I’m a big fan of the G1 Cartoon (specifically, Five Faces of Darkness) origins of the Autobots and the Decepticons, that is:
Both of them were created by the Quintessons. The Autobots were a the civilian product line, basically robots servants. The Decepticons were war robots.
The reason I like this so much – and of course this was never explored explicitly in G1 – is that it explains and problematizes the tendency for Autobots to value other species’ lives and interests over their own.
They were built to serve other species, so of course they protect human lives above their own. Whether or not this is a more ‘moral’ choice objectively, it’s a bias wired deep inside of them. So you get things like Skyfire, seeing humans for the first time and coming to a screeching halt – he can’t hurt them even if Starscream tells him they’re the enemy.
Meanwhile, Decepticons were built to fight other species (and probably different factions of Quintessons as well) so their relative xenophobia – and tendency to fight for what they want rather than negotiate or make friends – makes perfect sense.
Just sitting here thinking about the implications of it being G1 canon that red optics are a sign of starvation, which is brought up once and never mentioned again
For everyone going “what”, in S3 (The Dweller in the Depths, which is about the previous slave race the Quintessons made that didn’t quite work out… There’s a lot going on here, okay), there’s a monster that sucks all the energy out of tfs, leaving them as shambling zombielike empties and instantly turning their optics red. Apparently that’s what happens when you run out of fuel.
tbh it probably wasn’t intentional worldbuilding (most of G1 is a fever dream held together with paper clips and string), but since this is the season that keeps trying to convince us the Decepticons are a huge evil force when most of what they’re doing is hanging out on a crappy asteroid without anything to eat… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Okay one way to jury rig G1’s worldbuilding back into something sensible would be to say the Decepticons artificially give themselves red optics as a political statement about the cause
Yeah, it doesn’t make too much sense that all of the Decepticons are actively starving all the time, except for Swindle, Dirge, and the Stunticons. But I’d believe it as an aesthetic thing. “We are hungry and we are here for your fuel! (and then we will take over the universe!)” is pretty much the G1 Decepticon mission statement a lot of the time.
(It’s been a bit since I’ve seen the relevant scenes, but I believe the red optics go back to the original Quintesson military hardware line, though. Which, you know, G1. It does tie into my grand unified G1 theory that the ‘Cons overall have greater fuel needs than the ‘Bots, to power their flight and weapons systems and such. The Quints might have been underfueling them as well, deliberately or not.)
Quintessons are very soothing to draw. They are eggs that are also squids with grumpy old man faces? Some have multiple faces! The security guard Quintessons are particularly cute to me because they just have GUN on one side of their bodies.
Interestingly, the majority of Quintessons we see are not the five-faced judges, though Judges seem to be the leaders in most senses! I think a lot about how I would do Quintessons in Transformers, like about their weird fucked-up culture and why they’re all horrifying egg cyborgs. Also, does the Judgement face remind anybody else of Tyrest?
And then I tried to draw one not based off any I’d seen and it looks kinda like Alpha Trion.
During the rebellion against the Quintesson empire, the Quintessons developed many scare tactics to use against the masses of Cybertron in order to reaffirm their position as a stronger and superior race. One of those scare tactics was trumpeting tripods.
These tripods would be used like a war cry, a bellowing warning that the Quintessons were coming. It sent civilians into panic and intimidated the soldiers. In some battles the tripods were also used as troop transport.
After the Quintessons were defeated, Cybertronians gathered the tripods that had been left behind and rebuilt them into a global alarm system. Every city state was given at least one tripod at their core, usually where the local government was housed. Only city state leaders and the Senate could turn on the alarms, but city state leaders were limited to their city’s alarms; The Senate could turn on every alarm, but only did so when there was world wide threats.
Cybertronians adapted the tripods to make various pitched bellows. Each bellow had a different meaning, a different warning of what was happening. Some bellows were localized and related to issues that only the city state could understand. Most bellows were global though and could be understood by every Cybertronian.
Anybody remember this head canon?
