You know, I can't say I remember this ever being tackled in TF media... As long as I can remember Transformers have been pretty anthropomorphised (illogically given human characteristics), but as our own technology advances to where our machines are all "silently" super-connected, I've increasingly thought it should be explained somewhere why Transformers don't do everything wirelessly, or non-physically too. It stands to reason that for a mechanical race the most logical way to fire weaponry, talk, or share data would simply be to transmit it all over Cybertronian bluetooth (Subspace?). I mean, it's kind of silly that their guns have triggers, computers have buttons, and that they have mouths, and use audio, and hand and facial gestures for communication, etc... And then I came up with a reason to satisfy this logic hole that was forming. If super-advanced robots were doing everything wirelessly, their actions and communications would be that much more open to outside influence and hacking. Especially in a perennial wartime environment. Hence acting more like "people" and less like "robots" actually makes a lot of sense. (And if you wanted to get even geekier about it, it's pretty likely that Cybertron, not having a real atmosphere/magnetosphere would probably be host to a ton more radio interference than Earth as well). But I still find it curious that I've never seen it mentioned in any popular TF media. Not even in MTMTE comics, whose writer has gone out of his way to "world build" believable ways for the TFs to act as mechanical beings. Am I the only one who has thought about this a lot? Or has this been cleared up before?
Sure would make them boring if the never talked and just talked wirelessly. Also considering the franchise is meant as entertainment for us, we want them to be what we are familiar with. So many have human features. You'd probably not be able to connect with them if they looked like random things.
Yeah I believe the reason why they've started to looked,sounded and acted less like industrial robots over the years is because not only does it make them feel more like metal people who just happen to be robotic but also bring in an other worldly feature to them that makes them feel like they belong in another world as opposed to just looking like man made robots on Earth and just taking their word for being from another planet for it unless if that's the intent of course being actually man made. I like that because it helps make them be their own thing from robots from other media.
Well, they're "robots in disguise." So what does that mean? They can alter their physical forms to resemble the local machines of wherever they happen to be. But is that the extent of it? I think it goes beyond that. I see the Transformers as chameleonic on levels beyond just the physical. I don't even think they do it consciously, I think it's just an innate part of their programming: mimic everything in every way. So put Transformers on Earth where they can interact with humans, and pretty soon they're going to start acting like humans. It would be the same wherever they go and whatever species they meet.
