Optimus Prime: metaphor for the deep rooted collective remorse of the English people, or just another fine robot badonkadonk?

I was listening to those Art Bell late night radio shows about UFOs a couple decades ago when the guest said something to the effect of, "You know Art, farmers still harvest the wheat and grain from crop circles and we eat it in our cereals and crap". I have read some speculation that UFOs are putting messages in the grains and when we eat them they rewrite our personalities. Previously the only way I knew of to transfer personalities between living beings was to get an organ transplant from somebody. It's a concept called cellular memory through which organ transplantees wake up one day with personality traits consistent with the donor from whom they got their organs. The idea that somehow aliens were transferring to us some sort of consciousness-altering messages in our Froot Loops was quite profound.

What I was worried about was an idea I had that cellular memory was not limited to organ transplants and crop circles. I really hope the hamburger I ate yesterday came from a cow who was well adjusted without too much emotional baggage. I know if you eat a crazy cow you get mad cow disease, but what if you eat an emo cow? They don't screen hamburger cows to find out if they listen to My Chemical Romance. I would prefer that McDonalds sell only hamburgers from cows that listen to Iron Maiden and lived a heavy metal cow lifestyle, rocking out all day playing cow air guitar as they ate the grass. But that's assuming that McDonald's hamburgers are made from meat, which is probably asking a bit much. A more reasonable request would be that McDonald's play Iron Maiden to the cardboard that they make their hamburgers from, or at least draw the Iron Maiden logo on it before they process it into Big Macs.

Besides eating McDonalds hamburgers made from cardboard there's a more traditional method of transferring other people's thoughts from paper to my brain and its called reading comic books. I finally got that Spotlight Optimus Prime I was writing about the other day and as I read it I felt like there were underlying themes in it akin to cellular level subliminal messages. Simon Furman who wrote the book is from the U.K. and as I read the story of Optimus Prime facing the atrocities commited by his ancestors, I wondered if this was Furman on some level writing about deep rooted regrets the English have as a people. There was so much conflict between Optimus and his robot brothers on both sides of the war that I wondered if Simon was using Prime's struggle to cope with the sins of his fathers as a metaphor for the English people and the actions of their leaders both past and present. Or maybe that last hamburger I ate was from a cow who took his comic books way too seriously.

Optimus has to deal with the fact that it was a previous Prime who dabbled in the Transformer equivalent of genetic manipulation and created some tortured robot Frankensteins called the Monster Pretenders. Could this be Furman warning us against the dangers of biotechnology and stem cell research? I'm just getting started here. At this point I am sure there was something in that last hamburger.

I've always hated the one dimensional cardboard cutout super doo-gooder guy Optimus Prime as he's portrayed in the cartoons (and now in the movie). Simon's take on Optimus throughout the years and various Transfomrer comic continuities has always been my favorite because Simon does a great job of capitalizing on Budiansky's original tech specs and exploiting Prime's compassion as his ultimate weakness. Consequently I find myself disliking Furman's Prime on the basis of his character and not the lack of it. I extremely dislike Furman's Prime because he's so crippled by compassion for lesser beings. I find this an annoying character flaw fleshed out perfectly. He's the guy I hate to love, which is a testament to Simon's ability to make me feel anything about this robot who in any other media is portrayed as the most wonderful super perfect robot Jesus that has ever lived.

Example number one of big flawed wussy Prime is the Spotlight book. Once again we see Prime dead set against the expansionist ideals of the other members of his race. Simon has written Prime like this before. Some of Simon's best writing was during the G2 era where the Transfomers who were left on Cybertron after the Ark crashed on earth eventually discarded the notions of war and factions, deciding instead to just call themselves Cybertronians and going out to conquer planets in the name of the Cybertronian empire. This left Optimus both an evolutionary and idealistic throwback who felt bad for the conquered worlds instead of proud of the accomplishments of his descendants. This is where I think Simon may be communicating a remorsefulness on the collective consciousness of the English people for all the colonizing they have done of the world and the resulting destructive conflicts with the native peoples of other lands, most notably the American Revolutionary War and the New Zealand Land Wars of the late 1800's. It seems every time the British colonize a country, their western culture overwhelms that of the natives and the diseases they bring kill scores of indigenous peoples. Is Simon writing Optimus Prime as a sort of British conscience, looking to atone for what miseries the English have brought unto countless races and cultures? I guess the real question is whether or not I shaked his hand too hard at Auto Assembly back in 2004 and the skin cells I absorbed from him are rewriting my brain.

I feel like I've just scratched the surface of what could be the true message behind Simon Furman's work on the Transformers comics. But since I'm just uneducated lazy brown trash I don't care to explore this any further. Writing thesis papers exploring Simon Furman's characterization of Optimus Prime as a metaphor for the deeply buried collective remorse the English have over the expansion of western civilization is extremely retarded. But I will be rabidly following the next chapters in IDW's ongoing Transformer books, one of which will be called "Expansion". If I'm right, "Expansion" will be about a conquering Cybertronian Empire that mirrors the first European colonization wave beginning in the 1500's. Or it could just be about Optimus Prime eating too many hamburgers, in which case I will really need to cut down on them Froot Loops.