So you agree that the "three centuries ago" statement was absurdly short for a race that can live for millions of years, and that everything else in the shows better matched the later-given "eons ago" statement.
So you agree that the "three centuries ago" statement was absurdly short for a race that can live for millions of years, and that everything else in the shows better matched the later-given "eons ago" statement.
Mostly, though it could be fair to ask if the Maximal and Predacons have the same life spans. There's nothing to say they don't, but also nothing that really says they do. It is plausible that the Great Upgrade, might come with shorter lifespans; we kinda see this with technology where newer items might be better, but also don't seem to last as long. Now I'm not saying they have human life spans; but still if they only live for thousands or hundreds of years; then you still have some difference in how long it takes for such legends to form. Though that would still put 300 years as being too short; its still something interesting to think about from a writer's perspective imo.
You're right.
The problem isn't with the canon so much as it is the people writing the canon.
Speaking from experience here, most people have no real concept of history's timescale, or what words like "ancient" or even "eon" mean.
I've had students who firmly believed the 1600s is "ancient" and who believe that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, at most, were a generation apart (three hundred years separates them ftr).
To most laymen history is flat, history is static, and people just don't think too deeply about it. Like Cleopatra living closer to our present than she did the building of the Great Pyramids.
And no disrespect to the Beast Wars writing staff- they produced some of the best fiction this franchise has seen- but I doubt any of them were academic historians.
Which means they took that layman's understanding of our history and applied it to a fictional race where that already fuzzy understanding of human timescales gets even more fuzzy when you consider just how long lived Cybertronians can get.
So terms like "three centuries" and "eons" are thrown around with little care or understanding what these terms mean, or how they impact the broader ideas the writers are trying to get across.
All that really matters is that A REALLY LONG TIME separates the Autobots and Decepticons from the Maximals and Predacons. Good writing, however, calls for both a bit of flourish and some concrete dates so sure let's say "eons" and "three centuries" both of those sound old!
All of this, however, calls into question a bigger issue.
How do we properly convey just how far in the future the Maximals and Predacons have to be for the Autobots and Decepticons to be the realm of myth and legend?
For reference we on Earth have the story of the Seven Sisters- a story that explains the Pleiades Star Cluster. Not to get into the nitty gritty of it but there's compelling evidence that the stories about this cluster of stars go back 100,000 years. That's WELL into the realm of myth and legend, so far back we will never be able to truly know the truth about that story because it's so far beyond written memory.
And yet... 100,000 years is nothing for a Cybertronian. The Great War is usually depicted as lasting six million years or so. In IDW Nova Prime's era was ten million years from our present, and you still have contemporaries of that era out and about and it wasn't noteworthy really.
So if 100,000 years ago is the furthest back we can peak into our own past and see mere embers of stories and legends whose truths are long lost to us... just how long must have passed from the end of the 'Bot and 'Con Great War for those events to be that distant for the Maximals and Predacons? We're talking timescales so long they they potentially cease to have meaning to us as human beings.
I should probably also mention that the "three centuries ago" claim was only mentioned once, in passing, and never mentioned again in either show.
And, interestingly, there have been a number of other timeframes given in media outside of the two American Beast Era cartoons.
The BotCon 1998-2000 storyline "Reaching the Omega Point" introduced an alternate timeline set in the far future of the 32nd Century. One chapter said that this future was 200 years after the time period that the cast of Beast Wars had originally hailed from, which would have put that era in the 30th Century. But then, the 2001-2004 comic series "Transformers: The Wreckers" doubled down on the "three centuries" claim and placed the time of Beast Machines three hundred years after the destruction of Unicron, which the previous Omega Point story "Covenant" stated was in 2005, which then put Beast Machines in the 24th Century instead, retconning the previous 30th Century implication. And then, the second "Transformers: Universe" comic issue's inside-cover recap of Issue #1 stated that Universe (which Issue #1 said took place one year after Beast Machines) took place in the 23rd Century, but we easily can chalk that up to an error.
In IDW's 2006-2008 Beast Wars comics, it never actually stated how far in the future the home-time of the Beast Wars cast is. But when "Dawn of the Predacus" came out in 2016, author John-Paul Bove tweeted that that story was set "30 years after the Battle for Autobot City, 300 years before the Beast Wars", placing that story in 2035, and the Beast Era once again in the 24th Century.
Meanwhile, over in Japan, Beast Wars Second was originally meant to take place in the same future time period that the cast of the American Beast Wars cartoon hailed from, and it was set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that humanity disappeared from "several tens of thousands of years ago". With all the "myth and legend" talk from the BW and BM cartoons, the "several tens of thousands of years ago" statement actually kinda works rather well with Nightscream's "eons ago" statement (which, admittedly, didn't come until about two years after Beast Wars Second). Even the "three centuries ago" statement doesn't actually contradict this since that line was actually omitted from the Japanese dub of Beast Wars, replaced instead with a pop culture joke.
However, when the big Japanese G1/BW timeline was first put together and organized in the mid-2000s, the makers of that timeline did take to heart the "three centuries ago" statement from the English version, and thus moved Beast Wars Second to "several tens of thousands of years" after Beast Machines. They also likely did this because the Beast Wars II movie revered Optimus Primal and BW Megatron as legendary figures of history, which would only make sense if the events of Beast Machines were a part of Beast Wars II's distant past (they wouldn't know about the events of Beast Wars since that was kind of a secret war unrecorded by Cybertronian history). The likely reason the movie treated the BW leaders like historic celebrities is due to Takara initially thinking they were the same Optimus and Megatron of G1 (like how their earliest toys were treated as such by Hasbro before the cartoon came along and changed that). But then Beast Wars Metals hit Japan and made it clear that that wasn't the case. So in order for the movie to make sense, the time in which Optimus Primal and Beast Megatron existed on Cybertron had to be in the far past before Beast Wars Second (they could have instead just not included the movie in the timeline since it fits in about as well as your average Dragon Ball Z movie fits into that series, but they chose to shoehorn the movie in anyway).
