#tfa fandom

[candiie-teeth]

i made this while i was practicing drawing shockwave and i think its beautiful

[spectralpixelsredone]

Here is a complete, factual list of all the dubious/questionable actions Ultra Magnus took in the Transformers Animated (TFA) continuity, drawn straight from the provided canon material (cartoon episodes, AllSpark Almanac II, and supplementary notes). These paint him as an authoritarian “dictator-like” figure (my comparison to Megatron fits the “at any cost” militaristic style the text itself calls out), even though he’s still on the Autobot side and ultimately a “Reasonable Authority Figure” who gets results. He openly admits to “questionable projects” and prioritizes victory/peace over ethics, transparency, or individual rights.

Wartime / Leadership Decisions (The Big “Dictator” Stuff)

Passed the Decepticon Registration Act immediately upon becoming Magnus (12 million stellar cycles ago, right as Megatron started rallying). This was his first major act as Supreme Commander — a sweeping, preemptive law that treated an entire faction as inherent threats and enabled surveillance/persecution. (AllSpark Almanac II)

Unilaterally launched the AllSpark into space to hide it from both Autobots and Decepticons. This drastic, solo decision de-escalated the war but deprived his own side (and the entire galaxy) of the most powerful artifact in existence without any vote or debate. (AllSpark Almanac II)

Instituted a draft and created Project Omega (the Omega Supreme program and entire fleet of Omega Sentinels). These were literal super-weapons: massive, city-destroying robots deliberately built with “reduced intelligence” so they wouldn’t question the “destruction they’d bring.” Omega Supreme was the prototype; the fleet ended the Great War. The text and tropes explicitly call this an extremist “at any cost” measure. (AllSpark Almanac II + TV Tropes section: “Supreme-class Autobots, super robots with reduced intelligence”)

Authorized the risky Jetfire/Jetstorm flight experiment (Project Safeguard) using Decepticon coding from Starscream. When test subjects were needed, Magnus instructed Perceptor to source "expendable" bots from refineries/farms rather than risk Elite Guard personnel. Two young repair bots who had nearly died in an accident were repurposed as "volunteers" and subjected to dangerous protoform-splitting upgrades and grafting, creating the Jet Twins (and their combiner Safeguard). (Source: Rise of Safeguard / First (and Second) in Flight comic)

Ordered invasive open-processor surgery on Arcee (an Autobot intelligence agent in a coma after her memory was wiped). Desperate for the access codes in her databanks, Magnus had Ratchet perform experimental brain surgery on her while she was helpless. He had previously ordered her recovered “in one piece,” but overrode that once she was in Autobot hands. (The Thrill of the Hunt + TransWarped)

Covered up Megatron’s survival and the scale of the Decepticon threat from the general public. He explicitly told Optimus that letting civilians know Megatron was alive would “incite a panic and embolden the Decepticons,” so it was their “duty” to lie for stability. He also downplayed the Decepticon activity on Earth until Starscream literally fell into his lap. (Mission Accomplished + multiple episodes)

Shut down the entire Cybertron space-bridge nexus as a security measure during the Decepticon uprisings. This was a massive, galaxy-wide disruption ordered without apparent consultation, purely on his authority. (TransWarped)

Xenophobic policies and personal ship features. His flagship has a decontamination chamber for organics/“contaminated” bots; he’s shown as generally distrustful of anything non-Cybertronian. (Multiple episodes + character notes)

Personnel & Disciplinary Actions

Expelled Optimus Prime from the Academy and barred him from the Elite Guard, even though he personally believed Optimus had the highest potential to become a Magnus someday. He only gave Optimus a Prime rank and a ship as a consolation prize after Optimus took the fall for the Elita-1 incident. (Endgame, Part I)

Repeatedly prioritized protocol and control over truth/mercy. He was ready to severely reprimand Optimus (again) right before Starscream’s attack proved Optimus right; he trusted Sentinel Prime far too long despite knowing his flaws; he kept communications filtered and maintained an iron grip on information flow. (Various episodes)

Personality & Philosophy That Enabled All of It

The very first paragraph of his bio says: “utterly committed to keeping the peace of Cybertron at any cost” and “makes no bones about some of the questionable projects he’s enacted.” He is “not the most likable bot,” straightforward to the point of harshness, and doles out praise and admonishment without hesitation. (Main bio)

TV Tropes section explicitly labels him Adaptational Jerkass / dictator-like compared to other versions: “stern and aloof dictator,” “Good Is Not Soft,” “The Extremist Was Right,” and notes he’d have died in Season 4 from Shockwave beating him with his own hammer — the ultimate irony for the bot who built unstoppable weapons.

