There are a range of domesticated Cybertronian animals (‘mechanimals’) that are kept as pets, from certain types of crystalline insects to photovoltaicats. Most of these species are native, but some of them are not.
The most common pets prewar were insects, metallifish (fish), turbohounds (dogs) and photovoltaicats (house cats). These were popular for a variety of reasons, but mostly due to owners not having to be licensed. Other pets, including turbofoxes, cybercats (think Ravage), arachnedroids and ramdroids (sheep), required licensing for owners due to the potential danger they posed and the knowledge required in owning them.
However, most common as ‘pets’ in the work-centred culture of prewar Cybertron were crystal plants, some ‘intelligent’ and reactive to stimuli, similar to venus flytraps and succulents, as they did not require as much attention as another creature being dependent on a bot for their care and company.
Houseplants may not love you back, but at least they won’t make a mess of your living room in anxiety if you’re not back from work at the usual time.
I mentioned that I was dreading rewatching “Fire in the Sky.” This, of course, is why. It’s the scene in which Starscream orders Skyfire to execute a group of Autobot prisoners as a test of his loyalty. When Skyfire refuses, claiming they have done no wrong. Starscream retorts, “But you have – traitor!” and shoots him in the chest. In the aftermath, Starscream tells the fallen Skyfire, “consider yourself fortunate that you did not end up like your *friends*.” He then stalks away, stepping over Skyfire’s body as he does so.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always assumed this was pretty much what it appears to be: a murder attempt, which I put down to Starscream’s volatile temper getting the best of him. On this latest rewatch, though, the wording of his dialogue really jumped out at me.
Consider yourself fortunate that you did not end up like your friends.
What does this imply? Well for one thing, it implies that Starscream didn’t intend to kill Skyfire. His line is the equivalent of someone saying, “I hope you’ve learned your lesson.” In other words, Starscream’s shooting Skyfire in the chest was intended as punishment, a harsh corrective for his “diminished loyalty coefficient,” rather than attempt to kill him.
When I mentioned this thought to brilliant friend Dark, she quickly pointed out that Starscream’s shooting Skyfire in the hand in a previous scene was probably meant as a warning, and that this would match the pattern established in “More Than Meets the Eye.” During the course of that three-part episode that kicks off the series, Starscream makes two coup attempts against Megatron. Megatron punishes the first attempt by shooting Starscream in the arm, and the second by blasting him in the chest.
Is it possible that this is standard disciplinary practice among Decepticons? A warning shot for the first infraction, and a more painful, damaging one if the problematic behavior isn’t corrected? In any case, it certainly seems as if this is how Starscream is used to being dealt with by Megatron. Dark also pointed out that shooting as a punishment seems to be reserved for acts of disloyalty. I’ll have to continue my rewatch of the series to confirm this, but we did note that Starscream’s attempt to blast Thundercracker for his disloyalty in “Fire on the Mountain” would support that idea.
It’s worth noting, also, that when we do see Decepticons receive shots as a form of punishment, they don’t seem as adversely affected by it as Skyfire was. I suspect that after millions of years of being at war, Starscream is used to doling out punishments to mechs who have military-grade armor. It’s possible that when he lashed out in his anger, it didn’t occur to him that Skyfire wouldn’t have the same reinforcements.
I’ve heard it said that Starscream left Skyfire to die there on the ice, but now I question that. I don’t think he realized how badly Skyfire was hurt. There’s a later scene in which Starscream is shown back in the ice caverns, seemingly staring off into space. I’ve often wondered what he was thinking there, but now I suspect he was expecting Skyfire to come in and apologize – or simply get back to work.
Does that sound crazy? Well sure, it would seem crazy to us, but it’s what any other Decepticon on the show would have done. I think Starscream was expecting Skyfire to behave the way he, or any other Decepticon would after being punished. The idea that he might defect to the Autobots probably never even occurred to him.
Somehow, this realization has made me feel slightly better. “Fire in the Sky” certainly shows the potential in Starscream as well as his failings. Every time I watch it, it gets more painful to see the evidence that he very likely organized the Arctic energy project at least in part so that he could look for Skyfire, and I think his concern and caring for Skyfire couldn’t be more obvious. (Heck, even Megatron comments on it!)
Watching their relationship implode will always be gut-wrenching, but the thought that Starscream may not have intended things quite as they appear is… well, if not exactly comforting, then at least slightly less excruciating.
