Tag: prime

decepticonsensual:

A more grim take that occurred to me as I was thinking about Primehood, though:

Do you know the idea of the sacrificial king?  Books like The Golden Bough by James Frazer explore this as a theme in different mythologies:  the king who dies and is reborn/replaced every year, as a sacrifice to ensure the wellbeing of his people, and who’s often the consort of a queen who never dies, but remains unchanging and eternal.  And while I don’t know whether it’s ever been proven that they existed in the real world, communities where a new king is chosen each year to be sacrificed at the end of it pop up a lot in fiction and folklore.  If you were chosen to be king (so the stories go), you didn’t actually rule.  That was left up to various other figures:  the queen, the elders, the local priest or magic user.  Instead, you got to just kick back and live like… well, like a king.  For a time.  And then, at harvest or winter solstice or whatever thematically appropriate season fit the setting, you would be killed – sacrificed on an altar, defeated in combat by your replacement, run to ground in a hunt – and your blood would ensure the sun rose in the morning.

(I highly recommend Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for its exploration of pre-Olympian gods and belief systems in Greece, and the many variations on king sacrifice.  I also recommend it for sexy men in eyeliner, but mainly the first thing.)

Now think about this in the context of the Matrix and the lineage of Primes.

We know Primes (at least the most recent ones) tend to have an almost compulsive urge to sacrifice themselves for others.  We know that Optimus, in so many continuities, has died and come back to life multiple times (and Rodimus at least once).

What if the Prime was originally supposed to be a sacrificial figure?  What if what powers the Matrix – either for real, or at least according to ancient Cybertronian belief – is the life force of its bearer?  Over the eons, time and info creep erased the memory that Primes used to be chosen to be sacrificed after they’d carried the Matrix long enough, and later Primes considered themselves rulers for life.  But the Matrix didn’t forget, even if Cybertron did.  And it still finds ways to push its bearers into danger or into acts of self-sacrifice.  

The Prime is not only meant to be just a figurehead, while his advisors rule for him; he’s meant to be a martyr.

(And some of his advisors might wonder whether that’s a more sensible state of affairs…)