In short, Ultra Magnus is the “benevolent dictator” archetype done right for the Autobots: he won the war, but he did it with registration acts, mind-wiped super-soldiers, secret brain surgery, information suppression, and “whatever it takes” pragmatism that would make Megatron nod in approval. The text itself calls these things out as questionable while still framing him as a hero. That’s TFA Ultra Magnus in a nutshell.

[iswiminnachos]

anyone remember the tfa invader zim crossover tv series that came out in 2010 Transformers Animated: The Invasion ????? just me??

[mr-regretevator-fan]

IVE BEEN TFA PILLED LATELY.... GO BLURR!!!

[soloyaice]

Redraw my fv Decepticon

Alternate image

Old drawing in Instagram (2022)

[emperorren]

Actually my mom's reaction has made me think. Very few people got Rey/Kylo back then, including some casual viewers that surely didn't dig into interviews. I wonder why it clicked only with a small fraction of people? The only thing I got from TFA was mild sexual tension during the interrogation scene. A fandom acquaintance used to share Reylo theories like the bridal carry and while I thought it made sense, Americans have the worst record when it comes to redemption & villain/hero stories. 1/2

2/2 I got some pieces of the puzzle because I was sure Rey wasn't Luke's daughter (I thought she'd be some other villain's offspring 😂) and I was sure she was not going to end up with Finn (misdirection like Luke/Leia in ANH). TBF I didn't like the movie so I never bothered to keep up until TLJ trailer dropped. As I said, my only problem is that I didn't trust this kind of medium to tell certain stories and I am still a little wary of that. If Star Wars were an anime I would be 101% sure.

I wrote a post about “why people didn’t see Reylo” a while ago and I still stand by it, but to expand on it:

TFA did a fairly good job hiding things in plain sight. Like, the tropes in themselves are clear as day, but the characters never comment on remark on it and the dialogue does nothing to emphasize Reylo or convey it to the audience, which is quite unusual for a blockbuster movie and for Star Wars specifically, whose dialogue has always been extremely on the nose. Imagine if they had kept the “you have compassion for her” line. Or if Han and Leia discussed Kylo bridal-carrying Rey off and Han said something like “he’s smitten by her, you know he is”, and Leia were like, “I know. I sensed it, like I sensed she’s special”. Or if Finn and Rey had a conversation post interrogation scene where Rey would describe, enraptured, the “electricity” that passed between them? It would have made Reylo instantly 200% clearer. Mainstream fiction normally uses third party characters to “explain” the romance to the audience, but TFA never does that. The characters---including Kylo and Rey themselves---are none the wiser about what’s happening between Rey and Kylo. Their interactions speak for themselves, but the explicit “text” of the movie doesn’t remark them, which makes the whole thing unusually subtle, for something that employs not-so-subtle tropes. It’s show don’t tell at its finest, applied to the first stages of a budding romance.

the audience sees what the audience expects to see. And nobody was expecting a heroine x villain dynamic, going into TFA. Nothing in the marketing and promotion had prepared the audience for it (probably on purpose). And I think people, when it comes to blockbuster fiction, rely a lot on the tl;dr provided by trailers and promotional material to form their ideas on movies. “It wasn’t in the trailer and it isn’t technically a plot twist, so it can’t be that important”. (and I don’t mean it in a condescending way---I didn’t “see” Reylo either upon my first viewing, and it was only a few days of tumblring later that I started processing what I saw and looking deeper into the narrative of a movie that, at first, felt okay and occasionally very entertaining but not terribly different from 90% of current fantasy blockbusters, tbh)

I think, at least on Tumblr and at least initially, TFA attracted a demographic that isn’t particularly primed to recognize & appreciate heroine x villain tropes when it sees them. And it was that demographic that dictated the initial tone of the fannish discourse around TFA, which inevitably shaped most people’s understanding of the movie.

and yes, what you said: american fiction isn’t particularly heroine x villain-friendly. There’s a disconnect between the tropes that are employed in Reylo---which are common in the romance genre, but rare in mainstream “masculine” fiction---and the kind of narrative that one reasonably expects Star Wars to be (as I said in that post I linked: "neither specifically female-centric nor romantic"). 

[candiie-teeth]

i also forgot to post this oh my GODDD . render test. Ok.

[spectralpixelsredone]

Funny how TFA!Ultra Magnus is much more evil compared to TFP Ultra Magnus (And also TFA Magnus being a threat to Megatron unlike TFP.) Like TFA! UM mades Omega Supreme to be lobotimized. Also I do have to make clear its less due to Ultra Magnus being weaker in Prime's universe but more....Prime Megatron is significantly more dangerous than his G1 counterpart ever was as Megatron or Galvatron, and while Magnus' rank was higher, his badassery in the latter series is a little ambiguous since he never fought. So, it could be less that Magnus is weaker so much as Megatron is stronger.