The Four or Five or So sounds much less epic.
But seriously, if you list out separate aspects/attributes for each invidual of the However Many (combiner, bad one, beast guy, inventor, etc) it does all add up.
Transformers: Age of the Primes toyline discussion || update: stock renders of upcoming Alpha Trion, Micronus, Flatline, Fireflight, Skydive, ++
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But seriously, if you list out separate aspects/attributes for each invidual of the However Many (combiner, bad one, beast guy, inventor, etc) it does all add up.
Personally, I'd merge the functions of Solus and Alchemist together. Being able to transmute and create elements would help explain away the quasi magical aspect of the godly artifacts. Liege Maximo and Amalgamous I'd put together as well, seeing as they basically made Liege Loki, the trickster having superior shapeshifting makes sense. Vector and Alpha Trion's roles I'd combine because controlling time would make the ultimate historian.
I'd also remove Quintus altogether since having the Quintessons origin also be Cybertron just complicates matters in general. If organic life can spring up simultaneously all over the universe, I'd posit that mechanical life can too.
I'd also remove Quintus altogether since having the Quintessons origin also be Cybertron just complicates matters in general. If organic life can spring up simultaneously all over the universe, I'd posit that mechanical life can too.
If we must have a 13 (or equivalent), I'd rather them turn out to have all been normal Cybertronians from the early, lost to history days of Cyberton. Any mystical abilities or origins are just legends that have grown up around their relatively humble actual stories. Maybe most of them are actually from different (though still ancient) time periods and never even interacted.
Basically the way there was a real King Arthur in what is now England, but the stories that we tell about him today bear almost no similarity to him.
Basically the way there was a real King Arthur in what is now England, but the stories that we tell about him today bear almost no similarity to him.
Henshin Cyborg
Robotman
Great Robot Base
Diabattles
Dia Attacker
Big Powered
Battle Buffalo
Gats Blocker
Double Soldier
Twin Combat
Fortress Robot X
Sky Base
The Fallen, I guess.
Robotman
Great Robot Base
Diabattles
Dia Attacker
Big Powered
Battle Buffalo
Gats Blocker
Double Soldier
Twin Combat
Fortress Robot X
Sky Base
The Fallen, I guess.
The problem is despite being so prominant, there's actually not a lot of fiction done for a lot of them. You get one or two here or there, usually popping up in cryptic roles, but aside from the Covenant of Primus and some IDW stuff, many of them still just "exist."
The Greek gods are just their "one big thing" without the stories and tales to go along with them, giving them character.
Which was my point, yes. I can look at, say, Vector Prime or the Fallen and remember seeing them in a story, but when have Amalgamous or Quintus actually done anything on-screen (or on-page)? They just don't mean anything to me.
*naturally-occuring gears and pulleys have entered the chat
Quintus was an important figure in Earthspark.
Like, in the backstory; he's barely a presence in the actual show and basically gets zero characterization beyond "deadbeat dad."
Love that take on it.
In my defense, I lost interest in Earthspark halfway through the first season and never got back to it.
I think this makes sense if we're approaching them more as characters and not bodies built around a gimmick (oh, Transformers). Their "personalities" in the Covenant book are so generic as to be interchangeable and overlapping anyway, and it's unsurprising that there was this attempt to have a Zodiac sign-like "polarity" thing because Zodiac signs sound similarly interchangeable. Oh, a Taurus can be hot-tempered? Can't anyone?
Sure, it makes sense to tie the notion of having a group be all of the firsts (of insert gimmick here) with that group being the first of the race anyway. Still, how much more meat is on that bone? You could instead tell a dozen or so stories of individual historical icons (even if they became iconic after the fact for happening to be the first), but here it's just a cluster of bodies existing to be the first for its own sake.
I like this idea. Like what Barber did but no Shockwave at the center of everything. It might even still be interesting to have the artifacts and firstnesses, just emerging in a less contrived manner.
Or let's try and have it both ways. There's an actual pantheon of Thirteen, or Seven, whatever, at the dawn of Cybertronian creation. But absolutely nothing is known about them other than the names the descendants give them, and the belief system that has been built up around them because of the artifacts attributed to them. (May also want to rein in these artifacts a little bit so they don't have to dance around how they work so much, to keep from breaking the plot more than they do.)
