I love meta posting. But there's one criticism of canon that I'm actually too afraid to post, and that's an explanation of the issues with D-16 in Transformers One. I genuinely find his story deeply offensive, but I'm too scared to explain why. Constantly, I see people construct straw men about how fans who didn't like his arc are just bitter that a kids' movie wasn't going to argue that killing a dictator is a good thing. A claim I'm not even sure has merit given that in a deleted scene Orion Pax does suggest that Sentinel may deserve to die (though it should be a decision by the collective). But for me, that's barely my issue. Throughout the entire film, every single act of violence long before that assassination was framed as much more serious and scary than the brutal violence enacted by the other heroes, including when D got the High Guard on his side vs. when Elita-1 did literally the same thing.

I think that if you compare D in this movie to someone like TFP's Megatron, you can see that he's an attempt to push the incredibly insidious trope of an oppressed person rebelling against the system who takes it too far. TFP Megatron, despite leading a slave revolt initially, did go on to kill the entire planet. But D-16 almost quite literally did nothing wrong. The thing that triggers everyone's fear was him shooting a few statues depicting propaganda.

I'd be remiss not to mention the fact that D-16 was voice acted by a Black man as well. What the movie is truly depicting is the story of how scary it is that an oppressed guy portrayed by a Black man rebelled violently, and of the the oppressed guy portrayed by a white man who also rebelled violently and killed people, but who refused to kill the oppressor at the top and was blessed by God for it... and then he banished the former to a place he and his army may be killed by Quintessons.

I despise stories like these because they allow moviegoers to hate somebody from an oppressed minority group but have plausible deniability about it. "It's a tragedy and he's sympathetic and look, he took it too far, it's actually really mulit-faceted." And this trope is so insidious because if anyone tries to point out it's problematic, people will bring up all the wrong the fictional character did... not understanding this isn't a real person. That people made choices writing and framing the narrative. And it hurts me seeing people of color also seemingly falling for this and believing this is progressive somehow!

I expect the Notes on this to be full of attempts to headcanon a way out of these readings. But as for me, I'm relieved that there may be no more of this series.