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#Post#: 760--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 3, 2016, 9:58 am
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 1 – Time-Cruising (Legacy,
2006)
I honestly can’t recall how the first season of Transformers:
Legacy came to be. I suppose it was a strange combination of
circumstances – my interest in coming up with a sequel to Beast
Machines, a continued love of the breadth of prehistory, perhaps
a dash of Doctor Who’s cavorting through time. The only scraps
of a pre-Legacy series that I can remember involve Streetwise as
a new female character, inspired by, of all things, the cat
character Rita from ‘Animaniacs’. It wasn’t until I discovered a
certain fan-fiction featuring the character of K****h that
things began to shape up. The initial intention was to co-create
Legacy in some capacity with K****h’s creator, though she soon
had to back out due to her own creative commitments. With no
idea how long this universe would go on, thinking it would
simply be a brief flourish of ideas, I adopted the character
into Legacy; with hindsight, and with experience in creating my
own characters, I would never have done so. It’s something I
feel guilty for, and is a big part in why the character featured
less from 2012 onwards as the synopses were posted online… yet
her place in the earlier stories now feels fundamental. Besides
which, it is a testament to that other writer’s capabilities in
creating a character I grew so enamoured with.
In all honesty, Legacy’s first season is one of the stories most
evidently created by a young mind (I had just turned 13 when the
ideas really began to come together). The entire plot of the
season is our protagonists travelling through Earth’s history,
gathering DNA samples from every animal, to form a new Oracle
supercomputer to interface the Matrix(/Allspark) and halt the
respawning of deceased Cybertronians in an event known as the
Legacy. It’s odd, it’s contrived, it’s without much threat other
than Thundercracker, Cyclonus and Scourge… but I suppose it was
unique. Nothing before or after, either in official Transformers
or in my own fan-franchise, has had a plot quite like Legacy’s.
If I were beginning this endeavour now, ten years on, it’s quite
possible that I could turn a simple journey through Earth’s
prehistory and future into a Fragments-style character-focused
adventure. Certainly, most of the little scraps of story beyond
the basic DNA-sampling are quite focused on character
development, mainly for Silverbolt, Blackarachnia, K****h and
Nightscream (conversely, Cheetor and Dinobot had nothing, and
Waspinator was simply the butt of a running gag of being mauled
by swarms and hordes).
The former pair is simply given another repeat of their familiar
shtick, with Blackarachnia trying to bring Silverbolt out of the
depressive state he is in thanks to his new Jetstorm-like form
and resulting in the two of them being reformatted. With Legacy
being set after some version of Beast Wars, Beast Machines and
Transformers: Universe, each of which involved one of the pair
trying to free the other from darkness, the arc I created for
them was hardly an original idea for them. Nightscream,
meanwhile, is forced to face his fear of insects (a concept
introduced in the aforementioned fan-fiction) in combat with the
Decepticon Thundercracker, and eventually reformats and kills
Thundercracker. K****h’s arc is mainly a response to that,
pretending to leave the team in disappointment… only to stow
away on the Legacy-Hunter until the team head to her home
planet. Her shamanist abilities are then spun as a connection to
the Matrix of Leadership in a finale involving some random
abomination spawned of the collected DNA. The arbitrary points
in time at which the Maximals begin and end their DNA-hunt come
purely from where my prehistoric knowledge began and where BBC
speculative documentary ‘The Future is Wild’, which directly
informed the post-present portions of the adventure, concludes.
In the end, K****h absorbs the monster into the Matrix, and it
forms a new Oracle. Whether I knowingly left things with the
set-up for further stories, or simply conjured the dilemma of
many villains already being restored thanks to the now-halted
Legacy, I’m unsure. I may well have only created the season
finale in 2007, as I began forming further stories.
Besides the basic time-travelling and limited character growth,
there were some other raw elements in the mix. The villainous
Thundercracker stalked our heroes through time – I have no idea
of his intentions other than just being a villain (a far cry
from the likes of Dinobot and the Debt Collector as an
antagonistic presence), but he served his role well. With a
Falconfly beast mode taken straight from ‘The Future is Wild’,
he was gifted with lancing arms and a striking demeanour.
Cyclonus and Scourge served no real role aside from being
further antagonists. The Dinobots guest-starred during the
Cretaceous-set stories, another pointless addition. Perhaps a
more inventive idea was Megatron’s successive revivals, perhaps
the best running element across the season. Problems occurred
with the Beast era villain’s resurrections – returning to life
first as a Tyrannosaurus rex (taking from his classic beast
mode) and then as a Megalodon shark (simply a play on his name),
each time not remembering himself and simply living life as the
animal in question. It wasn’t until he revived once again as a
Squibbon, the intelligent primate-like evolved squid from 200
million years hence, that he finally had the capacity to become
aware of himself. I perhaps overestimated the intended
intelligence of the Squibbon in the form allowing him sapience,
but the steady teasing of the grand villain’s return and his
eventual reintroduction in a small form recalling his time as
the Diagnostic Drone in Beast Machines was a fun way of building
him up.
Legacy was just a random idea for me to play with back in 2006,
rather than a true creative endeavour as the fan-franchise has
subsequently grown into. Along with the early story (which I
recall included a scrapped plot point with Silverbolt dying –
something used not long later in 2007), I created the basis of a
toyline. Having taken a large list of the Beast era and Unicron
Trilogy toylines with me on holiday, I began mapping out a full
accompanying line for Legacy in a little red booklet. I still
have that booklet, with its main Legacy cast accompanied by a
host of random wave-fillers. This being circa Transformers:
Cybertron, I used the numerous size-classes present at the time
(Scout, Deluxe, Voyager, Ultra, Leader and Supreme), as well as
introducing “Evolvers” – characters who could transform into
three related forms from different periods of time. This idea
went unused in the real Legacy, but returned in a form for
Transformers: Evolution in 2009. Other interesting things of
note in the notepad include the working title Transformers:
Genesis, packaging designs, the villains being Predacons rather
than Decepticons, and unused characters such as an Ornithomimus
Predacon called Strangleneck, a Grimlock redeco called Overkill,
an Evolved called Hydro Hunter, and a Leader Class combiner
called Pack Hunter, who was comprised of Deinonychosaur
Predacons. Amusingly, various later character names also appear
– Uproar (here a Maximal Entelodon), Deep Dive (a Voyager-sized
Evolver) and Rapticon, still a Velociraptor but one of the
components of Pack Hunter. A veritable feast of prehistoric and
futuristic beast modes, it’s a wonderful insight into what
Legacy could have been, even if it would have been hopelessly
shaped by a naïve 13-year-old.
After the holiday was over, I don’t believe I continued with
Legacy – it wouldn’t be until 2007 that I really began focusing
on the new fictional universe that I had begun (and it shows,
what with 2007 being when the hallmarks of the fan-franchise
fell into place). A summer’s imaginings could have been like the
multiple other Transformers ideas of mine that have burnt bright
and died away quickly. Instead, it became the earliest
foundation of a grand fiction spanning ten years. Basic,
unusual, creative but without any finesse, the first season of
Legacy is quite the oddball… and yet, fitting its name, it has
cast a huge legacy.
A.
#Post#: 762--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 7, 2016, 1:41 pm
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 2 – The Legacy Continues
(Legacy, 2007)
If season 1 of Transformers: Legacy was a single, unimpressive
story, the remainder of the series would be an evolving web of
peculiar ideas and scattered stories. I’m not sure how I came to
bring Legacy back from abandonment, but it hit the ground
running with a second season that saw Megatron gathering up the
numerous Decepticons and Predacons already revived by the
Legacy. This led our heroic Maximals to mid-Cretaceous Australia
(a location plucked from BBC’s landmark 1999 documentary Walking
with Dinosaurs), and the introduction of the first of myriad
original characters to join the team, in the form of Snowstorm.
I haven’t the faintest idea why I chose Yeardley Smith – known
solely for voicing Lisa Simpson – as her voice actor, but the
character was immediately thrust into some timey-wimey
shenanigans with her clearly having lived through these events
before. Once again, this is something I could probably turn into
an intriguing plot point now, but at the time, it was simply
what it was. Snowstorm joined the team, a relationship between
her and Cheetor began to bud, and a few episodes were spent
battling Megatron’s forces (including the blank slate that is
Mantrax). Like most of the half-seasons of 2007, I had little
worked out in terms of episode-by-episode content. The
mid-season finale finally saw the fulfilment of Silverbolt’s
death, as he sacrificed himself to kill Megatron aboard some
kind of spaceship. K****h also briefly died (turning into some
kind of Matrix vortex, I believe), before returning with a new
phoenix form. Whatever drama this mid-season finale would have
had was drained away by later events and resurrections… but at
the very least, with Megatron’s amassed forces scattered, there
was some kind of lasting victory for the Maximals. In all
honesty, though, taking only six episodes to defeat Megatron’s
army, and seemingly doing so only by taking out Megatron… is
stupid.
By comparison, the second half of season 2 managed to play its
six episodes well, albeit with a lot more content squashed into
its run. Episode 7 introduces police officer Velocity, lost in
Late Cretaceous Mongolia; episode 8 then adds Cataclysm to the
mix, a secret agent who has, for reasons that I either never
specified or have since forgotten, sent Velocity spiralling
through time, whilst she found herself roughly 1 million years
in the past in South America. The use of Earth’s past and
hypothetical future was still strong through much of Legacy’s
2007 run, with no less than three characters being introduced in
season 2 in the native place and time of their beast mode.
Perhaps retroactively, episode 8 is the first appearance of
future hero Razorbeak, as his Phorusrhacos mode made him ideal
to apply to the team of Decepticons previously on the Nemesis
and who had now gained various indigenous beast modes. Episode 9
accounted somewhat for the new cast introductions (especially
with one being another Dromaeosaur), with Dinobot departing into
another universe. This would be the very first introduction of
alternate universes, a concept well and truly utilised
throughout Legacies and Rise. Episode 10 then served as build-up
towards the finale – which tied together a recurring element
across this half-season, a mysterious black shape being escorted
around by Decepticons. This turned out to be a resurrected
Megatron, now in Apocalymon-inspired form (certainly not the
last time I would take ideas from Digimon). Adding to this, the
alien race known as Zorgons from the film ‘Zathura’ appeared,
again crossing over from another universe (I believe from the
wormhole created by Megatron’s destruction, though I’m uncertain
on that). With the Zorgons drawn to heat, an appropriately-fiery
battle occurred between the Legacy-Hunter and a Zorgon fleet
high in the atmosphere of a random planet. While Cheetor was
heavily injured, a mystery fighter ended up helping to pick the
Zorgons off, with its pilot revealed to be a reformatted and
very much alive Silverbolt in an end-of-season cliffhanger.
Season 3 continues to make steps towards more familiar
territory. The first episode picks up from the previous season’s
cliffhanger, with Silverbolt displaying his new, cold demeanour
and Pteranodon mode (and sadly, I can no longer remember how he
came back to life). Cheetor was placed into a stasis pod, with
Nightscream finally stepping into the leadership role. Taking a
leaf out of Beast Machines: Transformers, I had given
Nightscream a push into adolescence when Cheetor took command of
the team, mirroring Cheetor’s “teen” period displayed in Beast
Machines and begun in season 3 of Beast Wars: Transformers.
While Cheetor felt plain as a seasoned character, Nightscream
felt like a leader amongst peers. His leadership excited me more
than Cheetor’s had, and added some extra spice to the run.
Nightscream’s slightly uneasy and challenging ascent to command
is another element that I could no doubt handle well nowadays.
Season 3 was mainly focused on Doctor Who-style adventuring,
with only some episodes fleshed out. Chief among those was
episode 3, in which another trip to Late Cretaceous Mongolia saw
Velocity and new Decepticon Skullcruncher fighting to the death
and becoming the infamous “fighting dinosaurs” fossil (which
required the caveat that beast modes are somehow literal
flesh-and-blood animal forms). Along with Velocity’s departure,
the episode also saw both Snowstorm and Cataclysm putting
themselves into stasis, the former due to injury and the latter
deep-freezing herself in grief. Dare I say, my characterisation
back then wasn’t particularly strong, especially for characters
like Cataclysm who opted to all but kill herself as soon as her
partner died… The mid-season finale played with some interesting
ideas – Megatron, revived again in a form inspired by a Hot
Wheels “Attack Pack” car called Darkclaw, allied with Cyclonus
and Scourge to attack the Maximals. A temporarily-feral K****h
eventually fatally wounded Megatron, while Snowstorm awoke and
ejected herself in an escape pod, returning herself to
mid-Cretaceous Australia in time to begin her ongoing time-loop
again.
The second half of the season quickly saw the depleted cast
(currently only Nightscream, Silverbolt, Blackarachnia, K****h
and Waspinator) gaining new members. Though I can’t quite recall
the order of events, Razorbeak was plucked from the (equivalent
of) the time vortex and joined the Maximals, and a trip to
K****h’s home world of T***n saw her fellow tribespeople, A**
and L***, temporarily joining the crew. While there was little
else worked out for this run of episodes, the two-part finale
was perhaps one of the most ripe in potential. K****h was sent
into the Matrix to confront Megatron while the other Maximals
were forced to confront a number of Decepticons taking over her
body. With all but Silverbolt (to the best of my memory; and of
course K****h) reformatted as they passed through the Oracle to
reach the Matrix, and a climactic battle against Megatron who,
for once, was both not technically revived and not in a form
inspired by something else, the finale had the makings of
something genuinely creative and powerful.
The fourth season was somewhat inspired by season 2 of the 2000s
Teen Titans series, with the first few episodes introducing
pirate captain Abydos, who after a time-hopping adventure with
Razorbeak as a hostage, ends up being arrested and joining the
Legacy-Hunter crew as… punishment, I presume. Events build up to
a mid-season finale revealing connections between Abydos and an
ominous entity known as the Beast, the (temporary) destruction
of the Legacy-Hunter, the departure of A** and L*** and the
return of Cheetor and Dinobot. With the revelation that a broken
“key” (actually a disk with various holes in it, inspired by a
broken protractor I had at the time) needed to be used to purify
Abydos of her satanic connections, the second half of the season
focused on obtaining these key-halves. Journeys to the very
beginning and very end of the universe followed, with natural
13-year-old defying of the laws of physics ensuing. The finale
upped the ante yet again, with Abydos killing Razorbeak and the
Beast finally surfacing from deep within Cybertron. He quickly
claimed his Four Horsemen – the revived Rhinox and Terrorsaur as
War and Pestilence, Cheetor as Famine, and K****h as Death. With
Razorbeak revived in short order, Abydos eventually used her
connection to the Beast to absorb him into herself and have
Razorbeak kill her to end the villain’s threat. With Nightscream
badly injured by K****h/Death and subsequently put in a stasis
pod, Cheetor took over as leader. Abydos’ arc (especially her
eventual sacrifice) took some inspiration from Terra’s story in
the aforementioned Teen Titans show, while the Beast was
inspired by Doctor Who’s 2006 interpretation and his Horsemen
clearly come from the Biblical concept and Marvel’s take on it.
More extreme inspiration occurred across season 5. The first
half saw the cast heading beyond the furthest reaches of ‘The
Future is Wild’, meeting the new sapient inhabitants of Earth
(descended from Squibbons) and, after some kind of underwater
adventure, eventually becoming involved with… the Daleks. The
end result was Cheetor being possessed (I believe by Dalek Sec
of the Cult of Skaro, specifically), some of the others briefly
dying before being restored, and Nightscream finally returning
while Cheetor left with the Daleks. As bizarre as it sounds, and
utterly destroying any real credibility for characters dying at
this point. While season 4 does end in a manner that, aside from
the altered cast line-up, leaves things as they began for new
adventures to continue, this was perhaps not the adventure to
continue on with. The second half of season 5 saw our heroes
heading to Skull Island, the home of King Kong (specifically the
version from the 2005 film, which was in my mind at the time
having recently purchased the in-universe guide book ‘The World
of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island’). Summoned by
Rhinox, now in the form of a Ferrucutus, the team found
Megatron, Terrorsaur and even Tarantulas operating on the
island. With various characters reformatting once again (and
Waspinator losing the buzzy tone to his voice, having already
stopped speaking in third person), and a final battle between
V.rex Megatron and a revived Kong Optimus Primal, this half
somewhat redeemed the season if by no other means than
incorporating the impressive work of Peter Jackson and WETA
Workshop. With Primal killed, Tarantulas stole Blackarachnia
away and he and Megatron fled.
Season 6 had little content. At one point, I recall having
created a new character for it, but they failed to appear in the
final version. The character Isis was introduced, intended as
one of the Original Thirteen (and therefore retroactively a
unique interpretation of Solus Prime) – she became a love
interest for Waspinator, the first of many. An intense fight
between Silverbolt and Tarantulas finally saw Blackarachnia
return. In what was meant to be something like a full series
finale, most of the heroes died, leaving only Nightscream,
K****h and Razorbeak to face Megatron as he collapsed the
universe in on himself… and then engineered a new Big Bang. Now
existing as the universe itself, it took K****h bringing back
the various heroes from across the series to defeat Megatron. I
can’t recall quite how they managed it… but he finally collapsed
again, and began a new Big Bang which happened to be the one
that began our universe. This happened to prove useful in
further engraining Megatron into the show’s history. With all of
the Maximals so far now alive, almost all of them headed off in
two teams, to continue travelling the universe and saving lives.
Well, this has been a lengthy retrospective so far (I fear how
long Part 4 might prove to be…) and there is still more to
cover. Thankfully, it should prove quicker.
Transformers: Legacy – The Movie was perhaps brought on by the
recently-released live-action Transformers. This was now summer
2007, and I’d created a lot with Legacy – the film was a chance
to have a one-off, epic adventure. An early idea would have
involved an all-powerful item inspired by the Revo Rubik’s cube,
something which I later received as a Christmas present. Instead
of going with a story involving the search for a legendary cube,
I had a universe-spanning hunt for twelve elementally-powered
Keyblades (of course inspired by the objects of the same name
from ‘Kingdom Hearts’), with Nightscream, Silverbolt,
Blackarachnia, K****h, Waspinator and Razorbeak joined by a new
team on a ship later named the Iron-Claw. The Keyblades were
required to stop Unicron from destroying Cybertron, and when it
appeared that the titan had done so, our heroes simply travelled
back in time to save their world. Within Unicron, Waspinator
encountered swallow-bot Tailturn and her fellow captured
colonists, ultimately launched into space with the smitten
Waspinator promising to find her. Further, Unicron was revealed
to be none other than Megatron – the being born in the early
moments of the universe in actuality being drawn together from
the residual existence of Megatron. With Unicron defeated, the
two crews remained together. A simple, fun adventure, relatively
light on continuity, but also lacking in any weight or depth.
Seasons 7 and 8 can be summarised together, as the two share the
same creative threads. The two behave like extended half-seasons
– in hindsight, they could easily be combined into one run.
Season 7 saw the return of Abydos, the brief appearance of
Rattrap and Botanica, the full introduction of Tailturn (who
would prove to be a mainstay, one of the best points of
later-Legacy), and the departure of the Iron-Claw crew. Inferno
played an antagonistic role, while the Beast proved to be the
big bad, taking over K****h in the season 7 finale and
inhabiting her throughout much of season 8 (as I write this, I’m
noticing parallels between K****h’s Legacy portrayal and Vanessa
Ives from ‘Penny Dreadful’ – both strong, mystical characters
often haunted by the darkness). I don’t believe I have anything
major worked out for season 8 besides the finale – the Beast
leaves K****h and uses her Matrix connection to possess every
other Cybertronian… barring Abydos, who he can no longer inhabit
having possessed her before. K****h and Abydos work together to
purify all of the other Cybertronians, permanently scuppering
the Beast’s plan. Primus then manifests to thank the crew… and
send them to the distant future to fight on a dying Cybertron. I
believe Dinobot re-joined the crew around here.
The ninth season involved Megatron, having reconstituted on
Cybertron far into the future, accumulating Acolytes. A
returning Tarantulas was joined by Bushfire, Nightshade and, a
little later on, Holocaust. Bushfire wound up switching sides to
join the Maximals. Little else of interest occurred in this
season. Megatron and his remaining Acolytes escape.
Within universe, season 10 occurs a few years after season 9. We
begin with Prowl, a young bot (I believe a cop) who becomes
engrossed in the mysterious goings-on of the Legacy-Hunter crew
all across time. Inspired by my lack of true knowledge on the
early days of an RP which I was involved in at the time, Prowl
eventually manages to join the crew as they appear on
contemporary Cybertron. Again, I don’t have most of the season
mapped out, only the beginning and the end – Megatron with a new
base on Earth, 1 billion years hence, and his eventual defeat
absorbed into the mind of Tarantulas. Nightshade escaped; I
can’t recall Holocaust’s fate. With Silverbolt, Blackarachnia
and a now-spontaneously-good Tarantulas heading off to do other
things, the line-up of Nightscream, Dinobot, K****h, Waspinator,
Razorbeak, Tailturn, Bushfire and Prowl continued off on new
adventures…
Which brings us to the end. What was once two near-identical
MacGuffin-hunting seasons are now reduced down to one for ease.
I can’t recall what the items were, although Silverbolt,
Blackarachnia and Tarantulas did bring some extra information on
them at one point. Our heroes were joined by a character called
The Lonely Goddess, inspired by an image of a humanoid Majora’s
Mask from ‘The Legend of Zelda’. A new troupe of villains, the
Horrorcons, were ultimately revealed to be led by Deathscream, a
possible future Nightscream who wound up slaughtering his team.
In the end, Deathscream made use of a weapon that merges
universes, firing it into a black hole. The singularity’s force
expanded exponentially, pulling in the entire universe – and
Nightscream and K****h finally shared a kiss in their apparent
final moments.
Of note before I conclude this part of the retrospective – some
unused ideas include an Ancient Egypt-themed story, inspired by
a historical episodes of ‘Rugrats’ (I believe relating to Moses,
since we watched it in a Religious Studies lesson at school) and
which went on to inspire Mirage in Transformers: Fragments; and
a story drawing from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, with new
characters based on Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban. Both
plot ideas failed to surface in Legacy.
Over the course of 2007 – a tumultuous year for me – I managed
to create a range of new stories, taking 2006’s simple Legacy
and expanding upon it with new characters, new concepts and new
directions. It was inarguably messy and poorly-handled, though
there are basic seeds of great potential. Nightscream as leader,
and characters like Razorbeak, Abydos and Tailturn, were all
great additions to the title, even though my execution was
inconsistent (and little more than promising and imaginative at
best). While season 1 was what started it all, it’s clear that
the 2007 run is the true foundation of where the fan-franchise
went.
A.
#Post#: 763--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 10, 2016, 12:58 pm
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 3 – Flourishing Fiction
(Reboot and Ultimatum, 2008)
The title Transformers: Reboot was intended to work on two
levels. For one, there was the (short-lived) in-fiction reboot,
presenting an abruptly different universe to that which had been
explored for the past 18 months. It was also about marking a
cut-off point for the Legacy title – with ten new seasons and a
film across 2007, there was already a lot of story material
under the one title. Certainly far more than would realistically
happen in that span of time (something true more or less across
the whole of Legacies and Rise, but certainly a big problem from
late 2008 and through 2009 – be prepared for the next instalment
of this retrospective). Reboot was an attempt at ending the run
of Legacy, while still continuing its story. And while Reboot
wasn’t very far removed from what had come before it, it did
begin to make some changes.
Much like Legacy, only Reboot’s first season really upholds the
title. The effects of Deathscream’s universe-fusing weapon are
different from usual, due to having been fired into a black hole
– rather than two universes merging into one, our universe is
being mapped onto another parallel universe. This begins with
some of our heroes – Nightscream, Silverbolt, Blackarachnia,
Waspinator and Razorbeak – waking up in the bodies of their
alternate universe selves aboard the Legacy-Hunter. The series
pretty much focused purely on gathering up the other Legacy
characters, most of who were also inhabiting their alternate
selves’ bodies (barring K****h, who remained her alternate self
until the finale) while trying to defeat Deathscream. With the
two-halves format no longer in use, I bolstered the season
length from 12 episodes to 13. Eventually, the Maximals and
Horrorcons came to clash in a mystical chamber with an
incredibly-high ceiling, adorned with a strange contraption
known as the Chandelier which Nightscream and Deathscream fought
upon. With the countdown to the complete and irreversible fusion
of the two universes ticking, and K****h to conveniently be the
very last being to fuse to complete the process, the stakes were
high. Eventually, Nightscream (wielding the Matrix sword in its
very first appearance) managed to stab through the Chandelier
and up through Deathscream’s jaw at the last second, ending the
fusion and killing his enemy in one fell swoop.
