#beast wars
After getting my first taste of Master Made stuff I immediately went in on (not) Scorponok. I also had the privilege of picking up Beast Wars Megatron that month as well. Definitely up there for toy of the year!
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Finally caught up to 2019 as far as posts. Again these were meant to be bigger sets with more in-depth photos of the individual toys. But as I said previously - life got in the way and tumblr hasn’t been the same since the purge. I will continue to post things here for my own recordings and as a way to look back. Thanks for sticking around! Once I catch up on my posts and finish moving my stuff out I’ll be back to posting regularly (hopefully)! Pt 3 on 2019 catch up.
The DK-08 kits are an absolute necessity. Turning meh figures into the best hasbro representations of Optimal Optimus.
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Some toys from November/December 2018 I never got to upload due to life getting too busy. These were all going to be their own sets with posing, transformations, as well as some thoughts on each set. But life got in the way and then Tumblr went and killed itself. After majorly trimming these sets down and combining them into one post I’ve decided to upload these anyways so I know the dates/time frame I picked these things up for my own records. Part 3. Final!
(I kind of went crazy for my birthday/christmas…)
I cannot tell you how much I love transmetal megs btw!
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Transformers Beast Wars Dawn of Future’s Past: Dinobot
Transformers is owned by Hasbro.
Dinobot sprite was originally created Nicholas Kelsch, who’s website is now defunct. His Deviant Art (nkelsch) is listed as the source for this post.
Find more Transformers perler bead patterns on my Tumblr!
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MORE PLACES TO FOLLOW MY ART
https://www.deviantart.com/zeromayhem
https://www.artstation.com/zeromayhem (updating this one soon, not much yet)
https://twitter.com/evangauntt
https://www.instagram.com/zeromayhemart/?hl=en
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Doobles
Love forever!
~ PRINT NOW AVAILABLE ON INPRNT AND REDBUBBLE ~
https://www.redbubble.com/people/cinnabonren/shop?asc=uhttps://www.inprnt.com/profile/sebastoratchet/
I worked really hard on this mainly because there’s like no art of these two on art shops and stuff so I had to make my own print LOL
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TM2 Blackarachnia that I drew for @tf-nation ‘s official zine! <3 Thank you so much for the opportunity guys, I’m always up for drawing badass ladies.
Even if I wasn’t able to be there in person it’s reassuring to know that a small part of me was able to attend. -thumbs up-
Also if you like this illustration you can get it here, on my inprnt account!
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TM2 Blackarachnia that I drew for @tf-nation ‘s official zine! <3 Thank you so much for the opportunity guys, I’m always up for drawing badass ladies.
Even if I wasn’t able to be there in person it’s reassuring to know that a small part of me was able to attend. -thumbs up-
Also if you like this illustration you can get it here, on my inprnt account!
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One time I was bored and created an all-Prowl Combiner Wars team - or, as I thought of them, the Prowl Corps Combiners.
They merge, of course, into Prowlastator.
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Yeesssss…
Transmetal Megatron, Quickstrike, Inferno, Waspinator and Rampage, plus Ravage’s TransWarp Cruiser. Art by Guido Guidi and colors by Hi-Fi Design. Scan from Genesis: The Art of Transformers.
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Greetings!
Now I am not the most online person (especially at the moment as I get ready for the birth of my son) but I am humbled by the kind words about Dawn of the Predacus that keep coming in from the folk that did manage to nab a copy at Botcon. Because I’m not online a whole bunch I have tried to answer questions as much as possible if they’ve popped up on forums I go to because I have always loved it when creators have chimed in. I’ve not been around much and that’s likely to be the case for a while as I try and keep on top of deadlines and all my new responsibilities. I’m a director’s commentary, interview reading, making-of book reading obsessive so I love to give some of that back, especially when so many of the questions have been very detailed and well-considered.
As with all things there are, of course, differing views. I can understand that some fans don’t want to accept that G1 and BW connect or that there was ever any overlap. For me the connection between past and present was what won me over to Beast Wars. Seeing those connections, the richness of a shared history was a big part of what made the series as special as it was. G1 and BW do not fit neatly together of course, there is a lot of disconnect and rough edges. And of course the G1 references in BW don’t necessarily mean that the G1 cartoon connects completely but that something that is very similar is connected. By picking a moment in time that straddles the two continuities to place the one-shot there was always a limit to how many threads could be pulled together, how many edges could be smoothed. I’m not stepping on anyone’s childhood, everything that happens in Beast Wars still comes to pass. Every decision that was made was taken where it could be supported by the actual concrete events of the previous comics and cartoon and just as importantly not be contradicted by it.
SPOILERS
Some fans had speculated that there was no overlap, that BW characters were completely separate and some that many of the characters were old characters. Any story that fits in this time frame has to choose a path to go down. With Magnaboss’s combiner function being an aspect of the toyline it would be impossible to separate out Tigatron from Ironhide and Prowl’s story. However with both Tigatron and Airazor effectively blank slates reborn in the series their presence in the past does not bump against anyone’s experience during the Beast Wars. The crew of the Axalon exist at the time of the Great War but they are not involved in it which again was a balance between the two viewpoints and is absolutely in the spirit of the show and other established canon. Megatron has a chance to take power which he is punished for. He never gets the chance to be a big player, but he displays cunning, manipulation, brute force and fearlessness, all qualities that will stand him well in the future. But the skill he learns from incarceration is the patience to play the long game.
