My ex-husband thoroughly despised the original Transformers cartoon in all forms except the toys, which he liked because he liked to fiddle with them. But he absolutely couldn’t fathom why I loved the G1 cartoon to death. I mean, he watched Beast Wars willingly enough because he liked Dinobot, who he said was not a "robot in disguise" but a "Klingon in disguise," and my ex-husband was quite possibly the world's biggest Klingon fan. But G1? Um, no. So let me just say before I begin this thing that, in a manner of speaking, this entire weird theory of mine is all my ex-husband's fault. So blame him.

Now, let me start at the beginning… In the beginning, a couple of years ago, I was happily watching a G1 tape, curled up on the couch, happy as a pig in slop. (And being happy was a rarity at the time, given that I was pregnant.) The episode that was playing, for better or worse, was "Autobot Spike." My then-husband walked into the room, sighed exasperatedly at what I was watching, summarily turned off G1 while studiously ignoring my growling about it, and popped a classic Star Trek tape into the VCR instead. The Star Trek episode that came on, completely by coincidence, was the one entitled "Return to Tomorrow."

I'm assuming that you all know (…and love. OK, maybe not…) the plot of "Autobot Spike." (To refresh your memory, just in case, that’s the one where Spike temporarily becomes a robot via a mind transfer.) But for those of you who aren't Trekkers, the relevant plot points of Star Trek’s "Return to Tomorrow" are as follows:

The point is that, while watching "Return to Tomorrow" after just watching Spike get transferred into an Autobot body in "Autobot Spike," I literally sat bolt upright on the couch (Not an easy feat while about 7 months pregnant) and yelled, pardon my French, "Holy shit!" I'd been racking my brain, you see, concerning the origin of the Transformers and had a vague idea about it, but suddenly the whole enchilada was just oh-so-brilliantly clear to me…Or at least I thought it was…And the theory was very quick to develop after that. Suddenly, I was envisioning a "before it was Cybertron" Cybertron, perhaps several hundred million years ago... Mind you, all of what I’m about to outline is only meant to explain Transformer origins as it pertains to the cartoon universe. I’m not a comic fan. I’m not even remotely knowledgeable about the comic, in fact. So the comic in no way has any impact on my own personal view of the Transformers, so I’m disregarding it entirely here, just as I disregard it with everything else, actually. If you can’t deal with that, perhaps you shouldn’t read any further because my theory doesn’t really fit with the stuff that’s in the comic. I freely acknowledge that. But if you can deal with my dismissal of the comic, though, and especially if you dismiss it yourself…Well, whatever the case, put aside your own thoughts on the issue of Transformer origins for just a little while, and wildly imagine along with Auntie Nightwind here…

What I suddenly saw in my head was an organic world (Similar, perhaps, to that suggested by Beast Machines… Oh, stop squirming, dangit!) that was home to organic — and, more importantly — humanoid inhabitants. They had one head, one torso, two arms (with five-fingered hands), two legs, and they walked upright. They were intelligent, these humanoids, way beyond us Earth humans, technologically. But perhaps they were also just as shortsighted as we humans can be, taking everything from their world and their environment and giving very little back. And they believed in a "god," just as some humans do. And let’s say that their name for their god was…oh, let’s say "Primus." (Mind you, I mention Primus at all in this dissertation only because his name is invoked as a God-equivalent in Beast Wars, as in the whole "Covenant of Primus" thing. Otherwise, Primus and all aspects of him would be a comic thing that I’d disregard, like, for instance, his whole adversarial "good god vs. evil god" relationship with Unicron in the comic.) Now, I envision some sort of disaster occurring, perhaps a war, perhaps the final breakdown of a planetary environment no longer able to stand the strain of its demanding and shortsighted inhabitants. (I tend to favor the war idea, though, since it fits nicely into what I think ultimately started the Autobot/Decepticon civil war as depicted in the cartoon.) This disaster, whatever it was, virtually destroyed "Pre-Cybertron" as the organic inhabitants knew it, eventually turning it into a barren rock that became more and more inhospitable to the humanoid inhabitants as time went on. And the inhabitants came to realize that because of what they’d done, their planet would eventually no longer support life as they knew it…

…Which left those inhabitants in something of a bind, as you can perhaps well imagine. They could leave, organize a mass exodus of the entire population of the planet and start systematically destroying another world…or they could stay where they were and find a means of adapting to the existing environmental conditions. In other words, they could make life different than how they knew it , convert themselves and their planet into forms that could peacefully coexist and support each other, albeit in a (very) changed form. And, obviously, I think those pre-Cybertronians chose to adapt, if only because, with the right sort of technology, I believe it would be easier, logistically speaking, than organizing and carrying out a mass exodus to another planet. After all, even though I imagine that their planet was pretty much drained of life at that point, they still had many natural resources and raw materials at their disposal. Such as metals, for instance. I think that, being advanced and intelligent, they would have made good use of those raw materials and resources…

