> Racism long dead.
>The year that I had white strangers legit say racist shit to me.

lol, come on.

Anyways why wouldn't it be bad anyways? Why wouldn't it fit? You're telling me you can't imagine an idea that "race" could be tied to alt modes? How you could easily make it NOT foreign by turning it into something extremely plausible in the Transformers world? You can't imagine a bunch of flying alt mode bigots hating on alt modes that can't take to the sky just on that principle alone?

 

It's not cool.

I said the same thing Patrick said, and I live in San Francisco.

Between where I live, where I work, and who I hang out with online, there is no possible way that I could think the world is still chock full of racism because I'm hanging out with too many unenlightened, openly racist people. I think that, as does Patrick, because it is true.

 

I just think that racism as cause of conflict is a cheap, easy, cop-out killswitch in writing fiction. We all know racism is the irrational hatred of differences purely due to being different, and it's a terrible thing we struggle to get rid of in real life, no question. But that's exactly the problem for fictional conflict based off it, there's no question it's wrong. The values the Autobots and Decepticons might hold are far more interesting primary reasons for conflict than basing it off of race. If it's about moral ideals or a political system, there's a real debate for finding the right answer, if there even is one. Then we get characters on both sides who can be right about something, and Transformers has shown several times that the Decepticons can be both convincing villains and reasonable enduring foils to Autobot ideals, and we get to participate in this debate and think, 'this Decepticon has a point, but this Autobot isn't wrong either; I get why they don't understand each other, the right thing to do is this, but it'll be hard for them...' . If we simplify it down to race, the Decepticons would 99% most likely end up the aggressors, and suddenly their capacity to have members with sympathetic motivations, visions, or goals goes way down and the whole thing becomes black and white and uninteresting.

One very good depiction of tribalism and divisions in science fiction is The Expanse. It establishes 3 clashing factions that have shaped their own worlds and developed their own lifestyles and cultures, and are even so physically incompatible they're almost alien to each other with how they struggle or even fail to live on each other's domains. But it's not about the xenophobia. The Martians have a singular goal of turning a lifeless rock into a garden, the Earthers had a garden, and they paved it, and the Belters live under the boot of both. Often the leadership of each of them, if they can even be united, will bring suffering to the others for the genuine benefit of their own people, like a division of the Belters throwing big rocks at Earth to become the boot instead of the ass under it, or the Earthers infecting a Belt colony with a mutagenic material in hopes of learning to use it to survive an impending alien danger. There's rhyme and reason to the horrible things done, but the main characters know it doesn't justify it, and, even if they're pulled in the direction of one division, want to bring communication, understanding, and empathy to these worlds in hopes of peace, and that's the core of the story, and it's damn good, and I think Transformers can be just as good.

So no, my being against the entire Cybertronian war being based off of race is no knee-jerk reaction. I just want a well-concieved, multi-faceted reason for the war that is the backbone of the whole series. I would, however, not mind racism being touched on in a smaller capacity.

 

Anyway, I tried to make a case for/against Decepticons-as-race and I'm just not sure where exactly I stand on it. Beside, alt-mode-as-social-standing (or Functionism) is, in fancier terms, a caste system which is a bit different and has much different implications. By this extension, if we assume all Cybertronian life with a spark to be the same species then we are looking at a caste-based species with a level of size, intelligent, body shape and abilities far beyond anything we've seen in nature. A species whose member can be anything from mechanimals to intelligent, non-humanoids (see: Sky Lynx) to the more traditional humanoid transforming robot, themselves split between beast and vehicle modes. Again, the TF Prime Predacons vs 'regular' Transformers come to mind, as their differences became quite moot the moment Predaking realized he could transform and talk.

That said, being from the Beast era I'm a lot less attached to alt-mode-as-immutable-thing or similar body attachments and much more a fan of Transformers bodies being far more mutable, being able to be rebuilt and redesigned quite a bit more. They are mechanical life, after all. Alive, yes, but still with a body made of machinery.

 

I live in the St. Louis area, pretty close to where some stuff happened that made the news not too long ago.

 

Well put response!

For the record I think it'd be boring if that was the reason for their conflict as well, I simply think it's a reasonable topic to at least bring up since they're robots, so naturally people will wonder "who made them? Are they ACTUALLY capable of free-will? What if the Decepticons were built to be more inclined to be war machines?"