Beast Wars only ran for three years and made massive impact on the fandom, and me in particular, but it also left contradictions and blank spaces. I have never seen those as barriers to further inquiry, and indeed the shape of the story I wrote changed when testing assumptions of what could be supported by the continuity. Episodes were rewatched, scripts and comics reread and opinions were sought from other fans which included people who worked on the book. Funpub, IDW and Hasbro all considered, cogitated and fact challenged anything which was not going to fit or make sense.
None of this means that anyone has to like the book, I’ve never been crazy enough to assume that everyone will, but I would hope that the above would contextualise the care and depth that went into it..
“The stasis pods in this story are labeled with the names of the characters inside, whereas the pods in the show weren’t (with the obvious exception of Protoform X). It’s possible that this is simply a change that occurred over the next 300 years, but why?”
Because they are not the same devices. The life support pods in DotP are literally to keep the protoforms alive. The stasis pods in BW are completely different, more like cryogenic suspension chambers. They are different shapes, have different windows… They are clearly shown to have a different purpose to the pods in BW and they look different. It is 300 years between then and now, the technology would naturally have evolved.
Again to use a Star Trek example there is a hundred year gap between TOS and TNG. In the former the Federation is at war with the Klingons, in the latter they are at peace. The fact that we have these two states of play and a time gap does not mean that an error has occurred, it means TIME HAS PASSED. Events continue to happen even if we don’t see them. We know that there are letters between A-Z even if only presented with those two letters. There are events that lead from here to BW, there are no events that stop BW from happening. This is the status quo NOW, it is not a barrier to a new status quo LATER.
“The death of Predaking, a being composed of black, yellow, and red mammals and birds, is commemorated with… a purple insect face?”
The Beast Wars do not start until they reach prehistoric Earth yet they had animal emblems already. This isn’t a continuity error it’s what was already there.
“In “Optimal Situation”, a cross section of the Axalon’s bridge is moved into the Ark, and we can see how big Optimal Optimus—who was larger than his fellow Maximals but much smaller than at least one Generation 1 guy—is in relation to the inside of the ship. As Optimal Optimus is tall enough to span the height of the entire hull (which is why the cross-sectioning happened for out-of-universe reasons), that the ship once housed Generation 1-sized guys is essentially impossible, unless they were scooting around inside it on their butts.”
Leaving aside the fact that Transformers were all in different heights and sizes (not everyone was Optimus Prime’s height) if you rewatch “Optimal Situation” it is actually clear to see that there is an almost empty deck immediately below with a raised platform in the middle. I’ve included a screen grab as the image for this article. It was my contention that existing decks were divided up into smaller decks following the reformatting and that consoles etc were reconfigured. And it is that secondary deck you can see in Optimal Situation. In DotP you see Rattrap and the gang pretty squished together on the bridge as the width of the bridge could not change but the height and depth of the bridge could. So it is more than possible and was taken into consideration in detail before writing the story.
“Protoforming technology is established as a weapon of war, with stasis pods as a form of life support for its victims. Optimus Primal takes possession of some of these stasis pods (stating that he’ll “do what we can for them”), implying that the stasis pods said to contain his Maximal crew on the cartoon are actually a bunch of protoformed Autobots and Decepticons he’s been carrying around in his ship for 300 years and that the blank protoform who becomes his new body from “Coming of the Fuzors (Part 2)” onward is actually somebody’s corpse.”
I’ve already explained this in a previous post but nothing I have stated conflicts with Beast Wars. By the time Beast Wars begins they are using this technology in a normalised way to transport their crew. It’s like saying “300 years ago everyone was on horseback and now everyone is driving cars and flying on planes” as if the two things contradict or prevent the other. Technology evolves, that’s a principle conceit in every aspect of Transformers.
In Beast Wars, Primal says that it his crew that are in the pods, yet later we discover he also has a mass murderer on board in Protoform X so his statement was never complete. It is not against the spirit of Beast Wars to conjecture that he would also have some unrecoverable blanks on board. He uses these in Dawn of Future’s Past to spark transfer Tigatron and Airazor aboard. Cheetor says “We do have a few blank protoforms in the cargo hold”. Dawn of the Predacus simply explains how they got there.
And of course Primal uses a blank as his new body in Coming of the Fuzors Part 2. But that was always the case, unless people thought the protoform was alive and well in case Rhinox would have murdered the previous inhabitant to take his body? I’m not sure why something that is plainly established in Beast Wars is considered a “point of note”. The use of “actually” implies this was not previously known yet is unambiguously presented within the cartoon.
“The sight of Generation 1 Inferno becoming a protoform which is then labeled as (naturally) “Inferno” suggests that his protoform became Beast Wars Inferno. Which wouldn’t really be a continuity error, but it would be incredibly stupid.