Over the eons, I envision them converting their once-organic planet into a "metallized," wholly technological one, rather like what we humans have been doing for the past few thousand years, converting natural landscapes into wholly artificial urban ones made of metal and concrete. And, of course, I envision them converting themselves, too, into wholly technological, robotic beings, albeit ones that were still governed by humanoid minds, with all of the quirks and emotions and loyalties and desires and psychoses and everything else that humanoid minds entail. Perhaps it was a matter of necessity. Their organic bodies could, perhaps, no longer survive in the environment of their planet. Perhaps it was a matter of vanity; they simply wanted bodies that could live virtually forever. In the end, it doesn't really matter why it happened, I suppose. It happened. Well, I think it did, anyway…

How would this transfer between bodies of flesh and bodies of metal be accomplished? A "simple" transfer of brain information, of course – Memory, knowledge, intelligence, personality, etc. – as was used in "Autobot Spike." (Which is perhaps why the Autobots were able to accomplish the events in "Autobot Spike" at all in the first place. More on that in a bit.) Now, I'm no expert on the subject, but as I understand it, the human nervous system is perhaps the most machine-like "component" of our bodies. It works, when you strip it down to its basics, on a system of biochemically-propagated electrical impulses that run along consecutive specialized cells called neurons. Those electrical impulses prompt various things to happen in various parts of the body – a heartbeat, a muscle contraction, an adrenaline rush, a response to pain, a blink of an eye, etc. Electronic devices and computers and, by extension, the robots that we build on Earth today work in basically the same way, using a system of electrochemically-propagated impulses that run along consecutive circuits. Now, the technology to convert nervous impulses — much less murkier things like thoughts, feelings, memories, personality etc. — to a data stream that could be "stored" in an artificial environment is currently beyond us. Way beyond us, as I understand it. We've only relatively recently discovered how to store sound as a recordable/storable data stream, after all, and that's beyond basic compared to trying to convert the contents of a human brain into "storable" data. I don't think, however, that such a process was beyond those pre-Cybertronians. (If nothing else, their "descendants" seem pretty handy at manipulating human minds, as I said.)

And the master supercomputer used to control this mass transfer? Why, Vector Sigma, of course! So the inhabitants of what by then could finally be called Cybertron suddenly had brand-spanking new bodies that could last, theoretically, forever. I imagine that, for a while, they lived in peace, building a new society and enjoying the fruits of their labors…but then I imagine that grudges from that old war way back when that caused all the problems in the first place began to surface. (After all, the Cybertronians now had computer brains. They would have been incapable of forgetting those grudges even if they wanted to…) I envision a rebirth of that war, brought about by fundamental political, ideological, sociological, and perhaps religious differences between the original sides of the ancient war who were now wearing different bodies. This new war, which was really just a continuation of the old one, would have drained Cybertron's resources… …And it would have left the new Cybertronian people very vulnerable to attack and conquest from without…

Yes, this, I believe, is the time of the Quintessons. And when the Quintessons got to Cybertron, they found a planet full of ingenious inhabitants with very durable bodies and highly marketable skills. They found a planet already sharply divided along two lines: Those with conquering, militaristic spirits and those who just wanted to be left in peace to go about their business. I would imagine that it was a simple thing for the Quintessons to systematically round up the Cybertronians, pacify them perhaps through some sort of reprogramming, and therefore make them all believe that they had never existed before the Quintessons arrived and had no reason to exist other than to be the Quintessons' slaves. Their computer minds were still relatively new and vulnerable, after all, and the Quintessons — as beings of merged flesh and metal — were, I think, used to manipulating such things. So they set up a profitable business selling "pacified" Cybertronians to customers in need of their various skills, much like 18 ^th-century Europeans sold African natives as slaves for the same purpose. And the Quintessons used what became the Autobot symbol as their trademark, of sorts, what the Cybertronians themselves called the "slave brand" in "Forever is a Long Time Coming."

