Have I been dead and that’s why I haven’t posted? Have I been alive this whole time and just been slacking off? Is a ghost writing this? Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z.
…Just trying to get back in the groove of drawing bots…oldest member of the old bot brigade was the sacrifice!
The new chapter of Rescue Mission is starting next Sunday! Don’t miss it! Blurr’s fate will be decided by the current magnus, but opinions are not in Blurr’s best favour!
The second printing of the TFNation 2017 exclusive graphic novel was recently posted to the attendees who missed out on it at the con, and is now arriving in US mailboxes! I think that means it’s well past time we gave you a proper three-page-preview, so check out the beginning of the story in these pages from Chapter 1, featuring art, colours AND sfx by @kingoji and letters by Andrew Turnbull! @dyemooch provides the cover, and @herzspalter and Gavin Spence drew Chapters 2 and 3, all written by me and Jim Sorenson!
(“Trial and Error” is an unofficial graphic novel based on the unmade Season 4 of Transformers Animated, bringing the series to a conclusion. It is a non-profit production, unaffiliated with Hasbro, produced exclusively for attendees of TFNation 2017.)
@ tfa please explain to me how the autobot high council works & whether or not it’s equal parts civilian & military
the magnus is the chairman & obviously ultimately holds the highest authority but alpha trion chairs the civilian guilds and also has a seat, seeming to hold a lot of (unofficial? official?) power, stating that the military ultimately answers to the guilds and not the other way around. preceptor, head of the science guild (ministry of science) ALSO has a seat & so does the head of intelligence and stuff so. what’s the constitution of the council. does alpha trion possess more fucking… votes then perceptor and cliffjumper as the symbolic and literal representative of the civilian heads of cybertron or what.
– Optimus was one of the original 13 primes but chose to be reborn with the new bots they created
– Megatronus was generally a Good Dude, even if he was technically closest to Unicron in nature, and he killed Solus Prime in self defense during a fight that they were manipulated into by Liege Maximo
– Megatronus became the Fallen by choice in honor of the friends he lost, and then swore to go around the universe protecting other species
– Optimus is older than Predaking by at least a few days
– The original Predacons were wiped out during a massive… solar events of sorts caused by a passing star that made their solar system go haywire. They were either too big or too proud to hide deep underground and go into stasis like the smaller bots, and thus didn’t survive
– Reflector and Preceptor created the first star map together
– the Quintessons showed up and kicked the Cybertronians’ evolution of knowledge into high speed, but as a result they created a caste system with bots most useful to the Quintessons at the top, and bots stopped caring to greet and name newly born sparks from the well
– Sentinel Zeta was elected as Prime during Quintesson rule in a very clearly not rigged election– the Quintessons were too proud and too confident to even bother to rig it
– Sentinel Zeta Prime eventually gathered together a secret task force full of scientists and sneaky bots and discreetly overthrew the Quintessons and kicked them out, but then didn’t bother to fix the caste system or really any major political problems beyond the invaders
– all of the bots in Aligned are genderless, they used to use only one pronoun before they started interacting with gendered foreign species and found adopting gendered language allowed them to better relate
– the easiest way to split themselves into 2 groups was by processor type– bots that were created in the image of Solus Prime had processors like her, meant for complex and abstract problem solving. Since she was only one of 13 primes, the gender division is 12:1
– there was a prewar bot named Cogwheel who was an Arachnicon like Airachnid, but she was a medic who trained Ratchet and used her many thin limbs for precision surgery and her webbing as bandages
– Alpha Trion describes himself as not understanding the point of romance, when close companionship seems more beneficial and less complex. Basically he’s aromantic
– Megatron’s first memory was watching a sunset alone right after he was born from the well, with the knowledge that he was going to immediately go into the mines afterwards and most likely never see the sky again (and then vowed to not accept such a fate)
– Combiners, when combined, are referred to by it/itself pronouns
– Alpha Trion has the world’s biggest hate boner against Shockwave and will routinely go out of his way to insult Shockwave whenever he’s brought up in conversation (and sometimes when he isn’t)
– The vast majority of bots right before the war were Majorly Racist towards minicons, thinking them untrustworthy, creepy, and suspicious. Both Megatron and Optimus shared this feeling towards minicons, ironically enough
The High Council in Animated is made up of representatives from each of the guilds that govern civilian life on Cybertron. Perceptor is head of the science guild, Cliffjumper is head of the intelligence guild (taking the place of Longarm after he got outed as Shockwave), and other known guilds include transportation, entertainment, maintenance, and commerce; we don’t know who their heads are, but we do know Botanica is also on the council. Alpha Trion is the collective head of all these “domestic” guilds, and the acting Magnus serves as council chairman. The council is in charge of the military – not the other way ‘round, despite what Sentinel Prime would like!
This is the only continuity that this particular form of government has been seen in. Animated is a rather unique case, of course, since it represents a post-war Cybertron where the Autobots comfortably and safely rule the planet, and society ISN’T dominated by the need to fight Decepticons.
Cybertronian Database 