Reimagining Quintessons

[lastmaximal]

Be interesting if Quintessa was, Quintus' first creation, and who the planet was named for.

(Do we see her actually creating life at any point in TLK?)

One thing I'd like to see more done with is the Emberstone. It might be interesting to explore the interactions between, and boundaries for, these Macguffins. It creates life; does it create Sparks? (I assume as much given Earthspark.) Did it interact with the Well of All Sparks? Can there be roles in a narrative need for both it and the Allspark (which already overlaps a bit with the Matrix) or is that too many doing the same thing?

 

[Dekafox]

The solution there might be to reimagine the Allspark a bit - what if the Allspark was the combination of ALL the 13's macguffins? Each of them only has a portion of its power, and it is only complete when all 13 are brought together - it even could have been separated for safekeeping. You could get a pretty good BW Neo style season/series out of chasing down the parts to reassemble it to save Cybertron or something.

 

[Sabrblade]

Didn't an answer from Hasbro say that there was a full Thirteen in the Bayverse, which the Seven Primes were half of and the other six just didn't have Prime in their name (or die in the same place)?

In hindsight, that felt more like a band-aid kind of answer since it was something that Hasbro never actually followed up on. The little teaser at the end of the answer ("Our future plans include telling to story of this epoch soon.") never actually came about for the Movieverse version of the Primes, with it now being evident that what this was alluding to was the story of the Aligned Thirteen, which Hasbro tried to make be its own thing and fully ignored what ROTF and the other movies were doing (and didn't even stick to that "only seven named 'Prime' in the Thirteen" answer at all).

And technically the Bayverse is also part of the multiverse that had the multiversal singularity version of the Thirteen

Which was yet another thing Hasbro was trying to get away from when promoting their Aligned stuff, as seen in other answers given only a year after the aforementioned one about the Thirteen.

and Quintus Prime wasn't on the full list for that version that we got from AVP.

The AVP answer about the multiversal Thirteen was also written by individuals who had nothing to do with the Hasbro Q&A sessions that original made that "only seven named 'Prime' in the Thirteen" claim.

---

except for the one continuity where they actually did do that.

In which Quintus wasn't a thing yet, either.

I get the feeling they didn't want too many evil dudes in the 13 after Liege Maximo and (ugh) Megatronus.

The biggest irony of this being that the Covenant book that finally laid out all of the Thirteen chose to actually rewrite Megatronus to make him not evil, but instead the misunderstood victim of Liege Maximo's machinations. Rather than Judas, he's now Othello.

...And then RID 2015 would go and pull a 180 on that by just making him evil again. Okay, whatever.

the title "Prime of Life" is so specific to Quintus Prime's whole deal I can't help but think she's either the Bayverse version of Quintus or one of Quintus' creations masquerading as him.

Or, here's a thought. What if she's actually not related to the Cybertronians at all, but a completely separate alien creature simply pretending to be a Prime for her own selfish ambition?

Like, maybe Unicron had once destroyed her home planet in the far ancient past, and now, to get her revenge on him, she impersonates a Prime in order to get the Cybertronians to kill Unicron for her, not caring who she has to manipulate along the way?

---

(Do we see her actually creating life at any point in TLK?)

Nope. Not at all.

 

[lastmaximal]

I do like the angle of a rogue Quintus creation trying like hell to kill Unicron before he... Regenerates or whatever. Maybe she was a primary creation, the sole survivor of Quintus' first planet that was devoured by Unicron.

She takes the planet's name and a measure of his power somehow, crusading in his memory as the new Prime of Life (I can't take this moniker seriously because of Friends but it's what we have so). She uses the Knights of Cybertron under pretense of being a Cybertronian Prime to grievously wound Unicron and force him into hiding, and after getting found out continues to deceive her way through the universe, on her sole mission to kill the grand poobah.

 

[Sabrblade]

Knights of Cybertron

Guardian Knights

 

[lastmaximal]

Yeah, them too

 

[Glitch]

Quitessa had another name 'the great deceiver' maybe she wasn't Quintis or the Prime of Life, maybe she was Liege Maximo.

 

[Badgertron]

One thing I haven't seen here yet is...didn't the Cybertronians only gain sentience while under the control of the Quintessons, and then followed to start the rebellion that saw the Quintessons driven off? Obviously all the Primus stuff was moreso in the comics, but couldn't this have just been Primus creating sparks? Or maybe, doing something that let sparks overpower the Quintesson programming, or something. This was all long before the civil war, iirc.

