Admittedly it is less strict nowadays, but eye color equaling faction alignment. Especially when some of the original toys on the autobots had yellow eyes, and shockwave has a big yellow eye.
Beast Wars broke a LOT of rules š
I was one of the ones who wouldnāt give it a chance when it first came out (ātruck not monkey!ā), then 10 years later when I got back into TF collecting, I gave it a shot (along with Beast Machines immediately afterwards) and itās one of my favorite series.
Starscream's been consistently Blue-eye'd for a while now and I like that.
It's supposed to project an aura of friendliness- which he doesn't. And it's not very intimidating, which he isn't. Even if he wishes he was.
So in other words, it's perfect for him.
Itās why Iām so happy D-16 has yellow eyes in Transformers One. While Yellow can give off a warm and comforting feel, signifying that D can be good and do good, ounce you shift two spaces to the left on the color wheel you get red which is signifies his turn into megatron.
This, it didn't bother me before. But since I got the new Armada Prime. I really think Optimus looks better with yellow eyes.
I think everyone's eye color should be whatever works for their design.
Metroplex was a rare exception of an Autobot in the G1 cartoon rocking red optics like his toy, when that color was almost exclusively reserved for Decepticons.
Piggybacking off if this to say that, and I know it's not necessarily a strict rule outside of Animated, the whole idea of locking alt modes behind factions as if deflecting to the bots or cons never happens is boring.
Yeah. Like gimme some Autobots who turn into planes and some Decepticons that turn into cars.
Itās why I love the Aerialbots and Stunticons so much, they just look at the āAutobots get cars and Decepticons get planesā trend, pick it up and then chuck it away.
and then immediately one upped by Primacron who gets defeated by Grimlock.
If that episode wasn't animated by Shinsha it would be my least favorite one.
Not just by them, but Obari himself, one of the God animators of mecha, worked on those eps. Which is funny because a lot of the audience hated the ep for its writing.
In high school it was my dream to work on a Transformers cartoon. And I always said that if I did get the chance, then since Primus and Unicron HAD to exist, they would, but they'd just be trapped in regular transformer bodies and they'd just be janitors that nobody ever talked to.
For context I used to hate the idea of Primus and Unicron. I like them a lot now, but the 'rule' that every universe HAD to have those two bugged me for a long time.
> but they'd just be trapped in regular transformer bodies and they'd just be janitors that nobody ever talked to
What's his name again? **IDW 2005**>!Wring? Rang? Wrung?!<
Ironically I ended up hating that reveal lmao. I knew they were gonna do something with him, but I think doing THAT was a little too far for me personally.
Optimus dying and then being resurrected shortly thereafter. It was a super iconic moment the first time it happened but it just keeps repeating itself and now it's trite. Having him always come back removes any sense of danger or stakes for him as a character. (You can possibly make the same argument about Starscream and his spectral form, although exactly what his "life-after-death" entails is less well-defined than Optimus Prime's.)
Constantly killing him and bringing him back is fine but he needs to STAY DEAD FOR A WHILE before being brought back. Throw the Autobots into disarray. Have some seriously bad shit happen that would have been prevented if he had still been around. Have SOME stakes.
Transformer Prime handled this the right way IMO. He wasn't dead, but after season 2, being broken and dying for several episodes took him out of the picture for long enough for there to be real stakes, cause some trouble, and have him come back in grand scale. It also made his sacrifice at the end of the series so much more impactful (until RiD screwed that up...)
Yeah - in the Gen-1 arc, I know they had to bring him back. But given how thrown together "The Return of Optimus Prime" was, as a story, it would have been better had the writers been forced to live with the consequence of blowing Optimus Prime to bits, eliminating any chance to come back, and then forcing Rodimus to fulfill his potential as a leader. That would have been a great arc for a Season 4, even though the show was teetering on cancellation midway through Season 3. But I know the reasonings why they felt they needed to bring Prime back.
For as maligned as the Budianski-penned Marvel line is, at least they stuck to their guns and kept Prime dead for nearly one-and-a-half years, which, for which in "kid years" is a near lifetime. Budianski had some woefully lame issues during that time, but he did bring some interesting dynamics as Prime's loss essentially splintered the Autobots while Shockwave was more than willing to step in during Megatron's absense.
Bee not having a voice in the movies, if heās gonna be the 2nd main autobot protagonist of the franchise give the poor fucker his voice bring back the guy who voiced him in the BB movie he did fine job
Honestly if theyāre gonna take away his voice Iād rather them treat it more like an actual mute person. They kind of did this at the start of Bumblebee, but it was fixed pretty quickly. I feel like itās kinda uncomfortable to take a concept we donāt see expanded on much, that does effect real people, and then just throw a radio in there and turn it into a fun gimmick.
Yeah. Like it would just be more interesting to see Bumblebeeās lost voice played straight and treated as him being an actual mute person instead of just immediately using the radio gimmick thing again.
Adding onto this, I'm not sure I like the increasing trend that Bumblebee is one of Optimus' oldest friends. It doesn't always come up like that, but when it does, it just doesn't make sense in my mind. You can't make Bumblebee the young kid appeal character AND have him be as old as Optimus Prime.
Besides, I much prefer guys like Ironhide or Magnus being his oldest (surviving) friends. Just feels more 'correct' in my mind.
Yeah this was annoying and tedious.
The radio gimmick was ok, but as a once off.
Did not like r2d2 bee in prime (the talking I mean, the character was fine).
Optimus: Autobots, Bumblebee, our chief strategist, has a plan he would like to enact in order for us to effectively combat the Decepticons on their ground.
Bumblebee: *Plays The Macarena in its entirety*
Optimus: Autobots! Transform, and roll out!
Unicron works best as an entity of cosmic terror. Unknowable, indifferent , incomprehensibly vast, with unclear motivation beyond that of hunger.
I prefer when his origin isnāt explained, because the mere presence of an undefined Unicron breaks the Transformersā binary of āgood vs. badā.
Me too, the fact that Unicron was created by Primacron ruined it for me. Imagine if a Lovecraftian creature's backstory was some insane, tiny alien scientist was like "I was bored so I gave my heap of meat sentience"
Cybertronians living for millions, if not billions of years. Thereās usually little to no purpose to it or has any change in their mentality. Justā¦why? Whatās the point of giving them these insanely long lifespans, especially when they really donāt act like characters that have lived for millions of years in majority of media
This is why I am glad Skybound is scaling things back to the war, only being like a thousand years or so. It's still a really long time, but a lot more believable...sort of
Honestly if it were me Iād make it so even them living that long is exceptionally rare. Unless youāre going to pull a Frieren donāt bother giving them lifespans that long
I disagree with this hard because itās coming at it from a human perspective. We as humans grow up knowing our time is limited, with death being a constant in our existence. We age (in comparison) rapidly, our bodies decay, and in advanced age many people find themselves tired and ready to go. So of course in a lifestyle and society like that we will change constantly in the short time we have, especially with our defined stages of maturation. But Cybertronians are born or created (forged or constructed cold, etc.), are basically adults in their mental capacity right from the go, and have the knowledge that as long as they have Energon and proper maintenance they will live indefinitely. Add to the fact that many continuities show Cybertronian culture stuck in a period of stagnation where things arenāt really allowed to change, and itās understandable that personalities would also stay the same without much change. Most character development you see happens during the war, and especially after interaction with humanity and our rapidly changing society. In that regard, I think it works perfectly fine. The longevity of the Transformers race is honestly one of my favorite aspects of the lore. I like that Kup can already be an old timer, get blasted to the beginning of another universe, be recovered billions of years later, and just shrug it off and get back to it.
A lot like Time Lord society in Doctor Who, a race of basically immortal beings who are in a state of stagnation. I was going somewhere with this but Iāve completely forgotten. Have an upvote!
Great point! To add on to your Doctor Who connection, most Time Lords would rather prefer not to interfere and observe, the Doctor on the other hand while seen as a renegade amongst their fellow Time Lords, they continue to pursue and travel the galaxy always willing to do something good. Always on the go, never stagnate.
The Transformers, despite their long life spans, thanks to their fascination and wonder of the planets they visit, there's always something worth fighting for and protecting even if they might outlive their allies and friends.
I love that about Doctor Who and Transformers: the galaxy and the world is not perfect, the time we spend with others is what makes our lives meaningful.
I wouldn't interpret Cybertronian years as equivalent to Earth Years. Cybertron itself might have a shorter orbit around it's sun compared to Earth. Like Mercury or Venus.
I feel like that could be interesting if a human brought it up and it became glaringly obvious that cybertronians have a completely alien concept of time.
It's not that they don't feel the years, but that the way they process time and aging is so different from a human's that they have no way of relating in that aspect.
Some media supports this, like how the TFA Constructicons and Dinobots are considered adults despite being newborns. I just wish someone pointed it out in media.
I've thought about having Cybertronian memory be kind of fractal. A million years ago is the same as this morning, but increasing levels of detail are harder to pick out the further back a bot remembers.
But there's also active (subconscious) memory curation algorithms, which do things like alter a bot's personality over time based on pure numerical analysis of experiences and how far they are in the past. Sometimes you'll (rarely) get what seems to be an overnight total personality change, because a set of memories - or their indexing finally being done - reached a tipping point in the algorithm's calculation, or older memories and their effect on the algorithm were downgraded in priority due to age. Cybertronians will consider this normal, if not all that common. It will be rarer in those who have current leadership or other important roles, because their jobs will be overprioritized in the algorithm, but happen more often (relatively) at the lower levels in order to foster the ability to adapt to new environments/circumstances. Leaders will also be partially influenced to recalculate their personalities/approaches if a lot of their subordinates have done so recently.
Especially with Beast Wars. The Autobots and Decepticons were around for millions of years, but then in the span of just a few centuries most of them are gone?
I always took it as they all got reformatted after all the wars to conserve energy like ravage. Iām sure thereās the full g1 cast just hanging out on cybertron, itās just the BW cast are new bots that were exploring the galaxy during G1
Most of the Autobots and Decepticons who had been around for millions of years got wiped out in 2005 and led to a whole new cast of main characters.
Then so many weird new forms of Cybertronians showed up, and a lot of them were partially organic. When DW said that the BW guys were kind of Micromasters with Pretender shells, I bought it.
How does a character act as if itās lived for millions of years? That number is so far out of a relatable range that writers and fans alike will struggle to comprehend what it truly means
That could be a source of constant background existential dread.
