#prowl literally didnt ask. like. no one asked him to do war crimes

[lord-squiggletits]

I think what I'm trying to express is that there's two aspects of Optimus being a "good person" at play here: there's the propagandistic public reputation, AND the personal actions/justifications of Optimus himself.

For public image, I don't think IDW1 ever intended to have Optimus' reputation as the Paragon figure be unquestioned (pretty much all of Autocracy, Chaos Theory, everything Barber wrote in phase 2/3). The fact that he's viewed in universe as A Good Guy isn't something the writers frame as "this is a fact of the universe," it's framed more as "this is a social/political factor that affects how Optimus is perceived as well as what he does to try and take advantage of (or deny) this."

So for this reason I don't find "ignorant fool" fanon!Optimus to be very compelling; canon as a whole was never trying to argue that Optimus is an Unquestioned Moral Good, so when fanon tries to subvert this by making Optimus evil/an asshole/bad at running his own army, it comes off less as an interesting subversion/exploration of canon and more like people just haven't read canon that thoroughly.

Then there's Optimus being a "good person" in terms of what he actually believes, does, and orders others to do and like. There is literally no question of it, IDW OP is under no delusions of his moral goodness and no delusions of just how shitty war/post-war society is. Pretty much Optimus' entire life is him going "God I'm taking one step forward and two steps back, people want me to be their Heroic Leader and I don't want to be but I also want to live up to their expectations, but if they believe in me as their Heroic Leader it means I can more securely lead them in war. Goddamn it I'm a horrible person but what other choice do I even have, if I don't do this then I'm going to be giving up an advantage I have in this war to stop whole planets from Literally Being Colonized."

Like idk it's just absurd to me this idea ppl have that because Prowl got away with doing blatant war crimes/ethics violations behind Optimus' back, somehow this means that Optimus is completely clueless as to how shitty war is and is unwilling to do morally gray things in the name of victory? Despite that the fact that he DOES, ON SCREEN, ALL THE TIME? How are people conflating "Optimus doesn't want to do literal war crimes" with "Optimus thinks/pretends that he's never done anything wrong in his life"?

One of my least favorite parts of how JRO wrote Optimus is that he wanted so badly to continue his dark and gritty world building making the Autobots problematic, but evidently couldn't reconcile this with Optimus being a Heroic Paragon, so instead he leaned way too hard into "oh Prowl was the one who did this and it was behind Optimus' back" which if anything I think makes Optimus look worse, not better. Because then it's like, okay I know Optimus trusted Prowl a lot as his friend but you CANNOT TELL ME that over the course of 4 million years, Optimus as the leader of the Autobot army who literally would have access to 99.9% of all the records they produce, would never notice or question where some of these odd/inconsistent details were pointing. It just seems really inconsistent with how a real military would actually function, especially regarding Optimus' character, who is incredibly thorough and responsible and wouldn't neglect to keep up with all the details of his army.

Hell, Optimus knows who the Wreckers are and had them on call for tricky operations when he needed them (Stormbringer) so he's literally not at all ignorant of/averse to the use of special wartime units composed of dubious individuals. He's the fucking commander of an entire army, of course he knows that War Is Hell (TM) and no one's hands are clean. That's not even getting into all the stuff he got up to in phase 2/3, I mean everything from the annexation of Earth to OP breaking humans out of prison against Council orders shows that Optimus is no stranger to immoral and/or unlawful means.

It also leads to a lot of annoying fanon where people write Optimus (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) as like some sort of ignorant fool who's unaware of the machinations of his own army or has some sort of naiveté of "b-but we can't use bad tactics against the enemy! I would never condone the use of morally gray means in war!" No, IDW Optimus knows perfectly well all of the bullshit he's enacted/condoned for the sake of trying to win the war. Some stuff is definitely out of character for him and was only machinated because of Prowl, but I think this fandom REALLY underestimates Optimus' personal agency/responsibility as the commander of a whole ass army and ESPECIALLY underestimates Optimus' capacity to condone morally gray Bullshit Of War while still being a good person individually as well as, comparatively, the lesser evil compared to Megatron/the Decepticons.

Anyways what I'm saying is JRO may be a good writer but he's really hesitant to make Optimus morally gray and does some asspulls sometimes to justify most of the bad things the Autobots did as "Optimus just didn't know," and since the majority of the IDW1 fandom only reads JRO's stuff they go running with this premise of ignorant/uninformed Optimus when there's evidence elsewhere in canon to show that Optimus is, in fact, very highly aware of the bullshit he's allowed "for the greater good" and the only stuff he was "unaware of" was the stuff he would literally never agree to the ethics of, like bombing innocent neutrals disguised as Decepticons to get them to join the Autobots.