"It's the act I enjoy more so than the nourishment."
| “ | Nyx: T-Tarantulas? He's a butcher! Megatron: That's one of the reasons I find him useful. |
„ |
| ~ Talk about no chill |
Damn, we're nearing the end of September, and thus nearing the end of my Transformers marathon of proposals, which I'm gonna be capping with the discussion for Transformers One (which is an absolutely awesome film btw, far better than that disastrous first trailer made it seem. Recommend checking it out even if you aren't a TF fan). So before I get to that, gonna get a certain discussion out on a part of the brand that holds immense value to my heart, as...
Beast Wars is the show that cemented me as a TF fan, so hearing that a comic series by IDW Comics was being issued, I made plans to read it and it really brings me back to how it was watching the show while having lots of fun new additions... and then IDW lost their license smh. What a shame. So, with that, lots of villains don't really get to their nasty actions (or nasty villains don't get introduced). Like Megatron, while still the delightfully fun magnificent bastard that he was on the original show, never got to vicious plots he had dished out in the original series. However, another, very familiar face also faces this issue but at the end, but having discussed with a pal who would propose him on the other side, we both agreed he still has the personal cruelty and sadism to count. Let the trial commence.
What is the Work?[]
Transformers: Beast Wars is an awesome 2021 comic series by IDW Publishings that got criminally cut short. A retelling of the classic 1996 series by Mainframe Entertainment, it follows eras after the Cybertronian Great War ended. The Maximals, descended from the Autobots, rule and coexist with the Predacons, the descendants of the Decepticons. But due to this, there is inherent prejudices against each other. This culminates in a group of rogue Predacons, led by Megatron (yes, named after the original Decepticon leader) who stole the Golden Disk and intends to decrypt it. But a Maximal science exploration ship, the Axalon, led by Optimus Primal (yes, named after the original Autobot leader) pursues them, leading to both ships being stranded on ancient Earth. While the Predacons seek to decrypt the Golden Disk, the Maximals focus on stopping such plans to conquer Cybertron, while a mysterious alien entity, the Vok, look in interest to see how their experiments involving Earth would go down.
Now, most villains get their heinousness cut short when the series got cancelled, but one manages to remain as a really nasty treat. One of the OG series' most nasty foes, Tarantulas.
Who is Tarantulas? What Has He Done?[]
Tarantulas is Megatron's most vicious and treacherous servant with the only one with the intellect capable of rivalling or even exceeding him. Joining his gang of renegades on the promise of having a seat at the table on Megatron's annexation of Cybertron, Tarantulas serves many roles within his crew, especially after they were crashed into ancient Earth and stranded. The primary one being the head of all scientific endeavors, but has made it clear to Dinobot that he is only out for himself and has no loyalty to the cause. But Tarantulas already had very infamous back on Cybertron which Megatron decides to employ as his Torture Technician.
Priding himself as an artist on torture, Tarantulas' methods have gained him a frightening reputation as a butcher who death will be a preferable fate to, which he will put to the test when Megatron has Nyx interrogated. Strapping her to her machine, Tarantulas subjects her to intense electric torture for hours on end, her flesh and circuits slowly breaking. Tarantulas eventually realizes Nyx is refusing to speak to safeguard her Maximal comrades, realizing all of them survived. Free to dispose of her however he wishes, Tarantulas decides to use the most cruel, sadistic method he could find. Using a transformation lock device, he traps Nyx in her robot mode, leaving her unable to transform into her alt-mode as a bat to shield herself from the Energon radiation. The Energon poisoning would slowly decay her body till she can't take it anymore. And it won't be like Tarantulas if he doesn't also plan on feasting on her remains, of course, as ahem, "It's the act I enjoy more so than the nourishment" (I really love how much on crack up 90s censorship standards were). Of course this greatly disgusts our bot of honor, Dinobot, who promptly turns against the Predacons and locks them inside the Darksyde and rescue Nyx, bringing her back to the Maximal ship.
After Tarantulas disables the lockdown protocol, Tarantulas is sent to infiltrate the Maximals' ship, the Axalon, to destroy it from the inside while Megatron laucnhes an assault as a distraction. Confronting Rattrap, Tarantulas of course tries to make a meal out of him (because... of course). But there he comes across the information that the ship was carrying dozens of stasis pods. To tell what stasis pods are, they are incubators for protoforms, which are the equivalent of Cybertronian babies or fetuses. Sensing the opportunity, Tarantulas installs a Predacon shell program onto them, forcing all the originally Maximal protoforms to become evil Predacons like himself when they are awoken and create a personal army to usurp Megatron. Tarantulas was defenestrated by Ratchet (my god, just using that word reminds me of that Loic Suberville video) before he could complete, to which he uses the opportunity to stab Dinobot from the back (giving the page image). Now, Tarantulas may not have been able to infect all the protoforms, but he was able to infect one of them, Blackarachnia, who once awoken was at first a genuinely curious and non-malicious being until the shell programming kicks in, forcibly turning her into an evil Predacon. Of course thankfully Blackarachnia, who uses Tarantulas' shell programming to infect mroe protoforms like he wanted, gets harshly reminded his plan also biting him back as Blackarachnia painfully makes it clear robbing the protoforms of agency doesn't make them easy to make them his slaves.
