Transformer Alt Modes as a metaphor for Self-Determination?

[Copper Bezel]

I mean that falls into a different ball of wax, which is TF timescales.

Yeah, which I know I've complained about before on the topic of IDW's ... everything, but I think it's unavoidable here.

I don't mean to pick on IDW1 because there was a lot I still adore about it, but eh... it's ripe in this case. We establish that the war is the standard six million years. Nova Prime's era is ten million years ago.
That's... not too drastic, comparatively. Hell, Rewind was there when Nova launched his expedition, and recorded the speech!
Yet they also wanted it that Nova's ascension took place in the realm of myth and legend. The time scale is whacked and makes no sense and every justification I've heard is frankly a bandaid trying to justify a plot hole that could have been avoided with maybe a bit more forward planning?
They want Nova to be Charlemagne. Instead, if you look at the scale of time involved, he's Jimmy Carter.
I mean Arcee is the brother-turned-sister of Galvatron, who dates to the era of the Thirteen! That's like if we had one of Moses' pals just still hanging around and it wasn't a big deal.

Thaaaaaank youuuuu.I normally feel like I'm the only one bothered by this, and it just makes the history of the world so flat.

Like, some simplification is necessary no matter what, a fictional alien planet can't have a history as complex and diverse as the entire real world and even when there's allegory from real-life events, it has to be simplified. But you don't have to connect up every outline and fill every gap, you can always leave space for things to be more complex than you've shown. IDW1 gouged in those outlines and made sure there was no more complexity than exactly what showed up on the page. And you're right, even G1 didn't do that, contradictions aside, it let some things fit together naturally without explaining everything.

I mean that falls into a different ball of wax, which is TF timescales. Funnily enough G1 did it best because it told a fairly straightforward no-nonsense story and if you wanted to you could just pretend that that the Autobot and Decepticon leaders getting knocked offline for six million years was sort of curveball that disrupted everything.

It's bizarre really. I honestly think the original reason for the initial time jump was to emphasize the Superman origin of it all, isolate the Transformers on Earth from Cybertron without blowing it up outright. Animated reduced it to 50 years, and then it was just to give Dr. Sumdac time to make an evil robot hand chair. I guess if the (G1) ships crashed today we'd know about it, but then it didn't take long for the Transformers to be on the news either way once they woke up. Once they needed Cybertron as a plot device again in G1, it was mostly abandoned and had as much history as it needed to have for any given episode plot, but that introduced the idea that six million years had to be a time in which Cybertron could have existed with little change while the big guys were away, and everything works backward from there.

To your main point, there are ways to address this. Animated did a very interesting thing I'm a fan of, making them two large societies in conflict with each other. And maybe one side is more "the good guys" than the other but these are two large societies, there's going to be variance among them and maybe our group of heroes isn't necessarily representative of ALL the Autobots?
Honestly? If someone from Hasbro came to me and said "LordGigaIce, we want you to write the next Transformers series" that's probably the approach I take? It leaves room for some complexities while keeping things more or less "Autobots good Decepticons evil" for the marketing and toys.

And Decepticons seem to be a faction maintained by the Autobots' own xenophobia, because a would-be defector can't really just stop being a Decepticon.

I agree that if Autobots and Decepticons are societies, making the heroes a small group not necessarily representative of all Autobots is a really good choice. That means there can still be political complexity, and in Animated, even our heroes aren't perfect and are learning to be better, which is a dynamic element lacking in other TF fiction. There's a possibility of real changes happening over historical periods of time, and the status quo doesn't necessarily extend indefinitely into the future and past.

Animated doesn't work as well the other way, though, in that if the Decepticons are a society or people group, they're definitely all evil. Some Decepticons are Autobot defectors, but that implies the rest aren't, so were they just built evil? The Almanacs seem to assume as much, that there's just been a society of evil people and one of not-evil people since time (literally, in this blessed case) immemorial.

There's way more justification for a "people group" that's entirely evil in Transformers than like, D&D race alignments or something, since they're presumably built and programmed that way, and it doesn't correspond as neatly to racialized differences in humans. I still don't like it, though; it wouldn't take a lot of time for such a world to mix and mush and end up in one faction or a dozen, none of which would directly correspond to the groups you started with. The never-ending war between exactly two factions just doesn't make sense over many generations.

I don't think I'd read that backstory from the Animated cartoon alone though. The Decepticons in the present are few in number but individually superCybertronian in power, and they have unique tech and built in weapons and think like supervillains. The Autobots have a regimented, military-like society and culture, but with rare exceptions (the Jet twins and the Omega guys) they're not built for war, and they seem to have had time to unfortunately codify some of the trauma they experienced in the war into their society, which might account for the general militarism.

It kinda feels like the Decepticons could have been a relatively small faction that got together a few centuries ago, more numerous than but otherwise similar to Megatron's group of Predacons in Beast Wars, that just got some McGuffins and invented some weapons and tried to take over the world, and while they eventually lost, they caused so much damage that it shaped the remaining Autobot society around the conflict. Hell, maybe the Decepticons' apparent physical differences are just new protoform molds they invented, and the original Decepticons all swapped bodies back when they could still get them to integrate all that new tech. Maybe Megatron was a short king who turned into a drill back in the day (he did not) and guys like Swindle just defected too late.

If it were me pitching a show or comic, that's the version of the Animated setup I'd consider.

