#but it just fits his characterisation in tfp so much | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

decepti-thots · 2 years

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Hello! Thank you for sharing so much stuff from the notebooks! I will most definitely buy them when they will be available (though I hope that it will deliver to the country I live in xDD). Though, I have a question... is there anything interesting about Ratchet? Like from what I got from Drift’s profile, apparently Ratchet and the others were the ones who opposed Drift and it led to Lost Light crew’s split into two crews???

Oh, and now I wonder whether other “background” characters had much larger roles planned for them (like Sunstreaker, Mirage, Hoist, Siren, etc.).

My pleasure!

I'm pretty sure JRo is gonna ship wherever if you can pay. From what he said he was willing to make the effort to get them to folks!

Onto your questions, anyway.

Ratchet is a character who didn't have that much stuff in these that stuck out to me on first read. It's interesting: some very, very prominent characters really don't get that much "new" stuff here, which I think is because… well… they really were almost "there" from the very start, conceptually. Fun fact: I haven't said much about Rodimus yet in part because it's obvious JRo just HAD his ideas for him nailed down out the gate. (Similar with Magnus. It's astonishing how much Magnus as we come to see him in the final product is just THERE from day one. Only thing that took a little while to nail down was the armour stuff, but even then, he hits on the basic concept pretty early.) The characters with the most interesting stuff in these notebooks are the ones where he's trying to work them out and they changed over time- characters like Brainstorm or Rung.

But he's obviously in there! He absolutely comes up, haha. So let me check for a few things.

The character profile for Ratchet (these are from 2011, so when he was into writing the first few issues iirc) emphasizes that he gets along with everyone except Drift. It actually seems like his more TFA/TFP style mildly-to-moderately cankterous characterisation that JRo famously half-retconned MTMTE Ratchet into (from IDW's earlier, more generic characterisation) wasn't much here even at this fairly late stage. You can see it coming out in some of his ideas, but it's not really nailed down when he describes the character directly. He's remarked on as 'friendly' and getting on with everyone but Drift. So. It also remarks on him as someone trying to advise Rodimus (but Rodimus unwisely chooses to go with Drift's advice instead, with them at odds), which went to Magnus in the end more than Ratchet. But you can see where this concept came from- it fits with the Drift-Ratchet antagonism nicely. And that's for sure here from the start, with the atheism and Drift's (in this version, seemingly somewhat inauthentic) new age-y religious perpsective butting heads.

Also, his motivation for joining here is twofold, and doesn't really reflect what happened in the final comic, though it does mention his wanting to 'regain his faith in what he does' and wanting to find a new CMO after (in this version of Death of Optimus Prime, called at the time Schism) misdiagnosing OP with something and it nearly killing him. But he also wants to find, and fix, Autobots that are stranded/lost around the galaxy after the war.

In the concept brought up when I talked about Drift's character profile on my last post, where Rodimus and Drift would split and go in different directions, Ratchet was going to stay with Rodimus' side of the crew, yeah. Not go with Drift.

OH. One thing though. Ratchet originally kills Pharma directly, which I think miiiight have been inspiration for the next arc with him having First Aid get goaded? Possibly? As follows:

Now, onto the next part of your question. Not a huge amount, actually. Most of the characters with material in there which didn't wind up with a major role after all are characters who were cut or replaced, not ones who wound up as background fodder. There was a concept for an issue with, of all characters, Dipstick, where he becomes like a data ghost after his death and is communicating through the ship, and Ratchet tries to get him into like… a kind of permanent holoform. Very odd little idea, that, comes up twice. Both times, JRo adds a 2022 note like 'I have no idea WHAT this was, no memory of this at all', lmao. Bluestreak is mentioned once or twice in a way that suggests maaaaybe he would have been a little more around? But by and large, the main cast are the main cast from the get go, with the exceptions being situations like e.g. Powerglide would have had the role that got transplanted directly onto Tailgate.

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