Aligned Soundwave’s chronological design changes are weird af
I mean he goes from Barawave during the very beginning of the Great War:
To a retro G1-like style in War for Cybertron to Fall of Cybertron (this design is also in Dark Spark but I honestly have no clue if that game is canon in the Aligned Continuity):
Lots of IDW readers should be familiar with this design since it was later reused in the 2012 ongoing series Robots in Disguise (later dropped to avoid confusion with the upcoming 2015 cartoon that had the same name)
Then finally we go to the present where Aligned Soundy has his much more debatably iconic look which also brings back his old head:
Of course don’t get me wrong at all, I do not hate ANY of these designs, in fact I love’em and personally think they are kinda cool in their own ways. But I just think it’s pretty funny that over time he goes from a beefcake, to blocky boombox/truck/lamppost, to silent Slenderman.
… and possibly back to beefcake if the RiD2015 Warriors Class toy look is going to be canon in the show (and IF he returns again):
All right. So here’s my attempt at deciphering the Cybertronian glyphs used in TFP.
Cybertronian – or at least Autobot Cybertronian – appears to have two distinct scripts: one similar to printing, the other more like cursive. This is the print script.
‘I’ and ‘Y’ appear to be interchangeable (as seen in the word for “cylinder”).
Some glyphs, when written next to each other, merge or run together. For example, the dual horizontal lines of ‘A’ run into the square component of ‘V’ in Soundwave’s name.
There’s a section at the end of the Covenant of Primus that has a nice english-to-cypher comparison on the afterword that shares many more letters ; yay! Am I here to share? Mais oui. Are the glyphs in the CoP different from those in TFP? Only a bit! I’d say what we have between the covenant and the script used in TFP is the difference between serif/nonserif/script font, because the larger patterns of the letter forms remain very similar. Here’s a chart from my work on the covenant which takes only like 5-10 minutes to crack, and five of them are looking for the letter K an cursing at how A’s kerning runs into other letters..
With this at our fingertips, it becomes quite possible to make both heads and tails of a longer stretch of cybertronian text. All one needs is large enough screenshots which I’ve been looking for, such as a high quality version of orion’s screen from Orion Pax 1-3. Then using the letters we already know and comparing with their mutations of letterforms in Prime and we can fill things out! It would be very exciting.
Sorry for butting in here but I felt it was worth adding the letters from War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron as well. Woo Aligned continuity!
(The only real difference is FoC has tweaked the character width so they avoid the awkward problem they had in WfC where half the Cybertronian text was actually missing and some of it became gibberish. They really wanted the ‘translating’ to look cool.)
Most of the glyphs are pretty similar! More like the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts than, say, a different character all together. At the very least they all keep the general ‘shape’. Most of the ones that look like they’ve changed dramatically are usually only slightly tweaked or skewed when you compare them. I think ‘O’ is the best example of this.
P.S. Thanks so much to both of you for sharing these. *o*
How's it hummin'? 