And so the titular reboot ended, with the two universes
separating from one another again. The process by which all of
this happened is beyond me – as ever, I had a concept, an
opening and a conclusion, but no real cohesive story behind it
and plenty of conveniences. In any case, everyone was now
restored to their original bodies in our familiar universe. Now…
I do believe that Nightscream and K****h were whisked away,
possibly with Tarantulas, for reasons that I can’t recall. This
left us with a team of gathered Maximals – Silverbolt, Dinobot,
Blackarachnia, Waspinator, Velocity, Razorbeak, Abydos,
Tailturn, Prowl and the Lonely Goddess. The majority of the
first episode actually had its own distinct and somewhat
peculiar plot, with Shockwave being introduced on Cybertron
along with a new super-fast train system… of course, with
diabolical intentions. Bushfire and Prowl both died during the
episode, with Dinobot (who had grown close to Bushfire) and the
Lonely Goddess subsequently departing. With seven bots left,
Velocity took lead of the team, and in their attempts to follow
Shockwave and learn his true intentions, they wound up on a
strange and distant world.
Once again, the greater details for season 2 escape me, but what
I do clearly recall is that the story had not only Shockwave
aided by Nightshade, Starscream, and two characters called
Scavenger and Immorticon inspired by concept art from the
scrapped Transtech: Transformers series, but also a new set of
villains known as the Others. These were beings who originally
existed as spores between universes, and who piggy-backed their
way into this universe after the events of season 1 were undone.
These villains were all heavily-inspired by the antagonists of
‘Digimon Adventure’s Vamdemon(/Myotismon) arc. The Master was
Vamdemon, Sorceror was Wizar(d)mon, Phantom was Phantomon, and
Claws was Tailmon(/Gatomon) – complete with the cat Digimon’s
gloves, scars and heel-face turn. With Dinobot and the Lonely
Goddess returning for an episode later on, the series was
otherwise a conflict between the three different teams. I
believe the new planet was home to Transtech technology, or
something similar – I was weaving in the idea of Transtech,
though I really don’t believe I had anything clever worked out.
The season’s climax saw Nightscream, K****h and Tarantulas
return, Nightshade joining the Maximals, Sorcerer and Phantom
dying, and at least Velocity, Silverbolt and Shockwave captured
by the Others (I believe that Starscream, Scavenger and
Immorticon went off on their own).
Season 3… again had little actually worked out. The Maximals
journeyed around, and many of them now had Transtech upgrades
which ultimately served no specific purpose other than being
another reformatting. There was a story idea with Waspinator
somehow sharing a bit of his immortality with Tailturn to save
her from fatal injuries, though I’m not sure if that was ever
made canon (per-se). Claws finally joined the Maximals, while
Velocity, Silverbolt and Shockwave were twisted into villains by
the Master. The bounty hunter Chameleark – this time drawing
inspiration from Randall from ‘Monsters Inc.’, with a name
taking from the Chameleon Arch in ‘Doctor Who’ – also first
appeared here, though I have no idea if he achieved anything.
The finale saw Silverbolt, Blackarachnia, Razorbeak, Scavenger,
Immorticon and the Master all dying, while Nightshade whisked
Abydos off on some mysterious mission. The Master’s dying act
saw another reboot-like event, with the entirety of the universe
being pulled into some other dimension.
With the Maximals now consisting only of Nightscream, K****h,
Waspinator, Tailturn, Tarantulas and Claws, season 4 took even
greater Digimon inspiration while also further falling flat in
terms of actual content. Emberscales, Armorhide and Kry were
introduced, as character-less expies of XV-mon(/ExVeemon),
Ankylomon and Angemon respectively, while Waspinator and
Tailturn were shoehorned into serving the roles of Stingmon and
Aquilamon. Jogress-style fusions quite likely ensued. There was
possibly some Dark Masters-like plot, but I never created
anything with it. The universe was now mapped out entirely on a
horizontal plane, one continuing, mind-bogglingly-huge expanse
of land. A new threat called the Machine, drawing from
BelialVamdemon(/MaloMyositmon), served as the big bad, and as
the object to be defeated in order to restore the universe to
its normal state. Claws and the new trio all died in the finale,
while Megatron finally took control of Tarantulas and hijacked
the process to restore the universe…
Which brings us to season 5, and Megatron now dominating the
universe while inhabiting/controlling Tarantulas’ body. In a
Beast Machines-like situation, the remaining Maximals return to
find Megatron already mid-conquest. Abydos and Nightshade
quickly return to the Maximals, with a new ally called Midnight
– an incredibly powerful being who they freed from imprisonment,
inspired by an unidentified sprite avatar of a black girl.
Megatron, meanwhile, had amassed his own Four Horsemen (I
believe somehow taking the capacity to do so from the Beast?):
Velocity as War, Starscream as Famine, Shockwave as Pestilence,
and Chameleark as Death, each one now the colour of ancient
parchment. The other Maximal team – now comprised of Cheetor,
Dinobot, Snowstorm, Cataclysm, Rhinox and the Lonely Goddess –
returned for the finale, though Cheetor, Cataclysm and Rhinox
all fell in short order. The Lonely Goddess also died, and it
was revealed that she was a recreated version of K****h… or
something along those lines. This was also the incident that
introduced the idea that only a god (the likes of K****h at this
point, or Midnight) could create a paradox. With Snowstorm now
existing outside of her own personal time-loop thanks to being
recreated at the end of Legacy season 6, K****h “copied” this
Snowstorm and created the very loop that the supposed-original
had been living, fembot et al. It is due to this double-paradox
nature that Snowstorm chose to rename herself Paradox. While
Nightshade again whisked Abydos off, Nightscream died, and in
trying to revive him, K****h somehow restored Razorbeak instead.
Fully transforming into a god, Reboot’s cliffhanger had K****h
completely losing control of her incredible powers…
This brought me to another new series – Transformers: Ultimatum.
Now intending to frame this as a trilogy of series, I continued
on directly after Reboot’s series finale cliffhanger… with the
sudden appearance of Optimus Prime. Taking the Matrix from
K****h, he took away part of her power, reducing her from
omnipotence and saving her. With Megatron still at-large,
Optimus Prime lead a team of Dinobot, K****h, Waspinator,
Paradox, Razorbeak, Tailturn and Midnight, all reformatted into
triple-changers (or in K****h’s case, quad-changer with linsang,
phoenix and alien jet modes) and joined in short order by
Vortex, inspired faintly by Sonic the Hedgehog. Megatron
restored his Vehicon Generals from Beast Machines: Transformers
in the meantime, this time using the name Terrorcons. This first
season became a MacGuffin hunt, tracking down thirteen Zodiac
Crystals, twelve of them perfectly copied from the Talismans
from ‘Jackie Chan Adventures’ along with a thirteenth crystal
representing the Cat. The Cat Crystal turned out to be
non-existent, causing K****h to create it herself. These
crystals served to begin to open a mysterious object known as
the Triskaidecagon – a thirteen-sided object which, in the end,
only opened enough for a small red orb to float out of it. This
orb fused into Megatron, but the object needed to be
fully-opened. I believe Megatron was aiming to do as much, while
the Maximals were attempting to collect the Zodiac Crystals to
stop him.
Season 2 followed the same format, and other than again taking
inspiration from ‘Jackie Chan Adventures’, this time with its
eight Demons and the Pan’ku Box, I don’t believe I have much of
anything plotted out. The most I can recall is the red orb
entity beginning to influence Megatron more, and an adventure
set on the planet Pyrovillia, home-world of the Pyroviles from
‘Doctor Who’. Jetstorm joined the Maximals; Paradox and Vortex
died in the finale (with Paradox’s death mirroring Nana’s
dismemberment from ‘Elfen Lied’, something I had only seen
images of at the time); the Triskaidecagon was fully opened,
allowing the red orb entity, Kronos, to return to his body; and
Nightshade and Abydos finally resurrected Nightscream. Kronos
and his forces were named Demonika, a name I had originally
created as a villain team name for ‘BIONICLE’ – they were a
faction who had proven too ambitious in Cybertron’s early days,
and were imprisoned. Now they had been unleashed on the universe
once more. (Also, Dinobot and Paradox had grown close prior to
her death – the third time this had occurred, first with
Bushfire and then with the Lonely Goddess.)
With the playing-field changed, season 3 took this a step
further, with Optimus Prime quickly frozen in time by Kronos in
the opening episode. The Maximals’ ill-fated venture onto the
Demonika ship, Genesis, resulted in K****h taking leadership of
the team for the first time, with Razorbeak as
second-in-command. All the while, Nightscream, Abydos and
Nightshade were joined by Primatia, the Monkey Zodiac Crystal
given Cybertronian form (inspired just a little by K****h’s
creator stating a monkey would be her beast mode…). I’m not sure
what was happening with Megatron’s Terrorcons all the while –
Thrust and Tankor must have died at some point, as I know that
Megatron, Obsidian and Strika were operating without them later
in Ultimatum (and even renamed themselves Galvatron, Cyclonus
and Scourge, respectively). The finale, at least with K****h’s
Maximals, the Terrorcons and the Demonika, occurred on a desert
world called Taraka. An incredibly powerful machine known as the
Hypervelt Audion Resonator was buried beneath the sands – and
while the Maximals and Terrorcons, in an uneasy alliance,
managed to fend the Demonika off, the machine’s presence was
known. One Demonika, a bot known as Cynder and inspired by the
‘The Legend of Spyro’ character of the same name, was captured
by our heroes; she was a character I had briefly considered for
Reboot, before the final version came into play.
Season 4 had a somewhat more focused path, with chases across
planets and Nightscream finding a prophecy that K****h would
“burn in the sun and die”. Paradox – returned to life by her
bi-paradoxical nature, but reconstituted in a more reclusive
form inspired by Renamon from ‘Digimon Tamers’ – appeared on
Taraka, and guided the Maximals to the reconstituted
Legacy-Hunter, now simply Legacy, in a chamber beneath the
sands. Sadly, I don’t remember when the ship was previously
destroyed… in any case, it became known that the Legacy, along
with Genesis and the Ark and Nemesis from the original
Transformers series, could combine into a single gargantuan
vessel, the Supremesis. Cynder gradually revealed that Kronos
had been abusive towards her, and become a proper member of the
Maximals. With Nightscream’s team eventually winding up on the
temple planet Manterax, with its temple walls covered in
prophetic texts, both K****h and the Demonika made their way
there too in time for the finale – where Kronos took K****h
captive.
Which brings us, at last, to the climax of everything so far –
Transformers: Ultimatum – The Keys of Audion. Another theatrical
film, this was the antithesis of the Legacy film, a
continuity-laden finale event with farther-reaching consequences
than anything before. As the Maximals all united on Taraka,
Kronos used the captured K****h to perform another, successful
Legacy. With the entire Cybertronian race returned, he then went
about enacting his full plan. I can’t recall if he had reason to
bring about a Legacy, but it did restore all of the deceased
Maximals (though Velocity remained evil). Uniting and joined by
a young bot called F******f***e, they then scattered across four
worlds – Earth, T***n, Taraka and Manterax – to try and prevent
Kronos’ forces from connecting the four fated worlds, all while
K****h escaped and joined her allies again. Kronos succeeded in
using the ties between the planets to unlock the mysterious
Deltadrome Network deep beneath Cybertron’s surface… and in turn
used that as a way to find the equally-enigmatic world known as
Occultus Porta. A ball of intense energy with an artificial
station at its core, Occultus Porta could be used to reach any –
or indeed every – other universe, as it existed across all of
them and connected to its parallel selves. The reunited Maximals
came to blows with Kronos, and it became apparent that twelve
bots served as the titular keys, beings with a rare type of
Energon known as Audion. With the Supremesis formed and the
Hypervelt Audion Resonator activated by these keys, Kronos began
using its incredible power (something which I actually
mathematically calculated at one point) to bore through Occultus
Porta’s surface. Eventually, K****h managed to once again reach
full godly abilities, becoming consumed in plasma even as she
dispersed Kronos and eradicated most of the Legacy-returned
bots. She managed to save herself at the last moment, returning
to her original form and locking away her powers and memories
(likely inspired by Donna Noble’s recent fate in ‘Doctor Who’).
Returned to T***n to live in peace, reality was saved from
Kronos and most of our heroes were still alive. The film
concluded with a set-up for the next series; I’ll elaborate on
this next time.
With The Keys of Audion more than anything before, I came up
with an imaginary advertisement campaign. With my birthday on a
Saturday in 2008, I had the film “open” that day, and had the
week building up to it filled with imagined voice actor
interviews and new mini-trailers. It certainly helped make the
film feel like a true event.
Looking back over Reboot and Ultimatum, it’s painfully obvious
that they’re remarkably hollow series. Much like Legacy’s 2007
run, each season is mainly built on certain concepts, opening
and concluding stories, and new characters. I feel that what
makes them so different is the use of characters. Legacy took a
couple of seasons to move on from the season 1 cast, but once
Nightscream was leader and Razorbeak joined, a set core cast was
in place. Sure, Cheetor popped up and took over at one point,
and Dinobot came and left more than once, and Abydos and
Tailturn became mainstays after the film, and we got a new
character every season near the end… but it felt like a staple
group at the heart of it. Despite how empty the seasons
ultimately were, and how flimsy many of the plots were, there
was (at the very least the illusion of) heart. Reboot and
Ultimatum feel as though they branch out more, because they lose
that group – Nightscream and K****h leave for a season, there
are multiple deaths and revivals, and the overall cast grows a
lot more. While the addition of Nightshade, Claws, Midnight and
Cynder have certainly proven their worth in the long run, the
first eight months of 2008 is a much more tumultuous affair
compared to what preceded it. Once again, there are plenty of
promising concepts that could be handled with much more finesse
and intensity now. It’s also nice to step away from Megatron and
the Beast being constant threats – Deathscream, the Master and
Kronos really shake things up in terms of threats.
Something that I didn’t really mention in the previous part is
the toyline. After 2006’s prototypal toyline ideas, I began a
dedicated list of toy waves in various size-classes for Legacy,
Reboot and Ultimatum. This of course included some non-show
redecos, sometimes appearing in the same wave as a new version
of that character. It was a fun speculative task, and the idea
of having figures of these characters is still endearing even
now.
So in the end, Reboot and Ultimatum took what Legacy did,
improved some things and worsened others. Its storytelling was
no stronger on the whole, and it lost some heart but added
lasting new characters and significant new concepts which
widened the fan-franchise’s scope. Sadly, it was also the
beginning of one of the most frustrating periods of the
franchise… and that will come next time.
A.
#Post#: 765--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 14, 2016, 5:56 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 4 - More Stories Than
Sense (Download-Empire, 2008-2009)
I’m not exactly sure at what point I came to divide my series
into sagas (and isn’t that becoming a recurring phrase in this
retrospective?), but Legacy, Reboot and Ultimatum soon became
the K****h Saga – a trio of series tied together by K****h being
a central character. Unfortunately, this saga format is part of
why the run of time from August 2008 to the end of 2009 was full
of so much Transformers content.
After Ultimatum, I already had the idea for a new spin-off –
Transformers: Download. With many of the surviving heroes
deciding to follow a mysterious signal into the Deltadrome
Network, an advanced computer system deep within Cybertron, I
was intending on heavily playing up the digital aspect. This
would be removed from the K****h Saga, with new size-classes
named after units of data and the idea of each episode being
included with a toy on some kind of USB. For a stand-alone
series, that’s… honestly inconvenient, and even back in 2008
they would have easily been ripped and distributed online. I was
also initially intending upon five seasons… I do believe I had a
full plot worked out, but it’s since been cut down.
The problem was the span of time that I was imagining. This was
the first time that I began thinking up stories ahead of time –
losing its spin-off status, Download was to be followed by
Transformers: Nightmare, Transformers: Dimensions, Transformers:
Countdown and Transformers: Endgame. Download would run for a
year, with Nightmare then having a theatrical film in 2009 and a
run through at least the rest of the year… suffice to say, I was
blocking everything out to last until 2012. With the creative
pace that I’d been going at since early 2007, blocking things
out like that was a very stupid move on my part. Nowadays, I
count all five titles as late 2008 – Download at three seasons,
Nightmare at one TV special (in place of the theatrical release)
and one season, Dimensions and Countdown at a season each, and
Endgame as a special. This kind of layout continues throughout
2009, as I’ll cover shortly.
Download’s first season introduced the new character Deltadrome
(drawing on EVA from ‘Wall-E’), who quickly grew close to newbie
F******f***e. Ratbat was the villain for this season, one of
many escapees from the prison within the Network. Season 2 saw
the Maximals leaving the Network, only to find that time a
thousand years have passed outside (placing us in the 34th
century, since the Beast era was 300 years after the 21st
century and only a handful of years pass between Legacy and
Download). The villain Lockdown has taken over Cybertron, while
the Maximals are joined by rebels Smokescreen and Talon. Over
the course of seasons 2 and 3, K****h returns (and eventually
regains her memories) while first Jetstorm and then Nightshade
die. The series concluded with the Deltadrome Network been shut
once again – half of the Maximals on either side through some
plot contrivance. Waspinator and Tailturn wound up separated,
her inside and him outside, after… some kind of situation with
Nightscream and K****h. Only Waspinator, Cynder, F******f***e,
Deltadrome, Talon and Smokescreen remained outside, with
F******f***e stepping up as young leader.
The Nightmare film involved the six heroes trapped in some dark,
psychedelic dream-world, stalked by a force called Malevolence.
The villain continued to prove a threat in the following run of
episodes – the team found themselves on a world locked in
combat, and allied with a new group of characters; Tailgate,
Rapid Run, Kuiper and Conundrum. All but Rapid Run fell by the
series’ end, along with Smokescreen and, most notably,
Deltadrome in a sacrificial act that destroyed Malevolence. With
the team down to five, the Deltadrome Saga came to an
almost-abrupt end.
Dimensions saw our Maximals find a hidden dimension where
Cybertronian colonists lived – including Wingpulse, vaguely
inspired by Terra from the animated ‘Teen Titans’, a
butterfly-bot capable of warping reality. That’s honestly all
that I really created for Dimensions, while Countdown’s main
point of interest was the return of those bots still lost within
the Deltadrome Network, alongside multiple other Maximals.
Megatron was back once again, and by the end of Countdown, he
had succeeded where Kronos failed: he broke through Occultus
Porta, gathered up his alternate selves and took over the entire
omniverse. Endgame was ultimately reduced to just a TV special,
as it follows a singular plot – the Maximals uniting to defeat
an army of Megatrons. Streetwise was finally introduced as one
of Megatrons many subordinates, while alternate universe
versions of Salore and Nightshade joined the Maximals. In the
end, the omniverse was snuffed out of existence, and K****h and
Wingpulse, shunted into an extra-universal location known as the
Base, manage to recreate everything… minus every single
Megatron, utterly erased from existence. It’s the most
comprehensive defeat for the arch villain yet, along with the
first time an antagonist has directly posed a threat to the
entirety of reality. Cluttered, unfinished and fully intended to
be the end. The Wingpulse Saga concluded a trilogy of sagas, and
Endgame brought everything to a close.
Unsurprisingly, then, I soon created a new story. This, like
Download before it, was meant to be a spin-off, and was much
more successful at being one. Far from the omniverse-spanning
space opera that had preceded it, Transformers: Rogues was
focused on a team of Maximals (around a dozen, much like
Download’s starting line-up) travelling space and capturing
villains. Somewhat inspired by Transformers: Animated, which I
was dabbling in at the time, the series would have played with a
smaller scope and a slightly lighter tone. Of course, as ever, I
only created a few ideas, mainly new characters and one or two
plot points. Nightscream was back in charge, and Chameleark
joined for the first time, while F******f***e and Wingpulse
began to develop a relationship. Xylar was a major recurring
enemy, a dangerous character with a “Xenomorph king” alternate
mode (trying to avoid having him be a queen, but otherwise the
same as the infamous ‘Aliens’ monster). Beast Wars characters
Tigatron, Airazor and Depth Charge joined in the first season,
while Sonar and Springer were brand new additions in season 2.
The end of season 2 saw Dinobot, Razorbeak, Abydos, Tailturn,
F******f***e and Sonar shunted off into another universe; season
3 saw F******f***e leading this splinter team, while
Nightscream’s bots were joined by more new arrivals. These four
new team-mates – Salyre, Roadbuster, Cloudraker and Wiretrap –
were Kyroska, another new faction along the same lines as the
Demonika. Unlike Kronos’ antagonists, the Kyroska were explorers
who left Cybertron and spread across space long ago. With
Springer dying during season 3, the teams actually remained
apart by the end of the series…
… because I had already begun new ideas that returned the
fan-franchise to its familiar grandiose nature. Transformers:
Core, taking its name for the internal name for LEGO’s BIONICLE
canister sets, saw Nightscream’s team returning to the dying
Cybertron from Legacy season 9 and recovering Primus from
within, granting the Cybertronian deity a new body. Of course,
he joined the team. The first season ended with the heroes
scattered across time and space after encountering something at
the heart of a (our?) galaxy. Season 2 focused on another team,
which may have been F******f***e’s… as ever, I’m uncertain, and
his team may well have reunited with Nightscream’s at some point
and season 2 was a separate team (this information may all exist
in random documents on my computer). What I do recall is that
Core season 2 introduced a somewhat bitter Cataclysm, working
with the Seeker Sunstorm to try and trace the still-villainous
Velocity. At some point, Sunstorm absorbed the evil taint from
Velocity, and took to his familiar sinister bent himself.
Transformers: Continuum and Transformers: Omniverse followed.
The concept of Continuum was to have the heroes scattered across
the previous events of the fan-franchise… the only definite
point here is Waspinator and Cloudraker being together, with her
starting to develop feelings for him. The other team confronted
Evolution, the Cybertronian form of cosmic-energy manipulator
and RP character Evie Miller – who, along with various followers
of Megatron, was seeking to revive him. By the end of Continuum,
the Maximals were re-gathered, and Evolution managed to revive
Megatron through… convoluted means. It basically came down to
people leaving a tiny imprint of themselves on everything that
they make contact with, and Evolution managed to combine the
imprints of everything that every alternate Megatron touched to
reform a single Megatron. Ridiculous and intriguing, and perhaps
one of his better returns in a somewhat over-complicated and fun
way. Omniverse has, once again, been reduced down to a TV
special, as it’s effectively the finale to the saga – the battle
against Megatron and the efforts to fix the damage that his
resurrection has made to reality. One of the major points was
the introduction of a new ship, the Fibonacci, an ancient
vehicle that monitored the Fibonacci sequence (something I had
recently learnt of, primarily through the Tool song
‘Lateralus’). The resolution to Omniverse didn’t see Megatron
fully defeated, for once; instead, it focused on repairing the
omniverse. There was a temple that needed bots from each faction
as a power source of some kind, and a single bot as a
sacrificial vessel for the ensuing energy. Tailturn opted to
take this role, finally stepping up and leaving Waspinator as
the Maximals fled the area. Primus remained behind with her,
sharing her burden, and the resulting surge of energy scattered
the fleeing Maximals. This became known as the Primus Saga.
What then followed introduced some very significant concepts to
the fiction. Transformers: Clockwork remains at two seasons, as
Transformers: Convergence occurs concurrently with its second
season. Clockwork was set on an alternate Cybertron amidst the
Great War, with some of our Maximals thrown into the mix and a
hunt for Temporal Gears. Sentinel Prime lead the Autobots, with
new allies Echo and Gigabyte joining our heroes, while
Silverbolt and Blackarachnia joined the ranks of the Seekers
(unless I scrapped that idea – I think Streetwise was also a
Seeker at one point, calling herself Sparkwise). Perhaps more
significantly, Cynder worked begrudgingly alongside the
Decepticons, working with a bot known as Uproar… the original
Nightshade reborn. The two grew close and eventually joined the
Maximals. Across Convergence, many of the scattered
Cybertronians died as they steadily reunited… all except for
Tailturn, who awoke on a mysterious beach with a Fibonacci
spiral on her palm. This spiral allowed Tailturn to control the
properties of things – tracing a finger up the spiral would
increase a property of the target, and tracing down would
decrease it. Another point… and I’m not sure whether this was in
the Primus Saga or here… was the return of Paradox, in a form
deriving from Cloudraker. With Cloudraker already dead, K****h
duplicated Paradox’s new form, altered it, and sent it back in
time as Cloudraker… grafting a third paradox into Paradox’s
nature. Eternity, once again a TV special, saw Megatron defeated
once again (part of his downfall brought on by a betrayal by
Laserbeak) and… some kind of plot about reality… falling apart
or something? The most significant part, however, was Tailturn’s
fate. She eventually ascended up into the Chandelier – the
opposite of the Base, from which the Reboot season 1 object took
its name – with Waspinator only just managing to glimpse her
before their separation. Within the Chandelier, time flows
differently to the rest of the omniverse… Tailturn spent
millennia in here, researching everything about the omniverse,
before giving her very essence to become reality itself… to
become the very beginning of the first universe itself. The
Tailturn Saga came to an end – and so, once again, did the
fan-franchise… temporarily.
