There was an art to climbing a Cybertronian. It wasn’t like a tree, or a climbing wall at the gym, or even like climbing fences, walls, piles of abandoned cars- suffice to say, Spike Witwicky had great experience climbing things. Keeping his feet safely on the ground was considered to be the hard part, by those who knew him, and it was only a matter of time from his first fateful encounter with the Autobots to him learning to pull himself up onto their backs and shoulders without hesitation.
Said matter of time was really a few hours.
Now, months later, he was a veritable expert.
Fortunately, they didn’t mind, for the most part. Smaller bots climbing upon larger ones was natural, easy- a sort of symbiosis that they all adhered to- Spike had observed and asked questions and understood well, now. Smaller bots climbed on larger ones for transport, to reach new heights- and to groom them in return, and larger bots happily assisted- Optimus Prime in particular had a habit of scooping up those smaller than him, only made easier when said smaller beings were humans who fit neatly into his cupped servos.
The first step was to learn where it was safe to grab. Nobody wanted pinched fingers, and nobody wanted fingers shoved into seams that housed sensory organs, so observing your climbing target first was key.
Then came ensuring that they knew you were there- jumping onto an unaware cybertronian turned out to be a good way to startle them into jolting you off- a shout or a small, benign touch usually did the trick. Unless they were Optimus, in which case you simply hopped on, since he had no qualms about being used as a jungle gym.
Third, you paced yourself. Minibots had no problem scrambling thirty feet vertically. Prowl could literally jump most of the height, but humans? Spike generally found that going steady got him further up Optimus than trying to push it. A good resting spot along the transformation panels of his lower back was ideal, when you needed to give your hands a break.
And you wore gloves. Cybertronians weren’t…textured, quite like anything he’d touched, but metal blisters still happened, or you were rubbed raw by a patch of irritable nanites where they were healing fresh paint. Bumblebee bought him the nice climbing gloves, and he made good use of them.
There was a final rule, to this art he’d mastered. Able to scramble up any of the Autobots easily (and admittedly, he’d managed it on a few Decepticons at this point, too) and to find the right spots on shoulders or back struts to put himself. The final rule, of course…was to relax. To enjoy it. To pick at peeling paint and rub grit off their armor where you saw it- to let them enjoy it too.
After all, it was only fair when you were using them as a climbing wall.
It’s no secret that I’m a Megatron fan. Hell, if you look at my tumblr for more than half a breath, you’ll see that. But there’s things that niggle at my brain, and trickle down my spine like fingers of frost. The most important saying of Megatron, that rings true in every continuity is not that he’ll beat Prime, not that he’ll be back, or that he retreats.
But that he still functions.
Pushed beyond all limitations and expectations, he’s kept going no matter what. There was never any rest for him, never any excuses to stop, or to not keep going.
Simply because those were never options for him.
Getting up time, and time again- devastation after devastation, ruination after ruination- because you have to, because there IS no other recourse. I think that’s what truly terrified the Autocratic bots the most.
No matter what is thrown at him, he still functions and he will continue to do so until he decides to do so no longer.
But, I would think after eon after eon, there is exhaustion that is strut deep, and so vast that not even a Prime would understand. Imagine being so paraonoid, so alert for all of your life- simply because resting was never an option. What everyone sees as arrogance is the knowledge of that he can go past their limitations. What everyone sees as cold indifference is the shield he’s always had around him.
And what is seen as inexhaustible stamina and simple unbeatable victory… is the tired knowledge that there is no other recourse. In the mines, as long as you functioned- you worked. In the gladiatorial pits, as long as you functioned- you fought.
And as a Decepticon, as long as you functioned – you survived.
