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

unluckiness

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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.
 

Donocropolis

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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.
 

Tuxedo Prime

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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.
TheFirstWhoWasNamed-MegatronusOrigins.jpg

And of course, the one with no name... ended up nameless again.
 

Undead Scottsman

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I'm indifferent tho the Thirteen unless they have some individual character. Most of them are total cyphers aside from their One Big Important Thing.

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.
 

The Mighty Mollusk

Scream all you like, 'cause we're all mad here
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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.
 

lastmaximal

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Personally, I'd merge the functions of
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.

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.
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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lastmaximal

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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."
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.
 

Undead Scottsman

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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.
 

lastmaximal

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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.)
 

Glitch

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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
 
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LBD "Nytetrayn"

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I mean, you could have a smaller group and call them ”The CoreSpark”, “Knights of Cybertron”, “Guardians of Primus”. Though, I’m not a fan of the apparent NEED by prior brand stewards to associate ANY and ALL conceivable aspects of a Transformer to an originator. I don’t feel there NEEDED to be a “first combiner”, “first beast”, “first micro” or “first multichanger”. I kind of view them all as natural (or maybe unnatural depending on how you lore the combiners or multichangers) extensions of a species that changes between forms.
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.
 

The Phazer

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The guiding hand were a mix of magical and mundane and done right though most readers including myself were guessing Quintessons. Vector Prime in Cybertron was well handled, he's revered but still limited by rules.

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.
 


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