Why it HAD to be Ratchet

It took me a while to put my feelings towards ll #25 in to words, I still have a lot of things I wanna say about it, but the thing that stuck with me a lot after I finished reading it was how it just HAD to be Ratchet who died and whose funeral brought everyone back together.

At first when I got to that page where we find out he’s dead I was heartbroken, and to be honest there are other characters I wished were in Ratchet’s place. 

But as I continued and when I looked back on it later I realized that it couldn’t be anyone else. 

In my opinion, that’s because no one else’s death would strike people as hard.

and by people I don’t mean readers - I would have been as devastated if it was the funeral of whirl or Drift or Tailgate or most of the main cast really.

I’m talking about people in-universe. 

You see, i find Ratchet to be kind of a really rare character in the comic - He is a genuinely good person and a well-known one at that, famous across all of Cybertron.

I honestly can’t think of many other characters in the comics like that.

The higher ranking people in these comics are so often selfish or morally grey or borderline (and sometimes completely) irredeemable people that a truly selfless and good character like him is very rare.

Ratchet, in my opinion, became an icon of hope - at the beginning of mtmte him leaving the planet was clearly traumatic to Bumblebee and the remaining Autobots, it is shown again and again that he is trusted unquestionably, be it by giving the honest medical reason for a bot’s death or treating the leader of the Decepticons who’s tried to kill him before

And sure there are characters like Velocity or Nautica or First Aid whom I consider to be “Good People” but they’re pretty unknown all things considered, their death wouldn’t have the same impact on the whole planet.

I mean just look at the way Cybertronians reacted to his death:

Five thousand innermost energon gifts, I frankly can’t think of a better way to show how close Ratchet became to so many people’s sparks before, during and after that war.

That’s especially incredible when you consider how few Cybretronians survived the war.

Ratchet dedicated himself fully to helping those in need, and while 4 million years of war made him jaded and cynical, they didn’t change that in him the way it did to so many others who lived through them, he was still just as willing to put himself in harm’s way and do everything possible to save everyone he could.  

It just seems so fitting to me, that Ratchet last action (if you could call it that) even in death, is healing, by donating his components to medical centers.

it just makes sense that he’s the one to bring the crew back together, and maybe, in his death, remind a planet so broken and torn and desensitized to violence and death of the beauty of life and giving just for the sake of giving.

After all, Without Love There Is No Meaning.

Drift is one of my favorite characters but I struggle w how much he’s smoothed out by the fanon interpretation. There’s a real collision between ‘these are a collection of deeply flawed individuals both desperate to move on with their lives and entirely unwilling to let go of old grudges’ and the fandom ‘these are all good boys who either did nothing wrong or are abusive monsters’ that haunts most of the lost light cast.

There’s one unequivocal Good Boy and it’s Thunderclash and that part of him is played for laughs?

I REALLY like Drift, I relate to him, and i say that as a chaser because Drift is also completely full of it, 24/7. His narrative arc is about how he struggles with the concept of forgiveness, and how he wants absolution, he wants to do the time and put the work in and wipe the slate clean except you can’t do that.

His understanding of forgiveness is ultimately shallow, and it’s why his spirituality and philosophy are so often not treated seriously by the narrative; they’re not. They’re affectations of who he thinks a person worth forgiving is. It’s a play-act of a better person, like someone who buys incredibly expensive things to help friends. Friends who are, perhaps, popular and well-liked enough to lend you some legitimacy.

Drifts journey is… incredibly tough. ‘Redemption’ as a concept isn’t as clean-cut as we like to think; once you hurt someone, once you do a bad thing, it’s done. You can do better, you can apologise, but you can’t take it back, you can’t rewrite yourself into someone who isn’t capable of horrible things. When Drift realises what he’s doing, he leaves. He can no longer buy into his own bullshit and thinks the only solution is exile, somewhere he can go and suffer in penance, the only honourable thing left to do.

