Ratchet to Raff: We are an ancient alien race and our life cycles are hundreds of millions of years long and our technology is far superior to that of earth's. But right now, we need you, little eight year old human boy, to write a virus that we can introduce into a cybertronian being. And not only do we want you to write the virus, but we want you to do it in a 22 minute timeframe of which we have already spent 8 minutes. And.. ermm.. we can't write this virus ourselves, because in our hundred million year lifecycle, we were just too busy to take the cybertronian virus writing class, which, of course, you took at your elementary school between lunch and recess.

HOW I LOVE THE GENIUS WRITING OF TRANSFORMERS PRIME!!

 

All I can say is: Raf is a beast in programming languages.



It's interesting that laserbeak had an OS. My guess is that its not a true Cybertronian creature, since I doubt Primus requires the installation of operating systems to breathe life into Cybertronians.

 

What part of Y7 programming did you not understand before you started watching?

 

Beast Wars was also for children, but the writers actually had enough respect for their viewers to not pull so much crappy writing out of their ass.

 

You've got it all wrong hulk. That was a throwback to Independence Day and all other movies in which they upload a virus to the aliens.

 

The part where we all suddenly decided to treat our kids like they have brain damage.. :-/

 

Raf is young Jeff Goldblum.

 

I wanna see someone call Arcee lil' twerp now for some reason.

 

I'm confused. Is this thread meant to insult Prime?

 

First off, you guys are missing the point. Virus' would be considered biological warfare on cybertron therefore outlawed long ago. If any had the know how it would be a decepticon. Raf is supposed to be a young genius and yes there are 12 year olds out there who are intelligent enough to write virus' and then some. The only questionable part is the time frame to get it done. But its a show for entertainment.

By the way, how did you guys survive G1? The thousands of errors in that show and you still became transformer fans?

 

You know, he could have a code library; putting the virus together using pre-typed code. I think its fairly common to have copies of previous work and just put them together in different ways later on.


Just a thought.

Anyway, I'm laserbeak's condition isn't the same for all Cybertronians. I'd rather have Cybertronians not running on some type of Operating system, I'd rather have them like earth life. I'm hoping laserbeak was just a cybernetic extension of a Cybertronium based lifeform.

It's just a preference.

 

That little eight-year old boy can also understand Cybertronian machine language like it was his native tongue. I think he'd be up to the task of writing a virus.

Besides, as part of Ratchet's character development he's come to respect Raf's skills, so it would be logical that he'd go to the kid for any haxx0ring.

 

While I didn't care for the fact that Raf created the virus all on his own instead of co-designing it with Ratchet, at this point I just accepted it as an attempt to give a much-ignored character a little screentime.

Ironically, the plot-significance of the virus would probably be easier for me to swallow if they had played up the shows' hacker-child character as a cartoonishly eccentric super-genius kid from the very beginning instead of the awkward little ball of insecurity that is Raf.

Dude, just don't. Whether it's to defend Prime or something like the Bay-movies, the fact of the matter is that G1 was made over 20 years ago. Given that today's audiences are more gere-savvy than ever thanks to the intermawebs, you can't use such an old standard for defending modern short-comings.

 

But they have played him as a super-genius from day one. Since the first episode of the Darkness Rising mini-series, he's had the ability to understand Bumblee's machine language. He took one look at the Space Bridge schematics and had an idea of what it was. He's had several other spots where he's shown Hollywood-hacking the shit out of something, be it a radio telescope array, tracking a moving train and deploying a Ground Bridge inside it, and a few other things that I've forgotten.

It's not like he only started programming on the show just now.

 

I'm aware. My selling point was the "cartoonishly eccentric" part. Sorry for not making that clear.

 

Tell that to Rhinox & his chain guns.  

 

Well then you'll have to pardon me for not wanting that. I personally think cartoonishly eccentric genius is overplayed, and these days only belongs on a Doctor Who serial.

I like that Raf is more of a wallflower-ish super-nerd.

 

Well I could see ROTF Arcee yelling at someone being a twerp.  

 

Dreadwing: Autobot warrior, I shall honorably insult you.

 

Raf is a Cybertronian relic. That's how he understands Bumblebee. That's how he can seemingly understand Cybertronian coding and technology.
Have we ever seen his parents? June says she spoke to them, presumably on the phone. Raf built a sophisticated answering machine to pretend to be his parents. Is Raf aware of any of this? Probably not. He goes home every day and goes into stasis mode and wakes thinking he's had a normal human home life.