The ones that become characters and that we associate with the names (and who may become legends to our present-day bots) are ordinary Cybertronians from later on, spread out across history, who take on the names or are called them by their people. Your King Arthurs, your Robin Hoods.
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This was part of the problem. You'd think getting a whole-ass book to themselves would give them room to be fleshed out and made compelling, but no, even there they were just chess pieces moving a plot forward. "We don't need to actually write much, this'll sell just because it's finally them, however much or little we reveal." And so much of what was revealed was each one's gimmick, and then the part they played in their largely-told-in-summary story.
And then their role was done, back to the convenient "ooh it's a mystery lost to the sands of time" so the rest of the boring history could be told.
But over time I've started to wonder if maybe that's for the best. Maybe part of what keeps mythical figures mythical is that limited exposure and humanization. They can't be on a pedestal and walking among us at the same time, and they may serve more of a purpose being on the pedestal.
Like, maybe their stories are just in big paintings from modern Cybertronians approximating what they must've been like. A fresco of Solus building Crystal City. A painting of Quintus raising a field of technorganic sunflowers.
I mean, we have all sorts of fables and stories about gods in various faiths, I see why the 13 would be no different. Hell, between embellishments, misunderstandings and outright making stuff up, they could easily bare little to no resemblance any actual events and be a true mythology.
Were the comic license still with IDW, I would have loved a limited series where each issue is some kind of fable about one of the 13. They don't even need to make sense with each other, or be canon; just a handful of stories Transformers would tell each other.
Were the comic license still with IDW, I would have loved a limited series where each issue is some kind of fable about one of the 13. They don't even need to make sense with each other, or be canon; just a handful of stories Transformers would tell each other.
I generally agree, but a key part of those fables is the somewhat broad strokes in the narration. Fabulation in general is partly characterized by that abstraction and flatness, where everything is taken at face value and more contemporary approaches that dig into the complexity of characters and motivations etc (and too many concrete details) aren't really a thing. That's partly what I'm referring to when I suggest the purpose of not "humanizing" these figures. Zeus may be a horny pervert bedding a married woman in this tale, but he's not that one horny pervert uncle bedding a married woman from marketing and getting found out because your aunt knows his phone password.
Among other things, it's one of the things that lends the stories a low-key authoritative tone (Rudyard Kipling has a collection of "just so" stories, as in "this is just so, no point questioning it), and perhaps one thing that lends them a sort of timeless quality.
I quite like your idea for a collection of disjointed stories about the Thirteen. In fact the less they make sense with each other the better. Just be stories, none of this continuity stuff.
Although someone's going to be tempted to AVP it up and weld them together anyway. (Hell, that might be how Vector Prime's chapter is written. Or Alpha Trion. Or they're collabbing.)
Among other things, it's one of the things that lends the stories a low-key authoritative tone (Rudyard Kipling has a collection of "just so" stories, as in "this is just so, no point questioning it), and perhaps one thing that lends them a sort of timeless quality.
I quite like your idea for a collection of disjointed stories about the Thirteen. In fact the less they make sense with each other the better. Just be stories, none of this continuity stuff.
Although someone's going to be tempted to AVP it up and weld them together anyway. (Hell, that might be how Vector Prime's chapter is written. Or Alpha Trion. Or they're collabbing.)
The guiding hand were a mix of magical and mundane and done right (though most readers including myself were guessing the five symbols the crew were tracking were Quintessons as the Guiding Hand were only prominently mentioned in the annual and name dropped in a few issues). Vector Prime in Cybertron was well handled, he's revered but still limited by rules.
Edit: Sorry I originally typed this post on my phone so am editing it on my laptop
Edit: Sorry I originally typed this post on my phone so am editing it on my laptop
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I think by the time you've changed the number of people in the group and who makes up that group and given it a new name, you've less pared down the group and just basically created a new one.
Vector Prime is still probably one of the most powerful transformers ever, they just didn't handwave stuff around because Galaxy Force is generally quite well written.