I role with the theory whoever created them just kinda "borrowed" ideas from humans for Transformers.

 

Cause our two races are linked. Transformers dna ended up on earth billions of years ago and fate evolved the two species along the same line but using what it had available to it. Organic material

 

Hey they developed war fare back when were just single celled organisms, the real question is why we look like them! And cause otherwise you hot bayformers and that just causes more problems.

 

Because we (Human Beings) made the series and therefore used that point of reference....

 

Costa demonstrating his profound lack of imagination, versatility, and creativity... to cover for his boring, nonsensical, and unpopular run writing Transformers.

During which, the absolute worst, most cliched, most irritating character was human.

Oh Costa...  

zmog

 

Because if people write a story characters will have some type of humanity regardless of if it's supposed to be an alien or space monster.

You can't make something completely not human since you are human.

 

I suppose if you make TF, or any alien species we're supposed to follow the adventures of for any period of time too inhuman then it becomes harder and harder to write something interesting the viewer/reader will want to stick with.
If you go too far away from 'people' then the people consuming that media will (eventually) lose a connection to it and abandon it. That said, I think it's less about form and more about personality and how long we have to experience them for. We have movies and comics and telly shows with animals and weird shit (like bacteria or processes within the body) as characters that aren't humanoid and yet we enjoy those just fine and can even follow movie length stories sometimes featuring them as the main characters, but I would say in just about every case those non-human-looking things exhibit human characteristics for us to latch onto, or at the very least give us something we can project a humanistic personality onto.

R2D2 is always one of my favourite go-to examples for something not humanoid (although even he has two legs, a head and eye and little 'arms' he can project out of his body to manipulate the physical space around him) and which yet still exhibits enough character that people enjoy when he's on-screen (personally he's always been my favourite Star Wars character). But would we be able to stand a whole movie of just Artoo units interacting with their bleeps and whistles? Possibly. At a stretch. If you really loved astromech droids. I reckon they'd need a few more humanistic markers about them added to carry an extended story, which brings us back to making these things more human-like so people can relate to them for longer.

Try another more extreme example: a whole movie with the Sentinels from The Matrix movies as the main characters. Central body-mass, multiple eyes and tentacles and they don't speak. Not human-like at all physically. They did sometimes act in a way we could perhaps hang something vaguely recognisable on, such as stopping and listening for humans, but those moments are brief and it's not like animals don't also do such a thing in the natural world. Of course, remember that we humans love to anthropomorphise animals. I think it's something we subconsciously apply to everything around us, like seeing faces in clouds and other non-human forms around us.

So, to boil this down, the real world answer for humanoid forms is, as ever boringly, so we viewers/readers can easier relate to the TF in fiction. They started off as toys where humanoids piloted vehicles that turned into robots. Of course they were going to be humanoid robots and it's carried on into TF as the majority norm. As things have gone on they've expanded and even more human traits have entered their actions and speech too. Some people hate that, some don't and some are in-between (personally it always bugs me when I see written English used by Cybertronians, such as city signs, grave markers, screen readouts, etc, even when not in a human setting, or actually millions of years before humans even existed).

In-universe explanation though for humanoid Transformers... it could just have been a massive coincidence. There really doesn't have to be a specific reason for it. Sometimes nature comes up with the same answer for different questions told in different places at different times. It's like convergent evolution or whatever it's called.
The humanoid shape has worked out pretty good for us so there must be something beneficial in it. And if you think about it the TF have that and the ability to alter their shape to another if and when needed. They seem to have the right idea.

Or it's because Quintessons built TF for humanoid customers, or because Primus was humanoid and made the TF in his image, or somehow humans went back in time and became the Cybertronians. Or any other number of reasons we can think of to explain it away.

Take your pick.

TLDR: After everything's said and done, there's really no right answer.

 

I agree. All he had to do was to read comics from past Transformers fiction, or watch the original cartoon to get what fans expect from Transformers. If someone had said what Mika Costa had said back in 1984, then I would feel more sympathy since Transformers didn't have established expectations back then. And all the points he has raised has actually been covered in Transformers fiction since its concept. That rant of his just comes across as him holding a big sign saying "I'm stupid, I don't know know why I was hired to write about something I know nothing about, and I refuse to do research despite it being easily available". I'd rather have read a story that shamelessly copies the writing style and characterisation from the Marvel comics or Sunbow cartoon than read a bad story from someone who doesn't have a clue how to write a Transformers story.

 

I have to agree with you and Windsweeper on this - the humanoid body plan, to me, is the most efficient overall, especially for toolmakers. Perhaps all advanced aliens are humanoid, and the Transformers are the ones who hew the closest to humanity in appearance.

Edit: This sort of convergent evolution is something that we see arise throughout nature, so it would make sense for it to come about in other settings.

 

I still don't get why the fuck he thought Transformers were ordinary robots.

ironically enough he wrote Thundercracker best. :/

 

Because Japanese Super Robots animation (Daitarn 3, Danguard Ace, etc.) tended to have humanoid faces and this was just a product of the times. When Hasbro decided to import transforming toys, this is product they chose.

Same reason during the 90's, when McFarlene Spawn toys became popular, everything took on a "scary monster" design aesthetic, including some of Beast Wars.

There's been a nostalgic movement to return to the Diaclone visages since early to mid 2000's...which is why Michael Bay's movie bots (and Ninja Turtles) seem sooooooo far out of place.

 

The bayformers have such detailed/greebly faces that I struggle with reading their emotions a lot of the time. I can't always make out their facial features either. Megatron and Starscream just look like a mushy mess to me.

