BW Media Spotlight

(l to r: Windblade, Bumblebee, and Rubble)

In a previous post in what I guess I’m making a prose series, I talked about how I’d combine the Quintesson and Primus origins of the Transformers. If I had to choose I prefer the Quintessons as they’re more sci-fi and less supernatural, but nobody asked me and somehow Simon Furman’s comic book take bled into the cartoons. I blame Beast Wars, but what can you do? I like my compromise and hopefully someone else did as well. It got a few likes but no real push for more, so I was ready to call it there and move on.

My brain was not.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like the modern day backstory for Cybertron, the whole “forced caste system” leading to Cybertron being a terrible place, with Optimus and Megatron simply fighting over replacing a bad system. A system that makes no sense to me since literally from episode one of the cartoon and issue one of the comics we see that they can change their alternate modes pretty easy even before the protoform concept was introduced. (Also blame Beast Wars for protoforms and sparks and things, but I consider them good additions.) I prefer when the Autobots were fighting to protect something, though even before they left Cybertron they seemed to be losing. It made the Autobots seem like cooler characters and I wanted them to restore Cybertron and win the war more than the current ideas. The war is a bit more tragic when something good is being lost rather than the place being terrible and just choosing what terrible idea to replace it with.

So I want to write my own idea of what started the Great War between Autobot and Decepticon, building off of the shared origin. Before I do that I need to create a more positive culture of Cybertron, one that feels right for shapeshifting robotic lifeforms that should still feel like a living world but less like humans. Before I do that, however, I need to come up with the basis for Cybertronian culture, customs, traditions, and society. That means not just how Transformers live but the basis of their entire existence.

In the origin I did mention that the Quintessons created transforming robots for use as merchandise and war, but that Primus created the All-Spark, a copy of his lifeforce the Quintessons were using to power the planet, out of the planet’s energon. I also went over how sparks in my headcanon work (taking aspects from the cartoon and the comic as well as the toys that are the “source material” of this franchise), and how they chased the Quintessons off. The recent compilation update by Transformers: The Basics also helped me try to figure out just how Cybertronians in my version would live, which would be the origin point for their culture and society. Looking at previous takes on sparks, energon, and transforming among other aspects of the Transformers, as re-imagined in different continuities, gave me a starting point, but in order to get where I want to I need to come up with what my version would be like. I’m going to be pulling more from the toys and meta logic when it comes to the concepts I’m playing with, using various media takes to fill in gaps and form the building blocks of life on a planet of robots who can transform into things. Let’s see what I can come up with.

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