The winner of the "Activate Your Alt Mode" Fan Vote has been decided, and the winner is going to SHOCK the world!
That's right, it's the Shockmaster!
Er, I mean, Shockwave!
Here's legendary voice actor Frank Welker announcing the winner:
Via Collider, Hasbro has presented us with a better look at the new alt mode for the classic Transformers villain:
That's right -- it looks like you really are what you eat!
As animalistic alt modes go, the whale is a rare one. The first instance to be recalled offhand is for the Maximal base Orcanoch in the Beast Wars portion of Hasbro's MicroVerse toy line, but seeing as that toy was never really given much time in fiction, one can question whether it counts as a character at all. (Even TFWiki uses both "it" and "he" to describe it, but most fiction seems to have it as a simple ship/base.)
The other, perhaps more prominent instance was only in fiction, as Tidal Wave took it on as an alt mode in lieu of his usual Dark Fleet form in IDW's Sins of the Wreckers mini-series. Ironically, the original Armada Tidal Wave's name in the Japanese version, Micron Legend, was "Shockwave." So in a way, it's like coming full circle!
But as for our favorite one-eyed, one-handed flying purple space gun, his connection to the animal is a bit more... grim. See, in Skybound's Transformers comics, he basically sucked a whale (and a bunch of other oceanic life) into an energy feeder to covert their organic matter into energon. It's like Mr. Burns' "omni-net" on a Cybertronic scale! Yum!
Perhaps this is his way of cutting out the middleman -- er, middle-machine -- from the process. After all, that does sound... logical.
So, what do you think? After all these years of being a giant floating space
