Then again, the last time I defended the concept of a military I got called a 'fascist', so....

[yvannairie]

I also wonder if I should write about how while there's a lot of interesting Labour Politics(tm) stuff in Aligned that goes into the Decepticons being a worker's militia, there's similarly interesting things going into the majority of the best-known Autobots being a part of a conscript army with most of their infantry also being retrained labourers.

Like, most of the explicitly professional military mechs we see are Decepticons, and the few professional officers we see are Autobots, which is about what you'd expect because commissioned officers are, like, academics and shit, while the majority of non-drafted military are people who just wanna make ends meet. The military of Cybertron is an interesting relic of the previous broad historical period but also a symptom of a society without much social mobility.

(Individual city-states also have apparently have their own police-forces but the "federal" police is just the military, which makes me feel A Kind Of Way as well.)

The civil war as it was isn't something I've seen a lot of explorations of other than some criticisms of the comics for having a bunch of imperialism in them (which, fair enough, they are written my Americans after all) and the tensions between civillians and military outside of wartime are incredibly interesting to me.