I like Stardrive. She seems nice. ^_^

 

I'm already liking Stardrive so far.   It makes me wish we'll se a figure of her in the future.

 

He didn't, just a not very good toy and his own comic series.

EDIT
Also, just these few pages made me love Stardrive. Now what awful things are going to happen to her in this story?

 

Good to see Milne back in action.

So wait... "by my 5th solar cycle I was considerably bigger than my classmates"?

Um, wouldn't she have been bigger IMMEDIATELY? I mean, I'm not sure exactly how TFs "grow up" in IDW... it's been pretty obscure, even now. But those protoforms look to already be at least 8-10 feet tall (ROM is already 7ft tall himself), and we never see Stardrive looking "small." So her only real physical growth seems to be her outer shell.

I've had my head down... have female Transformers (and/or their long absence) been explained in IDW yet? Or are they mostly all still presumed to be from Caminus? Was Stardrive a "fembot" from the beginning, or was she just a protoform that was raised to identify as female in Solstar culture?

zmog

 

Basically, Cybertron had both male and female Transformers during the days of the Thirteen tribes, but Solus Prime left with Caminus and female Cybertronians just kinda... disappeared, I guess. Female Transformer - Transformers Wiki

 

Ah, thanks for the update.

So I suppose the question is... how old is this flashback to Stardrive's origin?

zmog

 

ROM has been a Space Knight for 200 years, so it has to be in that general range, but before he struck out on his own. I guess we'll find out when it comes out. Though that makes Stardrive really young compared to all of the other characters in this continuity, who are mostly millions of years old.

...It just occurred to me, the Galactic Council calls the ship a Cybertronian ship, but Stardrive is female, and it's hard to tell but I think one of the crew members was also female. There also doesn't appear to be any sign of a faction symbol on either of the individuals in the ship (though to be fair we don't see them full body). Now, I'm not saying that it was a Camien ship or other non-aligned vessel that the GC indiscriminately shot down for being Cybertronian, but...

 

Whole mini's been said to take place 200 years before the current series.

And I strongly suspect the ship was a colony one.

 

I think it's been pretty well established the CG are dicks all around.

 

Optimus Prime # 9 includes an interview with the three creators of Rom vs. Transformers: Shining Armor: writers John Barber and Christos Gage; And artist Alex Milne.

I found on another site:

 

Just a pre-mature thought since this is only a preview. Considering her name is Stardrive she might be a triple-changer. If so Springer might be a nice mold choice for a custom. It's only a hypothesis but i'll hold any other ideas until we see her robot and alt mode in full view.

 

Considering that 200 years is basically yesterday on the Cybertronian scale, yeah... female Cybertronians would have been long gone, and Caminus seems to be the only place they existed, we pretty much have to assume it was a Camien ship. Which is sort of technically still a Cybertronian ship full of Cybertronians, so the GC wasn't completely wrong about that.

If it weren't for the fact that the co-pilot of the cruiser seems to be drawn as a fembot, we might have guessed that Stardrive just got "gendered" while growing up on Solstar, but now the Camien theory seems more likely.

The Galactic Council may be dicks, but they're not exactly totally wrong either. In fact, I don't like the way the GC has gradually been maneuvered into the position of being a belligerent, corrupt organization, to the degree that we read them basically as bad guys. I think it was a lot more interesing when they were portrayed as having absolutely reasonable anti-Cybertronian biases and motivations.

Because, let's face it... Cybertronians have been in a galaxy-spanning civil war for literally millions of years, that has involved both outright conquest or genocidal destruction of organic planetary cultures (by the Decepticons), or mass collateral damage due to these places being caught in the crossfire. And then, even before the Cybertronian Civil Wars, it has been all but confirmed that Cybertron under the Senate and the Primes was ALSO engaged in active warfare and conquest enacted against organics.

So for millions and millions of years, Cybertronians really have been an intergalactic plague of death and destruction. So I think the Galactic Council deserves a bit of a break.  

Maybe. But on the other hand, considering that she also becomes a Spaceknight, and with his Solstar tech, ROM can fly through space all by himself, I'd say that Stardrive wouldn't even NEED a dedicated alt-mode in order to be spaceworthy.

zmog

 

The female Cybertronians do not only exist in Caminus, they also exist in other colonies. Here are some examples:

- Moonracee and Override (Velociton).
- Airazor, Blackarachina and Airachnid (Eukaris).
- Elita One, Strika, Lancer and Greenlight (Vigilem).

 

Right, right... forgot about all of that stuff. I haven't picked up most of those titles for quite some time now.

So that means... uh... Caminus left Cybertron... so gender disappeared from Cybertron, but then it still stayed as a feature of all these other isolated colonies? Or... the fembots on those colonies all date back to the departure of the Metrotitans? Or... ?

Anyway, we can assume that Stardrive is from a colony, rather than a Cybertronian Autobot/Decepticon ship.

zmog

 

Maybe this series will just completely do away with the stupid idea that post-Metrotitan Cybertron had no females.

I mean, yeah, I don't know how you'd reconcile that with past stuff that addressed the gender issue, but like I said, the idea of Transformers just not having female/gender is stupid.

 

Then, I have decreed that they be kept, and instructed in the keeping of this tone.

 

I think Galvatron did some female purging in his youth. If not then my remaining guess is the majority of fembots in the past fled on titans and kept stable numbers while they became a rarity on Cybertron to the point gender was lost to them.

 

Well, the idea of them having males but not females is stupid. And the idea that they would have a specialized sub "tribe" of Cybertronians who are just "female" for no reason, and who also mostly happen to look remarkably like idealized earth females is stupid. But the idea of them having no gender at all actually makes lots of sense.

The problem is that IDW never actually handled gender very well. When there were no fembots, they mishandled the notion of "no gender"... and when they re-introduced fembots/gender, they went with a clumsy, awkward explanation and then stumbled over their own pre-existing history. So now their continuity is a convoluted mess... in that sense, I agree with you. A really a massive retcon or an outright reboot doesn't actually sound that bad to me.  

zmog

 

Wait, so Galvatron basically murdered all the females on Cybertron? Ouch.

zmog

 

He probably tried to, anyway, given his view of Cybertronian purity.

We know he succeeded in near complete genocide of the Headmasters, at the least, save Infinitus and Sovereign.

Let's see, Caminus is basically all female Cybertronians, the other colonies seem to be fairly mixed, and Cybertron ended up being all male by the time Nova and Galvatron were done with it. And then Jhiaxus decided to reintroduce gender into the race with his experiments on Arcee, whoever she used to be.


At any rate, this is a very promising crossover so far.