Things I noticed my second time watching Transformers One
Restricted access to information - the first scene is literally Orion, breaking into an archive. obviously, Sentinel is trying to restrict access to information to keep the couggler spots from figuring out the truth.
Only cogeless bots use the trains - What if the whole reason they have trains is because cogeless can't transform and need other ways to travel.
The cogeless are so small - this got me thinking about a whole bunch of things. Are they supposed to grow as they get older, but couldn't because they couldn't transform?
The bar the Orion landed in only has bots with coges- there's obviously a good deal of prejudice from the transformers against the coggle spots, so are there like transformers only establishment?
D is worried about getting punished after the race - have they been punished before and for what? Are cogeless not allowed to do certain things
How long is a cycle? - obviously, a cycle is equivalent to a year, but from past media, we know that a cybertronian year is a lot longer than an earth year. But how long exactly?
D has so much anger throughout the entire movie. - I only really caught this on my second time watching, but D has a lot of anger throughout the entire movie, he just hides it very well.
Food shortage - there's probably a food shortage in Icon. We see orion grabbing as many cubes as he can from the bar, and Sentinel says that they barely have enough for their own citizens.
Does Alpha tryon think a bunch of kids have come to save him? From his perspective, he just got woken up by child sized bots. What is going through his head?
The high guard has become really demoralized. - Was it always like that? Or did starscrem leadership make them like that? Obviously, if they were trusted by the primes for so long, they must have had some moral backbone once upon his hime, so was it just that the fifty cycles they sped on the surface turn them into a might makes right cult?
Sental told everyone they died - looking back on it sentinel, prime always intended to get rid of them.He probably told dark wing to throw them down to sub level fifty.
The transformers only seemed concerned with the transmission ater Sentinel nails to the quintisomes - like I said earlier there's probably a good bit of classism between the Transformers and the cogless and some of the elite Transformers knew about the miners having their cogs ripped out, but didn't know about the quintesons.
The little ranking singly as that they are wearing. - we see D stomp his after the truth is revealed, but I didn't notice that they're all wearing them.
The longer the movie goes on, the more orion's voice sounds like Optimus Prime.
Other stuff
The little kid in front of me say "no why did you do that" when D shot Orion
Megatrons are at eyes are so cool
The way the music cuts for Optimist
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RWRB Full-Cast Audiobook Imaginations
So with the sequel on the horizon, we’re not that far from a full-cast re-recording of the audiobook, right?
I listen to the audiobook more than I read the book, mostly because I can listen to it while doing other stuff, and no offence to the original narrator, but while it’s good, it’s not the best. I kind of cringe at his British accent for Henry.
So I have a lot of thoughts.
The thing is with an audiobook, we can get both the wonderful vocal performance of the movie cast, and the iconic book lines, the ones that didn’t, and frankly, could never have made it into the movie due to format restrictions:
Sexy explicit sex scenes
Sexy explicit sex lines “For fuck’s sake, man, you just had my dick in your mouth, you can kiss me good-night”, “I want you to fuck me”, “I’ve been thinking about your mouth on me all well”
Emails in their entirety
Email openings and endings “Huge Raging Heache Prince Henry of Who Cares”, “First Son of Shirking Responsibilities”, “Horrible Revolting Heir”, “First Son of Founding Father Sacrilege”, “Haplessly Romantic Heretic Prince Henry the Utterly Daft”
Email historical quotes “The whole is a mass of fools and knaves; I could almost except you”, “I meet you in every dream”
Swearing and explicit language “fucking shit” “I fucking love you, okay?”
Internal Struggle
Iconic lines that didn’t make it into the movie for adaptation and story purposes “I’m never gonna love anybody in the world like I love you” “I love him on purpose”, “America, he is my choice”
Like, imagine hearing all of this in Taylor, in Nick, in Sarah and Uma and Ellie and Rachel and Thomas and Aneesh and Cfiton etc etc 's voice. Just imagine it!!!
Another thing to add is that to put it in simple terms, the current version of the audiobook does the dialogue lines closer to theatre acting: more enunciated, more inflection, and slower. Which is fine in its own right (I’m a theatre kid). But with the cast audiobook, hopefully, we can get them to do something closer to film acting, i.e. closer to reality, reading the lines as they would if they were to shoot those scenes.
Which is gonna make big moments like sexy times and confrontations a lot of fun :D
And something really entertaining to think about is now that we also know the cast and their dynamic is thinking about how much fun they would have while recording the book, especially when they have scenes together. And it’s not necessarily just Taynick, it’s group scenes with the whole Super Six, like the karaoke scene in chapter seven, or the Texas Holiday Scenes with Firstprince and Junora.
Like, Imagine it, the actors in the same recording studio, maybe even on the same couch:
Taylor and Nick laughing while reading off the insults from the earlier frienemies days of their relationship
Taylor and Nick squirming and playfully hitting each other when recording lines for sexy scenes like the first night, or the tack room, or Wimbledon
The cast shouting and booing (playfully) whenever someone messes up a line in their group scenes
The chaotic fun that is the LA karaoke scene, everybody’s laughing, Ellie gets to be the singular sober person while everyone else acts drunk, Nick singing Don’t Stop Me Now shittier (Nick has the voice of an angel but book Henry can’t sing for shit),
Taylor and Nick giving each other hugs after screaming at each other for the Kensington confrontation
Nick grinning smugly at every book height difference mention (:<
More of Taylor speaking Spanish!!!
Thomas gets to be a proper asshole villain who later turns into awkward older brother who's trying
Ellie gets to do the pie metaphor grief monologue
Taylor gets to do another speech (he’s really good at delivering speeches)
I want to quickly reiterate that I am in no way unhappy with what we got in the end for the movie; I love it to pieces. However, as Matthew and Casey said, there are two “canonical” versions of the story now, and since audiobooks are an option, it would be really nice to connect this aspect of the movie verse with the book verse in some sort of middle ground.
So yeah Audible? Amazon? Get on with it!!!
@almightaylor this was the long post I mentioned, I literally started this in July lol
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Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?
I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.
disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.
this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.
what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.
with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.
from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.
with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)
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I've been writing my own sci-fi universe on and off after new Trek disappointed me, and has continued to disappoint me. If I had to sum it up it would be Star Trek but more overtly communist and also military sci-fi.
I've mainly been inspired by things I've read/played/watched, which has mainly been made by white or western creators, so I wanted to ask if you had any recommendations for sci-fi made by POC creators to broaden my horizons.
omg of course!!! (with the caveat that unfortunately non-Western scifi specifically is a bit of a blindspot for me, so most of these will be Western authors of colour)
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (& i recommend reading the complete trilogy - imo it works best read together as one whole)
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color ed. by Nisi Shawl
How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin
I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young
And 2 that i personally haven't read yet but i think NEED to be mentioned, especially if we're talking space stories:
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (also military scifi!)
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
also, short story anthologies!!! if you're looking for new authors or want to explore works from a specific culture/place, they're a great way to do that. here's a couple from my own reading list for this year:
Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba
Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction
Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction
Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction
& finally, i don't really watch a lot of tv/movies, but i do wanna wholeheartedly recommend:
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer (free on youtube and an absolutely top tier example of afrofuturism)
Nope
They Cloned Tyrone
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