[Note: I showed this to a couple of friends before posting it, and they had some even more fascinating insights about Fire in the Sky. I may eventually have to turn this into a full-length essay! It’s amazing how the more I think about this episode, the more there seeems to be to say about it.]
best part of Dark Cybertron, personally, was confirmation that the Lost Light is littered with bulletin boards that people fill with all sort of stupid stuff. Also – Ratchet – are you really guilting people into going for their physical by making them think they might have cybercrosis??
[image: Comics panel showing a holographic bulletin board with a number of overlapping, brightly colored advertisements.
“Xaaron’s Debating Society Upcoming Topics: Forged / Constructed Cold”
“Oil Reservoir Tours”
“Swerve’s: Everyone Welcome* No Guns, No Swords, No Briefcases…*Restrictions Apply”
“Are you making the most of your alt mode? Don’t take your transformation Cog for Granted”
“Autobot Code Refresher Course. Ignorance is no Excuse. 10,000 Pages in Only Two Weeks”
“Your Badge: Wear it Straight. Wear it Proud.”
“Coping with Grief See Rung, Level 3(W)”
“Cybercrosis: The Hidden Killer, Free Check-Ups See Ratchet Medibay One”
Woke up way to early with a thought about what robots are made of. I mean like, cybertronian alloy only would be boring, what if turbines and tailpipes are actually ceramic to withstand high temperature?? And ceramic brings in those translucent opaqueness UwU What if acrylic and resin based materials is used not only for the tires but like, for joints and tubing?? squishy energon lines, man. And dear god, interfacing equipment!! Polyurethane or acrylic foam as an expanding inner material covered for durability in woven metal mesh that’s actually got hexagon structure perfect for placing nodes under it!!
Just give me bots with all kinds of materials in their bodies, extra dense, elastic, opaque, transparent, dielectric and conductive gimme GIMME
Energy-absorbing energy vampires that ruled the planet long before Primus?
Transdimensional entities that conquer planets and integrate them to their own hellish world?
or my personal favorite…
Energy-based monstrosities that exist in a realm that can be best described as a “collective seizure?”
Honestly? After a long day of thinking about this and sketching ideas (which will be posted later) I’m thinking a lot about the all of those and a few more to boot, particularly what sort of visual representation they have. Whatever a Cybertronian “demon” looks like, in the setting of Matrix, they likely don’t look like what humans might consider demons to be- provided humans can see them at all. Cybertronians may have a much wider or different form of vision- where a human may feel a slight static tingle across their skin, a cybertronian may find horror.
Many minor malevolent energy beings might simply show up as a visual glitch to cybertronians- a living, moving glitch or error unable to be processed. A being of static and stray pixels and lines of code that won’t be parsed. Or perhaps a physical representation of such a thing- particularly while possessing a Cybertronian body;
The corruption in Horizon: Zero Dawn is a great example of this visually- writhing black-and-red tendrils of toxic nanotechnology and energy, lashing out and clinging to robotic life- slithering through them like worms. Of course, I do imagine a lot of the weirder stuff in Matrix starts off as straight-up just energy beings; similar to a holographic display that moves of it’s own accord, possibly unable to physically interact with things around it. Maybe through technology- after all, this is robot hell we’re talking about here.
Given enough energy, though, you might wind up with something like this (Hyper Light Drifter)
or this (Transistor)
But then, considering that “demon” tends to apply specifically to malevolent otherworldly beings who are here to do business, maybe something a little more dignified for dealing with Cybertronians would be necessary. (The following are from Destiny)
Something…almost Cybertronian yet still somehow organic in base might appeal to the innate fear many Cybertronians have of organics.
Or more mechanical, almost vehicle-like in itself.
or something a little more…abstract, but still distinctly technological?
I dunno, there’s a lot of really cool directions Cybertronian “demons” or any sort of otherworldly beings could go! And a lot of them are way stranger and (imo) more interesting than the classic western version of devils- after all, what might a species of robots be afraid of? What sort of monsters haunt their dreams? Disembodied circuitry, nothing more than a glimmer in the air, coiling wires ready to strike and thread their way into joints?
(Mukesh Singh- Grant Morrison’s 18 Days)
Or something a little more recognizable?