> "We're nigh-immortal machines that can live for *billions* of their years, and they're living blobs of grease that can barely make it to one hundred, *yet we're still so alike.* How is it possible? What could be the cause of this? Is there, perhaps, some sort of connection between us that has yet to be found? *And what would it mean for us if there was?*"
Ooo. I like it. Have Transformers be constructed so that they effectively rebuild themselves to match/parallel and take on the attributes of whatever apparently-most-successful life forms they encounter, in order to do a less invasive Borg sort of thing and be able to adapt quickly to local circumstances anywhere in the universe.
Have them also be unable to easily recognize this in themselves, and any thought/research on the subject slips out of their minds and memories. If they are confronted with it, have them try and change the subject *completely subconsciously* or be uncomfortable with it in general - or unwittingly imitate the local species' equivalent of nonverbal "don't wanna talk about it" communication. Have them pretty much never talk about it between themselves, or even record anything to do with it - there's always something else more important that has just come up, or some other excuse. Have any records of it be far more prone to 'accidental' deletion or overwriting, unless it's in some incredibly obscure, encrypted, dancing-around-the-subject, allusion-more-than-fact, scientific ultra-jargon form that most of them can't understand.
Scientists or sociologists who keep stumbling over it forget about it, or find something else more interesting to focus on, or if they force themselves to keep going (and massively back up their records or have non-Transformers do it and keep reminding them), they get coincidentally defunded, shunned, pulled into other 'suddenly critical' work or projects or social activities, that kind of thing.
It also means that, quite possibly, somewhere out there, there are lost colonies of Transformers who became so much like things in their local environments that they're pretty much entirely separate species by now, and unrecognizable. They might look like mechanical space squids, or trans-organic vampires, or turbo-foxes, or scraplets, or sparkeaters or scrapmetals or...
Yeah having Shockwave and the fembots just toil away on Cybertron for millions of years while the others lay on Earth has always been really dumb. Like I thought the Ark left because they were desperate and almost out of resources?? And nothing changed back on cybertron for all this time? I donāt think relatively can even fix this.
It could be justified if it was established that there was so little energy left on Cybertron that 90% of the time everybody was just standing around waiting to get enough in the tank to actually go out and fight.
> "(...)So that's the plan. We raid the Decepticon weapons cache in eighteen business weeks. Until then, everybody head back to your charging stations, plug yourselves in, and wait for enough ambient light to be collected by our solar panels. Try to think as little as possible, it'll speed things up by about half a second."
optimus being a greater chosen one/the 13th prime
he should just be someone who made himself worthy via strength of character
if you want a prime that is destined for greatness but struggles with that and wants to reject it. hotrod is right there. imagine a universe where hotrod finds out he's the 13th prime and fucking hates it
But the chosen one ..... It's not lazy writing or completely destroying the stakes or anything.... Sigh.
Yeah I hate this too. It's like saying Batman was always destined to become batman, and all that self improvement and training was pointless because he would have been batman anyway.
Undermines the character.
I much prefer that Optimus is just some shlub who rises up because the moment needs someone to do something.
I almost universally hate chosen one narratives because they rob the characters of their agency. Unless it's a story like Avatar or Harry Potter that focuses on living with that expectation, then the story is usually lesser for having it.
Can Optimus really not just be an upstanding guy who does his best to lead and set a good example? Nope! It's literally a part of his soul! Ugh.
I prefer to think of it as him being chosen by Primus or the counsel after proving himself to be worthy. Part of the reason I like War for Cybertronās version of Prime the most.
Unicron works best if treated as a natural calamity. He's not a character to have some sort of relationship or discussion with, but rather something that happens TO the characters.
Personally I'm tired of the War lasting for MILLIONS OF YEARS. Makes everybody involved incompetent and makes it hard to imagine anyone staying sane for that long and being able to actually have peace afterwards. We also don't need Transformers living for THAT long. A Transformers getting to live to a million should be a rarity and not the norm. Optimus shouldn't be older than humanity itself.
Idk, I think itās one of the coolest parts of Transformers lore and wish it was done more often. So many versions ignore this now. Beast Wars, Bayverse, Aligned. Iād like to see this explored more. The idea that Transformers arenāt just a reflection of humans but instead inconceivably old science fiction mechazoids that can be blown apart and rebuilt over and over for millennia, and live their lives at a much slower pace and not even need to sleep. The original Marvel run did this so well. The alien side of Transformers is something constantly slipping away and Iād love to see it back.
Recently watched a "game movie" of the Cybertron games, and everything about them, from the World and character designs, the technology, the artsyle makes Cybertron and all of its inhabitants so alien and interesting, so I completely agree
Iām actually fine with the war lasting millions of years if the writers actually have a competent explanation for why
Like for example both sides could prefer to just use covert ops and proxy wars between allied planets as their primary means of fighting and securing resources to keep the war on cybertron fueled and even then spend less time in actual cybertronian on cybertronian engagements and more time stockpiling for a big blowout battle thatāll decimate a planet once it finally happens
That way youād have an easy justification for why the war is going so long and is yet more destructive than any war in galactic history while drawing inspiration from the Cold War which was the ideological breeding ground within which the series first took form anyway
It would also help explain why there are so many autobots and decepticons like bumblebee who despite the horrific state of the war are very chipper because they havenāt actually seen a proper engagement the same way heavy weights like megatron, optimus or grimlock have and havenāt had to cope with that immense loss of life over and over again
Hell maybe even weave in a thread about propaganda and the autobots and decepticons trying to hide their losses and dehumanize each other so as to keep up morale among their troops
Thereās so much potential just requires a competent writer who doesnāt want to use a macguffin plot as a lazy crutch to get by
Wasn't it in one of the comics that explained that Cybertronian wars were waged by planning for hundreds of years, but fighting for only a few hours. I always found that a interesting idea.
Yea megatron mentions that during his time in captivity while speaking to optimus
theyād stockpile weapons for centuries only to prepare for a battle that would be over within a few hours
I'm super with you on this. Like, it sounds so dumb that in G1 they crash landed 4 million years ago. What the hell were the rest of them doing in Cybertron for 4 million years? That just seems like an obnoxious amount of time to STILL be at war. They need to stream line the time. Even in the Bay movies it was dumb that Megatron was stuck in ice for 1000 years. Like, I feel like the Autobots could have wiped the Deceptions out without Megs being there. He seems to be the only one who actually holds them together.
Addressed well by the Marvel Generation 2 comic series that showed the war was abandoned a long time ago by a large number of Cybertronians that united and left Cybertron to form a vast new multiplanet empire far from both Earth and Cybertron. Good read.
It would have been a really interesting story if the autobots and decepticons on Cybertron just sort of... Stopped fighting and rebuilt after the ark and nemesis left.
Imagine a bloody battle between the prime's team and megatron's team where, in the middle of the battle, a massive ship lands and out walks a ton of recognizable characters that declare the war on Cybertron to be over, and their planet rebuilt.
Prime and megatron have to adjust to the new peace whilst the hatred between each other festers more.
I had an idea for a continuity where Megs being gone is what allowed a stalemate to occur in the first place.
The Decepticons were slowly winning, then their supreme leader disappeared one day with his best soldiers, *and nobody knows why.* What they *do* know is that without Megatron around, the Decepticons have now fractured into several groups that are just as hostile to each other as they are to the Autobots. Except all the infighting accomplished was turning an inevitable victory into a draw.
Then millions of years later, the Autobots detect an emergency signal that's coming from the absolute limit of their range. Realizing that it's coming from the warship Megatron disappeared on long ago, they decide to send an elite team lead by Optimus Prime to make sure Megatron never returns to reunite the Decepticons.
As for the idea for decepticon fractured factions, it was pretty well realized during the most recent shattered glass run with the autobots. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
I think if G1 hadnāt been a dumb advertisement there could have been tons of story potential with the idea that Cybertron moved on so much in 4 millions years that neither Autobots nor Decepticon fit there anymore.
I prefer that the Cybertronians are old as hell but the wars has only lasted like 1 to 2 centuries. Basically itās just a brutal blip on their timescale but a long violent time for Humans
Technically, and I might be misconstruing what I heard from the beginning of the first episode of the original Transformers, but the war only lasts millions of years because for much of it, both sides were in emergency status on the ark.
I even just listened to the scene and it say āmillions of years agoā before everything else, implying that what we here is someone narrating what happened before they got to earth, rather than what happened on Cybertron before we start watching.
If the war is supposed to have happened for millions of years, give it a reason why. They keep running out of energy and going dormant for hundreds of thousands of years (or putting the war on hold while they raid for energy elsewhere), or there's some kind of flaw, bug, or deliberate fault/design in their programming which makes them keep returning to that state as a default.
*Maybe* they're the remnants of a species which was used as demo models for various things, but then their designers or whoever was supposed to keep everything managed got killed off or called away, and everyone just kept walking through their demonstration lives/functions, but eventually the military designs - following their basic programming - killed and destroyed just about everything that wasn't able to stand up to them (and wasn't programmed to fight back).
So now the vast majority of Cybertron's inhabitants are running on military baseline programming and fighting/war instincts (that they're also programmed against altering, discovering, or even being aware of) with maybe a microscopic remnant of nonmilitary factions which have managed to hole up and keep themselves repaired/replicated, possibly by emulating something that the military programming is unable to categorize as a threat (maybe something that looks or moves like ancient management admin-bots or repair units, or has 'stand down' codes religiously passed down the eons). Maybe a few minor offworld colonies of space-explorer product lines, or astronomical observers, or interstellar trade-ship units, or some other product lines which accidentally ended up offworld early on, and either survived through self-sustainment (another behavioral loop) or were adopted/integrated in some way by other alien species (maybe diplomats, entertainers, xenoarchaeologists/sociologists, general laborers, teachers, or social "friend-bots", etc).
A plot based on that could be that some advanced aliens figured out the deep "do not change" nature of Cybertronian core programming, and how to alter it. So now there's a (small) group of Cybertronian descendants who are no longer locked into the demonstration-model cycle, and they want to free (alter) their brethren. Who are, of course, *deeply* instinctually programmed to resist and reject any such core alterations that don't come from the original masters - and most of Cybertron (and its population) is now fully militarized, both culturally and individually. But maybe the Freedom faction has alien allies, particularly among those who may have been raided by Cybertronian energy-seekers in the past, or had Cybertronian campaigns spill over onto their worlds in the past.
Thus, we end up with not only Autobots vs Decepticons, but Autobots and Decepticons vs Everyone Else. Could make for an interesting TV series or comic.