What would become known as the Waspinator Saga was intended to
be a run of specials that explored events after Tailturn’s
ascension and the subsequent separation of the Maximals.
Waspinator put a team together to investigate… something… in
Transformers: Evolution. With Evie Miller/Evolution back as a
villain, leading a team calling themselves Pathocons and
including Dinobot II and mystery new character Rainburst, the
special saw both heroes and villains gaining the ability to
transform into two evolutionarily-linked beast modes. The
Pathocons managed to revive Megatron again (albeit this time as
a Future Predator from ‘Primeval’ and serving Evolution), while
Waspinator received a subtle message from Tailturn.
Transformers: Origins guest-starred Velocity and Cataclysm, and
saw our heroes exploring the earliest days of Cybertron – most
notably the origins of the Autobots, Decepticons, Demonika and
Kyroska, with hints at another faction. Transformers: Corruption
saw the return of the Beast, along with his new servants based
on the Seven Deadly Sins, and I believe the first hints at a
book charting every living organism which amounted to nothing
plot-wise. Corruption’s conclusion lead to Transformers: Genesis
and Transformers: Apocalypse, the two-parter which began with
time being rewound for everyone but our core team. Heroes and
villains alike were gathered up, leading to a massive union of
all of our big-bads to date (and the subsequent disposing of
Evolution). Eventually, a new villain was introduced – Legion,
the fused form of almost every member of the fifth faction, the
Revons. Primus’ experiment in innate evil, they were imprisoned
beyond the Arc of Armageddon. Rainburst, one of their number,
managed to slip out while the others gradually fused together.
Apocalypse ends with Legion destroying our familiar universe,
and the Maximals and their villains lost in the omniverse.
Transformers: Home was the first time that I came up with each
individual episode in a serialised story. Of course, I was only
coming up with the stories, and not writing them down, which
means most of the details are lost. A core team of Maximals,
including a guilt-ridden Waspinator and a mistrusted Evolution,
find themselves on an alternate Cybertron ruled by a villainous
Prime, Huntdown Prime. The Maximals join forces with a new rebel
group, led by Trailbreaker, to fight against Huntdown’s evil
Autobots. Two seasons of 13 episodes sped through the course of
a month in the summer of 2009 – by this point, I had officially
decided that the fan-franchise was aired daily, as it would be
the only way for most of the series to fit their actual
timescale. With the addition of characters like Maximal
Driveshaft and villains Downshift (later Gearshift) and Scalpel,
and the kindling of a Waspinator/Evolution relationship, Home
managed to introduce some lasting elements. Transformers:
Labyrinth returned to the wider cast, another two seasons (this
time unelaborated) which saw character deaths and the
introduction of Cryotek as a villain, aided by heel-face-turning
Cro. The character Sari (of course deriving heavily from the
teen version of the premiere human character in Transformers:
Animated) also appeared here, as the Maximals and their enemies
charted an immense labyrinth. Transformers: Til All Are One
finally saw our heroes succeeding in restoring their home
universe and defeating Legion, in no small part through the use
of a cube not unlike the one intended for the Legacy film two
years prior. Waspinator, Cynder, F******f***e, Uproar and Sari
were joined by Megatron, finally taking a heroic turn. The
reformed villain returned to his pre-Megatron name, Trypticon,
and took up a post guarding the Deltadrome Network, as the
Evolution Saga came to its conclusion. The titular character of
choice also left Waspinator and the Maximals.
By the tail end of the year, I reached one final trilogy of
titles. Parallel Worlds: Transformers took on the same naming
format as the Beast era, and brought with it a first season
involving a hunt for crystal shards across a number of
inter-connected worlds across different universes. The
Generation 1 Megatron surfaced as the new threat, with Shockwave
as his cohort and reborn Wingpulse and Huntdown (now no longer
Prime) serving as his hunters, later joined by a new bot called
Blaze. Uproar, now in a relationship with Cynder, gave his life
to travel back to the earliest moments of the first universe,
prior to any mitosis-like division of universes, and create
Occultus Porta. The finale saw the first appearance of
Hytherion, the Beast of Time from Japan’s Transformers:
Alternity; F******f***e becoming Prime; Huntdown and maybe Blaze
join the Maximals (I think with Blaze anyway, while Wingpulse
died); and Tailturn finally communicating with Waspinator via
the completed avatar crystal. Season 2 picked up with
F******f***e Prime establishing his place on Cybertron (and
losing a chance to rekindle things with Sonar, who he had shared
feelings with before), and the introduction of Razorbeast, Terra
and Takeoff, along with Shockwave conspiring and eventually
assigning his own four Acolytes (including Gigabyte, briefly
renamed Terrorbyte, and Rainburst) while powering up and
renaming himself Laserwave. Uproar returned, and it became
apparent that a crystal that he was in possession with, the
Angrath crystal, carried a mind and essence for a machine within
Occultus Porta, called Ouranos, which monitored timelines and
aborted those which would threaten all of reality. With the
crystal in place, Ouranos came to life, sealed Waspinator in a
coffin, and quickly traipsed to the end of the omniverse, only
to refuse deny his own destiny of causing said end and allowing
reality to continue on infinitely. (And somewhere in here,
Deltadrome and Sari fused to make Talisman.)
I’m afraid that I can’t recall where Parallel Worlds ends and
its sequel, Exodus: Transformers, begins. What I know is that,
after Ouranos’ devious actions, the omniverse existed on long
enough for entities known as the Ancient Gods to enter.
Mentioned in a few Transformers stories, the Ancient Gods are
meant to refer to Lovecraftian horrors; unaware of those, I made
them eight beings who existed outside of the omniverse, longing
to enter but unable to. With an omniverse lasting long enough to
grow frail and defenceless, they finally managed to breach it.
All the while, Ouranos attempted suicide for reasons I can no
longer fathom, and the act resulted in all of the infinite
universes blending into a massive mess of chaos. Then there was
some stuff about migrating to an “Exoverse”… and Ratbat and
Streetwise, now essentially antiheroes operating in a station
between universes known as the Looking Glass, brought Waspinator
back in a new Lagosuchus beast mode body, and it turned out that
his presence acts as a guideline for events to pan out as they
should. Ouranos throwing him into a coffin is why everything got
so messy. Then Waspinator and Streetwise work together, and then
the Ancient Gods are defeated or whatever, and General Grievous
from ‘Star Wars’ is there, and then Rainburst streamlines
everything into one Soloverse.
Which, finally, brings us to Empire: Transformers. I do have
some cast details worked out here, as rather unsurprisingly,
it’s yet another “bring everyone together” instance. With visits
to Earth, Pandora from then-new film ‘Avatar’, Pyrovillia and
many more, Empire saw our heroes, including Rainburst’s former
lackey Swift, steadily joining together to defeat Rainburst.
There’s lots of messy stuff like Trypticon being turned into
Unicron again and Terra having to possess Earth to transform and
fight him, Rainburst heading into the Chandelier and taking
Tailturn’s place (before continuing to interact with people via
the avatar crystal), and Uproar leading a team of Maximals
beyond the Soloverse, outside of the realms of reality, to a
golden city pumping out a waterfall of Black from a fountain
which Tailturn and Rainburst eventually fell into together and
became the restored omniverse… and then F******f***e Prime and
Sonar hooked up, there was some Swift and Terra chemistry I
believe, and everyone decided that it would be for the best to
stay together and form an Elite Guard (of course taking from
Animated again). All while Paradox, who had been absent from
events, picked up a strange device... Empire was once again
intended as a final story, but with ‘Doctor Who’ changing
stewardship at the time, I decided to try something similar. I
took everything so far as the work of a fictitious Matthew
Robertson, and decided that Lewis Irvine would be taking over.
Paradox’s teaser scene was setting up for a new story for 2010 –
a new decade, and a new beginning. After all, there’s
demonstrably no stopping my creativity.
This period of sixteen or seventeen months was ridiculously
messy. Whereas before, I had some solid concepts if in need of
depth and refining, this was a period of furious masturbatory
creation. While many of the characters are still worthy of note
(many of them in no small part due to their later use), and
perhaps a few concepts are promising, the overall result is a
continual stream of hasty, hollow and ever-more outlandish
ideas, vapid and complex. Without any kind of thematic
guidelines, and with my creativity getting away with me, I
paraded a cancerous degree of drivel. But all the same, it’s my
drivel. For how ridiculous it all is, it’s part of Legacies and
I wouldn’t remove it. Oh, this is probably the period in which I
came up with Legacies as the overall title. This period, more
than its predecessors, would also be the one most influential in
the grand space opera styling of this fan-fanchise – the loose
science-fantasy concepts, threats to all of reality and all
manner of sweeping re-workings of the laws of reality.
Toy-line wise, things were inconsistent. The likes of Download,
Evolution, Home and Parallel Worlds had lines devised, but they
provided little. Compared to the K****h Saga, which continued to
provide specific in-story reformats, there were no longer any
specific points at which characters could be said to gain new
forms, nor any given reasons, aside from Evolution and any
specific resurrections or changes.
Thankfully, the worst was now behind me. If you’ve managed to
read this far, have no fear; 2010 began a new age for Legacies,
and the remaining parts of this retrospective shall be more
focused on creative decisions of detailed stories than endless
recaps of hollow outlines. For all of the mess that late 2008
and 2009 provided, there were jewels that made the later years
shine a little brighter.
A.
#Post#: 768--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 17, 2016, 3:57 pm
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 5 - A New System
(Reconfiguration, 2010)
By the end of 2009, I was preparing to end Legacies. It was only
with the invention of the synopses – and of the changing head
writers – that I managed to give the fan-franchise a new lease
on life. Yet again, I can’t recall quite how the ideas for
Transformers: Reconfiguration coalesced, and in fact I think one
of the earliest things was the imagined toyline and the concept
of “Puzzle Pieces”. The title came soon after, and the new
format developed in due course. The series would take place over
a year, with two acts each spanning four months: the first from
February to May, and the second September to December. Four
episodes a week would allow the series to develop at rapid pace.
I worked out the Puzzle Pieces, each one a unique item with
intriguing powers, a stark change from the previous MacGuffins.
The toyline quickly followed, with new size classes (Drone,
Collector, Warrior and Titan in place of Scout, Deluxe, Voyager
and Leader, respectively); this not only helped me work out the
cast in advance, but to tie some of the Puzzle Pieces to certain
characters. A initial Maximal team of Uproar, Cynder, Huntdown,
Gigabyte, Waspinator, Streetwise and Swift would come to blows
not only with Starscream’s Decepticons (Ripcord, Impale and
Vapour), but also a returned Xylar.
Act I begins twenty years after Empire: Transformers, with the
Elite Guard well-established amidst a Second Cybertronian
Empire, and one agent, Havoc, receiving a funeral service.
Starscream broadcasts a message across Cybertron, his face on
every screen – warning them of impending Decepticon victory.
Uproar and Gigabyte manage to track the broadcast to a planet
called Trayka, and Uproar gathers up a team to head to Trayka
and pre-empt Starscream. Once there, they begin to become
involved in a race to gather the mysterious Puzzle Pieces, not
least of all as Paradox returns to the group with the Tallus,
one of the Pieces. With Starscream’s team and army of Drones,
and Xylar making use of the Order of Xaaron, the Maximals had
their work cut out for them. Gradually, new characters joined –
rogue agent Shine, soldier Shade, Earth-based Wing Saber,
egotistical Autobot Sunstreaker, Decepticon-sympathiser Long
Haul and Elite Guard rookie Apex joining the Maximals, as did a
young alien named Kolo; escaped Deltadrome Network criminals
Clunk, Signal Flare and Sub-Zero, Transformers: Home villain
Gearshift, crazed scientist Arachnatak and the infamous
Soundwave joining the Decepticons.
With numerous bumps in the road, various familiar Maximals
guest-starring (with the likes of Dinobot and Sonar becoming
especially prominent in later stories) and plenty of twists,
Reconfiguration’s first act made a huge change to what came
before. The synopsis format allowed me to better explore the
story – gone were the days of simply creating a story arc and
its conclusion, as I could now lay down a sprawling storyline
episode by episode. The four-day-a-week structure also granted
me the opportunity to have multiple strands occurring
simultaneously, with any given week concluding some threads and
starting others. This fluid format was a huge breath of fresh
air creatively, and the characters, especially some of the newer
ones, got to advance greatly (as I shall explore shortly). In
fact, even the finale was built to naturally for perhaps the
first time: Ripcord finally sided with the Maximals, losing his
life to Impale in the process; Kolo was revealed to be Havoc in
a deep-cover mission, in truth a Decepticon double-agent from
the start; Xylar fought first Starscream and then F******f***e
Prime; and the completed Puzzle released intense amounts of new
energy, before blasting both Waspinator and Streetwise to parts
unknown. Parts of this finale were some of the first story ideas
that I had for Reconfiguration, and the long-running format
allowed me to build towards them gradually.
Over the three months between acts, I began brain-storming for
Act II. My ideas culminated with a confrontation with entities
known as the Deus ex Machina, inspired by intriguing artwork I
had seen of Adam and Eve witnessing the arrival of an alien-like
god from an advanced machine. This in turn would set up for a
new Reconfiguration season in early 2011, following the Elite
Guard on missions as the Predacons resurfaced and more new
characters joined; and building up to a Reconfiguration film in
summer 2011 which would see the Elite Guard’s base attacked and
a climax on Earth, followed by a year-long Transformers:
Infinity until mid-2012. Of course, this was all planning too
far ahead, much like my earlier issue after Transformers:
Ultimatum (amusingly, Transformers: Endgame was also initially
intended for 2012!). Aware of this, I removed some ideas and
truncated what remained down into a refined Act II. Perhaps a
little more messy than the first act, it nonetheless utilised
strong ideas and managed to interweave them with relative
success.
Picking up months after Act I, the Decepticons have successfully
taken over the Second Cybertronian Empire. The Maximals of the
Elite Guard are scattered, with some of them hidden deep below
Cybertron – they gradually return to action, even as Starscream
manages to locate Waspinator… on the same mysterious beach world
that Tailturn found herself on before. The Maximal is turned by
Starscream, though the conflict between Maximals and Decepticons
soon sees many of the villains apparently dying when their ship
crashes down on Cybertron. Even as the remaining Decepticons
continue to act, the lead Maximals begin gathering the Syntropy
enhancers found in Lokon generators on various worlds (a
less-engaging MacGuffin which played a less important role in
the story compared to the Puzzle Pieces). Havoc, along with his
old friend Fold, gradually becomes more familiar with the
Maximals, while scientist Constant, IDW’s original Autobot Drift
and the Tailturn-like Daybreak also join the Maximals. Many of
the lesser Maximals wind up imprisoned on the Decepticon’s
mysterious Gorga-Major space-station. The dangerous Slash joins
the Decepticons, while Waspinator met a lonely alien scientist
called Illyiara on her home world of Herroway. Eventually,
everyone winds up on the planet Otara – the Syntropy enhancers
are combined into the mysterious Lokon blade, the seemingly-dead
Decepticons resurface, Waspinator learns how he was used, Kronos
is restored, Fold is killed by Slash, Constant is revealed to be
the revived Shockwave and Apex both Megatron and Optimus Prime,
and the Deus ex Machina finally appear.
The playing field quickly changes at this point. Cynder is
twisted into joining Kronos again. Waspinator heads to Earth
with Illyiara, where the Predacon Medusa offers him the chance
to lead a Predacon resurgence and has him restore Inferno and
Quickstrike (forgot to mention last time, but Waspinator’s
restoration in Exodus: Transformers granted him
evolution/devolution powers). The Maximals and Decepticons
eventually formed a loose alliance to take down the Deus ex
Machina, who were attacking each planet that the Puzzle Pieces
had been on. Impale finally meets his end at the hands of
Vapour. Slash begins absorbing random characters, and manages to
destroy Cybertron after retrieving the mysterious On’to’Ron
Chronicles. The final battle against the Deus ex Machina on
Trayka begins to reveal the full power of the Lokon blade, when
in the right hands. Medusa begins to doubt Waspinator’s
abilities. Maximal trio Necrow, Rapid-Wing and Warhawk, and
Rainburst-esque Nightfall, join events late in the game. The
likes of Cloudraker and minor Generation 1 character Ironfist
are revived amongst others via the same means as Kronos.
Eventually, Waspinator kills Medusa and returns to the Maximals
with Illyiara, just as Slash finally absorbs Apex and transforms
into a new form for Megatron – the villains slaughters his way
through our heroes as they use every weapon at their disposal.
Eventually, Swift, Sonar and Havoc sacrifice themselves to open
the way to the Infinity Chamber on the snowy world of Fothai –
Waspinator and Illyiara enter it, and as Megatron comes
ever-closer to destroying Trayka and our remaining heroes,
Waspinator presses the Quantum Reset Button.
Reconfiguration’s density of content – not to mention its length
of 171 episodes in total – allowed for much more character
development than ever before. It wasn’t necessarily handled
well, but it was a considerable cut above earlier titles.
Waspinator was at the heart of this, with a story arc exploring
his increasing darkness. Act I dabbled with his darker
persuasions very early on, going so far as to barter with Xylar
at one point and to actually be “traded” into the Decepticons
later in the act as part of an agreement between factions. While
Waspinator was meant to act as an informant amongst the
villains, his darker impulses continued to be swayed. The
character’s heroic nature remained, and he and Streetwise shared
a mutual attraction, but the gradual change that began with
Tailturn’s ascension were finally reaching boiling point. The
climax to Act I revealed that Waspinator was also jealous of
Uproar’s successes as leader, while the universe had been
destroyed when he lead a team. His insecurities and his pain
finally took hold over him, and once separated forever from
Streetwise, he was ripe for manipulation by Starscream. In his
time with the Decepticons, Waspinator revelled in his
frustrations and rage, only to realise time and again that he
was uncared for and used amongst the villain faction. This
persisted even when he accepted Medusa’s offer to lead the
resurging Predacons, only for her to become increasingly
frustrated with his failings. It was only Illyiara who stood by
him continually – kindred spirits, both in pain, both lonely.
While I don’t feel that I explore their kinship enough, or gave
her much autonomy in Reconfiguration, there is certainly a sense
of a bond and a mutual respect between them. Ultimately,
Illyiara plays the role of his moral compass, guiding him back
to the light. Waspinator is remorseful for his decisions, but
the Maximals are his family, and they manage to forgive him. It
was the Waspinator Saga that gave Waspinator something more than
just being the ever-present, light-hearted bot, and
Reconfiguration expanded upon that exponentially, placing him in
a hugely central position more than ever before.
The play between the Decepticons is another high point of the
series. Compared to previous villain teams, typically a bunch of
largely non-descript lackeys serving a main antagonist,
Starscream’s Decepticons were all dynamic characters of their
own. Ripcord and Impale were opposites, as the former was an
honour-driven warrior and the latter was an anger-driven
berserker. Impale was constantly driven by a desire to be
second-in-command, to hold a place of importance, and he
despised Ripcord… so when his comrade gradually developed
Maximal sympathies, even working alongside Paradox, he took
great pleasure in killing him. It was much to his chagrin that
Gearshift was then given Ripcord’s position. It took Impale a
while longer to bring about Gearshift’s demise, sending him into
combat with Nightscream which resulted in mutual death. Vapour
was then placed as second-in-command. The somewhat enigmatic bot
was somewhat undeveloped at first, but it became increasingly
apparent that he had plenty of plans of his own. Vapour finally
bested the incensed Impale, killing him with his own blade-like
arms. He eventually remained with the Maximals, finding that he
served his purpose better amongst them than with the
Decepticons. All three characters were unique in the series,
with interesting roles to play.
Multiple relationships also formed across Reconfiguration.
Waspinator and Streetwise had a mutual attraction; Paradox and
Ripcord developed feelings for one another, and she later grew
close to Wing Saber; Havoc and Daybreak slowly fell for each
other; and the distant relationship between F******f***e Prime
and Sonar lead to the latter falling for Swift. Even Gigabyte
and Constant shared a budding romance, with her later comatose
state gradually pushing him towards his old Shockwave identity.
It may well be a testament to my continued interest in character
romance, but the romance in Reconfiguration was very notable.
Reconfiguration also introduced a wide range of new worlds, some
of which have continued to play a prominent role in later
titles. The somewhat Earth-like world of Trayka and the snowy
Fothai are chief among these, while Gogax, Aadorea, Cantra and
more all appeared on occasion. The series also had a number of
ships – the new main ship, the Resplendent, as well as its
sister ships, the Cygnus and the Warbird; Drift’s Raito; the
main Decepticon ship, Harvester, and later smaller ship
Warbroker; and the Predacon vessel called the Vendetta.
Of course, one other thing that the series had in surplus was
characters. While the initial cast of seven Maximals (plus
Paradox) and four Decepticons was easy to handle, the sheer
influx of characters old and new soon overwhelmed things. With
random choices like Sunstreaker, and the addition of characters
like the new Maximal trio late in the game, the show was truly
crowded. Of course, that made the finale that much more
diabolical…
Annihilation was a six-part finale event, taking advantage of
the four-episodes-a-week format and the dates of Christmas Eve,
Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve that year. Events began to
build up to it over the course of December (actually causing
something of a lull for a while), and I imagined a wonderful
advertising campaign with snow falling at night and sleigh
bells, paired with shots of certain characters looking to the
“camera”. The actual event saw the latest return of Megatron,
the result of Slash’s continual chaotic actions throughout Act
II, and he took no time at all in slaughtering swathes of the
expansive cast. Even main players weren’t safe, as the likes of
Uproar and Cynder fell to him. The fact that it took a
randomisation of the universe to defeat him is… perhaps a little
over-the-top, but it (and the general tone of the event)
demonstrated how dire the situation had become. There were
elements clearly left over from older plans – the points on the
Compass representing certain bots resulted in the underwhelming
plot point with Sonar, Swift and Havoc giving their lives while
Daybreak watched on – and other points, like the revival of
Cloudraker and Ironfist, existing purely to set up the next
series… but by and large, the finale was an immense conclusion
to an entire year’s worth of storytelling.
Reconfiguration wasn’t perfect. It was overcrowded, unbalanced,
and it still displayed underdeveloped ideas even if they were
explored and/or utilised better than in older series (not to
mention the number of times a character was held captive…). But
it was an entirely new way of creating Legacies, and one that
proved to be immensely successful. The storytelling was more
detailed and more dynamic than ever before, allowing for the
fan-franchise to delve much deeper than ever before and to build
a truly intriguing story. Reconfiguration was the result of an
incredible metamorphosis which changed Legacies for the better.
A.
#Post#: 770--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 21, 2016, 3:37 pm
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 6 - Abridged Versions
(Infinity, 2011)
The conclusion of Transformers: Reconfiguration was to lead
directly into the next series – Transformers: Infinity (stylised
as Transformers: ∞). While Reconfiguration had some
abridgement of ideas, Infinity was greatly affected by changes
during its run. The initial plan was a year-long series, with
one episode a week. That’s how the first couple of episodes
actually played out, with the aftermath of Annihilation and the
pressing of the Quantum Reset Button. Megatron has been turned
into Optimus Prime, who F******f***e passes the Matrix back to;
Terra somehow has Wingpulse’s form; new heroine Blizzard joins
the team; while Starscream, Soundwave, Shockwave (Constant,
grieving Gigabyte’s death and taking on his old identity) and
Tarantulas revive Generation 1 Megatron. The intention was for
the Maximals to fight these new Decepticons, with the later
introduction of a new villain, Revon leader Oblivion, and a
grand finale in the golden city beyond the omniverse. 2012 would
then introduce a new series, Transformers: Wild – it would be
the Beast Wars to the Generation 1 of Legacy-Infinity, set some
300 years after Infinity with the Cybertronian race at home on
Trayka as a new host of Maximals and Predacons come to blows on
Earth. As I began working out the characters and story-beats for
Wild, it heavily overshadowed Infinity. I realised that I was
more interested in these new Wild characters than in the current
Infinity… so I set about bringing the two together to form a new
idea.
