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short-wooloo · 5 years

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Not the Happy Ending you think it will be

I’ve seen people wishing that Ben/Kylo had lived at the end or ROS, now I assume that most of these people are Reylo shippers, but that aside a believe the reason they wish for such is because they assume it will be some kind of Happy Ending where he helps build a new Jedi Order

That wasn’t going to happen,

Ben/Kylo have participated in and/or ordered massacres of civilians/non-combatants and prisoners (as seen in TFA), has used torture on prisoners, and was the leader of xenophobic, human-supremacist regime attempting to conquer the galaxy, if he lived he would have been arrested and tried for War Crimes

The thing with redemptions, particularly for major villains, is that there’s a tendency to kill them off soon after their redemption, why? Because it lets them skip the complicated issue of what comes next, if Anakin had lived he would have been in the same situation Ben would be in that I mentioned above, arguably worse, so killing off the former villain is a great way of avoiding the issue, because while a character may be redeemed, that does not absolve them of their crimes, so if they live you either have to put them through a trial where there is overwhelming evidence against them, or just plain ignore everything that they have done, let them go free and have everyone just be fine with it

See the problem?

Now a good example of how to deal with a major villain getting redemption/switching sides and still living afterwards would be from IDW’s Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye, with Megatron’s defection to the Autobots

(If you want the full rundown go here: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Megatron_(G1)/2005_IDW_continuity)

Now what happens here is Megatron switching sides is not the Autobots getting a new members, rather its more akin to leaving one side of a conflict and surrendering yourself into the custody of the other,

Case and point, what happens next is Megatron is put on trial for his crimes, during which he complies, pleading guilty, but its only once Starscream makes his testimony that Megatron changes his stance, what happens is:

“When Starscream gets his turn on the witness stand, it is to speak in Megatron's defense—in a sense. Although he starts off with some unrepentant grandstanding, for which Magnus and Optimus Prime reprimand him, he eventually delivers a speech that paints Megatron as a painfully inept leader who merely lit a fuse, and was unable to control of the explosion of war that resulted, but insisted on perpetuating it rather than admit failure. It is not death Megatron deserves, Starscream opines, but pity.“

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/World,_Shut_Your_Mouth_Part_2:_Words_Hang_in_the_Air

From here Megatron instead opts to plead not guilty, not out of belief of his own innocence mind you, but a desire to ensure that the final chapter of his story is written by himself, not Starscream,

Now how does he do this? He is in captivity and on trial, but thanks to some legal technicalities regarding the location of where the trial is held, Megatron invokes the right to be judged by the ancient long-lost Knights of Cybertron, to this end, Megatron hopes not to escape justice but atone for his crimes by finding the Knights, upon which he will submit to justice

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/World,_Shut_Your_Mouth_Part_3:_Predestination:_A_Beginner%27s_Guide

Now this all works and to that end he’s made (co-)Captain of the ship on a quest to find the Knights, The Lost Light, and over the course of the second half of More Than Meets The Eye’s run there are a number of adventures where Megatron bonds with the crew that is comprised of Autobots who were once enemies, you see Megatron change, become a better person, and you even see Autobots come to accept him,

But when the chips are down they turn against him

When the crew is asked if they’ll support a mutiny against Megatron and his companions, the overall majority say yes, and I think Getaway puts it best as to why:

"By what tortured logic did High Command conclude that letting an unrepentant mass murderer off the hook represented anything other than an insult to the memory of the billions he killed? Seriously—can someone explain to me how the war can end with the instigator being allowed to go about his business as if nothing happened? The death camps! The massacres! The cities razed to the ground! Apparently all of them were just missteps—painful but necessary—on Megatron's path to self-discovery! (...) By helping that maniac find peace you're excusing his past behavior. And so it falls to us—the 99%—to remind you how wrong this is. Forgiveness? Rehabilitation? Reintegration? No. Not him. Not now. Not ever."

At the end of the day, no matter how much a person may try to change and atone for their crimes, most people will probably not forgive them, and what they’ve done doesn’t just go away, they will not be absolved from their crimes,

And as the sequel series The Lost Light ends, while its ultimately not said which, it is made clear that Megatron doesn’t get to have a happy life with his friends, his fate is either a life sentance with no chance of parole, or execution,

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Transformers:_More_than_Meets_the_Eye

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Transformers:_Lost_Light

And that’s probably what would have happened to Vader, Kylo, or any other villain of turns and lives, life imprisoned or execution, and to that end, dying after turning back to the light was probably the best case scenario for Ben, that or spending the rest of his days in exile, on the run and isolated from the rest of the galaxy, because the alternative would of been a trial where we would have undoubtedly been found guilty, imprisoned for the rest of his life or executed

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wavesinereverse-blog · 2 years

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so something that I’ve been on-and-off thinking about in relation to The Transformers

is that there’s never really been any deep consideration of how Cybertronian languages actually work in-universe, at least not from any official source

there are named languages, but they’re usually presented as glyph swaps of English or as untranslatable nonsense, with the ”Aliens Speaking English” trope in use for any conversation not explicitly intended to be in the ‘default’ Cybertronian language (Neocybex in the 2005 IDW comics, but usually not mentioned by name in other continuities)

like the deepest look at how Cybertronian languages work is from the 2005 IDW comics where some characters that were around in the planet’s distant past are still able to speak the language from that time (Cyclonus) or somehow only speak that version of the language (Vos’s whole thing in that regard doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without more context on how a presumably ‘recent’ Cybertronian would have been in a situation where they would only learn “Ancient Cybertronian”, but there is very little info on the past of any of the DJD members that aren’t Tarn or The Pet), and a sort of seeming analogue to sign language

#text post #the_transformers #transformers idw 2005 #ramblepost

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