But the Cybertronians didn't much like being slaves so, once again, they all banded together in order to oust the Quintessons, and they were successful — but they never learned who they really had been before the arrival of the Quintessons. (Hence the Matrix, which I’m going to say was created, for some reason that I haven’t yet determined, during the Quintesson occupation also doesn't "know" the true origin of the Transformers. It "knows" only what the Transformers themselves "know.") And they kept the symbol, turning it into a source of pride rather than shame. And, in the aftermath of their victory over the Quintessons, the Golden Age of Cybertron began. And it lasted for quite some time…only to be shattered down the line when, I imagine, ideological differences arose between those who (so they thought) were created to be domestic servants and those who (so they thought) were created to be military fighters. And this time, the split was more or less permanent. So, new faction names were created, a new faction symbol came about for those who chose to call themselves "Decepticons"…and we all know the story from there on out, I believe.

Now, it's all well and good, I know, to spout off this theory, this little speculative mini-history of mine. Anyone can do that. But why do I believe it works, you ask? Why do I think it makes more sense than, specifically, the simple "the Quintessons created them" theory put forth in the cartoon? Well, for one thing, I actually prefer complex. Simple is good for some things, but for me, if I’m playing around in a fictional universe, I like things twisted, interesting, and complex. But beyond that, if the Quintessons decided to make giant robots to sell to other species to make a little profit, then they sort of went about it in an odd way. Because if it's true that the Quintessons created the Transformers rather than simply subjugating them…Well, if that's the case, then there are some general things that have and will always bother me about the Transformers. These are issues that made no sense – or at least very little sense – to me until I came up with my wacky origin theory. Now, however, they make (almost) perfect sense. So, to me, this is "evidence" that my theory is correct. Because if a theory makes sense, then logically, the probability of it being true is greater than the probability of a theory that doesn’t make as much sense being true, yes? Yes. So now I shall simply take one at a time a few of these points that, to me, don’t make a whole lot of sense if one believes that the Transformers were created by the Quintessons. They do, however, make a whole lot of sense if my theory is closer to the truth of the matter…

Why do the Transformers have humanoid-shaped robotic bodies?

Think about it for a moment. Now, I do not claim to be an engineer, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know from reading science magazines and such that a human-shaped body is not the most mechanically efficient shape in the universe. It’s why not many creatures on Earth stand and walk upright. A quadrupedal stance, for instance, is far more efficient, mechanically speaking. This is partially why, nowadays, people who are trying to build robots that mimic humans are having some difficulties. The upright human posture is very tricky to mechanically emulate and there are much more efficient body types that are a heckuva lot easier to build. So, if the Transformers were created by the Quintessons, why give them a humanoid shape if it’s not a very practical and efficient shape? I suppose that one could say that they did it so that their creations would appeal to humanoid customers. Which may be true, sure. However, we have seen that not every species in the TF Universe is humanoid. Many are, yes, but certainly not all of them are. Perhaps not even the majority is humanoid. The Quintessons themselves certainly are not, and we didn’t see enough of the rest of the TF Universe to really know what the ratio of humanoid vs. non-humanoid species was.

But even if humanoids were the majority, they certainly weren’t all that was out there. If the Quintessons were making Transformers to sell that would physically appeal to their customers in that they looked sort of like them, then one would think that there would be at least a few Transformer designs that weren’t vaguely humanoid. But there aren’t. Even the centurion droids guarding Vector Sigma and the maintenance drones that the Autobots used to fend them off were humanoid in shape. Everything, every sentient creature, is humanoid-looking on Cybertron, except some of the menial robots (Like Shockwave's sentinels or Deceptitran) that the Transformers themselves built, much as humans build robots that don't look like humans.

If the Quintessons created the Transformers, then this, as I said, doesn’t completely make sense to me. What does make sense to me is that, if the Transformers ultimately had an organic, humanoid origin, then it would only make sense that the new bodies that they would create for themselves would be humanoid in shape and form and function. A humanoid-shaped body would be a body type of the sort that they were already used to controlling, rather than a completely new and unfamiliar body type with, say, eighteen eyes and ten independently-functioning tentacles, for instance. So, to me, the Transformers’ humanoid body shape makes much more sense if one thinks about their origins my way.

Why are there female Transformers and why are there obvious emotional attractions between the two genders?

Ever wonder about that? Really! Putting aside Beast Wars for now, in G1's "The Search for Alpha Trion," you have female Autobots, four of whom during the course of the episode are "matched up" with four of the male Autobots. And at least two of those pairs – Elita-One/Optimus Prime and Ironhide/Chromia – are quite obviously romantic pairings. They at least touch each other, and it’s quite obvious that there’s a definite affection between Ironhide and Chromia and a definite bond of sorts between Optimus and Elita, which makes sense in light of "War Dawn." (The other two pairs in "The Search for Alpha Trion," in my opinion, are debatable; I tend to think of them as pairs of friends, not pairs of lovers.) On top of that, the female Autobots seem more or less "traditionally" female, physically, from a humanoid point of view. They’re slimmer, sleeker, their bodies are rounded off, their preferred body colors are what we think of as "feminine" ones, and they have obviously female voices.