I’M GONNA PROVE THAT CYBERTRONIANS ARE CLOSER TO PLANTS IN ANATOMY THAN MECHANICS AND ELECTRONICS AND I’LL FUCKING PROVE IT USING BITS OF CANON
SO FAR FUNGI ARE DOING BETTER THAN PLANTS IN BEING CYBERTRONIAN LIKE
– complex cell structures while still having a cell wall rather than just a membrane (my main argument for cybertronians being non-animal organics; their metal is extremely hard cell wall structures)
– can reproduce both sexually and asexually; in Marvel they’ve shown to reproduce via budding
– grows well in damp acidic areas; cybertron has acidic rain and in uh… some continuities cybertron just doesn’t have a sun anymore
– We don’t know what Primus is in the continuities he’s cybertron itself, energon could be a waste product that the cybertronians can live mostly off of,
BLEASE google “dimorphic fungi” because i feel like it will make your day + help your theory to know that there are types of fungi that can totally change forms (cough… transform)
like there are plenty of species that turn from a mold/hyphal form into a yeast form. sometimes they change based on temperature, environment, other physiological stuff… sometimes we just dont know…
fungi are so cool and i support this “transformers as fungi” theory
HELL YES THANK YOU FOR YOUR ADDITION TO THIS PSEUDO SCIENCE THEORY
I love plants and animals and all sorts of life and fungi isn’t something I know a TON about compared to, say, my general knowledge on bugs, so this is really useful thank you 😀
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.
This is a tricky one, and one that forces us to loosen up our thinking a bit. Because the Transformers are robots, and because the spark is a tangible concept, we expect their mechanical biology to be more explainable, but really – it’s not.
Think about a human being. It’s an endless and unanswerable philosophical debate over what the difference between the “mind” and the “soul” are, and if those things are, or are not, distinct and separate from the ideas of the “consciousness,” and exactly what relationship they have to the physical “brain.”
Well, Transformers are the same. The spark is the “lifeforce,” the animating energy that makes them actually living creatures and not just machines, which as a tangible concept is more “knowable” and “provable” than the ethereal concept of a human soul. But they also have brain modules that contain the programming that is their “mind,” called a “core consciousness” in Beast Wars that was a concept distinct from a spark, which made up who they are as a person.
And the relationship between the two is just as undefinable as it is for humans. Even in Beast Wars alone, seemingly contradicting what we were told about core consciousnesses, Optimus Primal’s disembodied spark was transferred from one body to another alone, taking his mind and all his memories with it – but that happened in the same story in which Rhinox was able to project his core consciousness – his mind, not his spark – out of his body and into the Matrix. And then later in Beast Machines, we’d see multiple sparks moved from body to body, consciousness travelling with them each time. So where does consciousness lie if both these things are possible?
Presumably, the spark is what “fills” the brain module with that personality programming upon a Transformer’s activation. But, it is just programming, and it can be overwritten – Beast Wars used shell programs, while in Energon, Megatron could do it himself, and did it to Inferno, who only escaped by destroying his physical body and having his spark – unaffected – moved to a new body.
And how connected the mind and spark are once that initial birthing is forever in question. If you can alter a mind without altering a spark, must they then be considered separate concepts? In Binaltech, for example, Wheeljack was able to “resurrect” the dead Prowl by loading the programming from his mind into a new body, and using the lifeforce of Chip Chase in place of a spark. And it’s possible to have robots who have “just” programmed minds – no sparks – who are totally indistinguishable from normal Cybertronians in all cognitive functions, appearing just as sentient and alive as anyone else (Beast Machines’ Diagnostic Drone, Afterburn from the Animated comic) – but who are just considered… not, purely because they don’t have sparks.
So you see, sparks and brain modules co-exist with these philosophically-intriguing overlapping qualities, and exactly which truly makes a Transformer who and what they are is…. open to interpretation. When Megatron transferred his mind into Bumblebee’s, he was essentially moving programming from one piece of hardware to another. Did he remain “alive” in Bee’s brain because of Bee’s spark, providing animating force to his body? Or was it because his own spark remained alive inside his own body, his intangible “soul” transcending any kind of physical limitation, in the more abstract sense we might think of if a human character were to do the same?
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
Not in it’s IDW form, that’s for sure. However, open-processor surgery can have similar results, and there’s probably something similar to the cortical psychic patch from TFP as well. I think it’s far more…unexplored territory, so to speak. TFA seems to be well behind IDW/TFP continuities in terms of certain advancements- they’re younger as a species, I think. I mean, at most, Optimus Prime is maybe a thousand, two thousand years old. At most. He’s at least a few hundred. But he’s certainly not even in his millions, yet.
