![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFebruary 29 shows up just once every four years in general (the qualifier involving just how the Gregorian calendar is set up hasn’t applied for more than a hundred years and won’t recur until the end of this century), and with a calendar built into these journals I’ve made efforts to mark it here. The first time I tried thinking of a post significant enough for that rare day I happened on expressing an “unpopular fandom opinion,” and I’ve been managing that since then.
This time around, I’ll admit to starting off wondering if I could get around to a proper articulation of something I still sneak in mentions of every so often and explain just why I checked out more or less right away on the Star Wars projects overseen by Disney. With that thought formed, though, I wondered almost at once if it was at least four years too late, and then I looked back and noticed I’d said something on the subject four years ago. (There’s the slight and unfortunate question as to whether that had slipped my mind since then because of a developing world crisis that had me starting to lay in emergency rations that day, then putting myself into isolation about two weeks later.) I did wonder as well about whether that idea more just risked associating with odious company; the only actual “unpopularity” might be my own weaselly efforts at “it’s the specifics...” An opinion of more genuine unpopularity might be to try and articulate one reason why I’m not engaged with the previous prose-and-comics continuation of Star Wars. There, though, I supposed that where I’d had the blithe readiness before to work from single screenings of movies, here I’d have to read through Timothy Zahn’s original trilogy to confront impressions that for me something about their central conceit seems a little too uncomplicated and the way they engage with the established characters feels unsatisfying. In the end, I just considered how many times these opinions have involved Star Wars and tried to think of something else.
The first “something else” to come to mind just happened to involve how I’m at least approaching three decades since getting properly online, and how tempted I am to say something about having grown leery of “fandom” in general, if only in some affected opposition to “fans” amid thoughts about how it’s easier to nitpick than explain positive reactions. That, though, did raise an uncertain feeling of “the opinion to preclude all smaller opinions...”
With that thought pushed out of the way, I managed to think back one more decade and considered how I’d anticipated saying something about the fortieth anniversary of Transformers around the more specific marker of when the first issue of the comic book went on sale. I have a vague recollection of having glanced at that issue in my home town’s convenience mart, but didn’t ask for it. Then, on seeing the second issue (perhaps in my home town’s stationery store now), I did ask for it, and managed to buy all seventy-eight more issues that followed. I even happened along the way to come across a copy of the first issue in the home of a friend who seemed more into GI Joe (although his parents had treated him to the rather sizeable Transformer Metroplex), and he was willing to give the comic book to me.
I suppose that’s a roundabout way of saying some of my groundwork assumptions about the first Transformers characters were formed by the first issues of the comic book (“a four-issue limited series”) rather than the cartoon, which seems more popular. My unpopular opinions amount to not liking cartoon mainstays such as “Soundwave’s ultra-processed voice” (although when it comes to comics, everyone in them pretty much “speaks in my own voice” for me), “Rumble’s piledrivers” as compared to a previous if less “visual” explanation of how he “makes earthquakes” (or even how rare the “red and black” colour scheme of his toy became when it was applied to Frenzy instead), how Ravage and Laserbeak (and Buzzsaw, another infrequent character in the cartoon) don’t speak, and the thought that a “grey-helmeted Megatron” looks somehow incomplete regardless of that matching the actual toy. Lest I come across as a “Decepticon sympathiser,” on the Autobot side the special abilities of Hound and Mirage could come across to me as more interesting when more limited in their biographies, Grimlock having been introduced as articulate in the comic can make his limited cartoon grammar not quite agreeable, and having never watched through all of Transformers: The Movie I’ve been left with the feeling I’d rather have seen Ultra Magnus live up to his responsibility than just have Hot Rod just happen to get “upgraded” by taking hold of a mystic item. (To be fair, I did have the Ultra Magnus toy.)
While unpopular, these opinions aren’t profound. The temptation might be to try and tie that in to how I’ve never quite managed to put all thoughts of the Transformers behind me for all that I don’t “collect the toys,” “watch the shows,” or “read the comics” in general. I suppose the property moved into the space Star Wars was vacating forty years ago in sufficient force to be a sort of default option for me, always ready to hand back then for all that the lesser amount of Robotech I saw was still enough to have the thinner thread of their prose novelizations hold up for years afterwards. I’m also a little conscious that when Transformers seemed to have ended for the first time, I got around to trying to set up a continuation of my own that marched straight back to “giant robots stuck on Earth that turn into relatively realistic human machines (and some cool robot animals),” and then ran out of ideas for that antique setting almost at once. Some years after that, though, I did manage to take interest in the “Beast Wars” computer-animated series. That wasn’t altogether unpopular at the time, of course.
