Uncharitable

[stainless]

...y’know, I think I just realized why that “WE’VE ACHIEVED SOMETHING” panel from MTMTE always makes me feel weirdly uneasy rather than amused

because how depressed are you at baseline if achieving “something” is the threshold for celebration? Like, it’s not “we did this difficult thing” (even though that’s likely the cause for the banner) or “we achieved something this week” or “this month” or even “this hekavorn”

so my brain parses it like “ooh, we finally went against type and DID SOMETHING. Sarcastic yay.”

like, I know the thing is supposed to be self deprecating British humoUr but my brain reads it like how I feel when i’m convinced I’m not worth much.

that I think was my whole problem with that series—it was clever but my mind parsed it as overwhelmingly despairing. The Decepticons turned into a colossal mistake, the one guy who redeemed himself ultimately ended up executed or put away for eternity by an evil authority everyone nonetheless had to bow to, a whole bunch of guys died just For The Feels as far as I could tell...

other people read it as “masterful tragic playing with my feels” and I read it as “overwhelmingly despairing in tone” and “for the love of Primus please give me some sort of crowning moment of awesome no matter how ridiculous because I HONESTLY CAN’T ANY MORE”

Comments

[raisedbymoogles]

yyyyyyeah, that's part of the reason why I can't stand MTMTE too. I read to escape from my brainweasels telling me I'm worthless and everything is awful, I don't need them validated.

[greyliliy]

I had to stop reading long before that (I couldn't stand how he wrote Rodimus, I'll be honest) but you're not wrong. MTMTE always had a very somber, depressing tone to it under all the forced humor and supposedly tender moments. Every time something good happened, it tended to get snatched away fairly soon and replaced with something depressing.

[astolat]

Yes, I'm with you -- I felt with a lot of MTME that they were stretching out a fairly small amount of story, and this was an example of hanging a lantern on the fact that nothing was happening and they weren't actually achieving anything, which is both boring and depressing, and mostly it was like a bad office full of infighting and pettiness, lol.

IDK, I don't care about 90% of the characters they crammed the stage with and didn't want to care, so perhaps I am not the target audience, but even the ones I did care about I felt were badly handled. Megatron's redemption story in particular just didn't fundamentally work for me because they kept not SHOWING critical parts of it. And then they shoved him into another universe and had him reappear at the last minute as a saintly Marty Stu with his cannon turned into a medical kit, and then right, to be executed or imprisoned forever despite this, I guess either because the writers felt (correctly) that they hadn't earned letting him go free, since they didn't SHOW any of the actual work he did becoming that guy, or because they felt (incorrectly) that it makes his arc more ~deep~ to have a depressing ending. :P