Bove stated at BotCon 2016 that this was was deliberately left open to the reader’s interpretation, and that he hasn’t ruled out Generation 1 Inferno’s return if the story were to be continued.”
Despite the second point invalidating the first it confirms that this is neither factually a continuity error and the opinion is irrelevant for a site that is supposed to represent “facts”.
“There appears to be at least one of Ravage’s transwarp cruiser, which will be “experimental” 300 years later, flying around.
Bove explains that it’s just a similar design, similar to the various Enterprises.”
Again the second point should negate the need for the first…
“However, on some points his explanations fall short:
Rattrap really shouldn’t know Optimus Primal yet. Bove defends this by saying nobody ever said how long they’d been serving together, but while nobody establishes a precisetimeframe, “Beast Wars (Part 1)” makes it abundantly clear that Rattrap is new to Primal’s command, and on top of that strongly suggests that Primal himself is new to command. Making them old friends destroys the backbone of Rattrap’s entire first-season character development, as it’s grounded in him learning to know and trust Primal as a commander. There’s some wiggle room, but it’s hard to argue that there are three centuries of it.”
Primal’s backstory was a somewhat mixed bag of fragments. He WAS present in the last days of the Great War. He WASN’T anyone who really fought in it. Again the absolutism of the statement on the wiki is a very, VERY narrow reading of the events of Beast Wars. Rattrap sarcastically asks Primal if it’s his first day on the job. They are not friends in this story, it is clear that they have an antagonistic relationship.
What is also being completely overlooked is that Primal is established within Dawn of the Predacus as a SHIP captain not a COMBAT captain. It is never said that Primal is new to captaining a science vessel in the cartoon, but he is constantly being forced to prove himself in combat which suggests that he is new to commanding TROOPS and engaging in combat. That is absolutely consistent with DotP. Primal may even be an excellent science ship captain but there is no reason at all for Rattrap to respect him as a soldier, as someone to trust his LIFE with, by the time of the Beast Wars. These are not either/or circumstances - there is no contradiction. Characters can possess more than one facet at the same time without it being a contradiction.
For Rattrap to not have respect for Primal before the first season and then to grow to appreciate Primal when he steps up as ‘bot ready to fight, adhere to principle, lead by example and make the ultimate sacrifice does not touch the backbone of the show’s portrayal at all. Starscream disrespected Megatron for millions of years, we’re talking about 300 here. Rattrap is, in this story, a character who disrespects Primal, the ship, the mission and it’s importance. Only when he sees what Primal is capable of in the cartoon does his attitude begin to shift. Everything established in DotP leads to the events of Beast Wars.
“Many Maximals and Predacons from the cartoon, plus some who didn’t appear in the cartoon, existed concurrently with their legendary “energon guzzler” “ancient ancestors”. Bove tries to explain this away by pointing out that most of them aren’t seen to interact with any Autobots or Decepticons, but that still puts them in the same time frame as characters who were supposedly part of the distant past.”
We exist in the same time frame as sporting legends, presidents and celebrities who most of us have no chance of meeting. Being a legend and being part of the distant part are not necessarily one and the same thing. Optimus Prime and the crew of the Ark had existed for MILLIONS of years and been involved in almost every major event in Transformers history. Whether you met Optimus, passed him in the street, fought against him or just read about him he would be a legend in all senses of the word. The word “ancient” as well as “antiquated” are figurative as well as literal expressions. The timeline of the show establishes that the war ended 300 years prior, G1 characters are established as existing in the BW timeline. Optimus Primal says to Rattrap “Remember the Great War” which if we’re going to only allow literal interpretations of what people say would suggest that they were both there and that Primal knows that he was.
“Tigatron and Airazor are incredibly important Autobots, to the point that Prowl says that Tigatron is “respected by all sides for his desire for peace”, sending him as an emissary to the Decepticons due to his widespread reputation. This echoes his later personality traits when awoken on prehistoric Earth and he would again be sent as an emissary by the Vok… but apparently nobody will make the connection.”
Only Tigatron is an important Autobot. But let’s break this down:
Optimus Primal is established as having not been home for some time.
Tigatron does not meet Optimus Primal.
In Dawn of Future’s Past, Tigatron and “Airazor” do not introduce themselves when they meet the Axalon so Primal would have no idea who he has park transferred aboard.
It is consistently the case that Beast Wars characters seem to be able to choose a name for themselves even if they are not the character that previously held that name. E.g. Silverbolt, Inferno, etc. In the same way no-one ever said “Oh my, you’re the former Aerialbot Silverbolt” to BW Silverbolt (because he wasn’t), there was no reason for a character who says his identity circuits are damaged to be immediately thought of as the same guy as the name he chose. To assume otherwise follows the same knee-jerk logic that assumed Optimus Primal and Megatron were the G1 versions before being given the information in the show itself.
“Airazor ends up in a stasis pod labeled with her name and Tigatron does not, which makes the status quo of “Dawn of Future’s Past” difficult to extrapolate. Apparently at some point she was brought back, but without her memories (and possibly without her name—despite it having been written on her pod), and also Tigatron won’t recognize her. Which isn’t impossible, but wow she has the worst luck.”