I quickly took the two episodes of Infinity that I had written
so far, and changed the direction of the story with the next few
episodes to make it a prologue – a stepping stone from
Reconfiguration to the main Infinity series. Nightfall is
recovered by Ratbat and Laserbeak, who guide him to Oblivion.
The Revon has been imprisoned for eight billion years, and now
freed, he quickly charged up with Energon in the Revon flagship,
the Enigma, before intervening in the Maximal/Decepticon
conflict occurring on Trayka. While some of the Maximals manage
to find eight coloured crystals that seem to be tied to the
enigmatic “Lokon wavelengths” (and it is revealed that Blizzard
is a turncoat Revon), Nightfall forces the Quantum Reset Button
back up and presses it.
The new world order that greets our heroes in the full Infinity
series is markedly different. A Revon-Decepticon Conglomeration
has full control over Cybertron, with Sentinel Prime recently
killed and our Maximals – a band of neo-Autobots – having just
stolen the Matrix away, with a handful no longer present and
Terra fully replaced by Wingpulse. Our characters, good and bad,
essentially awaken into alternate versions of themselves with
existing histories, somewhat similar to the first season of
Transformers: Reboot, or having the characters being in media
res along with the viewers. Oblivion is emperor and Megatron is
his warlord; Starscream leads an aerial legion which includes
Skywarp and Thundercracker; new Revons are introduced, including
scientist Deep Dive, squabbling twins Rapticon and Double Claw,
treacherous Ravage and Poison Bite, and Autobot-sympathiser
Brushtail. Optimus eventually takes the Matrix into himself,
becoming the new Prime, before Talon is taken captive and the
remaining Maximals retreat. They are soon joined by Team Aether,
six neo-Autobots who recently lost their commander – these are
the Maximals from Wild, while many of the new Revons are former
Wild Predacons. Deep Dive begins cloning Talon, Sunstorm is
appointed vice-commander of the aerial force, and a team of
Maximals lead by F******f***e deal with Cryotek leading a
Predacon splinter faction. Talon is introduced to his one
successful clone, Zero (an homage to Marvel’s X-23, with Talon
loosely taking the Wolverine role), and the two are rescued by
both the other Maximals (lead by Optimus) and a new bot, Brawn…
only for Zero to remain with the Revons. Optimus’ team encounter
Cryotek and bring him back to Earth, heart of its own empire,
where he breaks free and winds up killed by Brawn; Blizzard
encounters Streetwise, seeping across universes like a ghost,
who warns her about the Beast of Time and of her budding
feelings for Waspinator; and Ravage and Poison Bite discuss
Brawn being their triple agent (working for Oblivion but
actually on their side).
Part II picked up after a short break, with Zero beginning to
realise the darkness within the Conglomeration while under
Brushtail’s tutelage, Nightfall reveals that he too has
conspiracies against Oblivion, and Starscream begins plotting
against Sunstorm, with lowly Seeker Flare-Boom assisting him.
Megatron, Rapticon, Double Claw and scientific Seeker Calculus
chase F******f***e’s team from world to world, while Brawn
informs Optimus of an Autobot called Duststorm hidden within a
pyramid and the Maximals begin to relocate to Earth. Ravage and
Poison Bite manage to steal the Lokon blade from Optimus’ team,
who are then rescued by Alpha Trion. F******f***e’s team locate
Duststorm, who tells them that the Transfuser, a device
containing the entirety of Cybertronian history, is located on
Mars (now a terraformed sanctuary for recreated extinct
species)… while the Decepticons and Revons set off to acquire
it. All forces come together on Mars – the Maximals are joined
by the guardian of the Transfuser, a gigantic Amphicoelias-bot
called Titanicon, while Streetwise sends Blizzard to retrieve
the zero-gravity gripdrive, which she passes on to Zero as the
clone chooses to join the Maximals. Megatron kills Sunstorm to
make a point when Starscream reveals his treacherous colours,
while Brawn turns on Ravage and Poison Bite, killing the pair
but fatally-wounded. While some of the Maximals are cut off from
the main team, Megatron gains possession of the Transfuser
(killing Longarm in the process), Earth’s defences are brought
down and a horde of Scourge drones (taking from the Beast Wars
locust Predacon) are sent to ravage the planet. Oblivion and co.
leave the Maximals to suffer their defeat.
Now, here’s where things get a little more complicated. The
intention was for Part III to play out with another twenty
episodes, leading up to a conclusion which saw Oblivion taking
on the essence of Hytherion, Optimus Prime passing the Matrix
back to F******f***e, and the Quantum Reset Button getting
pressed once more. The second half of the year would then be the
final series, Transformers: Synergy, with the Maximals
slaughtered by the returned Beast-era Megatron and only a
handful revived by a new bot, Gigatron – this final conflict
against the Maximals’ greatest enemy would lead them to the
golden city, the prophetic Darkest Hour come to pass. All the
while, there would be three Wreckers mini-series throughout the
rest of the year: the first was set up in the conclusion to Part
II, with the new Wreckers-to-be separated from their team-mates,
and two more series were planned beyond the one written (one
would have been set on Teyan, while the other was an equivalent
to IDW’s Last Stand of the Wreckers with the team trapped on an
overrun prison facility). Instead, I quickly realised while
beginning Part III that I was struggling to produce more
stories. The Mars finale was a big milestone that I had focused
on a lot, and I had no material between that and the grand
finale. I wound up taking the rather rash decision to bring
about the Darkest Hour imminently, and conclude the story in
time for my 18th birthday.
The Maximals return to Earth, and Bushfire happens to be taking
part in the Conglomeration attack… before switching sides, and
helping our heroes destroy the swarms. Streetwise also manifests
again, bound to the universe that she was blasted into at the
end of Reconfiguration Act I, and explains the existence of
Lokonessence – it is an energy-like quantity that the omniverse
is comprised of much like matter being comprised of energy.
Lokon wavelengths are how Lokonessence interacts with living
beings, and in the case of eight of our heroes – Wing Saber,
F******f***e, Illyiara, Waspinator, Blizzard, Daybreak, Vapour
and Ironfist – their wavelengths are two-way and coloured.
Oblivion sends a team to recover Ouranos from Occultus Porta,
but Gigatron intercepts – Starscream, Skywarp, Thundercracker
and Deep Dive all perish, while Shockwave joins Gigatron’s side,
longing for redemption. In Transformers: Wreckers – Light and
Dark, Ratbat approaches Cheetor, Talon, Grizzle, Jolt, Blaze,
Cloudraker and Zero, and sends them to a planet caught up in a
war between two alien races. Across the five-part mini-series,
many of the bots are killed (with Blaze notably giving her life
in the finale – the only death that wasn’t originally planned,
as there was only Darkest Hour left to write now).
Darkest Hour (Transformers: ∞) was the seven-part
conclusion, meant as the latest ending for Legacies as a whole.
Optimus Prime departs, leaving the Matrix with F******f***e,
while Blizzard is swiftly revealed to be the mole, a sleeper
agent being secretly manipulated by Oblivion. With the Lokon
blade delivered to her, she proceeds to attack multiple Maximals
– and use the phenomenal power of Lokonessence to cleave Earth
in two with a single strike. The Maximals make their way to
Cybertron, joined by their allies who had vanished during the
second reset, while Optimus allows himself to be consumed by
Hytherion. Oblivion reveals to the Maximals that he has begun
wiping out the entire Cybertronian race, across all universes,
via Advanced Cybonic Plague. Some of the Maximals are taken out,
and Oblivion abandons Megatron on Cybertron while he heads out
with the rest of his followers. Absorbing Hytherion into
himself, he reveals that the spark of
Trypticon/Megatron/Unicron/Optimus Prime is actually part of the
Beast of Time, now whole again. The surviving Wreckers join the
Maximals, and go to confront Oblivion – Calculus is killed, and
Oblivion opens the way to the golden city while the Maximals are
all teleported to the Looking Glass. Ratbat, Gigatron, Ouranos
and Shockwave send one team back to Earth, where they use the
Tether linking Wingpulse and Terra to revive the latter. More
and more heroes fall, and Gigatron, Megatron, Wingpulse and
Terra give their lives in an attempt to buy the Lokon-related
eight more time. Oblivion steadily manages to gain all eight
Lokon crystals and the Lokon blade even as Rapticon, Double Claw
and Flare-Boom are all killed. Combining the crystals and blade
into his body, he begins to use the power to reshape reality…
until all of our surviving heroes (the eight, turncoat Nightfall
and Zero) except for Illyiara sacrifice themselves, shattering
their crystals and completing the Matrix of Leadership bar
Oblivion’s own spark. Illyiara places the relic into the centre
of a Hall of Matrices… the entire Cybertronian race is restored,
and Oblivion is consumed in the glow. Illyiara and the
Cybertronians find themselves on the mysterious beach planet, as
F******f***e swears to restore unity across the race.
Infinity is decidedly imperfect. While Reconfiguration was
flawed, it had a clear arc to it. By contrast, Infinity bumbled
along, failing to take advantage of its full potential and
coming across quite messy. That, in no small part, comes down to
format. The prologue was a very cumbersome section, born of
fluid plans. The main series followed the same four-a-week
routine that Reconfiguration started, but used them for
four-parters rather than more open storytelling. While there
were naturally ongoing elements, it resulted in stories
specifically stretched out to fit four episodes and an
all-around more restricted style for the series. The cast size
also didn’t help: the Maximals at the start of the main series
were 14-strong, with six more joining in the second story.
Alongside the large cast of Decepticons and Revons, there were
far too many characters to handle well. Indeed, many of them had
very little to do, essentially only filling out the casts.
Streetwise’s character essentially changed once again; having
previously been an opportunistic villain, and then a
hard-working hero with a sweeter temperament, she now
essentially filled the wise sage role. There was even a harem
for Waspinator – inspired by my early forays into anime,
specifically ‘Hayate no Gotoku’, I showed Waspinator not only
being mutually-attracted to Illyiara, but also having chemistry
with Cloudraker, being drawn to Daybreak, being crushed on by
Blizzard, and still holding feelings for Streetwise. Anime
influenced other parts of the series, too – Freeline was
inspired by Konata Izumi from ‘Lucky Star’, and I imagined the
series being animated by J.C. Staff (the studio behind the
second season of ‘Hayate no Gotoku’), rather than being CG
animation as with all previous series.
There were plenty of unused or misused ideas, too. The Many
Truths introduced with Duststorm was meant to play out through
Synergy, but with the abridgement of Legacies, that fell by the
way side. The Transfuser basically wound up playing no purpose,
where originally it would have been the means to fuse Hytherion
and Ouranos into Oblivion. Even the zero-gravity gripdrive –
said by Streetwise to be used to ensure that reality is not torn
– finally saw use in Darkest Hour, when Zero used it to
deatomise Flare-Boom. Starscream’s plans to overthrow Megatron
come to naught as soon as Sunstorm is killed. Alpha Trion
vanishes from the story. Both Tarantulas and Deep Dive are
killed off by heroes as soon as their traitorous natures are
revealed (it makes me laugh to wonder how later stories would
have played out with this logic). Even Oblivion, with his
incredible display of power over Optimus and Megatron in the
prologue and his sinister presence in Darkest Hour, spent most
of the series in his throne room or calling his warriors off
when they are about to kill the Maximals.
Not everything was bad, though. Brushtail proved to be an
interesting character, a member of the antagonists who very
openly favoured the Maximals and who at one point bemoaned the
fact that he never followed through on switching sides. It’s a
shame that I didn’t have him sacrifice himself while destroying
the hordes attacking Earth – instead, he had Optimus rewrite his
coding to make him a Maximal, then had him unceremoniously
killed off on Cybertron during Darkest Hour. The relationship
between Waspinator and Illyiara continued to bloom as a couple,
and she showed some character progression as she changed from
pining for her old life, to feeling that the Maximals were her
family. F******f***e’s arc of self-doubt and displays of strong
leadership were at least promising. Blizzard was a fun addition,
handled well as a light-hearted and innocent character. Darkest
Hour introduced the concept of quotes within the synopses for
the first time. It also had titles that followed the Fibonacci
sequence in their syllables, which was a fun touch. The actual
climax, with Oblivion set to reshape reality as he sees fit and
paint Primus and his people as demons, is thrilling; diluted
only by following a similar story beat again down the lines.
Wreckers – Light and Dark was an intriguing little story, and
the general concept had lots of potential which I managed to tap
at later points.
Infinity is definitely not in the top set of my Transformers
series. It falls short of the bar that Reconfiguration set,
being messy, somewhat bland, overcrowded and undercooked. It
fell foul to me not being fully aware of all the things which
made Reconfiguration work, and of choosing to conclude
everything much sooner than anticipated. Given more focus,
Infinity could have been incredible, and its strong points could
have been much more numerable. But Infinity’s shortcomings
helped pave the way for everything that came after it… and
Darkest Hour was the beginning of a massive overall arc that
would see the franchise through for the next five years.
A.
#Post#: 772--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 24, 2016, 5:25 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 7 - An End and a Beginning
(Twilight Voyage, Synergy and Wreckers, 2011-2012)
For being something of an abridged ending, Darkest Hour
(Transformers: ∞) was by far the most successful
conclusion. After the final episode on August 2nd 2011, Legacies
genuinely did stop. Mere days after, I began working on a new
series, called Transformers: Breaking Time – it followed
Autobots and Decepticons as they travelled various worlds ruined
by their war and by mysterious tears in the fabric of spacetime.
With beast modes, a human companion, Optimus Prime and Megatron
as leaders and Waspinator on the Autobot team, it implemented an
interesting concoction of ideas. However, Breaking Time never
got past its three-episode opening story. Perhaps it was simply
a lack of interest, or the fact that I’d already let the
“airdates” (or rather the dates upon which I wrote the synopsis)
slip from Saturday to Sunday. In any case, the new series
quickly ground to a halt. Instead, one particular creative
element began to cultivate in my mind.
With the growing plans for Breaking Time, I had come to an
interesting turn of events. In truth, Breaking Time would turn
out to be not a unique story, but an epilogue to Legacies –
eventually, familiar Legacies characters would enter the
Breaking Time universe, and bring an unparalleled conflict with
them. It would turn out that, after the mass-resurrection at the
end of Darkest Hour, an immense, multiverse-spanning Total
Conflict began (and why not, when all of the most infamous
Cybertronian villains would be alive once more?). The Breaking
Time universe would be, for some reason, isolated from all of
this until the conflict finally breaks through. Even though
Breaking Time died swiftly, the concept of the Total Conflict
remained as a dramatic new status quo for Legacies. In truth, it
sets a much more dramatic and somewhat grounded backdrop for the
franchise, compared to the almost wide-eyed adventuring of the
early series.
My early plans on reviving Legacies came in the form of
Transformers: Fractures, which would see F******f***e Prime –
now using the name Emberscales Prime, both to keep his identity
concealed and to keep online privacy in the event that I began
posting these new synopses online – leading a crack team in
trying to bring about the end of the Total Conflict. The team
would use wrist-mounted versions of the Timaeus drives from
Japan’s Transformers: Alternity to cross universes. While this
plan faded out in due course, most of its ideas were implemented
sooner or later (indeed, ‘Fractures’ went on to inspire the
title of Transformers: Fragments).
Instead, Legacies returned with a Christmas special,
Transformers: Twilight Voyage of the Fibonacci. The special
serves primarily to re-establish the Legacies fiction, introduce
the concept of the Total Conflict, and lay out the tone and
direction going forward. Picking up five years after Darkest
Hour, it follows Waspinator, Illyiara, Nightfall, Daybreak and
Vapour as they fly the Fibonacci to Fothai, with the intention
of using the ship to restore the universe to its pre-Infinity
state, all while witnessing the devastation that the Total
Conflict has caused. The special utilises its small cast to
focus quite heavily on their interactions and how the war has
affected them – most notably Waspinator, who has spent much of
his time in the more distant universes and is clearly worn down
by it all. Nightfall enjoys the carnage that the Total Conflict
has wrought, while Vapour is pensive about how little
information he revealed in the past and how trying to handle
everything himself may have brought all of this on. Illyiara
displays a deep compassion for Waspinator, further strengthening
their relationship. As they continue on, it becomes increasingly
apparent that a mysterious Shadow entity is stalking the team,
and Waspinator specifically… not that he has any desire to talk
about it. It’s only when Illyiara is almost killed that
Waspinator confesses the Shadow’s intention to kill her.
Daybreak manages to press the Quantum Reset Button while the
Fibonacci streams down the precise settings for the original
layout of the universe. Rather than the ends of Transformers:
Reconfiguration and the Transformers: ∞ prologue, the
cut-to-black isn’t the final scene… instead, we see Slash awaken
in a stasis chamber only to hear Megatron’s voice greeting him.
This synopsis, aside from the Breaking Time ones, was the first
one to be posted online, on my previous private forum. Twilight
Voyage was a belated final instalment in the past two years of
Legacies – collectively the Illyiara Saga.
2012 began with the introduction of two new titles –
Transformers: Synergy and Transformers: Wreckers. The original
intention was for the former to last 52 episodes, throughout the
year, while Wreckers would wrap up in the autumn at 39 episodes…
and that these would be the last Legacies titles, the Final
Saga. Synergy quickly begins with our heroes finding themselves
back on Trayka, complete with the collapsing ruins of the
Fibonacci. A new threat loomed large in the form of the
Overreach Fleet, a platoon of Decepticons lead by the dangerous
Steeljaw and filled out by militaristic Darkspine, deranged
scientist Amphitox, earnest young experiment Sabretail, and
Shockwave, Constant with a Transformers: Animated-inspired
head-transformation capability and acting as a double agent.
Other than Shockwave, each of Steeljaw’s team-members were
kindly created for me by a friend, a process which I would
repeat to some extent or another down the line to help fuel my
creativity (providing characters I wouldn’t necessarily have
thought of myself) and providing some degree of interactivity
with the new readership. While Synergy began slowly, with the
revelation of Project: Synergy and a return to the On’to’Ron
Chronicles’ prophecy of “and the Dragon devours All Reality”,
little real progress was made early on. It was only the
Predacons – Scale and Medusa, joined quickly by Inferno,
Quickstrike and Dinobot II – that made any notable progression
early on. Wreckers, all the while, kept a steady pace from the
off – half of the initial cast in episode 1 of Synergy were
recruited by Ratbat, sent off as Wreckers to investigate a
universe sealed off from the rest of reality and guarded by
“Hounds”, predatory and animalistic Cybertronians. I soon
decided to abridge the initial planned lengths – make Wreckers
that much more punchy with only 13 episodes, and give Synergy a
much-needed boost by contracting it to 26 episodes.
Wreckers was essentially an attempt to tap into the missed
opportunity of the planned Wreckers mini-series back in 2011.
With a starting team of twelve bots, I had plenty of opportunity
for gruesome demises… but what Wreckers provided more than its
2011 predecessor was a more in-depth plot. The mystery of how to
access the sealed-off universe, and what lay beyond it, drove
the first portion of the series, with occasional deaths to spice
things up and keep the danger prominent. Upon arriving on the
planet Rostinda within the sealed universe, the mystery began to
give way with the arrival of a ruthless, bloodthirsty team of
Decepticons. While Swift, Sonar and Grievous join the Wreckers
(with one of them noted to be a traitor), the heroes and
villains continued to rather brutally take one-another out,
leading to the horrifying moment were Blizzard had half of her
head sanded away by Grindcore. Still alive, Blizzard was
restored through the efforts of Sonar and Blaze, but her trauma
resulted in a much darker and more sombre attitude.
As the scattered Wreckers finally reunited and made one final
effort against the Decepticons, their numbers reduced to six but
with their enemies all defeated. Blizzard leads the survivors
into the unknown master’s citadel, where they encounter
Reconfiguration villains Clunk, Signal Flare and Sub-Zero
transformed into Hounds… and, of course, find Impale as the
master. Not only does Impale view himself as a god-ruler of this
universe, but he plans on taking advantage of the resurrection
to have Ripcord kill Vapour, establishing a mythic Triangle
(each individual involved having killed one and been killed by
the other) which would grant him true omnipotence. Sonar, the
purported traitor, kills Ripcord to prevent this, and Blizzard
eventually uses the detonator in Impale’s sliced-off (and since
regrown) arm to detonate the citadel, sacrificing herself while
Ironfist, Cloudraker and Sonar escape. They carry with them
Blizzard’s Blazefire Saber, which contains the fembot’s memories
and offers a chance to bring her back.
All the while, Synergy continued to blossom over its first half.
Oblivion and Rapticon were reintroduced to join the Maximals,
now both on a redemptive course. A new character, Prophecy, was
also introduced – a crazed fembot, somewhat inspired by Merle
from ‘The Vision of Escaflowne’ (a character who I remembered
from seeing episodes as a child) who sees her entire timeline at
once – while the Predacons retrieved the monstrous Psychosis
from Amphitox’s lab, acquired the exotic metal Syrenium on the
hellish planet Arkon, and took Daybreak and Nightfall captive.
Gigabyte, Fly-By and Freeline all lost their lives on Arkon,
while Darkspine discovers Shockwave’s true nature, but keeps it
secret. Zero gets captured by the Overreach Fleet, and joins
Sabretail in becoming a guinea pig for Project: Synergy, winding
up bound on both a metaphysical and emotional level. A team of
Maximals head onto the Overreach Fleet’s flagship, and split up
to kill Steeljaw and recover Zero. Along the way, the Shadow
takes control of a dead officer’s body, managing to fatally
wound Illyiara. She appears to die, before the Shadow makes use
of her body to attack the grief-stricken Waspinator. The Shadow
then reveals that he is Waspinator’s darkest thoughts and
emotions, extrapolated by a darkness spore that the Maximal
accidentally picked up during his Total Conflict efforts.
Steeljaw has the ship self-destruct, taking himself and Oblivion
out, while the other Maximals leave with Constant, Sabretail and
the On’to’Ron Chronicles. Uproar also joins the team on Trayka.
The surviving Wreckers return in episode 14, with Cloudraker
defeating the Shadow and proving her new-found mettle to
Waspinator while the Predacons take Ironfist captive (having
also taken the bodies of Illyiara, Steeljaw and Oblivion from
the flagship wreckage). Megatron is finally restored, utilising
a patchwork body from the corpses of Steeljaw and Oblivion and
the psychic energy of the Shadow. Cynder is summoned to
translate the On’to’Ron Chronicles, accompanied by Razorbeak and
Abydos, and she brings to light the possibility of the final
line in the book instead reading “and the Phoenix devours All
Reality”, suggesting rebirth. The infuriated Darkspine, along
with Amphitox, leads a devastating attack on Trayka which sees
her, Claws, Cynder, Razorbeak and Abydos all still on the planet
when it explodes… except for the appearance of a mysterious
cloaked “Death” mere moments before. Amphitox is captured by the
Predacons, and along with Ironfist and new arrival Iguanus (who
is accompanied by Spinister), helps to build a new machine. With
Daybreak and Nightfall forcibly absorbed or dissolved into the
construction, it takes on their powers… and the Arcrise Machine
activates.
The surviving Maximals relocate to Earth, where Nightscream and
K****h (now using the alias Firecloud) briefly appear, being
stalked by a God Hunter. Ironfist is absorbed into the Arcrise
Machine, Amphitox is shot, and Slash, finding himself
increasingly dissatisfied with the Predacons, winds up
Transwarping away with fatal wounds and warns the Maximals of
the Machine before dying. The Maximals continue to bond all the
while, both emotionally and by beginning to tie themselves
together via Project: Synergy; Waspinator and Cloudraker grow
close, and Rapticon shows remorse over having killed his twin
during Darkest Hour. The Predacons finally make their move, only
for Dinobot II to reveal that, in fact, he is the original,
operating under the alias of his clone – Spinister winds up
being absorbed into the Arcrise Machine, while Dinobot is
fatally wounded (and later approached by “Death”) and the
Maximals depart. Gigatron sends the team off to Manterax, where
Prophecy winds up mentioning the Hollow Globe, and Zero is
absorbed into the Arcrise Machine, an act which affects
Sabretail enough for her to plunge herself and Iguanus into the
Machine too. As Streetwise manages to communicate with
Waspinator, they discuss the past; an excuse to recount all of
the most prominent elements of Legacies which I was now aiming
to tie together in this grand finale. Streetwise also points out
to Waspinator that he, like Tailturn, has a Fibonacci spiral on
his palm after having woken on the beach planet back in
Reconfiguration. The Maximals then have Ouranos locate the beach
planet, while it is hinted that Rapticon had feelings for
Blizzard, and he and her sword are absorbed into the Arcrise
Machine before the others manage to leave.
