Does anyone know if some of the comics might go into more depth about life on Cybertron? Customs, lifestyles, stuff like that? In general, I'm curious about whatever there may be, but specifically I'm curious about "kids" or "protoforms," whatever you want to call them.

I always envisioned Cybertronians being a social race; not confined to familial units. They might share a dwelling, and have "creators", but I always thought that the kids had free reign, as in they could go where ever they pleased, that everyone would feed and keep watch over and, essentially raise them, as an entire community.

I see all this "sis" and "bro" and "mother and father" stuff floating around, and it makes me wonder what else could be possible.

I'm also curious about reproduction, parring, and the like, but that's a subject for another day. Plus it's been such a widely discussed topic, we can all kind of guess what the standard answers will be.

I know; why spoil all the awesomeness with boring realism?

Just curious. :]

Oh, and, your thoughts and ideas are welcome, too.

 

As far as I know nothing too detailed has been revealed along the lines you are asking.

But as for reproduction they don't make kids. Sparks are imbued into a body via one of several methods. Some come from a place called the Well of All Sparks. Some come from Vector Sigma. Somehow these sparks are placed into a protoform and a Cybertronian is born.

Very rarely do familiar relationships develop though strong bonds of friendship can form. Some explain blatant familial relations, like Sideswipe and Sunstreaker for example, as one spark splitting into two before the "birthing" process is complete.

 

Yeah, I was almost not going to post that, because people get pretty snippy about it. I was actually gonna go edit it out, but since you've already replied, I'll just leave it alone.

 

I've really always wondered the same as well.

 

I've always imagined that life on Cybertron was similar to life on Earth, barring a few things here and there because they're robots.

 

I want to see some comics, or an episode of normal cybertronian life in a series. We got our best view of peaceful TF civilization in Animated, but it wasn't enough. G1 tried, but there wasn't anything interesting there.

Transformers don't have kids. (and protoforms, if you look at the word, is a body without form. once there's life introduced into the protoform, it's no longer a protoform) There's the strange Victory manga that shows them, but I like to ignore that since it goes against all other established canon on the subject for the G1 universe (which includes Beast Wars too). We have no idea how new TFs are brought online in RiD, Unicron Trilogy, or Prime, but it's safe to assume there's no TF children there. In Animated we got to see exactly how new TFs are made, several times. Allspark creates spark, spark enters protoform (or other bit of technology) and comes to life full sized, and already intelligent. No new TFs were made after the great war, because they lost the allspark. So there's absolutely no room for kids there either, even as an alternative creation method, thankfully.

 

Yeah, right; absolutely. I would like to see an episode or a comic or two explore that, as well. So far all we really get are glimpses into their "slang."

And I know the "how are Transformers made" topic is frowned upon--but it isn't the prime focus here, so let's try not to get carried away with it, please. That isn't meant for you four, but for others who may reply. I do regret posting that bit now. Oh well.

 

I like Transformer kids, though...

 

Unfortunately, we don't usually get much info about everyday Cybertronian life. Animated and IDW-verse have some glimpses every now and then, but it's never been a real focus of the story. Even big things like government, the judicial system and religion are barely touched on in most continuities.

I wish they would explore this a little more, because Transformers don't have to be firing lasers at each other 24/7 to be interesting. Maybe it's the sci-fi geek in me, but I would love to know more about the mundane details of their existence as an alien species.

 

The Animated Allspark Almanacs helped with that.

 

Well Mirage hunted Turbofoxes with his rich socialite friends.


Wish i knew what they looked like.

 

Isn't wheelie a kid? Grimlock calls him a "little boy" in the 86 movie.

What about stakeout from victory? The masterforce version of jr headmasters are kids also.

Animated had kids also. Arcee was a school teacher remember.

So there are kids and they have schools in animated anyways.

My guess is the allspark can make kids.teens or adult transformers.

Isn't hot rod a teen and not a full adult?

 

I've often wondered and speculated about this stuff too. The fiction has never really given us definitive answers (and when it has, it's never really been consistent across the various sources).

I tend to see it as being a varied process, but perhaps similar to your own ideas. I ABSOLUTELY REJECT the idea of traditional pair-bonding and pseudo-sexual reproduction in Transformers. As soon as you get too far away from the whole "machine biology" side of things, and make it too similar to humans, it gets pretty boring and unimaginative. I've always liked the ways in which Transformers can seem like us, but still function in entirely different ways, that to humans are more associated with industrial manufacture ("Were you forged, or cold-constructed?" Brilliant!).

I also like the way that this question can have multiple answers. Who says Cybertron is one big culturally-homogeneous society, where everything is always done the same way? Maybe some regions of the planet, robots are built on assembly lines, fully programmed with a skill set and function, and then infused with a spark, while in other areas, a whole community of bots contributes parts to build a protoform, and they pool their sparks to create a new, nascent life, with a basic learning computer mainframe that grows, even as their body is gradually upgraded over time, in a process akin to "childhood".