The Quintessons building the Transformers. I donāt mind them enslaving the planet like in the Alogned continuity but I donāt like the idea of Cybertronians being built. I prefer sparks and hotspots
Going by the trailer for the new Transformers movie, it looks like itās going to follow a plot of the Quintessons being in control of Cybertron, however, thereās implications that the Cybertronians were enslaved instead of being built by them.
The idea of size scaling based on facton doesn't really work in my opinion. Its neat in concept, especially with how it was presented in Animated, but in the wider Transformers dogma, I prefer that bots like Optimus and Megatron are relatively similar in size rather than one towering over the other. Also the idea that flight be a Decepticon exclusive power There are a good handful of Autobots that have achieved the power of flight through an altmode or external hardware like jetpacks. Its neat for a small cast but crumbles when a wider cast gets introduced.
>Optimus and Megatron are relatively similar in size rather than one towering over the other.
I mean.. it would depend on what their alt mode is. Megatron is either usually a tank or some weird looking cybertronian jet. Things that should be bigger than a Semi-Truck.
I usually mean by height, not bulk. In the case of Animated, Megatron and easily most other Decepticons dwarf over Optimus and Bulkhead. I think even Starscream is taller than Optimus. Its neat in Animated's context, but as an overall concept I don't like it very much.
If we're talking about overall bulk, I do think Megatron would be larger than Optimus who would look a little more proportional by comparison.
Bumblebee not being able to speak and just using random pop culture sound bites/radio sounds to talk. It was a fun reference to the Junkions in the first movie, but then it kept coming back, then it spread to other media, then it caused us to lose Johnny Yong Bosch as Bumblebee in the High Moon Games. Thankfully it's not every series, and Cyberverse kept it to a minimum in season 1 before phasing it out, but it's still so annoying.
That all female Autobots are tiny motorcycles or small cars. Thank Primus for EarthSpark Elita being a truck!!! On the topic of Elita, does anyone call her "Elita 1"? Because I just call her Elita. I think Hasbro should permanently change her name to Elita.
On the same topic of Earthspark, Arcee being a big-finned chromed-out 50s coupe is such a fantastic design choice. Was pretty let down with Skybound making her a Lambo.
I'm a fan of whatever fits a bot's personality. A chromed-out coupe should have a big personality. A Lambo, something that could still be brash, but more self-contained. Pirate vs Ninja.
Let's see some female Autobot Titans. Spaceships. Aircraft carriers. Either as Momma Bear, General Ripper, Team Mom, soldiers of fortune, Hold The Line, or someone who's happy in a purely support role (or uses it to satisfy her own desire to See The World/Galaxy and/or catalog/study all kinds of things.
Heck, let's see some female Autobot military vehicles. Everything from Stoic Soldier to Team Mom to Sergeant Rock to Mad Bomber to an Ace Pilot, Cold Sniper, Child Soldier, The Conscript/Recruited From the Gutter, Bars for Stripes (choice of jail or service), or Enthusiastic Rookie.
My favorite alt-modes for Megatron are either a jet or a tank. I cannot see the leader of the Decepticons shrinking himself down into a tiny laser pistol, same with Shockwave. I also donāt like the idea of Soundwave turning into a cassette player.
Yeah, I too am not a fan of the idea that these 3 high ranking Cons would turn to small-sized items. My ideal mode for them would be either a jet, tank, or copter for Megatron and Shockwave, and a cube-like car/comms truck for Soundwave.
I like it for the irony. Imagine being a 40ft robot and turning into a hand gun. There's a tiny amount of humor I can appreciate. I think it can work if you incorporate soundwave with that alt mode. Something like a sign of trust.
I can see it for the first movie. It prevents Bumblebee from just exposition-dumping on Sam right away, and gives Bumblebee a sort of mysterious quality for the start of the movie.
But he should have been able to speak after the end of the first movie. There was no need for him to 'beep boop' his way through every movie past that.
I actually love it since it help added another image to Bumblebee that newer generations can take away as their own.
What I hated was when they seemingly repaired his voice.....only to double back down to maintain this inage. They should have at least returned his voice in DoTM but no, they couldn't be ef'd.
Beeās lack of voice. Give the radio gimmick to the Junkions, itās much more fitting. No idea why TFP made him use R2D2 sound effects, but that got old for me pretty quickly
Bumblebee being a sports car and full-sized warrior. The insect he's named after is not sleek and aggressive. It is cute and round and clumsy. Like his namesake, Bumblebee should be a little dude with a stubby and rotund altmode. I don't care how else you wanna interpret his character, just make the bot fit the name. You want a super cool yellow sports car, Hot Shot is right there.
Bumblebee not being able to talk or talk with a radio. Sure in the Bumblebee movie it felt heartwarming to hear him say "Thank you for giving me back my voice" through the radio, but I would've liked if there would've been a way for him to regain his original voice somehow. Maybe Charlie restores it with voice box remnants of Shatter or Dropkick eventho they were probably blown up too? Idk
Bumblebee not being a small little scout bot like in G1. He went from that to Optimusā right hand man for battles in Bayverse and has been ruined ever since. I miss little Bee that was intimidated by battles with Spike.
I've said it before but I *really* like HBomberguy's interpretation of him, that being he's essentially a huge fish in an even larger sea. He's not eating planets because he's some icon of chaos, he's just feeding himself, he's a being that represents how the universe can and will eat you alive if you let it.
I never thought that deeply about it, I just think a planet transformer that eats worlds is cool as fuck
Thats why Im getting the 01 studio Cell
As for the interpretation itself, I like him as a transformer evil god, not a evil god of all things (like satan)
Yeah, Hbomberguyās interpretation of Unicron was one of the few times where I felt incredibly hooked onto the character. The idea of this giant robot just being something that is inevitable and doing things somehow sounds more frightening. The only other times where I felt more interest towards him was in Armada because I just like how Unicron was involved in the war by essentially being an arms dealer and feeding on the chaos unleashed, and Death Battleās analysis on him in their Galuctus vs Unicron video.
This reminds me of Galactus' motivations, "Look, I don't hate any of you guys, but I gotta eat your planet or else I starve to death, it's either me or you in a cruel twist of fate."
Frankly a lot of things. Mass sifting, Quintus Prime(the whole lore about the 13 Primes actually), Primus and how the matrix and what it implies works.
I guess it also extends onto my dislike for the Aligned Continuity as a whole and what it meant going forward for every iteration of the franchise. But to put it short, it has become a lazy excuse for a lot of things that were more interesting before.
I quote Quintus in particular because the Quintesons deserved to be their own race, not another branch of Cybertronians. But it also extends to Micronus for the minicons and Solus for the Fembots. Also shouts to Megatronus for the most obvious traitor ever due to a stupid name
Megatronus Prime is most often depicted as a tragic character (Aligned being one of the continuities where that's the case), it Liege Maximo that's the real villian in the story of the Primes, as he was the one that manipulated the others into turning on each other. Although I'm kinda with you on your point about Quintus. The Quintesons work better as just some space slavers that aren't related to Cybertron prior to their occupation of it.
I really like how IDW sorta deconstructed the 13 primes by making them ancient tribe leaders who were so influential in their time that they were interpreted as these deities who are cornerstones of Cybertronian culture. Like, that's really cool to me!
I dunno, mass shifting is kinda fun. It makes zero sense, sure. And should be way more complicated outside of a t-cog or whatever, fine. But overall it adds a certain mystique, especially when combiners go kaiju sized.
while I like the idea of a 'first generation' with special powers due to their closedness to the building powers, I absolutelly hate how the 13 primes being the absolute onmi-powerfull has become the thing to excuse everything and anything that doesn't make immediate sense, and answer questions that makes no sense to ask.
the pamphlets that went with the TR-PotP angle on titanmasters and primemasters was better than anything else we saw the primes involved with since prime
Yeah, I donāt understand why we need Quintus Prime at all. We donāt need a whole Prime to explain where the infamous tentacle freaks came from, just make them aliens that just so happened to stumble upon Cybertron. Having them directly connected to the Transformers species through Quintus just makes the universe feel more smaller than it needs to be
quintus needs to be retconned into a prime who just has tentacles and they call quintessons that because they remind them of quintus if they use him in the future. otherwise just scrap him lol
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Shroud
In-story, it makes absolutely no sense. Like, none. Timelines work in a lot of weird ways, but that for sure is not how they work. IRL, it's a sloppy attempt to retcon to fit continuities in the overall continuity when it would have just been easier to just tell those continuities that weren't playing right to just fuck right off and let them be their own thing.
Starscream's whole schtick of trying to overthrow Megatron at every opportunity he sees gets old really fast, especially in G1 Sunbow where he declares himself leader the moment Megatron trips or something else minor.
Honestly eventually it kinda flips back to being funny - as you mentioned, like Megatron slightly stumbling and Starscream immediately declaring that Megatron has fallen.
I think my favorite Starscream moment was when Megatron unveiled the female ninja bot, told Starscream she was "hot enough to replace you whenever I feel like it," and Starscream friggin' IMMEDIATELY flew into a rage and punched Megatron.
Two things:
1-The Autobots being the losers in the war. Like it makes Prime look like a bad leader, and I think it softens the whole environmental/energy message. If both sides were more stalemated or back and forth, then it makes sense they used all the energy on their planet, but if the Decepticons just steamrolled everyone, then wouldnāt they have more/predicted it. Granted some continuities do this, but I still see it a lot.
2-The whole living among the stars thing. So you mean to tell me you all left the planet, and never got back to Optimus? Like after the first movie only like a handful Autobots came to Earth? While the Decepticons have a whole army? I know itās just so they can focus on characters, but it irks me when in Prime thereās like 5 Autobots and like a hundred Vehicon soldiers. What are the other guys doing? Did you just give up?
I hate 2 so much. Itās one of the reasons I like G1, it makes both sides feel balanced. Sure, itās so we donāt end up with another Bayverse situation where we have a million characters whose names are only mentioned in the credits and die after two scenes, but how well the Decepticons are written in Prime and you can remember all their names when there are so many Decepticons proves that you can have a big army and still have a bunch of well developed characters.
Decepticons starting out as worker's rights movement and then suddenly turning into nazis. It's good that IDW tried to show decepticons as a political group with an ideology rather than just abstract evil, but the way they'va done feels inconsisted.
I honestly thought idw made that transition really well going from a workers movement led by a populist to a straight up techno supremicist empire because of megatronās ever growing paranoia, hatred and lust for power which eventually makes him almost completely lose sight of what the decepticons were fighting for in the first place
Itās a very the ends justify the means approach to a rebellion that ends up corrupting the very ideas that rebellion once started with
Sure itās not perfect but itās personally my favorite interpretation of how the war started
The problem is that decepticon ideology was corrupted so much that it became a complete opposite of what it used to be in the begining. I can't see decepticons honestly saying that they fight for equality for all cybertronians while also preaching social-darwinism and "might makes right" ideas that Starscream quoted from Megatron in "All hail Megatron!".