Managing to pass the gauze field surrounding the beach planet,
the Maximals land down and Prophecy announces its name –
Valyssia. The Predacons then appear, scattering the Maximals
while Prophecy begins to explain things. Valyssia monitors
reality, and our heroes, from Transformers: Legacy to right now,
are its chosen protectors, set to act upon any threat that
Valyssia identifies. After all of the events that have centred
on our heroes, and on their universe, the timeline itself is
fundamental to reality and putting it at risk could destroy
everything. Waspinator’s spiral represents him being Tailturn’s
truest warrior, while Megatron is the biggest threat to reality.
Each of the Maximals, save Prophecy, is gradually absorbed into
the Arcrise Machine, this time in blue mode instead of red and
so find themselves within a blue fluid and the small chamber
beyond instead of being totally consumed. Megatron proceeds to
use the Machine to unravel the timeline back to the start of
Legacy – the team of Emberscales Prime, Waspinator, Uproar,
Cloudraker, Vapour, Sonar and Constant exit the Arcrise Machine
find themselves on a Cybertron covered in swarms of
techno-organic towers. Whisked off to Earth by Prophecy, she
guides them in completing their Synergisations, while Megatron
tears out the sparks of Medusa, Psychosis, Inferno and
Quickstrike, throwing them into the red mode Arcrise Machine. As
the Maximals return to confront Megatron, they find him as a
monstrous combiner with his Acolytes’ corpses for limbs and
enhanced by the Arcrise Machine. He intends on using the towers
to reach out, tap the Lokonessence and shape the unstable
omniverse as he sees fit. The Maximals eventually manage to best
him, with Emberscales using the Synergy sword – the focused
totality of their bonds – to disperse Megatron’s spark across
reality in infinite pieces. With reality still unstable,
Prophecy points out that the Arcrise Machine draws from the
power of Tailturn and Rainburst: it has as much power as the
rest of the omniverse, and it has more than enough power to
restore the timeline. It can then seal it away and forge a new
timeline. The Maximals sacrifice their lives, absorbed into the
Arcrise Machine in red mode.
Legacies ended extra-narratively with a countdown to its end.
Rise began with a similar countdown, and a brief scene of a
silver bot with blue lights and an Illyiara-like appearance,
stood in a verdant field and announcing herself to be Arcrise.
At some point during Synergy, I had decided to end Legacies in a
way that concluded things narratively – that tied the entire
thing together, rather than simply giving a climactic story –
but which also allowed for a brand new story to begin with the
same characters. The Arcrise Machine was created (meta-textually
speaking) to do just that, and Illyiara being utilised as a
living battery for it allowed for her to be reborn as a new
entity within this new timeline. I’ll cover more of the creative
process behind Rise in the next part.
The decision to continue Legacies after Darkest Hour was
definitely a wise one. While I was happy with the conclusion I
had written at first, I soon came to realise that it was rather
rushed and clunky. That, combined with the excellent set-up of
the Total Conflict, gave me enough reason to bring the franchise
back… and of course, to eventually reboot it as Rise. It’s worth
noting that I only used the Total Conflict as something of a
backdrop, nor did I resolve it before the end of Legacies –
while I felt it would be too challenging to try and depict such
a devastating war, I perhaps let it fade too far into the
background. Twilight Voyage provided the most focus on it, by
directly addressing the damage that the warring had done to
numerous worlds (and to our heroes) over the past five years.
The collateral and psychological damage was immense… perhaps
something that I could have pried into deeper with more focused
writing.
Synergy and Wreckers both display an improvement over the
writing of Infinity, with better handling of characterisation
generally. Perhaps this came from the slightly more limited cast
line-ups, or from somewhat more focused writing. Wreckers
managed to maintain an interesting, engaging tone throughout its
thirteen episodes, while Synergy ebbed and flowed, taking a
while to pick up. Death was hugely prevalent across both series,
and while it made sense in Wreckers (though even that really had
too many characters to have much in the way of focused
development), Synergy was littered with deaths that were often
without much impact. While they at least had emotion to them,
they were largely about clearing house… though the later Arcrise
Machine absorptions did help to build a sense of foreboding,
repetitive nature notwithstanding. Illyiara’s death was also
basically an instance of fridging, killing her off as part of
Waspinator’s character arc… after her growth through her own
saga, it disappoints me that I chose to kill her, especially in
this manner, and doubly-so with having Cloudraker become
Waspinator’s new love-interest so quickly. Still, part of the
reason for her death was to set up her return as Arcrise, so
while it was a nasty bump in the road, it helped pave the way
for something that would eventually redeem and further develop
her character.
The series had their issues, too. While I was continuing to
develop as a writer, I was still largely focused on plot and
letting that override character beats. Dinobot’s honour would
surely have driven him to reveal his true self to the Predacons
around Ironfist’s death, if not sooner; certainly earlier than
his arbitrary reveal and subsequent ‘death’. Oblivion and
Rapticon come back almost as changed characters, with the former
suddenly remorseful and repentant, and the latter a somewhat
darker and more brooding character. Blizzard was brutally and
near-enough instantly changed from a sweet-hearted character to
one much more dour and serious. Much like the changes with
Streetwise, these were driven by where I wanted the characters
to go, without any kind of effort taken in-fiction to cultivate
these changes. Sometimes I could tie these into character
development, but by and large the characters were utilised as
necessary for the story. This would change in due course,
naturally.
Waspinator returned to focus in Twilight Voyage and the Final
Saga, with his dark side expanded upon. While he was no longer
swayed towards the villainous factions, his own self-destructive
tendencies were demonstrated with the Shadow, and his self-doubt
was presented on multiple occasions. Megatron was essentially
restored as his more characterful presence, rather than the raw
force of destruction presented in Reconfiguration’s
Annihilation… but much like Oblivion in Infinity, he spent much
of his time sending his followers out, having things steered
towards his intentions and broadcasting the climax. Even his
final plan was the same as Oblivion’s, reshaping reality to his
intentions. At the very least, the use of Valyssia to tie
together all of the recurring elements of Legacies – the team of
heroes, Megatron’s near-constant threat, the various events
saving or even establishing reality – was rather inspired, and
helped to inform a proper conclusion from which the story could
move on.
The number of reboots of one type or another occurring was also
becoming a little ridiculous. With the Quantum Reset Button
pressed no less than three times, and Synergy ending with an
entirely new timeline being created, the playing field was
rarely staying static. Changes in status quo seemed to be coming
not from the actual events of the story alone, but from
literally reset buttons. The change back to the pre-Infinity
arrangement was merely for the sake of restoring the original
layout.
Beyond the material, there was a faint toyline plan which I
didn’t work on much. More significantly, these were the first
synopsis to be posted on my own private forum. While I only had
a couple of friends reading, getting to see them follow the
story and their thoughts and excitement was a fun experience.
In terms of concluding Legacies, these final few titles did a
good job. They were by no means perfect, but Synergy alone
provided a satisfying conclusion to what could loosely be termed
a singular story beginning with Legacy. Rather, these stories
were the start of a new age of what would come to be
Legacies/Rise – shaken by the consequences of Darkest Hour,
beginning to establish a more refined tone, and gradually
improving. While the end of Legacies and the beginning of Rise
has lost some meaning with the passage of time, Synergy and its
contemporaries set the stage for some of my strongest
Transformers fiction in numerous ways.
A.
#Post#: 774--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: June 28, 2016, 4:01 pm
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 8 - Starting Afresh (Rise,
2012-2013)
With Legacies resolved and the characters primed to continue on
in a new timeline, Transformers: Rise was meant to be the
overarching title for the revamped franchise. No longer a
cascade of changing titles, Rise was intended as an umbrella
title for a number of connected endeavours, centred on a
long-running series of the same name. Unsurprisingly, this idea
quickly fell by the wayside, as the main Transformers: Rise
series took the lead – and even that was soon shortened down to
a single year’s run.
Going into the series in July 2012, the plan with Rise was to
have a full 26-episode season running to the end of the year;
followed by another in early 2013, a theatrical film release in
the middle of the year, and a final season in the second half of
that year. As the series developed, I instead opted to abridge
season 1, bring in elements of the film to build a new season 2,
and turn the planned second and third seasons into a new season
3 and film. Whether or not this was ultimately the best decision
is debatable, but the way things played out proved to create an
interesting series focusing on new faces.
The very first episode of Rise was an episode 0, titled “An
Unearthly Child” after the first ever episode of ‘Doctor Who’.
Rather than diving into the plot of season 1, it served to
introduce the new characters; namely Tidal Wave, Howlback and
Bash, three Cybertronian colonists living on Earth, and Arcrise,
who the trio become involved with when Tidal Wave happens upon
her. Arcrise has no real sense of her identity or the full scope
of her powers, and episode 1 sees her teleporting herself and
her new friends into the midst of a battle between Maximals and
Predacons. Medusa and her team – Inferno, Quickstrike,
Psychosis, Iguanus and Spinister – have broken onto Fortress
Maximus, a high-security prison facility for Predacon criminals.
An Elite Guard team comprised of Blizzard, Rapticon, Waspinator,
Prophecy and Ironfist intervene, and our new characters teleport
in during the chaos as the prisoners are released. Bash is
murdered by a particularly ruthless criminal, Rampage, while the
floating prison is sent tumbling through a wormhole, winding up
in an uncharted planetary system. As the Predacons scatter,
Tidal Wave, Howlback and Arcrise join Blizzard’s team in hunting
them down.
The rest of season 1 followed our team of Maximals travelling
from world to world in new ship the Epsilon-Zero, fighting
against various Predacons. Some of these were all but one-off
characters, while others – Snaptrap, Rampage, Flicksting,
Skysquawk, Divebomb, Sail-Away and Ambush – went on to join
Medusa’s core Predacons, who went largely unused throughout the
season. Tidal Wave, Howlback and Arcrise were at the heart of
the episodes; Howlback especially had a focused story arc, with
her devastation at Bash’s death turning into a strong resolution
to protect her friends and something of a rivalry with Rampage,
who herself was gaining tutelage in psychological torture from
Psychosis. Howlback’s resolution went as far as to have her sign
up to join the Elite Guard, with Tidal Wave and Arcrise
following in kind. Arcrise herself had an arc of discovering and
exploring her powers, and their impact on her developing self,
while she gradually grew as an individual. Tidal Wave had less
of a fully-formed arc, simply getting more comfortable with an
action-packed life full of danger. Blizzard and Rapticon had
hints of deeper plots, with her having undergone an experiment
that almost killed her and him clearly carrying feelings for
her. New character Feral became a double-agent for the Maximals,
while clearly being a warrior from the Total Conflict who
somehow managed to enter the impenetrable new timeline. With
Inferno and Quickstrike killed by the ruthless Skysquawk, and
Medusa having to manipulate him into joining her, the Predacon
ranks began to shift and destabilise. The finale saw Emberscales
Prime joining the action while Blizzard combined into Fortress
Maximus, transforming him and gathering up almost all of the
Predacons save Medusa’s group. While the team leader was left in
bad condition by this, and Medusa’s Predacons escaped in their
ship, Ravager, Rapticon lead the other veterans off after them
and Emberscales took Blizzard and the newbies back to Cybertron.
Season 2 picks up three months later. Tidal Wave, Howlback and
Arcrise are training as Elite Guard agents, with Uproar as their
teacher, and star pupil Cross-Shot and somewhat-bumbling
Wiretrap as fellow trainees. While the veteran Maximals finally
locate Ravager and a fight ensues, Uproar and his trainees get
teleported to the battle zone and chaos quickly ensues. Feral’s
double-agent nature is discovered by Medusa, but he gets whisked
away by Gigatron; Skysquawk redirects a blast from Arcrise,
killing most of the other trainees (something which deeply
affects our younger heroes); and Waspinator manages to send
Wiretrap back to Cybertron to inform the rest of the Elite Guard
before the wormhole closes. The season then largely becomes a
chase, as the Maximals try to intercept the Predacons before
they reach the Hollow Globe, while new players join the story. A
new band of Predacons, the crew of the Chaos-Blade – Bloodtide,
Venecrom, Drain and Icepick (and hi-then-die character Brittle)
– join Medusa’s team after rescuing them from brief Maximal
incarceration. Dinobot, Razorbeak, Abydos and Cynder resurface
as Warriors of Death, serving somewhat-tentatively under “Death”
who saved them in Transformers: Synergy. Emberscales Prime,
Blizzard and Wiretrap join the Maximals, along with another new
character (one introduced primarily as I had put the name into
the toyline), Headstrong, while Tidal Wave and Howlback finally
become a couple. Rampage kills Spinister, leading to Iguanus to
further doubt his loyalties after Prophecy’s hints earlier in
the season. He begins to feed the Maximals information, leading
to the Maximals dividing into two teams to deal with the
Predacons – one team continues to follow Ravager, while another
team takes the Kappa-Three to intercept Bloodtide’s team as they
go to attack the Warriors of Death, who join the Maximals.
A flashback episode covers the origin of the Warriors, from
Dinobot’s rescue in Synergy and through his subsequent
interactions with “Death” and the other Warriors. Amongst them
is Claws and Laserbeak – when “Death” sends them back into the
familiar universe to translate the markings on the Hollow Globe,
Claws and Laserbeak depart on a new mission, following a message
from Illyiara imparted in Laserbeak when the Arcrise Machine
created the new timeline b. In the present, all of the teams
manage to reach the Hollow Globe, a facility in deep space which
unveils hidden pathways across the universe. “Death” reveals
himself to be Flare-Boom from Transformers: ∞, having
joined the Overreach Fleet after the mass-resurrection. His
mobile base, the Ruins, is actually the remains of the Enigma,
and he intends on using the Hollow Globe to find a way to “fix”
reality. Many heroes and villains die over the course of the
finale – Headstrong, Divebomb, Sail-Away, Venecrom, Icepick and
Flare-Boom are all killed off, while Rapticon sacrifices himself
to destroy the Enigma as it powers the Hollow Globe, sending a
confessional last message to Blizzard as he does. The Predacons
retreat with their mission a success (and Snaptrap heavily
injured)… only for Medusa to finally solve the mysterious puzzle
box which she has been working on for over a dozen episodes.
Feral appears to sweep the Warriors away, but Dinobot opts to
stay with our heroes while Uproar joins the Warriors.
Season 3 continues on in short order, with Medusa’s Predacons
reaching Cemeterias, the so-called Grave of the Light, and the
Maximals hot on their heels. Both sides eventually find
Necrocide, a war criminal of Valoranian origin from a by-gone
conflict (and with an oily-black exterior much like Venom from
‘Spider-Man’). It becomes apparent that Medusa has been
preparing to free him, gathering Predacons for him to command
and using the solved puzzle box to unlock the way. Necrocide
quickly takes to his new place as leader of the Predacons, and
leaves chaos in his wake. He almost immediately begins ignoring
Medusa, and has the Predacons being activating dimensional gates
on each world they visit. Absorbing Psychosis into himself,
Necrocide takes on his psionic abilities, allowing him to
decimate an Elite Guard fleet with their own
telekinetically-deflected firepower. He even has Emberscales’
Matrix torn out and blasted into the multiverse via an Alternity
cannon. On the Maximal side, Arcrise starts to notice her
feelings for Waspinator while Wiretrap winds up kissing her. The
characters involved in the Total Conflict make occasional
appearances, and work on trying to locate Emberscales’ Matrix.
Skysquawk and Ambush coax Medusa into attacking them, leading to
her being imprisoned and given a nasty oily-black facial scar by
Necrocide. The insane villain also recognises Iguanus’
Maximal-sympathising, and warns that he shall kill him once he
has finished making repairs to the engines of Ravager. While
Flicksting and Bloodtide fall in combat against the Maximals, it
is the Maximals who are bested once both sides arrive on
Manterax… and Necrocide locks the Maximals’ minds inside their
worst fears. As he attempts to use the well of energy deep
within Manterax (accessed via the Predacons’ journey through
dimensional gates) to reach out and kill every living thing in
the universe, Iguanus frees Medusa and officially leaves the
Predacons before the pair help the Maximals. The inside of
Arcrise’s mind is much like the Arcrise Machine, with Illyiara
inside – when Arcrise herself awakens, she has access to as-yet
unprecedented levels of power, and manages to destroy Necrocide
while taking on Illyiara’s colours. While she returns to normal,
Iguanus joins the Maximals, Skysquawk leads the other Predacons
back off aboard Ravager, and Medusa remains near the
Epsilon-Zero, prepared for incarceration.
With the seasons bridging 2012 and 2013, there was no
opportunity for me to implement any Christmas-theming in
December 2012. Instead, I took a break from the series-proper,
and penned a non-canon, non-story Christmas special. Prophecy
hosted, even directing a couple of lines at real-life readers
rather than imagined viewers; she answered “viewer questions”
read by other characters, and interviewed Lewis Irvine and
Michael Ryan, the head of Legacies and Rise toylines. It was
here that the upcoming 2013 film’s title was finally unveiled:
Transformers: Downfall. A teaser prelude was shown, featuring
Gigatron talking with a shadowed figure called Nova Supreme.
Accompanying the three seasons of Rise were two other stories.
The first of these was a five-part series (originally intended
to be 13-part), Transformers: Catalyst. Airing from February to
March 2013 and featuring a cast of familiar official
Transformers characters, Catalyst focuses on an Optimus Prime
left as the only surviving Autobot on a desolate world. Attacked
by Decepticon Stalker, he has a device implanted into his back,
which sends him back in time to the body of his younger self.
Throughout the story, Optimus continues to shift back and forth
(the device is a temporal astral-shifter, a device which
Wheeljack in the earlier time has yet to build), while
attempting to change the past. Ultimately, he comes to learn
that his Autobots are alive in his present after all – they have
been using Decepticon guises to help close the temporal loop
that they’ve already experienced. Originally, Catalyst was meant
to be a series which showed the effect of the Total Conflict
through the prism of the stable Transformers characters, but it
quickly became a story about Optimus attempting to change his
own past, and in reality fulfilling it.
The other existing branch of the planned Rise franchise was a
comic, titled Transformers: New Legacies – starting in November
2012, it was an alternate take on Legacies that was meant to
simplify the story. Instead, it just became much more
complicated by truncating storylines but retaining all of the
characters’ complex origins. The long and short of it is that
Tarantulas appeared and assassinated Cheetor at the start of
Transformers: Legacy, which has a ripple effect leading to more
and more changes. Velocity, Cataclysm and Razorbeak unite in
Pleistocene South America, while Tarantulas gathers Abydos,
Nightshade, Claws and Vanguard (a.k.a. Vapour) before unleashing
the Beast on Cybertron. Even more characters were also
established before, with a mere eight issues, the low-priority
comic was scrapped. Rather than the usual synopses broken into
three parts, the synopses for New Legacies were written in
chunks matching up to a regular 22-page comic length. They were
also accented by “So… what’s changed?” segments which explained
the context of events with regards to the original Legacies.
Writing this retrospective in particular has helped me realise
that the best way to write a new version of Legacies would be to
refine the good ideas and weave them together with finesse.
About the only good that came of New Legacies was the
introduction, meta-textually, of writer Gregory Costa. I had
already quipped in the fictitious San Diego Comic-Con panel
write-up – something which has become an annual thing since 2012
– that Costa was being lined up as successor to Irvine, and this
would prove true in due course.
Said SDCC panel also mentioned a Rise video game, adapting the
season 1 plot with an update for the intended season 2 plot.
Since games aren’t my forte, I didn’t put any thought into how
this would play out with the later changes to Rise’s structure.
The earliest plans for Rise were a filler season to build up a
cast including Tidal Wave, Howlback (or here, Phytoshock) and
Bash, before some of the characters were killed in a big attack
on the Elite Guard not unlike the one planned long ago for a
Reconfiguration film. The remaining eight bots – saved and
revived by Gigatron, as in the planned Synergy – would be a team
inspired by the partner Digimon in ‘Digimon Adventure’. The
Elite Guard attack persisted even into the later 18-month plan,
as part of the opening for the Rise film. Indeed, my plans and
intentions continued to shift, with many elements in Rise’s
second and third seasons being influenced or informed by my
developing plans for the upcoming film and beyond…
After only minor toyline plans for Infinity and Synergy, Rise
was somewhat more mapped out. Continuity with their introduction
in Synergy, I made use of new size-classes, analogous to the
persistent official ones – Alpha, Beta, Sigma and Omega. I also
expanded upon the Cyberverse mini-figure line, used in official
Transformers series from 2011 to 2013. Further to this, having
imagined a Masterpiece version of Waspinator to be released
alongside Transformers: Twilight Voyage of the Fibonacci, I
continued on with new “Rise Masterpiece” figures – the likes of
Blizzard, Rapticon and Arcrise got Masterpiece releases, a
figure every three months. The imaginary SDCC panels took extra
advantage of these toylines, allowing upcoming waves to be
teased like with the real lines.
Again following the general trends of this fan-franchise, the
Arcrise Saga presented some stronger writing than anything
before it. While it was still by no means even, and there were
some vestigial elements of abandoned or underdeveloped concepts,
there were a lot of praise-worthy parts to Rise. Perhaps the
singularly most-notable is the development of certain
characters. It still wasn’t ubiquitous across every character,
but the ones who took the most focus in the development stakes
used it brilliantly. Howlback’s season 1 storyline saw her
resolve herself remarkably, and her compassionate, motherly side
was apparent throughout the series. Iguanus spent the full
26-episode run of seasons 2 and 3 steadily moving towards
joining the Maximals, with his already-tentative faith in the
Predacons continually shaken. Medusa spends season 3 steadily
being worn down, her efforts readily thrown back in her face
until she is nothing but a prisoner aboard her own ship. Perhaps
the biggest arc is Arcrise’s – beginning as a blank slate, and
growing remarkably and naturally into a fully-developed young
bot, with friends, duties and even a crush. The entire year’s
worth of story-telling being named after her is very much
appropriate. Indeed, all of the new Maximals – Arcrise, Tidal
Wave, Howlback, Cross-Shot and Wiretrap – are engaging, fun
additions who really did add to the story…
… and that worth is certainly of note, because again, the story
quickly became flooded with characters. Eight Maximals at the
start was already a large number (excusing Prophecy being her
usual self, Waspinator and Ironfist got no real focus), and with
Emberscales, Cross-Shot and Wiretrap joining them, along with
Uproar and Headstrong in season 2 and Dinobot in season 3, the
numbers were really quite ridiculous. Even Rapticon’s death only
provided a minor dent in the numbers. Likewise, despite losing
Inferno and Quickstrike in season 1, and more characters along
the way, the Predacons were still boasting a large number of
characters in their ranks. As ever, the persistent problem was
having ideas and archetypes that I wished to use, without having
a proper purpose for each character. Many of the Predacons were
previously-unused characters planned for earlier series – Revons
for Infinity, Predacons for Transformers: Wild, Decepticons for
Transformers: Breaking Time. Bloodtide was initially going to be
a scrappy brawler, even up to the original plan for Rise where
he would have been introduced later in season 1. Instead, the
finalised version was a much more focused and sinister
character, a looming, ruthless monster. Rise also began with
female leaders for both teams – Blizzard leading the Maximals
and Medusa, the Predacons – but this was gradually stifled with
Emberscales taking over the hero team in season 2, and Medusa
giving way for Necrocide in season 3.
While Rise certainly didn’t become the multi-branched franchise
that I had imagined, and Catalyst and New Legacies both took
different turns for better or worse, Transformers: Rise itself
as a great new instalment. Though the second and third seasons
become somewhat sprawling chases through space compared to the
first season’s Predacon-hunting, there were strong character and
narrative arcs that bound the show together. A victim of
changing plans, it still managed to serve as a stable new
beginning and a thrilling, fun show in its own right.
