Alright, time to nitpick. Despite having a civilization that's millions of years old, not a lot happens in the Transformers' history. The earliest (non-mythical) thing we know about happened 10 million years ago, the War of the Primes, introduced in Robots in Disguise #34: "The Crucible". Nova declares himself Prime and unites Cybertron's remnants, suddenly jumping into Cybertron's "Golden Age". Transformers from this era are considered very old in the present, but they're not exactly fishes out of temporal water. Then sometime afterward, we enter an era that's still held in living memory.

I'm sorry, but this broke my immersion a little. Has there only been a few generations of Transformers? Where's the "lost history" so often talked about, because that only seems like a few events to me. Earth history puts it to shame. Human history is packed with a plethora of cultures and happenings, a venerable trove of stories packed in the span of a few thousand years. Cybertronian history seems to only go on for a few generations. You have people from the "dawn times" (Cyclonus) beside people who were born just a war ago (Rodimus, any of the M.T.O.s)

Where's the richness of mystery? Even if the writers implied there was a lot of untold history, it'd be better I think.

 

Information Creep - Transformers Wiki

 

Transformers are virtually immortal.

The Great War lasted 4.5 Million Years. The bulk of the current Transformer population on Cybertron were created during the Nova Prime or post-Nova.

 

Information creep was a much needed addition to the series to give at least a semi-passable excuse for handwaving away the legitimate complaint about the juxtaposition of the way characters and events are written occurring on a human timescale and the million+ year lifespans.

But at least this juxtaposition helped lead to this wonderful old Shortpacked! strip.

 

It's, unfortunately, one of these things that were ditched from Furman's original vision. You can blame Megatron: Origin, AHM and "-Acy" series, because originally a timeline for Cybertronian war was supposed to be measured in millenias and centuries (you can see it in Stormbringer). So there would be a bigger time gap betwen Nova's departure and the civil war.
Average lifespan would be shorter. Different generations of TFs who simply weren't around "back then in the Golden Age".

It was changed/retconed by other authors for more "classic" G1 feel, with the Great War and Megatron's rise to power started 4 millions of years ago, but it also made the entire timeline feel like a paper cutout scenic decorations. And of course the whole feel of TFs like Nova Prime and Trion being really ancient went through window. Gap between pre-Great War generations also became blurred.

Current IDW writers now have to deal with this state of things.


You can take the "information creep" as a band aid made to turn this situation into something more believable, it does sound a bit dubious on its own, but that's the best solution for now.

 

What bugs me is that, despite most TF living through a four million year war and not being considered old, they seem to only have clear history for a few million years prior, then it suddenly becomes ancient history. I guess that's where information creep comes in, but it still seems weird to me.

 

That's what I'm saying! If you go back two generations, you've stepped into antiquity.

 

Think about like this: A typical generation of humans is around twenty years. We don't know how long a generation of Transformers lasts so could probably be something like, half a million years. So that would at least imply that there are fewer generations of Transformers than generations of humans, which means the ratio of humans to Transformers is probably something like, 3 to 1, which means there are more ideas, which in turn makes more conflicts, governments, religions, etc.

 

The "four million year war" thing is easily the biggest mistake IDW has made for exactly the reasons you and others have pointed out. It's such an unrealistic amount of time for beings that function, mentally, on the level of people.

It's just one of those things we have to deal with, sadly.

 

I agree considering all the changes made to the timeline due to different writers or retconning.

 

Yeah, 4 hundred or thousand years I could accept...millions not so much.

 

I really wish they'd scrapped the Million year thing. Thousands of years I can deal with, but millions of years is just a ridiculous number and causes all sorts of problems. I appreciate the introduction of the Info Creep, but it's like slapping some duct tape on the massive crack in the dam and hoping no one notices or thinks too hard about it.

 

This applies to pretty much every aspect of all Transformers fiction, honestly.

 

Not to mention how much resources a war of that length would consume. I don't care how big Cybertron is, it is not big enough to sustain a four million year war while it was already having resource problems to begin with.

 

I agree. And I also don't think it's too late to do something about it. There are gaps being filled and soft retcons going all the time. Cybertronian history definitely needs some of that.

While we're at it, it would be nice to see different cultures and civilizations introduced across Cybertron, rather than just "oh, there were 13 tribes, until Galvatron and Nova killed them all". I mean distinct societies in different periods and geograhical locales. Even just the history of "city states" opens up all sorts of possibilities of a diverse culture, rather than one big homogenous monoculture.

The "colonies" in IDW are now kind of getting back to that, but I think it's too little, too late. I'd like to see more of that tied in with Cybertronian history.

That's more of a cheap cop-out, dressed up in intellectual media theory drag. There's a grain of a really fascinating idea there, and I give Roberts full points for that... but when it comes down to it, it's still papering over the issue by saying "um... everybody just kind of forgot stuff".