Why on Earth would all of this be true if the Transformers had been created by an outside species solely as non-sentient robots designed to be commercially marketed as domestic servants or as military hardware? In fact, why would there be females at all? Especially in light of the fact that "The Key to Vector Sigma" (Which, admittedly, comes after "The Search for Alpha Trion," but still…) would seem to establish quite clearly that two genders aren’t required to propagate the species? I suppose that one could make a case for the Quintessons creating female-looking robots to market for…uh, quite sleazy purposes, but I can’t imagine that there’d be that much of a market for giant robotic…uh, playthings. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

To me, it makes far more sense that female Transformers exist solely because the Transformers began as a humanoid species that had two genders. When the females of that species "transferred," they wanted bodies that were sort of "familiar," just as the males did. The females were "culturally" used to being smaller, sleeker, etc than the males, so that’s what they wanted to be in their new forms. Likewise, the attractions between the two genders would have "carried over," particularly so in the beginning of their cybernetic existence. Makes perfect sense to me…Now, why do female Transformers seem to be rare in the "present" of the G1 Transformers universe? Why does it seem like they’re being "phased out?" Ahhhh, now that’s a question for another essay entirely… I will address that, I assure you. Just not here. :)

Why do the Transformers have human-like personalities and psychological quirks?

According to the "official" history of the Transformers put forth in the third season of the cartoon, their ancestors were created sort of "soulless." They had no sentience, no volition of their own until at some point they somehow "became sentient." Hmmmm…Well, I don’t know. I have a hard time buying that. In general, non-sentient creatures don’t poke along for a while and then suddenly, miraculously decide to become sentient. That’s really not the way it works, so I have a hard time believing that something like that would happen with the Transformers, especially because at that point in their existence, if you believe the "Quintesson Theory," they would have been slaves to programming, with no way to develop otherwise. And I have an even harder time believing that the Quintessons would create any Transformer as sentient from the get-go. That would surely lead to all sorts of problems for them…as the Quintessons eventually found out.

Without sentience, without intelligence and self-awareness, one cannot have a true personality. Without sentience, one cannot have morals and values and virtues. Without sentience, one also cannot have psychoses. But the Transformers have all of those things, the bad and the good. To me, that had to come from somewhere. It didn’t just suddenly develop overnight in an otherwise "empty" group of tightly-controlled slave robots. And, as I said, it would be quite stupid of the Quintessons to make their creations sentient or to allow them to develop such a thing at some point in time. If they created the Transformers, that is...I don’t believe they did. I believe they discovered an already-sentient but momentarily vulnerable species and realized just how valuable they could be. They took full advantage of the Cybertronians' vulnerability and subjugated them, managing to suppress the Cybertronians’ free will for a while by some method. But eventually some individuals – such as A3, of course– broke free of that yoke. (Because they were already sentient, "underneath" whatever mechanism or programming subroutine was being used to control them.) And then the Quintessons found out just how dangerous sentient creatures can be, especially when outraged…

How the heck did the Decepticons know how to suck the antimatter formula out of Chip Chase's brain so easily, and how did the Autobots know how to transfer Spike's mind — intact! — into and then out of a robotic body?

This is quite easy to understand if one accepts that this was how the Transformers themselves began their own cybernetic existence. True, I postulate that they don’t really know their true origin, knowledge of it having been lost because of what the Quintessons did during their occupation, so when they try to do it in the "present," the process isn’t completely perfect (See: "Autobot Spike"), but they can do it. They have the old knowledge within them, as sort of a "racial memory," but it's dim and hazy, corrupted by the Quintessons and faded due to disuse and the ravages of hundreds of millions of years of passing time.

And, when you think about, if they’d just been created by an outside species and had never had any sort of contact or experience with a humanoid species outside of maybe being a slave to one, it’s pretty miraculous that they’d know enough about humanoid brains to do this sort of information transfer. If nothing else, the way that a human brain stores information and the way that, I would presume, a Transformer computer brain would store information would be two totally different things. If they’d never dealt with humans or humanoids before in that sort of way, I can’t imagine how they would know how to get stored information out of a human brain without at least some studying up on the subject. Given how indifferent the Decepticons in particular can be toward humans, it’s especially amazing to me that they’d know how to get information out of a human brain, because I can’t imagine that they had ever deemed it necessary to devote time to studying human neurophysiology. Yet Soundwave easily extracts information from Chip’s memory in "Roll For It," very shortly after the Transformers' awakening on Earth. And the Decepticons even have a machine for such a purpose in "The Girl Who Loved Powerglide." Perhaps that machine was meant to be used on other Transformers, sure…but it’s telling that the Decepticons were apparently able to modify it for use on a human, even if it ultimately didn't work.