A.
#Post#: 776--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: July 1, 2016, 6:16 pm
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The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 9 - Plans, Themes and the
Pinnacle (Downfall, Fragments,
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E and the specials,
2013-2014)
In the autumn of 2012, with Rise mapped out for eighteen months,
I began planning the next instalments of the franchise. The end
results would prove to be the highest-quality storytelling the
fan-universe would ever see.
At this point in time, the plan for the third 26-part season of
Transformers: Rise would see the Maximals drawn into the Total
Conflict, eventually building to Wiretrap becoming the vessel
for Necrocide’s return as the Matrix of Leadership transforms
him into a Prime. I decided that this would be the point at
which Lewis Irvine’s fictional stewardship of the franchise, and
a new era would begin with 2014. Many of my early plans here
were influenced by my renewed interest in Marvel’s X-Men at the
time. Multiple series with different teams would air
concurrently – Transformers: Fractures as the core hero team,
Transformers: Strike as a secondary strike-team, Transformers:
Dark following a villain team, Transformers: Wreckers with a new
band of do-or-die heroes, and Transformers: Legacy featuring
most of the classic Legacy characters. (The title Transformers:
Horizons was also in consideration around this time.) The
eventual defeat of false-Prime Necrocide would see fragments of
the Matrix turning Blizzard, Ironfist, Vapour, Medusa and
Snaptrap into Primes, much like the Phoenix Five from the
‘Avengers vs. X-Men’ event. While our other heroes gather lesser
fragments, the five Primes are influenced by the remnants of
Necrocide, gradually killing each other until the full mind of
the villain is gathered in Medusa’s head. She would then manage
to trap him in her mind, and 2016 would see a final series
tentatively-titled Transformers: World. Other ideas included the
new series opening with a brand new female character fighting in
the Necrocide-dominated world, and a number of dinosaur-themed
bounty hunters playing an antagonistic role.
I’m not entirely sure when the finalised ideas began to
formulate relative to the abridgement of Rise, but the concept
that started it all off was revolutionary. Throughout Legacies,
I had done little with Dinobot as a character – his honourable,
stern nature was his core, and something which I never thought
to change, leaving him a very stable character. But what if I
changed that? What if I took Waspinator and Dinobot, two
Maximals who had been part of the franchise from the start… and
turned them against each other? Like Optimus Prime and Megatron,
or Professor X and Magneto, they would be pitted against each
other ideologically. Dinobot would decide to form his own
faction, and gradually be twisted into a villainous figure
(though of course he would find redemption eventually). The
dinosaur bounty hunters idea lead to Dinobot’s new faction
having entirely extinct alternate modes – the name Archaicons
came about. The idea of the Matrix being shattered and the
subsequent hunt for the fragments also remained, becoming a
driving force for the new series. More than this, it would lead
to a number of new Maximal characters being introduced. With all
of these enticing new ideas, I began to plan out the series,
several months before I would begin writing it. I once again got
friends to create characters for me. Growing ever-more conscious
of thematic writing, I began to engineer themes within the new
series. Gregory Costa, the fictional scribe of Transformers: New
Legacies, would be the new head-writer.
Come June 2013, the Rise film was written, now with the Total
Conflict-related plot and the title Transformers: Downfall (as
first unveiled in the Rise Christmas special). With Medusa now
the Maximals’ captive and no sign of the other Predacons, the
peace on Cybertron is disrupted by multiple ships bursting
through the planet’s surface. A portal is discovered at the
planet’s core, and as the ships tear the whole world apart, our
familiar heroes evacuate through the portal with as many
citizens as they can take. Beyond the portal, the remainder of
the fleet are being taken out by another fleet – the Alliance,
the amassed forces of the multiverse’s Autobots, Maximals,
Kyroska and more. More familiar faces are aboard the Alliance
flagship, Leviathan, along with commander Nova Supreme. Uproar
now has his timeline a (Legacies) memories back, and guides the
others to have theirs returned too. In regaining his memories of
the old timeline, Waspinator finally recognises Arcrise’s
similarities to Illyiara.
We learn that the main Legacies/Rise universe is now referred to
as Universe 1, due to its significance to both the Cybertronian
race and all of reality. Emberscales’ Matrix, with the role it
played in Darkest Hour (Transformers: ∞), is the “One True
Matrix” which both fleets are now trying to find. Skysquawk and
his Predacons are captured by the Conglomeration, the fleet
comprised of Decepticons, Predacons, Demonika and more. The
fleet’s leader, a female Galvatron, beats information out of
Skysquawk – that Necrocide launched the Matrix out of Universe
1, with coordinates that the Predacon managed to note down. The
Alliance is tracking the specific code in the casing of the One
True Matrix all the while. Waspinator talks with both Streetwise
and Cloudraker, resolving any lingering feelings from his
timeline a memories, before the two fleets come to blows.
Cross-Shot snarls about the Conglomeration’s villainy, but
Dinobot points out that both he and Waspinator were once
Predacons. As the fleets battle, a team of Maximals –
Waspinator, Dinobot, Tidal Wave, Howlback, Cross-Shot, Arcrise
and Prophecy – wind up on one of the Conglomeration cruisers,
with the Predacons also aboard. This cruiser winds up crashing
onto a random alien world, and while Arcrise sense the Matrix
nearby, Dinobot questions the point of recovering the Matrix
when the conflict would only restart in time. All the while,
Nova Supreme begins to show signs of mania, and Medusa winds up
kissing Wiretrap, her current guard.
The Maximal and Predacon team finds the Matrix casing, but the
crystal itself is gone, launched back to where it came… which
Arcrise can sense on Trayka. While Waspinator and Dinobot
continue to debate the decision to return the Matrix to the
Alliance and whether either side deserves to win, Cross-Shot and
Drain discreetly inform the fleets of the Matrix’s location.
Waspinator gives Arcrise a heartfelt encouragement speech to
help her return them to Universe 1, with all forces converging
on Trayka. The citizens send up a platform-ship for the
Cybertronians to battle on rather than threatening the planet,
while Dinobot guards the Matrix on the island which, a timeline
ago, served as the Decepticon’s base in Transformers:
Reconfiguration. Nova and Galvatron battle over the Matrix, and
the platform-ship winds up being brought down onto the island.
The Matrix ends up with Wiretrap, and he begins to transform
into a new Prime… only for the process to become twisted. Medusa
reveals that he ingested some of the scar tissue during their
kiss, and it is now being transformed by the Matrix. Necrocide
didn’t die in Rise’s finale, instead retreating into her mind
via the scar… now he shall leave her into a new Prime body. Nova
Supreme quickly falls in-line with the false Prime, while
Galvatron defies him and is killed. When Waspinator holds up the
Matrix to him (as the essence of Primus harms Valoranians), it
is blasted apart… by Dinobot. Waspinator, Cross-Shot, Tidal
Wave, Howlback and Snapjaw all wind up with a fragment in them,
while the rest scatter into space. Necrocide retreats to
Leviathan, leading off a large swathe of the Cybertronians,
while the Predacons leave and Emberscales unites the remaining
bots as they return to the leftover ships.
Only Waspinator, Arcrise and Dinobot remain in the
platform-ship’s ruins. Waspinator first sees to Arcrise, who has
advanced in power far too quickly and regained Illyiara’s
memories. She bursts into flames like a phoenix, reducing to
ashes with a small silver egg amidst them. Taking the egg,
Waspinator then talks with Dinobot – the former expressing his
faith in the Maximals’ justice, the latter certain that there is
another way. They part on uncertain terms; later, aboard our
Rebellion’s new flagship, Panthalassa, Waspinator talks with
Gigatron, noting that he intends on gathering the fragments of
the Matrix, which we then see landing down on various worlds.
The Downfall synopsis saw the return of quotes to the synopses,
and also included a closing song, ‘Future’ by Paramore (with my
changing feelings for the band at the time, this has become
something of a sticking point, though the song very much
encapsulates the tone of the film’s conclusion). Downfall saw a
dramatic close to the Arcrise Saga, and the setting of a new
status quo for something entirely new.
That something new was the Matrix Saga, most specifically its
central series, Transformers: Fragments. After months of
planning, the series kicked off at the end of June 2013,
complete with an official logo and (rather makeshift) theme tune
for the first time. (Meta-textually, Downfall was also the last
instalment animated by J.C. Staff, with Shaft taking over
animation duties here.) Episode 1 of the 52-part series saw
Waspinator, Cross-Shot, Tidal Wave and Howlback joined by
Snapjaw, as they reformat into new forms that will help them
control the powers they have gained from the fragments.
Selecting a new ship with a sentient artificial intelligence,
the Dawn Katana, and with Prophecy tagging along, the team of
heroes set out to gather the fragments. All the while, Dinobot
saves a young fembot, Sickleclaw (another character originally
from Transformers: Breaking Time), from an angry mob – she
becomes the first new member of his Archaicon faction, intended
to gather those against the ever-present conflict. The outset of
the series sees the Maximals gathering up fragments, each one
embedding itself into something or someone and generating
fascinating powers, while Dinobot builds up his Archaicons, most
notably with the Universe 1 version of Huntdown, unsettling
Scorpinax, egotistical Airazor and PR agent (and possible
sadist) Lacerator. The Maximals in turn began picking up new
members with fragments; grizzled mercenary Scale and Buzzstreak,
a young bot from a hive-like colony whose fragment grants her an
independent mind. While Dinobot begins to take Sickleclaw under
his wing, and the Vok (the unfathomable aliens from Beast Wars)
came into contact with Scorpinax, Buzzstreak took her own life,
too scarred by her own independence and unable to open up to her
team-mates. Tidal Wave and Howlback, having only recently come
to terms with Waspinator’s slightly-utilitarian leadership, left
the team in grief due to Buzzstreak’s death, and it took
comforting words from Cross-Shot and a fragment-enhanced alien
child to resolve Waspinator.
The smaller Maximal team, now without their moral heart, gains
more new members – the ever-determined Paladin left his own
people, who he could not cure of their mind-bug affliction;
while independent immortal pharaoh Mirage almost stole the Dawn
Katana for herself until Waspinator managed to convince her to
join the team (finally incorporating the Ancient Egypt ideas
from 2007). One-off adventures spaced out the new arrivals,
allowing the team to develop and the friction between characters
to be explored; while the Archaicons began to be more proactive,
even coming to blows with Skysquawk’s Predacons. By November,
the series had progressed plenty from its beginnings – two more
Maximals, awkward young Wildfire and flirtatious, exuberant
Swingback (inspired by Suruga Kanbaru from Shaft’s
‘Monogatari’), joined our heroes, Waspinator began to form a
Matrix sword from the gathered fragments with the extractor as a
hilt, the Waspinator/Dinobot rivalry had developed into
something rather fierce, and the Archaicons made their active
presence known to the universe. The Archaicons took captive the
anarchic Sawblade, one of the fragment-bearing bots who
mentally-manipulated the two teams to cause chaos together, and
in a late December two-parter set on Fothai, Waspinator and
Mirage began a surprise fling and the existence of a potential
traitor was revealed.
As 2014 began, Sawblade was placed in the Archaicon inner
circle, in an attempt to teach him what it meant to be an
Archaicon; the Waspinator and Mirage relationship was gloriously
revealed to the others; and the Shadow made an unexpected guest
appearance as some of the team’s darkest secrets were brought to
the fore. The Vok had Scorpinax select a candidate for them to
make use of, choosing a vicious Archaicon called Hatchet, whilst
a new bot, the seething Toxiclaw, joined the ranks. Eventually,
with all of the fragments gathered, the Maximals find themselves
on a Quintesson ship, Iudicium. In something of a mid-series
climax, the playing board heavily changes here. Hatchet, now a
snarling monstrosity, appears on the ship, with the Archaicons
following, taking on more new members from the Quintesson’s
captives including Kickback and Rapax. Waspinator accuses
Snapjaw of being the traitor, leading him to leave in disgust.
Instead, the traitor is Cross-Shot – exhausted by Waspinator’s
unilateral focus on finding the fragments to the expense of
those in need, and convinced of the Archaicon’s mission
statement, she switches sides. Hatchet manages to destroy the
Dawn Katana, with the A.I. ejecting in a spherical black box and
Arcrise’s growing egg prematurely hatched, causing the
child-form, Illyiara-coloured bot to attack with full force. A
duel between Waspinator and Dinobot sees the latter lose both of
his swords and an eye, while the Maximals are forced to evacuate
under the pretence of the ship exploding, leaving the Archaicons
to mine it for information.
The Maximals crash down in their escape pod on a random planet,
which turns out to be Valoran, once at war with Cybertron. (At
one point, the fragment-hunt would have taken up all 52
episodes, with Valoran and many of the following elements in a
second season along with a returned Megatron and Dinobot
clones.) The Archaicons continue to be proactive, with
scope-eyed Dinobot acquiring a new, infinitely-mutable weapon,
the Omniconfigurator, and claiming a new world for the
Archaicons. Cross-Shot cuts her synth-hair (previously long
curled locks, drawing from her visual inspiration, Merida from
‘Brave’) and takes on a new beast mode. Waspinator and Arcrise
bond again (with him occasionally calling her Illyiara),
unsettling Mirage, while Scale, Paladin, Wildfire and Swingback
strengthen their relationships with one-another, all while
making their way across Valoran. Sawblade manipulates Airazor
into leading Lacerator into a trap, before killing her and
taking her place in the influential position of Dinobot’s right
hand. The ties between Cybertron and Valoran are uncovered –
that not one hero was born of Unicron, but two, Primus and
Protus, with Protus being the creator-god of the Valoranians.
Cross-Shot and Huntdown begin a relationship, while the
Predacons appear again, this time with Dinobot taking
Skysquawk’s life after the vulture-bot refuses to heed Dinobot’s
warnings. In one of the first stories planned, Scale, Swingback
and Arcrise take to gladiatorial combat to win possession of
wrist-worn Timaeus drives (of course taken from the 2011
Transformers: Fractures concept) and the Lokon blade. With the
items comes a prophecy – of three blades for two hands, which
Waspinator deduces to be in reference to Fibonacci spirals like
his. Making a deal with the Archaicons to have a
rather-remorseful Cross-Shot help them locate another spiral,
the Maximals head off via their Timaeus drives while the
Archaicons remain on Valoran.
Our heroes arrive on a world called Pioathon and find Andromeda,
a kleptomaniac fembot who was once guided to “the ultimate
treasure”, Valyssia. The rulers of the colony, Cepheus and
Cassiopeia, learn that Andromeda had also taken a strange chest
containing “Ignition keys”, and put her to death – the Maximals
rescue her, regain the keys and return to Valoran. The
Archaicons had uncovered a machine called the Valyssia engine,
which rewrites fate – Dinobot orders his Archaicons to kill the
citizens in the area, claiming that death at their hands is
better than being wiped out by use of the machine. Sickleclaw
continues to be convinced by Dinobot, while Cross-Shot and
Huntdown are decidedly against the slaughter. While Waspinator
insists that Dinobot has forgotten himself, the Archaicon
insists that he and Cross-Shot have both grown. He plans on
writing the Maximals and Predacons out of existence to save
reality – specifically by using the Eternal Heart, the
Valoranian version of the Matrix, to wipe them all out. With
Cepheus and Cassiopeia leading their own people across universes
to Valoran, and the revelation that the Ignition keys are needed
to use the Valyssia engine, the Maximals scatter across reality
via the Timaeus drives. The Archaicons and the Pioathon forces
unite to retrieve the Maximals and the keys, Huntdown leaves the
Archaicons, eventually dying from horrifying wounds inflicted by
Sawblade even as he returns Cross-Shot’s fragment to Waspinator.
The Vok unveil that Hatchet was their attempt at bringing the
Maximals and Archaicons together, scuppered by Cross-Shot’s
betrayal – they then destroy the Archaicons’ fortress and take
away his eyes having previously enhanced them. Finally bested
and with the Ignition keys taken, the Maximals reunite and
return to Valoran, bringing about an all-out battle between
heroes and villains. Waspinator passes around powers amongst the
Maximals by slashing them with the Matrix sword and swapping out
fragments. Soon enough, he and Dinobot wind up duelling
fiercely, with the Omniconfigurator capable of killing the
immortal Maximal – Cross-Shot dives in, taking the death-blow
and pushing Dinobot into hysterics. The Quintessons appear and
apprehend the Archaicons, with Sickleclaw finally recognising
Dinobot’s newfound twisted nature. Cross-Shot passes away as
Waspinator tends to her. The Maximals, now with the Dawn Katana
restored, take the Ignition keys, the Valyssia engine (reduced
in size and kept by Arcrise) and the now-completed One True
Matrix. Concurrent events in the side-series, which I shall get
to shortly, forces the Maximals to remain far from the conflict
against Necrocide.
Through much of the second half of 2014, the Fragments team
starred in a series of specials. Originally planned as just
three (August, October and December), this eventually became
five between July and November. Each special was loosely a
different genre. Transformers: Run, Run, Run sees the Maximals
embroiled in a chase across worlds in pursuit of an escaped
serial killer with deranged ambitions. Transformers: Boxes and
Dunes introduces the Paradise boxes as the team return to
Mirage’s former home, Ra – these boxes connect different worlds,
and as some of the Maximals pine after their homes, the boxes’
distributor, Ohwa, is confronted. Transformers: Cybertronian in
New York follows the suspiciously-returned Freeline and her
captor, Morphose, who wind up in 1930s New York; the Dawn Katana
crew end up there too, and are forced to track down Morphose,
while Freeline’s true nature as an Arkonian turned into a
perfect copy of the Maximal is uncovered. Transformers: The
Monsters Inside, written/“aired” on Halloween, sees the Maximals
quarantined and slowly suffering from a mysterious infection,
and some progress in the budding relationship between Wildfire
and Andromeda. Transformers: Until the Sun Sets is a more gentle
special, with the Maximals relaxing on a tropical world only to
be advised to “let go” before sunset – eventually, we learn that
Paladin still has a residual psychic imprint of Cross-Shot in
his mind (having had fragment-granted telepathy), and he talks
with her one last time before letting her go.
Boxes and Dunes and The Monsters Inside were two of the original
ideas – the third was Transformers: The Broken Ribbon of Time.
Two ideas existed with this title; the first was a story where
our Maximals wound up disbanding in spite of a message from
their future selves advising otherwise, only to end up forced to
reunite five years on. The second would have seen a character
called Tempust, a being who consumed time and who had managed to
access timeline a. Waspinator and Dinobot would ultimately give
their lives defeating Tempust.
Running alongside Fragments and the 2014 specials was
Transformers: S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E, which
continued to follow the older, familiar faces in their conflict
against Necrocide. The series unfolded in the form of Logs –
mini webisodes, each weekday, every three weeks, with split
focus across three core teams and the occasional diversion to
other players. Emberscales’ Strike team (Firecloud, Nightscream,
Zero, Gigatron, Sabretail and Iguanus) first venture to secure a
multiversal barrier, with Wingpulse joining them and God Hunters
preying upon them. Blizzard’s new Wreckers (Cynder, Ratbat,
Cloudraker, Vapour, Medusa – forced into taking part as an
expendable member, complete with explosives in her chest with an
Impale-inspired palm trigger in Blizzard’s possession – Ironfist
and Feral) initially attempt to assassinate Necrocide, which
only leads to Ratbat’s death; subsequently, Necrocide attacks
their ship, bringing it down onto a random world and hunting
them along with his forces. Cloudraker is captured while
Blizzard and Medusa meet with Paradox. Uproar’s Colonial
Recruitment Team (Razorbeak, Abydos, Streetwise, and former
Breaking Time characters Hummingstreak and Ripple) initially
sets out to gather the support of various Universe 1 colonies,
but their adventure brings them into contact with the
Annihilation Busters, four bots-for-hire sent on a mission by
Necrocide, leading them to cross paths with the Strike team at
the temple that houses the source of the multiversal barrier.
One of the Annihilation Busters, Straight-Aim, retrieves the
Covenant of Primus; Firecloud takes the source of the barrier
into herself; Emberscales kills Nova Supreme; and Blizzard,
Medusa and Paradox destroy a facility set to activate “Operation
Plateau”, intended to wipe out much of the Rebellion. The Home
team on Panthalassa – Constant, Sonar and Ouranos, soon joined
by the returning Tidal Wave and Howlback – occasionally contact
the other teams.
A few weeks later, as 2014 began, the Strike team head out to
rescue Cloudraker, who is secretly passing on information from
Necrocide all the while – primarily his desire for the Covenant.
The Wreckers try to find out why the villain wants the book and
to acquire it first, encountering a dangerous bot called
Shockblast and losing Feral in the process before finding their
way to Takeoff, who begins to help them track the book. The
Colonial Recruitment team continue on their mission, with
Skysquawk’s Predacons appearing to rescue the Annihilation
Busters – Straight-Aim remains with the heroes, while the other
three (Beachcomber, Skydive and Stampede) join the villain team
(later appearing in Fragments). The Strike team loses both
Cloudraker and Iguanus to Necrocide, and he locks Wingpulse in
her own worst fears much like in Rise’s finale. Though the
Strike team escape him, he soon manages to track them down
again, and explains that he was anticipating Cloudraker passing
his information on, allowing the heroes to do the legwork of
finding the Covenant before he takes it. He adds that he wants
the book so as to corrupt the Matrix and wipe out the
Cybertronian race. The Strike team’s ship is brought down, while
Emberscales manages to contact Waspinator and inform him to keep
the Matrix far from Necrocide and the conflict. All the while,
Hummingstreak encounters a damaged bot called Haywire during an
excursion, and the Wreckers finally catch up to the Colonial
Recruitment team, with Straight-Aim’s possession of the Covenant
coming to light. The Wreckers are then sent off to find the
Strike team. Shockwave and Haywire cross paths, and it becomes
apparent that she is immediately forgotten when out of sight.
The two band together.
While Necrocide hunts the Strike team as they journey from world
to world, the Wreckers try to locate them – Medusa finally
springs her trap, leading Blizzard off and slicing off her arm
before leaving her impaled, before telling the others that their
leader was attacked and killed. The Colonial Recruitment team
are captured and tortured for information on the Covenant, until
Straight-Aim finally reveals that he has the book. Zero and
Sabretail sacrifice themselves, the Wreckers continue to
mistrust Medusa, and Freeline manages to save the Colonial
Recruitment team though the Covenant is taken. Vapour requests
the Colonial Recruitment team try to find Blizzard, and they
eventually manage to recover her, avoiding traps left by Medusa
all the while. Medusa’s plan to abandon the other Wreckers to a
black hole is only scuppered by Takeoff’s own selfishness, with
the team working together to save themselves at the cost of his
life. The Strike team find that they have been herded to a world
with a physical connection to the Prime Vault, a dimension
within the Matrix. Emberscales and Firecloud catch the image of
a specific gene which scares them, before Necrocide catches up
to them even as they manage to awaken Wingpulse. Although the
Wreckers arrive on the scene, the villain retreats to study the
Covenant, having used the Prime Vault to locate the Matrix. All
of the teams return to Panthalassa, and a lengthier Christmas
Eve epilogue shows them preparing themselves for the inevitable
battle against Necrocide.
Before I move on to the final instalment, I’ll quickly cover
some earlier plans. At one point, when first version of The
Broken Ribbon of Time was still in existence, 2015 would have
had a year-long Transformers: Pantheon series, seeing the
Fragments team gathering up further team-members as part of a
Final Thirteen while the various
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E teams assist them.
This would essentially add an extra series before iterations of
the stories that actually entailed. The second version of The
Broken Ribbon of Time would have led to the Dawn Katana team
meeting a new leader, Sonicon (drawing homage from Shoutmon of
‘Digimon Xros Wars’), and gaining devices called Hope braces.
One story idea saw a larger Paradise box being opened, releasing
an entity called Paradise who would become a mentor to our core
heroes. They would then take on the ability to reformat into
forms reminiscent of the older Maximals, though Paradise would
eventually prove to be an antagonistic presence.
2014 – and the Matrix Saga as a whole – came to a conclusion in
the final week of the year, with Transformers: Extinction – A
Rise Event (the subtitle was added for the final version to
avoid any theoretical confusion with the live-action film
Transformers: Age of Extinction, released the same year). The
seven-part story begins with the Dawn Katana teleported back to
Panthalassa – Emberscales explains the situation to the crew and
the new Maximals meet the old guard. On a Quintesson ship called
Iustitia, a Quintesson called Edramylia helps the Archaicons
escape, and they wipe out their captors as an incensed Dinobot
states that they shall never be imprisoned or oppressed again.