This time around, I’ll admit to starting off wondering if I could get around to a proper articulation of something I still sneak in mentions of every so often and explain just why I checked out more or less right away on the Star Wars projects overseen by Disney. With that thought formed, though, I wondered almost at once if it was at least four years too late, and then I looked back and noticed I’d said something on the subject four years ago. (There’s the slight and unfortunate question as to whether that had slipped my mind since then because of a developing world crisis that had me starting to lay in emergency rations that day, then putting myself into isolation about two weeks later.) I did wonder as well about whether that idea more just risked associating with odious company; the only actual “unpopularity” might be my own weaselly efforts at “it’s the specifics...” An opinion of more genuine unpopularity might be to try and articulate one reason why I’m not engaged with the previous prose-and-comics continuation of Star Wars. There, though, I supposed that where I’d had the blithe readiness before to work from single screenings of movies, here I’d have to read through Timothy Zahn’s original trilogy to confront impressions that for me something about their central conceit seems a little too uncomplicated and the way they engage with the established characters feels unsatisfying. In the end, I just considered how many times these opinions have involved Star Wars and tried to think of something else.
The first “something else” to come to mind just happened to involve how I’m at least approaching three decades since getting properly online, and how tempted I am to say something about having grown leery of “fandom” in general, if only in some affected opposition to “fans” amid thoughts about how it’s easier to nitpick than explain positive reactions. That, though, did raise an uncertain feeling of “the opinion to preclude all smaller opinions...”
With that thought pushed out of the way, I managed to think back one more decade and considered how I’d anticipated saying something about the fortieth anniversary of Transformers around the more specific marker of when the first issue of the comic book went on sale. I have a vague recollection of having glanced at that issue in my home town’s convenience mart, but didn’t ask for it. Then, on seeing the second issue (perhaps in my home town’s stationery store now), I did ask for it, and managed to buy all seventy-eight more issues that followed. I even happened along the way to come across a copy of the first issue in the home of a friend who seemed more into GI Joe (although his parents had treated him to the rather sizeable Transformer Metroplex), and he was willing to give the comic book to me.
I suppose that’s a roundabout way of saying some of my groundwork assumptions about the first Transformers characters were formed by the first issues of the comic book (“a four-issue limited series”) rather than the cartoon, which seems more popular. My unpopular opinions amount to not liking cartoon mainstays such as “Soundwave’s ultra-processed voice” (although when it comes to comics, everyone in them pretty much “speaks in my own voice” for me), “Rumble’s piledrivers” as compared to a previous if less “visual” explanation of how he “makes earthquakes” (or even how rare the “red and black” colour scheme of his toy became when it was applied to Frenzy instead), how Ravage and Laserbeak (and Buzzsaw, another infrequent character in the cartoon) don’t speak, and the thought that a “grey-helmeted Megatron” looks somehow incomplete regardless of that matching the actual toy. Lest I come across as a “Decepticon sympathiser,” on the Autobot side the special abilities of Hound and Mirage could come across to me as more interesting when more limited in their biographies, Grimlock having been introduced as articulate in the comic can make his limited cartoon grammar not quite agreeable, and having never watched through all of Transformers: The Movie I’ve been left with the feeling I’d rather have seen Ultra Magnus live up to his responsibility than just have Hot Rod just happen to get “upgraded” by taking hold of a mystic item. (To be fair, I did have the Ultra Magnus toy.)
While unpopular, these opinions aren’t profound. The temptation might be to try and tie that in to how I’ve never quite managed to put all thoughts of the Transformers behind me for all that I don’t “collect the toys,” “watch the shows,” or “read the comics” in general. I suppose the property moved into the space Star Wars was vacating forty years ago in sufficient force to be a sort of default option for me, always ready to hand back then for all that the lesser amount of Robotech I saw was still enough to have the thinner thread of their prose novelizations hold up for years afterwards. I’m also a little conscious that when Transformers seemed to have ended for the first time, I got around to trying to set up a continuation of my own that marched straight back to “giant robots stuck on Earth that turn into relatively realistic human machines (and some cool robot animals),” and then ran out of ideas for that antique setting almost at once. Some years after that, though, I did manage to take interest in the “Beast Wars” computer-animated series. That wasn’t altogether unpopular at the time, of course.