If you had the chance to take one thing OUT of Transformers...

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Warcry
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If you had the chance to take one thing OUT of Transformers...

Post by Warcry »

Like the title says. If you had the chance to erase one concept, plot device or story element from the Transformers 'canon', what would it be? Why would you do it, and how do you think Transformers would be changed (for the better, presumably) by getting rid of it?

I'm not talking about entire series, so "Bayformers"/Armada/Beast Machines wouldn't really fit. I'm talking more about ideas, like "the Quintessons created the Transformers" or "the fight ends up on Earth" or even something more simple like "Minicons".


I would start right at the very beginning and pluck the words "four million years later" out of any continuity they appear in. The huge time-gap has been a big personal peeve of mine for a while now. I'm not sure why it was so large to start with, to be honest, since it was never really played off of at all. If the premise of the series was "Cybertron is lost to them forever so Earth is where they're staying" it would have made some sense, but they were hopping from Earth to Cybertron like it was no big deal after only a few episodes/issues.

It also never really felt like that much time had passed on Cybertron while the main crews had been absent. In the cartoon literally nothing had changed. In the comics, although things had changed a bit it honestly didn't feel like more than a few decades had passed between Arkfall and the crews waking up. Neither one really made a big deal about it though, so it was easy enough to ignore.

Both of the modern G1 revivals have latched onto the same timeframe though, and they've both been very ham-handed about it. I suppose Dreamwave felt obliged since they were a 'nostalgia' thing and wanted to keep as close to the original as they could so they could rake in more cash. But it was obvious they had no clue what to do about it, since they told us that everyone on Cybertron took a nap for three million plus years. They also made things worse in a sense by dating their War Within books to something like nine million years ago.

IDW has no excuse at all. The way Furman set things up, the Transformers had just recently shown up on Earth and there was no reason to date any of the 'past' events that far back. They did though, starting with 600,000 years ago in Spotlight: Shockwave and working their way progressively farther back until we finally got the dreaded "Four Million Years Ago" in the Ironhide mini. IDW is probably the best example of why this sort of time-scale just doesn't work, because four million years ago the exact same characters were fighting each other over the exact same things as they are now -- no one important has died (permanently) and nothing important has changed (permanently) so why the **** should we care about the stories you're telling us now?

If that huge timescale was contracted, I think it would make the stories more believable. Transformers are more durable than humans, certainly, and they have longer (natural) lifespans than we do, but four million years is a hell of a long time. A few really, really lucky (or unlucky) ones might survive that long, like Kup, but most of them would be claimed by 'natural causes' or accidents before they got there. And with a war in the mix lifespans would go down even further. And the way the story treats these huge swaths of time as if they're nothing ("Oh, it's our old girlfriends. No, why wouldn't they remember us? They've only been living in a dystopian, Shockwave-run hellscape for the last four million years, it's no big deal) makes them effectively meaningless anyway.

I think the Movieverse has handled this perfectly, to be honest. The earliest event in TF history that we know about is the Fallen setting up the Solar Harvester in 17,000 BC, which is a hell of a long time ago but a lot easier to swallow.

That's my rant. What's yours?
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Blackjack
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Post by Blackjack »

I want to take Mike Costa and/or Shane McCarthy out. First thing that came into my mind. Skywatch. And Combaticons being hired by Koreans. If possible I would take them out of continuity and nuke it.

And the whole idea of 'HUMANS WANT TO NUKE TRANSFORMERS ZOMG WE NEED SOMEONE TO FLY UP AND BLOW THE BOMB OSHITT!!!!'

That said, like Warcry I don't really like the four-million-year gap. The movieverse was pretty nice with the pacing, so the war feels like something that's happened for quite some time, but not that long. Animated, too, made it more believable with fifty (or was that thirty?) years for the Autobots to sleep.

The early IDW comics actually handled it pretty well, at least in the beginning. Shockwave and the Dinobots crashed on Earth during the Ice Age, which isn't terribly long considering everyone else assumed they are dead. But put in Megatron: Origin and all the other early-war stories, with the exact same people as the present day guys, and it becomes unhinged.

I'd also pluck Daniel Witwicky out of the Movie. Noisy little brat... Ditto for Beast Machines Nightscream. And the Armada kids.