Makes you wonder about age ranges for everything else…
I’ve actually been thinking about the shadowplay thing a lot, too, because I’ve been considering Chromedome in this setting- I believe he is, or was, sort of a combined programmer-brain-surgeon. Which would certainly explain how he winds up on the Lost Light. His job was to fix people whose processors and sparks had been damaged- he might have worked, previously, on other crewmembers like Sunstreaker or Skids, as part of their treatments.
Once they started asking him if he’d be interested using his skillset on, say, Decepticon prisoners or dissidents, he knew he had to get off Cybertron.
Don’t get too comfortable. You can still ruin, erase, and rewrite a bot’s memories- it’s just…instead of doing it with some little slips of the needles into the back of the neck, like
you gotta
….you know. Except presumably you either need a hell of a computer hooked up to the other end. Or you need to hook yourself up to the other end. And it’s more likely you’ll just scramble their processors irreperably or damage their spark in the process, instead of getting the results you want. Of course…technology is improving every day!
Sentinel: Back in my day, there was no such thing as “feelings”.
I realize that Sentinel Prime was a heavy-handed parody of racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic bigots who may or may not be orange, and that’s why he says most of the things he says—but ever since his issues have come out, I’ve been dying with curiosity about the implications for Cybertron.
He complains that “Conjunx endurae swap fuel in public,” and above he accuses Cerebos of being “one of those,” “those” apparently being the “terminally sentimental” who had sparkmates instead of peers, colleagues, and associates. Okay, the real-world parallels are obvious, he’s supposed to be a homophobe complaining about how The Transformers Are Gay Now, yeah yeah alright, but what does that mean to them?
Obviously, from Sentinel’s perspective, inside this universe, he isn’t complaining about Transformers being “gay"—this is a society that, outside of ancient history and recently-discovered colonies, only has one gender. It’s really unlikely that what he’s bothered about is a bunch of male-coded bots falling for other male-coded bots, instead of holding out for non-existent female-coded bots (which by the way he also thinks don’t belong on Cybertron). As far as we can tell, the male-coded-ness has nothing to do with it. So it’s not that (within the comic universe) he’s a homophobe; it doesn’t seem to be the “homo” part that he’s objecting to. It seems more likely he’s a romance-phobe. If so, why??
Was romance taboo in pre-war Cybertron? Was it considered proper to not feel romantically toward anyone, ever? He said Cybertronians had “peers and colleagues” but he doesn’t list friends—was even friendship taboo? Was that because most Cybertronians are naturally aromantic (someone DOES say in MTMTE that it’s rare for most mechs to ever find a conjunx—that might be a reason why) and those that are even capable of romantic love are rare, making it easier to stigmatize and oppress the minority? Or are they pretty much universally capable of romantic love and the apparent taboo Sentinel is demonstrating was a societal, political thing?
Did they have conjunx endurae before the war? Sentinel Prime clearly knows the term, so obviously, they did at some time. How does that line up with Sentinel’s apparent belief that only “peers and colleagues” are acceptable? Was it in the pre-war time seen as only a long-term business arrangement, and during the war was adapted (or reverted) to something more like what we consider spouses? Or was it something that was banned during Sentinel’s time, and was seen as a disgusting pre-Golden Age practice from when sentiments ran high and frame types mixed and people followed their passions rather than their duties? Why did conjunx endurae become taboo, and/or sterilized into something non-romantic? Was it something the Functionists or the Senate did to control the population further—a 1984-esque sterilization of people’s emotions, forcing them to turn their love and passion toward the state rather than each other? Did amica endurae follow suit, since Sentinel’s ideal world doesn’t seem to include close friendships? Or were amica endurae still permitted, as a “next best thing” substitute when conjunx endurae weren’t allowed?
How well did these policies go over? It’s probable that Sentinel, being a Prime who before that worked for the Senate, is espousing the official governmentally-sanctioned POV on the subject. But how widespread was it? Did people pay lip service to the “no romance” laws in public but hold hands and stare into each other’s eyes in private? Did lovers call themselves “associates” or “work partners” in public to hide their relationships? Did the upper classes—the nobles, the intelligentsia—subscribe to the same rhetoric as the Senate? Did the middle classes? Did the workers and disposable classes? Or did some castes reject the taboo on love? Was it easier to love in the lower classes when you weren’t subjected to the scrutiny of your peers and the power games that called upon you to present yourself with decorum? Or was it easier to love in the higher classes where you had the power and wealth to get away with illicit or disreputable actions without a police officer confronting and beating you on the street for it? Was the taboo more prominent in some cities than others—prominent in cities where the Senate had a stranglehold like Iacon, but less common or even foreign and bizarre in places where they had a weaker hold like Kaon? Was it more or less common in Functionist cities?