I have already explained how the two points connect, but as it is contained in material that does not feature in the issue I won’t repeat it all here. However the principle is EXACTLY the same as the way Beast Wars characters give themselves names which other characters already have or change their names when they wake up. Even in Beast Wars Part 1 the characters mainly rename themselves to account for their changes in form. Either the show and the book are in making the same error or they are both consistent with each other in their approach. From my last post I explained that Airazor would be one of the few that could not be brought back and that Tigatron decides to allow her to born as a new life rather than live an unlife, but he cannot watch as the one he loved was effectively lost forever. The new Airazor (no longer called that) would live a new life.
Even without that information, at the time of Dawn of Future’s Past, she is going by a different name. It is clear that her and Tigatron do not know each other. Tigatron has a completely different face. Airazor does not look the same. Their total interaction is him commandeering her ship, getting attacked, the hull breaching and then being spark transferred out into protoforms. There is literally no time for them to make the connection even if they had enough information to be able to make it.
Long conversations were had about how all these points would connect with Dawn of Future’s Past. I did not have to keep it in continuity at all with the previous TFCC stories but if felt absolutely right to not contradict what was in that comic. There will definitely be some issues that abut with some of the bio cards originally intended to go with the toys and the comic, but again the bios and the comic/cartoon not aligning is not something I have invented.
“In “The Agenda (Part 1)”, General Ram Horn says, “ever since the Autobots defeated our Decepticon ancestors, we Predacons have worked secretly towards the day where we might rise up and take what is rightfully ours,” but we learn in this story that the Tripredacus Council WERE those Decepticon ancestors and that they defeated themselves, on purpose. To be fair, it doesn’t really jibe with Tarantulas’s claim of having different origins in “Other Victories”, either.”
In any fiction, information is true until new information comes along which either adds to your understanding or contradicts what you thought was true. Beast Wars already retconned out the “Decepticon Ancestor” aspect that had gone before through Tarantulas’ attempt to destroy the Ark which he was only happy to because he and the Council had NON-DECEPTICON origins.
In DotP it is clear that they predate the Decepticons, but present themselves as being on their side. But they are not Decepticons and are not loyal to their cause, that should be pretty clear by their actions. Because the show itself completely contradicted itself the best fix I could see was that they were presenting themselves as Decepticons in the past but their origins predated factions. So they could be considered Decepticons but their fates, history and destiny were not tied to the Decepticons. The use of the term “Decepticon ancestors” by the council was always difficult to reconcile and the show itself didn’t even try after contradicting it.
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I’d like to thank the folk who reached out and responded telling me that they had tried to update the wiki but had found their entries removed and overwritten. The problem with a split release is that the normal opportunity to talk in depth about the work comes when everyone has had a chance to read it, but in this case some have but most haven’t. Which is also why misinformation before most people have had a chance to read it is particularly problematic and requires going into more depth a lot earlier than planned and risk spoiling it for a lot of folk.
If anyone has any questions that the last 10 pages of answers have failed to address drop me a line!
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This past weekend my first Transformers story “Dawn of the Predacus” bridging some of the gap between G1 and Beast Wars launched at Botcon. The book told the story of the last 48 hours of the Great War and the betrayals and sacrifices that lead to the eventual status quo of Beast Wars. I am a huge Beast Wars fan and a huge G1 fan and these are continuities I love and characters I adore. I want to extend a huge thank you for all the wonderful messages of support and the great reviews people have given me, and for the excellent, deep and well-considered questions I’ve seen on some of the forums. As a fan myself there’s a lot to go through and I always appreciate it when creators make themselves available to give a greater understanding of the work and respond to aspects that weren’t clear.
One of my usual go-to’s for TF information in terms of both breadth and depth has always been the tfwiki. On viewing the recent entry for Dawn of the Predacus I found a few inaccuracies and a number of notes which seem very confused or based on misunderstandings so I thought it’d be helpful to go through them and address them to help clarify and expand on aspects of continuity. On that note for those that haven’t read the book yet:
SPOILERS
“Three hundred years ago, Optimus Primal, Rhinox, and Rattrap (in their “Dawn of Future’s Past” bodies) are flying around in the Axalon. Let’s break this down:
Rattrap shouldn’t know Primal yet. It’s pretty clear, starting in “Beast Wars (Part 1)”, that Rattrap is someone who is new to Optimus Primal’s command, and also that Optimus Primal himself is new to command.”
The amount of time Rattrap has know Primal has never been stated. With robots living millions of years how recent is recent? Optimus Primal is in charge of a science and exploration vessel. It is stated in the story that the the ship and it’s crew were not special - they were nearest to the thing that needed investigating. He is not a great commander or a military commander, he is in charge of a ship. But previous fiction has established Primal being present at the end of the war and he is present but he is not an active participant.
Rattrap seems to name Optimus Primal within a scene in this book. Because of how his face looks? It’s not clear.