Make Cybertron a planet on the back end of a Golden Age. The cracks are starting to show and here comes Megatron as an unrepentant fascist willing to not only exploit some social tension to get what he wants, but actively engages in accelerationism to speed things up.
The Autobots can be the government or just another political factions more in line with the good stuff like freedom, co-existence, democracy, rights for all sentient beings etc... but maybe, say, Sentinel Prime is your typical centrist/moderate, the type of guy who just doesn't take the rising, bubbling fascism seriously until it's too late. Orion is your more proactive Autobot who knows very much what Megatron is (you could even do the 'they were once friends' thing to show Orion really knows what's up) but whose words fall on deaf ears.
Then the fascist uprising happens, Autobots are caught off guard because leadership was asleep at the wheel. Orion becomes Optimus Prime and now has to lead the Autobots as a resistance force against an ascendent Decepticon empire that's not just going to enact a police state on Cybteron, it's going to launch a war against the universe because they think it's their right to scour it for resources and slave labour.

I haven't read IDW2, but I had heard someone hint that there was a ghost of something like this in that story. Is that the case, or did I misunderstand? Either way, it's definitely a better approach than what IDW1 tried to do. Hell, it's really almost just a politically aware version of the G1 cartoon backstory. Er, the one where Megatron started the Decepticons, not the one where he was built by the Constructicons he would later convert to his faction, then much later still, build from scratch on Earth.

I feel like IDW1 got a little into the sauce of what Dreamwave had done, and decided the backstory would be more fun if it was counterintuitive, and just like, failed to deliver past that idea.

Either way, the only thing I don't like about your idea is the time scale issues I know any modern TF series would create with it.

But it's weird because we have to humanize them to a degree because otherwise we, the paying human audience, won't relate to them. It's one reason (among many) I roll my eyes at people who lose their minds at gender being brought up in Transformers. "THEY'RE ROBOTS THEY DON'T HAVE GENDER" no shut up, they've been coded as male and female since the start because it's easier to get us to relate to them that way, it's part of the brand, stop it.

It is damn funny that this thread started with someone wanting to sea-lion about TF gender and that's the one thing we can always point to that Transformers definitely transposes 1:1 into how Cybetronians work. (Which also means there's a complete shared language and nothing to explain or invent, which makes it easier, though not necessarily more enlightening, for Transformers to do stories about gender than about politics.)

 

[Copper Bezel]

how interesting could a toyline/show be if say long established characters... say Thundercracker for a fast example... came out as a truck, just popped up as a jet one time and then the next time we see him he's all like "yeah now that the war is over I'm taking my dog and we're going to explore earth together.. also I'm a truck now"

I'd buy truckdercracker

And that falls into that same category for me as "what if Rodimus but without the whole Matrix thing" I mentioned earlier. In theory I love that. He's changing his body to reflect a change in his life and role. That's something you can do with robot characters that reflects or externalizes a relatable character thing that you can't make so literal with humans and similar. And somehow in Transformers it's never been explored in canon.

Dekafox mentioned a multi-changer collecting alt modes, but we've never actually seen even the far simpler version of that, where a character goes through a phase of swapping alt modes on the daily, or simply has a habit of changing them out every few episodes. We've also only very rarely seen a character take on a new alt mode for the sake of a particular mission, or to update their disguise after they've been outed to the humans.

I imagine it's a mix of branding requirements and cost of implementation, but it's actually kinda surprising when you look at it from the fiction side how little of this stuff has ever actually been explored, even in continuities where it appears rather easy.

(Or, you know, Transformers really wants to be a thing where alt modes are more or less permanent and only change as a result of powerups, but can't because they have to get the modern Earth vehicle forms in the first place, so everything about alt mode swapping is ignored as much of the time as possible.)

as I am now 41 and rushing head first toward 50 and the grave... I'm also not all that interested in doing TFs as political commentary all that often again XD... maybe that's why I find the concept of them being spiritual beings (not necessarily religiously speaking, I could do with less of that too) an honestly more appealing aspect of the whyfors related to transformation -alt-mode selection etc...

Aright, come on now, you thought TF was too political when you were twenty-something, I was there.

I was a bit unfair in my response to that idea though I think. Transformers Prime had ancient gods and feigned gravitas; long before that, Beast Machines had very strained "cryptic wisdom" that was actually just exposition about the dungeon locations, respawn rules, and level-up requirements wreathed in some obvious metaphors. When I think of "spiritualism" in Transformers, I think of those things (and cringe into a lemon's asshole.)

But in the actual post, you were talking about budding and protoforms and mutations in CNA and growing limbs, the whole biological metaphor in Transformers. I mentioned Rossum's Trinity as being a disappointing example of that concept, but I had to be interested in the first place to be disappointed. If there's a version of that that works, and also bears on an individual Transformer's ability to swap alt modes, I'd love to see a comic or cartoon that uses it, and I honestly imagine there are quite a lot of ways to spin it that would indeed work. It just never quite comes together in any actual TF continuity IMO. (Animated has its version of Transformer biology locked down, no notes, but there's also not a lot of biology in it.)

 

[Destron D-69]

hmm, maybe so. I'd go look at some old posts to check if I could. It feels like I'm correct in thinking that I'd enjoy it less the second time around... I'm not sure why pointing out that i wasn't thrilled with it then changes that. Looking back I can commend it for the good things that came out of it, but it's not like we can ever redo our first all female combiner Victorion Orthia. lol

but also thanks for taking a second look at what I said. It would be fun if they got it right one time.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I'm not sure why pointing out that i wasn't thrilled with it then changes that.

Your opinion wasn't unclear.

But yeah, I think there's a lot of potential there, and I get the impulse to make Transformers have a biology, it means they can experience more things that are more similar to our experience as humans. They can age or have health conditions and injuries that can't be fixed just by replacing mass-produced parts. If Transformers were manufactured machines, it shouldn't be any more or less an extensive overhaul of their bodies to fix those things as it would be to take on a new alt mode. And if you don't have a special life essence thing like sparks, and their minds are just digital programs, they should be able to copy themselves into new bodies, or multiple bodies at once, or backup files in case they die.* And all of those things sometimes happen in Transformers at its wackiest, of course, but under special plot circumstances instead of as a matter of course. If you don't want to deal with those things being around all the time, you have to have some kind of biological or spiritual thing happening.

