BW Media Spotlight

Not ALL the factions, mind you. In the years since Hasbro took random Japanese transforming robot toylines and split them all up into two warring factions, we have gained a whole bunch more factions in the Transformers franchise, depending on continuity. Predacons alone have two factions and a Combiner team using that name. Mini-Cons, Blendtrons, Quintessons, Mutators, and a whole host of others are more united by a gimmick than a set of values. Instead, our focus for this commentary will be on the original two born of similar but not completely shared values: the Autobots and Decepticons.

The Primus origin for the Transformers, the one that has become official multiversal continuity despite the G1 cartoon allegedly being the more important media, doesn’t give a lot of reasons for the factions. Every comic, cartoon, and movie since has had different reasons for the forming of the Decepticons. In the original cartoon Quintesson origin the factions were almost destined to exist. Creating robots to sell off, these pre-Transformers were split into consumer goods and military hardware, the precursors to the Autobots and Decepticons respectively. While this could have informed their general differences when they gained sentience and overthrew their creators, we do see evidence that this isn’t the case. There are military minded Autobots and laborer Decepticons with the alt modes to match, but usually it’s the Decepticons with the war modes and Autobots with the casual, cool, or rescue themed modes. It’s more a majority of A went in one direction and the majority of B the other, taking a few stragglers from their opposites along the way. So even when you have an origin that forces them into one perspective or another there are outliers.

However, since that origin has Megatron being created by the Decepticons to be their leader and multiversal continuity states Megatron formed the faction himself we won’t look too hard at that. Besides, it’s through the tech specs, the character bios they stopped putting on Transformers figures outside of the occasional homage packaging, that tells the real story of the division between Autobot and Decepticon and what the external creators had intended for the mythos. It’s a story that seems to be ignored by more recent continuity giving us evil Autobots and a reformed Megatron, a Cybertron that even when run by Autobots was a terrible place to live, and why that doesn’t reflect the story the creators, Hasbro and the original Marvel-produced concepts by the likes of Jim Shooter and Bob Budiansky, were actually trying to tell with the factions. That doesn’t mean you can’t tell a deeper history but modern writers don’t seem to fully understand why Autobots and Decepticons exist beyond selling toys, and why the simpler ideas of the kids toyline don’t have to be abandoned in order to tell a mature story. Unless your version of mature is just about explosions, gore, nudity, and cynical “people suck” deconstructions.

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