The fact that Primal has Optimus Prime’s face and yet, in the show, is pretty low ranked has always been a bit of a contradiction. In the book the Primal Council is established and Rattrap, ever a bit of a jerk, is making fun of both Optimus’ look and the people who gave him the mission. Eventually that name would either be earned or be stuck with him. Originally I had planned for Primal to be named “Primal” as part of induction into the Primal Council as head of Science but I felt that elevated his status too far too soon given what had been established in previous stories. But the face and the name coupled with his supposed lack of rank are hard to reconcile within the show unless there is a connection like the one I have made. I have tried to make it less of a stretch.
As this story predates the existence of Maximals and Predacons, and there is no indication that any sort of downsizing has taken place, apparently in the past the Axalon was scaled to Generation 1-sized Transformers and… eventually shrunk after the war ended…?
Of the characters we see they are all pretty much on a G1 size scale. The Axalon was a small ship by G1 standards and a big ship for BW bots. It is a natural extrapolation that their cities and tech would have to be adapted and retrofitted to accommodate smaller, more energy efficient forms. So if the Axalon was a 3 levelled ship for example, it would later be subdivided to have 6 levels. Transformers had become weapons of war and while newer technology was heading in the direction of more energy efficient or smaller (or both) there were also so many losses that there was less competition for resources. So downsizing everyone prewar was not necessarily the way things went.
By scaling everyone down after the war the idea is that they could no longer cause the sort of devastation that their archaic, energon guzzling modes could achieve even if hostilities did resume. Their understanding of transmatter over the next 300 years is what enabled and expanded technologies like transwarp, cloaking, biological/technological hybrids, time travel etc. It also potentially contributed to more energy efficient forms beyond technologies we have already seen before.
Had this been part of a mini series as originally intended there would have been an establishment of Micromaster and Pretender tech as a starting point to the ultimate abilities and configurations later on. But as people already knew about Micromaster and Pretender tech I assumed that people would naturally connect to those dots as they had already without seeing that process happen.
Also - Transformers have been shown repeatedly to have the ability to mass-shift. Suggesting that bodies may change in style, shape, size etc is not a concept that has I have created, indeed it’s essential to the premise. It is never stated that every Transformer downsized before the war.
That’s right, every Maximal from the cartoon was an Autobot, and every Predacon from the cartoon was a Decepticon. Several Maximals and Predacons who didn’t appear in the cartoon are also Autobots or Decepticons. They exist concurrently with every major Generation 1 character you can think of. It’s pretty weird that these characters would go on to regard their peers as enigmatic legends, while dismissing them as “energon guzzlers” due to their relative size.
That’s not right. There’s a reason why most folk are not wearing badges and referring to themselves as parts of units. But there are Transformers who are aligned and wanting to be parts of those factions without formally being part of them. A lot of the frameworks have fallen down. Again the mini (which could still yet happen) would have made this clearer but Cybertron had, for a time, enjoyed the Golden Age as established at the end of s4, with only pockets of rebellion with Galvatron et al off the map. Many factions thought they were more important than others (including the largely recluse Tripredacus Council) but when Galvatron comes back he reignites, rallies and re-energises the non-Autobot factions. Mostly though just the future Maximals on the front line would have been Autobots.
It is not unlike the fact that during WWII there were the overarching Axis and Allied powers but also factions and leaders underneath as well as supporters, sympathisers and those who supported sides in secret. Megatron glorifies what the Decepticons are and especially what G1 Megatron represents and he fancies himself as the leader. He isn’t but that is never going to stop him from trying. In a wider 6 million year view it would be viewed as the Autobot/Decepticon War the same way as Axis/Allied but there is always a bit more to it than that.
Compounding this, everyone who eventually ended up in the Beast Wars were pretty important to the end of the Great War.
Not really true at all. None of the crew of the Axalon stopped the Great War, they stopped a planet wide catastrophe being bigger than it was, and even then it was more by luck than design. Had they not been there the war would still have ended it’s just that the Tripredacus Council would have won. The only ones that actively brought the war to an end the way it did were the Tri Predacus council, along with Tarantulas and an unseen Ravage.
Beast Wars Megatron appears to be the Decepticons’ most important non-Galvatron military leader, bossing Predaking around.
Megatron is an opportunist who sought to take advantage of a power vacuum. Predaking was established as not being the sharpest tool in the box in the cartoon and was easily manipulated by BW Megatron. And whoever leads Predaking has an advantage, because he isn’t smart but he IS powerful. That’s why he blocked further communications with the Tripredacus council because he knew his authority would be immediately countermanded. This was his his chance to usurp power. That’s also why when he finds out Predaking is gone he and his troops look crestfallen, he lost his biggest link to the Decepticons as a symbol and as a weapon. Megatron is a master manipulator but his string pulling pales compared to the Council. Megatron is not known to Tigatron and none of the Autobots recognise him because he isn’t a big player but he has BIG ambitions.
Tigatron and Airazor are incredibly important Autobots, to the point that Prowl says that Tigatron is “respected by all sides for his desire for peace,” sending him as an emissary to the Decepticons due to his widespread reputation. Apparently nobody recognized this critical historical figure when he was reborn later on Earth.