Steven Universe did it with the gemstones, where the essential part of a Gem is this thing that has to be produced over thousands of years through a natural process with at least a little magic in it and at a cost of natural resources, and irregularities can occur that alter the capabilities of the Gem at the end. They produce their projection bodies that can shapeshift and be temporarily beat up or destroyed, but there are limits to the size and power of the body that a given Gem can produce, and the gemstone itself can also be corrupted or damaged or shattered, with the possibility of being magically healed by some means. Reforming a body after it's destroyed takes time and mental effort, rushing it has messy results, and shapeshifting seems like a temporary version of that "rushed" body formation, and also requires skill and practice to master. Even with all that, fusion to combine with other Gems only requires an emotional journey the first time, and it's otherwise instantaneous and reverses instantly too, which kinda feels like they're getting a body reform for free. But the show spends way more time on it than any one Transformers series spends on Transformer biology and it holds together more than well enough for the scope of a series.

For me, Rossum's Trinity sounded tantalizingly close to that kind of neatly wrapped up package until we got the details. I still think maybe there's something there that a future TF continuity could flesh out into a really cool idea, in the basis of treating the brain, spark, and transformation cog as the core essentials of Transformer biology. IDW1 didn't stick it, and I tend to have issues with how each of the three components are actually handled in various continuities. Too much overlap between the brain and spark so that it ends up seeming that one or the other is easily replaceable, and then there's the transformation cog, which even IDW1 hilariously couldn't even call that most of the time. The thing that would probably be the answer to a lot of the questions in this thread if it meant anything at all, except somehow they had nothing to do with alt modes themselves and were literally interchangeable, so the whole idea that it was one of these three essential parts was just blown out of the water in the same story that introduced the idea.

I think to do it right, the brain and spark would need to have a settlement and sort out which is doing what, but you'd also need to keep enough codependency that the poor things can't live without each other, maybe brains are imprinted with their sparks and can't get new ones, sparks aren't fully intelligent but they need them for some reason, etc. And then like, make the transformation cog actually follow the pattern and be a core part of the Transformer's identity with visible effects, maybe it's altered whenever a new alt mode is adopted but has its own inbuilt limits that are hard to change, and whatever you do, don't go around swapping them around like AAs.


* There's the whole "transporter problem" deal there, that if you are a robot and you copy the contents of your brain into a fresh new one when it breaks, some philosophers would say that you're not really the same person afterward and equate this with death. But if those philosophers were robots in a world where the ability to do so was readily available, they would rapidly become extinct in a world dominated by the P-zombie clones of the people who disagreed with them.

 

[Destron D-69]

the "Mind,body,soul" trinity for tfs is just another aspect the writers can futz around with when dreaming up this mythical new continuity of potential greatness.

Beastwars had the Core Consciousness and Spark., to go along with their protoform bodies... swapping any of the 3 out left you with something newish.
Rhinox put Primal's spark and datatracks (memories, one would need to assume it was a scan of his CC before he left in the pod) and put it in a new protoform Body.
so yeah one 'grandfather's hammer' Primal ...and that was much more straight forward than what happened to Dinobot or tigerhawk later on.

Blackarachnia is a slightly more interesting case "spiritually" given that we've never seen her in her original state. Tarantulus' shell program altered her CC and her protoform body to the point that she internally contained a physical manifestation of -essentially the brainwashing. Yet once that was removed it wasn't a case of her original mind reasserting itself like you might expect would happen if you "restored to factory default" ... which leads me to conclude that the spark is malleable too.

See BM Vehicons for additional examples of crazy hijinks.

and then in rid 2001 we get Scourge and Ruination who got converted to evil by Megatrons evilness spark ray XD SO perhaps not as well thought out and deep as the previous examples... it does offer an interesting take on things (moreso with scourge)

I still haven't figured out any way to rationalize the changes done to the bots from armada once they make it to energon XD... Cyclonus to Snowcat doesn't follow any sort of logic that I can bs my way through so I'll stop rattling off examples of times I thought it was interestingly handled.

but like I said in one of my first post in this thread, ... even if they found a way to make this work... I wouldn't want it to become a Hard and fast thing adopted by all future tf stories, variety is the spice of life, and as we all know, the Spice must flow.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Beastwars had the Core Consciousness and Spark., to go along with their protoform bodies... swapping any of the 3 out left you with something newish.
Rhinox put Primal's spark and datatracks (memories, one would need to assume it was a scan of his CC before he left in the pod) and put it in a new protoform Body.
so yeah one 'grandfather's hammer' Primal ...and that was much more straight forward than what happened to Dinobot or tigerhawk later on.

Yeah, Beast Wars doesn't care about physical brains the way IDW does as long as the data's there. But at the beginning of S2, Tarantulas has tricked Blackarachnia into downloading his mind into her own brain, and he's able to take control of her body when the only spark in the equation is hers. Then, when he mad-sciences his body back to life to transfer back into it, he says "My spark is restored!", and he certainly didn't need to go into the Matrix for it. Kinda seems like he just made a new one. If the Dark Glass story had been an episode, Dinobot II's turn once Rampage was destroyed would be a similar thing, that the spark matters a lot less than the brain data. Without it, though, I don't think Dinobot II's turn makes any sense at all.

With Blackarachnia I think we're meant to take that it's significant that the shell program still had two of its tendrils attached when it killed her, but it also explodes, so.