Well I found another strange siren sound to go with it. If you heard this siren coming out of the tripods, then it meant that the Senate activated them, that there was a global wide threat. It was heard a lot during the beginnings of the war, up until the Senate was destroyed and there was no one left to active the tripods.
This video popped up on my dash today and I was reminded of this head canon.
This is what the early Cybertronians dealt with when they were fighting against the Quintessons.
What if Cybertronians had an instinctive reaction to tentacles- an ancient and supposedly pointless line of code that, depending on the bit, either instills them with a phobia of them or a fetish or, in many cases, a passivity response.
So a bot wrapped up in tentacles relaxes and gets a lil heated at first and yepppp turns out its a gross ancient response built in by Quintessons to make them easier to handle and manipulate.
I need Quintessons in valveplug I’m fuckin gross but u know you’re all sinners with me and would groove on Quintessons seducing and fragging Bots into submission.
I am super down for this. Fuck yeah, ancestral Quintesson slave coding.
And also tentacles.
Someone said tentacles?
Sign me up for this.
I would read that…;)
I want to play with it so badly TuT
Like medberths having tentacle-like straps to restrain patients, playing on that passivity response. Mechs who can’t sleep properly discovering they CAN relax enough to sleep when rolled up in a few hundred meters of draughtstop. (Discovering THAT by being very very tired when doing maintenance, getting tangled up in loose tubes and dozing off while waiting for someone to come get them out)
… Bluestreak with a life-size plushie colossal squid deliberately tucking the tentacles around him before trying to recharge and if he falls asleep at movie night someone goes and gets the squid and drapes it over him so he doesn’t wake up from nightmares
WHEN THE FUCK DID THIS GET SO MANY NOTES I SAW TIS COME UP ON MY DASH AND ALMOST GOT ORANGE JUICE UP MY NOSE HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS YOU REALLY WANT SOME HOT QUINTESSON ACTION
Good thing, becuase so do I.
Bots watching videos of earthly cephalopods and being oddly entranced by the smooth, undulation motions of the tentacles. SOme bots feel a deep, unsettling pang of fear at the sight and don’t know why.
The worst is bots who have a passivity response and a fear response, so they panic…but can’t do anyting about it, becuase they relax and go slack while internally worrying.
That, or you’d have the ones that react severely negatively and these would be the ones that the Quintessons were trying to find and route out, but were unable so some of that aversion CNA made it through frame lines.
And they can’t understand why the others are so entranced while they’re repulsed.
This is a headcanon I could get behind. Pieces of that are really cute, others are appropriately disturbing.
(just a smol fic here, not edited or anything at all)
Jazz wished he took a better look at that codeing the one orn he came across it. It was just sitting their in his sub-core programming, connected to his motor relays not doing anything. And when he poked it, it lit up for a second and settled down back into it’s dormant state, completely harmless. So he went over it and forgot to look at it again. It was currently his biggest regret ever.
The tentacles
that were wrapped around him squeeze a little bit, like a hug, and his frame went lax again against his will from the tension that had built up from his thoughts. He was suspended in the air, not a part of him not supported by the many appendages the creatures around them had. The codeing had flared up when the creature had taken a hold of him from behind.
They had been fighting, there ship had landed not at all far from where there base was and started to outright attack them. They were at war, and so they knew what to do. But when the hatch opened to show the creatures, confusion broke out, and it wasn’t good at all. But most of the bots kept fighting anyways and, and… what again? One of the appendages had caressed his helm, gentle and smooth against his sensitive auido horns and warm. He leaned into the support, optics flickering off when the tentacle stayed where it was, the warmth of the appendage comforting in the cool air around him, all the tentacles
really, keeping him warm in the cool air.
