I'd wish this difference between TFs and humans would be a bit more expanded upon.

If you are a Cybertronian and you are coming from a species with technology that remains mostly unchanged through your entire lifespan and then you are encountering species that made a jump from a barely flying pathetic contraptions to space flight and reverse-engineering and building a complete Cybertronian bodies, and those species were made borderline hostile to your entire kind... That's a good reason to be cautious and maybe, if you are a Decepticon, to ponder taking care of humans just to stay on the safe side of things.

But for now it's only Galvatron who acts like humans mayyyybe could be a future problem. An accomplished scientist like Jetfire just handwaves it, because few weeks ago human probes totally were a non-issue.

 

Yeah, I've always preferred something like that, but with the slight variation that the protoform doesn't work any nanotech/spark-magic. The process of building a protoform up to a complete TF is a slow process of adding custom parts to the chassis to suit its aptitudes and abilities... but it pays off, by having a Spark that has a thoroughly tested, hand-made (forged) body that it is acclimated to... as opposed to just slamming a spark into a mass-produced body.

Also, following the long-term process, the core programming could be supplemented by a learning matrix based on the spark's "temperament"... instead of having full suite of databases and knowledge and occupational skills rammed into it, regardless of the spark's particular aptitudes.

That way, the difference between the "forged" upbringing, and the "mass produced" would also carry other class distinctions, one being from an affluent stable society where Cybertronians were cultivated over time, and the other being the product of a resource-poor, slapdash wartime assembly-line, where quality is a matter of happenstance, rather than design.

But that's getting into fanon territory there. Suffice to say, I think that could parallel some aspects of human development without forsaking the mechanical assembly motif, and still allow for uniques, protoforms, or 'instant' MTO type bots. I felt like Roberts was going there in Chaos Theory when the concept of "forged or constructed cold" was first introduced, but since then the nuances have shifted a bit.

Yeah, it's not much of a lineage, if you trace it just from Nova... though now it's looking like IDW is also adopting the "13 Primes" from Hasbro's 'aligned' fiction, so now there's a whole generation of Primes who possibly predate Nova, whose demise marks a paradigm shift/break in history, separating two eras... a fragmented, feudal one, and the later "golden age" of Nova.

Certainly, even aside from info-creep, there's plenty of room to insert some revisionist history and propaganda there.

zmog

 

Well, at least MTMTE tries to break the mold.

 

Well, there has been lots of histories: The birth of Primus, The scattering of the Titans era, the 13 Primes era, The Nova Prime era, the functionist council era, the Great War era, and now we have the Primordial Cybertron era.
A "primordial" cybetron really begs a question though: So Cybetron were not always metallic? Has there been organic beings on Cybetron prior to transformers? is Primus actually a genius who build the first transformers or has seeded Cybetron with mechanical precursors that change all of the living creatures into mechanical, spark based creatures? Is this Cybertron a long lost colonies of Stentarians (of the evil Ammonites and the heroic Terradores)? So many questions!

 

Oh, for sure. Roberts does his part seeding the past with interesting details and cultural flavour... though a lot of it is "recent" past (like, 4 million years ago   ), rather than adding 'ancient' eras.

Wait, where is this discussion of a "primordial age" coming from? I thought I was up-to-date on the latest developments in the comics...

zmog

 

Primordial Cybertron, which we are having in IDW right now: Cybertron is a planet devoid of any modern infrastructure except the remnant of kimia satellite and Metroplex.

 

Four mil is 'the last generation we have a lot of survivors in, and their memories are often a bit blurred but still mostly useful.'

A few mil before that is 'we have scattered survivors, and things are really blurred, as we've gone below critical mass of verifiable information.' In part because most of the four-mil people were during an era of population growth, while new creation died down a lot once the war started.

It's not quite that bad. Nova was gone for awhile by the time Optimus and Megatron showed up.

Lesse, I think it's Cyclonus, Dai Atlas, Jhiaxus, Arcee, Alpha Trion, maybe Rung, and probably Kup who're that old.

Yes, this is the one that gets me too.


IMO, there should've been a ton more big bots around at the start, famous names now gone, and the main ones may have been around, and Optimus still the biggest, but what we have now the winnowed down remained of what was once much more.


I feel the -acy books are especially bad about it, because after Autocracy, they try and get things down to the few-famous-bot status quo as fast as possible. At least the Shadowplay stuff tosses in Glitch and Roller and Proteus, even if it's, like, 80% people we know.

 

On that, I want to add in- the early war era.