No-one recognises anyone when they are reborn on Earth, including (mostly) the bots who are reborn! No-one really refers to the pasts of the reanimated Maximals or Predacons. The show requires you to accept that the guys appearing are not people they know, yet are part of the crew? And that the reformatted protoforms with no memory of their past are not tragic victims worthy of comment as friends that have basically died? That seems like a much broader stretch than the ship consisting of not just crew and suspended crew but also blanks, etc. The vast majority have no or limited knowledge of their pasts, and the BW cartoon no-one reacts significantly to their fellow crew coming back in a familiar way. Primal never lamented that Silverbolt was someone he knew that had had his entire life’s wiped away. Silverbolt refers to Cybertron as the home he never knew. Tigatron’s identity circuits are damaged. Unless they were awake when they crashed no-one really references their past except for Protoform X.
Primal was incredibly removed from the events on the ground in this story, he witnessed almost nothing first hand and was in space through much of his career, so there is no real stretch to say that he would not necessarily know much about the histories of ALL the crew/passengers.
Protoforms are no longer new members of Optimus Primal’s exploration team in stasis for the journey to other planets. Stasis pods are now life support vessels for Autobots and Decepticons who were critically damaged by transmattertheTripredacus Council members weaponized from Unicron, with “protoform” now describing a quantum state of being suspended between dimensions and realities. Optimus Primal takes possession of these stasis pods, stating that he’ll “do what we can for them,” implying that he’ll carry these guys around in his ship for the following 300 years.
This is an incomplete picture. The story states that they will do their best to recover them but that it may not be possible. This is the ORIGIN of the technology that makes protoforming possible not the END of the technology. Most will be brought back, some cannot be. Some are irrecoverable blanks. Primal makes it his mission to bring them back and we know that he succeeded at least in part. We also know that the Axalon had prisoners on board that were not referenced until they showed up in the cartoon. There are THREE HUNDRED years in between this and the next piece of continuity, the story does not end here, there is no disconnect between these 2 points, they are not either/or points of contradiction - they LEAD to each other.
The protoforms on the Axalon are ABSOLUTELY members of the exploration team, but some of the protoforms are also criminals, blanks, the rescued Tigatron and Airazor. I was not rewriting Beast Wars, I was connecting the dots between then and now.
It is worth bearing in mind that the need to put functionally immortal timeless robots in stasis, especially at a time where faster than light travel was available, is itself an odd use of technology. Or that firing them into space would be safer than crashing with them. They announce the stasis hold is failing, but it can’t be worse in the hold than the vacuum of space? I have however not questioned anything pre-established just added to the understanding of it or rationalised it where appropriate. Take for instance the fact that the Tripredacus Council mention their Decepticon ancestors despite Tarantulas stating that he and the council have different origins to Autobot and Decepticon. s2 and s3 contradict but a connective thread is suggested by the roles people in the story had/have.
Airazor is in one of these stasis pods (labeled “Airazor”) and Tigatron is not, which makes the events of “Dawn of Future’s Past” pretty implausible.
This was a point which was discussed when writing the story and does require more explaining because this forms the wider backstory rather than what is in the book itself. It is the only part that without more information does potentially contradict DoFP.
The fact that Airazor is back in DoFP confirmsthat many of the protoforms are brought back following the end of the story. In DofP neither of them is using the name they know each other by here and neither of them look the same as they do here, so again there is no reason for them to recognise each other. Airazor is plainly not killed or unrecoverable in the story precisely because she does appear in DofP. I chose to show those characters having a moment because I felt that fans primarily of the show would feel shortchanged if they did not have a moment.
For cartoon only watchers they would see a connective point between that and this and readers of DoFP would see two characters who knew each other (prior to a tragedy) looking very different, with different names not recognising each other or their own connection as the circumstances they meet in are at a time of urgency. They are both then spark transferred in that story to the Axalon.
The wider story that was developed to fully explain the events post this book were that Tigatron, a century down the line, when most of those in stasis have been recovered, still hasn’t been able to recover Airazor. Like so many in Beast Wars her identity circuits are damaged and he is told that she may be in stasis forever as a blank or near blank condition forever. OR she can be given life with a new identity. Tigatron knows he has been selfish, never wanting to give up on her, and relents for them to go ahead, that life should triumph but he cannot be there to see it. She goes out to live a new life with only fragments of her past intact. She is brought back as the character she is in DofP with a different name and no real recollection of anything that went before.
They effectively become the star crossed lovers who always meet with tragedy. They are separated in DotP, don’t recognise each other in DoFP, grow close in BW only to be abducted and later merged by the Vok. There was no sensible way in which this back story could be placed in the one shot, and ultimately it seemed unnecessary because the fact that she is brought back in some way is explicit in DoFP.
It is implied that Generation 1 Inferno becomes Beast Wars Inferno. He is hit by transmatter and loaded up onto the Axalon in a stasis pod labeled “Inferno.” Pre-beast forms of Silverbolt and Blackarachnia are seen walking around hand-in-hand.
This is awful.
