Hey! This list does contain some potentially triggering material, so feel free to cross out anything you don’t want to use/write. Could be used either as RP material, referance material, or if you’d like to shoot me a character and a number I could whip up a little drabble too!
Shadowplay (the use of mnemosurgery to alter one’s memories, beliefs, or personality)
Empurata (the surgical removal and replacement of the face and hands with a single optic and pincer-claws, used as punishment by the functionalist regime)
Vivincorporation (alterting a cybertronian into an inanimate object while keeping them alive and aware of their situation)
Circuit Boosters / Syk Dose (powerful and dangerous illicit drugs)
Slave Coding (coding that binds it’s victim to one or more masters, who cannot be disobeyed)
Cosmic Rust (a virulent infection that can creep over bots quickly)
Turned into a Sparkeater (an aggressive, feral, seemingly undead cybertronian with strange powers who feeds on the sparks of others)
Cybercrosis (an illness of the spark and body that slowly incapacitates and kills it’s victims)
Domestication (the trapping of a cybertronian in a beastmode form and reducing their intelligence to make them a pet)
Memory Wipe (what it says on the tin, could have multiple causes)
Spark Isolation (the removal of the spark and processor from the body, and isolation therof, as a form of punishment- sensory depravation)
Spark Transfer (the tranfer of a spark from it’s native frame into a different frame, resulting in a new body)
Reformat (the alteration of a Cybertronian’s body into something different, be it a new altmode or a new frametype)
Tainted Energon Mutation (created the Dinobots in IDW, known to result in spectacular or monsterous mutations)
Dead Universe Infection (gradually turns bots into the walking dead, or undead. Apparently also makes them purge black goo)
Dark Energon (the blood of Unicron, can influence bots to his will or drive them insane)
Terrorcons (ZOMBIES but not like your garden variety shamblers we’re talkin’ gross Resident Evil special zombies with probiscuses and stuff)
Not only does Shockwave have this pattern on both sides of his hand, he has lights ON HIS FINGERS. I don’t think any other transformers have that, at least not in Prime.
I still think Megatron has the prettiest hands, but Shockwave somehow comes in second.
I love the “starscream was a scientist” backstory because it informs absolutely none of his current character? Like yeah I used to be a scientist and I was really good at it and now I kill people and those two things are entirely unrelated like he isn’t an evil scientist and he didn’t have some tragedy where he had to Give Up science to fight he just. changed his mind one day out of spite apparently
Megatron’s face when Silas advises him to ‘relax’.
Human. That is the face of someone who has been doing the same job for one million years and only enjoyed it for the first five. That is the face of someone who has never had a weekend. That is the face of someone who was in a coma and spent every second of it killing Autobots on endless loop in his mind. That is the face of someone so averse to the mere concept of relaxation that he made Starscream his second-in-command, which is like willingly sharing an office with a hungry alligator that is somehow also a chronically anxious chihuahua.
Since I’ve been reminded of a post I made on Aligned Soundwave’s multiple design changes recently I think I’d might as well talk about one of my more favorite design changes, Bumblebee’s.
Now thankfully there wasn’t any visual flashbacks in the shows or the comics that were based on the shows centered on Bumblebee’s creation just before War For Cybertron, from what I remember anyways, so it would be safe to say that his very first appearance, obviously War For Cybertron, would be his first design
This design was a pretty small round and looks very young yet he also looks ready to head to the frontlines, which is fitting since it’s implied that he was born somewhat recently before the Autobot Campaign.
Like before these designs were used for IDW Bumblebee around
The Transformers: The Death of Optimus Prime before getting modified to his “Goldbug’ look (they never named him Goldbug when he was rebuilt because there was already an pre-existing, separate character named Goldbug in Spotlight: Metroplex)
Now he still kept this design during
Cybertron Adventures and Fall of Cybertron so there really isnt much change between the three games so lets just head over to the next mold, the Transformers Prime design.
With this look it seems that they wanted to add a Bayformers look to him since the movies were pretty relevant at the time but none the less this looks shows off that he grown since he left Cybertron but has yet to fully mature just yet.
