lol, I have Roadblock and LOVED him as a kid. He's basically a mega pretender (transforming robot inside a transforming shell) that lies down in a big green vehicle. So, yeah, he's pretty weird.

The little robot just folded in half to become a tank thing--I used to "transform" my Star Wars 8D8 figure the same way, lol. It looked similar too! The pretender shell basically just fell forward and did the extreme splits to become a jet. The big vehicle just opened up like a clam. Weird now, but it was soooper awesome then, lol.

 

In my imagination, the arms and legs that were visible were all part of cyborg armies bent on crushing the forces of darkness and evil, as they jumped off of the worlds tallest cliffs to transform into futuristic warriors of righteousness......

Or maybe that's just me.

 

So they can poke your eyes out. But seriously, it was a pretty poor fiction idea, but the toys were awesome, and that does it for me  

 

Now the only mega pretender I have is roadblock. And that's basicly a armored carrier that brings a pretender shell into a combat zone. So its not really a disguise, And if that's the case, there might be fiction suggesting its more effective for the autobot and decepticon frontlines than the mechas alone are. Taking IDW stormbringer into account pretender tech is like the highest level of techno organic fusion. The goal of this technology was to allow Transformers to survive an impending environmental collapse on their home planet, and for thunderwing he became super powerful but also irrationally destructive. And bludgeon trying to accelerate the process went comatose.

The technobots built four shells more in the style of the humanoid pretender space suits, so they could fight the powered up cyclonus and enter the dead universe to dispose of the nega-cores. The suits protected them from the deadly energies of this dimension.

 

QFT.

Personally I always thought they were a far better idea then the actual Pretenders; whom I viewed as a stupid concept.

Not to sound too much like a familiar internet meme, but it was a Transformer within a Transformer. That concept has a ton of applications, kind of like a reverse of the small robots that accompanied the likes of Metroplex, Fort Max, and Trypticon.

The bot is safe from outside aggressors thanks to the shell, could perform multiple functions without being compromised by a multimode body, could be in two places at the same time, and was a micro-combiner on top of that. As for the Robots in Disguise angle, instead of thinking of it as the outside mode fooling anyone, think of it as people not realizing that there's an inner bot and fooling them in that regard.

On a slightly seperate tangent, I'm quite looking forward to Thunderwing.

 

Fiction wise, I like to think they are upgrades of the Masterforce powers. They're humans / humanoids in battlesuits. They wear the suits with the machine parts to go into a fight, not to blend in.

Though to be honest, I think the whole transformation angle is better handled either by Victory's Crossformers or IDW's approach, both of which made the suits purely mechanical without the organic element. A human turning into an attack helicopter doesn't exactly work for me.

 

If you only wanted to discus the fiction then why start this thread in the Transformers Toy Discussion section here??

It would have been better off in the Transformers General Discussion section.

 

It could be argued that the fiction of the Pretenders is tied to the toyline...

Tigermegatron- have you read all of the bios from the original tech specs and everything? It may clue you in to what they were all about. I'm about to go do that, I'll chime in later with my thoughts