Another one: In all honesty I've always wished that G1 and Beast Machines wouldn't have the whole 'Cybertron used to be techno-organic!' thing going on, but after watching Beast Machines I've warmed up to the idea. Welcomed it, even... but I would've preferred if BM had had a different ending.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Today? The Neo Nights. Furman had hit onto a good enough thing with Death's Head that he thought using Transformers as a back door pilot for his escape route a second time would go down just as well. They look stupid and have exactly one personality trait each (Oirish, feisty, Imigrant). There's enough delicious irony in the woman who hates robots being the one who provides the distraction to save them all for me to still want Circuit Breaker to end up on Cybertron, but it wouldn't have been so hard to just have her and G.B. along for the ride without the hangers on.
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Blackjack
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Post by Blackjack »

Something that escaped my mind earlier: I've always abhorred the idea that a crazy monkey scientist was the one that created the planet eater Unicron. Always hated it. Doesn't make sense, and Primacron is like one of the most badly-drawn aliens out there.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Blackjack wrote:Something that escaped my mind earlier: I've always abhorred the idea that a crazy monkey scientist was the one that created the planet eater Unicron. Always hated it. Doesn't make sense, and Primacron is like one of the most badly-drawn aliens out there.
And may I also add the subsequent attempts to retcon the crazy monkey scientist into the Primus origin. Which for the most part, are crap.
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Sades
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Post by Sades »

Most of the fandom, I think the change for the better is obvious there, HARRR

Now that that's out of the way, I'd have to agree with the ending of BM technorganic=warmed to the concept, but the ending was kind of shit. I'm not elaborating beyond that right now, because writing and studying and not sleeping has left me ****ing brain-dead.
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Summerhayes
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Post by Summerhayes »

There are probably a few, but the one that really springs to mind is all the computer hacker rubbish from the first Live Action. It just doesn't go anywhere or add anything to the film.
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optimusskids
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Post by optimusskids »

Any of the masters with the exception of the targetmasters that came with the Actionmasters which were essentially mini shockwaves they make no sense at all how having organics being your gun/engine or head improves a millions of years old robot makes no sense.
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Post by Halfshell »

The paedophilia from Kiss Players.
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Post by Rack 'n Ruin »

The Kiss Players from paedophilia.

:joke:
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Shrapnel Clone
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Post by Shrapnel Clone »

There's so many annoyances in it, it is tough to choose just one.

- Invisibility spray
- Crystal City
- The Technobots
- Megatron transforming into a gun.
- Awful 3D in BW. Can't watch the first season.
- Jazz in new TF:TM
- Jazz in old TF:TM
- Grimlock in old TF:TM
- Welker not doing the original voice in TF:Prime. Why get Welker at all?
- Botanica in BM
- Stryka in BM

But I'm going to nominate the G2 TV show for this. It has that special kind of f***ed upness.
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Post by Wildrider »

I think Power Masters always struck me as being a bit crap, the idea I mean, Dreadwind and Darkwing were an awesome duo, but who would really want to volunteer to be a battery pack?

Sure I can understand the benefit and power trips of Target and Head Masters, but Power Master's? Although Hi-Q's death was sad, I just wouldn't fancy it as a career choice.

To be honest, it's more a case of what I'd do differently, rather than what I'd remove. Less ostentatious designs for Pretenders for one, defeats the point really? Likewise as a guilty lover of DW's Micromaster's mini-series (So many characters, so little time!), I would maybe have liked to see the two concepts combined. Micro Pretenders would have made a lot more sense in a fuel conservation/robot's in disguise point of view.

Also make Wheelie the bad ass he should have been on his original tech spec, he was the minibot equivalent of Rambo before 'TFTM', in my mind anyway.
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Post by Terome »

Hmm. Sparks, I think. I get that they had a use in a show where the cast was regularly blown up and dismembered but still had to, on occasion, actually die-die, but I think the concept has been horribly abused since.

Seeing as the writers/Hasbro/everyone seem to be so resistant to the idea of killing off any characters and of keeping the cast consistent over nine bajillion years or so, I'd like to see the concept of death taken out of it altogether. Endless back-ups and copies and transplants could keep a machine alive forever, so why not grab that opportunity with both hands and make the death of a Transformer dependant only on the materials available to rebuild its body?

Though, honestly, I think I increasingly wish for Transformers to be something it most certainly is not. Perhaps a lot of us here think the same way?
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Post by Summerhayes »

Terome wrote: Though, honestly, I think I increasingly wish for Transformers to be something it most certainly is not. Perhaps a lot of us here think the same way?
I do notice that sometimes. Personally, I love almost every aspect of Transformers, but I am quite immature.
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Post by Denyer »

Quite fond of the millions-of-years schtick, although a few tens of thousands of years would be fine. The problem is that it very badly fits the pace at which stories play out, and any in which lethality is a plot device. A highly advanced AI civilisation should be well-versed in backups (touched upon with TFs lending their personalities to storage crystals aboard the Ark for decanting on Earth, but ultimately written off by later media in favour of an other-dimensional heaven analogue.)

