Micron Legend: Starscream is Abandoned

ALONE. As part of a gambit to force the Cybertrons to use to Astro Blaster, the Destrons have given the Star Saber back to Starscream, and he is on cloud nine. He swings that thing the way you'd expect an anime character to swing a sword almost his size in terms of length and girth (heyo!), but Convoy, rather sporadically, asks Starscream what we assume is supposed to be a disarming question: What's the point? Little does Convoy know, Starscream has actually been down this existential road before. (See "Ready for a Rebellion.") Starscream blows off Convoy's attempts to make him question himself, claiming to have already resigned himself to his destiny as a Destron. It's just a shame that the other Destrons don't have Starscream's back. Yup! In what is a pivotal moment for Starscream's character arc, the entire Destron team actually leaves the battlefield to invade the Cybertron base, WITHOUT TELLING STARSCREAM, fully intending to use Starscream as a sacrifice to distract the Cybertrons as they pillage their base. Wow. That's like the Destron equivalent of all your friends going into town to hang out without you. Except, you know, your friends aren't expecting you to die when they do that. Not only did the Destrons ditch Starscream, they also closed the Warp Gate off to him, so when the Cybertrons leave to defend their base, Starscream is just stuck there, in the rain. This leads to a brief but beautiful wake-up call moment for Starscream as he asks the question that Starscreams probably need to ask themselves more often: "What am I doing?" This scene has a shit ton of differences with the English dub. It's actually kind of impressive how you can take the same footage and get a completely different script. Aside from the general sloppiness of the conversation thread in English, the Japanese version also adds a minor arc where Starscream blows off Convoy's insistence that the Microns do not wish to fight by saying that he's the only one they've chosen to fight alongside. This, of course, is what motivates the Star Saber Microns to shut off, instead of just shutting down at that moment for dramatic convenience a la the English dub. To punctuate the point, the Japanese version even has Starscream attempt to call his personal Micron, Grid, only to again get the cold shoulder. Insert "Even the Mini-Cons have abandoned me now," joke here. Also, the Japanese version is on this weird metaphorical train where they keep comparing the Destrons' sacrifice of Starscream to a game of Go. Go, if you aren't aware, is a board game quite popular in East Asia. While it has very different rules and goals from chess, the basic idea of sacrificing one piece to ensure victory in the long run should be accessible to chess players. Also, the shot of the mantis eating the snail in the foreground of 0:34? Yeah, added for the Japanese version. I'm sure it's symbolic or some shit. Probably. Scene from episode 33 of Transformers: Micron Legend, "Sacrificial Scapegoat."