Never mind eons of literacy, history and culture. They should have invested in some stone slabs or something instead of those cheap HDDs.  

Yeah, I think that chopping down the natural life expectancy of TFs is probably in order... or at least aligning it with differences in spark type or whatever. Maybe some of those ancient dudes who are still around have POP Sparks, or were made of different, primal, "sterner" stuff.

Dreamwave had the "Great Shutdown" as one way of getting around the absurd timeframes... not the worst solution. IDW also tried to break up the Great War into a period of smaller, successive wars, permeated by long periods of resource stockpiling... if each one of those "gaps" in the Great War constituted its own distinct era of history, that would work.

What bugs me is when it seems like pretty much everybody was around for the start of the war. Sure there are MTOs and stuff, but that span of millions of years really seems insignificant when Chromedome, Prowl, Ironhide, Windcharger, Hotrod, Rumble, Blurr, and... well... almost every/anyone is of at least that vintage. It seems especially broken when guys who are traditionally defined by their immaturity, like Bumblebee and Hotrod, fall into that prewar timeframe.

I agree, though I think there's still much that could be done to amend it. It just requires a bit of imagination and a commitment to really dealing with some of those dogged blindspots in the fiction.

I mean, like... we still don't REALLY know how TFs are "born". We've seen naturally occurring sparks, we've seen industrial production of cold-constructed bodies... but the details and history and cultural underpinnings of that side of Transformers is STILL really underdeveloped.

Mind you, I really hope it's not just "a spark turns into a glowing coccoon protoform, and then a full-fledged industrial robot steps out". That kind of organic/mystical stuff really runs against the technological motif.  

I suppose that from our perspective, what's really the difference between 100 000 years, and 1000 000 years, right? Either way, it's incredibly abstract, or incredibly abstract X10.  

And who knows... if they developed an internet early enough, it's entirely believable that the entire species just sat around doing pretty much nothing for millions of years.  

Though of course, the term "year" is pretty easy to destabilize. Cybertron is not Earth, is not the same size, is not in the same solar system, probably has different gravity, etc... since a year is just a rotation around the sun, and a day is just the speed of planetary rotation, NONE of these things have stable values for Cybertron. Maybe every 1 million of their years actually IS the same as 10 000 Earth years.  

That's one thing that Marvel did... they introduced the Vorn as a unit of time (equivalent to 83 Earth years), so TFs weren't always using alien measurements.

Yeah, but I'd rather see it fixed up than ignored. It doesn't need to remain frozen as a fiction aimed at 9-year-olds, especially with an increasingly grownup fandom. It can be a little smarter.  

zmog

 

I feel like they should have something along the lines of Animated's form of creation. Produced protoforms(or just basic skeletons) in stasis pods that, when combined with a spark, (or just before) reconfigure into the basic features of the Transformer, (face, hands, general build) which is then augemented and built into a full Transformer, with the CC's using cheaper body parts over the protoform.

 

It's even worse in the Prime/Aligned continuity. Were Perceptor actually designed and created the classic look of Cybertron's surface according to some big meaning. And everybody forgot about that, including Perceptor, whose still around.
Or Ratchet showing up, being described as an ancient robot, while Optimus was young, who was of course created as one of the first batch of Transformers ever.
Then there is the constant use of "Evolution", without knowing what it means. Or the Predacons being described as the Dinosaur equivalent of Cybertron and having gone extinct, somehow and nobody knows anything about them, when they coexisted with almost everyone alive today, and with the well of allsparks apparently always spitting out a replacement for every living creature that dies.

But yes, idw is a close second with their ridicules time line. In fact, it'S the biggest problem I have with their current comics. The old Furman stuff really made it feel and seem like there was loads of history and many different generations to the point that Nova Prime had entered Legend, now about 70% of characters were actually alive when he was around and have actual memories of him. I don't mind that that'S the case with Rung, since that seems to be part of his mystery, but everyone else?

 

Do we know, for definite, that it is 4 million Earth years, in the IDW universe?

If not, it's possibe that one Earth year is actually 10 Cybertronian years.

 

I don't mind a war lasting 4 million years. A bit ridiculous, sure, but it's an interesting idea to play with. Apply it to Earth, and the entire ecosystem would've evolved around it; it wouldn't just be normal, it'd be the way of life. Peace would cause a mass extinction. A fascinating and terrifying concept.

But that's all negated since the war only takes place during a single generation. The people that started it are still there when it ends, and without any significant changes either. Starscream is still the same type of jet as he always was, compare to Earth armed forces going from wooden biplanes to unmanned drones in less than a century. What's the point of such a huge timescale if you're not even going to use it?

 

One of the things that also bugs me in this topic is the fact that the primal lineage.. consists of about 5 guys..Nova/Nemesis, Nominus, Sentinal, Zeta, Optimus. 3 of which never even saw the real matrix! Gah! I was rather hoping for a few more than that - and yo have some decent honest, straight up Leaders there.