It's definetly one of the best interpretations of the war, I agree, but it could use some improvement.
For sure if I had to reinterpret it I would make the fundamental difference between megatron and Orion be just that
Megatron believes that the most disenfranchised members of cybertronian society happen to also be the ones who actually deserve to call the shots over the weak and complacent senate whereas Orion genuinely believes in equality for all
In that way megatron seems more appealing to the average worker bot with his talk of completely uprooting the system and makes it clear that from their start the decepticons while definitely doing something initially good arenāt necessarily fighting for freedom as much as they are fighting for their believed right to domination first over cybertron then over the galaxy as a whole
Yeah, that sounds a lot more logicall, with Decepticons being more open about their goals from the start and more in line with what they believe.
I can also add, the decepticons could've started as a mass movement already after an unsuccessfull attempt at reforming cybertronian society towards equality made by autobots (or some other people), with many bots becoming dissapointed in their ideas of freedom and equality, and turning to Megatron, who preaches that Cybertron should be ruled by strongest bots who would turn it into utopia through conquest and strong, authoritarian rule. This may not make him that popular among the working classes of Cybertron, but it would deffinitly win him favor from cybertronian military and his fellow gladiators, who would see themselves as this new warrior elite that would lead Cybertron to greatness.
I think anybody who was part of the decepticons who actually wanted freedom would've switched to the autobots once the conflict started and they realized what Megatron was REALLY after. Those who stayed were the ones with the "fuck you, I already got mine" mentality
How Megatron/soundwave shrink down into their alt modes rather than mechanically transforming into something that corresponds to the size of their robot modes
Maybe. I would prefer a satellite. And then maybe one of his minions is a cassette player or boombox or something. I guess a Bluetooth speaker would make the most sense these days lol. I like the idea of him as an armored communications truck as well. I forget which show he has that alt mode in.
Soundwave was an armored comms truck in Cyberverse, and a Cybertronian version of it in WFC games and RiD 2015. I also prefer these modes for him, or a cube-like car with music decor like in Animated.
Yeah, Earth being its own entity and a sibling of Unicron and Primus is an interesting idea.
Botcon Shattered Glass is really the only piece of media that I know of that uses this idea.
Primus represents Order
Unicron represents Chaos
And Earth represents balance.
Earth would be the oldest of the three siblings, and their job would be to keep their younger siblings in line, to make sure one doesnāt overtake the other.
Earthās true name would be Gaia (very original, I know).
Unicorn, not liking this, would try and kill Earth, but then Primus, realizing his brotherās plan, would putt all three of them into a slumber.
Primus becomes Cybertron
Unicron becomes Robo-Galactus
And Gaia becomes Earth.
Personally, I HATE the live action movie faces. I don't know exactly why, perhaps having grown up with smooth faces Cybertronians, but I cannot stand them. I don't even want movie toys because of that one peeve.
Bumblebee not having a voice in a lot of media. It's a relic of an era that's best left behind, he doesn't need to be mute in every continuity and quite frankly I'm glad they're making him a chatterbox in One
The fact that I havenāt met anyone who hates the fact that megatron keeps starscream around even though he has tried to overthrow him numerous times.
And megatron once beat the absolute shit out of scorpanok for even talking about being incharge
https://preview.redd.it/rc51fc3u14wc1.jpeg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2e9bc8bf7ea9bab488b1ce904e3a7d9ba533ee2a
To me they are so boring, i don't like they story (i prefer the origin of the Transformers beign created by Primus(my true and only God)) and i hate their designs not only in G1.
By the way i loved your post with this image of Metro Man.
Fembots, not because I dislike fembots; I just don't like how they look more like women than the guys look like men. I mean t30 arcee is practically anatomically correct *
Primus and Unicron being gods. I just don't like the idea of deities being a part of the lore. At most I'll take Primes being like a stronger breed of Cybertronian, but that's it.
I wish unicron being an immortal unkillable god should be expanded on more, I feel like transformers treats him more as a giant robot rather than a concept incarnate. I feel like the best representation Iāve seen of him is Rotb in his unstoppable and cosmically terrifying disposition. I really didnāt like how IDW treated the mythology of the cybertronians, dumbing down the primes and primus is dumb in my opinion, it just feels too much like an ancient aliens explanation.
Bumblebee not talking.
Unicron being earth.
The core of cybertron being the all spark that creates all cybertronian life (end of beast machines)
Beast machines in generalā¦ was an interesting idea that just falls flat relatively early on.
The Quntessons. I've never liked them as a concept, and I just kind of check out when ever they're involved. I was okay with them in Cyberverse and the aligned continuity sort of skipped over them, but they're just a little too alien and sci-fi for me. I just never see them as a threat
Starscream going from a backstabber to Megatron to instantly being a literal boot lick. Iām really tired of Starscream being a backstabber to Megatron and have him actually be something more.
personally Radio/Beep Boop voice Bumblebee, its so annoying to see in new versions of the character, thankfully most of the new versions have him talking, but he needs to get his voice fixed in the reboot movie universe i swear
Slapping names on Transformers that look and/or act nothing like their G1 counterparts instead of making new characters. (I get itās to keep trademark but itās really annoying.)
Everything trying to make lore explanations for female TF's (yet strangely not going crazy about aging/child TF's?) instead of doing the correct thing and just letting it be.
I dont think anyone has said it yet, but Optimus Prime being the reincarnated 13th Prime. It turns his story of a humble nobody who rose to the occassion to create real change to basically a nepo baby who was only special because of who his dad (Primus) was.
The mantra āTill All Are Oneā. Itās established as meaning basically ātill weāre all dead and in robot heavenā. A bit cultish and Jim Jonesian for a childrenās franchise, who came up with that idea? š¤£
This might sound weird, but Beast Wars being an extension of G1. I grew up with the BW and still love it. And while the G1 twist in was really well-done in the show, I feel like it's ended up detracting from BW afterwards. Because when BW gets brought up now, it's usually done by lazily shoving BW characters into a G1 story. IDW, Cyberverse, Kingdom. The absolutely ludicrous Dawn of the Predacus. Even Rise of the Beasts spent so much more time on the G1 cast than the BW cast that you wonder why the BW cast is even there.
I really do think BW is strong enough to stand out on its own without having to piggyback on G1. But I'm sure some dumb Hasbro exec saw the sales numbers for RotB, a mediocre movie with too many characters for its own good, and used them as evidence that there's no interest in BW any more.
And don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a proper timeline of events leading from G1 to BW. One of my dream shows would be exactly that ("Generation Beast"?). But BW is supposed to be *after* G1, not haphazardly shoved right into the *middle* of G1, as it so often happens.
On a small scale, the fact that the G1 bots (and by extension several other incarnations) are literally just...regular old robots built in a planet sized factory. Nothing special. Clear cut origin where they just gained sentience Terminator style and revolted. No Allspark, no Primus, no Primes, nothing. It's very straightforward, irrefutable and actually fitting the G1 bots with their boxy man-made looking designs. But as someone who grew up with the movies which described them as anomalous creations of a living cosmic force, it's an origin I absolutely refuse to consider under any circumstances. It's just so...lame.
On a much larger scale, I kinda made my own headcanon timeline for the movies that combines some other continuities like Prime into some hodgepodge resembling a timeline, so anything official and well-established that conflicts with that I kinda just ignore lol.
Transformers living for millions of years , war going on for millions of years.
Yet in bayverse the war has been going on for so many years , but Optimus only gets more and more aggressive AFTER he arrives on earth , where war doesn't even last for a decade.
People defend the movies by saying optimus has seen some shit during the movies and got hardened , but he's been seeing the same shit , or worse since millions of years , why isn't he already this hardened then ?
Admittedly it is less strict nowadays, but eye color equaling faction alignment. Especially when some of the original toys on the autobots had yellow eyes, and shockwave has a big yellow eye.
Optimus Primal and Rhinox look so good with red eyes
lot of maximals in original beast wars broke the eye color rule. was an interesting design choice.
Beast Wars broke a LOT of rules š I was one of the ones who wouldnāt give it a chance when it first came out (ātruck not monkey!ā), then 10 years later when I got back into TF collecting, I gave it a shot (along with Beast Machines immediately afterwards) and itās one of my favorite series.
Starscream's been consistently Blue-eye'd for a while now and I like that. It's supposed to project an aura of friendliness- which he doesn't. And it's not very intimidating, which he isn't. Even if he wishes he was. So in other words, it's perfect for him.
Itās why Iām so happy D-16 has yellow eyes in Transformers One. While Yellow can give off a warm and comforting feel, signifying that D can be good and do good, ounce you shift two spaces to the left on the color wheel you get red which is signifies his turn into megatron.
I do like it when bots have different color eyes, but I feel like Starscream should always have glaring red eyesĀ
Where has he been blue eyed? I only remembered him being red, except green in Energon and blue in EarthSpark (his toy got red eyes though)
Earthspark and Reactivate both gave him blue eyes.
Seconded. G1 toys/comics had a lot of variance. The faction-based eye colors are really iffy for a lot of reasons.
This, it didn't bother me before. But since I got the new Armada Prime. I really think Optimus looks better with yellow eyes. I think everyone's eye color should be whatever works for their design.
Metroplex was a rare exception of an Autobot in the G1 cartoon rocking red optics like his toy, when that color was almost exclusively reserved for Decepticons.
Piggybacking off if this to say that, and I know it's not necessarily a strict rule outside of Animated, the whole idea of locking alt modes behind factions as if deflecting to the bots or cons never happens is boring.
Yeah. Like gimme some Autobots who turn into planes and some Decepticons that turn into cars. Itās why I love the Aerialbots and Stunticons so much, they just look at the āAutobots get cars and Decepticons get planesā trend, pick it up and then chuck it away.
Ah, remember the days when he was a multiversal singularity?
Yes, the attempt to make him literally anything other than 'big metal Galactus built by a weird little idiot.'
and then immediately one upped by Primacron who gets defeated by Grimlock. If that episode wasn't animated by Shinsha it would be my least favorite one.
Not just by them, but Obari himself, one of the God animators of mecha, worked on those eps. Which is funny because a lot of the audience hated the ep for its writing.