And it’s why Ratchet and Drift work so well, because Ratchet NEVER bought it. He always knew it was a load of bollocks, but he didn’t care. Drift leaves and Ratchet goes and gets him because fuck that!!!! I love you, idiot! Nobody wants you to leave! Everyone knows you’re sorry, it’s fine. You’re a violent little weirdo but come do it on our boat, your friends need you and miss you. And that’s why I love Drift. I think he’s got a beautiful story about living with yourself when ‘yourself’ is kind of a bastard.

one of the things i wish had carried over from Empire of Stone when drift and ratchet came back onto mtmte/ll is drift agreeing to come back, but not as an autobot. i know overall EoS wasn't always in great continuity with the main title, and a lot of it was very easily discarded and disconnected from major happenings plotwise, and overall it's quite... thin and underwritten so understandably was never really going to get much traction. but that part, that was great.

first of all, it helps build a narrative bridge between pre-mtmte drift and how he's characterized in that series. in spotlight: drift and the drift miniseries, it's made pretty explicit that drift did not defect towards the autobots. he defected from the decepticons. he is much more ambivalent about the autobots in that era, and basically says he joined up because his number one priority was to end the war as fast as possible. (in the drift miniseries, this is also his motivation while still deadlock in the decepticons, so that's consistent.)

there isn't really anything in mtmte to contradict this necessarily but it's definitely not... hm, present, i guess is how i'd put it. implicitly, especially since mtmte is very much a comic pitched as a jumping on point for folks who didn't read some already-quite-unpopular old one shots and miniseries, it kind of just assumes he's all in on the autobot thing.

but EoS shows us a drift who has now dropped the act he was carrying on while on the lost light even around ratchet, and it gives us a much clearer look at what drift is like when he's not bullshitting for an audience. and it's there that we get drift saying he has no real reason to go back to the autobots and that he can do just as much if not more to help people as a neutral now.

to which ratchet basically goes "yeah that's fair, but you still need to come back". and at that point, Drift agrees to. only when he shows back up in DotL, this particular bit clearly hasn't carried over, and Drift's just an autobot again.

but before that, taking just the end of EoS into consideration, you can easily see it as being that Drift's implicit commitment to being An Autobot TM on the LL the first time around was as much a part of his "nonthreatening" persona as anything else. plus, of course, I'm sure Rodimus would take for granted that of course Drift really wanted to be an autobot, and letting him believe that would make things easier. once he was out of there, and all that blew up in his face, he dropped it and showed his actual ambivalence. i think that works really well to hammer home the difference between the version of Drift that we saw in "series one", and the more honest version of Drift that comes back.

there's probably multiple reasons this didn't wind up picked up. if nothing else, you try keeping track of all this disparate continuity across writers and series and shifting deadlines and such in ongoing comics, maybe that had a hand in it! but. i like it and wish it had carried over. i would have loved to see a conversation with rodimus after that particular change.

I love this scene so much, cause

was thinking about this again and came to the revelation that drifts swagger and posturing is down to the fact that cyclonus is everything drifts trying to reinvent himself as - drifts trying to pass himself off* as the lost lights religious swordguy and suddenly along comes cyclonus who is the realest of deals and drifts probably feeling threatened because if anyone’s going to see through him, it’s this guy

*not that I think drifts faking everything, but I think that drift feels like he’s faking. i think he’s definitely a fake it til you make it guy 🤔

I also love how mister “Not A Decepticon” Cyclonus has not only a) Immediately seen right through the front Drift puts up to protect himself and b) Tolerates exactly zero of this Accusatory Autobot Nonsense he then c) Doesn’t expose Drift, knowing that mister “I’m Not Deadlock” here does this as an overcompensating survival tactic. I mean, Cyclonus generally avoids him after this but if he wanted he could destroy the crew’s (already very tentative) trust in Drift. But he doesn’t, and Drift eventually works through it himself. Just like Cyclonus had to after Galvatron. I find it very interesting that these two also find love and get married when at the start of their stories in MTMTE they were both in no way ready to be in a relationship. Love that character progression towards Tailgate and Ratchet.

Good evening transformers Tumblr please look at this Twitter comment on Alex Milne’s commission art. I’ve been reeling for ten whole minutes