Transformers: Age of the Primes toyline discussion || update: stock renders of upcoming Alpha Trion, Micronus, Flatline, Fireflight, Skydive, ++

[LBD "Nytetrayn"]

Cause cybertronians didn't have enough to fight over: now they can enjoy the religious war patch.

Beats Optimus sending the Allspark flying off for the quadrillionth time.

It's so funny to me how we're all now like "There can be multiple different origin myths, not everything must be beholden to one true mythology" when a mass refusal to even entertain that idea was a big reason behind the early fandom's hatred of the Oracle and Cybertron's organic core in Beast Machines: "How DARE this show ignore Primus and/or Vector Sigma!!! They're the TRUE origin lore for Transformers!!! Stop childing my ruinhood, Bob Skir!!!"

My, how times change.

(Disclaimer: Skir didn't come up with those concepts. Those were first developed by Marv Wolfman)

In fairness, I think something stops being a mere myth when they're actually here and doing stuff.

And back then, though it was kinda fluid between cartoon and comic, people seemed to see G1 as kind of the amorphous blob that Forward and DiTillio drew from for Beast Wars.

Probably not helped by G2 only have the comic follow-up to call on for any sort of lore, which might have made the comic lore the defacto "main" canon in some eyes, since the G2 cartoon was just repackaged G1 reruns.

Say what you will about the Wreckers comic, but I did like how it made all three more or less work together.

I'm surprised we haven't gotten a "They were created by time traveling humans from the future" origin yet. Unless it's in one of those continuities I missed.

I think that was GoBots.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

I'm surprised we haven't gotten a "They were created by time traveling humans from the future" origin yet. Unless it's in one of those continuities I missed.

Not in anything official, but the "Tales from the Intermezzo" fanfictions had a story where Skyjack survives to the distant future, and uses a transwarp bomb to end an argument between two Advanced Future Posthumans.

Spoiler

One calmly accepts his fate, showing a bluish-white crystal that serves as his badge of office, noting that Skyjack had seen it before. The other, as the energies tear him apart and send his consciousness who-knows-when, shouts "YOU CANNOT DESTROY MY DESTINY!"

Shielded from the effects, Skyjack realizes that he, a barely remembered survivor of a long-extinct faction, has instead Set The Whole Thing In Motion....

 

[LordGigaIce]

The thing is... well... let's be honest. Actually building a realistic world where you'd have multiple religions, stories, and myths that don't all line up was never the point.
Back in the 80s Hasbro had no idea what this thing they had was, and probably didn't care that Marvel and Sunbow each had their own version of the Transformers' origin.
Once they started to care they began to streamline things down to one single origin. Quintus being among the Thirteen is Hasbro attempting to reconcile the Sunbow and Marvel origins. YMMV on how well that works, but that was the intent.

Then IDW began to explore their own mythology, and the Guiding Hand and Knights of Cybertron each came about before the Thirteen as a concept was really promoted, and then once they were IDW had to awkwardly push the Thirteen in their own mythology.
There was no "maybe the Guiding Hand, the Knights, and Thirteen are from different religions," or "maybe it reflects how IRL mythology can be contradictory," no. None of that. It was just three separate ideas that IDW- be it from a Hasbro mandate or their own editorial staff- had to streamline into something resembling a cogent mythological narrative. Again, YYMV on how well that worked, but that was the intent.

And since then... the franchise has been pretty dead set on Primus and the Thirteen, with Quintus and the Quintessons being a nod to Sunbow. Frankly I'd be shocked if we ever saw the "Knights of Cybertron" or "the Guiding Hand" again. They're relics, some of the last alternate takes before the great streamlining.

I'm not saying that every new Transfomers project will focus on, or even mention, the Thirteen. I am saying, however, that the ones that deem it necessary to touch on backstory are going to default to that. The Thirteen as Hasbro canonized them is far from perfect, we've all said plenty on that, but at this point it is The Single Founding Myth.
This tapestry of conflicting mythological origins that reflects IRL Earth? That was never the intent, and you're never going to see any TF fiction run with it. The intent was already to create a streamlined origin myth for the franchise, and while not perfect, that is what ended up happening.

 

[The Mighty Mollusk]

IDW1 mentions different religions (Drift is a Neo-Primalist, Cyclonus follows the Clavis Aurea, probably more I can't recall right now.......and then there's the DJD worshipping Megatron , if that counts), but it all kind of disappears into the background once MTMTE focuses on the Guiding Hand and the other ongoings got wrapped up in the Thirteen.

And then the Thirteen were a hoax created by a time-displaced Shockwave for no real reason other than to prove it was a hoax all along.

 

[lastmaximal]

I've gotten kind of lost over the last few pages, but I think there may be some separation in the discussion of what is, what the roots of this was, and what some might like to see done instead at some point. Or at least, that's what I'd rather respond to/engage in, rather than a conflation of those points.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

And then the Thirteen were a hoax created by a time-displaced Shockwave for no real reason other than to prove it was a hoax all along.

Partially, yeah. There was also the Babylon 5 time travel angle of "He is from the future and knows that history fits together like a jigsaw puzzle", so Shockwave basically tells Alpha Trion to write it all down as he remembers history being told. Including "prophecies" about Starscream becoming leader of postwar Cybertron (and so it came to pass) and advice to younger Shockwave on where to plant Regenesis ores (and so it came to pass, because from Shockwave's perspective, he'd already done it).

It does create some ontological paradoxes, but IDW-2005-G1 Shockwave seems much better prepared for such things than Marvel-UK Shockwave.

(The latter's brain may have broken from the sheer WTF of Cyclonus -- usually a more competent warrior outside Headmasters anime -- pulling the whole "Oh Yeah? Well we're gonna kill you in twenty years!" bit. Time is complicated, but mostly in the grammar, as the late Douglas Adams once wrote.)