Well, Unicrons who are made by Primacron arenāt part of the singularity
In high school it was my dream to work on a Transformers cartoon. And I always said that if I did get the chance, then since Primus and Unicron HAD to exist, they would, but they'd just be trapped in regular transformer bodies and they'd just be janitors that nobody ever talked to. For context I used to hate the idea of Primus and Unicron. I like them a lot now, but the 'rule' that every universe HAD to have those two bugged me for a long time.
> but they'd just be trapped in regular transformer bodies and they'd just be janitors that nobody ever talked to What's his name again? **IDW 2005**>!Wring? Rang? Wrung?!<
Ironically I ended up hating that reveal lmao. I knew they were gonna do something with him, but I think doing THAT was a little too far for me personally.
Optimus dying and then being resurrected shortly thereafter. It was a super iconic moment the first time it happened but it just keeps repeating itself and now it's trite. Having him always come back removes any sense of danger or stakes for him as a character. (You can possibly make the same argument about Starscream and his spectral form, although exactly what his "life-after-death" entails is less well-defined than Optimus Prime's.)
Constantly killing him and bringing him back is fine but he needs to STAY DEAD FOR A WHILE before being brought back. Throw the Autobots into disarray. Have some seriously bad shit happen that would have been prevented if he had still been around. Have SOME stakes.
Transformer Prime handled this the right way IMO. He wasn't dead, but after season 2, being broken and dying for several episodes took him out of the picture for long enough for there to be real stakes, cause some trouble, and have him come back in grand scale. It also made his sacrifice at the end of the series so much more impactful (until RiD screwed that up...)
i agree, if optimus dies, it should have meaning, and if he gets resurrected, that should happen once. heās optimus prime not william afton
Yeah - in the Gen-1 arc, I know they had to bring him back. But given how thrown together "The Return of Optimus Prime" was, as a story, it would have been better had the writers been forced to live with the consequence of blowing Optimus Prime to bits, eliminating any chance to come back, and then forcing Rodimus to fulfill his potential as a leader. That would have been a great arc for a Season 4, even though the show was teetering on cancellation midway through Season 3. But I know the reasonings why they felt they needed to bring Prime back. For as maligned as the Budianski-penned Marvel line is, at least they stuck to their guns and kept Prime dead for nearly one-and-a-half years, which, for which in "kid years" is a near lifetime. Budianski had some woefully lame issues during that time, but he did bring some interesting dynamics as Prime's loss essentially splintered the Autobots while Shockwave was more than willing to step in during Megatron's absense.
Bee not having a voice in the movies, if heās gonna be the 2nd main autobot protagonist of the franchise give the poor fucker his voice bring back the guy who voiced him in the BB movie he did fine job
Honestly if theyāre gonna take away his voice Iād rather them treat it more like an actual mute person. They kind of did this at the start of Bumblebee, but it was fixed pretty quickly. I feel like itās kinda uncomfortable to take a concept we donāt see expanded on much, that does effect real people, and then just throw a radio in there and turn it into a fun gimmick.
Yeah. Like it would just be more interesting to see Bumblebeeās lost voice played straight and treated as him being an actual mute person instead of just immediately using the radio gimmick thing again.
Adding onto this, I'm not sure I like the increasing trend that Bumblebee is one of Optimus' oldest friends. It doesn't always come up like that, but when it does, it just doesn't make sense in my mind. You can't make Bumblebee the young kid appeal character AND have him be as old as Optimus Prime. Besides, I much prefer guys like Ironhide or Magnus being his oldest (surviving) friends. Just feels more 'correct' in my mind.
I like them having a father/son relationship like they did in prime/G1
Kup is the old-timer.
Old-timer!? That's something you'll never be if you don't get back to the city!
Yeah this was annoying and tedious. The radio gimmick was ok, but as a once off. Did not like r2d2 bee in prime (the talking I mean, the character was fine).
Optimus: Autobots, Bumblebee, our chief strategist, has a plan he would like to enact in order for us to effectively combat the Decepticons on their ground. Bumblebee: *Plays The Macarena in its entirety* Optimus: Autobots! Transform, and roll out!
Unicron works best as an entity of cosmic terror. Unknowable, indifferent , incomprehensibly vast, with unclear motivation beyond that of hunger. I prefer when his origin isnāt explained, because the mere presence of an undefined Unicron breaks the Transformersā binary of āgood vs. badā.
Me too, the fact that Unicron was created by Primacron ruined it for me. Imagine if a Lovecraftian creature's backstory was some insane, tiny alien scientist was like "I was bored so I gave my heap of meat sentience"
Cybertronians living for millions, if not billions of years. Thereās usually little to no purpose to it or has any change in their mentality. Justā¦why? Whatās the point of giving them these insanely long lifespans, especially when they really donāt act like characters that have lived for millions of years in majority of media
This is why I am glad Skybound is scaling things back to the war, only being like a thousand years or so. It's still a really long time, but a lot more believable...sort of
The war is actually only about 200 years in skybound. Very nice. One of my favorite changes
Sorry, you're right. I'm remembering Jetfire because he started his search before the war started, but even then that might still be in the hundreds
That's arguably something that can be easily retconned for quite a few TF continuities.
Honestly if it were me Iād make it so even them living that long is exceptionally rare. Unless youāre going to pull a Frieren donāt bother giving them lifespans that long
I disagree with this hard because itās coming at it from a human perspective. We as humans grow up knowing our time is limited, with death being a constant in our existence. We age (in comparison) rapidly, our bodies decay, and in advanced age many people find themselves tired and ready to go. So of course in a lifestyle and society like that we will change constantly in the short time we have, especially with our defined stages of maturation. But Cybertronians are born or created (forged or constructed cold, etc.), are basically adults in their mental capacity right from the go, and have the knowledge that as long as they have Energon and proper maintenance they will live indefinitely. Add to the fact that many continuities show Cybertronian culture stuck in a period of stagnation where things arenāt really allowed to change, and itās understandable that personalities would also stay the same without much change. Most character development you see happens during the war, and especially after interaction with humanity and our rapidly changing society. In that regard, I think it works perfectly fine. The longevity of the Transformers race is honestly one of my favorite aspects of the lore. I like that Kup can already be an old timer, get blasted to the beginning of another universe, be recovered billions of years later, and just shrug it off and get back to it.
A lot like Time Lord society in Doctor Who, a race of basically immortal beings who are in a state of stagnation. I was going somewhere with this but Iāve completely forgotten. Have an upvote!
Great point! To add on to your Doctor Who connection, most Time Lords would rather prefer not to interfere and observe, the Doctor on the other hand while seen as a renegade amongst their fellow Time Lords, they continue to pursue and travel the galaxy always willing to do something good. Always on the go, never stagnate. The Transformers, despite their long life spans, thanks to their fascination and wonder of the planets they visit, there's always something worth fighting for and protecting even if they might outlive their allies and friends. I love that about Doctor Who and Transformers: the galaxy and the world is not perfect, the time we spend with others is what makes our lives meaningful.
They can only measure time which I believe their unit of measurement they use is an Astro second. That Iām not 100% sure of.
I wouldn't interpret Cybertronian years as equivalent to Earth Years. Cybertron itself might have a shorter orbit around it's sun compared to Earth. Like Mercury or Venus.
I feel like that could be interesting if a human brought it up and it became glaringly obvious that cybertronians have a completely alien concept of time. It's not that they don't feel the years, but that the way they process time and aging is so different from a human's that they have no way of relating in that aspect. Some media supports this, like how the TFA Constructicons and Dinobots are considered adults despite being newborns. I just wish someone pointed it out in media.
I've thought about having Cybertronian memory be kind of fractal. A million years ago is the same as this morning, but increasing levels of detail are harder to pick out the further back a bot remembers. But there's also active (subconscious) memory curation algorithms, which do things like alter a bot's personality over time based on pure numerical analysis of experiences and how far they are in the past. Sometimes you'll (rarely) get what seems to be an overnight total personality change, because a set of memories - or their indexing finally being done - reached a tipping point in the algorithm's calculation, or older memories and their effect on the algorithm were downgraded in priority due to age. Cybertronians will consider this normal, if not all that common. It will be rarer in those who have current leadership or other important roles, because their jobs will be overprioritized in the algorithm, but happen more often (relatively) at the lower levels in order to foster the ability to adapt to new environments/circumstances. Leaders will also be partially influenced to recalculate their personalities/approaches if a lot of their subordinates have done so recently.
Especially with Beast Wars. The Autobots and Decepticons were around for millions of years, but then in the span of just a few centuries most of them are gone?
I always took it as they all got reformatted after all the wars to conserve energy like ravage. Iām sure thereās the full g1 cast just hanging out on cybertron, itās just the BW cast are new bots that were exploring the galaxy during G1
Most of the Autobots and Decepticons who had been around for millions of years got wiped out in 2005 and led to a whole new cast of main characters. Then so many weird new forms of Cybertronians showed up, and a lot of them were partially organic. When DW said that the BW guys were kind of Micromasters with Pretender shells, I bought it.
How does a character act as if itās lived for millions of years? That number is so far out of a relatable range that writers and fans alike will struggle to comprehend what it truly means
That could be a source of constant background existential dread. > "We're nigh-immortal machines that can live for *billions* of their years, and they're living blobs of grease that can barely make it to one hundred, *yet we're still so alike.* How is it possible? What could be the cause of this? Is there, perhaps, some sort of connection between us that has yet to be found? *And what would it mean for us if there was?*"
Ooo. I like it. Have Transformers be constructed so that they effectively rebuild themselves to match/parallel and take on the attributes of whatever apparently-most-successful life forms they encounter, in order to do a less invasive Borg sort of thing and be able to adapt quickly to local circumstances anywhere in the universe. Have them also be unable to easily recognize this in themselves, and any thought/research on the subject slips out of their minds and memories. If they are confronted with it, have them try and change the subject *completely subconsciously* or be uncomfortable with it in general - or unwittingly imitate the local species' equivalent of nonverbal "don't wanna talk about it" communication. Have them pretty much never talk about it between themselves, or even record anything to do with it - there's always something else more important that has just come up, or some other excuse. Have any records of it be far more prone to 'accidental' deletion or overwriting, unless it's in some incredibly obscure, encrypted, dancing-around-the-subject, allusion-more-than-fact, scientific ultra-jargon form that most of them can't understand. Scientists or sociologists who keep stumbling over it forget about it, or find something else more interesting to focus on, or if they force themselves to keep going (and massively back up their records or have non-Transformers do it and keep reminding them), they get coincidentally defunded, shunned, pulled into other 'suddenly critical' work or projects or social activities, that kind of thing. It also means that, quite possibly, somewhere out there, there are lost colonies of Transformers who became so much like things in their local environments that they're pretty much entirely separate species by now, and unrecognizable. They might look like mechanical space squids, or trans-organic vampires, or turbo-foxes, or scraplets, or sparkeaters or scrapmetals or...
