They are kinda both. In the recent IDW comic runs, Decepticons originally wanted to overthrow the Functionists. The Functionists were the ruling class of Cybertron who enforced the ideology that a bot's alt mode (what they transform into) should determine their occupation. This lead to a stratified apartheid society where the intellectual class was better off than the manual workers' class.
Megatron was among other things a philosopher and political thinker but because of his alt mode he was forced to work in a mine. He secretly writes and disseminates theory. At one point he even says "religion is the engex of the people". So the Marx parallel is apparent.
The problem is that Megatron also wants to exterminate ALL organic life for reasons I didn't look into. This is one of the main points of contention with the Autobots. Later in the timeline he is portrayed as extremely sadistic and bloodthirsty. So he is clearly not a character that one should be sympathising with. Decepticons in general are ruthless, brutal and destructive.
So it looks like the idea behind them is a liberal's understanding of communism with a fascistic angle thrown in?
Weirdly enough later they give Megatron a redemption arc where he esentially turns remorseful and good which seems completely out of place.
Damn, even getting some trans vibes there. Which I guess makes sense.
No surprise that they have a villain make reasonable points, but then also have to have them randomly want to murder everyone for no reason, pretty sure it's illegal if the villain isn't like that in lib fiction.
I understand the sentiment and I realize that Transformers is unfortunately stamped with the marks of neoliberalism like most entertainment media, but in the comics and movies, Megatron 70 percent of the time is a douchebag megalomaniacal maniac that wants to destroy non-organic life or commit genocide of the autobots, despite his token occasional criticism of the autobots. It unfortunately makes sense for the autobots to tacitly tolerate working with the U.S. military.
I think they're just kinda stupid frankly. The goal of their faction is to destroy the Autobots, after that they don't seem to have a real plan except cull the weak.
Batman is the ultimate right-wing power fantasy. A Billionaire who beats up poor people on the streets because the law/government is too corrupt/weak/incompetent to deal with anything. What had you conflicted about this?
I don't think the classical archetypical Batman is inherently right-wing, or should be considered right-wing. I grew up with multiple incarnations of Batman, and I find that those who claim Batman is "just" a billionaire who beats up poor people to be misunderstanding the crucial context and nuance, not arguing in good faith or missing the forest for the trees, even if I don't completely disagree with their arguments.
Many of Batman's villains themselves are/were capitalists, bourgeoisie or their enforcers and bootlickers and agents of them, namely Penguin, Simon Stagg that themselves treat the working class and poorer people as garbage and relentlessly exploit, manipulate or abuse them.
And while many of Batman's villains have extremely sorrowful mental issues, most of them are of the disgusting and vile and sadistically cruel mindset of "if I can't be happy, no one else can!" or "everything sucks, so I should be able to kill people!" and are straight up no-exaggeration irredeemable monsters, like Riddler, Mad Hatter, Joker, Calendar Man, Professor Pyg, Hush, Victor Zsasz.
For every working-class villain that's screwed over by capitalists like Mister Freeze, there are villains like Firefly.
Of course being a billionaire is disgusting and irresponsible, but those who criticize Batman for this don't have any real solutions, and just seem to be complaining for the sake of it. Is Batman supposed to give away billions of dollars to various aid organizations to feed, house and clothe the entire Gotham population? Is he supposed to become a revolutionary communist that tries to insert himself into the general population to overthrow the Gotham government so that way when Gotham becomes socialist, they can be invaded by the trillion-dollar U.S. military and their puppets?
In real-life, it costs billions of dollars a week for a city to operate in even just a week, and I don't see Batman ushering in a national communist revolution anytime soon.
There is plenty of criticism to be made of Batman and superheroes, but it always annoys me when the criticism is the same old surface level "rich white billionaire beats up poor people because he's sad and nuts"