prime and Transformers: Cyberverse. There is no amount of analysis and meta posts that I could read that would convince me that the pacing of those two shows were better than EarthSpark thus far, OR effectively and satisfactorily wrapped up the themes, character arcs and plotlines
It just seems that EarthSpark is taking a lot more criticism at a way earlier stage compared to other previous Transformers shows and that makes me sad because people are treating it as though its shortcomings are genuinely harmful but dismiss the previous harmful depictions in the Transformers franchise... I admire the risks and narrative choices that EarthSpark has undertaken so far and I hope it only improves from here on out, to give it that opportunity the show must continue and be given a chance to fulfil its vision
Woah, woah, woah, I agree with many of the things you bring up here, but if you're going to send me a ginormous essay, could you post it on your own blog, please? Plenty of your points are well thought-out and could stand to be there own posts, and I know I've answered long asks before, but this is way too long for me to respond to everything easily. Two or three of these points would be enough for one ask, so that's all I'm going to comment on:
-The criticism about Alex Malto defining a word wrong is definitely something that should be brought up, and I'm glad people have. I think the issue isn't necessarily the language he speaks, but that he defines "lolo" as a Tagalog word when he'd probably say it's a Bisaya word since he grew up in Bohol? I do wonder if there could be something more to his history that may explain this, especially since given his background he's probably had to switch to Tagalog and English a lot, or if there's something about his family we don't know yet. I don't have the knowledge or background to speak on this though. Also, part of me is a little glad discussing the language politics is even on the table at all for this franchise after like... how TFA handled South Asian representation, which it sounds like you were thinking as well lol
-I'm not sure if you're quoting somebody, but Hashtag (and the rest of the Maltos) ABSOLUTELY had reason to believe Megatron was abusive! Did they not go to that war memorial and hear him talking about how he's done horrible things? Don't the Malto parents often mention how he's been trying to change—the kids all know he's done harm! And Starscream even pointed out how hypocritical it is to think Megatron wouldn't leave people behind when he's locking up his former followers—even kids could get that point! Plus, the show is almost certainly trying to make the point that people who say they've been hurt should be believed and the first impulse shouldn't be to try to convince them it's not true. That's a good message for kids!
Yesterday the 12th of May was Fibromyalgia awareness day. I'm a little late uploading it, but spreading awareness is being done nonetheless. Lots of love for my chronic pain people!! <3
-
lunaorloona liked this · 5 months ago -
zanypainterglitter liked this · 5 months ago -
shinybastiodon liked this · 1 year ago -
electricdragon64 liked this · 1 year ago -
rosehen96 reblogged this · 1 year ago -
rosehen96 liked this · 1 year ago
-
grayphantomoffical liked this · 1 year ago -
certainneckgardenhound liked this · 1 year ago -
inhumanetrash liked this · 2 years ago -
littleredhat29 reblogged this · 2 years ago -
littleredhat29 reblogged this · 2 years ago
-
littleredhat29 liked this · 2 years ago
-
vihattu-thethoroughbredofsin reblogged this · 2 years ago
Hello, this blog is for posting things I find interesting like critical opinions about media and fanarts. PS: NO spicy fanart on this blog
126 posts