In some respects the treatment in Beast Machines is the polar opposite, because people retain their full identities and faculties as sparks in the Matrix, like Blackarachnia when her spark is extracted, and Waspinator and Silverbolt retain their own memories to be fronted by goo regardless of the fact that whatever datatrax and core consciousness they had were melted down with their bodies. Megatron could have copied his memories from his dragon body into the head fortress before getting stuck as Noble, but he certainly didn't have the chance in the case of the diagnostic drone, and he retained his memories there too.

To me, at that point, the brains matter so little that they're not even robots anymore. And we've had other cases in later TF fiction that have at least implicitly used that interpretation of sparks, that they contain everything essential to the person.

Within Beast Machines, the first three Vehicons are the opposite, a parasitic brain on top of a spark that's still experiencing everything but doesn't really influence their behavior directly, and still does whatever magic is required to make them "alive", but that's kind of their whole gimmick. I guess that as long as that's possible, Beast Wars can be read not to contradict the Beast Machines interpretation directly, but only if Transmetal Tarantulas is really a shell program and his new spark wants to be a botanist named Dent.

I do get the body / mind / soul thing, but it inherits the problems of "real" souls in that those are redundant too, and if they were physically manifested in our human bodies we wouldn't know what they were for either. I think I'd personally make the spark more of a "heart", in the literal and metaphorical senses. Make the "spark core" sort of a Star Trek intermix chamber but for people, so it's a mood ring and sign of life that has some relationship to the mind but doesn't actually contain one.

 

[Destron D-69]

You are completely correct, the 2nd best kind of correct. The sparks made a lot more sense back when they were laser cores lol and all we knew that they did was be the thing that uses the energon- and is likely in the chestial region of the bot like a heart.

if Sparks were simply just the finger flick on the nose of a transformer from Primus that "wakes them up" that would be fine too.

But now we've got this whole "well of allsparks" floopy woopy semi FF7 Lifestream reincarnation / fact finding mission Primus is conducting -thing... so the sparks have to contain some sort of "higher dimensional being energy" -god mojo in order to report back upon death and then get blendered up and recycled back out again
I might need to brush up on my Hindu mythology or maybe it's Buddhism I'm thinking of...

one thing seems clear though at least between Bw and BM, that is the spark retains aspects of the core consciousness (which would make sense if they're experience recording devices) as you say the Vehicon Generals' spark's previous personalities continued to exist inside the spark despite the lose of both Mind and body...

hmm... perhaps I've been putting too much weight behind the idea that the data tracks are important. Maybe they're just the autonomic brains of the bots and the sparks do most of the rest of the "being" part of them being living beings.

ponderous

 

[Copper Bezel]

Oh, I think you're right on the money for datatrax and core consciousness in Beast Wars. It would be far from the first thing Beast Machines unwittingly retconned.

 

[Destron D-69]

I enjoy being correct on these rare occasions, I guess the thread's over then LOL...

just kidding

 

[LordGigaIce]

I haven't read IDW2, but I had heard someone hint that there was a ghost of something like this in that story. Is that the case, or did I misunderstand? Either way, it's definitely a better approach than what IDW1 tried to do. Hell, it's really almost just a politically aware version of the G1 cartoon backstory. Er, the one where Megatron started the Decepticons, not the one where he was built by the Constructicons he would later convert to his faction, then much later still, build from scratch on Earth.

Pretty much. IDW2 had it that the Autobots led Cybertron in beating down some Old God-esque abomination entity at some point in the past that led to them being in charge of the planet, and Nominus Prime made a decision to stop colonizing planets and preserve energy as a means to recover from the war and also keep Cyberton on everyone else's good side in the galaxy.
Then some time later you had the Ascenticons founded by a bot named Termagax and her whole thing was that Nominus' plan of action stifled Cybertronians and that everyone should be as forceful as they can be to be their best self, and the restraint the Autobots were preaching was self-defeating. Megs co-opts this and turns it to full on "we have a duty to take as much as we want because we deserve it" fascism as the Decepticons.

Like... if you look at Megs' motivations in the G1 cartoon they're pretty much standard Saturday morning cartoon villainy. Yet if you try to glean something from it, it's clear his motivator is strength. He finds humanity weak, and therefore the Decepticons have the right to attack them and exploit them. He finds the Autobots weak because they have ideals and morals that keep them from just exploiting less technologically advanced races.
And fascism is all about strength (or at least the projection of it) and the belief that you're allowed to dominate and oppress someone if you're stronger/technologically superior to them.

IDW2 failed for me because it was TOO political. I don't really care to read about Robert's Rules of Order in a fictional legislator. And everyone should know that sucks thanks to the Star Wars prequels. I liked the ideas though, even if the execution was lacking. There was just so much "MEANWHILE IN THE SENATE" and talks about elections shenanigans stretched out over multiple issues. They could have streamlined that whole thing.

I feel like IDW1 got a little into the sauce of what Dreamwave had done, and decided the backstory would be more fun if it was counterintuitive, and just like, failed to deliver past that idea.

That makes sense. We know Megatron: Origins was originally pitched as part of DW's universe and got pulled out of a drawer for IDW. And it's clear A LOT of Megs: Origins influenced later IDW backstory takes.
DW didn't have much on WHY the Decepitcons were the way they are, but between Megs' underground (literally and figuratively) rallies and ceremonies it's clear they were some sort of subversive society. Megs: Origins made that overtly political with references to miners and corrupt elites and that led itself naturally to "what if Decepticons but socialist?"

Thing is, I think if you look at groups like MAGA and QAnon the idea of a fascist or otherwise overtly right leaning subversive element is both far more relevant to our world today (this isn't the 1950s anymore, "those subversive reds!" isn't relevant) and more accurate to the original source material.

Either way, the only thing I don't like about your idea is the time scale issues I know any modern TF series would create with it.

