Transformers: Chaos Theory: Theory

That was one hell of a ride.

To get some minor criticisms out of the way first, some parts of the story were a little janky. Stuff like the practical details of the Whirl situation (how the hell is this random beat cop important enough for someone to have half his precinct beheaded over?), and the whole "deep state milking the Primal Matrix for adrenochrome" thing (no further elaboration needed). I also still am not sure how I feel about present day Optimus Prime torturing a prisoner, even when needled toward doing it, even when it's Megatron; that part in isolation felt like your standard turn of the century style "let's turn all your childhood heroes into assholes to prove how mature we are" crap. There were also a few bits of dialogue where the characters seemed to be talking slightly passed each other, and I had to reread them a couple times before I could follow the conversation.

The core of this comic was good enough for those flaws to barely even hurt its overall quality, though. Even just the art, choreography, and dialogue (when it isn't being slightly off) would have made it a good product before saying anything about the story. And there's a LOT to say about the story.


"Chaos Theory"

Chaos theory is a very complicated subject, and I'm too bad at math to understand trigonometry let alone something like this. But, one layman's summary of chaos theory that I've heard a few times is that if every variable within a system is effecting every other variable, the system's output becomes unpredictable.

It's a nice framing for the fall of Old Cybertron. The system was supposed to work like a mechanical contraption, each caste locked into place, each part only touching the few others it needs to in order for the machine to keep working. The problem that its leaders - for all the alleged "wisdom" stored in that sacred whatchamacallit of theirs - couldn't bring themselves to face is that no matter what the "progenitors" originally created them for, the cybertronians weren't just machines. No social control method is effective enough to completely stop parts from touching when they aren't supposed to, and given enough time your society is going to start looking chaotic.

So, their theocro-liberal house of cards fell apart, and two competing revolutionary movements snapped them all up. One seeking to grant each individual the freedom they'd been denied. The other seeking to numb the old pain and humiliation with petty revenge and racial supremacism. But, they were also both changed by prolonged exposure to one another in motion, as well as the dying thrashes of the old order.

Of course, "chaos theory" is also a lens through which to look at the two main characters, how they changed each other, and how their own changes dynamically caused even further changes in one another.

It's notable that Megatron's original manifesto was insistent on "nonviolent direct action," but that that principle fell apart the moment it came in contact with the facts on the ground. Even when Orion read passages from it aloud before the senate, he'd already changed the message just by his method of delivery. He fought his way through the security guards (the sentence "taken them apart" was used to describe his approach to this), with the corpse of another cybertronian he'd just killed in battle slung over his shoulder, in order to get his audience. This is a really major change, especially in light of Megatron's (unconvincing) principled pacifist shtick at the bar, but it goes completely uncommented on at the time. Comparing the original manifesto to either the autobot OR decepticon ideologies shows that it hasn't survived contact with reality any better than the old cybertronian theo-liberalism, but it still made a very significant impact.

And, since we're getting political, let's get political.


Getting Political

Here I'll also praise the comic for not falling into the trap that so many other pop stories about civil unrest do of blanket-condemning violent protest. It looked like it was going there in the first half, but issue #23 was a very pleasant surprise. The comic is aware that the Ghandis and the Martin Luther King Jr's of history only succeeded because the oppressors knew they had a choice of either exchanging words with them, or exchanging bullets with their armed and organized acquaintances.

In fact, the comic goes further than that, and suggests that the kind of ideological absolutism that pure pacifism requires often doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Or, at the very least, it doesn't hold up to stress. I know I already mentioned the K6BD sidestories at least once in this review, but the Existentialist parallels between this and the "Tales of the Silver Prince" story I just analysed are really hard to miss (come to think of it, "Chaos Theory" is basically a synthesis of the last two K6BD sidestories I looked at, what with the honest cop abandoning the force). A culture of martyrdom and victimhood requires murderers and victimizers. Defining yourself in contrast to your enemy means letting the enemy live rent free deep in your brain. So, Prince Kassardis lashes out and murders someone weaker than himself when he gets frustrated, and Megatron lashes out and...well, becomes Megatron. In both cases, they end up reproducing the thing they're allegedly trying to escape.

Contrast that with the approach Orion/Optimus ends up taking by the end of the story. An ideology about solving problems, rather than clinging onto virtue in the face of them and thus becoming complicit in their continuation. At the end of the day, the decepticons are the ones preserving the hierarchical, supremacist ways of the old days, and the autobots are the ones opposing them.