Tarantulas then later convinces Megatron to not kill Terrorsaur for his treachery because of conserving resources... only because Megatron will kill him in a way he won't have any salvageable remains. Eventually during the Maximal's attack on the Predacons' ship, the Darksyde, Blackarachnia and Tarantulas team up with each other to defend the ship form inside. While Tarantulas tries to face Nyx, Blackarachnia makes use of Tarantulas' infamy to use a torture session from him as a worse alternative to a swift death by her lade when she fights Cheetor. However, Nyx manages to destroy the ship's TransWarp Drive and Optimus Primal forces Megatron to let them go to get the Golden Disk back. However Tarantulas manages to use Terrorsaur's corpse to create a zombifie who endlessly thirst for Energon to use as his attack dog. When Waspinator and Terrorsaur come across an extremely potent form of Energon, Tarantulas uses this to create weapons that will spread a Hate Plague across the Maximals and have everyone attack each other.
Eventually meeting the leaders of the Vok, who promised him the secrets of the universe, Tarantulas sells out both the Predacons and Maximals while they were on a truce to let the Vok not only desttroy them, but the entire Earth as well so that he can use the acquired knowledge to conquer Cybertron. For that, he is the one that helps the Vok use more Maximal protoforms to turn into their servants, known as the Children of the Vok. Tarantulas then uses the zombified Terrorsaur to have him devour his friend Scorponok and escape and then watch as the chaos he orchestrated has the Maximals, Predacons and the Children of the Vok go into a battle to the death while he sits back and watches the carnage unfold. Blackarachnia confronts Tarantulas, but he manages to slip away in the chaos when the Vok leaders arrive, and makes a run for it. Upon Megatron's banishment thanks to the new unspace weapons of the Axalon, Blackarachnia as the new leader makes it a priority to find and kill Tarantulas for his treachery.
Mitigating Factors[]
It's Tarantulas, the smug, sadistic traitor who holds no loyalty to nobody. This section can be really really brief, in which he sees everyone as people to kill and harvest for their resources. It says a lot the only reason he convinced Megatron to spare Terrorsaur was only because he would do so through a blast so has no resources to manage. And even though it was never an issue on the OG series (because when he actually has to do horrifying crimes they are portrayed straight with easily the most horrifying death in the series), this version also lacks the multiple instances of being on the brunt of comedic humiliations, so seriousness is even more guaranteed here.
Heinous Standard[]
Okay, so when it comes to this... Tarantulas is not as obviously nasty as he was in the OG series. Like he isn't an established cannibalistic serial killer, and we don't get to the point where he becomes the domestic abuser to Blackarachnia and mind-raping her to be her slave to the point where she threatens suicide for freedom, or the numerous attempts to delete all Cybertronian kind from the timeline through a time paradox. And while in this universe Tarantulas sells out the Earth to be destroyed by the Vok, this loses a lot of punch because only the barely above a dozen Cyebrtronians are who all that will be killed are the confirmed sapient creatures on Earth. It's why I thought the Vok leaders could count but eventually dismissed all of them.
But literally, every other villain ends up getting the short end of the stick on heinousness. Megatron is nowhere near as evil on here as he was on the OG series. I am sure he could've counted had the series not been cut short as the core characterization is still the same, but so far his villainy is just above average. Some guards killed to steal the Golden Disk, nothing exceptionally cruel. The worst he did was subjecting Nyx to some really nasty torture or have the Autobots attack each other through a hate plague, which pushes him to being above average in cruelty, but just being above average isn't enough. And a huge lot has to do with Tarantulas does as the torture technician, while sharing equal culpability on the latter two crimes.
Because Tarantulas, our sweet, spider friend, is a vicious, sadistic Torture Technician. He is the one running the hideous torture on Nyx, in which from her and Tarantulas, we get an established history that such horrific tortures are nothing new for Tarantulas, in which Nyx screams in horror how Tarantulas is infamous for being a butcher while Tarantulas prides himself as an artist when it comes to torture. Heck, after her torture session, Tarantulas has another go at making poor Nyx suffer slowly by forcing her to her robot mode to slowly degrade thanks to energon poisoning and then feast on her remains, and has a seperate instance of trying to feast on Rattrap so while not an established serial killer, his cannibalism is still prevalent. Tarantulas' torture here is infamous for how atrocious he is that Nyx immediately knows who he is and how he was reputed as a butcher (but Tarantulas prefers to call himself an artist), that just being handed over to Tarantulas is used as the worse alternative to a swift execution, something Blackarachnia uses.
Then there are other horrific touches on Tarantulas' sadism, be it having Scorponok be devoured by the zombified Terrorsaur, who he was close to with, betraying all sides to be destroyed by the Vok and trick both sides into killing each other just so he can watch the carnage from the back. Or instilling a shell program that forcibly turns all the protoforms (baby Transformers) to become evil Predacons against their wills once they activate, which we see in full exploration as Blackarachnia starts out as just genuinely inquisitive and curious being before the shell program finished completion and forcibly turned her to evil. While Blackarachnia was not someone Tarantulas could make his slave, there is a visible lack of agency to her nature as well that has to be attributed to him.
It's like how we got up Lockdown and Prometheus Black from Transformers: Animated. They don't have a lot on scale, but they make up with personal, sadistic cruelty that is exceptional for the series. And Tarantulas, in the low heinous standard of his series, excels on that, with such sadism making him worse than both Megatron or the Vok leaders, the Big Bad & Greater Scope Villains of the series.
Final Verdict[]
He's not the easiest keeper I've gotten from a TF work but I can very much see a case on personal cruelty over scale.
And oh boy oh boy, do I have a discussion for the next week.