[Character profile] Optimus Prime

Optimus Prime is such an iconic character that the risk of cliche hangs over him whenever he is made the subject of interest in any Transformers Fanfiction. The fear of cliche has probably been the greatest motive behind my decision to make Optimus Prime's character arc rooted in sparse story time for this character. In addition, I decided to craft an Optimus Prime who clearly bears the psychological imprint of his canonical experience on Earth. The result is, in my highly self-critical view, mixed yet at least rich.

In my Fanfiction, Optimus Prime appears towards the end of The Untimely Death of the Universe  as an Autobot who is content with the outcome of the war for Cybertron, namely the rule of the Triumverate of Shockwave, Thunderwing and Cyclonus in a loose diplomatic Union with the Autobots. From the point of view of the Autobots, a divided official Decepticon government of Cybertron technically satisfies Decepticon ambitions while in practice keeping the power of the Decepticons in check because the members of the Triumverate will check each other's powers and perhaps a prolonged period of cooperation with the Autobots will develop into a routine and secure the peace.  The basic idea is that the Autobots decided to resign from the aim of defeating all of the Decepticons and instead insisted that the Decepticons cannot be led by a strong, fanatical leader like Megatron. The Triumverate members, especially their leader Shockwave are all more logical and open to negotiation.

As for Earth, or what can be summed up as the G1 cartoon and comic experience in the usual vague and generic multiverse sense, my view of its effect on Prime's psychology is somewhat of an outgrowth of my own reaction to Hotspot's sacrifice in the Transformers/GI Joe run up to the G2 comics. There, Hotspot gave his life to prevent Cybertron technology from falling into the hands of the evil Cobra. That sacrifice always made me angry because it illustrated everything that was wrong with human nature. Our species' instinct is not to unlock the power of science to feed the hungry or cure the sick, but to blow each other up or threaten to do so in the name of domination.  In my Fanfiction Optimus Prime's experience on Earth has disillusioned him with his former beliefs that freedom is the right of all sentient beings.  While he is no where near taking up Megatron's view that fleshlings are insignificant worms, he has retreated into a Cybertron-centrism. He is primarily concerned with the fate of his own planet and species. The War for Cybertron incarnation of the toy lent itself to this interpretation very well, given that it is radically far removed from anything remotely reminiscent of an Earth based truck.

Of course this doesn't last long. Prime grudgingly returns to Earth and in true Transformers fashion the reason isn't all that compelling, though it promises to be as if suggesting a deep plot thread, but in the end never materializes. Is this just my interpretation of Transformers stories or a cheap mask for my laziness as a writer? We'll leave that as an open question. Back on Earth Prime seems to distinguish between innocent humans and evil humans which is more nuanced than his cliche and complicates things. He is pursued by Hiero Yuei who seeks vengeance for his parents death in the Transformers wars in his Wing Gundam.  I really wanted to set up a more elaborate antagonism between Prime and the Wing pilot, but I fear it ended up being just a series of random clashes peppered with suggestive dialogue.

I think I had a bit more success in my portrayal of the Prime-Shockwave tension. Prime is a disenchanted idealist which means that while he doubts his ability to effect idealist change, he still thinks in ethical idealist categories. Shockwave never had any illusions and therefore isn't disillusioned, just logical. His function is to pursue Decepticon interests within the framework of the Pax Cybertrona and so long as events on Earth don't threaten those interests he is not concerned by the fate of the humans either way. Indeed with their nominal victory on Cybertron, Decepticon interests on Earth are pretty much zero. No one needs to conquer Earth to use its resources to defeat the Autobots and so forth and so on.

As hard as I tried to stay away from cliche, I couldn't help it insofar as Grimlock's relationship with Optimus Prime was concerned. Chalk this up to Bob Budyanski's writing in the G1 comic. His portrayal of Grimlock as Autobot leader was so unconventional and shook up so much of the cartoon cliche that it was just to good to let Grimlock sink back into his cartoon role of Captain Caveman. Besides, Simon Furman somewhat cemented the role in his G2 comics. So, yes, Grimlock shows up on Earth to teach Prime a lesson and Prime, being the tempered idealist, decides to compromise and split command of the Autobots with Grimlock rather than duel to the death.

