Barber is actually a genius

You see, when Barber wrote the reveal into IDW1 that Onyx Prime was actually Shockwave sent back in time orchestrating all of Cybertronian history, it was really a brilliant moment of in-universe plot events and metatextuality intersecting.

You see, in-universe, Shockwave’s goal for becoming Onyx Prime was to make all things ‘meaningless’ and to ‘destroy hope’ and to ‘serve as an agent of chaos’ by making all of Cybertronian history purely arising by his design.

And in the META sense, this is perfectly mirrored by the fact that the “Onyx Prime = Shockwave” reveal made Shockwave’s death in Dark Cybertron and even the entire story of IDW1 meaningless, destroyed my hope that exRID/OP would ever have emotionally satisfying writing, AND was a completely chaotic choice that came out of nowhere and completely blindsided me thinking that Shockwave logically died after being shot by Megatron and Optimus at once and then sucked into a black hole.

Truly John Barber is the absolute pinnacle of Transformers writing. Such a brilliant mixing of in-universe plot with meta themes that the readers feel directly is such AMAZING writing. A plot twist that you could NEVER see coming and that makes the story SO MEANINGFUL. A plot twist that gives characters AGENCY and that DEFINITELY makes a ton of sense. Such quality writing must be exactly why SO MANY PEOPLE talk about exRID/OP and how BRILLIANT the storytelling is ^w^