(That being said, the “Demons” in Matrix are less…demons in any sort of human term, so much as they are entities related to and unique from Cybertron. Humans would start referring to the translation of them as demons, though, since they serve a similar purpose.)
sometimes i feel like the tf fandom just collectively forgets that the disposable class was like, A Thing
it comes up so rarely (…basically just the once) that I could see people actually forgetting.
Super frustrating that we know so little about disposables
they existed
rewind was one of them
they were treated as property
they weren’t permitted normal energon
they weren’t considered sentient until the ambus test
possibly mostly small mechs or mechs that transform into objects that would be easy to manufacture? jk I don’t think there are any details on what classes of mechs were disposables
which is a ton less info than we got for cold constructed mechs/empurata & it was mostly all an infodump in one issue. There’s just less to work with. (WHICH COULD BE SOLVED IF JR WOULD ANSWER MY LIST OF 5 MILLION DISPOSABLES CULTURE QUESTIONS AND/OR WRITE A SPINOFF SERIES ABOUT PRE-WAR DISPOSABLES)
Okay so I have no idea how to start this little blog of mine but I might as well start here.
Our first post shall be on Cybertronian music.
I have five headcanons on what Cybertronian music would sound like, how it would be created and what purpose it served.
1) Artificially created.
Okay so this is probably the most human sounding one on the list, but it still sounds pretty mechanical. This idea was one of the last I thought up but definitely the most unique.
Cybertronians don’t ‘sing’ sure they can pitch their vocalisers but that’s not singing for them that’s just talking with a musical tone, huge difference. Because of this no Cybertronian really has a talent for singing apart from the ones who were specially created for it, so ‘pure from the Cybertronian’ music would be a rare thing to hear, especially midway through and after the war. The A.I system needed to pitch the music, pitch the lyrics, know how to put both together and make it sound pleasant was really complex and really big.
Songs would be created through a specific computer module that had no other purpose that to basically remix voice clips of Cybertronians. It would drastically pitch and mix these voice clips together to create words, sentences, and lyrics. Sometimes the lyrics would mean something, but often they wouldn’t and they’d just be random clips pitched right to flow together. It would also create music or tones that were complimentary to the pitched lyrics.
So, what was created wouldn’t really be music it would be complimentary tones and pitches with words melded in. This would be where culturally different and personally different music opinions came from in Cybertronian society. Seeker’s whose language is much higher pitched would find lower tones ‘not nice’ to listen to, so their complimentary tones would be much higher and clipped than that of Polyhex music that used much wider pitches.
Personal preferences would be different because many Cybertronians auditory systems are hooked up differently for different jobs. Because of this personal preference could easily be predicted if you knew what the auditory systems were for each job. So, Praxian officers had a much lower pitch range so they could access the enforcer ‘radio’ sort of thing, so in turn, lower pitches would be preferred and Vosvian level ones would hurt.
What would sound ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’ to a Cybertronian though would not sound like anything bearable to a human. Luckily most of the song would be above and below the human sound range, doesn’t mean what can be heard doesn’t sound bloody eerie though. Look up a song called ‘Mr Shadow: a song composed by Artificial Intelligence’ on YouTube and this is sort of what I imagine for this type of music. (Warning, creepy, especially the last twenty seconds.)
2) Quick beat, quick step.
Next would be the much more robotic sounding (???) seriously I have no idea. Its human counterpart would be Extratone by the way. (It’s an incredibly acquired taste, so don’t look it up if don’t want a headache.) Look up ‘Diabarha – Crazy Beauties’ , ‘Diabarha – Uranoid (Extratone)’ or ‘7!cHO – Murder EXTRATONE’ to see what I mean. This would be the slowest their songs would go since Vosvian ones would speed up so fast it would just sound like one long high pitched or pulsating tone to a human.
This one, in all honesty, sounds a lot more mechanical and sequenced, with the beats fast and the lyrics are far and few in-between. Since the Cybertronian language (or at least my version of it) is quick, harsh and computerized the music would be equal to this. Like the artificially created music, it would be easiest and most reasonable to create it with a whole system, not just one installed on a Cybertronian.
But unlike the other music type, it would be much easier to perform with installed frame tech, it’s not running hundreds of algorithms to get pitching and timing just right the Cybertronian in question would just need to know how to create a beat and mix it with light background music. It wouldn’t be that hard and wouldn’t take up ‘cpu’ space.