Come to think of it, my writing of Prime bucks cliche in that he is far from being an uncompromising hero. But this seems to me to be the logical result of his deep opposition to war. The cartoon always suggested he was ready to fight eternally for peace, but that is a contradiction in terms which I couldn't stand. Peace demands compromise. Only a fanatic like Megatron would fight uncompromisingly for his vision. Prime found it necessary to fight Megatron on Earth but I find it shallow to interpret all Decepticons as equally fanatical just as I find it absurd to interpret all Autobots as pure idealists.

All in all, War for Cybertron Prime had a fairly good run in my photo comics. He duked it out with anti-Cybertron Gundams, tried to help the human efforts at escaping the world war by building a colony in space, kept Grimlock's extremism at bay, provided an empathy based counter-balance to Shockwave in Transformers politics, and ultimately despite seeming to have struck a more realistic balance between the aspirations of idealism and pragmatism, still ends up more disillusioned than before as even this apparently more realistic approach turns out to be a pipe dream in the face of the depths of evil, both human and Cybertron.

It's at this point we get to the next Transformers cliche: changing bodies! So this basically begins in War for Cybertron with the eternally-undead-thanks-to-his-binary-bonding-with-Fortress-Maximus Spike Witwicky showing up to sooth Prime's broken psyche. Prime's big push to be a pragmatist idealist has resulted in the death of countless innocent humans and his compromise with his self-avowed pledge never to fight humans was in vein. He has returned to Cybertron, vowing once and for all to never get involved in the affairs of Earth and finally break his emotional attachment to the planet.... I swear, sometimes I think that in writing my emo-Prime, I was channeling Rodimus Prime from Burden Hardest to Bear - but not really. No, because you see there we had a young 'bot who was not ready or willing for the burden of command; here we have a seasoned veteran and idealist who has concluded after over 4 million years of war that it was all for nothing. 4 millions years of wasted effort is bound to leave a psychological scar and attachment complex.

Anyways, Prime agrees to follow Spike to the core of Cybertron where the head of the original Fortress Maximus lurks doing something important (read the comic to find out!) and agrees to give Prime a body more suitable for Earth while using his War for Cybertron body for a different Convoy (I have this obsession with not totally invalidating the existence of my Optimus Prime toys, thus whenever Prime gets a new body, the old body becomes one of the many Convoys of Japanese lore; Battle Convoy, Grand Convoy - and so on and so forth...I don't think I have yet to actually feature them as such beyond the cameo and obligatory mention of "and now this body has the spark of X Convoy in it" but, you know, they're there...fighting for freedom over land and air. Anyways, getting his Movie 2007 body, Prime returns to Earth determined to solve the problems he's created for himself by emotionally breaking down, giving his command away to Optimus Primal and leaving Earth for ever and tackle the forces of evil head on after all. It's almost as though my version of Prime in my Fanfiction is struggling to regain his cliche status after being painted into an emo corner by my character development. It is a struggle that reflects my own struggle as a writer to get a grip on this character. I didn't want him to just be the deus ex machina who saves the day before we return to the status quo each time, but at some point I realized that if I go too far down the path of emo-Prime, I would turn the character into a vegetable. (p.s.: I did manage to give a bit of character development to the RID Prime toy who, in my Fanfiction is Star Convoy)

So back he goes for the Earth Wars, and he doesn't really have much luck in his new body until yet ANOTHER new body comes along. This was the beginning of the Combiner Wars era in the toy line and I really liked the concept of Optimus Prime being able to combine with other Transformers. I was actually a fan of the Grand Convoy design and didn't really mind "chicken" Prime so much because the whole Power Rangers Prime gimmick appealed to me. This took things to a whole new level. Enter the Constructicons who, in my comics, had been sent to Earth by Shockwave and the Pax Cybertrona to pretend they were helping rebuild Autobot City as part of a soap operatic foil to fool Prime into not being able to make any moves against the Decepticons - they come in handy when things like a new body for Prime become necessary and the "Fortress Maximus's head at the core of Cybertron" type cliche has already been exhausted.