That is to say, the period after Nominus's death when the war was persecuted first by Sentinel, then by Zeta, but before the fall of the senates and the rise of Optimus,

We don't know how long that is exactly but it might've been a few hundred thousand years for all we know.

 

Yeah, I did not like making the young bots be actually millions of years old. For example Hot Rod I imagined to be built in the 80s or something like that and not being there from the start. That also makes them appear dumb, because they are millions of years old and did not develop much in that time?

And how did they fail to kill so few bots if they are warring for millions of years?  

 

That's always bothered me about Hot Rod. At least the G2 comics tried to amend that or at least hinted at it.

 

Oh, that. It implies that there was a 'primitive' state like this once before, but we don't know if there actually was, or what happened then. Personally, I feel like IDW has sort of botched Cybertron across the board... first it was a toxic, depopulated world, then it was a primitive wasteland with one city, because apparently the planet "rebooted". Fortunately, we've had the flashback stories to give us some sense of what society was like for TFs.

Wasn't it implied that Trypticon was from some ancient era of Cybertron as well? Be nice to know where that fits in.

Also Shockwave and Tailgate. And probably Ratbat.

Has Arcee actually been confirmed? Do we know for sure that she was captured in the golden age, and not sometime after by Dead Universe Jhiaxus? After all, he was still running around building labs and stuff at that time, wasn't he?

Yeah, it does seem pretty much like it's all the same gang. Good thing none of those guys died, eh? It pays to be in Prime's personal entourage I guess.  

It's hard to see that as a distinct era though, since it still seems like part of a continuum with the same generation of characters. I guess if we were to break the era since Nova up into ages based on the succession of Primes, it makes a certain amount of sense... except some of those primes didn't last so long.

zmog

 

Rewatched War Dawn yesterday, and you thing four million years is bad, the G1 cartoon had Orion Pax rebuilt into Optimus at the start of the war at nine million years ago.

Keep in mind that if you go with Transformers as truly mechanical beings then living for millions of years is not unreasonable. They would be able to just replace parts as needed, and unlike humans with our shortening Telomeres they wouldn't age on a genetic level.

The other odd question is that TF's know about information creep. You'd think they'd then write some stuff down. "Hey Brawn what were you doing ten million years ago?" "Well Cliffjumper, according to my journal I was helping build a road in Polyhex."

As for the lack of multiple cultures, ask yourself how often you see a planet have more than one culture in science fiction? Not very often, and never nearly as many as you find on earth. All Vulcans, Klingons, Asari, Wookies, Etc will be from the same culture.

 

Right. Machines never break down. In fact, my computer will probably keep on chugging on for another hundred years, right?  

I think there's a limit to how much you can simply replace over time. In fact, I kind of liked the point in IDW, where Kup was so old, that he wasn't compatible with a lot of replacement parts. There must be something intrinsic to who and what a TF is, that can't simply be swapped out, right?

(ignoring Costa's resurrection of Ironhide of course...   )

Part of the issue is that we don't know quite enough about the Cybertronian biology... we know that TFs can replace their transformation cogs, but their brains and their sparks... they might come with an expiration date. Or they could at least.

I guess it depends on what the journal is recorded on, right? Carved in stone might work for them.  

Yup. Pretty stupid, isn't it? Biodiversity and environments too, seems pretty limited on other planets. It's always Jungle-Planet, Desert Planet, Ice-Planet, etc...

Adding to that, the fictions you cited tend to be settings that are reliant on having a spectrum of alien cultures, so there tends to be a lot more simplification, while Transformers is mostly just focused on one species (two if you count earthlings).

zmog

 

Wasn't Megatron worried that his spark starts to fade? Seems like their spark has an expiration date and that's about the only part impossible to replace.
And the most important one...

 

He was reportedly made by Mortilus back in the same era as the Metrotitans.

Shockwave and Tailgate, yes. Ratbat, he was a senator at the start of the Decepticon uprising but that's all we know, he could've been a million years post-arc.

It hasn't been confirmed, no.

Yea :/

I really wish there were more Rollers and Ultra Magnuses and Glitches.

It's close enough that a lot of characters were in both, but for example, Hot Rod came online during that time frame. And due to the shortness of prime lengths, I do kinda lump Sentinel and Zeta together time wise. Nominus had a good long run, Sentinel a shorter one where the war hadn't *quite* broken out but was building, and Zeta a short-but-quite-eventful one during the war. Long enough for Orion to get somewhat bitter, even.


