In Which a Blogger Muses Pointlessly About a Culture of Living Machines

When I was a child, I had no real expectations for Transformers beyond what the original animated series and toyline promised: alien robots fighting. Certain things that stand out now as strange didn't seem unusual at all when I was a child. For instance: Why is it that Kup had aged visibly when other robots who were millions of years old did not? Why were robot children depicted among the Lithone? It wasn't until Michael Bay took the franchise in hand that I really started to think about things like this as well as the potential of the basic story. The Transformers is, above all, a story of war, and most of its characters are soldiers. But, surely, Cybertron wasn't entirely populated with military. How was the civilian populace affected when the great war started? Were the Autobots and Decepticons government forces? Disappointed with the aforementioned films and their video game tie-ins, I sought out a MUSH in which to roleplay an original Transformer, and I brought into it all of my questions and ideas about what a living machine and his home planet might really be like. I had lofty aspirations; I hoped to add to the MUSH's canon details about the real role of and reason for sexual dimorphism in the naturally asexual Cybertronians, descriptions of civilian life before the start of the great war and the system of government from which the Autobots may have sprung, and even theories about how Cybertronians are mass-produced. I was clearly overly ambitious in that regard - the MUSH, of course, had its own canon and theme - but playing there did serve to increase my fascination with Cybertronians as a people.

Sadly, nothing I come up with can ever be anything more than fanon! Transformers has several well-developed continuities, each with their own ideas of just what Cybertronians are and where they came from. In my opinion, however, and perhaps this is necessarily so, no continuity has done a satisfactory job of portraying pre-war Cybertron and explaining Transformer physiology.