Since this has managed to run for the better part of three pages (spanning four on the old thread), I figured that maybe this topic doesn't really belong in the "not worth its own thread" thread.
Thanks! Even before I wrote the OP, I wondered if I should've just started a new thread. But I didn't know (and was pleasantly surprised by) how much engagement it would get. Glad you had the ability and inclination to split it off so it doesn't overwhelm the other one.
And that's with the Autobots in charge. How well do you think that would have worked while the Decepticons were running the planet for the last four million years?
I don't think that, outside of a school of Sharkticons who were able to be spooked in line by one Dinobot stomping his foot, they really had much in the way of numbers on their side. Might be worth noting that the Sharkticons seemed to usually feed on unarmed prisoners, too.
I held off because I didn't want to get bogged down in an argument about unanswerable hypotheticals, but at the risk of doing that, I would recommend watching the beginning of "Transport to Oblivion" (seriously, it's beautifully animated) when it shows Shockwave making first contact with Megatron. He looks and sounds physically drained as he talks about "losing power" and energon supplies being "dangerously low". Over the course of the series, we see him having, what, a handful of Seekers and a bunch of drones at his disposal? The Combaticon takeover happened even after a year of Megatron's aid efforts. Cybertron was already facing an energy crisis four million years earlier - with all the Quint dialogue about probabilities and percentages and whatever, it's hard for me to conceive of them not being able in all that time to make the math work for a strike on the low-power Cybertron that could hold off its defense forces long enough to get to the switch. I mean, it's possible they'd been
incredibly patient and kept delaying because the planet could always be a little lower-power tomorrow, and then Megatron's return threw them off. But maybe I just want the Quints to be smarter than that.
And while not stated outright, it's not hard to infer that they were indeed snatching up all the crumbs that fell off Unicron's plate, since Kranix was the guy who went before Hot Rod and Kup. And he'd just fled the destruction of his planet like, what, one Earth day or so earlier?
I always assumed that that inference was exactly why the Quints-as-Unicron's-servants idea was introduced - it was someone at Marvel trying to make some sense where there was none. Though
@Sabrblade said that that came from an early draft of the TFTM script? I've read what may have been the very first draft, which connects Unicron ("The Entity") to the Junkions, but I don't recall anything about the Quints. I certainly haven't read all the available drafts, though.
Anyway, something that never made sense about that to me is that I didn't understand what the Quints got out of it. Sharkticon chow? A fun mock trial on the occasional boring afternoon? Or for that matter, what does Unicron get out of it either? To run with the analogy, I don't think sharks care whether their scraps get eaten after they've fed.
Meanwhile, here are James Roberts's own words about the original Furman origin:
While Furman makes it sound easy, what he was doing was taking a variety of disparate concepts—Unicron, the Matrix, Cybertron—and tying them all together in a way that seemed logical and organic. What's more, by introducing the Lords of Chaos and the Light Gods, and by establishing Unicron and Primus as godlike beings as old as the universe, Furman was elevating the Transformers story to truly cosmic levels. It was now a bona fide space opera. Readers had always felt—subconsciously, if nothing else—that the Transformers were the most important things within the "Transformers Universe"; in other words, the focus of the story was properly on them. Now it was revealed that the Transformers were uniquely special within their own universe: their destiny was to prevent a satanic demigod from destroying all of reality.
No doubt some readers felt this was a stretch too far, and mourned the passing of the days when the series was about interacting with humans and searching for fuel and blending in with—
No, sorry, I'll say it again: their destiny was to prevent a satanic demigod from destroying all of reality. Find me an 11-year-old Transformers fan that wouldn't have been excited by that.
I was [counts fingers] 12 when I read "The Primal Scream", so I think I can weigh in. James isn't wrong when he says that those ideas are exciting. But even at a young age, something about it seemed a little absurd to me, much like the millions-of-years timescale. To be fair, this is in no way unique to TF; how many times has all of existence been spared because, like, Johnny Storm landed a punch at the right moment? If the universe is that fragile, then in all of its vastness and countless worlds, wouldn't we expect those kinds of threats to be appearing elsewhere too, light-years away where our characters would have no clue about them except for their cosmic shockwaves rolling through catastrophically and inexplicably from time to time? (I wrote this before
@Platypus Prime's post above had appeared, but exactly that.)
And I actually feel a strong aversion to James' idea that TFs should be literally the most important things in their own universe. I like how both Sunbow and Marvel presented them as existing adjacent to a panoply of alien worlds and races that had their own concerns, and for whom life would go on with or without TFs.
A couple of JG1 writers would later write their own similar take on this with a series of retcons that likewise involved Vector Sigma being a physical form of Primus (helped by preexisting Japanese TF media having already described Vector Sigma as the Transformers' "god") that the Quintessons had taken control of when they colonized and mechanized Cybertron into the factory world that it was said to be in the FFOD flashback.
I just can't with the JG1 meta-continuity stuff. To be fair to those creators, most (all?) of it is couched in stories, which is what I'd asked for earlier in the thread. But man, does it push the limits on that. My brain gives up pretty quickly when I try to read them, or even summaries.
"Roll for It" was Episode 5, before the planet got moved in "The Ultimate Doom".
....Then why did you post that screenshot from it as a reply to my musings on where Cybertron had ended up after TUD? At the beginning of TUD, the planet-moving space bridge is described as having an "apex beyond this galaxy," so what's shown in RfI is... just what one would expect.
Let's party like it's alt.toys.transformers and 1994!
Let the unmoderated flamewars commence!
This is how to deal with the Furman backstory (which Hasbro may insist upon at this point) while downplaying it as much as possible and leaning into the Sunbow side of things. Treat the Sunbow vagueness as an asset, not a failing. Space is big and ancient and scary. It's not for the timid.
</John de Lancie voice>
I like that approach. And if I were writing it, I would throw in some very pointed lines about things being "unfathomable" and "unknowable" and so on, signaling that the audience shouldn't expect explanations.
There may even be some fun there in a new twist: Primacron being arrogant enough to have created or had a hand in building the our-plane bodies for Primus and Unicron and naming them after himself.
Taken at face value, I understand why some fans thought Primacron was silly and Primus was cool, because Primacron
is silly. What's more compelling, that Unicron is essentially a scaled-up Hun-Grr, or that he's an evil god who not only wants to consume the whole universe, but actually succeeded once?
But even in "Call of the Primatives" there was a sense that what was on the face of it wasn't the whole story, that Primacron was messing with forces he didn't understand. A space monkey is laughable, but a space monkey waving around an existential-threat gun is terrifying.
Hot Rod: "We have to hurry, or Cybertron is going to get eaten out by Unicron!"
Kup: "Don't say it that way, lad."
Unicron opens maw
Primus transforms to robot mode
ziiiip
QUINTESSON: Pay us no mind. We just... like to watch.