 

Honestly, I think it's because they would have evolved in similar conditions to us; their humanoid body is entirely due to convergent evolution. Characters like the Mini-Cassettes (excluding the humanoid ones) are domesticated forms of Cybertronian wildlife which naturally evolved transformation as a method of defense, like how humans have domesticated dogs and cats.

Evolution works the same way regardless of where it is; so TF's that experience the same environmental pressures as us would naturally converge into the same evolutionary pattern as us. They look human in physical features, but are entirely alien in function.

I don't want them to get super-alien in design, but they should definitely be more akin to the Marvel comics, where they are unfamiliar with Earth's customs, but are very much akin to us in other ways. It makes them relatable without overhumanizing them.

 

Well, not if they're intelligent sentient beings. I never liked it when they were treated as 'pets' (which they clearly weren't meant to be, if you read the original bios). I think that's one of the things that I liked about Transformers right away... those beast guys totally upset the humanoid standard, in the sense that it demonstrated that Cybertronians come in vastly different shapes, many of them not quite "humanoid".

I don't think that's true. Form follows function, and convergent evolution (in any truly scientific sense, rather than as narrative convenience) really doesn't work that way.

The conditions between Cybertron/Transformers and Earth/Humans are so -incredibly- different, that it's sort of inconceivable that they would end up looking the same. Plus, as I mentioned before, Transformers have very little need for evolution as we know it, since they don't reproduce the same way, don't 'eat' the same things, have totally transformable, upgradeable bodies, and basically live forever. There are just too many specificities in human development that lead us to this, that wouldn't have existed for them at all.

Which is not to say that there's a better explanation other than "Primus did it." or "Space slavers made them." I think it's just one of those sci-fi genre conventions you have to turn a blind eye to...

I agree with that premise. I like having the outward humanoid-ness (even if only out of nostalgia) but I love it when, in spite of appearances, the many ways that they totally differ from us are highlighted.

Yes, but that's really ONLY because McCarthy set it up for him. We wouldn't have gotten 'neutral Thundercracker' otherwise. In that sense, I guess we can say that he at least read the preceding series before he started on the title.  

IS it actually something we see throughout nature though? I mean, can we demonstrate that? I'm not entirely convinced that 'convergent evolution' isn't just something Trekkies made up to explain M-Class planets.  

Word. Every damn issue, there was at least one thing (usually more) that made me groan out loud like I was in some kind of pain. Ugh.

Nothing worse than a writer with only contempt for both his material and his readers.

zmog

 

Thank you too! I like your thoughts as well!

The former. Added some clarification at the top of the thread  

A theory as good as any, thing is, then we have to willingly accept the sci-fi cliché "intelligent life generally look humanoid".

I have toyed around with this thought as well, that Transformers are really just amorphous technological masses that can transform into a number of things; vehicles for transportation and then humanoid modes to interact with humans once they reached Earth!

This obviously ties in with the gender discussion in the other thread as well, as acceptance of gendered attributes/pronouns etc partly relates to the degree of "otherness" we expect to see in Transformers. Everyone has their pain threshold I guess, but mine goes with beards and "cy-gars"...

I can willingly admit I am not super-knowledgeable about sci-fi conventions in general, but I do see the necessity of having relateable characters to create and engaging narrative. It is just that I am trying hard right now to find an in-universe reason for them to be made in our image, more than "convergent evolution". And another thing that comes to mind; if many of the alien races in say Star Trek really represent various political ideologies, etc, what part of human nature can Transformers and their transforming capacities stand metaphor for?

 

Interesting question, though my inclination is to dodge it, simply because I never liked the way that in Star Trek and other sci-fi fictions, cultures were so often broken down to a single idiom.

Transformers do have a single Earth idiom, of course... but it's not ideological so much as conceptual. It's, as I always say, an industrial mechanical metaphor... a filtering of familiar human tropes through the imaginary complex of industrial production and machine motifs.

Culturally and ideologically, however... I think we need to maintain more polysemy in their interpretation. Not just because it's "deeper", but just practically, since Transformers stories almost always take place inside a Cybertronian-centric context, rather than a bunch of humans travelling around to the 'samurai' planet, and then to the 'communist' planet, then to the 'hippie' planet, and so on. It just makes sense for us to have more options spread across the Transformers concept, than one overriding theme.

As always, I like analogies... but not when they're almost direct 1:1 relationships. There should always be something in there that throws off a too-easy comparison.

zmog

 

Yeah that's true.

 

SMOG: I was referring to the concept of convergent evolution in general - I should have been more clear on that. My apologies.

 

Well that cliché was already built into the show, whether it explains the Transformers specifically or not.

But here's how I look at it. The mere fact of other humanoids existing is going to be a result of convergent evolution, and the sheer amount of potential for life within a vast universe. But the universe is vast, and incredibly so. The universe could be positively teeming with intelligent life, humanoid or otherwise, but those life forms finding one another in the void of space is against the odds. Despite those odds, we have the best odds of meeting and recognizing life that resembles ours. Non-humanoid life could far outnumber humanoid life, but we have no idea how to look for it or recognize it. So humanoids are going to recognize and seek each other out more readily, and will therefore be overrepresented in the story.  

 

I fell like this thread needs to rise again, as the more recent one about gender is a parallel to this question.

I also had pointed out in another thread that we do get the "but they are aliens and don't think like we do/are not like us", for which both this and the gender thread does show comments that are related to this and provide example of this very thing.

They have human emotions, that a photocopier wouldn't have, no matter how sophisticate it would be, unless it was programmed to mimic emotions.

The reality is that these are toys, and meant to sell. A humanoid body is relatable to us, much more than if Transformers were toasters that would sprout wheels, lamps with wings, and such. Anything beyond that is fiction, it's plot driven by the story teller/author.