How many times do I have to explain to you that it's the MESSAGE of the show that I'm finding preachy, NOT the villains? How in the hell can you even EQUATE the evilness of a villain to how preachy a show is?Dominic wrote:King Tut and the Beast-era. Ah, incest.
I admit, I hated the abstract, and just plain innaccurate, toys. The Vehicons were okay. But, most of the Maximals were intolerable. The looked like knock-offs. Nightviper was okay, but cancelled out by garbage like Rattrap or Nightscream.
Fan-modes are not worth points when it comes to rating a toy, any more than fan-fic potential is worth points when it comes to rating a show.
I am still wondering how a show that had not completely evil bad guys can be more preachy than a show with "bad guyz who is bad guyz". In any case, Megatron's actions in "Weak Component" make sense. He was acting as an ideal machine would, giving the correct output, (keeping hiw word), in response to the correct input.
Dom
-only noticed Rhinox's voice actor screwing up in hindsight.
Let me explain this to you in as simple of terms as I can: the show is preachy because the pseudo-philosophical debate they're using for the basis of the conflict between the two groups - the argument between instrumentality vs. free will and technology vs. nature - is heavyhanded and prevalent throughout the whole thing, to the point where the show focuses on little else. The evilness of the villains aren't in play, here; Megatron could've been irredeemably evil or sympathetic as all hell, and it wouldn't have made a difference to the preachiness of the philosophical position he holds. When I compare the preachiness of this show to the preachiness of Captain Planet, I'm not comparing how evil the villains are, I'm comparing how the writers handle the message and the morals they want to express in the show; Captain Planet isn't preachy, because the villains pollute for the sake of polluting, it's preachy because in order to get through to the viewers their environmental message, the writers resort to having the villains pollute for the sake of polluting and having the heroes give long-winded and annoying diatribes about how polluting is wrong. It's not what the villains DO, or whether they're SYMPATHETIC in the end that makes the show preachy, it's the MESSAGE that the writers want to get past through the conflict between our heroes and the villains, and how they portray that message and deliver it to the viewer. And with Captain Planet, just like this show, they did NOT portray that message subtly.
With BM, the message they're basing the conflict on is the clash of philosophical ideals between Megatron's instrumentality and technological superiority, and Optimus' free will and environmentalism. Every single time we see either one of them, they're always going on a rant about how their side is right, their philosophies are right, and they need to destroy the other side because their philosophies are wrong. THAT is preachy and heavy-handed, because they CONSTANTLY remind us of it, they CONSTANTLY bang it into our heads that they feel they're in the moral and philosophical right, and they NEVER. SHUT. UP. ABOUT. IT. Anything they do, any missions they go on, they do to further their philosophical goals, and every time they do something that their underlings think is questionable and are called on it, they go on ANOTHER diatribe about how it's necessary for "technological perfection" or "fulfilling the Will of the Oracle". This philosophical debate overtakes everything else in the show; most of the character development we see are either absorbed into the debate or forgotten in lieu of said debate, and quite frankly, the Vehicon generals don't seem that evil, because they're little more than more animate drones for Megatron's industrial machine; they don't have any goals of their own, other than to serve Megatron's will, and even when he was snapped back into his old persona, what did Tankor decide to do? Usurp Megs and take his philosophical ramblings as his own. They may have been more quirky, but they weren't INTERESTING.
Compare this to Beast Wars: the villains' main plans were simple, and left out philosophical idealism - they felt they were being oppressed in the new peace, wanted to restore the Decepticon empire to its former glory, and set out to do that, in any way possible. It was simple, yet elegant, and didn't have any "deep" or "artsy" pseudo-Nietzschean thesis into the human condition or the meaning of life to be interesting. I actually found Megatron in this show to be LESS evil than his BM incarnation; Yes, BW Megs was eventually planning on destroying Optimus Prime and changing history, and in the end he didn't care much about any of his troops (if he cared about them, at all), but at least, as we saw in the show, he had limits - his focus on gathering Energon for a "modern-day" revolution, during the first season, and his moving up to killing off primitive humans in the second, showed that he KNEW that his ultimate goal was way too ambitious to be sanely feasible, and wanted to hold off on doing it until he had no other choice in the matter. He probably realized that things could go terribly wrong for the future, if he did so, and so put it on the back burner until he ran out of schemes to achieve the same Predacon liberation he was looking to achieve with it. Plus, many of the villains actually had GOALS they were looking into achieving for themselves, and while they weren't always very well explained, they were at least goals that the villains pursued for themselves. They had their own ambitions, their own dreams, and their pursuit of those ambitions made them more interesting and fleshed out and sympathetic than your average one-note villain. The show focused on the characters and their development, NOT on the philosophical diatribes of the main hero and villain.
And, y'know, just because Rhinox repented during the last cycles of his life in BM, doesn't mean that the philosophical ideals he was fighting for as a villain wasn't being shoveled to the viewers in a forceful and preachy manner. It doesn't lessen the presence of the debate between technology and nature or instrumentality and free will, or how much he preached about it while he was a villain. If the preachiness of a show or message is dictated by the evilness of the villain, then I'm betting you'd dismiss Fred Phelps' crusade against gays and non-Baptists as not being as bad as people think it is, if he renounced his ways on his death bed. That's basically what you're saying, it doesn't matter how hard the show pushes its existential bullcrap on the viewer, it's not "preachy" if the villain once pet a freaking kitten instead of strangling it. How evil the villain is doesn't change the message being portrayed, or how it's being portrayed, and the heroes can be JUST as bad with selling THEIR philosophies as the villains. So, once again, and I hope this gets through your thick skull: IT'S THE MESSAGE THAT'S BEING PREACHY, NOT THE VILLAINS. The villains could be saints, for all I care; if the stupid "Technological Perfection" versus "The Will of the Oracle" debate was as heavy-handed, blatant, and mind-numbingly inescapable as it was in the show, THE SHOW WOULD STILL BE PREACHY.
As for Megatron...his ultimate goal is to control a world of soulless automatons with him as the only spark left in existence. THERE IS NO NEED FOR HIM TO KEEP HIS PROMISE TO RATTRAP. Saying he was trying to show his dedication for a "perfect machine system" by keeping his word is bullcrap, since it's not a perfect machine system if the aberration he sees as Rattrap and his ilk are still running around. This is a guy who forcefully stripped the sparks of millions if not billions of Transformers, without bothering to deal with giving "the correct output" by asking them nicely if he could steal their souls, or getting "corrupt input" from the billions of non-consensual sparks. His "technological perfection" is him imposing his will on a cold, dead world with him as the only living soul on it. That is incompatible with letting his mortal enemies, the ones he sees as aberrations to Cybertron and a threat to his version of perfection, leave on his own when he had the guy in his clutches, because he "made a promise".