Of course, over on the Autobot side, they’re not averse to humanity in general, so they’re able to actually accomplish once again transferring a human consciousness to a robotic body. It wasn’t a perfect process, no, but they still accomplished such a transfer (Twice!) without any permanent damage to Spike’s mind. If they’d never done anything remotely like that transfer of a human mind to a robot body before, that…would be pretty amazing. Especially given that there was very little lag time between Wheeljack postulating that such a transfer was possible and then actually having to do it, and having to do it with a human consciousness, no less! Methinks that Wheeljack had a bit of a "head start" in knowing how to do it, though he probably didn’t really know where the knowledge came from. If that knowledge existed and if the Transformers had just such experience in their distant past, then it all makes all of this mind/information transferral between two totally different sorts of creatures a heck of lot easier to swallow, at least in my book.

All else aside, there's a line in "The Key to Vector Sigma" that I think is particularly relevant to my little theory here. Whenever Vector Sigma activates, it announces that "Before Cybertron was, I was." Why is that? Well, according to me, it's because Vector Sigma existed literally before Cyberton was Cybertron and before there were "Cybertronians" in the sense of robotic inhabitants living on a cybernetic planet…As I said, I see Vector Sigma as the supercomputer that carried out the actual transfers between humanoid bodies and robotic bodies. I envision it as a "repository" into which the organic inhabitants of "Pre-Cybertron" dumped their minds and personalities, creating an archive of sorts. To create the new robotic version of the previously-organic citizen, Vector Sigma simply retrieved that person's personality out of the archive and transferred it into a previously-constructed robotic body, just like it did for the Aerialbots and the Stunticons. I also, however, think that Vector Sigma, after the initial "mass transfer," had the ability to recombine certain personality traits of those original inhabitants, creating an endless variety of possible personalities for future generations, if needed. Thus, the ability to create Transformer personalities "to order," as both Megatron and Optimus Prime do in "The Key to Vector Sigma." To me, the infinite number of cybernetic personalities that Vector Sigma is apparently able to bestow on an inanimate robotic body had to come from somewhere. I can't imagine that an endless array of personalities were "programmed" into it by some outside source. The logisitics of that would be mind-boggling and it would have taken, I should think, several thousand…million, maybe…lifetimes to do it. No, it seems much more sensible to me that Vector Sigma simply has a stash of "raw material" to work with and that it has the ability to recombine and reintegrate endlessly from there, much like organic genes can endlessly recombine to form new individuals of a species that are different from both their parents.

Some people say that the Quintessons built Vector Sigma as part of their slave construction facilities. I don't think so. I think they merely used existing equipment, if they used it at all. Some see Vector Sigma as an extension of Primus, though that's never specifically mentioned in the comic. And, again, I don't think so. I think it's a computer, nothing more. A vastly powerful one, yes, but it was created for a specific purpose at the time and, I think, it served that purpose well. And then there's that Key…The one that can conveniently convert just about anything to refined metal and that activates a computer capable of imbuing robotic bodies with remarkably human-like personalities… Gee, I wonder what that "metallizing" function was used for, way back when…? Yes, indeed, that function only makes sense to me if, at the time of its creation, the pre-Cybertronians were actively in the process of converting their organic, perhaps once-Earthlike world (not to mention themselves!) into a metallic paradise, yes? Otherwise, I can't think of any reason why the Key might plausibly and logically have had such a function…Now, do I think that Vector Sigma is currently the only method of making new Transformer personalities? Nope, I don’t. I think that it was a means to an end at a desperate time in the planet’s history, yes, and it can certainly still be used for "reproductive" purposes in an emergency sort of situation, as it was for the creation of the Aerialbots and the Stunticons. But I think there are other, more common methods of creating new Transformer personalities (Or "sparks," or whatever you want to call them) now. But that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish…and a topic for a whole ‘nother essay, specifically the same one that explains, among other things, why female Transformers are apparently "phasing out" of the species...

So, there you have it, folks. My nutshell version of Cybertronian history and "evolution," if you will. Agree with me or disagree with me as you see fit (I do realize that there are holes in this thing, after all... I'm in the process of mentally "patching" them, though...), but this is the theory from which I, personally, operate. Not that it really affects anything I write in fanfic, no, but this is the theory that resides in my cranium. :) Take it or leave it, as you will...