I declare, making the girl get melted down into the planet to become Cybertron's "baby-maker" was one of the dumbest things to ever come out of that Covenant book.
I forgot about that! Yeah that's an even bigger level of dumb on top of everything else. Solus is so cool as an idea but everything they did with her outside of having her forge the Star Sabre and Matrix was dumb.
Also, you mean "ancestor", not "descendant".
D'oh. Yes.
Thankfully, the one saving grace about that name is that the "Prime" part was dropped post haste, only ever making it into the Transformers Vault book and nowhere else. In all of his appearances outside of that book, he's "Megatronus" without a "Prime".
Another thing that bugged me about the Thirteen is that they wanted them all to be "Primes" but some just didn't have the title. Alpha Trion and Liege Maximo are Primes but didn't rep the title? Why not? Hell, Dreamwave canonized "Alpha Prime" as a thing...
It just bugged me. At the time same dropping the idea that they're all "Primes" and just having Prima himself start that lineage would be a cool idea. Make the rest gods/demigods who don't have the "Prime" title?
But yeah, the tacking-on of "-us" to any name that ends in "-tron" (or any variation of "-on") is annoying and keeps persisting. When Terratronus first revealed her name in EarthSpark, I was facepalming so hard over how lazy and uninspired her name sounded. The "Terra" part is fine, but it's like they couldn't come up with anything more original and just slapped "-tron" and then "-us" on the end to make it sound "Transformers-y" and called it a day. Had it been me who named her, I'd have tried for something more original like "Terra Maxima", or if it absolutely had to be a name ending in "-us", "Terra Maximus", or even "Terra Firmus".
It's interesting to me that "-us" is the stereotypical to the point of joke addition to a name to make it "Prime-y" but if you look at every new Prime character introduced between Rodimus and the Thirteen the only one who followed that convention was Nominus. No one else had it.
And then Hasbro went nuts adding it to a good chunk of the Thirteen and now it's everywhere again.
While I don't necessarily agree about making those two the same guy, it did always strike me as weird that both were supposed to be the evil members of the Thirteen.
For me it comes down to simplicity in narrative. Simplicity or following tropes isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Something can follow recognizable patterns and still be good.
In this case you had Prima as the leader and twelve other Primes. Sounds kinda like Jesus and the twelve Apostles. Or Zeus and the twelve Olympians.
Not to get too deep into theology and mythology but if you want to broad strokes mirror that dynamic the most straightforward narrative is making one guy the evil one who messes with the rest.
If you add Liege Maximo to the group... he's your evil guy. And the thing is... "Liege Maximo" isn't a name. It's a title. So if you make him the Fallen you can play with the character's true name still not being revealed.
It just cuts down on muddled narrative threads and lets the mythology focus a bit more.
Unless The Fallen was the only one of the two who took direct action to betray the others and was punished for it, while Liege Maximo rather bided his time and kept his plans to himself.
That would be a fun twist and would explain how Megatronus got the stricken from history treatment while Liege Maximo didn't... the problem is that so little fiction actually explores these ideas.
One of the few that did... IDW1... had Liege Maximo's own tribe lock him away for his deceptions and lies. Meaning that his deeds must have been fairly well known, at least after the fact.
Aligned took a bold step coming up with it and writing it all down... only to demonstrate why sometimes the not knowing is infinitely better.
I never got fiction's obsession with writing it all down. Transformers is far from the only franchise guilty of this.
Look at our own mythologies on Earth. Norse mythology is only preserved in two books, both of which written post-Christianization and both of which make vague allusions to stories they don't detail, hinting at a much larger picture we don't have.
Greek and Roman mythologies are better attested but even they were peppered with secret cults whose own histories and mythologies we don't know because everyone who did know died without writing it down.
My own religion, Judaism, forms the theological and mythical backbone of the world's two largest religions and Judaism's own origins are in the murky past of myth from Mesopotamia where we can't really fully parse it out. There are bits from Judaism's origin story- Abraham leading his family to Israel- where they just make references to wider mythologies and belief structures we just don't know about because it's been lost to time.
So wouldn't it be cool if a franchise with significantly developed lore just said "yeah the deepest origins of X are myth and legend. Here are some basics but who knows what's true and what's not?" and just refused to elaborate? It would be very true to life.
And make for more interesting ideas.