Emberscales explains to the gathered heroes that Primus
engineered an extinction gene into every spark, as a contingency
should the Cybertronian race turn to chaos. In turn, Medusa
explains to the Maximals that, courtesy of a renewed psychic
connection with Necrocide through her scar after Blizzard
punched her, she is aware of Necrocide using a programme called
O-SCILL (Omniverse-Scale Cybertronian Intelligent Life Locater)
to pinpoint the locations of every Cybertronian. Blizzard leads
most of her Wreckers (minus Medusa), along with Uproar, on a
final suicide mission to destroy O-SCILL, managing to destroy
the planet it is situated on, while Ouranos is returned to
Occultus Porta. Snapjaw returns, reuniting with his former
team-mates, and joins Gigatron, Razorbeak, Abydos, Streetwise,
Freeline, Tidal Wave and Howlback as a new Strike team headed
onto Leviathan to try and kill Necrocide. Emberscales sends the
Dawn Katana team off on a mission to Fothai all the while, and
as the Archaicons take control of Iustitia, the Vok are
summoned, granting the bots new forms which circumvent the
extinction gene. The Ravager Predacons appear, having followed
Snapjaw’s signal, and begrudgingly join the effort against
Necrocide.
While the Dawn Katana lands on Fothai, confronted by hordes of
Necrocide’s Imperial troops – amidst the ensuing fight,
Waspinator and Mirage make their way to the Infinity Chamber,
only to find a single large Paradise box instead of the Quantum
Reset Button. When Andromeda suggests the box is like the
mythical Pandora’s box, Mirage opens it, unleashing a surge of
energy and revealing thirteen Hope braces inside. Sickleclaw
cuts her synth-hair and leaves the Archaicons with the
Omniconfigurator, feeling betrayed by Dinobot; the Strike team,
joined by the Predacons, make their way through Leviathan as
their numbers dwindle. As most of the Dawn Katana team don some
of the Hope braces, the Archaicons appear, having traced the
energy surge – Waspinator and Dinobot battle, and Sawblade
approaches Shockblast and Haywire, who were conveniently also on
Fothai, convincing them to join the Archaicons. Eventually, with
the Imperial bots defeated, the Maximals and Archaicons part
ways; all the while, Gigatron sends Freeline back to Panthalassa
while all of the other Strike team bots fall to Necrocide’s
ruthless power.
The Fragments team returns to Panthalassa, and Emberscales and
Waspinator catch one-another up on events while Prophecy
explains the legend of the Final Thirteen, who shall lead the
Cybertronian race in their dying days. Presumably, the Fragments
team are amongst these prophetic figures. Shockblast and Haywire
are upgraded by the Vok, and Necrocide begins building a new DNA
computer to use for his plan. As our heroes prepare for a final
strike against Necrocide, the various recruited colonies begin
to arrive in fleets. Almost all of our heroes board the Dawn
Katana and make their way to Leviathan, while Emberscales crowns
Waspinator the new Prime, passing on the Matrix – Waspinator
chooses the name Unitus Prime. Necrocide’s Prime powers are
immediately taken away, and as Emberscales and Unitus are
teleported to join the others, Firecloud and Wingpulse generate
a number of shells to potentially shield Cybertronians from
Necrocide’s extinction gene activation. Ironfist, having
converted Panthalassa into a gigantic fusion cannon, gives his
life blasting Leviathan in half. Medusa takes a random bot’s
shell, Arcrise generates a briefcase which she passes to
Freeline, and Necrocide activates the gene… almost every bot
instantly falls over, dead. Of our cast, only the Hope
brace-bearing Fragments team, Arcrise, Prophecy, Hummingstreak,
Ripple, Straight-Aim, Freeline, Medusa and the Archaicons remain
alive… though Emberscales lives long enough to cause the front
half of Leviathan to completely explode, seemingly killing
Necrocide. The bots on-board are scattered, and as ‘Aeon’ by
Anavae plays, Mirage winds up crash-landing down on an alien
world, heavily-damaged but alive.
Planning so far in advance meant that I could seed hints of
Fragments into Rise – Cross-Shot’s betrayal was hinted at, as
was the Duality myth of the Primus and Protus, and it was made
clear that Dinobot was unfamiliar with the Total Conflict prior
to the events of Downfall. When Downfall and the Matrix Saga
finally came around, it was truly a revelation. These stories
had so much more depth, focus, creativity and finesse to them.
Admittedly, there were still flaws; of course, this level of
writing was still new to me. Downfall, for one, may not have
served as a stand-alone story very well when trying to both
conclude many story threads and establish a new status quo. Many
of the Fragment-gifted powers went rather underused, and the use
of the Quintessons and the Vok were novel ideas that were
somewhat shoe-horned in. Even the finale to Fragments relied a
little too much on ideas that I had already planned, resulting
in the underused “three blades for two hands” concept.
But… what did work, worked so well. Waspinator once again
returned to the spotlight, finally taking on the leader mantle
much more successfully than before. While still stung by
self-doubt at times, and of course struggling to control the
ram-shackle team, he truly flourished as a responsible, driven,
heroic figure. By contrast, Dinobot’s path from well-meaning
revolutionary, down to a downright ruthless, warped figure, was
something handled with skill. In fact, the exact manner was
somewhat surprising even to me – many elements of Fragments
developed during the writing process, and both Lacerator (thrown
in when Toxiclaw wasn’t provided to me in time) and Sawblade
(added along with Toxiclaw later on to help change the Archaicon
dynamics somewhat) happened to become hugely influential on
Dinobot across the story. Buzzstreak’s short arc, leading to her
suicide, was meant to be something deeply affecting; a character
too fragile to be exposed to the harsh realities of the world,
and unable to find the comfort that she needed. Cross-Shot’s arc
saw her develop wonderfully as a character, her intense sense of
justice driving her to switch factions and eventually gain a
greater perspective on heroism and her place in the world. The
reintroduction of Arcrise put an interesting new spin on her
relationship with Waspinator – as the very first image that I
saw of Shinobu Oshino from ‘Monogatari’ was one of my later
additional inspirations for Illyiara (complete with the Kokoro
Watari inspiring the Lokon blade), it’s only fitting that not
only did her new, physically-immature form paid homage to
Shinobu, but that her relationship with Waspinator recalled
Shinobu’s with Koyomi Araragi. The episode ‘Overcast’
beautifully explored Prophecy’s psychological issues as she
endured an abnormally long period of mental clarity. The use of
an ‘Other V’ episode as the eleventh of every thirteen episodes,
using the same Vok-focal naming scheme as Beast Wars, was also a
fun concept which added an extra touch to the series. The new
characters in general provided such an engaging cast, with brand
new dynamics and degrees of development hitherto unseen in
Legacies/Rise – wonderful, fun characters, whose interactions
were given an extra lease on life with the continued presence of
quotes in the synopses. With a smaller over-all cast, I managed
to handle them all with greater attention, though some still got
less work (Sickleclaw fell to the way-side through the middle of
the series, and Toxiclaw’s potential remained untapped).
While S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E wasn’t as
planned out, many of the elements in it played out well. The
intertwining stories of the three teams made the series
energetic and captivating. Medusa’s character was given even
closer examination, with her telling Takeoff that her own life
is her priority, and that if someone is not of use to her or an
ally, they are her enemy. The viper-bot quickly grew to become
one of my favourite characters over the course of
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E, with everything from
her rivalry to Blizzard getting further focus to her
manipulative nature repeatedly coming to the fore. The specials
helped to explore the Fragments team more, while Extinction
essentially acted as the final part of a story begun with
Darkest Hour and shifted by Downfall. I do feel that Extinction
was somewhat messy, and in no small part served to establish the
next series, but its themes of fate and of fighting fate were
handled well… not to mention the grim image of some of our
familiar heroes keeling over dead, and entire fleets halting in
mid-battle. The near-extinction of the Cybertronian race is
something truly dire…
Toyline-wise, I mapped out the main Fragments line, with Deluxe
and Voyager size classes returning alongside new Ultimate Class
versions of Waspinator and Dinobot. The Cyberverse line expanded
out to a Legacies Collection, covering an unrealistic range of
characters from across Legacies as well as Fragments; the
Masterpiece figures likewise began to focus on the Legacy cast
in their early forms, adding a DX size to account for larger
characters. The imagined SDCC panel coverages also continued.
There’s plenty to say of Downfall, Fragments,
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E and the 2014 specials
(it shows in that I’m still typing this past midnight). The
evolution begun in 2010 with Transformers: Reconfiguration
finally reached its pinnacle, with stories that took on much
more emotionally and thematically than ever before. My writing,
while still not flawless, reached much farther, and achieved
much more. Fragments shall always remain the best single
Legacies/Rise series, one that will definitely remain the
standard which I hold any other works of this nature up to. And
that’s just the problem… after eighteen months, I was beginning
to getting to worn down. I had already decided that I would be
concluding Legacies/Rise in mid-2016, on its tenth anniversary –
hence the decision to wipe out much of the Cybertronian race –
but the final instalment would sadly not live up to expectation.
A.
#Post#: 778--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Transformers Legacies/Rise Megathread
By: Ashes Date: July 5, 2016, 6:33 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The Legacies/Rise Retrospective, Part 10 - Overambitious (Hope,
2015-2016)
To sum up Transformers: Hope – the single main series in the
Valyssia Saga and the final instalment of Legacies/Rise – in a
single word, it was messy. Much like with Transformers: Downfall
and Transformers: Fragments, elements of Hope began to form well
in advance, and were written into Fragments and Transformers:
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E. Unfortunately, unlike
with Fragments, Hope wasn’t worked out in advance. That proved
to be a vital flaw, something which highlighted how and why the
Matrix Saga had been so successful.
As mentioned last time, at one point 2015 would have been a
year-long series called Transformers: Pantheon, with
Transformers: Extinction concluding it and Hope being the title
for a year-long 2016 series. With the eventual decision to bring
Extinction to the end of 2014, Hope became a singular
eighteen-month concluding series, divided into five parts.
Certain elements, those already being worked into Fragments and
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E, were still to be used
in Hope. One of these was the existence of a Final Thirteen,
reflecting the original Thirteen Cybertronians established in
multiple Transformers universes. With a print version of the
Covenant of Primus being released in late 2013, identifying all
members of the Thirteen (or at least those of the Aligned
continuity) for the first time, I was inspired to balance this
out with a Final Thirteen. The Covenant became a major component
of S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E for this reason,
complete with its introduction at the end of 2013 tying in to my
receiving the print book as a Christmas present. The plan for
Pantheon was to have the Fragments cast, who would be revealed
to be members of this prophesised Final Thirteen, gathering the
remaining members. This idea wound up transferred into the new
Hope. The other element was a new antagonist I had devised – a
figure known as the Debt Collector, a manipulative and ruthless
character drawing inspiration from Kyubey of ‘Puella Magi Madoka
Magica’, Black Hanekawa of ‘Monogatari’ and Mystletainn Treesea
from the anime adaptation of ‘Dream Eater Merry’. The Debt
Collector would have her claws in all of the Final Thirteen, and
this was gently teased with Scale referring to his benefactor
and Andromeda mentioning a mysterious bot leading her to
Valyssia during Fragments.
But the bulk of planning for Hope failed to materialise. Indeed,
while I mapped out the other members of the Final Thirteen, it
took me until early January 2015 to even begin trying to work
out the episodes. The biggest issue was a particular ambition I
had – to present a story with multiple antagonists. In a world
where almost the entire Cybertronian race is dead, there would
no longer be inter-faction conflict. Instead, multiple enemies
would confront the surviving Cybertronians. I already had many
of these mapped out. Necrocide would, of course, survive
Emberscales’ attempts to kill him in Extinction, making use of
Medusa’s scar again. The Archaicons would continue to oppose the
rest of the Cybertronian race. The Quintessons would make a
return, and the Vok would continue to have influence. The Debt
Collector would appear continually, steadily manipulating things
to her own ends. Two other new enemy forces would manifest – the
Anti-Cybertronian League, or ACL, a number of assorted worlds
standing against the damage of the Total Conflict; and the
Paradise Four, strange bots materialised from the Paradise box
on Fothai and inspired by the Elite Four from ‘Kill la Kill’.
Lastly, returning to one of the old ideas for a second Fragments
season, Hope would see the introduction of an army of Megatron
clones – not a true return of the original so as to preserve his
death in Transformers: Synergy, these clones would instead
possess all of the original’s memories and personality. I’m not
entirely sure when I came up with this idea, but it may have
been during Fragments.
The Final Thirteen’s other members were devised even further in
advance of the series’ start. Alongside Waspinator (now Unitus
Prime), Scale, Paladin, Mirage, Wildfire, Swingback and
Andromeda, there would be six additions. Sickleclaw would be one
of these, with her departure from the Archaicons leading her to
find a place amongst our united heroes. A medic and a bruiser
would fill in those missing niches – these would be Noxa and
Ferros, respectively. Quickpaw was inspired by Frenda Seivelun
of ‘Toaru Majutsu no Index’, specifically in response to the
character’s gruesome and premature death, with some suggestions
from a friend resulting in Umbraven as an opposite for her,
somewhat taking inspiration from Ruri Gokou of ‘Ore no Imouto’.
The final member would be the one-billionth Megatron clone,
Parallax, who would turn away from the villainy of his fellows.
Partially as a method to allow for these characters to be
introduced, and partially to help utilise the various
antagonistic factions, I decided to scatter the Maximals at the
end of Extinction. Hope would then follow the divided team as
then begin to gather together again. Between all of these new
characters to introduce, and various individual plot threads to
establish and follow, the logistics of organising and planning
Hope proved too much. With little time to work out a new plan of
action (nor any real opportunity to with how Extinction played
out), I simply went ahead with what little I’d devised and
sought to let the series build on-the-fly.
The first thirteen-episode part was titled Foundations. Mirage
is found and patched up by Noxa, the only survivor on his colony
world; Medusa also found herself on this planet, and Noxa has
extrapolated some of her scar tissue to give Necrocide’s mind
somewhere to reside other than in Medusa’s head. Noxa is a
Predacon but has no interest in faction conflict now. Freeline
then appears, with Noxa placing a Hope Brace on his wrist and
Freeline teleporting him and Mirage away. Unitus Prime and
Arcrise investigate the ACL, encountering political figurehead
Giaseqen, while their military leader Talenra leads an assault
on the Archaicons. Scale, Wildfire and Andromeda are attacked by
the Paradise Four’s Shadows, before meeting both Ferros and the
Paradise Four – Tetsuprima, Wartiger, Firegrowl and Rattlesoar –
themselves, who insist on saving reality by taking over every
world. Paladin and Swingback find themselves on an alien island,
with Sickleclaw also there; the trio opt to band together, with
chemistry developing between Paladin and Sickleclaw.
Hummingstreak, Ripple and Straight-Aim, aboard the Dawn Katana,
wind up finding Medusa and Necrocide. A bottle episode
introduces Quickpaw, Umbraven and the Debt Collector, with the
first two getting to know one-another on a refugee ship, and the
Debt Collector bringing herself to their attention. Mirage, Noxa
and Freeline meet up with Unitus and Arcrise, who unveil their
huge cruiser, New Cybertron; Paladin, Swingback and Sickleclaw
finally make their way off world; the Dawn Katana comes under
attack; and Scale’s team cross paths with Quickpaw and Umbraven,
who join them when they discover mutual connections with the
Debt Collector. The Archaicons take a refugee ship captive, with
Sawblade beginning to show signs of discontent with Dinobot and
Claws and Laserbeak suddenly appearing to whisk away one of the
refugees, the yet-unnamed Parallax, while the ACL and
Quintessons forge an alliance.
The Vok lead the new Dawn Katana crew to a planet called Audel,
where they are drenched in Red Rain and rescued by a
mentally-stable Prophecy – she takes them to her facility,
explains that the rain is an ACL bio-weapon, and engineers some
of Necrocide’s tissue to use as a potential temporary cure for
them to use while they make their way to Earth for a full
resolution. Paladin, Swingback and Sickleclaw reach New
Cybertron, and Sickleclaw winds up donning a Hope Brace courtesy
of Freeline; all the while Dinobot had Sawblade lead a team of
Archaicons to investigate the actions of the new Prime. The
Paradise Four start to divide over their mission and their
apparent purpose, while Scale’s team try to bond – Umbraven
grows disconcerted when she learns that Quickpaw was a member of
a guns-for-hire group called DisRupt. The Dawn Katana crew wind
up being sent to both main teams’ locations at once, and help
Unitus’ team fight off the Archaicons and the ACL-Quintesson
alliance, while aiding Scale’s team against the Paradise Four
and their Shadows on a planet called Zefetraia, the Debt
Collector’s old home world whose citizens are now all dead.
During this, Ferros’ origin as a war criminal given a second
chance as a World Breaker, set out to destroy forfeited planets.
Part 2, Journeys, begins with the mysterious briefcase unlocking
itself – inside are a number of Legacy crystals, each reflecting
an older hero and, when placed into a Hope Brace, granting a
specific power. Paladin is bothered by this apparent reduction
of what the heroes (most especially Cross-Shot) stand for into
the form of power-ups, while the Archaicons make an attempt to
recruit some of the passengers of New Cybertron. Scale’s team
continue to get to know one another while the Quintessons,
displaced during the Foundations finale, come to blows with the
Paradise Four. Prophecy joins Claws, Laserbeak and Parallax on a
mission into the ACL citadel, where Claws confronts the founder,
Nosk’yra, demanding he remove certain information from the
league’s computers to prevent them interfering in upcoming
events. Dinobot likewise finds missing data in Iustitia, and
learns that Edramylia is in fact taking part in a secretive
experiment. Necrocide takes control of Hummingstreak,
Straight-Aim and the Dawn Katana all the while (taking advantage
of his tissue samples in the two bots), with Ripple and Medusa
struggling against him. They cross paths with Iustitia, and
Dinobot helps them transfer Ripple’s tissue sample into
Edramylia, killing the Quintesson and turning him into a
psionically-locked vessel for Necrocide’s mind. As the
Archaicons return to New Cybertron to canvas for new members,
Sickleclaw and Noxa stand up for Cybertronian unity and the Debt
Collector appears to dispatch the Archaicons. Scale’s team
divides to intercept the increasingly-aggressive battle between
the Paradise Four and the Quintessons, with Firegrowl gaining
information from the aliens’ ships, and Quickpaw and Umbraven
managing to shut down the Shadows from inside the Four’s
fortress, only to still be inside as the Four return.
Claws, Laserbeak and Parallax, hunted by a displaced Talenra,
make their way up to the Chandelier… where they happen to
encounter a young Prophecy, called Lightchild. Claws winds up
causing Lightchild to see her entire timeline, and the
newly-named Prophecy heads off. Talenra, having been teleported
away by Prophecy, finds himself in a rainy city and detects huge
numbers of faux-Cybertronians. As Iustitia heads to Earth, the
Dawn Katana team get to know Kickback and Rapax, while Sawblade
updates Dinobot on recent progress, and Dinobot and Medusa
discuss their positions and philosophies. The New Cybertron bots
begin an exchange with a mysterious summons to Earth, while the
Debt Collector is interrogated, revealing her ties to the Final
Thirteen, and Paladin and Sickleclaw discuss the faction issues.
Quickpaw and Umbraven make their escape from the Paradise
Fortress, while Firegrowl rebels against Tetsuprima, heading off
to Earth in search of answers with the other members of the
Paradise Four pursuing and Scale’s team following after. As our
various teams make their way to Earth, Unitus’ team (along with
the Debt Collector) is the first to arrive on the planet… only
to be confronted by numerous Megatron clones.
What resulted here was a cluttered two-parter that brought all
of the characters together; the tipping point that span Hope
into even more confused territory than before. (The following
plot points are listed in no particular order.) Talenra is
captured by the Megatrons, as are the Paradise Four, Freeline
and the Dawn Katana team, barring Necrocide, who manages to take
a Megatron’s body as his own and escape (though not before our
first meeting of the franchise’s two biggest villains). Dinobot
is as shocked as Unitus to find Megatron alive (in a sense), and
the two, along with Medusa, wind up being given the full
explanation of the clones’ creation. The original Megatron kept
a constantly-updated database of his memories and personalities,
which wound up in Quintesson hands. The aliens began cloning the
villain, with each clone containing the memories of “Megatron 0”
and connected by a shared memory network of their own. The Final
Thirteen all gather, including Parallax, who is revealed to be
the billionth Megatron clone. At the height of the drama, with
the Thirteen and the Archaicons aiming to escape, the ACL
appear.
It was at this point, after 26 episodes and with three more
parts to go, that I realised the mess that I had created. While
the Quintessons were taken out of the picture, I still had
numerous individual threats around. While I had concepts for the
grand finale, and certain elements planned for the journey
there, I no longer felt that I could guide things along
effectively. To that end, I made a decision that itself brought
on mixed results. I had been planning on introducing an
alternate future, a timeline c, where both Buzzstreak and
Cross-Shot were alive, leaders of the Maximals and Archaicons. I
decided to heavily re-appropriate this – now, timeline c would
simply be another timeline where Buzzstreak lived, and it would
become the stage for the final two parts of Hope after Part 3
ends with a massacre of the surviving Cybertronians. High stakes
followed by a new status quo.
Part 3, Challenges, utilised a new gimmick – each pre-titles
scene was a flashback to one of the Final Thirteen being
confronted by the Debt Collector for the first time. The main
story picked up a week or so after Part 2’s final cliffhanger,
leaving it essentially unresolved. Unitus Prime sends out a team
– Scale, Paladin, Sickleclaw, Noxa, Quickpaw and Umbraven – to
assassinate Giaseqen, but Umbraven’s insistence in not being
involved leads to her becoming the freed Talenra’s target.
Sawblade recruits Shockblast to help him dethrone Dinobot now
that the leader is beginning to suspect and resist him, having
already more-or-less gained Haywire’s support. Mirage leads
Wildfire, Swingback, Andromeda, Ferros, Parallax and Prophecy to
explore the abandoned Paradise Fortress, only for multiple
Megatrons to appear and for Wildfire to discover information on
both Arcrise and the Debt Collector pertaining to the existence
of the Paradise boxes. The Debt Collector then has the entire
Fortress vanish from existence. The Megatrons’ captives get to
know one another, with Freeline’s true nature coming out and
Medusa having Necrocide’s tissue removed from her facial scar.
Medusa almost escapes on her own, before begrudgingly returning
to the others to offer them a chance to join her. Necrocide
returns to the island on Trayka, restoring Galvatron’s mind into
her ruined body and sending her off to Earth as his new servant.
As Dinobot, Airazor, Toxiclaw and Haywire join the fray at the
ACL citadel, Umbraven winds up teleporting to her allies to
escape Talenra. They come close to reaching Giaseqen, only to be
shunted back to New Cybertron (though Quickpaw’s footsteps
spread tiny explosives, which she remotely triggers). Haywire
attempts to kill Dinobot on Sawblade’s orders, but he bests her
and she reveals Sawblade’s intentions. Mirage’s team are
diverted off to Prophecy’s temporary base on the planet Fixoma,
while the Debt Collector visits her “sisters and brothers” on
Zefetraia, manipulating their dust remnants. Both Prophecy and
the Debt Collector locate one another, surprised by one
another’s existence and locations. Mirage’s team then head off
to reach the Paradise Four before the Debt Collector.
The Megatrons’ captives begin their escape, while Galvatron
appears, eventually stealing a clone “heart” to use as a
makeshift spark and break herself free of Necrocide’s control.
On New Cybertron, it becomes apparent that the team sent into
the ACL citadel have brought a dangerous infection back with
them, the symptoms of which mirror the death touch which Noxa
once had. All but our core team are quickly wiped out. Claws and
Laserbeak appear in the Megatrons’ facility, while the Debt
Collector reveals that she created the Paradise Four and that
they have now fulfilled their purpose, before making them vanish
from existence. Claws is killed, and Prophecy and the Debt
Collector briefly reunite for the first time in years, before
all of the Maximals manage to escape. Unitus’ team leave New
Cybertron and its dead passengers, taking a smaller ship called
the Trailblazer. Sawblade and Shockblast make their strike, with
Shockblast attempting to kill the “traitor” Haywire, and
Sawblade fighting against Dinobot. The Archaicon leader learns
the degree to which he’s been manipulated, but shows that he has
prepared for Sawblade’s attack – with the others evacuated,
Haywire teleported away and Sawblade and Shockblast trapped
aboard Iustitia, Dinobot has the ship explode, killing the
co-conspirators. Dinobot then disbands the faction aboard their
escape ship. Mirage’s team land on a small world called Volshe
following a request to meet from the Debt Collector, but instead
wind up fighting multiple Megatrons (including a Mirage vs.