Anyways, here I think begins what slowly morphs into a full embrace of the Optimus Prime cliche in my comics. It mirrors the tides of my emotional relationship to the entire Transformers mythos - going from a purist nostalgia for G1, a demand that everyone behave exactly in character, that things play out exactly as they always did in the cartoon to a deep desire to go beyond the bounds of cannon and explore new realms to being sick and tired of the whole repetative and incoherent mess (you can see me coming out of this phase in The Untimely Death of Universe which is populated mainly by Gundam and Macross Mecha, with a dash of Evangelions and Figma figures and hardly any Transformers at all). In fact, my comics all the way up to the Tears of Time were slowly shifting from almost no Transformers to a mix of Transformers and other mecha to, finally (now) only Transformers. And the evolution of my Optimus Prime character from non-cliche emo-Prime back into cliche-macho-deus-ex-machina Prime reflects this. If I had to choose a moment when the emo-Prime peaked and cliche-Prime started to make his comeback, it would be at the time of the Combiner Wars...though as readers will notice, emo-Prime would not go quitely into the night...

Oh no, far from it. First he had to go through one of my proudest literary achievements as a Fanfic writer: Something-Something-Combination-Syndrome. The basic idea was that the combiner Optimus Prime refused to de-combine for one reason or another which started to bother all of the Autobots who, having accepted him as Autobot leader remained suspicious of his emotional state given all of his past instability. This and the fact that he declared neutrality in Earth conflicts which kind of clashes with his initial determination to take responsibility for Earth per Spike's wishes (hah, in fact, to remain consistent, Spike -who was binary bonded to Fortress Maximus - was ordered by Optimus Prime to leave Earth because he was a walking contradiction of the neutrality pact! - gosh I love the soap opera aspects of the Transformers universe!) Anyways, yes - things were quite a struggle for Optimus Prime as he teetered between emo and cliche-Prime!

And in the end - cliche Prime won out! But when you think "cliche Prime" - you think the heroic save the day battle to the end fearless Optimus Prime, don't you? I do too - but I also think "dying Optimus Prime" - and what better way for cliche-Prime to triumph over emo-Prime than to have Optimus Prime die? And not at the hands of Megatron or the Quintessons, no - at the hands of human avengers! Of course, since Death of Optimus Prime in my fanfiction would mark the full return of cliche Prime, emo Prime was given one last (and long) swan song. This swan song went on for quite a while, with the Autobots debating amongst themselves what to do about it. Skyfire, Skids, Nightbeat, Wheeljack, Smokescreen - everybody had an opinion about what to do about Optimus Prime's behavior and many ventures were undertaken while Prime himself was written to keep readers in suspense - was he really going crazy, or were the Autobots paranoid? I think the funnest bit was when the Autobots started to suspect that since it was the Constructicons who built Prime's new combiner body, then they must have done something to tamper with Prime's personality chip!

In fact, this suspicion of the Decepticons was another element that indicated my Transformers comics were headed back towards cliche and out of the wilderness of breaking with the past. The break with the past and the whole Pax Cybertrona concept of Autobots and Deccepticons mixing together and dividing not along faction but along other more subtle lines (such as personality) was also a testimony to how the IDW comics of the time (Lost Light and Robots in Disguise) had inspired me. I even brought a version of the Lost Light in (thankfully the multiverse is cannonical in Transformers meaning that all of our Fanfiction versions are legit even if they all contradict eachother!). But this fascination was drawing to an end, just as my weariness with Transformers themselves in favor of Gundam and other mecha was also drawing to an end. Of course, the beginnings of that weariness coincided with Hasbro's Unicron trilogy and finally started to close with the introduction of the Generations line (go figure!). As the Transformers toyline was returning to its' roots, so I was returning to the toy line.

