Autobased and Decepticringe: The Politics Of Transformers Armada
20 Years Later, A Kids’ Show About Robots In Disguise Still Has A Message For Kids Of All Ages
Adams’s note: this post was originally authored as a column for publication elsewhere, so it might seem out-of-voice. Oops.
In the last few years, I’ve been revisiting a lot of the shows I watched as a kid. In doing so, I’ve discovered that many of those shows had right-wing themes. I wrote a Twitter thread in 2020 about the salient political theory offered by the Lego Bionicle books. Behind the facade of a children’s anime about car robots fighting each other, 2004’s Transformers: Energon was actually a timely commentary on the Iraq War. The good-guy Autobots go on a foreign expedition, trying to harvest a critical resource while also fighting a war to keep it out of the hands of the evil Decepticons and their army of “Terrorcons,” to prevent them from attacking their home. The Robots may have been In Disguise, but the social commentary sure wasn’t. Recently, I picked up the 2002 prequel series Transformers: Armada. What I found was that, like many of its contemporaries, Armada has an overtly right-wing message, still relevant 20 years after it aired.
American politics and wartime culture have enveloped Transformers since they were introduced in America in 1984, at the tail end of the Cold War. The franchise generally has leaned on conservative themes. The original 1980s character profile for Optimus Prime based his personality on Abraham Lincoln: fierce in battle and stalwart in his defense of justice and freedom, but compassionate and kind to his friends. Optimus has since gone on to be portrayed in some variation of this characterization in every new iteration of the franchise. In several continuities, he doesn’t just share the personality of a great American statesmen– he actually becomes a statesman, a diplomatic envoy between humans and Transformers following the Autobot-Decepticon war. Essentially, the Transformer George Washington.
Likewise, the bad guys have evolved in ways that mirror contemporary politics. The 1980s Decepticons were merely a tyrannical empire seeking to expand their territory from the Transformers’ home planet of Cybertron to the entire galaxy, and that’s generally been their motivation in most portrayals. But from the 2000s onward, media aimed at older fans, like IDW Publishing’s comic books, have fleshed out much of the backstory behind the Transformers’ war. Specifically, the comics have portrayed Decepticon leader Megatron not as an evil emperor, but as a revolutionary. Born into the lower classes, he became hateful of a harsh caste system on Cybertron. He founded the Decepticons as a Bolshevik-esque revolutionary faction to violently overthrow the old order and impose political equality. This revolutionary Megatron even boasts his own manifesto, with the propagandistic title, “Towards Peace”.
Paring this back down to Armada specifically, much of the outside political climate it spoke to in 2002 is still present in 2022. There are many examples. The first and most obvious is the story itself: both factions seek to employ another race of Transformers, the Mini-Cons, to achieve their ends. It’s a textbook allegory of how both parties employ racial politics. The Decepticons seek to exploit the Mini-Cons to increase their power; Democrats exploit their minority voter base for everything from gerrymandering to voter turnout, to give themselves a constant upper hand in electoral politics. Each Mini-Con itself is completely loyal to the faction or robot that captures it, and each robot and its Mini-Con partner are symbiotically linked; Democrats have a multi-generational stranglehold on women and minority voters. And while they don’t quite have a symbiotic relationship, Democrats, leftist talking heads and activists (but I repeat myself) certainly expect one. Anytime a black person publicly strays from leftist orthodoxy, or God forbid expresses conservative views, he or she gets branded a “token,” an “Uncle Tom,” a race traitor, or worse: Ben Carson, Candace Owens, Clarence Thomas, Herschel Walker, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mayra Flores, “far-right” and “white supremacist” Latinos, just to name a few. The Democratic agenda (allegedly) represents the interests of all minorities, so speaking out against that agenda is not just going against your own interests, it makes you a traitor to your own being.
Armada is also famous among fans for its unique portrayal of Decepticon warrior Starscream. In most continuities, Starscream is a conniving, ambitious upstart who seeks to subvert and ultimately usurp Megatron as Decepticon ruler. But Armada Starscream is a tragic hero: resentful of Megatron’s abuse, he defects to the Autobots, then wavers between the two factions, before ultimately sacrificing himself to make the two sides work together to destroy a much greater threat. In recent years, centrist Democrats and social liberals have also been abused by the Progressive elements of the left, and have begun speaking out against the aggressive far-left, names including Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, and Tulsi Gabbard. Starscream was not a true Autobot, and many right-wing Tweeters will similarly point out that “Good Liberals” are just as opposed to a positive conservative agenda as they are to a progressive one. But the Right should use this alliance, however tenuous, to defeat the threat posed by the radical Left.
Starscream wasn’t the only one playing both sides. Armada also introduced the (literally) two-faced Sideways. Sideways had no allegiance to either faction, but played on the worst instincts of both to perpetuate the conflict. In politics we call this “bipartisanship,”or more accurately, “Uniparty.” The Uniparty is the worst instincts of both factions: corporate Democrats and “principled” Republicans actively betraying their voter base to perpetuate the status quo. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger’ condescending bile about preserving “our democratic institutions” on the J6 Committee. Washington Republicans screwing over railroad workers looking for a mere week of sick days; codifying gay marriage into federal law; and pushing another omnibus budget loaded with leftist priorities. Thom Tillis trying to push a backroom amnesty deal for illegal aliens with Kyrsten Sinema. Susan Collins. Lisa Murkowski. Mitt Romney. The Uniparty is not interested in partisan fights, so long as it can preserve the real institutions of our country: the Washington establishment, corporate donors, the Deep State, and the LGBT agenda.
Sideways was not a threat himself, but an agent of the aforementioned larger threat looming over the Autobot-Decepticon battles: the planet-eating embodiment of chaos, Unicron. Unicron created the Mini-Cons in order to feed on the hate and constant fighting between the two sides. Unicron was, and still is, an allegory for the war machine, the ugly consortium between intelligence agencies, military leadership, defense contractors, neoconservatives and neoliberals in government. In 2002 the military-industrial complex and the Washington establishment were intervening in the Middle East to install democracy at gunpoint; in 2022 they’re doing the same, trying to protect a corrupt “democratic” regime in Ukraine. In both cases, Wilsonian propaganda is the motto, guns and bombs are trafficked like goods to market; the project can’t and won’t fail, because the world-eating monster of kickbacks and government funding feeds on perpetual war in real life as well as fiction.
Transformers: Armada is notoriously shoddy, lacking substance and rushed onto TV screens. But so is American politics, as our decaying regime crumbles under its own fakeness. But even bad art reveals truth beyond its time. Armada sent a message to kids back then, one that we adults in the current moment need to hear. Fortunately, we are in Prime position to fix it, if we listen.