Megatron fight on a moving train which I came up with during the
Pantheon idea).
As our three hero teams unite on a planet called Hedrovex,
attempting to bring all of the surviving Cybertronians together,
the Debt Collector reveals her control over Arcrise’s powers
before trapping Unitus and Arcrise in a Matrix cage – something
created to imprison Primes during the Total Conflict. As
Cybertronians gather, Mirage takes command, leading them on a
final strike against the ACL to try and defeat their enemy
before the enemy wipes them out. The ACL begin plotting all the
while; Dinobot comes to a Temple of Solitude and encounters
Galvatron; and as the battle between the Cybertronians and ACL
begins, strange flower-like honey traps appear all over reality
wherever there are Cybertronians, drawing them in and killing
them on-contact. Galvatron manages to keep Dinobot from touching
a honey trap, but the Archaicons elsewhere aren’t so lucky. The
Thirteen gradually get killed off with ACL weaponry; Dinobot and
Galvatron arrive, with him killing Talenra to save Sickleclaw,
only for her to state that he hasn’t changed before being
killed. Freeline takes Medusa aside aboard the Dawn Katana, and
has her leave with secret information from Laserbeak, before the
ship crashes into the citadel, destroying it. In the chaos, the
Debt Collector uses an ACL gauntlet to finish off Mirage. Unitus
and Arcrise are freed from the Matrix cage, and they join
Dinobot and Galvatron (harsh words are shared amongst the
mechs). While Medusa is sent off by the Vok, realising that they
had set her on this path since Audel. The Debt Collector
approaches Unitus all the while, explaining the existence of
another timeline – one bound to timeline b, two sides of the
same coin courtesy of the Debt Collector’s appearance to
Buzzstreak before she decided to take her life. Timeline c is
the version where she chose not to, and is a second chance for
Unitus if he makes use of the Debt Collector’s Quantum Stopwatch
to swap timelines. Though the remaining bots are cautious, they
opt to head into timeline c. Dinobot gives Galvatron the
recovered Omniconfigurator, telling her to kill Lacerator and
Sawblade early in timeline c, while Necrocide prepares to use
their remaining connection to follow her into the new timeline.
Unitus, Arcrise and Dinobot switch timelines together.
Timeline c is the new stage for Part 4, Revisions. An opening
episode shows us how events played out after Buzzstreak chose to
live – an alternate take on the Maximals and Archaicons’ arrival
on Iudicium, with Tidal Wave and Howlback also still present and
Cross-Shot clearly not swayed towards the Archaicons. Galvatron
arrives here, killing Lacerator and Sawblade; while timeline b
Necrocide jumps into the head of his timeline c self. The two
quickly act on the timeline b knowledge, intercepting the
Fragments team as they return to Panthalassa and taking
Waspinator’s body, transforming into a new form of false Prime
with the sacrifice of timeline c Necrocide’s mind (and taking on
the name Terminus Prime in tongue-in-cheek fashion). Cross-Shot,
Tidal Wave, Howlback and Snapjaw all fall, while the others
manage to escape, distraught at their losses. Necrocide begins
wiping out the Cybertronian race with his new powers. We then
jump to the present, as Unitus, Arcrise and Dinobot appear on
Fothai. Dinobot goes off on his own, while Unitus and Arcrise
join the Fragments team as they arrive in the hopes of pressing
the Quantum Reset Button. With all but Buzzstreak suspicious of
the new arrivals, and with a new batch of Hope Braces recovered,
the team reluctantly head off to gather the rest of the Final
Thirteen on Unitus’ suggestion. While Unitus comes to repeated
blows with Mirage, he quickly grows close to Buzzstreak,
savouring his second chance.
The team manage to recover Andromeda (acquiring Timaeus drives
on Valoran), but it was around here that plans began to change
again. While I had intended on bringing the Final Thirteen back
together here, I realised how much of a mistake it had been to
try and handle upwards of thirteen heroes at once. Instead, I
began to complicate the quest to gather up the Thirteen, with
Necrocide stealing away a terrified Noxa. Buzzstreak learns
about her timeline b fate all the while. All the while, Dinobot
tries to locate the timeline c Archaicons, instead winding up on
Earth where his timeline c self headed after Galvatron explained
timeline b to him. With the Megatrons having experimented on and
killed his alternate version, our Dinobot winds up finding
timeline c Sickleclaw, who looks up to him in a manner that he
can no longer understand. The Dawn Katana then arrives, hoping
to recover Parallax, and while Sickleclaw opts to remain with
Dinobot rather than join the Maximals, Dinobot himself scolds
the alternate heroes for mistreating Unitus. The Maximals then
try to find Ferros, to no avail, and head off to find the
On’to’Ron Chronicles instead after Prophecy brings them up. The
Debt Collector confronts Necrocide all the while, taunting him
with her power and plans, before Noxa is recovered by
Hummingstreak, Ripple, Straight-Aim, Freeline, Ferros, Quickpaw,
Umbraven and Parallax in the Epsilon-Zero. The Archaicons
finally recover Dinobot and Sickleclaw from Earth, now using a
Dawn Katana-like ship called the Renegade Wish complete with the
Omniconfigurator shielding it from Necrocide. Galvatron’s
Archaicons are a force for vigilante justice, with a strict
regimen. Dinobot is uneasy with her leadership, but knows to
continue on with Sickleclaw rather than remain with the faction.
The Dawn Katana team manage to locate the On’to’Ron Chronicles,
while Noxa is introduced to his rescuers and their “leader”, a
being called Hex who passes them information via a special
computer system. They then wind up at the Fixoma base, while
Unitus uses Cynder’s Legacy crystal to translate the On’to’Ron
Chronicles… and finds no reference to the Final Thirteen. The
ship notes the presence of an extra entity who seems to keep
passing in and out of existence… and this turns out to be
Medusa, with a remarkably different form. At the end of Part 3,
she wound up journeying back into timeline a – and, as we
witness, has now retroactively been involved in everything from
the early moments of Transformers: Legacy. Having slowly grown
to befriend her new teammates and become less sinister and
self-serving, and is indeed the Hex that is guiding the
Epsilon-Zero team (having used the name Hex in later years when
her earlier self appeared). The Dawn Katana lands on Fixoma, and
the two teams unite, while Necrocide appears on Valoran to take
advantage of the Valyssia engine. Dinobot and Sickleclaw happen
to be on the planet too, and Dinobot begins fighting Necrocide
while Medusa explains that the Final Thirteen seems to be purely
a concept created by the Debt Collector. Instead, there are
eight final arbiters – Unitus Prime, Buzzstreak, Scale, Paladin,
Mirage, Wildfire, Swingback and Andromeda. She adds that the
other members of the Thirteen may still be of some importance,
before the major bots head across to Valoran to stop Necrocide.
Sickleclaw is harmed during the fight, though Medusa manages to
save her, and Unitus ultimately defeats Necrocide and retrieves
the timeline c Matrix from him. The villain is taken prisoner,
while Dinobot and Sickleclaw agree that he is better off finding
redemption on his own. Prophecy soon realises that the eight
bots are specifically the keys to fate, meant to utilise the
Valyssia engine without the Ignition keys. However, they must
first unlock themselves. Buzzstreak reveals her crush on Unitus,
but adds that she is now moving on.
Which brings us to Part 5, Victories. We pick up a few months
later, with our heroes scattered, fulfilling multiple tasks. The
first three episodes each utilise the same “Other V” naming
structure as the various Vok-related episodes, though there are
only minimal Vok connections here. Buzzstreak, Quickpaw and
Umbraven learn more about unlocking – self-discovery and
understanding – while Medusa manages to brutally kill the Debt
Collector, only to find that it has no consequence when the
time-manipulating villain reappears and kills timeline c Medusa.
The imprisoned Necrocide manages to make his escape from Fixoma,
killing Noxa and Ferros in the process (leaving Scale, Swingback
and Freeline alive), and Unitus Prime with his team of Prophecy,
Arcrise, Hummingstreak, Ripple and Straight-Aim, gather up
almost all of the remaining Cybertronians in the universe,
gathering them in a city generated by Arcrise beyond a doorway
in their ship.. Mirage leads Paladin, Wildfire, Andromeda,
Sickleclaw and Parallax to check on the Megatrons on Earth. As
Dinobot meditates in an alien forest, he is greeted by old
frenemy Rattrap – merely an apparition, the deceased Maximal
talks with Dinobot, and eventually leads him to a temple with a
pool of silvery liquid. Touching the pool, Dinobot briefly finds
himself awakening elsewhere with Nosk’yra leaning over him – the
alien tells him to get the Omniconfigurator, gather Unitus and
Arcrise, and press the Quantum Stopwatch, to save reality.
Regaining himself, Dinobot then takes a new sword from the
temple and sets off. Most of our heroes reunite, save Medusa who
is chained up and abandoned by the Debt Collector on a random
planet. Arcrise rushes into the city before losing control over
it, her powers heavily limited, while Prophecy chronoskims over
to Medusa, rescuing her. Dinobot manages to find the Archaicons,
but Necrocide has reached them too – in the ensuing battle for
the Omniconfigurator between Galvatron and Necrocide, the
Valoranian manages to take the weapon as his new body, killing
Galvatron and slinking off. The Debt Collector tells an unheard
truth to Megatron 1 on Earth, while Arcrise fails to hold the
city together, losing it and the bots inside and returning to
the ship. With the remaining bots preparing to unite with the
Archaicons, the Debt Collector appears, primed to pull strings…
only for both Dinobot (with the Archaicons) and Prophecy and
Medusa to intercept. Prophecy whisks Unitus, Arcrise and Dinobot
down to the planet below, where Necrocide is attacking some of
the other Maximals – they grab a hold of him and press the
Quantum Stopwatch.
The simple reason for this was that I had grown weary of having
the story conclude in a new timeline, where the familiar
characters were still “new” and not the ones we really knew. To
that end, I orchestrated a way to return to timeline b. The trio
awaken on a dead Cybertron in another universe, and steadily
learn the truth from Nosk’yra and the timeline b’s versions of
the Maximal Medusa. Timeline c was not a true timeline, but a
captured possible future, a virtual world engineered by the Debt
Collector. It’s a setting entirely under her control. The
Megatrons, with the Cybertronian race gone, have begun spreading
out across reality, attempting to convert everyone into a
Megatron. Nosk’yra himself is not an enemy of the Cybertronians,
but an emissary of the Vok – he founded the ACL to sabotage the
efforts of people who really did hate Cybertronians, and in
fact, every ACL victim is not dead but simply disconnected from
their spark. Unitus uses his Matrix and the Omniconfigurator to
awaken them all. The happy reunions are short-lived, however, as
thousands of Megatrons appear. Sickleclaw utilises the
Omniconfigurator, duplicating it for every Cybertronian to use,
before Arcrise manages to briefly overthrow the Debt Collector’s
control over her, accessing her fullest powers and destroying
the attacking Megatrons before regressing back down.
Parallax talks Toxiclaw around from her hatred of the
non-Archaicon bots (a character element which had gone unused
ever since her introduction), and Quickpaw is finally reunited
with her younger “sister”, Dash, who was saved by a version of
Bumblebee. Nosk’yra explains that they shall head to their
destination, Valyssia, via a facility called The Heavens-Way,
though Unitus intends on dealing with the Megatrons too. The
Debt Collector appears, and explains that the Zefetraian
Cybertronians managed to achieve limitless power, but wound up
dying because of it (save her and Prophecy, who had sealed away
their ability to create new life). All of her attempts to
resurrect her people have failed, as they are fated to die. Her
timeline c self manages to convince Buzzstreak to use the
Quantum Stopwatch all the while, leading her to timeline b and
The Heavens-Way. While Necrocide, back in his timeline b body,
is picked up by passing Megatrons, the Cybertronians reach The
Heavens-Way – the Debt Collector waits with Buzzstreak, who
learns that her timeline is virtual. Our heroes activate the
station’s massive portal but find that it generates a pool of
chaotic energies (most likely due to the gauze-field around
Valyssia), while the Debt Collector begins placing the Legacy
crystals into machinery deep inside The Heavens-Way and the
Megatrons and Necrocide arrive. Chaotic fights begin, both on
the station and in the air – Medusa heads inside the station,
where the Debt Collector heavily beats her and reveals that use
of the Legacy crystals steadily erases the beings that they
represent from history.
Eventually, as Unitus and Dinobot fight Megatron 1 and
Necrocide, the two villains wind up fusing into one monstrosity,
which Dinobot sacrifices himself to destroy in the portal’s
chaotic energies after saying farewell to his old friend. The
Debt Collector then physically manipulates the keys via their
debts to her, bringing them to the Valyssia engine (stolen away
from Arcrise) and explaining that she shall have them rewrite
her people’s fates so that they may live. They shall then take
the places of our own heroes, being revered as god-heroes.
Medusa, having said goodbye to Unitus, disrupts the machinery
draining the Legacy crystals, finally giving her life for a
greater purpose and erasing her own retroactive existence in the
process. Sensing this, the Debt Collector pauses, giving
Prophecy enough time to hug her and seal all of her powers. This
in turn allows Arcrise to access her fullest powers, and she
erases every remaining Megatron and stabilises the portal. As
the Cybertronians head through to Valyssia, Unitus and Arcrise
share a farewell and she reduces into ashes once again, leaving
another egg. Nosk’yra explains that the Zefetraian bots were
part of a Vok experiment, hence their attempts to prevent the
pseudo-gods’ permanent return. As Unitus welcomes the surviving
Cybertronians to Valyssia, he gets the sense that he has
forgotten someone. On The Heavens-Way, he finds Medusa, now no
longer having entered timeline a, still the bot we once knew.
She reluctantly joins Unitus in heading to their new home on
Valyssia.
Before I summarise this, there is one additional thing to
mention – a 10th anniversary special. I knew that I wanted to do
a celebratory special, set during Legacy (though I also knew it
would be 2007 Legacy, rather than 2006). I was unsure of a plot,
until my grandfather passed away. Remembering how he had told me
as a child that, when he died, he would go to a “Grandpa
Planet”, I decided to dedicate the special to him. Set between
the first and second halves of Legacy season 5, Transformers:
Legacy – The Journey to Find You sees the Legacy-Hunter crew on
a relaxation moon, only to encounter a lost alien child called
Metri, looking for his grandfather. The grandfather has
supposedly gone far away; Waspinator insists that they help the
child, and as they travel around, they find that they are being
hunted by Vaaroids. It soon becomes apparent that Metri’s
grandfather has died, and that this would inspire him to become
a great galactic hero just like his grandparent – the Vaaroids
have been sent from the future by a criminal called N’Tez, who
the Maximals wind up defeating. Waspinator explains to Metri
that his grandfather is gone before he’s returned home, and in a
final few moments, we get a scene that adds Medusa, talking to
Waspinator about the child (this scene exists in a way that it
can be cut and leave the story purely as it would be without
Medusa – there would of course be a version where she is present
throughout the whole thing). It’s heartfelt and it reminds me of
the strengths and weaknesses of those older characters and
stories (certainly, I still can’t care for Legacies’ Silverbolt
and Blackarachnia, despite their great official appearances).
Hope was a victim of ambition and failures. The Thirteen was a
flawed idea, and it took me far too long to realise that. Having
so many antagonists was also stupid in terms of creating a
cohesive story. If I had started without those intentions, I
could potentially have made a tighter series even without fully
planning it in advance. So many characters went unfulfilled or
served no real purpose. Galvatron’s return was meant to place
her as a wildcard, a powerful female villain, and later in
timeline c, an attempt at capturing those old Transformers: Dark
plans with her leading a team. Instead, she only appeared a
handful of times, and added very little besides another
philosophical opponent for Dinobot. Parallax provided little
more than comic relief, with even his nature as a good Megatron
clone never fully explored. The best thing he ever did was give
Toxiclaw a pep talk, in the third-last episode. Noxa and Ferros
likewise went underutilised, with their niches and backstories
providing potential that their personalities (and places amongst
a large cast) couldn’t support. The Paradise Four played well
into the theme of fate and purpose, but were essentially filler.
On the plus side, while Quickpaw and Umbraven again didn’t get
to add much to the show, they were fun additions – from their
wonderful opening episode, their unique personalities and
interesting dynamic lit up the episodes that they appeared in.
The timeline flip-flopping prevented that from getting used much
later on, sadly, but Quickpaw especially was a shining addition
that makes the whole Final Thirteen idea a little more worth
having brought in. Truthfully, the timeline c thing meant that
even our existing heroes from Fragments got little real
development or focus later on. By the finale, we were squarely
focused on Unitus and his relationships.
Various concepts introduced also panned out poorly. The Legacy
crystals went heavily underused, and I had to say that Unitus
and Arcrise already suspected Debt Collector involvement in them
as a reason that they were consciously avoiding their use. The
idea of them tying into the actual bots they represented was an
addition, and not something originally planned – they simply
followed on from the older idea (where Paradise became a mentor
to the team), and from my growing interest in the gimmick-heavy
Toei tokusatsu series. The Vok were supposedly operating to save
reality… but I forgot about that and ultimately shoehorned in a
connection to Zefetraia at the end. And while the episode title
“Other Versions” was well-handled, the later “Other V” episodes
only used the title as a way to tie the three loosely-connected
episodes together. Medusa specifically mentions the Valyssia
engine being used to pave the way to Valyssia at the end of Part
4, but instead it’s only used by the Debt Collector in an
attempt to restore her people. Even the whole “keys to fate”
concept was worked in hastily as a way to make the Fragments
team special, and it purely served to invalidate the use of the
Ignition keys. Plus the Debt Collector having to manipulate them
physically in the end…
But, of course, there were still diamonds in the rough that was
Hope. For one, the Debt Collector was a fantastic villain.
Enigmatic, manipulative, intelligent, ruthless, the perfect
character to both enjoy and despise. Her plans weren’t evil,
simply cruel and selfish – her ultimate defeat was to suffer
failure, rather than death, and it deeply affected her. Her
devious control and the constant uncertainty of being able to
trust anything that she says establishes her as a phenomenal foe
– it’s no wonder I took what was meant to be her true, gruesome
death, and subverted it as something she escaped simply via
control over time. Even the gradual drip-feed of information
regarding her and her plan was well-handled – her involvement
with the Final Thirteen, her connection to the Paradise Four,
her past, and eventually her plans outright. That it took until
the end of the series to fully unveil her intentions may not be
the best move, but it certainly displayed how heavily woven her
nature was.
Character growth was also handled well for those who received
it. While Unitus Prime was perhaps the main character,
especially later on, he was at the concluding end of ten years
of gradual growth. Dinobot, on the other hand, fulfilled the
second half of his character arc starting from Downfall –
beginning the series as a dangerous, ruthless villain, quickly
struck by heavy remorse once Lacerator and Sawblade’s
manipulations came to light, and then working to redeem himself,
leading to his sacrifice. His brief abandonment of swords
reflected his loss of identity and his disgust with himself,
leading to him finally taking up arms again in Part 5. His
relationship with Unitus can be seen as a yardstick for his
development, going from enemies in Part 2, to bitter
former-friends at the end of Part 3, with their bond steadily
returning with each subsequent reunion. Partnering him with a
more innocent Sickleclaw was also a stroke of genius (most
especially the episode where I, wholly unintentionally, paired
Unitus and Buzzstreak with Dinobot and Sickleclaw – the two
world-worn heroes with their once-deceased young charges). Her
faith in him throughout Part 4 helped to bring him back to his
former glory. Sickleclaw’s timeline b development was also
worthy of note. While she was previously vaguely inspired by
Asuka Langley Soryu of ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’, at least
appearance-wise, her shorter hair and glove-form
Omniconfigurator took from Ryuuko Matoi of ‘Kill la Kill’. While
her budding relationship with Paladin was fun and sweet, she
also took quite devotedly to building inter-faction relations
amongst the survivors. With her backstory of not being at home
with the Maximals or the Predacons – according to her, she
sought individuality – it was only appropriate that she would
become such a figurehead amongst the Cybertronians. While this
was again clipped by the inception of timeline c, she was given
spotlight in the grand finale, and time with Dinobot to resolve
their relationship issues.
Lastly, Medusa… after the focus she received in
S∙T∙R∙I∙K∙E, it is unsurprising
that she would continue to hold the limelight in Hope (not to
mention she had quickly become one of my favourite characters).
Gradually growing to feel more at home amongst the heroes while
also dealing with the presence of both of her former masters,
Medusa began to reflect on her own place in the world. Having
been both a villain and something of an anti-hero just within
the Rise part of the franchise, she was now becoming more and
more of a heroic figure. In stepping into timeline a and writing
herself into the entire history of the franchise, Medusa wound
up a completely changed character – again, in gradual steps, as
covered in a single episode that showed highlights of this new
history, especially her developing relationship with Waspinator.
From a bumbling eager-to-please bot and a venomous
former-villain, to two wise, weary, veteran heroes, their growth
wonderfully brought them together. Medusa’s subsequent sacrifice
at the series’ end really reflected how far she had come, giving
up this new heroic life completely to save her friends and
protect the past. The scene with the more familiar Predacon
Medusa at the end was a last-minute addition, a scene showing
that, even as she was just before entering timeline a, she was
someone worth giving a second chance to – and someone who,
ultimately, sought one.
Something nice that I added into Hope was the use of Pavane in
F-sharp minor, Op. 50 by Gabriel Fauré. Familiar with it via its
sampling in the S Club 7 song “Natural”, I wound up discovering
the original and deciding to use it as a bit of a motif.
Initially intending on using it like “Make Your Own Kind of
Music” in the opening moments of season 2 of “Lost”, with
Prophecy playing the music while operating in her Fixoma base,
it soon became a tune that she would hum often throughout the
series. A gorgeous choral version became the musical backdrop to
the climactic battle on The Heavens-Way, setting a dramatic yet
elegant tone.
The toyline ideas once again took a dip. While I came up with
some ideas, mainly for the continuing faux-SDCC panel summaries,
I didn’t put in effort to fully map out a line. The Deluxe and
Voyager classes continued, along with Leader Class figures for
the likes of Ferros, Wartiger and Shockblast. The Masterpiece
figures gained a third size, Max, for the largest characters.
So, then, the final series turned out to be a complicated one.
Overwrought with ideas, many of which stifled creativity in the
long run, it provided a mixed ending to ten years of
storytelling. Perhaps it was only with the hindsight of the
Matrix Saga’s successes that I could really view Hope as a
disappointment; certainly, it pales in comparison to the issues
of mid-Legacies and is decidedly stronger than Infinity. For all
of its missteps, it provided strong points and great additions,
both character- and story-wise, to the franchise. I do wonder
how things might have gone – how keeping Necrocide as a
jar-stored tissue sample would have been better than shoving him
in as another huge threat, or how briefly giving the Debt
Collector her victory would have provided a much more dramatic
finale with more ties to the franchise’s earlier days.
Certainly, if I could do Hope over, I would focus it much more
tightly on the Fragments cast, those plucky heroes who won my
heart so decidedly. Building a personal battle against the Debt
Collector would have been so much more rewarding. And maybe I’ll
return and create an alternate version of these final stories
sometime? Or even simply create new stories – the opportunity is
there, after all, with the story concluding quite openly. But
then, there’s a reason that a random Bumblebee appeared in the
finale… a tease for the future, the brand new We Are
Transformers that I have had such fun preparing…
And that, perhaps, is the truest legacy of Legacies and Rise.
For ten years, I spent so much creative effort on building
hundreds of characters, dozens of concepts, and so many stories.
Not all of them were great – some of them were poor – but all of
them matter to me. And along the way, I’ve grown as a writer,
and learnt so many skills. Even if I never do return to this
franchise – be it an alternate take, a new story, or even
homages in other works – it will always have a place in my heart
and in its history. It’s now 12:30am, and I’m proud to say that
Transformers Legacies and Transformers Rise has been a part of
my life.
A.
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