In the opening sequence of Transformers The Movie '86, we see "children" playing on Lithone before Unicron attacks. Wheelie also, is supposed to be a Cybertronian "child"... though one who probably never grew up because he had no local support to upgrade his body, and nobody besides Sharkticons to relate to (hence his being stuck in a very childlike social behaviour model).

While I'd like to see them do something definitive and official down the line, I hope at least that it's something that leaves the door open for different possibilities, rather than painting it all with one brush. After all... the fandom has been postulating on these things long enough now that there are certainly a lot of interesting theories out there.

zmog

 

You have a good point! Who IS to say practices are the same? I mean, the written (and spoken, if I'm mistaken) language of Cybertron differs from Autobot to Decepticon, at least in the live action movies, which suggests that maybe even another 'dialect' could exist, maybe tons more. Maybe different areas had different practices; north, south, east, west; maybe some bots rejected everyone else's entirely, and formed their own little group, like the Amish (bad example, but you get what I mean.)

Huh. That really made me think. What a great post!

 

Related to the child thing, another thing I've always wondered about is what it's like to be born as a fully-functioning adult. It makes sense that they start life with adult knowledge and skills (how to walk, talk, read, transform, etc), but a lot of more abstract life skills can only happen through actual experience. Logically, even an adult TF would be sort of childlike until they lived a little while and figured out how the world works. This is how I interpreted characters like Hot Rod; while technically he's been an adult all his life, he's immature because he's chronologically younger than most TFs and hasn't had an adult level of life experience yet. Physically he's an adult, but mentally he's still at the teenager level. (Which is to say, he's probably only one million years old, instead of four.  )

It's also interesting that turbofoxes suggest that Cybertron has wildlife, which isn't something we usually see. I remember someone thinking that the Driller from DOTM might have been a Cybertronian beast that Shockwave tamed, and I like that idea.

Wow, I that never even occurred to me! I just assumed that something like that was species-wide, I guess because that's how life on Earth does it. But you're right, there's no reason they couldn't have multiple methods of creating new TFs. And I agree that the forged vs cold constructed thing is effing brilliant. I desperately want more info on that, though we'll probably never get it.  

 

As a kid watching G1, I always figured that Decepticons got their kicks killing and torturing other life forms, and they basically lived to fight and conquer.

With the exception of Mirage hunting "Ravage looking creatures"... I always figured the Autobots liked to sit and joke around a lot. Or some liked to seek knowledge. And then there were bots like Sideswipe and Hot Rod who probably spent a lot of time doing "Jackass" stunts.

 

primus created them

 

Nope. She was a teacher, but she taught newly-online Autobots, not kids. a TF is brought to life via the allspark, goes to school to learn about things they need to know, then it's off to bootcamp or whatever other job training.

Derrick J Wyatt has completely destroyed the possibility of child transformers over on his formspring. They don't exist in Animated.

as for G1, I don't think wheelie is a kid. He's a kid the same way Bumblebee is. A small, immature autobot. Through life experiences, he would mature, but not grow in size, because he's a minibot (like the obviously not child-like Huffer or Gears) As for lithone, yeah, we saw kids there. But who cares, they're not transformers, and they're all dead.

Even in G2, where we saw the budding reproduction method, new transformers were made full size.

There's no reason for robotic life forms to have childhoods. there's no reason for them to start out small. We don't start our machines out small and then make them bigger over time. It just makes sense to start them out full size., since they don't need to grow. replacing the body in stages that make it progressively larger is just a hassle, and a waste of resources and time.

They're alien robots. Let them be alien robots, not everything about them has to be humanized.

 

It really depends on continuity, but as far as a general case, its a knock-down drag-out civil war and guerrilla insurgency among the ruins of a shattered and burnt-out planet. That kind of takes priority in almost every aspect of daily life. Hard to think about raising a family when you're enthralled to a dude who turns into a flying cannon and wants you working 24/7 or else he throws you into a pool of molten metal. Similarly hard to build a community when you're scurrying into enemy facilities to steal what energy you can scavenge just to stay online, knowing that at any moment that lamp-post next to you could turn into a murderous foe who calls down a squadron of geometric-shaped deathbringers on you.

 

These questions is why I was so excited about War for Cybertron. While the game didn't answer enough for me (and to be fair, it never could have) it gave me a glimpse of the planet. This is the reason I want WFC2 to remain on Cybertron as well.

The "normal" life on that planet and indeed the very planet itself is far to under-explored to me. Think about it. Where the planet they were from Earth, we would only know of a couple cities. So we'd know a handful of cities of Earth and have no clue about the Sahara, the Rainforests of South America, Antartica and the Arctic Circle, the Asian/Indian mountains, or even any of the oceans. Man I want to just roam around on that planet!

And I really want Cybertronian culture to be more detailed too.

My dream WFC2 game would start with the player creating a freshly made Transformer and being introduced into what that means along with their history.