I cannot emphasize how truly devastating it was that we were seeing an optimus that was stripped of basically every heroic quality, Autobots whose morality was dipping into the evil end, and Decepticons being painted as human, just as the gilding of the US was being ripped off

I was in college/exiting college as a young muslim dude and was semi-Woke. I was going through a LOT of anxiety/learning and silly me decided to hyper focus (to steal a term from the neurodiv community) on the one fandom I've always fell back onto, Transformers.

So there I was, dealing with what I knew would be the next unknown number of years of my life, facing an election that I knew we were going to lose, and the heroes I relied on in fiction became corrupted and treated by the fandom en masse as dictatorial genocidal fascists.

I LOVE the idea of exploring different character philosophies, but we were not yet in the era of Barber stitching together all the rampant loose threads and forming something cohesive out of it. We were still exploring a Fascist Optimus and Autobot Megatron.

We were exploring how the Autobots who can't forgive Megatron are worse than Megatron and would perform incredibly personal manipulations to get where they wanted to. We were exploring Op-the-cop and how he was an accessory to if not a performer of brutality. We had tappet.

It wrecked my heart and burned me out of the one fandom that I could rely on. I was already in the throws of a major depression that would annihilate my sense of self for the next 5+ years, having lost the ability to make friends, and lost the sense of the weight of my words.

I don't have anything to really close this thread with. I was just thinking back to how much it sucked to see that the Good Guys are Evil and Bad Guys are Not So Evil when real life was already kicking me in the teeth.