Hang onto that thought. We're coming back to it later.

Another thing that impressed me with this comic, as I mentioned before, is that it was coming out and speaking the hard truth a good five years before everyone else was. Again, I'm not trying to say that NO ONE was doing this back then. There's nothing about this comic's politics that leftists hadn't already been writing about for over a century. But, until pretty damned recently, it was much harder to find these kinds of ideas being disseminated openly in Anglosphere media. If I'd been reading stuff like this back in 2011, it might have helped steer me left a lot sooner than I did. Getting this story out there within a popular, established pop culture franchise in the early 2010's cultural environment is impressive, to say the least.

To reprise another point I made earlier though, I think the biggest weakness of this comic is how on-the-nose the similarities between Old Cybertron and the modern Anglo-colonial states are. Maybe it had to be this way to make sure the target audience of not-very-politically-aware nerds and hobbyists could get it, but it does weaken the work as a science fiction story. Things got a little better toward the end, as it acknowledged the more fantastical implications of the Primal Matrix. But still. I wish I could have seen a Cybertron that really looks like it was built by and for a race of immortal, multiton, shape-shifting machines. Maybe it would be hard for a human reader to comprehend what they were seeing, but I'd still like to see it.

On the topic of the cybertronians themselves, it's time to look at the story's central dialectic and its participants.


Do Androids Sacrifice Electric Goats?

Megatron's revolutionary theory sparked the beginning of the end for the old regime. Certainly, it would have still happened without him eventually. Someone would have written the right tract in the right place for the right other cybertronians to read it, and a revolution would have happened. In all likelihood, it would have been better had it been someone else. But, Megatron was the one who did, in fact, end up being the one.

He wasn't the one who went loud with it, though, and who actually bridged the gap between theory and practice. Orion did that without any input from him. Oh, he credited him, sure. He named him as the author of the tract when he quoted it in front of the senate. But still, it wasn't until Orion took the writing and made it his own that it actually had any impact. Due to the circumstances of their meeting, Megatron wouldn't have been kindly disposed to Orion afterward. Seeing him make that speech on TV or whatever after their own interaction, how earnest would Orion's performance appear to him? Especially given Megatron's own affinity for theatrics, which probably tints the lens through which he sees others' actions?

Like a blood sacrifice to usher in the new age. The practitioner and first beneficiary of the sacrifice being the officers of the very same police precinct that abused him. Like they turned him into their sin-eater, finding moral redemption and self-satisfaction at the cost of his dignity, his physical health, and his bragging rights to the revolution. They crucified him and washed their sins in his blood, and then discarded what was left. Heck, he even managed to get a literal crucifixion to illustrate his point with, when Optimus electrocuted him on the cross-shaped prison harness.

That's not a very objective reading of what happened in the story, of course. But I'm willing to bet that that's how Megatron sees it. It goes beyond envy at someone else stealing the vanguard role that he wanted for himself, and into something much darker. I can only imagine that Megatron's new ideology, what would eventually become the decepticon platform, got more and more twisted as a result of him SEEING Orion's movement catch on. Back to chaos theory.

Megatron could have approached Orion/Optimus again after that and demanded an apology, and he almost certainly would have gotten it, if only his pride had allowed it. By that same token though, I wonder if Orion ever tried to seek out Megatron again to proactively offer him that apology and ask for his guidance going forward? Maybe he did try. Or maybe he didn't, and his failure to do so has been one of the things weighing on him ever since.

That gets back to the theme of actually righting wrongs versus performing emotional gymnastics to feel better about them that I said I would return to.


The Trial of Optimus Prime

The author does a piece of sleight-of-hand with this arc that I've seen some similar works do. Start the episode off with mention of a trial, either coming up or unfortunately postponed, to put the reader in a juror's frame of mind. Then, toss them a different character to judge without making it explicit that that's what you're doing. I'd have to read the material that comes before and after these two issues to know why Megatron surrendered himself, but going by #22 and #23 in isolation it seems like at least part of the reason was because he wanted to put Optimus on trial.

What is he on trial for? Well, basically, Megatron thinks that everything he's done since their meeting, as Orion or as Optimus, has been essentially the longest, fieriest, most narcissistic campaign of virtue signalling in cosmic history. That him leading the autobots is just to convince himself that he was really a good person all along, rather than any actual empathy or desire to help.

Basically: is Optimus just running on white guilt?