While his build didnt change in Beast Hunters but he did get some new colors to hide himself from the Decepticons after the Autobots’ base blew up (this was mostly to sell toys on Hasbro’s part but hey it looks good so I can’t complain)
At some point between Prime and BH he visited the Rescue Bots, though this design change is just adapting the TFP look with the show’s “modified G1″ art style than an actual change.
About 20 years after Beast Hunters we reach to Tranformers: Robots in Disguise (2015)
As we can tell he has grown even more than his TFP look and and has a much sleeker and smoother design to show that he’s fully mature and is ready for responsibility.
Honorary mention to Transformers Universe Bumblebee who never was thanks to the game’s cancellation, thus I cannot exactly pin point where exactly this design should go in.
So yeah unlike I’ve mention in the Aligned Soundwave post where the changes in chronological order in the timeline felt weird,
somewhat inconsistent, and out of place since his body size and measurements were vastly different in each series; I liked these changes more because they show that Bumblebee has grown a lot since his original appearance as a fresh off of the assembly line messenger to his current appearances an Autobot leader who is ready to take on some responsibility! (Kinda)
RID15 gets such a bad rap when compared to TFP, and it’s true that the rendering is less sophisticated and the designs are less elegant (though I suspect there’s a certain element there of Hasbro telling the character designers, “we have to be able to actually MAKE THE TOYS, guys”) … but c’mon. Look at this animation. Look at the color palette and the lighting. Look at the articulation of her armor. I grew up on G1, guys; this is awesome 😀
I agree, the animation style is extremely simplified compared to TFP and I’d complain that many of the Cybertronians portrayed don’t evoke a feel of “yep that’s a robot I’m looking at there,” but the animation itself is full of little details and has a nice flow to it. I also assume that it was done like this not just for budget reasons (to allow for a greater quantity of models), but maybe because more cartoony shows tend to age better than the more realistic animated ones.
((I actually have a headcanon about that – it has to do with what each of them understood about Dark Energon and how it works, how they chose to use it, and how it affected them. Megatron fully understood that this was the blood of Unicron, and that he was placing himself in Unicron’s service in exchange for power. He took Unicron’s power into himself and it fully bonded with him. Starscream, on the other hand, always kept Dark Energon at arm’s length and didn’t want to know what it truly was.
Starscream’s whole thing with Dark Energon was “if this made Megatron powerful then I want it too.” It was superficial, and even though he knew it’s Unicron’s blood, I don’t think he was fully down for the soul-selling aspect of using it. He didn’t seem to understand that aspect at all, didn’t know what it would do, and was thoroughly freaked out by it, but then he saw it work for Megatron and decided to go for it after getting the shit beaten out of him. He got briefly enflamed with power, but that power never took hold. Notice when he actually tried to use it, his eyes went from purple back to red, resulting in him getting his arm shot off:
The shard is still sitting in his Spark chamber at that point, but Unicron isn’t going to mess around and waste his power on some guy who just wants a zombie to murder his boss. Starscream is out for himself, and wouldn’t place himself in thrall to Unicron to command an undead army the way Megatron did. He doesn’t want to dive that deeply in, so he doesn’t get the full “benefits” as deeply as Megatron. I think there has to be an element of free, informed choice if you’re selling your soul to Unicron. So basically what I’m saying is Starscream is too self-centered and also not crazy enough to be a good servant of Unicron, so his experience with Dark Energon is more of a flash in pan (or a burst of flames), while Megatron shudders as his whole essence is bonded with Unicron’s. It’s why Megatron can control zombies and Starscream really can’t even though he can sense that Skyquake was re-animated. Starscream is an amateur when it comes to the ways of Dark Energon, which is ironic, considering he spent so long trying to keep it out of Megatron’s grasp to begin with. Then again, he did that because he didn’t know what it could do and frankly didn’t want to know. He still used it once Megatron got ahold of it though, because he can’t let Megatron have something powerful that he doesn’t also have.))
((It also might be because they are too different styles of extra, and Starscream is the least subtle person ever ))
How's it hummin'? 