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TRANSFORMERS PRIME RANT

content warning: discussions of physical/psychological abuse

I’m going to try to write a rant but we’ll see how good I am at stringing my words together.

I love Transformers Prime with my whole heart, particularly Starscream, and despite and because of this, I don’t like the way his character plays out in season three.

After Starscream rejoins the decepticons at the end of season two, the abuse he receives from Megatron gets way worse. Megatron physically beat Starscream quite often in season one, and as season three progresses, this treatment is on full display and gets so much worse. And these abuse scenes are genuinely horrible and upsetting. Megatron physically dominates Starscream, who is much smaller and thinner, and the show spends a lot of time emphasizing his fear and screams as Megatron beats him.

Alongside Starscream’s abuse getting worse, he also gets significant Stockholm syndrome in season three, which makes the whole situation one thousand times ickier. While in season one Starscream tried to usurp and fight back against Megatron, now he looks up to the person who is actively and regularly beating him half to death.

But there’s nothing wrong with depicting a toxic character dynamic, it’s how the narrative frames it that matters.

Starscream gets treated worse by Megatron while thinking better of him as the show goes on. And the only people we get to see this ugly situation through the eyes of are Starscream and Megatron, who both think this is fine in one way or another.

We never get to see any other character acknowledge the abusive relationship. The autobots are totally oblivious or totally uncaring that it’s happening, and you can bet the other Decepticons aren’t going to do anything about it. Even after Megatron leaves behind his goal of oppression, he shows no regret of how he’d treated Starscream, the person who he had arguably made suffer the most. He just shouts at him and makes him flinch one last time then abandons him. He continues to mistreat him then leaves him behind. Leaves behind the person who he had physically and psychologically destroyed for thousands if not millions of years. Although I don’t expect Megatron to show sympathy for Starscream, since his ‘redemption’ was just him retiring and leaving everyone else to clean up the mess he made. (I have good and bad feelings on Megatron’s ending, but I don’t want to get too sidetracked)

What matters is, without Megatron acknowledging the horribleness of the situation, and without the autobots being aware of it, the only person who can acknowledge how toxic the situation was is Starscream.

But he doesn’t get this chance. His arc ends when the Predacons beat him up for revenge.

Starscream is an abuse victim, and he is never given a chance to heal. No character, himself included, ever fully acknowledges how problematic the situation is. He is never given a chance to be powerful. Over and over again he is forced to be weak and without agency. From the start of season three to the end of the movie, his character is a slow trickle into suffering more and more, being beaten down again and again until he doesn’t get back up.

When watching the show, I was fine with the amount of frightening abuse they were depicting on screen because I thought they would have some amount of healing from it. But it just gets worse and worse until the show ends and that’s it. It just feels like abuse for the sake of abuse at this point.

But the thing is, I’m not even opposed to Starscream having a bad ending. Let me explain.

I think it makes sense after him being conniving and evil and power hungry and cruel for his actions to catch up for him, and for him to be humbled in one way or another.

The thing is, they depicted Starscream’s fall to shame without ever giving him a moment of power. There’s no climax in season three where he takes control of his life again. There’s no moment where he gets to be more than humiliated and shamed.

Starscream is a victim, and he’s an abuser as well. He treats everyone around him horribly. He is a perpetuator of the cycle of abuse, where, after being abused by Megatron and others, he started to replicate their cruelty in order to have power.

The story needed to recognize him as both an abuser and a victim. It seemed to think these cancel out. That Starscream being beat by the Predacons in the end is the consequence of his abusive actions towards others coming back to haunt him. But just as a middle school bully doesn’t deserve to go home and be bullied by their sibling, an abuser does not deserve to be abused by another person. No one deserves to be abused.

Starscream being abused doesn’t pay for his crimes. And he isn’t just being humbled for treating the predacons badly; he’s being tortured.

As an abuser, Starscream deserved to see the consequences of his actions in some way, but as a victim, Starscream deserved any kind of moment of victory.

All this to say, this isn’t about wether or not Starscream deserved to be beat by the predacons (although I maintain that we should have better mindsets about paying for our crimes than “abusers deserve abuse”). This is about the fact that he deserved to see a shred of honor before his fall as well.

This is about the fact that as an abuse victim, he is given not a shred of dignity or an acknowledgment of his pain. His descent in season three isn’t even a character arc. There’s no growth, no resolution, no rising or falling climax. Like I said before, it’s just him suffering over and over, until the series ends.

Starscream is perhaps a good, although tragic, depiction of an abuser: a character who treats others poorly until it finally catches up to him. But he is a bad and problematic depiction of a victim: someone who never gets to be seen, even by himself.