I think IDW had a good idea with the whole 'forged' / constructed cold thing but just failed to fully utilize it, I thought Roberts' original concept for it was interesting, sadly I can't even recall where I read his original plan. Basically post-war Cybertron devolving into forged Vs. Constructed cold I THINK? I'm sure I read that somewhere. Basically doing more with the concept 'Is there a reason constructed cold bots seem more prone to doing immoral things?' But even then I'm not saying the difference in birth should be the sole reason, but as a plot point it'd be interesting.

 

Okay, random idea: Decepticons-as-Transformers-super soldiers. Basically, taking the Warrior Caste idea and the Forged/Constructed cold idea to a dark place. Now it isn't one I would use, but what about Decepticons having started as that universe version of mass production. A version of Cybertron that badly needed cheap, expendable troop for some alien war and kept producing more and more accelerated growth Transformers and engineering them to be little more than world-destroying infiltration machines or planet-busting weapons. Then oh, surprise, they are hyper aggressive, ambitious (but not very emotionally and philosophically developed) and most of all way stronger than the average robot joe. Basically, Transformers version of the Clone Troopers meet Augments, maybe? That would tie in pretty well into a Quintesson origin and also somewhat echoes G2's weird budding storyline.

 

Yeah I think I remember hearing about some of that.

But I'm guessing you don't choose to hang out with openly racist people either. <3

 

I try to avoid it if I can help it. I learned a lot about a few people in my life in recent years.

I'll just leave it at that so as not to derail the thread.

 

The best (major) villain That the tf franchise has ever had was d-void. Bite me

 

D-void is a good nickname for BW Megatron.

 

I meant major as in majorly large or gigantic like unicron

 

Blue Bluestreak should just be an upgraded Bluestreak.

Because he needs to be a fucking main character. The protagonist of a full spinoff, even.

 

TFP Starscream

 

I know I've brought it before in previous post, but I'm not a fan of alt mode essentialism. However I understand that there need to be some amount of story logic on why not everyone can be a plane or even a titan-sized ship or city. I also quite like it when characters have the ability to rescan a mode that share the same general mass, shape and function or are simply cosmetically changing from one car year to another, akin to what movie Bumblebee does. That seems like something logical for incarnations of Transformers where scanning is built-in.

It would also fit the more vain characters to constantly be scanning the latest concept cars.

 

Hasbro has tried to do original things up to 2020, most people just weren't interested in RID 2015 and Cyberverse wich created the illusion that all mainstream TF media was G1 even thou up to the Netflix show the only G1 thing most casual fans were exposed to, were Bumblebee 2017 and The Prime Wars trilogy, both of wich really weren't as unoriginal as they seem. Most of the G1 pandering came in form of merchandise and comics wich has only recently (depends on what you call recently) take over cartoons. Now that we don't have anything non G1 except for these gimmicky shelf warmer Cyberverse figures, The G1 is consuming us and listening to Hasbro's plans makes us look towards a dark future.

The Netflix show actually could be good if it had competent writers. But it's Roosterteeth so.

 

Roosterteeth's only producing it.

The creative team were all brought over from the Prime Wars Trilogy.

Which explains a lot.

 

Sad thing is, had we gotten a more 'proper' adaptation of the Prime Wars trilogy? It could have ended radically different from the G1 roots because these toyline focused on some very 'super robot'-ish elements as well as characters which didn't get much screentime outside of Japan. Imagine a Titans Return cartoon where the main Headmasters and maybe the triple changer Voyager headmasters are in the main cast! You'd have Mindwipe, Chromedome, Octane and more being the main cast of a show. Possibly even Sentinel Prime, Overlord, Six Shot and Black Shadow. Hell maybe even the American debut of Liokaiser if you extended it to the exclusives. You would have seen the new Dinobot Combiner, Volcanicus, fight against the Terrorcons as Abominus during Power of the Primes. Maybe backed up by the monsterbots and Optimus Primal of all characters! We only briefly got a taste of this with the Machinima shows and it wasn't done well.

Prime War toyline could have offered us some pretty crazy cast for a TV show but it was never meant to happen, sadly.

 

Well, at least we know that the budget excuse doesn't work anymore.

 

Prime Wars also tried this weird thing where they tried to mesh IDW and Sunbow G1 together for their worlds backstory.

Didn't really work out that well.