Implication is not the same as confirmation. One of the main points of the story is that characters take the names of those who have fallen. There is more than one Silverbolt for instance, more than one Prowl, etc. As I have stated elsewhere, if it isn’t confirmed it isn’t the case. The POSSIBILITY for a connection exists as indeed it always did (BW Inferno was made from a Maximal protoform after all) but the confirmation does NOT exist in the story I told. I cannot rewrite the cartoon to have someone say “Hey isn’t that old G1 Inferno’s stasis pod?” Nothing has been changed, nothing has been retconned. If there were a story reason to have Inferno back as a Maximal in a future story then that could still happen.
Also, all three stasis pods are shown in 3 different rooms, lit by 3 different colours of light to accentuate that. They are not all on the Axalon because there are potentially THOUSANDS of affected individuals and even after the Axalon is refitted there would only be capacity for maybe a hundred? That should be a given that the Axalon does not take them all as we only see about 20 in the opening BW episode. The transmatter wave hit a huge portion of the planet, the Axalon (as a science and exploration vessel) takes as many as it can to help find a cure. As we know that protoforming becomes a stasis technology of choice rather than a weapon later on we know they must have succeeded.
Even if the two robots were Blackarachnia and Silverbolt (they are referred to as simply generics in the script and the colour scheme for what the wiki identified as “Silverbolt” was modelled on Airhammer) BOTH had their personalities (either whole or in part) overwritten in the show. If they were at some point crew on the Axalon they had to have existed beforehand, they had to come from somewhere. No matter who they were or what they did before BW they were effectively new people in BW. There is no way in which their existence in this moment in history undermines or contradicts anything in BW, indeed it is only logical that they had to have existed in some form before otherwise there would be no crew from which their BW forms would come from.
So how big a secret to Megatron/anybody was it supposed to be that Tarantulas worked for the Tripredacus Council? Megatron vidconferences with all four of them together at their shared headquarters, and later Tarantulas combines with them in front of everybody in the Great War’s last and most important battle.
At this point they ALL worked for the Tripredacus council, even Megatron was supposed to follow theirorders. Megatron leaves Predaking behind to storm the Autobot base and Tarantulas combines with the TP council MILES from the final battle where there are no witnesses. Predaking is left to take everyone on his battlefield out and by the time he’s fighting the TPC his enemies are either dead, disabled or protoformed. There are no witnesses, no-one to send word back. There is still a jamming field in place which is why Megatron tries to send Tarantulas back to get Predaking. He has no idea Predaking is dead until Tarantulas tells him.
The Council hide the fact that they can combine and who they can combine with. Megatron does not know how (literally) connected Tarantulas is to the Council, he has witnessed nothing that makes him think either the Council or Tarantulas have an agenda beyond what the Decepticons displayed. That’s why Megatron is shown a hologram of Predaking’s fate, (because he didn’t witness it), why the Tripredacus council do not appear in public until Megatron is down. It’s why Ravage fires from a distance - literally no-one knows what he did. Megatron does not know the full extent of the betrayal. If those following Megatron were party to the deception then the war would not have ended, instead they would have turned against the Tripredacus council. The whole point is that the TPC have engineered the events in secret to undermine Megatron, shock the troops into falling in line and end the bloodshed long enough for them to get their own plan back on track.
See also: Ravage. “Rumor has it” he was granted amnesty and rebuilt as a Predacon, but there’s no indication this was done in secret at all, instead being a major part of thePax Cybertronia.
Ravage was a Decepticon whose activities at the end of the war were secret. Primal, established as someone who was not a major player in events, would only know rumours. Prowl et al would have been the keepers of record and deciders of detail. Ravage was a Decepticon, he was granted amnesty and was given a new form after the one seen in this story. A great many things would have been secret or rumours from Primal’s point of view. The audience’s point of view and Primal’s are not the same thing.
Remember Ravage’s experimental transwarp cruiser? Unicron has a fleet of them sitting around in his head.
Not sure the 2 ships we see can be described as a fleet and neither are the Transwarp cruiser seen later! The Transwarp cruiser is curvier and more Egyptian in look. One of them is actually a folded up version of their base we see later on, and the other is a precursor of the vessel Ravage would pilot in the show. It’s like the Enterprise from Star Trek: TOS compared to The Enterprise-E. One leads to the other (with steps in between) but they are not the same ship. There are other (unseen) ships but none are transwarp cruisers. The plans for Ravage’s ship are seen at the end, but it has not been built.
That’s it for now. Oddly the points I thought would be the most contentious are not the ones that have tripped people up so if there’s anything you’d like to know more about or want to ask questions about please drop me a note! I had to plan out 300 odd years of connecting material and continuity figuring out how G1 s4 connects to BW and this one shot was originally part of a 4 issue story which would have shown more of the connective tissue and more of the big events that connect the dots. My hope is to one day get to tell the story of Galvatron’s return, the fall of the Golden Age, and the status of a number of Autobots before DotP and the some of the Cold War events after to properly begin to fill in some of the picture of a post-war world.
