No, the Decepticons are not misunderstood as the good guys. You are giving the Transformers series WAY too much credit.
First of all, let’s address this lie about decades and decades of woke comic books. That’s mostly marketing for the MCU that the movie industry has told you. Some comic books from some publishers some of the time have had social justice allegories. Stan Lee did it a lot. That was far from the standard; elsewhere in the industry you’d find nationalist propaganda like Captain America or just…DC spent a lot of time just doing salacious shit for the sake of salaciousness. Batman has been anything from goofy shit for children to a grimdark showcase of mental illness. Wonder Woman was an excuse for one author to write about his bondage fetish.
That’s not where Transformers came from. Transformers was a toy line first; Hasboro imported a line of Japanese toys and then created comics and cartoons around them as a marketing exercise. In the Ronald Reagan 1980’s. There’s a lot of people who have correct memories of Transformers being about a team of virtuous, American-made automobiles lead by a Red, White and Blue Peterbilt^®^ in their glorious fight against the fundamentally Evil, dark-colored foreigners. And those eye rolling The More You Know segments the Gubmint makes em do.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Those types have been attacking “woke” cartoons this whole time. There’s a lot of stories about writers getting push back from executives for having independent female protagonists and being forced to shoehorn romantic or maternal aspects in like with Pirates of Dark Water.
Sometimes though, a whole “woke” show gets made, but then it becomes the butt of jokes like Captain Planet.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 days ago
TBF Captain Planet is one of those programs that was made specifically to be “woke”, that’s the entire point. I mean, yeah, we can mock it for being so on the nose. Those execs were kids too at one point, watching the good guys beat the bad guys in cartoons. At some point they chose to be the bad guys.
As far as shoehorning in a female (and or other minority), I guess I’m gonna be on thin ice bringing this up… I don’t know why these execs have to force a change to an established character. That changes the story from being the story to being about the change. There are plenty of shows that have female or other minority characters that make them real, fantastically written, enjoyable, relatable characters for who they are. We need roles written for them. Just like a decently written cis male character. We need much more of that, so we can see everyone as human, real, part of our lives and normal and not some shoehorned personality that needs to be worked around. Woke is about being real as much as it is about the realization that change needs to happen. That all said, I’m not against these changes to established characters. If a young African american girl is thrilled to see a black Little Mermaid, then that’s beautiful. I’m just not happy about the possibility that the young girl grown up might later see the character as shitty corporate pandering to the community (would she be wrong?) rather than having a well-written character and an original story all her own.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’m not sure what part of my comment this tangent is replying to. When I cited Pirates of Dark Water, I’m comparing how Tula was portrayed in the pilot compared the to main series. The writers themselves said that the executives forced them at add maternal aspects to the Tula character because to the executives, any female character should be promoting traditional female society roles. In the pilot, she essentially written as a male or genderless character who happen to be female. Similar to Ripley in Alien. This isn’t some analysts made in Death of the Author.