Cayde “Spades” Astrophel

I love this show so much! It's been a great source of comfort, and there's decent trans representation through the character of Nightshade. Ignoring all the review-bombing from the Fox News Snowflake Squad, that is, it's a pretty good show that deserves as much positive attention as possible. This show bears a wonderful display of talent on all fronts, with very punchy and expressive animation (especially the fight scenes and a few of the other scenes where things get pretty intense) and a wonderful voice cast, and an even better soundtrack to boot. The story is also pretty well-written, and has some moments (especially in the latter quarter of season 1) that gets surprisingly dark for a children's show, perhaps even rivalling Transformers Prime back in the day. If you think "Oh, Earthspark won't go that far!" Oh yes it *does.* I especially love how they handled Megatron, I think he's such a sweetheart and I love how they gave him (finally!!) a human friend who is ALSO super cool. I also like how the main characters actually *feel* like children too, someone (or multiple someones) must work with kids or have kids themselves, while other shows fall flat on how they write children because it's surprisingly tough if you don't have experience or know what you're doing. There is also some great handlings of PTSD and trauma through the way in which Grimlock is written, which made me pretty happy and made me feel seen in my own experiences with trauma and PTSD. This show is worth it, even if it doesn't seem like it, even if the harassment and general snowflake-isms from Fox News and their goons wants to make you turn away. Please give it a look!

I do really enjoy RDO, especially with my friends. However, it gets incredibly boring playing on your own after a while, hence the lack of a fifth star. It's hard to keep interest at times. There's also the issue with R*'s lack of any major updates, giving all their attention to GTA instead, when this game deserves more love and attention than GTA. I enjoy GTA, but I would love to see more content with RDO as well.

It has one of the best renditions of Starscream and that's all that matters to me. Everyone else is cool, yes, but Starscream.