[Split from Thread of Thoughts, Questions (and Maybe Even Answers) That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread]
I was rewatching "Five Faces of Darkness", and Matrix-Optimus and Rodimus have this exchange:
RODIMUS: And the Quintessons are our creators.
OPTIMUS: For all these centuries, the Quintessons have waited for the proper moment to strike, to reclaim the planet we Transformers took from them.
RODIMUS: And now they're going for the gusto.
Even before I'd gotten to that part, it had occurred to me that the Quints had picked just about the worst time in a lot longer than centuries to pull off their plan. If the Combaticons were able to beat Shockwave and his drones and take over, why couldn't the Quints and their Sharkticon army? Especially since they wouldn't have even needed to fully defeat Shockwave - they just needed to get to the switch and throw it. For all their calculating and forecasting, what took them so long? Where had they been for the last four million years?
Well... what if they hadn't been around for all that time? "Madman's Paradise" showed that they'd had the means for interdimensional travel before they'd been driven off Cybertron. What if, at some point after their expulsion, they left this plane of existence entirely? Perhaps they found another dimension that seemed like greener pastures. And maybe the Quints we see are exiles who were banished back here, or maybe refugees from some calamity that befell them in that other place. Keeping the "centuries" framing (and conveniently disregarding the "all these"), they only had to have been back for at least 200 years - not long at all on their timescale. And per "The Quintesson Journal", they had a lot of irons in the fire. Cybertron may not have even been as much of a priority to them as Optimus suggests.
For that matter, it's unclear how subjective the Matrix's info is; if it's just a collection of the memories of its holders, those can be flawed and biased. I like to think that the Quints hadn't even thought of Cybertron at all until some TFs showed up on their doorstep. Maybe that could explain the "innocent" discrepancy: In the movie, they didn't realize what Hot Rod and Kup were, and they were just having their fun. It wasn't until after they'd dealt with the Sharkticon revolt and had reason to wonder who those robots were that almost got them slaughtered that they reviewed the incident and realized they were TFs. That then reminded them of Cybertron and started them hatching their plan.
I don't recall enough specifics of the other Quint-related exposition throughout the series - or in the 3H fiction, for that matter - to say if this idea holds outside of FFoD. I'm open to hearing it doesn't, but I suspect it does.
One other reason I like it is because time doesn't have to flow at the same rate in another dimension, so that's a way to make the millions-of-years thing less absurd, at least so far as the Quints are concerned. That timeline is something I've never liked about G1, even as a kid - there was no need for it. So I also appreciated the Dreamwave solution of Cybertron and its inhabitants having been fully shut down for most of it. But that's another topic.
(And another topic besides that is the quality of worldbuilding, character, dialogue, and atmosphere in FFoD. If only it'd been animated better!)
I was rewatching "Five Faces of Darkness", and Matrix-Optimus and Rodimus have this exchange:
RODIMUS: And the Quintessons are our creators.
OPTIMUS: For all these centuries, the Quintessons have waited for the proper moment to strike, to reclaim the planet we Transformers took from them.
RODIMUS: And now they're going for the gusto.
Even before I'd gotten to that part, it had occurred to me that the Quints had picked just about the worst time in a lot longer than centuries to pull off their plan. If the Combaticons were able to beat Shockwave and his drones and take over, why couldn't the Quints and their Sharkticon army? Especially since they wouldn't have even needed to fully defeat Shockwave - they just needed to get to the switch and throw it. For all their calculating and forecasting, what took them so long? Where had they been for the last four million years?
Well... what if they hadn't been around for all that time? "Madman's Paradise" showed that they'd had the means for interdimensional travel before they'd been driven off Cybertron. What if, at some point after their expulsion, they left this plane of existence entirely? Perhaps they found another dimension that seemed like greener pastures. And maybe the Quints we see are exiles who were banished back here, or maybe refugees from some calamity that befell them in that other place. Keeping the "centuries" framing (and conveniently disregarding the "all these"), they only had to have been back for at least 200 years - not long at all on their timescale. And per "The Quintesson Journal", they had a lot of irons in the fire. Cybertron may not have even been as much of a priority to them as Optimus suggests.
For that matter, it's unclear how subjective the Matrix's info is; if it's just a collection of the memories of its holders, those can be flawed and biased. I like to think that the Quints hadn't even thought of Cybertron at all until some TFs showed up on their doorstep. Maybe that could explain the "innocent" discrepancy: In the movie, they didn't realize what Hot Rod and Kup were, and they were just having their fun. It wasn't until after they'd dealt with the Sharkticon revolt and had reason to wonder who those robots were that almost got them slaughtered that they reviewed the incident and realized they were TFs. That then reminded them of Cybertron and started them hatching their plan.
I don't recall enough specifics of the other Quint-related exposition throughout the series - or in the 3H fiction, for that matter - to say if this idea holds outside of FFoD. I'm open to hearing it doesn't, but I suspect it does.
One other reason I like it is because time doesn't have to flow at the same rate in another dimension, so that's a way to make the millions-of-years thing less absurd, at least so far as the Quints are concerned. That timeline is something I've never liked about G1, even as a kid - there was no need for it. So I also appreciated the Dreamwave solution of Cybertron and its inhabitants having been fully shut down for most of it. But that's another topic.
(And another topic besides that is the quality of worldbuilding, character, dialogue, and atmosphere in FFoD. If only it'd been animated better!)
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