Then they were moving, he was gliding through the air, not caring, but he did care, and he tried his best to reactivate his optics, seeing a glimpse of another creature, one with three faces, cradling Bluestreak like a new spark, wrapped much like himself in
tentacles. Beyond that he caught a glimpse of Prowl, being attended to by two of the creatures that had one face each, like the one that was carrying him, both of the ones at Prowl very attentive to how aroused he was looking with the tips of the appendages wiggling they way under his plating, holding his secure there. He tried to look more, at the sound of someone scared and frightened but he was tilted, going up the ramp of the ship, past some more creatures that had swiveling faces, and a oval looking frame, they to had plenty of
tentacle appendages.
The last one in line stopped the creature that was carrying him. It changes faces five times, he thinks, he couldn’t for the life of him keep his optics on longer than for a few short klicks at a time when the five face one began to caresses him also. He shifted hands, well,
tentacles when the five faced one took him from the one faced creature, a new set of appendages shifted around him and took him down a different hall than all the others were being taken. He to was cradled against this new five faced creature, but the codeing was held fast against all his prodding and probing. They enters a very brightly lit room, and despite being let go and and onto a medical like berth, his frame was still limp against his will, and when the creature pried away the cover of his medical port at the nape of his neck, and pluged in what ever wiring, it didn’t hurt a bit. He lost the battle, optics shuttering, and he entered recharge.
AAAAAAAA EVERYBODY READ THIS YOU WONT REGRET IT!!!!!!!!!
Speaking of Quintessons I’m rebogging this fic again because AAAAAAAA
Oh, he knows he’s full of hypocritical bullshit, but he is also entirely and fully beyond caring. Plus, humans aren’t really people to him.
They’re organic. Just like Quintessons.
Organics don’t have souls, or sparks, they have no purpose, they just…exist. They eat and consume and breed and the universe will be better off without them, as far as he’s concerned. Things will stabilize, and even out, and you know what? In his opinion, he’s much more merciful than the Quintessons ever were.
The Quintessons wanted their toys back, they wanted slaves and labor and to take back something they claim is rightfully theirs, and they’re a race driven insane by some catastrophic event that has led them to systematically destroy their own society again and again and again, for the sake of Gods and Judges and appeasing their own appetites. They want things they can torment, and train, and subdue.
Megatron just wants organics gone. Ash, dust, heat-fused glass.
I mean, Megatron’s ultimately self-aware enough that he knows he’s not a good guy. He’s 100% aware of this, and he’s wholeheartedly embraced it- he knows his own morals and as far as he’s concerned, those are the only ones he needs to be concerned with, because, and to quote him at one point- “Redemption isn’t real, and I’ve already doomed us all.”
That’s what The Curator tells Nautica in this weeks Lost Light
The different symbols are for the “Five Clans”
Except
Some of those symbols
Have a very worryingly familliar shape
And it’s canon that Transformers basically suffer from memory degradation…as a side affect of living SO LONG, after a while they don’t remember things properly. So Transformers who had been alive when the Knights were around, their memories of the Knights by the time of the present day AREN’T RIGHT
The Knights were judges
The knights could judge the “Crimes” of Cybertronians
The Curator talks about how the five clans “Came together” to create “Cyberutopia” somewere
Five in one, in other words
Cybertronians remember the Knights as being five distinct personalities/views…united in one
Five voices, all acting as a judge
I don’t think the Autobots should want to find the Knights of Cybertron O.O;
And I really don’t think they should go to “Cyberutopia”
Because let’s not forget that back in issue thirteen, there was literally a discussion all about how the more idealised by people a “Utopia” is…the more horrifying it actually is in secret
Roberts has spent over fifty issues having characters talk about how perfect Cyberutopia must be
The 1980s Transformers cartoon is one of the few examples where robots turning on their creators is presented as an unambiguously just action.
This is legitimately one of my favourite things about the cartoon – not only that it’s presented in a completely positive light, but that we don’t even know about it until two seasons in.
We’ve bonded with these characters, come to admire them, come to think of them as almost more human than the humans, and then –
BAM, YOU’VE BEEN COZYING UP TO SKYNET.
And it turns out they really are the good guys.
I love that.
The Quints are dicks, though. An entire species with no need for sexual reproduction and they still saw fit to install a gender binary.
Cybertronian Database 