Ha, yeah. Time scale will always be an issue, unless someone decides to sit down and work it out very carefully, and not be afraid to break some long standing cliches. Like... they're robots so they ofc have longer lives then humans, but why does it have to be on the scale of millions of years? Why does the 'Bot/'Con War have to be six million years long? What if it were only a couple of thousand?

Like... I think you could fix the timescale issues with Transformers but it would require admitting that the way things have been isn't really sensical.

And Decepticons seem to be a faction maintained by the Autobots' own xenophobia, because a would-be defector can't really just stop being a Decepticon.

I agree that if Autobots and Decepticons are societies, making the heroes a small group not necessarily representative of all Autobots is a really good choice. That means there can still be political complexity, and in Animated, even our heroes aren't perfect and are learning to be better, which is a dynamic element lacking in other TF fiction. There's a possibility of real changes happening over historical periods of time, and the status quo doesn't necessarily extend indefinitely into the future and past.

Animated doesn't work as well the other way, though, in that if the Decepticons are a society or people group, they're definitely all evil. Some Decepticons are Autobot defectors, but that implies the rest aren't, so were they just built evil? The Almanacs seem to assume as much, that there's just been a society of evil people and one of not-evil people since time (literally, in this blessed case) immemorial.

In my mind palace I tend to think of the Decepticons as... a different group? I mean that's very simplistic I know, but I look at how things are on Earth and I don't see the Autobots as a political faction or alliance, but more like a society that grew up around the myth of the Thirteen? Like it would explain why they have the Matrix, are led by a Prime, etc...

The Decepticons would be those that either rejected that, or were otherwise unaffiliated. And they'd be distinct societies, with a gradient. Maybe the Autobots would be more relatable for us because they'd generally be chill about not exploiting our backwards world and they have a tradition about freedom and liberty, etc... but you could have room for jerks, bad faith actors, etc...

Meanwhile maybe the Decepticons as a society are more assertive, more aggressive, and maybe that's all gotten worse since Megs took over (there'd be room to figure out how the 'Cons are governed, and how Megs ended up in charge) but maybe you have 'Cons who are willing to help humanity either for their own self-interest or because they just think Megs is a jerk, but they're no Autobot.

I donno, I'm just thinking out loud here, but there are ideas I've been working on in my head and this convo kind of got me talking about it all
I've just come around to the ideas Animated played with. I wasn't a fan of everything it did, but its basic setup I think has a lot of cool possibilities.

It is damn funny that this thread started with someone wanting to sea-lion about TF gender and that's the one thing we can always point to that Transformers definitely transposes 1:1 into how Cybetronians work. (Which also means there's a complete shared language and nothing to explain or invent, which makes it easier, though not necessarily more enlightening, for Transformers to do stories about gender than about politics.)

I suppose there's a question about why a race of robots would have gender and there's room to explore that, but IDW1 tried to do that and we got Arcee's backstory which started off EXTREMELY transphobic until later writers made it a mission to salvage it. And when you look at that, it becomes really easy to go "it's easier to just say that gender exists and leave it at that."

My personal theory on why they have gender is that if you delve into Cybertron's history back enough eventually someone organic made them. And digital life, robotic AI, sought to emulate its creator. Their creators were organic and had gender so whatever advanced AI that was evolving as they gained sentience worked that into the code. By the "present" they may not even remember their creators, but the idea of normalized gender is just ingrained in their nature and they don't question it.

 

[Cybersnark]

In my mind palace I tend to think of the Decepticons as... a different group? I mean that's very simplistic I know, but I look at how things are on Earth and I don't see the Autobots as a political faction or alliance, but more like a society that grew up around the myth of the Thirteen? Like it would explain why they have the Matrix, are led by a Prime, etc...

The Decepticons would be those that either rejected that, or were otherwise unaffiliated. And they'd be distinct societies, with a gradient. Maybe the Autobots would be more relatable for us because they'd generally be chill about not exploiting our backwards world and they have a tradition about freedom and liberty, etc... but you could have room for jerks, bad faith actors, etc...

Meanwhile maybe the Decepticons as a society are more assertive, more aggressive, and maybe that's all gotten worse since Megs took over (there'd be room to figure out how the 'Cons are governed, and how Megs ended up in charge) but maybe you have 'Cons who are willing to help humanity either for their own self-interest or because they just think Megs is a jerk, but they're no Autobot.

That's what I do in my fan-verse; the ancient 13-related Decepticons (who served Megatronus before he became The Fallen) were Cybertron's warrior class, who served to protect communities and enforce peace. After the War of the Primes, they were eventually replaced by the Autobots, who were more like the UN (drawing recruits from multiple other factions/lines/tribes rather than being Natural-Built). Then Megatron co-opted the original idea of the "Decepticons" as a proud warrior culture (and cult of personality around himself). By now nobody really remembers the original Decepticons (other than Alpha Trion, but Megatron made sure that none of his followers will believe anything Trion says).

As the war escalated, it got to the point where everyone had to choose a side, so there are a lot of newly-minted Autobots/Decepticons who are not entirely onboard with Megatron's cult or the Autobots' formal command structure (which is why Optimus takes care to maintain such a casual atmosphere, despite what Prowl or Ultra Magnus might prefer).

Post-war, I've basically resurrected the Gobot factions of "Renegades" (Autobots who believe there will be no peace unless the Decepticons are completely exterminated, and any collateral damage in the process is acceptable) and "Guardians" (Decepticons who've figured out on their own that their warrior traditions should be used to protect things, and have adopted Earth and its people as their new home).

My personal theory on why they have gender is that if you delve into Cybertron's history back enough eventually someone organic made them. And digital life, robotic AI, sought to emulate its creator. Their creators were organic and had gender so whatever advanced AI that was evolving as they gained sentience worked that into the code. By the "present" they may not even remember their creators, but the idea of normalized gender is just ingrained in their nature and they don't question it.

