I just don’t know how to feel about dead Transformers

polygon.com:

Like pretty much every story in the wide-ranging Transformers franchise, the live-action movie Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has an odd relationship with death. Most of its primary characters are living machines who can take seemingly fatal damage and then be repaired or revived later in the story. That makes it hard to take any apparent character death seriously, especially given the franchise’s long history of killing off beloved characters and then bringing them back later. Even superhero comics can’t compete with the death-and-revival cycle of Transformers media.

Just to make things more confusing, the Transformers movies sometimes play character deaths for big drama and pathos. At other times, the robot characters are so casual about their companions’ destruction that they come across as callous and uncaring. Does life or death mean anything to Transformers? Given how Rise of the Beasts plays up some character deaths as big emotional moments while completely glossing over others, is the audience meant to take any of these beats or emotions seriously?

As a casual longtime Transformers fan, I have no idea how to feel about dead Transformers anymore, so I asked the least-casual longtime Transformers fan I know what we can learn about Transformer life and death from the larger franchise — and how writers have used those elements to manipulate readers and viewers.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ahead.]

Tasha: David, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Rise of the Beasts didn’t try to wring big-time pathos out of multiple Autobot and Maximal deaths, then quickly reverse some of them, but not others, for reasons that are unclear. I know these quasi-deaths are meant to be