The thing I find hilarious about people freaking out because Optimus Prime has been acting ruthless and underhanded…
What did you think would happen after Prowl got kicked out?
Blackmail, assassination, coercion… All terrible, immoral things. Terrible immoral things Prowl used to deal with in secret so that his Boss could keep his hands clean and remain the pure and inspiring and heroic leader people wanted to follow.
But now Prowl is gone, and it turns out those terrible immoral things were done for the very good reason of preventing genocides, so the Autobots can’t just refuse to do them because the blood-dripping price would be devastating.
And so we have OP blackmailing Soundwave and executing a surrendering and pleading prisoner, and people are like HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN???
Because Optimus is a good person, and good people never do terrible immoral things, right? The only reason anybody would ever do terrible immoral things is because they are a monster. Like Prowl, who must be a monster because he did terrible immoral things while trying to save as many lives as possible during the bloodiest war in the universe where the enemies literally destroy entire planets and turn prisoners into living mines and torture people to death as punishment for seeking comfort in faith and experiment on their own to create cannibalistic abomination so on and on and on and on and on.