I just shrug and say "gender" means something different for Transformers than it does for humans. English just doesn't have words for whatever their deal is (and they have no words for whatever socio-anatomical bullshittery organics get up to).

 

[Copper Bezel]

Pretty much. IDW2 had it that the Autobots led Cybertron in beating down some Old God-esque abomination entity at some point in the past that led to them being in charge of the planet, and Nominus Prime made a decision to stop colonizing planets and preserve energy as a means to recover from the war and also keep Cyberton on everyone else's good side in the galaxy.
Then some time later you had the Ascenticons founded by a bot named Termagax and her whole thing was that Nominus' plan of action stifled Cybertronians and that everyone should be as forceful as they can be to be their best self, and the restraint the Autobots were preaching was self-defeating. Megs co-opts this and turns it to full on "we have a duty to take as much as we want because we deserve it" fascism as the Decepticons.

Like... if you look at Megs' motivations in the G1 cartoon they're pretty much standard Saturday morning cartoon villainy. Yet if you try to glean something from it, it's clear his motivator is strength. He finds humanity weak, and therefore the Decepticons have the right to attack them and exploit them. He finds the Autobots weak because they have ideals and morals that keep them from just exploiting less technologically advanced races.
And fascism is all about strength (or at least the projection of it) and the belief that you're allowed to dominate and oppress someone if you're stronger/technologically superior to them.

IDW2 failed for me because it was TOO political. I don't really care to read about Robert's Rules of Order in a fictional legislator. And everyone should know that sucks thanks to the Star Wars prequels. I liked the ideas though, even if the execution was lacking. There was just so much "MEANWHILE IN THE SENATE" and talks about elections shenanigans stretched out over multiple issues. They could have streamlined that whole thing.

Makes sense to me. I guess if you get too "realistic" about something you call a "war", then if you want to go to the source and tell the story of what's really making stuff happen, it's all politics and economics, and stops being about any of the things that made the concept appealing in the first place. Best to leave it to the highlights Obi-Wan can tell Luke about and keep us imagining something appropriately cool for the rest. But as backstory, Megatron as fascist makes a lot of sense.

Thing is, I think if you look at groups like MAGA and QAnon the idea of a fascist or otherwise overtly right leaning subversive element is both far more relevant to our world today (this isn't the 1950s anymore, "those subversive reds!" isn't relevant) and more accurate to the original source material.

Yeah, 100% agreed. The only real possible drawback is if it gets so close to contemporary politics that it stops working as fantasy fiction at all. And I guess I do think it stops working as toyline branding before that. If I hate a Decepticon character as much as I hate Ted Cruz, I'm never going to buy his action figure.

Ha, yeah. Time scale will always be an issue, unless someone decides to sit down and work it out very carefully, and not be afraid to break some long standing cliches. Like... they're robots so they ofc have longer lives then humans, but why does it have to be on the scale of millions of years? Why does the 'Bot/'Con War have to be six million years long? What if it were only a couple of thousand?

Like... I think you could fix the timescale issues with Transformers but it would require admitting that the way things have been isn't really sensical.

Yeah. And I think IDW1 was trying to fit into a squint-and-it-kinda-fits retelling of the G1 Transformers universe, which meant that even when they were telling new stories outside the scope of what was being directly adapted from events in G1, the timeline still needed to be a similar shape.

I think the way I keep going back to Animated and to a lesser extent Beast Wars when I think about good Transformer fiction is not a coincidence, and it's also not a coincidence that our main characters in either show aren't millions of years old. They're the only shows built from first principles as if they were introducing the whole franchise. Derrick Wyatt said that the art style of Animated was to take G1 Transformers and pull out the Gundam to replace it with Mighty Orbots, which was brave and true and right. But Animated has the same relationship to the source material in its lore, too. Every time there's a concept introduced from the original cartoon, from Headmasters to Dinobots to Omega Sentinels / Guardian Robots, the game is to find a creative way this broad idea can fit into the universe using the parts the universe has on offer. They don't bring their lore with them, it's built in place out of a new universe of available devices. For a viewer, it's less "I recognize that thing W, we're going to get to see X and Y and Z" and more "Oh, I recognize that thing W, I have a suspicion events are going to conspire to bring about X, Y, or Z, and I bet it has to do with P and Q from that other thing." The underlying rules of the universe are more or less unique to Animated, and they're not always nailed down but very self-consistent. There's no reason to assume that standard Transformers tropes we haven't seen show up still exist in the background somewhere, and when they don't fit and we finally do see them, Powerglide has a ground alt mode.

It's the exact opposite of what the "Aligned" disaster tried to do, and it allows for the kind of new, consistent, and creative worldbuilding choices that none of the other series can seem to manage. And although Beast Wars was the least planned TF show ever, starting somewhere remote from any connection to G1 and making up any connections they wanted as they went along had a similar effect. We wouldn't have sparks and protoforms if Beast Wars hadn't felt the need to build its own stuff from first principles, too.

In my mind palace I tend to think of the Decepticons as... a different group? I mean that's very simplistic I know, but I look at how things are on Earth and I don't see the Autobots as a political faction or alliance, but more like a society that grew up around the myth of the Thirteen? Like it would explain why they have the Matrix, are led by a Prime, etc...

The Decepticons would be those that either rejected that, or were otherwise unaffiliated. And they'd be distinct societies, with a gradient. Maybe the Autobots would be more relatable for us because they'd generally be chill about not exploiting our backwards world and they have a tradition about freedom and liberty, etc... but you could have room for jerks, bad faith actors, etc...