As is usually the case with these surprise judgement stories, it's up to the reader to decide. There's evidence pointing both ways.

In the modern half of the story, Megatron manages to get Optimus to regress into slave morality, and consequently to recreate the cruelty of the masters. When Megatron asked him why they were still talking instead of just getting to the sentencing already, he was pointing out that Optimus was going back on the autobot philosophy and prioritizing salving his own feelings over solving the problems. And, just like Megatron himself turning to murderous supremacism when his sanctimony wasn't rewarded, Optimus lashed out and tortured a helpless prisoner when his sanctimony wasn't rewarded. And that's after bullying his underlings into giving him sole power over Megatron; yet another violation of the autobot ethos.

On the other hand though, Optimus has been watching Megatron commit war crimes for literal eons. His personal investment in Megatron might not only be guilt for what happened to the miner, but also for the "baby Hitler" factor. That doesn't make Optimus behaviour any better, but it's at least a less self-pitying and self-serving kind of moral myopia (even if it's still both those things). Additionally, Megatron's framing of Optimus' actions is coming with a massive amount of projection, and he's doing everything he can to prove himself right about Optimus, so to an extent this might just be Optimus being vulnerable to suggestion.

There's one other factor that strikes me as significant, though I feel like I'd need more contextualizing information to be sure how to read it. The end of the flashback plot has the very shady-seeming senator implanting Optimus with the Primal Matrix, and seemingly making his own plans around the rise of the autobots. Hinting that, just like the decepticons with their synth-supremacism, the autobots had some of the corruption of the old regime get in on the ground floor. When Optimus dithered around trying to figure out how to deal with Megatron, he had the Matrix in him. When he lost his shit and tortured Megatron, he had the Matrix in him. When he finally saw the obvious right answer under the autobot ethos (giving Megatron himself the choice of sentences, and thus empowering every individual as much as possible given the circumstances), he didn't have the Matrix inside of him. He had to rid himself of its "wisdom" to remember what he stands for.

Like I said, I'd need to read more of the comic to be sure about this interpretation. Based on these two issues though, I think the most satisfying ending would have Optimus permanently removing the Primal Matrix and ending the line of the Primes. Its skill-boosting functions are nice to have, but containing the biases of the previous Primes as well as their skillsets kind of makes it a Sauron's Ring situation. Again, just going off of what I saw in these two issues.


The Verdict

If you asked me, I'd say that Optimus did pass the test by the end of the story. However, I'd also say that it doesn't really matter. When it comes to people in positions of real power, I consider it best to turn one's personal feelings off and stick to consequentialism. If Optimus and his army are saving innocent species from the decepticons, then it doesn't matter why he's doing it. As far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned, he's the good guy, and their opinions matter more than those of two cybertronians.

That's the Watsonian answer, at least. Doylistically, it's more complicated.

I'm not sure about how this comic characterized Optimus. As I said in the introductory section, the electrocution scene in particular reeks of Mark Millar style "your comic book superheroes are all war criminals now" edge. I think the comic could have accomplished most of what it did without resorting to that.

But, at the same time, I feel like it may have had reasons for doing this beyond juvenile attempts at being dark and mature. Fourth wall breaking reasons.

Optimus Prime was one of THE heroic paragons of daytime TV back in the day. He was as popular a standard-bearer for "truth, justice, and the American way" as Superman himself for a time, albeit less explicitly. This comic's take on Orion Pax has him as exactly that; what American children who grew up with the Transformers were taught to think of as a hero. There's just a lot of stuff about that type of hero, at least in the context of a racially stratified capitalist state, that doesn't work if you take off the ideological blinders. This story is about Optimus himself taking those blinders off, and encouraging readers who grew up with that kind of media to do the same.

It also is about him not being sure if he's actually gotten rid of the brainworms even long after the fact. Something that a lot of people in my generation, at least, often struggle with. I guess that's what happens when you grew up with shit like ExoSquad on TV.

So, while this depiction feels like character assassination, and it probably could have avoided that with a slightly different execution, I can see the point the comic is making with it. It would have been more effective if it weren't for so many other stories doing stuff like this for sheer edginess, and I guess you could criticize the author for not taking the preexisting comic book media environment into account, but that's still more on the Millers, Millars, and Ennises than it is on this writer.


I could probably write a lot more about "Chaos Theory," but if I don't stop myself somewhere this article will never be finished. Good comic, maybe even great comic, despite some minor annoyances throughout. I'd be interested to read more of the IDW Transformers run.