Anyways, the Combiner Wars toy was, in my view, one of the best Optimus Prime toys. Yes, it was clunky - but so was G1 Prime, and so CW Prim's clunkiness was like having G1 Prime again but with much better poseability and a combiner gimmick (instead of a trailer). It was a toy that was easy to transform and fun to play with (unlike the very beautiful but complex studio series Prime) and the design was at once novel and appreciative of traditional Transformers G1 aesthetic. It also had all of these Grand Convoy Energon elements to it which was also welcome (now that the Unicron Trilogy is over, I am starting to finally warm to it as one of the different Transformers story lines). So while I knew the death scene had to come - I didn't really want it to come. I can't remember whether pictures of Titanmasters leader Prime had come out yet or whether I made my "Death scene" decision somewhat blindly - but I just knew that it was the fitting end for CW Prime and for the entire emo-Prime story arc which had started back in The Untimely Death of the Universe. Fitting because he was hunted down by the human who had sworn vengeance upon him, Hero Yuie, and his cadre of Evangelons who executed him rather brutally! And there you have it - I actually succeeded in finishing out a character arc that I started! Great!

So, now Optimus Prime was dead and the whole Gundam/Macross/Evangelion crossover which ended up lasting through hundreds of pages of photo-comics was closed. Great. We (or I) had entered a new and unexplored realm: pre-cliche, post-emo Prime. And now I remember how my line of thinking went: I never imagined Titanmaster Prime as being my next Optimus Prime toy for the photocomics. I wanted him as Ginrai. I am a big fan of Transformers Victory and Masterforce. I had already introduced Star Saber into my comics, I have an entire saga dedicated to him and the Breast Force (my only third-party combiner) and Ginrai was a great character from Masterforce who I wanted to bring in. Dead emo-Optimus Prime was the perfect backdrop. Borrowing liberally from the comic cannon whereby a Transformers brainchip was the size of a pea and Optimus Prime's mind had once been saved on a floppy disk, I too announced that Optimus Prime was not really, dead - his brain chip had simply been lost in the sand by the Autobots who recovered his body and that brain chip ended up being found by a trucker trying to make ends meet during the last Super Robot War on Earth who happened to by named Ginrai!

I had big plans for Ginrai, but due to logistic reasons - they had to be put on the backburner. My Ginrai toy went into storage much faster than is customary for new Transformers toys in my collection due to a very complex set of circumstances...and there he waits...patiently...for the time when nostalgia for my old toys and for old plot ideas that didn't get developed and accommodating circumstances will see him delivered from his cardboard box and made the star of some Masterforce themed show. Maybe if and when the Power of the Primes Pretenders actually go on sale I'll do a story with them and Grinrai - who knows? It's nice to know I haven't really used this character's potential. Now, technically, because this is the Optimus Prime character profile, just so there's no confusion - if you read the end of my Earth Force photocomic, you'll see that Optimus Prime is binary bonded to Ginrai, so technically this is Optimus Prime - but not fully, not yet. And that's good, because having him binary bonded to a human for too long would actually not bring back cliche Prime, but prolong emo Prime - big time! Instead, Ginrai was nice enough to eventually rebuild Optimus Prime's Movie 2007 body (a version of which Prime had before he had been rebuilt into Combiner Prime by the Constructicons and a return to which was logical in light of him no longer being a Combiner) and ...this brings us full swing into... Studio Series Optimus Prime!

Studio series is a dream come true for me. I liked the Bay movie designs. What I didn't like was the toys. The robot modes of the original toys from 2007 looked nothing like the movie designs. So what was the point of the design if I couldn't play with it? I was very happy to see the Movie return Transformers to its real robot roots with real world vehicles, just like in G1. But while I could tolerate and understand the reasons for the differences between the character designs drawn up by Marvel and the diaclone toy designs, I expected the preparation for the Movie 2007 and future toys to be better. How disappointing. Until finally, Studio Series came along. Great stuff! Fantastic! Really rekindled my interest in the movie line which, up to Studio Series, was absent from my collection entirely. And what better Optimus Prime toy to use for returning to cliche Prime than Movie 2007 studio series ROTF Prime? ROTF Prime was cliche Prime on overload. Not only would he save the day, he'd kill the bad guys before they even got a chance to try to implement their scheme. He was a no-holds barred hero, spewing one liners like Arnold Schwarzenegger and terminating everything and anyone in his path (unless they happened to be fighting him in a forrest while he was trying to defend a lone human boy and therefore unable to use his full force). 

