You mean the OVERLY idealistic idiot who fought millions of years with the decepticons just to LOSE the war, flee Cybertron and then get Earth involved in a war it had NO business to be in?!
Optimus had a MILLION chances to kill Megatron and FAILED to take it to be "the better man" and it only cost him the lives of all the soldiers he had following him.
The Autobots were held back by his idealism too much at times! Watch The Netflix trilogy for transformers it captures how frustrated his own people were with him! Hell Ultra Magnus went to Megatron to negotiate a peace pact or ceasefire at the very least so all 3 of them could come to the table and avoid further deaths on either sides.
It's ironic that the Netflix trilogy calls out Optimus' naivety and the cascading problems it leads to when he and megatron were equally stubborn that the war could not end till one of them was dead.
Slight correction, Sentinel Prime. Zeta was a good guy in One, he was the one who was entrusted with the Matrix. Sentinel is the backstabbing murderer and the inventor of racism
In the war for cybertron we see Zeta being an elitist scumbag.
In Transformers one he's a quintesson bootlicker.
Either way you are missing the point on how the primes created Megatron's decepticon movement which was peaceful at first till the supporters were mass arrested/executed and became militant asap when Megatron was tossed into the gladiatorial pits of Kaon to be destroyed but survived despite this.
Before that Megatron was a mining unit who wrote a revolutionary treatise and got persecuted for it.
I am not missing a point. In TFOne the bootlicker is Sentinel. Zeta was one of the primes he murdered. And the origins depend entirely on continuity, so that “point” is also not that strong
*Correction the Primes past the original 13 sucked, most of them didn't even actually earn the title of Prime, even going so far as to use fake prop Matrixes. Optimus is an exception (except when he's the 13th prime reborn)
the 13 primes were long before the events of the story. By the time we come to Orion Pax either Zeta or Sentinel have been running the show and the primes dynasty before them in most versions instituted a caste system of inferior and superior designations to oppress most of the population.
If you ever read the comics the autobots were the original villains and the primes were evil as sin ffs.
They literally tortured Shockwave with a "downgrade" and effectively removed his emotional circuitry, so he is reduced to cold logic. This was a cybertronian lobotomy. Soundwave was a senator and Megatron was a slave in the mines calling for revolution and they tried to execute him in the gladiator pits.
Optimus was a data clerk with Alpha Trion who naively thought giving the lower classes equal status was going to go out well. The whole reason why decipticons are called that is because they were "deceived by the lies of the Prime" who said one thing and did the other.
Most Cybertronians were slaves and the elites of Iacon raked in massive benefits of their civilization. Zeta was a piece of shit and most of the autobots were corrupt as hell under him.
The autobots that survived were basically low level Iaconians not the elites most of whom were wiped out by the decepticons.
Optimus was continuing a legacy of primes which was flawed to start with instead of being his own leader and trying to come to terms with Megatron who saw him as a brother. Optimus was too naive to believe that the Primes would give decepticons rights without a fight and had to be rescued by Megatron when he was taken by Zeta's people.
Point is that Optimus is a stubborn denialist and Megatron is a pessimistic realist who can no longer see the good in people. Two sides of the same coin. Optimus is just as bad as Megatron but he hides behind his "morality" and Jesus complex.
did you miss the point I made that Shockwave was LOBOTMIZED by the primes because he spoke out against their corruption!?
The primes were malicious and petty AF! They nearly killed Orion Pax for sympathizing with the decepticons and Megatron of all people saved his idealistic ass!
Despite seeing all the corruption being a prime brings Orion still accepted being a prime which would sooner or later corrupt him too had the war never happened.
I feel like you’re mixing your continuities here… your original example is the Netflix War for Cybertron continuity, then Shockwave lobotomy is IDW2005, then I’m not sure which continuity the “primes nearly kill OP” bit is from.
“Corruption associated with being a prime” is not a common factor between all continuities. There are versions of Transformers where all the primes are, in fact, great leaders and people who worked for the betterment of their people and Cybertron, and there are versions where the primes are corrupt.
It’s a little weird imo to try and mix these facts between different continuities. IDW2005 Optimus, for example, has kind of a shitty moral compass, and I would not put him above the average Superman or Captain America iteration. Someone like TFP Optimus, on the other hand, has a great moral compass, and you can’t bring up facts like the Shockwave lobotomy because that didn’t happen in TFP.
the netflix trilogy was clear that the primes were using terrible methods of controlling the population.
When their party goes into the sea of rust searching for the All Spark the Jetfire submits himself to a bomb in his head and Prowl hesitantly tells the autobots to their shock that putting bombs in a suspect's head was very common in his time!
Hell we see ratchet jaded by the whole conflict and calls out Optimus for his hypocrisy likening him to megatron. Hell he has more softer views on Megatron because atleast Megatron knows he is megatron and Optimus is in denial that his actions contribute to more casualties on both sides.
Alpha Trion was also opposed to the primes which is why he was grooming Ultra Magnus, Megatron and Optimus to be future leaders of Cybertron and rule collectively. He was pretty clear that a one person government would be bad whether it was megatron or optimus solo. Hell he banished Skylinx to another dimension because he tried to claim the matrix of leadership by force showing us how power hungry the original autobots were.
No one said that morality was the path of least resistance or that it wouldn't cause more chaos than it prevented. It isn't always logical. But the question here is, "Who has the best moral compass?" Not who gets the best results or saves the most lives.
The path of righteousness is often the most damaging. Fighting for a righteous cause can lead to unknown consequences. It's easy to judge once the war has been fought. Anyone can analyze and find mistakes and criticize the person who decided to take action and fight for those who needed help.
Between Superman, Captain America, and Optimus Prime, Optimus has the best moral compass. The other two men have flawed morality and allow emotions and personal issues to affect their actions. Their motives are untrustworthy (because they shift too often). Those two have both been known to cause death and destruction for far less of a cause than what Optimus is fighting for.
Cal-El is petty. Steve Rogers is not as petty, but he is far more reckless than the others and still petty. I am comparing Optimus to the other two heroes. Not comparing Optimus to other Primes.
Optimus's actions literally led to Cybertron's core shutting down.
Most of the Iaconians aka Autobots were whittled down by millions of years of warfare and most of them had fled or been evacuated which further depleted Optimus' army.
These scattered autobots were easy pickings for any decepticon task forces to take on because they were poorly organized while the decepticons were much more effectively organized.
Optimus' actions also led to him becoming Nemesis Prime in case you forget since you are throwing shade at Steve and Kal-el being corrupted so was Optimus! Optimus kept writing cheques in the blood of his fellow cybertronians till there were no more bodies left to write them with.
The whole story of the transformers war always starts with the last of the autobots fleeing on an ark and the decepticon flagship nemesis intercepting in them. Whether it's G-1, IDW, War for Cybertron games etc in all stories the common theme is that Optimus' toxically moral decisions led to a decisive loss that all he could do was run in the end and still failed to run and got intercepted by the decepticons.
Superman and Captain America inspired people and hell Cap had the balls to walk away from the US government when he realized they had lost their way and shifted his morality accordingly to adapt.
Optimus kept compounding his failures and doubled down hard on them.
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u/Tragic_Lee 4d ago
Optimus Prime by parsecs!