 

[Sabrblade]

One thing I haven't seen here yet is...didn't the Cybertronians only gain sentience while under the control of the Quintessons, and then followed to start the rebellion that saw the Quintessons driven off? Obviously all the Primus stuff was moreso in the comics, but couldn't this have just been Primus creating sparks? Or maybe, doing something that let sparks overpower the Quintesson programming, or something. This was all long before the civil war, iirc.

Granted, the Quintesson creation origin predated both Primus and sparks as concepts by a number of years.

 

[LordGigaIce]

It feels like making "Quintus Prime" one of the Thirteen was Hasbro's way of finally trying to reconcile the Sunbow and Marvel origin stories.

IDW1 may have actually had another solution. We find out that Rung (Primus) had the serial number of "1" meaning he was the first Cybertronian created, and the Lost Light crew finds a giant plant sized mould that conforms to Cybetron's geography.

It doesn't take much to take those revelations and toss in the Queintessons as the creators of Cybertron as a factory world, with Primus being the first Cybertronian to come online.

IDW1 had it that Primus and his immediate peers who formed the Guiding Hand fought the "God War" that ended with everyone's memory being erased, but what if you swapped that conflict out with Primus leading a revolt against the Quintessons, driving them off world? Then Primus' deeds get mythologized, a religion is built up around him, and "Primus the first Cybertronian" becomes "Primus the creator of Cybertronians" after enough time has passed.

 

[Sabrblade]

It feels like making "Quintus Prime" one of the Thirteen was Hasbro's way of finally trying to reconcile the Sunbow and Marvel origin stories.

I mean, it's not like attempts to reconcile the two hadn't happened prior to Quintus's conception.

The first of these reconciliations happened as far back as 2004:

 

[LordGigaIce]

I mean, it's not like attempts to reconcile the two hadn't happened prior to Quintus's conception.

Quintus was an Aligned creation, yes?
I ask because I've always sort of dismissed a lot of Aligned's "unifying" fiction as Rik Alvarez fanfiction. It just felt like he wanted to take another stab at the concept. And it was... ehhhhhh

 

[Sabrblade]

Quintus was an Aligned creation, yes?

Yes indeed.

I ask because I've always sort of dismissed a lot of Aligned's "unifying" fiction as Rik Alvarez fanfiction. It just felt like he wanted to take another stab at the concept. And it was... ehhhhhh

In a nutshell, the Aligned lore treated the Quints as aliens who came to Cybertron in its infancy, pretended to be benevolent innovators who taught the Cybertronians how to transform into altmodes (an ability that was already built into their superstructures, but the Quints lied to them about that and claimed to have given them that ability as a goodwill gift, exploiting the fact that no one on Cybertron initially knew how to transform or even that they could at all), and helped them advance the planet's scientific and technological developments (like showing them how to build space bridges and such), all so that they could infiltrate and integrate themselves into Cybertronian society and secretly take it over from the inside, influencing the government by installing new laws, regulations, and the outwardly functional but inwardly oppressive caste system.

 

[lastmaximal]

And this I think isn't really incompatible with the 3H stuff, so it's fine by me. The whole "factory world" thing to me is them taking a world and making a factory out of it, expansively overwriting what records they could to manipulate later generations into thinking their way (they're the creators, etc) had always been the way.

Interestingly, the Aligned era change of Alpha Trion being one of the 13 adds another layer to A3 being part of the resistance against the Quintessons, which is also called back to in that 3H era issue.

 

[Glitch]

Another take to Sunbow G1 and ignoring the Primus stuff of the comics and fanon is Vector Sigma arrived during the Quintessons rule to start the rebellion ("before Cybertron was I was." is a rather ambiguous statement) by granting the non transforming Cybertronians sentience.

 

[Cybersnark]

It doesn't take much to take those revelations and toss in the Queintessons as the creators of Cybertron as a factory world, with Primus being the first Cybertronian to come online.

IDW1 had it that Primus and his immediate peers who formed the Guiding Hand fought the "God War" that ended with everyone's memory being erased, but what if you swapped that conflict out with Primus leading a revolt against the Quintessons, driving them off world? Then Primus' deeds get mythologized, a religion is built up around him, and "Primus the first Cybertronian" becomes "Primus the creator of Cybertronians" after enough time has passed.

That's basically how I do it in my fanverse, with the addition that "Primus" (meaning "first," remember) is the name for the planet's AI (he "created" the Primes by giving them free will in exchange for serving as his [guiding] hands), with other factory worlds having their own designations: Dion (two), Triax (three), Quartex (four). . . and Quintessa (five).

The modern Quintessons are just a remnant of the Makers, the ones who happened to be living on the under-construction Quintessa when their homeworld was wiped out in the Rebellion.

