There is no shortage of stories about gods and immortals secretly living amongst humanity without revealing their true nature. Alchemist/Maccadam is pretty explictly a Cybertronian example of that trope. Given that, I don't really understand why some, or even all, of the Thirteen still being alive is an issue. It's like saying there can't be Greek mythology in the world of Percy Jackson because the Greek gods are still alive.
The only things I see as being substantially different in this case are the facts that Cybertronians are mechanical and live MUCH longer than humans. Their being mechanical lends itself to concepts like "species that should be able to back everything they know onto the Cloud". However, that ignores two major facts:
1) Electromechanical systems are more reliable and longer-lasting than us fleshies, but still ultimately experience the same kinds of failures.
2) As has been often pointed out, TF fiction pretty consistently treats Cybertronians as being just giant metal humans. If we're going to toss that aside, the Thirteen are nowhere near the top of the list of things in TF fiction that don't really make a lot of sense.
Meanwhile, their extremely long lives might seem to throw a wrench in the works, but only at a narrow look. As already noted, they can still experience all the same sorts of issues we do: failing memories, lost history pre-written records, loss of records due to things like war or negligence, etc. It just takes a lot more time for all that to happen.
Only IDW1 has ever shown any significant character overlap between the era when the Thirteen were active and the present day. Even that didn't have very many, with most of them explicitly being either unknown, not present, or reclusive. Given that IDW1 explicitly subverts the Thirteen mythology concept by making them all normal bots and inserts its own justifications for how that era became lost to memory (regardless of how compelling or not that justification might be) even amongst the small handful of bots that bridge that gap, it really doesn't negate the concept.
The only things I see as being substantially different in this case are the facts that Cybertronians are mechanical and live MUCH longer than humans. Their being mechanical lends itself to concepts like "species that should be able to back everything they know onto the Cloud". However, that ignores two major facts:
1) Electromechanical systems are more reliable and longer-lasting than us fleshies, but still ultimately experience the same kinds of failures.
2) As has been often pointed out, TF fiction pretty consistently treats Cybertronians as being just giant metal humans. If we're going to toss that aside, the Thirteen are nowhere near the top of the list of things in TF fiction that don't really make a lot of sense.
Meanwhile, their extremely long lives might seem to throw a wrench in the works, but only at a narrow look. As already noted, they can still experience all the same sorts of issues we do: failing memories, lost history pre-written records, loss of records due to things like war or negligence, etc. It just takes a lot more time for all that to happen.
Only IDW1 has ever shown any significant character overlap between the era when the Thirteen were active and the present day. Even that didn't have very many, with most of them explicitly being either unknown, not present, or reclusive. Given that IDW1 explicitly subverts the Thirteen mythology concept by making them all normal bots and inserts its own justifications for how that era became lost to memory (regardless of how compelling or not that justification might be) even amongst the small handful of bots that bridge that gap, it really doesn't negate the concept.