Or I'm being spoilt by the new Iain M Banks being much better than the last Culture novel, and find it makes too much sense to not start applying it to vaguely similar scenarios. It's obvious why some cultures might not want to backup... but in a long-running war situation, you'd expect more non-sentient-but-intelligent weapons, and more sentients to consider it worthwhile. Which leaves the possibility that they don't understand how to...

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the things I'd like to take out of TFs: characters being written as stupid to service plots, and the TFs having "origins shrouded in myth". Whilst a lot of records could have been lost during the war, data and storage size/resilience should be quite decent by the time a civilisation can encode stuff with light, play with teleportation and matter gates, etc. TFs should understand a lot more about themselves than writers have tended to give them credit for.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Are we talking "take out with a sniper rifle"? Pat Lee, Don Glut, etc, etc, and so on.


I probably couldn't pick on one thing, though big chunks of fandom (notably whoever decided in about 2002 that Transformers fandom should be about case assortments, barcodes and EXCLUSIVE NEWS rather than discussion of fiction) would be up there if Sades hadn't posted the early reducer on that one. :/

So instead I'm just going to wibble on what other people have said, in the vague hope of starting a fight with someone. Anyone.

Don't mind a big gap, but four million is stupidly long, it's just a preposterously big number... In context, for example, look at the effective change in status quo we get between, say, Season 2 and Season 3 - in 20 years, the whole war changes and turns on its' head. Okay, so the G1 cartoon isn't something anyone thought through at the time (Glut Glut Glut), but still... Even in the Marvel comics in the space of... eight years... we have combiners, binary-bonding, Pretender shells, Micromasters. Stagnation in warafre is one thing... Though stagnation only tends to set in in trench warfare - in guerilla warfare, the guerillas (i.e. the Autobots) need to be constantly developing in order to survive against much greater numbers.

A few thousand years would have done the job... I've no problem with a longish gap, especially as the basic G1 set-up works it well in places, but 4,000,000 years is just so silly compared to what we actually see happen in a much smaller period of time.

I'm still pondering whether the visuals of TF:TM, Legacy and Edge of Extinction are enough of a pay-off to outweigh all the bad shit Unicron's brought to the table. I think it probably does, though, on the grounds I'm never, ever going to watch the Unicron trilogy shite, consider all of DW's output to simply be fanfic with a budget (i.e. nice enough in places, but I don't necessarily need to pay much attention to anything it has to say) and wouldn't wipe my arse on a copy of The Ultimate Guide.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I'd simply go with removing most post Marvel Unicron showings rather than completely zapping him out of existence entirely (I'd save the wonderful battiness of Cosmos killing Unicron with mushrooms and the UK Movie comic showing, the rest can go burn).
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Post by Cliffjumper »

I think Transformers in general has a big problem with leaving things be - if something comes off well once, like Unicron, or Nightbeat, or Ratchet, or Grimlock, there's this need to retread and over-expose it to the point where no-one cares.

I think it could be part of the reason why Beast Wars is so consistently liked - the need to break away from the then-unpopular regular archetypes in order to simply survive gives it a fresh feel, and yet neither it or many of its' themes have been revisited (which doesn't seem to be a simple generational thing - there was as much space between BW and now as there was between TF:TM and the ~2001 nostalgia explosion) so it still feels fairly unique. On the one hand, it's pretty much those three years and not much else, but on the other there's not the baggage that G1 or G1-influenced (which is basically everything else, whatever gimmicks they dress it up with) stuff tends to bring with it.
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Post by Hound »

I think the original cartoon would've been miles better if the Decepticons hadn't been so damn inept or if Megatron and Starscream hadn't been completely useless as leaders.

You can't help but watch and wonder why Megatron didn't destroy Starscream the first time he opens his mouth or how a moron like Starscream could even be any kind of legitimate rival for leadership.

More to the point, if Megatron and Starscream are the best the Decepticons can muster to lead them you have to wonder how they weren't defeated from the very beginning.
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Post by Paul053 »

G1 Soundwave's voice. I know it's unique and special but I had hard time understanding it. Good thing he didn't talk much.
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