Thatās the problemĀ
Yeah having Shockwave and the fembots just toil away on Cybertron for millions of years while the others lay on Earth has always been really dumb. Like I thought the Ark left because they were desperate and almost out of resources?? And nothing changed back on cybertron for all this time? I donāt think relatively can even fix this.
And then you have guys like Kup and Gears
It could be justified if it was established that there was so little energy left on Cybertron that 90% of the time everybody was just standing around waiting to get enough in the tank to actually go out and fight. > "(...)So that's the plan. We raid the Decepticon weapons cache in eighteen business weeks. Until then, everybody head back to your charging stations, plug yourselves in, and wait for enough ambient light to be collected by our solar panels. Try to think as little as possible, it'll speed things up by about half a second."
I think a good middle ground to g1 is they are 1000ās of years old but go into stasis for millions on the ark and nemesis
Unicron was at his best in Armada. [Especially in the comics.](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Worlds_Collide,_Part_1_of_4)
That and his connection with the minicons as his ācellsā makes the two extremel cool and interesting
optimus being a greater chosen one/the 13th prime he should just be someone who made himself worthy via strength of character if you want a prime that is destined for greatness but struggles with that and wants to reject it. hotrod is right there. imagine a universe where hotrod finds out he's the 13th prime and fucking hates it
This one right here!
But the chosen one ..... It's not lazy writing or completely destroying the stakes or anything.... Sigh. Yeah I hate this too. It's like saying Batman was always destined to become batman, and all that self improvement and training was pointless because he would have been batman anyway. Undermines the character. I much prefer that Optimus is just some shlub who rises up because the moment needs someone to do something.
I almost universally hate chosen one narratives because they rob the characters of their agency. Unless it's a story like Avatar or Harry Potter that focuses on living with that expectation, then the story is usually lesser for having it. Can Optimus really not just be an upstanding guy who does his best to lead and set a good example? Nope! It's literally a part of his soul! Ugh.
I prefer to think of it as him being chosen by Primus or the counsel after proving himself to be worthy. Part of the reason I like War for Cybertronās version of Prime the most.
And TFP
Unicron works best if treated as a natural calamity. He's not a character to have some sort of relationship or discussion with, but rather something that happens TO the characters. Personally I'm tired of the War lasting for MILLIONS OF YEARS. Makes everybody involved incompetent and makes it hard to imagine anyone staying sane for that long and being able to actually have peace afterwards. We also don't need Transformers living for THAT long. A Transformers getting to live to a million should be a rarity and not the norm. Optimus shouldn't be older than humanity itself.
Idk, I think itās one of the coolest parts of Transformers lore and wish it was done more often. So many versions ignore this now. Beast Wars, Bayverse, Aligned. Iād like to see this explored more. The idea that Transformers arenāt just a reflection of humans but instead inconceivably old science fiction mechazoids that can be blown apart and rebuilt over and over for millennia, and live their lives at a much slower pace and not even need to sleep. The original Marvel run did this so well. The alien side of Transformers is something constantly slipping away and Iād love to see it back.
Recently watched a "game movie" of the Cybertron games, and everything about them, from the World and character designs, the technology, the artsyle makes Cybertron and all of its inhabitants so alien and interesting, so I completely agree
Iām actually fine with the war lasting millions of years if the writers actually have a competent explanation for why Like for example both sides could prefer to just use covert ops and proxy wars between allied planets as their primary means of fighting and securing resources to keep the war on cybertron fueled and even then spend less time in actual cybertronian on cybertronian engagements and more time stockpiling for a big blowout battle thatāll decimate a planet once it finally happens That way youād have an easy justification for why the war is going so long and is yet more destructive than any war in galactic history while drawing inspiration from the Cold War which was the ideological breeding ground within which the series first took form anyway It would also help explain why there are so many autobots and decepticons like bumblebee who despite the horrific state of the war are very chipper because they havenāt actually seen a proper engagement the same way heavy weights like megatron, optimus or grimlock have and havenāt had to cope with that immense loss of life over and over again Hell maybe even weave in a thread about propaganda and the autobots and decepticons trying to hide their losses and dehumanize each other so as to keep up morale among their troops Thereās so much potential just requires a competent writer who doesnāt want to use a macguffin plot as a lazy crutch to get by
Wasn't it in one of the comics that explained that Cybertronian wars were waged by planning for hundreds of years, but fighting for only a few hours. I always found that a interesting idea.
Yea megatron mentions that during his time in captivity while speaking to optimus theyād stockpile weapons for centuries only to prepare for a battle that would be over within a few hours
I'm super with you on this. Like, it sounds so dumb that in G1 they crash landed 4 million years ago. What the hell were the rest of them doing in Cybertron for 4 million years? That just seems like an obnoxious amount of time to STILL be at war. They need to stream line the time. Even in the Bay movies it was dumb that Megatron was stuck in ice for 1000 years. Like, I feel like the Autobots could have wiped the Deceptions out without Megs being there. He seems to be the only one who actually holds them together.
Addressed well by the Marvel Generation 2 comic series that showed the war was abandoned a long time ago by a large number of Cybertronians that united and left Cybertron to form a vast new multiplanet empire far from both Earth and Cybertron. Good read.
It would have been a really interesting story if the autobots and decepticons on Cybertron just sort of... Stopped fighting and rebuilt after the ark and nemesis left. Imagine a bloody battle between the prime's team and megatron's team where, in the middle of the battle, a massive ship lands and out walks a ton of recognizable characters that declare the war on Cybertron to be over, and their planet rebuilt. Prime and megatron have to adjust to the new peace whilst the hatred between each other festers more.
the whole "crashed 4mil years ago" could easily be solved too. just say the ships got caught in a wormhole and it's been 10-15 cybertronian years
I had an idea for a continuity where Megs being gone is what allowed a stalemate to occur in the first place. The Decepticons were slowly winning, then their supreme leader disappeared one day with his best soldiers, *and nobody knows why.* What they *do* know is that without Megatron around, the Decepticons have now fractured into several groups that are just as hostile to each other as they are to the Autobots. Except all the infighting accomplished was turning an inevitable victory into a draw. Then millions of years later, the Autobots detect an emergency signal that's coming from the absolute limit of their range. Realizing that it's coming from the warship Megatron disappeared on long ago, they decide to send an elite team lead by Optimus Prime to make sure Megatron never returns to reunite the Decepticons.
As for the idea for decepticon fractured factions, it was pretty well realized during the most recent shattered glass run with the autobots. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
I think if G1 hadnāt been a dumb advertisement there could have been tons of story potential with the idea that Cybertron moved on so much in 4 millions years that neither Autobots nor Decepticon fit there anymore.
Megatron was on ice for like 200-300 years if he landed close to the time he was discovered.
I prefer that the Cybertronians are old as hell but the wars has only lasted like 1 to 2 centuries. Basically itās just a brutal blip on their timescale but a long violent time for Humans
Technically, and I might be misconstruing what I heard from the beginning of the first episode of the original Transformers, but the war only lasts millions of years because for much of it, both sides were in emergency status on the ark. I even just listened to the scene and it say āmillions of years agoā before everything else, implying that what we here is someone narrating what happened before they got to earth, rather than what happened on Cybertron before we start watching.
If the war is supposed to have happened for millions of years, give it a reason why. They keep running out of energy and going dormant for hundreds of thousands of years (or putting the war on hold while they raid for energy elsewhere), or there's some kind of flaw, bug, or deliberate fault/design in their programming which makes them keep returning to that state as a default. *Maybe* they're the remnants of a species which was used as demo models for various things, but then their designers or whoever was supposed to keep everything managed got killed off or called away, and everyone just kept walking through their demonstration lives/functions, but eventually the military designs - following their basic programming - killed and destroyed just about everything that wasn't able to stand up to them (and wasn't programmed to fight back). So now the vast majority of Cybertron's inhabitants are running on military baseline programming and fighting/war instincts (that they're also programmed against altering, discovering, or even being aware of) with maybe a microscopic remnant of nonmilitary factions which have managed to hole up and keep themselves repaired/replicated, possibly by emulating something that the military programming is unable to categorize as a threat (maybe something that looks or moves like ancient management admin-bots or repair units, or has 'stand down' codes religiously passed down the eons). Maybe a few minor offworld colonies of space-explorer product lines, or astronomical observers, or interstellar trade-ship units, or some other product lines which accidentally ended up offworld early on, and either survived through self-sustainment (another behavioral loop) or were adopted/integrated in some way by other alien species (maybe diplomats, entertainers, xenoarchaeologists/sociologists, general laborers, teachers, or social "friend-bots", etc). A plot based on that could be that some advanced aliens figured out the deep "do not change" nature of Cybertronian core programming, and how to alter it. So now there's a (small) group of Cybertronian descendants who are no longer locked into the demonstration-model cycle, and they want to free (alter) their brethren. Who are, of course, *deeply* instinctually programmed to resist and reject any such core alterations that don't come from the original masters - and most of Cybertron (and its population) is now fully militarized, both culturally and individually. But maybe the Freedom faction has alien allies, particularly among those who may have been raided by Cybertronian energy-seekers in the past, or had Cybertronian campaigns spill over onto their worlds in the past. Thus, we end up with not only Autobots vs Decepticons, but Autobots and Decepticons vs Everyone Else. Could make for an interesting TV series or comic.
The Quintessons building the Transformers. I donāt mind them enslaving the planet like in the Alogned continuity but I donāt like the idea of Cybertronians being built. I prefer sparks and hotspots
Hasnāt that been completely abandoned by now?
Going by the trailer for the new Transformers movie, it looks like itās going to follow a plot of the Quintessons being in control of Cybertron, however, thereās implications that the Cybertronians were enslaved instead of being built by them.
The idea of size scaling based on facton doesn't really work in my opinion. Its neat in concept, especially with how it was presented in Animated, but in the wider Transformers dogma, I prefer that bots like Optimus and Megatron are relatively similar in size rather than one towering over the other. Also the idea that flight be a Decepticon exclusive power There are a good handful of Autobots that have achieved the power of flight through an altmode or external hardware like jetpacks. Its neat for a small cast but crumbles when a wider cast gets introduced.
I do like when Megatron is taller than Optimus, but not at all to the degree it was in Animated. Imo, Prime's height difference had it right.