So there he finally was, back on Earth - again - only this time he really was there to just defend the planet, fight the Decepticons and do good, and that's that. He neither involved himself in human affairs, nor contemplated human evil - he was too busy bashing Destructor's (I think that's what I ended up calling my studio series Brawl?) head in. His attitude towards Grimlock had changed too. Grimlock was always concerned with Cybertron; Prime could never abandon Earth. With Grimlock crowned King of Cybertron, Prime let the Dinobot rule the planet and exile all the Decepticons to Charr while focusing on commanding Autobot forces on Earth. And those forces were anyone who answered Optimus Prime's call to come and help him defend the innocent planet - which of course was the creme of the crop of the G1 crew, albeit in their Movie 2007 forms. It was finally a chance for me to enjoy Transformers as it originally was. Albeit this time not only were there no Gundams to be seen, but no humans either. The battles would be on Earth and for the fate of the Earth, but I felt that I had exhausted the human angle and just wasn't interested in any "boy meets talking car" let alone "mecha pilots fight talking robots" type of stories. Starting with Grim Tidings, this was all Transformers allow f the time from now on. (although I think it had been pretty clear from Fires of Hades that the human/mecha aspect had been shifted to the background).

Another change was that I stopped drawing the backgrounds. I had aimed in my background drawings for a very simple look, reminiscent of the uncomplicated G1 cartoon bordering on Hanna Barbera He-Man ascetics, but eventually I stopped having the time to draw even such simple backgrounds. Besides, they just wouldn't match the Studio Series at all. So out went my drawings and in came as many generic public domain images as I could find on the internet! As for Optimus Prime, he relished in his new cliche role. Now, he was still an advocate for pragmatic compromise, only this time it was compromise on his terms! He defeats Starscream and Overlord in one fail swoop and then in typical Optimus Prime fashion mercifully exiles Starscream (who comes back in a new body to battle it out on Earth...we'll get to Prime's reaction to this eventually in my comics...I hope) and allows Overlord to rule the Decepticons so long as he abides by a peace treaty. And Overlord better abide or else - Prime has shown everyone how powerful he really is! Finally! No more emo-Prime!

Of course, I don't regret emo-Prime. In a way, emo-Prime was something that I as a writer had to have my Optimus Prime character go through because it reflected my own struggles with the issues that Prime was plagued with. Also, cliche-Prime now seems less cliche in his essential personality because he's gone through the emo-Prime phase. He doesn't have any illusions that the war will end or that his actions will bring about some utopia; he just does his duty as it appears to him. This is, actually, the speech CW Prime gives to the Autobots in Earth Force when he returns from his self-imposed post-death-of-Zeta-colonists-Tears-of-Time-exile, but did he really live out his speech in Earth Force? No - he teetered on the brink of it, but ultimately he collapsed back into wallowing in emo-Primeness and got shot in the head by an Evangelion because he refused to fight humans. No more of that stuff. Now Optimus Prime is here for good as he was meant to be and we shall see, as the current story arcs from Grim Tidings and The Spirit of Unicron unfold in the future, where this all goes.

One thing is for sure, just as back in 2012 when I started emo-Prime's arc it was a relief to write Optimus Prime saying things that weren't just corny heroic dialogue, it is a relief to now have Optimus Prime appear in the worldo f the complex and blurry with easy answers, stern words and decisive actions. And the fact that cliche Prime functions in a Transformers world that is not cliche (because I haven't made my meta-universe any less tangled and complex) gives an added layer of drama to the whole thing. Because now what we have is pure idealism going head to head with the real world that is anything but ideal. Of course, it helps that Optimus Prime happens to be the most powerful of the Transformers, but as readers can see, he seems to have found a worthy foe in First Megatron who despite setbacks, is poised to do what no other Megatron has yet been able to do! Will he succeed? Stay tuned to find out!