The music is mainly hard and quick beats with most songs not even having music behind it. The pitches would go up and down and once again follow to pitch rules of the above type. With Vosvian pitches reaching incredibly high but Kaon incredibly low. Vosvian song would generally be faster too as they had the processing power to keep up with the 5000+ beats their songs often used.
There was the synthetic beat music, and the Cybertronian made music. Synthetic would be made from a specialised computer that wouldn’t burn out and was created only for creating the synthetic beat songs. Cybertronian made songs were forced to be slower since they had to manually input commands to hit a beat in the sound system they had installed for this. Each beat had to be pre-coded with the backing sound and a CPU could only take so much.
The Cybertronian society that used this music would’ve used it for much at all and had little cultural meaning or ‘words’ behind any of it. It was mostly made for fun by mecha that had the time to pitch code and had the systems to support the harsh sounds. Teenagers would sometimes have these sound systems installed in them and would create these songs on the go up against one another on stage. They would see who could get the fastest and coherent beat without burning out something important from exertion.
3) Scare
This once less its own idea and more of an extension to quick beat, quick step and would be the only type of music here to require an instrument. This music would be constant wavering tones normally with shrieks or cutting metal in the background, it wasn’t really a music for anything and was supposed to be sat down and listened to.
Most of the music would be made personally and with an original touch on each one. It was designed to ‘twang’ certain audio cords of very specific mecha so there were ones attuned to maybe one or two different types of frame and sub-frame, but the tones couldn’t be enjoyed by any other frame as it would hit the wrong personal pitches and ‘hurt.’
It could be played live if one collected enough mecha of the chosen chord, the song itself would mix the musical instruments sound and personal sounds made by the composer up on stage. It wasn’t a thing ‘just anybody’ could do either, the spark had to be able to ‘attune’ certain pitches and sounds through the E.M field and it was an incredibly rare skill.
‘Merzbow-Requiem’ Just turn the audio down as low as it can go, it’s an even more required taste than Extracore and in all honesty, I can’t listen to it for that long. But it’s an incredibly interesting feat in human music so, yea…
4) Tonal
Seriously this would be the most alien one on here and is personally my favorite one and the one I think would be most plausible. I’m not even going to explain what this is but look up the song called ‘Maxwell’s Demon [Lowercase/Field Recording/Drone] ~ Gen Thalz’ and listen to all of it, it will be a weird experience, I promise.
It would truly be an alien concept of music and Cybertronians would dig this sh!t. The music would be created personally by recording the world around them and once again messing with the pitches. It would never have any sort of lyrics to it as Cybertronians weren’t designed to be ‘singers.’ The more odd and indecipherable the sound the more ‘out there’ and ‘cool’ the song would be.
Vosvians would have recordings of engines and morphed beyond reason sounds of the wind and acidic rain. Polyhexian’s would have the least morphed sound usually consisting of clangs of metal and skidding wheels. Praxians would just have morphed sound of cogs and mechanics turning and clashing.
All of these would be smooshed together with complimentary higher and lower tones, once again going from the tone preferences above. Warbles, harsh buzzes, and screeches would occasionally accompany the ‘music’ too, but that was for the younger generation. Old mecha like Ratchet would just prefer to listen to music when the music was ‘normal’ and low tones were accompanied with only things like smashing glass and breaking cogs. Like it should be.
5) Silence
No, no, honestly, I’m being serious here. When I say that silence to a Cybertronian *is*, in fact, their music I mean it. I doubt you need an example.
A Cybertronians life would’ve been consumed with regular city sounds or building and the constant sound of cars. In ships, it would’ve been the constant hum of engines and everywhere else on Cybertron there would have been constant sound, constant loud, unbearable sound. Even in ‘silence’ the hum of their own engines and workings would accompany them.
True silence would have been bliss and literal music to their ears. True silence would be enjoyed by a mecha alone, preferably in their quarters with their entire audio systems down, in this time they truly ‘listen’ to the world around them.
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Anyway, hope you liked this, even though I kind of expect you to have only skimmed it. Culture and stuff seem to only interest me and a few others nowadays. Anyway, expect sort of regular updates. xxx
“What would sound ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’ to a Cybertronian though would not sound like anything bearable to a human. Luckily most of the song would be above and below the human sound range, doesn’t mean what can be heard doesn’t sound bloody eerie though.”
Cybertronian Database 