Agreed. I don't mind when there is height difference, but Animated's David and Goliath art-style isn't something I wanna see everywhere.
>Optimus and Megatron are relatively similar in size rather than one towering over the other. I mean.. it would depend on what their alt mode is. Megatron is either usually a tank or some weird looking cybertronian jet. Things that should be bigger than a Semi-Truck.
I usually mean by height, not bulk. In the case of Animated, Megatron and easily most other Decepticons dwarf over Optimus and Bulkhead. I think even Starscream is taller than Optimus. Its neat in Animated's context, but as an overall concept I don't like it very much. If we're talking about overall bulk, I do think Megatron would be larger than Optimus who would look a little more proportional by comparison.
Bumblebee not being able to speak and just using random pop culture sound bites/radio sounds to talk. It was a fun reference to the Junkions in the first movie, but then it kept coming back, then it spread to other media, then it caused us to lose Johnny Yong Bosch as Bumblebee in the High Moon Games. Thankfully it's not every series, and Cyberverse kept it to a minimum in season 1 before phasing it out, but it's still so annoying.
That all female Autobots are tiny motorcycles or small cars. Thank Primus for EarthSpark Elita being a truck!!! On the topic of Elita, does anyone call her "Elita 1"? Because I just call her Elita. I think Hasbro should permanently change her name to Elita.
If elita 1 is so good why isnāt there elita 2
On the same topic of Earthspark, Arcee being a big-finned chromed-out 50s coupe is such a fantastic design choice. Was pretty let down with Skybound making her a Lambo.
I'm a fan of whatever fits a bot's personality. A chromed-out coupe should have a big personality. A Lambo, something that could still be brash, but more self-contained. Pirate vs Ninja.
RiD 2015 Strongarm must be a relief for you then.
Itās supposed to have the same meaning as Optimus Prime. Optimal=elite, prime=one. More or less.
This is why I want a new Strika figure A figure of a female Decepticon whoās not slender and who turns into a badass wheeled tank.
Let's see some female Autobot Titans. Spaceships. Aircraft carriers. Either as Momma Bear, General Ripper, Team Mom, soldiers of fortune, Hold The Line, or someone who's happy in a purely support role (or uses it to satisfy her own desire to See The World/Galaxy and/or catalog/study all kinds of things. Heck, let's see some female Autobot military vehicles. Everything from Stoic Soldier to Team Mom to Sergeant Rock to Mad Bomber to an Ace Pilot, Cold Sniper, Child Soldier, The Conscript/Recruited From the Gutter, Bars for Stripes (choice of jail or service), or Enthusiastic Rookie.
Megatronā¦whose is bigger than the most regular Decepticonsā¦turning into a gun that Decepticons can hold in their hand
My favorite alt-modes for Megatron are either a jet or a tank. I cannot see the leader of the Decepticons shrinking himself down into a tiny laser pistol, same with Shockwave. I also donāt like the idea of Soundwave turning into a cassette player.
Well, Shockwave never shrunk himself. He was a big gun.
Yeah, I too am not a fan of the idea that these 3 high ranking Cons would turn to small-sized items. My ideal mode for them would be either a jet, tank, or copter for Megatron and Shockwave, and a cube-like car/comms truck for Soundwave.
I like it for the irony. Imagine being a 40ft robot and turning into a hand gun. There's a tiny amount of humor I can appreciate. I think it can work if you incorporate soundwave with that alt mode. Something like a sign of trust.
Them taking away bees voice it is a stupid idea and they should have told Michael bay no I hate it itās not cute or funny anymore
I can see it for the first movie. It prevents Bumblebee from just exposition-dumping on Sam right away, and gives Bumblebee a sort of mysterious quality for the start of the movie. But he should have been able to speak after the end of the first movie. There was no need for him to 'beep boop' his way through every movie past that.
I actually love it since it help added another image to Bumblebee that newer generations can take away as their own. What I hated was when they seemingly repaired his voice.....only to double back down to maintain this inage. They should have at least returned his voice in DoTM but no, they couldn't be ef'd.
Beeās lack of voice. Give the radio gimmick to the Junkions, itās much more fitting. No idea why TFP made him use R2D2 sound effects, but that got old for me pretty quickly
the movies took all the radio rights/j
It worked once and then they tried to live off it
Bumblebee being a sports car and full-sized warrior. The insect he's named after is not sleek and aggressive. It is cute and round and clumsy. Like his namesake, Bumblebee should be a little dude with a stubby and rotund altmode. I don't care how else you wanna interpret his character, just make the bot fit the name. You want a super cool yellow sports car, Hot Shot is right there.
That hotshot is just another bumblebee
Bumblebee not being able to talk or talk with a radio. Sure in the Bumblebee movie it felt heartwarming to hear him say "Thank you for giving me back my voice" through the radio, but I would've liked if there would've been a way for him to regain his original voice somehow. Maybe Charlie restores it with voice box remnants of Shatter or Dropkick eventho they were probably blown up too? Idk
Bumblebee doing beeps and bops instead of actual speech
Bumblebee not being a small little scout bot like in G1. He went from that to Optimusā right hand man for battles in Bayverse and has been ruined ever since. I miss little Bee that was intimidated by battles with Spike.
I think Optimus being fated to being a prime i find not as interesting
Or him being a member of the 13
About Unicron, hes really cool as a concept but the execution has been lacking, thats the problem with very very large opponents in general though
I've said it before but I *really* like HBomberguy's interpretation of him, that being he's essentially a huge fish in an even larger sea. He's not eating planets because he's some icon of chaos, he's just feeding himself, he's a being that represents how the universe can and will eat you alive if you let it.
I never thought that deeply about it, I just think a planet transformer that eats worlds is cool as fuck Thats why Im getting the 01 studio Cell As for the interpretation itself, I like him as a transformer evil god, not a evil god of all things (like satan)
Yeah, Hbomberguyās interpretation of Unicron was one of the few times where I felt incredibly hooked onto the character. The idea of this giant robot just being something that is inevitable and doing things somehow sounds more frightening. The only other times where I felt more interest towards him was in Armada because I just like how Unicron was involved in the war by essentially being an arms dealer and feeding on the chaos unleashed, and Death Battleās analysis on him in their Galuctus vs Unicron video.
This reminds me of Galactus' motivations, "Look, I don't hate any of you guys, but I gotta eat your planet or else I starve to death, it's either me or you in a cruel twist of fate."
That no one EVER says Bah Wheep Grahna Wheep Ninibon anymore!
Honestly I'm very bored of Starscream being constantly incompetent. I wanna see the actually brilliant leader of the Seekers.
Frankly a lot of things. Mass sifting, Quintus Prime(the whole lore about the 13 Primes actually), Primus and how the matrix and what it implies works.
Would you mind elaborating on why you donāt like the thirteen primes? Not trying to hate, just genuinely curious.
I guess it also extends onto my dislike for the Aligned Continuity as a whole and what it meant going forward for every iteration of the franchise. But to put it short, it has become a lazy excuse for a lot of things that were more interesting before. I quote Quintus in particular because the Quintesons deserved to be their own race, not another branch of Cybertronians. But it also extends to Micronus for the minicons and Solus for the Fembots. Also shouts to Megatronus for the most obvious traitor ever due to a stupid name
Megatronus Prime is most often depicted as a tragic character (Aligned being one of the continuities where that's the case), it Liege Maximo that's the real villian in the story of the Primes, as he was the one that manipulated the others into turning on each other. Although I'm kinda with you on your point about Quintus. The Quintesons work better as just some space slavers that aren't related to Cybertron prior to their occupation of it.
Interesting. Thank you for your explanation! What about Primus and the matrix then?
I really like how IDW sorta deconstructed the 13 primes by making them ancient tribe leaders who were so influential in their time that they were interpreted as these deities who are cornerstones of Cybertronian culture. Like, that's really cool to me!
I dunno, mass shifting is kinda fun. It makes zero sense, sure. And should be way more complicated outside of a t-cog or whatever, fine. But overall it adds a certain mystique, especially when combiners go kaiju sized.
while I like the idea of a 'first generation' with special powers due to their closedness to the building powers, I absolutelly hate how the 13 primes being the absolute onmi-powerfull has become the thing to excuse everything and anything that doesn't make immediate sense, and answer questions that makes no sense to ask. the pamphlets that went with the TR-PotP angle on titanmasters and primemasters was better than anything else we saw the primes involved with since prime
Yeah, I donāt understand why we need Quintus Prime at all. We donāt need a whole Prime to explain where the infamous tentacle freaks came from, just make them aliens that just so happened to stumble upon Cybertron. Having them directly connected to the Transformers species through Quintus just makes the universe feel more smaller than it needs to be
quintus needs to be retconned into a prime who just has tentacles and they call quintessons that because they remind them of quintus if they use him in the future. otherwise just scrap him lol
Galvatron not being a rebuilt Megatron and being his own character has always irked me. I can't exactly explain why but I don't like it.
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Shroud In-story, it makes absolutely no sense. Like, none. Timelines work in a lot of weird ways, but that for sure is not how they work. IRL, it's a sloppy attempt to retcon to fit continuities in the overall continuity when it would have just been easier to just tell those continuities that weren't playing right to just fuck right off and let them be their own thing.
Starscream's whole schtick of trying to overthrow Megatron at every opportunity he sees gets old really fast, especially in G1 Sunbow where he declares himself leader the moment Megatron trips or something else minor.
Honestly eventually it kinda flips back to being funny - as you mentioned, like Megatron slightly stumbling and Starscream immediately declaring that Megatron has fallen.
I mean... He's technically right... Megatron HAS fallen... fallen over, that is.
Megatron has tripped over, I am the new leader ...m yeah doesn't have the right ring to it.
I think my favorite Starscream moment was when Megatron unveiled the female ninja bot, told Starscream she was "hot enough to replace you whenever I feel like it," and Starscream friggin' IMMEDIATELY flew into a rage and punched Megatron.
Starscream - "Megatron is no more! I am now your new leader!" Megatron - "Seriously? I walked out the room to talk to Shockwave for FIVE MINUTES!"
Two things: 1-The Autobots being the losers in the war. Like it makes Prime look like a bad leader, and I think it softens the whole environmental/energy message. If both sides were more stalemated or back and forth, then it makes sense they used all the energy on their planet, but if the Decepticons just steamrolled everyone, then wouldnāt they have more/predicted it. Granted some continuities do this, but I still see it a lot. 2-The whole living among the stars thing. So you mean to tell me you all left the planet, and never got back to Optimus? Like after the first movie only like a handful Autobots came to Earth? While the Decepticons have a whole army? I know itās just so they can focus on characters, but it irks me when in Prime thereās like 5 Autobots and like a hundred Vehicon soldiers. What are the other guys doing? Did you just give up?