Was it law, or merely social convention? Could two mechs be arrested for “swapping fuel” in public? Could being caught with love letters send you to jail? Could you lose your job for being known to fall in love? Was it perfectly legal to be romantic or to take a conjunx for reasons of love, but it would get you ostracized from society and dirty looks on the street? Or would people admit to you under their breath that they really see nothing wrong with it, they just assume everyone else does, but more power to you for your courage?
When did it start to change? Did the change come more slowly in the Autobots than in the Decepticons, since the Autobots carried far more of the ruling parties’ legacy than the Decepticons did? Did the Decepticons consider romance a rebellious act, a political act—did some of them rush into really ill-advised conjunx ceremonies to prove a point? With the changing of times, were the Autobots happy to embrace the downfall of the romance taboo, or did they cling to it and the arguments in favor of No Sentimentality for half the war? Do war-built MTOs think the whole thing is stupid—were they the ones who pushed the shift from taboo to acceptance? Are there still mechs who think romance is disgusting, but they’re now in the minority and keep their mouths shut around mechs who are courting or dating? Is this lingering legacy why we never saw Rewind say “I love you” until he was about to die—is the reluctance a societal thing?
I have so many questions. And so many thoughts. I’d be very interested to see this explored in the comic, and to see if the authors thought it through as anything deeper than a one-time shallow homophobia metaphor.
If they didn’t, though, I’m pretty content to speculate on the potential implications myself.
Just an added thought to why it might not have been allowed, especially in Functionist Era, which if I remember, began under Sentinel:
Love is dangerous. Love doesn’t respect boundries, like class and caste and function and supposed ‘worthiness’. Look at Rewind and Dominus Ambus. Rewind was classed disposable. He wasn’t even allowed energon. Dominus literally hooked up to him, and fed him from his own systems. Keeping his ‘disposable’ conjunx alive. Now, think about that when Sentinel says they ‘shared fuel in public’.
Also, think about how hard Dominus and others fought against the classifications, for the poor mechs who were considered disposable or, stars forbid, obsolete. How hard would you fight the system to save someone you love? I mean, there will always be those good people who fight just because it is the right thing to do, like Orion Pax, but most fight for the ones they know and love. You aren’t going to let a friend or loved one just be walked into a smelter because they are ‘obsolete’ or ‘disposable’, no matter the difference in your class or caste.
Affection means those mechs are now, at least by Sentinel and the government’s point of view, compromised. Affection means breaking the rules, hiding affairs, secret liaisons between mechs in different castes, smuggling mechs and energon, defying the government- all for the sake of feelings.
@ckret2 makes a lot of wonderful points, and I would love to see them explored more. But this is what I thought of when Sentinel said that.
I think that close relationships were discouraged in functionalist society, from romantic partners to friendships. I’m gonna add a couple more possibilities that haven’t been mentioned so far:
1.) Loyalty: A good cybertronian’s first loyalty should be to the system instead of to each other (which is admittedly 1984esque). You can see this mentality get shifted from loyalty to the system to loyalty to the cause. This might be a reason why Cybertronians are so prone to war, they value ideology over personal relationships by default.
2.) Class: In human society, the higher classes tend to be the more reserved with each other. It could be that interpersonal relationships were considered ‘beneath’ anyone that Sentinel was expected to take seriously back in his day. Friendship/Romance could have been a marker of the common rabble or lower castes.
I really hope they go into this more. I think that this notion of ‘personal relationships are undesirable’ might be one of the reasons why Cybertronians are prone to these fierce, long wars.
Idea time: what if on Cybertron “hot wheels” is like this mega compliment like for a bot you find attractive but on Earth they are these dinky tiny toy cars and? Idk, I feel like there’s potential there?
Imagine driving around with Smokescreen and saying something like “take it easy there, hot wheels,” and he nearly veers off the side of the road! XD
Cybertronian Database 