Transformers: War For Cybertron is what happens if you have bad leaders

This is gonna be short but I just wanna talk about this.

Transformers: War for Cybertron is a weird show. It's a heavily retooled retelling of the Generation 1 story that's darker and edgier in some ways than the original TV show. This first part of a planned three part series covers the battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons before their fated trip to Earth. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's okay, and fans will surely get some sort of enjoyment out of it.

What really piqued my interest, however, was the backstory of the whole conflict, which sounds like a far more interesting story than the main story of War For Cybertron. I don't have much of a background in Transformers except for the G1 TV show and some scattered episodes of later series, so let me know if this has happened in other series too.

In some side dialogue, the Decepticons mention that they staged a revolution because they were abused and used as labor for a very long time. Thus, the conflict between Autobot and Decepticon is basically a class war, and the Decepticon uprising is basically a worker's revolt against the aristocratic Autobots, who fight for nebulous concepts like freedom (from what, exactly?) and miss a world with arts and culture (mentioned specifically during dialogue.) The Autobots were the oppressors, and they got overthrown.

What happens next after the Decepticon victory reminds me a lot of Pablo Freire's 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he talks about how oppression dehumanizes both oppressor and oppressed, and how the onus for uplifting society lies mostly on the oppressed. Screw up that process, and all people will be doing is switching sides. That's kind of what Megatron ended up doing - instead of equality for both Autobot and Decepticon, he decides to take revenge. Other than that, he establishes authoritarian rule and a cult of personality around his leadership. Usurping the desire for change, he uses blind loyalty and all too human desires to create a new oppressor class.

How ironic (or fitting) for a series about fighting robots.