Meanwhile maybe the Decepticons as a society are more assertive, more aggressive, and maybe that's all gotten worse since Megs took over (there'd be room to figure out how the 'Cons are governed, and how Megs ended up in charge) but maybe you have 'Cons who are willing to help humanity either for their own self-interest or because they just think Megs is a jerk, but they're no Autobot.

I donno, I'm just thinking out loud here, but there are ideas I've been working on in my head and this convo kind of got me talking about it all
I've just come around to the ideas Animated played with. I wasn't a fan of everything it did, but its basic setup I think has a lot of cool possibilities.

That's what I do in my fan-verse; the ancient 13-related Decepticons (who served Megatronus before he became The Fallen) were Cybertron's warrior class, who served to protect communities and enforce peace. After the War of the Primes, they were eventually replaced by the Autobots, who were more like the UN (drawing recruits from multiple other factions/lines/tribes rather than being Natural-Built). Then Megatron co-opted the original idea of the "Decepticons" as a proud warrior culture (and cult of personality around himself). By now nobody really remembers the original Decepticons (other than Alpha Trion, but Megatron made sure that none of his followers will believe anything Trion says).

As the war escalated, it got to the point where everyone had to choose a side, so there are a lot of newly-minted Autobots/Decepticons who are not entirely onboard with Megatron's cult or the Autobots' formal command structure (which is why Optimus takes care to maintain such a casual atmosphere, despite what Prowl or Ultra Magnus might prefer).

Post-war, I've basically resurrected the Gobot factions of "Renegades" (Autobots who believe there will be no peace unless the Decepticons are completely exterminated, and any collateral damage in the process is acceptable) and "Guardians" (Decepticons who've figured out on their own that their warrior traditions should be used to protect things, and have adopted Earth and its people as their new home).

You know, it's probably not a coincidence, as well, that these stories I like in Animated, Beast Wars, and MtMtE S1 have one other really, really big thing in common: They all have a war of immense proportions that created the present "geopolitical" realities of the story, a war that shaped everything that's going to be important in this story, a war that the present conflict could escalate to reignite ... but definitely ended sometime in the past before the story we're interested in started. Star Wars' Original Trilogy, too, just with that the bad guys won in that case. In Beast Wars it was 300 years ago that felt like a thousand, in Animated it was (??? way more than 50) years ago that felt like 50, in MtMtE it was five minutes that felt like five minutes, and two of those wars had been preexisting stories that had been told in chronological order. But in all cases it was also WWII and it was 40 years ago and we were in the Cold War now, and also it's superhero or swashbuckling times. I got a real elder millennial "end of history" bias going here.

So I might just actually maybe not like the war as a setting itself. Like maybe my real bias is, no matter how politically interesting you make it and how many factions you have, although those things can help a bit, I just don't find space war stories compelling period. I mean I really liked Deep Space Nine, which has a present-day space war ... as a device for drawing out more of the dynamics of the leftovers of the previous one we didn't see that's way more important to the story....

 

[Copper Bezel]

I suppose there's a question about why a race of robots would have gender and there's room to explore that, but IDW1 tried to do that and we got Arcee's backstory which started off EXTREMELY transphobic until later writers made it a mission to salvage it. And when you look at that, it becomes really easy to go "it's easier to just say that gender exists and leave it at that."

My personal theory on why they have gender is that if you delve into Cybertron's history back enough eventually someone organic made them. And digital life, robotic AI, sought to emulate its creator. Their creators were organic and had gender so whatever advanced AI that was evolving as they gained sentience worked that into the code. By the "present" they may not even remember their creators, but the idea of normalized gender is just ingrained in their nature and they don't question it.

I just shrug and say "gender" means something different for Transformers than it does for humans. English just doesn't have words for whatever their deal is (and they have no words for whatever socio-anatomical bullshittery organics get up to).

The two genders of exporting human experience onto robots. I lean toward LordGigaIce's strategy myself.

It's a slightly different dichotomy, but I'd definitely rather have one big in-fiction explanation for why they have these human-like qualities, or just accept that they do without explanation, rather than have a similar-but-different explanation for each individual trait. Those individual explanations can be creative and kinda fun, but pile enough on and you just draw attention to the one thing you're not explicitly saying in the first place, which is that your universe is conspiring to make your robots experience the world in a way that is as much like that of humans (of roughly the present day and culture of the writer) as possible.

If you do call out and explain each of those normal everyday things - arguably "conjunx endura" is an example - I can't help starting to read it just prefixing everything with "space" like "spaceburgers" in Battle of the Planets (spacewives etc.) And then the picture they all add up to create looks a bit like The Flintstones, the whole joke of the "modern stone age family" that every fixture of contemporary 1960s suburban culture has a 1:1 equivalent in this fantastical setting, except made of rocks and dinosaurs.

I get that Cybersnark's strategy is not to actually explain any of these things, but just to assume that's going on in the background. We're getting Cybertronian culture as regionalized for Earth consumption by a 4Kids dub. And that removes the need to stop and explain anything, but replaces it with a persistent slipperiness that still adds up to, from my perspective, where we started in the first place, with a very obviously contrived setting we're pretending isn't. So we're imagining the Flintstones except the fiction isn't even trying to create that veil, we're just sometimes more mealy-mouthed in how we talk about things. I don't like it. It feels like calling a spade a "miniature excavation implement commonly analogized to a spade".

(There's probably a balance among the extremes that has only some of the disadvantages of each, and what we're each picturing is somewhere in that possibility space. I don't need my robots to have noses.)

 

[Donocropolis]

I can totally take or leave gender in Transformers. On the "Leave" side, they're not just robots, but alien robots, so if they were totally genderless (or gendered in some way unrecognizable to us) it would completely make sense.

