Just Watched Unus Annus Getting Deleted.

Just watched Unus Annus getting deleted.

There are no tears.

I feel empty but satisfied at the same time...

because I took part in this wonderful journey and it was an honour to see how it ends.

And I'm curious to see how many people try to do what they did.

Thank you and goodbye forever.

Memento Mori.

Unus Annus.

AI fanfiction is not fanfiction

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the-bookworm-queen

5 years ago

The Tragedy of Bayverse Optimus

I’ll be honest…I’m not a huge fan of the universe Michael Bay has created for a variety of reasons but I will say that like any addition to the Transformers franchise, it has its highlights and its downgrades. For starters, Bayverse is the closest thing we will ever get to a modern day interpretation of Transformers in relation to the real world. I’ve had my grubby little hands inside of cars (and not in the sexy way), and seen the infrastructure and the wires and tubing that makes them up from the inside and I gotta say…they’re not pretty. So having the bots and cons looking like metal Frankensteins is probably not too far off from what they’d look like in person.

If the government were ever to learn of their existence, they most certainly would dedicate all their time and energy to squeezing every ounce of information they can from them. They’d partner them up with the military and subtlety go after their technology, their biology, their weaponry and when they cease to be of use…ka-blam. They’d riddle them full of holes until they resemble Swiss cheese then melt them down for luxurious commodities or experimental weaponry that won’t even make it off the testing bay.

But that’s beside the point. I’m here to talk about a headcanon I’ve recently thought up regarding Bayverse Optimus. We all remember him for his deep throaty baritone and his tendency to adopt heroic poses and spew idealistic speeches that tend to contradict the essence of the movie they take place in. Or, more recently, for his seemingly inexplicable infatuation with shouting “I’LL KILL YOU” to every single enemy he faces on the battlefield and his grotesque formats of taking out his opponents.

Remember how in the first movie he was so tentative when fighting Megatron? He was a warrior, renowned for his strength and bravery, and yet there he was getting thrown around in the middle of Mission City, about to meet his end until a sweaty teenage boy grew a pair and did something so stupid that somehow ended up being the key to ending the battle.

From there, he sorta went into a downward spiral. In the Shanghai battle of Revenge of the Fallen, he shot the Decepticon in the head without so much as a flinch but you still couldn’t detect the bloodthirsty persona we’ve had in the more recent movies. In the forest battle where he inevitably died, he was more vicious but his anger and his wrath was righteous. He was defending Sam, the only human he seemed to truly care about (even if Sam was being a little dick about the college situation) and he threw everything he had into the battle…not that it did him any good but I digress.

But that’s where Optimus Prime sorta comes to an end.

It’s my headcanon that when the Matrix was used to revive him in Revenge of the Fallen, some influence of the past Primes sort of creeped their way into Optimus. We never really got any insight into what the Matrix actually was or what constituted the energy it carried. Was it the Wisdom of the Primes? I’d like to think so. Cause continuity is screwed. We’re told nobody knew of the Matrix past the 7 primes that gave up their lives for it because it was locked in a tomb and yet when Sentinel comes back in Dark of the Moon, Optimus offers it to him and Sentinel is not at all surprised by it, he seems to know what it is and when he holds it in his hand, he almost looks at it longingly as if he knew what it was.

And even if Sentinel never carried the Matrix, I refuse to believe the original 7 Primes were all do gooders as Jetfire painted them out to be (he was a fanatic for crying out loud). I’m pretty sure they must’ve had a Liege Maximo in there who was a cheeky manipulative bastard with a grey morality slate and his evil aura (heh, I’m starting to sound like IDW Drift) probably infected the damn thing.

Cause the first thing Optimus did when getting his upgrades was breaking Megatron’s arm, shooting him in the face, and blasting him through a wall. He didn’t even go for the kill shot. Then with the Fallen, he basically tore his face off, and then positioned him to skewer him and crush his Spark with his bare hand. A friend of mine told me that he was righteously pissed because the Fallen was aiming to basically kill all of humanity with the Harvester but if you’ve noticed, Optimus wasn’t particularly fond of humanity in Bayverse. He tolerated their tantrums about wanting access to Cybertronian tech but he never really sacrificed himself for anyone except those he formed friendships with like Sam and Lennox. And that’s the thing, he tolerated a lot of shit and showcased the patience he was known for in past iterations.

But after ROTF, he basically ended up getting more and more brutal. I mean, did you see the way he took out Shockwave in DOTM? Or how he shot Sentinel and then proceeded to slice the head off of Megatron when the big M asked for what sounded like a veiled offer of armstice? I’m all for badass Optimus but even then you gotta notice the big guy is kinda going off his rocker.

From AOE and forward, well, humanity just unleashed his IDGAF phase. He forsook his “I won’t hurt humanity” speech and killed humans and then Quintessa was able to manipulate him so easily in TLK. I mean, all it took was a a view of Cybertron then her telling him that killing Earth would restore Cybertron and he had no qualms with taking the task. Hell, when he came face to face with Vivian and Cade, he basically told them to give him the staff or he would kill them. I call bullshit on how Bumblebee’s voice was able to take him out of his stupor tbh; it would have been more tragic, more realistic if Optimus was never under any so called “mind control” because it would’ve showed us how we managed to push the epitome of patience and understanding into somebody that’s so willing to kill and hurt for the sake of his own survival. It’s gritty and raw and real. And I headcanon that it started with the Matrix and we just gave him the extra kick he needed to go off the deep end by turning on him and the Autobots, even after they saved us from our own colossal mistakes. Because you have to admit Chicago wasn’t entirely Optimus’ fault; sure he may have not been privy to Sentinel’s impending betrayal but the governments were basically ruled by arrogant pricks that thought they could withhold secrets and play god to titans from another planet.

Bayverse Optimus may not be the Optimus that we know and love from the past 30+ years of Transformers content that we’ve indulged in but he’s certainly a complex and tragic version that deserved so much more exploration that what the writers had given him. There’s something fascinating about seeing these perfect characters break and fall apart and Bayverse offered us a taste of what Optimus would be like after suffering millenia of betrayals and disappointments. A mech who dreamed of peace but who eventually grew to understand that hatred and greed is a fundamental aspect of sentience and very often, the desires of the few are enough to topple the needs of the many.

And I appreciate him for that.

So here ends my rant. If you’ve gotten this far, I offer cookies and apologies and a very amusing GIF because this was no doubt as incoherent as The Last Knight and you probably have a headache.