The Foreword to Redemption

Well, here it is...finally. A story six years in the making because Real Life Sucks™, especially when it includes unpleasantness like...ohhhh...divorces and cross-country moves and working full-time and...Well, you get the idea. So here we are, finally writing an intro to this behemoth, to let y'all know what you're in for before you embark on reading it.

The first thing that you need to know is that it's "slash," meaning that we put two "males" together into romantic relationships. In all honesty, we don't believe that you can have real "slash" with robots, but you might feel differently. And if you can't deal with that, don't read this story. If you decide to read it anyway, we don't want to hear about how grossed-out you are and how "Megatron isn't gay!" Now that that's out of the way...

This whole thing started as a series of online/IM discussions between the two of us about Starscream, Megatron, and Skyfire and the interrelationship between the three of them. Then it started coming together as "just" a few little vignettes. Then we realized that, as you watch the second season of the G1 cartoon, you can see a definite progression of events, a slow degeneration of the relationship between Megatron and Starscream and of the Decepticon organization as a whole. We highly doubt that this was at all intentional on the part of the people responsible for creating the original G1 cartoon, but nevertheless, it is there if you look for it. We figured that there had to be a reason for it and...well, this story is, when all is said and done, just our take on that.

It is also our attempt to give Starscream a measure of justice. We sympathize with Starscream in the sense of his association with Megatron, seeing their relationship as a highly aberrant one (Yes, even for Decepticons) of creatively manipulative abuser and highly-vulnerable-to-manipulation abused. (For more info about how we see their relationship, see Nightwind's "essay" here: Having lived through that sort of thing ourselves, each in a different way, we feel for Starscream in, admittedly, a wholly biased sort of way. As such, there is quite a bit of, shall we say, situational self-inserting that happens in this story. Many of the things that happen in this story are directly drawn from personal experience, and some of them may be quite disturbing to you, depending on your own level of sensitivity. One reader has advised us to insert a non-con warning here, although we don't really see it that way. You might, though, so be warned.

Because of our pro-Starscream bias, there is, of course, the urge to make things all better for him. Hence, by the end of this thing, an alternate universe is born, but this story itself is not necessarily AU at all; it sticks very closely, in fact, to the canon cartoon events. Our interpretation of events and the ("slash") relationships between characters might not be strictly canonical...but it works for us and we can justify it at least to ourselves. Your interpretations, of course, may not be exactly the same as ours, and that's OK.

Redemption is, when you strip it down, simply a series of episode tags for certain key episodes (so we see them, anyway) that take place in the latter two-thirds of the second season of the G1 cartoon, starting with "Enter the Nightbird" and ending with the end of "Masquerade," at which point our AU diverges from the canon. The story is our take on what might have happened "behind the scenes," so to speak, during that time period. It is not meant to be an action-packed, plot-heavy epic. In a sense, it is not even a "story" at all. It is more of a series of linked vignettes, each one being a chapter of the story and narrated by one of five characters, three of which are Starscream, Skyfire, and Megatron themselves. You can tell who's "speaking" when because at the start of each chapter is a quote from the cartoon series from the character who'll "narrate" the chapter. Note that our story and our interpretation of the characters is based solely on the original G1 cartoon; nothing from the comics figures into it. If you're a comic fan, please keep that in mind as you read.

Above all, Redemption is simply a story about three individuals living out a pivotal stretch of time in each of their lives, all seen through the eyes of five individuals. We hope that you enjoy reading it, and we hope that it will, perhaps, make you think.