("Unicron" I'm handwaving as meaning "zero" --or "nothingness"-- the first prototype, and thus Primus' brother.)

Cybertron's Alpha-Q and the Bayverse's Quintessa could be survivors of this cataclysm, obsessed with destroying/using Unicron and Primus to recreate their species.

I also have the Quintessons eventually evolving into the Vok and using time travel to ensure their own downfall-and-ultimate-ascension.

 

[lastmaximal]

Just had a thought about Unicron's mission turning out to be just trying to reset the universe -- by ingesting and absorbing everything in it (living beings first so the rest is simpler/ more efficient), so that all are one (again). (I had a whole thing about entropy here before realizing I did not understand a single word I was writing.)

Primus, the first (Transformer at least), was a remnant of the energy of life that sparked shortly after the big bang (which gave life to a number of later-deified beings if you like), and as an individual, stood out as an affront to the emerging awareness of the universe that wanted everything unified and the same. (Maybe this means Unicron also came into conflict with other deified beings... like Celestials or whatever, not real-world religious figures.) And this Primus jerk kept creating more and more beings, making everything worse!

And then whichever "creator" of Unicron (more a harness-er, really) gives him a physical body, and so on.

I realize this is basically Unicron 101 (it's in the first paragraph of his wiki page), but I guess I'm steering him away from chaos and uncreation and death and more toward an unfeeling desire to eventually just reduce and resorb everything. Til all are one.

 

[Sabrblade]

Meanwhile, over in Japan, Unicron's whole schtick was never about consuming the universe, but dominating it. His eating Lithone and Cybertron's moons in the movie was more about asserting his dominance and doing whatever he pleases than any distaste for life itself. But, in contrast to how Megatron wanted to rule the universe as an Emperor of Destruction, Unicron wanted to rule the universe as a god.

 

[Donocropolis]

Just had a thought about Unicron's mission turning out to be just trying to reset the universe -- by ingesting and absorbing everything in it (living beings first so the rest is simpler/ more efficient), so that all are one (again). (I had a whole thing about entropy here before realizing I did not understand a single word I was writing.)

Primus, the first (Transformer at least), was a remnant of the energy of life that sparked shortly after the big bang (which gave life to a number of later-deified beings if you like), and as an individual, stood out as an affront to the emerging awareness of the universe that wanted everything unified and the same. (Maybe this means Unicron also came into conflict with other deified beings... like Celestials or whatever, not real-world religious figures.) And this Primus jerk kept creating more and more beings, making everything worse!

And then whichever "creator" of Unicron (more a harness-er, really) gives him a physical body, and so on.

I realize this is basically Unicron 101 (it's in the first paragraph of his wiki page), but I guess I'm steering him away from chaos and uncreation and death and more toward an unfeeling desire to eventually just reduce and resorb everything. Til all are one.

I always liked the idea of Primus and Unicron being similar to Greco-Roman gods or Tolkien's Valar, embodiments of some fundamental part of the universe. Primus was the avatar of entropy, with his soul constantly splitting off parts of itself as sparks in an attempt to spread throughout the universe. Unicron was the opposite force, obsessed with trying to draw everything in the universe into himself. Ironically, Unicron came to be known as the god of chaos and Primus as a god of order, which is the opposite of their actual alignment, due to the negative connotations most beings have about chaos vs. order.

 

[KingSwoop]

One thing I haven't seen here yet is...didn't the Cybertronians only gain sentience while under the control of the Quintessons, and then followed to start the rebellion that saw the Quintessons driven off? Obviously all the Primus stuff was moreso in the comics, but couldn't this have just been Primus creating sparks? Or maybe, doing something that let sparks overpower the Quintesson programming, or something. This was all long before the civil war, iirc.

If we assume the Quintessons conquered them, it's likely that they used shell programs to significantly restrict autonomous transformers. On your theory, it would be like dogs gaining sentience and/or an overt Skynet thing; neither of which is how I'd want to present our race of aliens.

Early G1 suggested that transformers "discovered" the ability to transform; but this seems problematic. One seems to posit that the ability to transform was taken from Miners, and I think that's a better angle - that Quintessons STOLE something unique to transformers to make them easier to control. But then again, if they're going to export them as weapons of war, or even use them to move cargo, the ability to transform isn't something to cut.

One option is that Quintessons limited transformer's ability to transform to one alternate mode and/or removed their ability to take on new alternate modes. The problem with this view is that it means that truly free transformers can just transform into anything at any time, which creates obvious storytelling and toy making problems. But maybe you could say that Quintessons artificially selected out Triple Changers and the like, helping to make them rarer.