Maybe not separate eras in terms of characters too much, since not a lot of sparks were being activated at that point, largely Rodimus's batch, but still a reasonably significant amount of time.

Records get lost over that time frame too, and people write with bias, and write down after-the-fact stuff which is wrong.

Heck, relying on writings is probably where a number of errors creep in.

The war-Cybertronians themselves really have just the two.

Which frankly does make some sense, as due to the war each side stays fairly connected to each other, except when they're off in small groups. Different cultures exist with sizable groups largely are among themselves for a significant period. A small group's 'culture' changes are effectively military-unit culture, and then when they meet back with the whole they naturally assimilate into the whole, so you don't have the culture splitting into multiple effect, just these small groups introducing new factors.


Where you'd see culture form is larger groups who avoid contact, like Deathsaurus's, or the Nail's. And we get some of that from the Nails, though it's not emphasized too much.

 

Reportly, they did kill millions of cybertronians on each side, and took breaks that measured in the thousands of years between brief battles.

Just, y'know, not the bots we *know*.

 

Well, Tailgate's cybercrosis was basically that, wasn't it? A spark running unmaintained for 8 million years, finally giving up the fight? Mind you... that's 8 million years. Totally insane.

Yeah, just guessing, based on the fact that most of the Senators seem like fancy old-timers... there's probably a class thing going there, maybe based on seniority to a degree.

And this is the problem, really... the characters' lives are so expansive that breaking things down into "eras" starts to lose meaning... even if they are millions of years long.

I mean, Tailgate is 2/3 as old as all Cybertronian history... Cyclonus is even older. I mean, their "war of the gods" only happened 12 million years ago! It sounds like a long time, but not when you compare it with the other timeframes that are going around.

Relying on memory is probably worse.  

Starting with the war, sure... except that there would probably still be a vein of regionalism dating back to previous eras.

The war would homogenize that to a degree, especially for the warborn... but it seems like there are still plenty of guys who remember what it was like before. Making TFs a monoculture really makes Cybertron feel pretty small...

How big is Cybertron in IDW, anyway? In the G1 Cartoon it was about the size of the moon, but in G1 Marvel it was the size of Saturn.

I mean, I'm assuming that they had mass communication, but despite that influence, there would still be geographical divides in culture and politics, assuming that Cyberton wasn't just one completely homogenous landscape. A society built up around a Cesium mining installation, or located at a major trade hub, or isolated somewhere in the Acid Sea (or whatever) would have its own indigenous character and traditions, I would think.

I mean, you could try to make arguments for a monoculture too... but why would you? Why choose to be boring, right?  

zmog

 

Honestly?

Honestly?

I think this all started to go wrong the first time that the Transformers comic/cartoon/bio gestalt bolted back to Cybertron to grab some new toys, essentially ignoring the first, basic truth of the Transformers scenario--they had all been frozen for millions of years and there was no telling where their home was, what it was like, or if it existed.

They took "robots can be repaired after millions of years given energy" and turned that into "Cybertron is still essentially the same, just the Decepticons won the war and about one generation has passed." There's no indication that Perceptor and Blaster had met Optimus Prime in person before, but they paid homage to his statue. When the Autobots met up later, no cultural or technological shock was depicted.

But yeah, in the context of the IDW universe, the post-Furman team fucked this one up altogether.

 

I try to look at the 4 million year long war as the second thirty years war (World War I and II); it defined a generation. Is it a perfect comparison? Nope, but it helps.

To answer the OP I would also like to see the history further expanded further.

 

It depends on the machine. Also I was reffering more specifically to early, early G1 cartoons back when we didn't have sparks and brain modules. As to what makes them intrinsic to them, in that case it might be more the software than the hardware. Most of the second set of characters got introduced on the Ark from having their personality programs loaded into new bodies.

Also the kind of machine it is makes a difference on how long it can last without matainence. For example, assuming they are stored in good conditions, older cars take a lot longer to degrade than modern cars due to not having electronics.

Wasn't part of the problem with Kup that he hadn't upgraded his systems in so long that it rendered him incompatable with newer stuff, but if he had been upgrading it wouldn't have been a problem?

Granted the whole ludicrous amount of time thing shouldn't be surprising. It is after all another form of scale.

Funnily enough the G1 cartoon had a lot of forgotten generations and stuff in it's background. I remember an episode where Swoop and Spike found a machine with history files and there had been numerous wars before the current one. And all the random stuff that was really dangerous laying around in the lower levels, not all of which seemed to be of Quintession origins.