In Headmasters - The Death of Ultra Magnus they bury him on earth as opposed to a "burial" in space. But they're machines. Why waste the parts? I'm sure at least some of them could be reused.
Maybe it's considered sacred? Transformers may be machine beings, but they may also have notions of sentimentality, propriety and respect for the dead. When your dog dies, do you eat the body? On the other hand, I often like it when their culture is portrayed as having these very alien and unusual (to our eyes) aspects, and when you think about it, their attidutes about death should be really diifferent than our own. zmog
Because that would be sacreligious? I'd think it would be as blasphemous as Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Though I'm sure there would be some Decepticons that wouldn't have a problem with it.
I get that. It's probably the same as if a human doesn't want to donate organs when they die. That's funny.
What I'd like is that the dead TF is melted down and molded into a metal slab with their name and life details etched on it and then it's placed along with other such slabs to make a Path of Rememberance. Then other TF can walk the path and remember all those that have died. It's less wasteful than burial and less creepy than recycling parts.
Magnus never signed his organ/part donor card. Why not? He found it difficult to deal with thoughts of his own mortality.
I think the answer is that the story was written by humans, and they probably didn't stop and think about how different a machine culture would be from a human culture. I mean, it makes sense to me to reuse the parts.
I have, but I'm not sure that most people have a favourable inclination towards being thoroughly dissected (or having their loved ones dissected) and shared around, rather than being properly put in the ground. I mean, in our world, we like to insulate ourselves from all the gory details of life, whether it's what happens to us after we die, or where our food comes from. Considering the small community of Autobots, scrapping their fallen comrades for spare parts is a lot like eating your friends when they die. There's still a sense of transgression. Or so I might imagine. This is the real truth of it of course. LOTS of stuff in Transformers fiction is just based around analogous human traditions and habits, and has nothing really at all to do with how machine-based aliens would likely behave. That said, there are a lot of things that would "just make sense" in human society too, that we would have a hard time accepting, often due to obsolete traditions, superstitions and general close-mindedness. Every society has it's blinders... things that they do or won't do, purely based habit, propriety or false sanctimony. zmog
Would you like this to happen to you: Some random Decepticon/Autobot:"We love him....he was a great guy....SHOVE HIM INTO THE SPARE PARTS BOX....NOW!!!!" No....you do not.
I've only ever seen Autobots sealing their dead in tombs. Decepticons build statues and monuments, but they may use spare parts for the good of the cause. I can see Autobots honoring the dead by keeping them whole and putting them somewhere they can visit like humans do. Decepticons however I see as possibly being a society where you're honored by having your pieces serve the purposes of the objective until they fall apart. Even in death you are useful.
The comics had a lot of recycling of the dead. Heck, part of the operation Straxus ran was recycling, he'd melt down Autobots to use for parts for the Decepticon Empire.
"Everything is fodder." as Megatron would say, in his original bio quote. True, though the smelting pits were viewed as something abominable, so it's not certain that Straxus' actions wouldn't have been viewed as fiendish by normal Cybertronian values. Of course the fact that he often dumped bots into the smelting pits LIVE probably didn't help his public image much either. On the other hand, in the Marvel comics, wasn't Optimus Prime's whole dead body launched into space, "burial at sea" style? zmog