On the "Take" side, I think it's easy enough to explain why the COULD have the equivalent of genders with either origin option. If they're creations of/offshoots of Primus, maybe whatever kind of Olympian interdimensional god society he and Unicron came from had roughly the same type of gender system we do and it's been passed down to the Cybertronians from him.

If you go with the idea that Cybertronians are a race of robots created by the Quintessons for sale throughout the galaxy, maybe the genders are more of a purely aesthetic thing. "Male" coded robots are more popular amongst customers for stereotypical "male" roles such as fighting, factory work, mining, etc, while your household / medical / educational duty robots could be either/or with preferences for male or female coded robots being more split amongst the customers. It would also explain why the female robots are so much fewer in number.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I'm not really sure that Transformers without genders are completely sensical. I think if you want to convince human readers and viewers not to anthropomorphize and read the robots as having genders, you have to do an awful lot of very deliberate work to resist the magnetic pull of those labels in the minds of your audience, or ask your audience to do some of their own work. Either or both of which is a fair precondition for some kind of esoteric xenofiction that Transformers is not. That's before considering that writers themselves are humans with their own prepackaged assumptions.

Though I suppose that at the very least, unlike Simon Furman in the 1980s operating on the pretense that these highly masculine-coded robots that would never do anything to imply femininity nonetheless have no gender, we do have at least one modern fig leaf to throw on that he didn't have available: they could all use they-them pronouns.

 

[Donocropolis]

Agreed, that's really the hitch in the "genderless" option, that so many of them are clearly written as "male" as opposed to truly neuter. There's so little reference frame for a non-gendered being that it's almost impossible for the writer/viewer not to immediately make the character lean into one even without meaning to.

 

[LordGigaIce]

The vast majority of humanity identifies with one gender or another, so giving these space robots who are so unlike humans in a lot of ways gendered presentation helps us, the audience, identify with them.

I'd prefer to go "they just have gender, ok?" and run with that because G1 did that and no one freaked out about EWWWW GIRLS when Elita's crew showed up. You can have gendered characters (they have been since the start) and even play with the idea that you have same gendered attraction or transgendered individuals if you just accept that gender is a thing and it just is.

To expans on my earlier idea about it... if you must address it I'd explain that in the very distiant past Cybertron was a factory world and Cybertronians were produced there as mechs or whathaveyou for some alien race. Make them organic and human-like. Like humans they have sex, gender, and all the particulars that go with that. When Vector Sigma or whathaveyou gained sentience and started passing that along to Cybertronians it did the math and was like "ok about half the populace of organic life is male, half is female, and there are these percetages of gendered minorities" and baked that all into the "code" of Cybertronian sentience and AI.
Like on a deep, fundemental level they're mimicking naturally occuring patterns found in organic life because that was the model they had to go on when the AI made that leap to sentience.

ofc doing that invites MOAR BACKSTORY which may or may not be preferable. Which is why my first choice is to go "eh they have gender" and leave it at that. Some of the robots are ladies, some are gay, some are trans. Ain't no big deal.

Yeah. And I think IDW1 was trying to fit into a squint-and-it-kinda-fits retelling of the G1 Transformers universe, which meant that even when they were telling new stories outside the scope of what was being directly adapted from events in G1, the timeline still needed to be a similar shape.

I think the way I keep going back to Animated and to a lesser extent Beast Wars when I think about good Transformer fiction is not a coincidence, and it's also not a coincidence that our main characters in either show aren't millions of years old.
...
You know, it's probably not a coincidence, as well, that these stories I like in Animated, Beast Wars, and MtMtE S1 have one other really, really big thing in common: They all have a war of immense proportions that created the present "geopolitical" realities of the story, a war that shaped everything that's going to be important in this story, a war that the present conflict could escalate to reignite ... but definitely ended sometime in the past before the story we're interested in started. Star Wars' Original Trilogy, too, just with that the bad guys won in that case. In Beast Wars it was 300 years ago that felt like a thousand, in Animated it was (??? way more than 50) years ago that felt like 50, in MtMtE it was five minutes that felt like five minutes, and two of those wars had been preexisting stories that had been told in chronological order. But in all cases it was also WWII and it was 40 years ago and we were in the Cold War now, and also it's superhero or swashbuckling times. I got a real elder millennial "end of history" bias going here.

So I might just actually maybe not like the war as a setting itself. Like maybe my real bias is, no matter how politically interesting you make it and how many factions you have, although those things can help a bit, I just don't find space war stories compelling period. I mean I really liked Deep Space Nine, which has a present-day space war ... as a device for drawing out more of the dynamics of the leftovers of the previous one we didn't see that's way more important to the story....

Agreed on all of this. I don't know if you'd have to make the war a strictly past thing, but you can certainly create distance between it and our main cast. There are lots of ways to play with it, but I think having a relatively young crew of 'bots who aren't necessarily representative of the Autobots as a whole gives everyone more versitility? You can play with complexities and backstories and the like without muddying the overall brand, which has to stay pretty simple for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, 100% agreed. The only real possible drawback is if it gets so close to contemporary politics that it stops working as fantasy fiction at all. And I guess I do think it stops working as toyline branding before that. If I hate a Decepticon character as much as I hate Ted Cruz, I'm never going to buy his action figure.

To me the best way forward there is to never make something so on the nose that it's obvious. The best fiction doesn't go X is Y, it tells a story about X that the viewer goes "hey that reminds me of Y."

It also gives the writers and (more importantly for legal and money purposes) the stockholders plausible deniability.
"No we wouldn't base the Decepticons on Donald Trump, you're clearly reading into things."

 

[Cybersnark]

"No we wouldn't base the Decepticons on Donald Trump, you're clearly reading into things."

"The fact that Mr. Trump acts exactly like a poorly-written 1980s cartoon supervillain is not our responsibility."