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So my regular parter in crime Ed Pirrie aka http://kingoji.tumblr.com/ have a deep and special love for Beast Wars and we talked about homaging the MTMTE #1 cover (itself and homage) and getting to work with some of our favourite characters.
So here they are, the good guys. Bad guys to follow…
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materialsscienceandengineering:
The history of petrochemicals and their impact on global geopolitics
All aspects of people’s lives are now bound to a “seemingly unlimited supply of cheap and readily disposable” petrochemicals, a new essay argues.
Global demand for petrochemicals continues to outstrip increases in production capacity, despite substantial expansion in production in China and the Gulf.
The piece, written by Professor Adam Hanieh from the University of Exeter, describes how the synthetic production of petroleum drove post-war revolutions in productivity, labor-saving technologies and mass consumption.
From the 1950s onwards, an array of naturally derived substances—wood, glass, paper, natural rubber, natural fertilizers, soaps, cotton, wool and metals—were systematically displaced by plastics, synthetic fibers, detergents and other petroleum-based chemicals.
The growth of plastics at this time was possible thanks to the growth of the chemical industry in Germany and the U.S. in the early 20th century. By the end of the Second World War, the US was the dominant global chemical power.
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As it turns out, I’m still excited about Transformers Beast Wars art, especially with Kingdom coming out soon!
@artsy-hobbitses has a Humanformers AU and we got to talking about what the Beast Wars might have been like in it.
More info under the cut.
When the Quintessons played about on planet earth, they left behind a swathe of land off the coast of Northern Canada terraformed to an immense degree. The island is divided into no less than 5 distinctive biomes, and it’s literally possible to step out of a desert and into a blizzard.
The entire setup is held in a tenuous balance by a massive vein of energon that runs underground.
…And the Predacons want it.
The island, dubbed ’No-Man’s Land’, is barely inhabitable. It’s only residents are local wildlife, and the beast-men who are hardy (and expendable) enough to be posted there to study it.
Axolon Base hasn’t had active personnel there in a while. With the growing Predacon threat, other questionable experiments, and all outside communication cut off, the Maximals posted to defend No-Man’s Land will have their hands full.
Chase Dutoit (aka Cheetor) is a young recruit - the army identified him as a beast shifter when he enlisted. He was offered the chance to enhance his shifting abilities and primed for combat… only to be shuttled off to No-Man’s Land, a quiet posting far, far away from active conflict zones. He’s a potent mixture of teenage rebellion and immaturity, but with the right guidance, this kid could be somebody.
“Mickey” Mikoshiba (aka, Rattrap) really thought he was going to catch a break in No-Man’s Land. Having lived through multiple deadly skirmishes, he has enough conflict to last a lifetime. He’s got more self-preservation than charm, but he’s also a world-class sharpshooter and tactician. He’s prickly, but his heart’s in the right place.
Mickey is the only beast-man in a human family (inheriting the mutation from a great aunt, allegedly). He’s had a rough time growing up, and isn’t keen on going back to Brooklyn anytime soon.
Dean Branagh (aka Dinobot) has funky dinosaur hands, plenty of byronism, and a degree from the Juilliard performing arts programme. Due to beast-man discrimination, he struggled to find his footing in L.A. and the West End. Later, he’d wind up joining a branch of the Decepticons on a wild and very dangerous mission. He intends to fight for a future he wants, or die trying.
Retrax from the beast wars toyline!
(Photograph from TFW2005)
2020 VS 2021, Beast wars megatron!!
CAT-NAPPED!Cheetor abruptly awakens on Cybertron, with the Beast Wars a distant memory… or does he? We’ve gotta go deeper as our feisty feline Maximal navigates dreams within dreams, but can he figure out the sinister plot in his mind in time to warn his fellow Maximals? Race to the finish on “The Speedway of Central Consciousness”, now on TFwiki!
The end is nigh, but if you enjoyed this article, please check out my Patreon page! Any support is greatly appreciated!
GO FOR THE GOLD! As the battle for the Golden Disk reaches its dramatic conclusion, rivalries are settled, grudges are born, and gambits collide as Optimus Primal and Megatron battle for the Golden Disk. Who lives, who dies, and who walks away with the artifact that started it all? Find out in “Maximals Strike Back, Part Three”, now on TFwiki!
If you enjoyed this article, please check out my Patreon page! Any support is greatly appreciated!
TURTLE POWER! The battle for the Golden Disk rages on! But when the battle takes a disastrous turn, how will Skold react to the tragedy… and who will come away alive? The Beast Wars spin off into a wild new direction in “Maximals Strike Back, Part Two”, now on TFwiki!
PLUS!
WHEN YOU’RE A JET, YOU’RE A JET ALL THE WAY! The epic conclusion! With Gold CIty under Decepticon assault, can Jetfire put things right with Starscream, or will everything… shatter? Find out in the final issue… for now… of Shattered Glass!
If you enjoyed these articles, please check out my Patreon page! Any support is greatly appreciated!
Wildestride of his life!!
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I had super limited free time these days. So this sketch is messy. Sorry y’all .
I haven’t been able to draw and can’t write really well so I did a quick amv-esque video edit for @doop-week!!!