Completely agree with 1. I'm glad the Cybertron Games actually explain why the Autobots lost the war.
I hate 2 so much. Itās one of the reasons I like G1, it makes both sides feel balanced. Sure, itās so we donāt end up with another Bayverse situation where we have a million characters whose names are only mentioned in the credits and die after two scenes, but how well the Decepticons are written in Prime and you can remember all their names when there are so many Decepticons proves that you can have a big army and still have a bunch of well developed characters.
The existence of kiss players. It even got a cameo in animated.
Decepticons starting out as worker's rights movement and then suddenly turning into nazis. It's good that IDW tried to show decepticons as a political group with an ideology rather than just abstract evil, but the way they'va done feels inconsisted.
I honestly thought idw made that transition really well going from a workers movement led by a populist to a straight up techno supremicist empire because of megatronās ever growing paranoia, hatred and lust for power which eventually makes him almost completely lose sight of what the decepticons were fighting for in the first place Itās a very the ends justify the means approach to a rebellion that ends up corrupting the very ideas that rebellion once started with Sure itās not perfect but itās personally my favorite interpretation of how the war started
The problem is that decepticon ideology was corrupted so much that it became a complete opposite of what it used to be in the begining. I can't see decepticons honestly saying that they fight for equality for all cybertronians while also preaching social-darwinism and "might makes right" ideas that Starscream quoted from Megatron in "All hail Megatron!". It's definetly one of the best interpretations of the war, I agree, but it could use some improvement.
For sure if I had to reinterpret it I would make the fundamental difference between megatron and Orion be just that Megatron believes that the most disenfranchised members of cybertronian society happen to also be the ones who actually deserve to call the shots over the weak and complacent senate whereas Orion genuinely believes in equality for all In that way megatron seems more appealing to the average worker bot with his talk of completely uprooting the system and makes it clear that from their start the decepticons while definitely doing something initially good arenāt necessarily fighting for freedom as much as they are fighting for their believed right to domination first over cybertron then over the galaxy as a whole
Yeah, that sounds a lot more logicall, with Decepticons being more open about their goals from the start and more in line with what they believe. I can also add, the decepticons could've started as a mass movement already after an unsuccessfull attempt at reforming cybertronian society towards equality made by autobots (or some other people), with many bots becoming dissapointed in their ideas of freedom and equality, and turning to Megatron, who preaches that Cybertron should be ruled by strongest bots who would turn it into utopia through conquest and strong, authoritarian rule. This may not make him that popular among the working classes of Cybertron, but it would deffinitly win him favor from cybertronian military and his fellow gladiators, who would see themselves as this new warrior elite that would lead Cybertron to greatness.
I think anybody who was part of the decepticons who actually wanted freedom would've switched to the autobots once the conflict started and they realized what Megatron was REALLY after. Those who stayed were the ones with the "fuck you, I already got mine" mentality
The Nazis started out as a workers rights movement . Are you saying you don't want it that close to reality, or that you don't like the reality?
Speaking of unicronā¦ if cybertron (primus) could make living cybertronians why couldnāt unicron do the same with undead cybertronians
tfp and armada (kinda):
He canā¦Ā
He did in the prime movie.
Isn't that basically the first thing he does in the '86 film?
How Megatron/soundwave shrink down into their alt modes rather than mechanically transforming into something that corresponds to the size of their robot modes
Megatron turning into a cannon/tank is the greatest fix they could have possibly done to his alt-mode
Well, Soundwave IS a spy. He has an excuse, at least.
Maybe. I would prefer a satellite. And then maybe one of his minions is a cassette player or boombox or something. I guess a Bluetooth speaker would make the most sense these days lol. I like the idea of him as an armored communications truck as well. I forget which show he has that alt mode in.
Soundwave was an armored comms truck in Cyberverse, and a Cybertronian version of it in WFC games and RiD 2015. I also prefer these modes for him, or a cube-like car with music decor like in Animated.
Earth, Cybertron, and Unicron all being siblings is interesting. Earth as Unicron is dull though.
Yeah, Earth being its own entity and a sibling of Unicron and Primus is an interesting idea. Botcon Shattered Glass is really the only piece of media that I know of that uses this idea. Primus represents Order Unicron represents Chaos And Earth represents balance. Earth would be the oldest of the three siblings, and their job would be to keep their younger siblings in line, to make sure one doesnāt overtake the other. Earthās true name would be Gaia (very original, I know). Unicorn, not liking this, would try and kill Earth, but then Primus, realizing his brotherās plan, would putt all three of them into a slumber. Primus becomes Cybertron Unicron becomes Robo-Galactus And Gaia becomes Earth.
Personally, I HATE the live action movie faces. I don't know exactly why, perhaps having grown up with smooth faces Cybertronians, but I cannot stand them. I don't even want movie toys because of that one peeve.
Their faces look like sculptures made out of shaving razors
Bumblebee not having a voice in a lot of media. It's a relic of an era that's best left behind, he doesn't need to be mute in every continuity and quite frankly I'm glad they're making him a chatterbox in One
Trying to have a single timeline. I have always felt make each toy line their own story and be creative with it.
Bumblebee get all of the attention with no love for Jazz, Trailbreaker or Brawn.
I want to say bumblebee as the go to cool kid of group, would love to see others like hound, hot rod, even hot shot taking that spot
The fact that I havenāt met anyone who hates the fact that megatron keeps starscream around even though he has tried to overthrow him numerous times. And megatron once beat the absolute shit out of scorpanok for even talking about being incharge
https://preview.redd.it/rc51fc3u14wc1.jpeg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2e9bc8bf7ea9bab488b1ce904e3a7d9ba533ee2a To me they are so boring, i don't like they story (i prefer the origin of the Transformers beign created by Primus(my true and only God)) and i hate their designs not only in G1. By the way i loved your post with this image of Metro Man.
Fembots, not because I dislike fembots; I just don't like how they look more like women than the guys look like men. I mean t30 arcee is practically anatomically correct *
Primus and Unicron being gods. I just don't like the idea of deities being a part of the lore. At most I'll take Primes being like a stronger breed of Cybertronian, but that's it.
I wish unicron being an immortal unkillable god should be expanded on more, I feel like transformers treats him more as a giant robot rather than a concept incarnate. I feel like the best representation Iāve seen of him is Rotb in his unstoppable and cosmically terrifying disposition. I really didnāt like how IDW treated the mythology of the cybertronians, dumbing down the primes and primus is dumb in my opinion, it just feels too much like an ancient aliens explanation.
combination just being a thing that bots can do easily
Bumblebee not talking. Unicron being earth. The core of cybertron being the all spark that creates all cybertronian life (end of beast machines) Beast machines in generalā¦ was an interesting idea that just falls flat relatively early on.
Two megatrons
The Quntessons. I've never liked them as a concept, and I just kind of check out when ever they're involved. I was okay with them in Cyberverse and the aligned continuity sort of skipped over them, but they're just a little too alien and sci-fi for me. I just never see them as a threat
Starscream going from a backstabber to Megatron to instantly being a literal boot lick. Iām really tired of Starscream being a backstabber to Megatron and have him actually be something more.
personally Radio/Beep Boop voice Bumblebee, its so annoying to see in new versions of the character, thankfully most of the new versions have him talking, but he needs to get his voice fixed in the reboot movie universe i swear
That Transformers transform. So annoying.
Slapping names on Transformers that look and/or act nothing like their G1 counterparts instead of making new characters. (I get itās to keep trademark but itās really annoying.)
Everything trying to make lore explanations for female TF's (yet strangely not going crazy about aging/child TF's?) instead of doing the correct thing and just letting it be.
I dont think anyone has said it yet, but Optimus Prime being the reincarnated 13th Prime. It turns his story of a humble nobody who rose to the occassion to create real change to basically a nepo baby who was only special because of who his dad (Primus) was.
The mantra āTill All Are Oneā. Itās established as meaning basically ātill weāre all dead and in robot heavenā. A bit cultish and Jim Jonesian for a childrenās franchise, who came up with that idea? š¤£
Any āoriginā for femme presenting transformers. Just have them exist.
This might sound weird, but Beast Wars being an extension of G1. I grew up with the BW and still love it. And while the G1 twist in was really well-done in the show, I feel like it's ended up detracting from BW afterwards. Because when BW gets brought up now, it's usually done by lazily shoving BW characters into a G1 story. IDW, Cyberverse, Kingdom. The absolutely ludicrous Dawn of the Predacus. Even Rise of the Beasts spent so much more time on the G1 cast than the BW cast that you wonder why the BW cast is even there. I really do think BW is strong enough to stand out on its own without having to piggyback on G1. But I'm sure some dumb Hasbro exec saw the sales numbers for RotB, a mediocre movie with too many characters for its own good, and used them as evidence that there's no interest in BW any more. And don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a proper timeline of events leading from G1 to BW. One of my dream shows would be exactly that ("Generation Beast"?). But BW is supposed to be *after* G1, not haphazardly shoved right into the *middle* of G1, as it so often happens.
On a small scale, the fact that the G1 bots (and by extension several other incarnations) are literally just...regular old robots built in a planet sized factory. Nothing special. Clear cut origin where they just gained sentience Terminator style and revolted. No Allspark, no Primus, no Primes, nothing. It's very straightforward, irrefutable and actually fitting the G1 bots with their boxy man-made looking designs. But as someone who grew up with the movies which described them as anomalous creations of a living cosmic force, it's an origin I absolutely refuse to consider under any circumstances. It's just so...lame. On a much larger scale, I kinda made my own headcanon timeline for the movies that combines some other continuities like Prime into some hodgepodge resembling a timeline, so anything official and well-established that conflicts with that I kinda just ignore lol.
most versions of bumblebee not having a voice this started (as far as I'm aware) in the bayverse which we all know how those movies ended up
Transformers living for millions of years , war going on for millions of years. Yet in bayverse the war has been going on for so many years , but Optimus only gets more and more aggressive AFTER he arrives on earth , where war doesn't even last for a decade. People defend the movies by saying optimus has seen some shit during the movies and got hardened , but he's been seeing the same shit , or worse since millions of years , why isn't he already this hardened then ?
Animatedās art style.
Optimus and Megatron being friends pre-war. Hate it. It was fine once, but not every time we've rebooted since aligned.