Not to mention the other contradictions in Beast Wars Neo that prevented both it and BWII from taking place before Beast Machines. Namely, the fact that Episode 1 of Neo showed the Maximals and Predacons to be engaged in all-out war with each other when Episode 1 of Beast Wars already stated the Maximals and Predacons were still at peace with each other on Cybertron and had been "for centuries", and "The Agenda" three-parter introduced the Pax Cybertronia and reiterated the Cold War-esque peace between the two factions. And then there's Neo's portrayal of Vector Sigma as a well known public figure on Cybertron who governs it as the highest authority on the planet, while Beast Machines instead depicted Vector Sigma as having long ago become the Oracle and faded in obscurity as a lost and forgotten legend. Those two contradictions are far more difficult to reconcile, and thus likely factored in further to the decision to relocate BWII and Neo to occurring long after Beast Machines instead of right before it.
And, interestingly, there have been a number of other timeframes given in media outside of the two American Beast Era cartoons.
The BotCon 1998-2000 storyline "Reaching the Omega Point" introduced an alternate timeline set in the far future of the 32nd Century. One chapter said that this future was 200 years after the time period that the cast of Beast Wars had originally hailed from, which would have put that era in the 30th Century. But then, the 2001-2004 comic series "Transformers: The Wreckers" doubled down on the "three centuries" claim and placed the time of Beast Machines three hundred years after the destruction of Unicron, which the previous Omega Point story "Covenant" stated was in 2005, which then put Beast Machines in the 24th Century instead, retconning the previous 30th Century implication. And then, the second "Transformers: Universe" comic issue's inside-cover recap of Issue #1 stated that Universe (which Issue #1 said took place one year after Beast Machines) took place in the 23rd Century, but we easily can chalk that up to an error.
In IDW's 2006-2008 Beast Wars comics, it never actually stated how far in the future the home-time of the Beast Wars cast is. But when "Dawn of the Predacus" came out in 2016, author John-Paul Bove tweeted that that story was set "30 years after the Battle for Autobot City, 300 years before the Beast Wars", placing that story in 2035, and the Beast Era once again in the 24th Century.
Meanwhile, over in Japan, Beast Wars Second was originally meant to take place in the same future time period that the cast of the American Beast Wars cartoon hailed from, and it was set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that humanity disappeared from "several tens of thousands of years ago". With all the "myth and legend" talk from the BW and BM cartoons, the "several tens of thousands of years ago" statement actually kinda works rather well with Nightscream's "eons ago" statement (which, admittedly, didn't come until about two years after Beast Wars Second). Even the "three centuries ago" statement doesn't actually contradict this since that line was actually omitted from the Japanese dub of Beast Wars, replaced instead with a pop culture joke.
However, when the big Japanese G1/BW timeline was first put together and organized in the mid-2000s, the makers of that timeline did take to heart the "three centuries ago" statement from the English version, and thus moved Beast Wars Second to "several tens of thousands of years" after Beast Machines. They also likely did this because the Beast Wars II movie revered Optimus Primal and BW Megatron as legendary figures of history, which would only make sense if the events of Beast Machines were a part of Beast Wars II's distant past (they wouldn't know about the events of Beast Wars since that was kind of a secret war unrecorded by Cybertronian history). The likely reason the movie treated the BW leaders like historic celebrities is due to Takara initially thinking they were the same Optimus and Megatron of G1 (like how their earliest toys were treated as such by Hasbro before the cartoon came along and changed that). But then Beast Wars Metals hit Japan and made it clear that that wasn't the case. So in order for the movie to make sense, the time in which Optimus Primal and Beast Megatron existed on Cybertron had to be in the far past before Beast Wars Second (they could have instead just not included the movie in the timeline since it fits in about as well as your average Dragon Ball Z movie fits into that series, but they chose to shoehorn the movie in anyway).
Not to mention the other contradictions in Beast Wars Neo that prevented both it and BWII from taking place before Beast Machines. Namely, the fact that Episode 1 of Neo showed the Maximals and Predacons to be engaged in all-out war with each other when Episode 1 of Beast Wars already stated the Maximals and Predacons were still at peace with each other on Cybertron and had been "for centuries", and "The Agenda" three-parter introduced the Pax Cybertronia and reiterated the Cold War-esque peace between the two factions. And then there's Neo's portrayal of Vector Sigma as a well known public figure on Cybertron who governs it as the highest authority on the planet, while Beast Machines instead depicted Vector Sigma as having long ago become the Oracle and faded in obscurity as a lost and forgotten legend. Those two contradictions are far more difficult to reconcile, and thus likely factored in further to the decision to relocate BWII and Neo to occurring long after Beast Machines instead of right before it.
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This is just my view, I would say that the Great War was Autobot v Decepticon, when a peace treaty was evenly signed, and the two factions began evolving into Maximals & Predacons, they entered into a cold war state where the Predacons were plotting to start the war anew and retake Cybertron from the Maximals, everything that happened in BW & BM is simply a side story as BW Megatron was a rouge agent and Ravage was sent to capture him along with the Predacons and the intention was to bring him back to the present day because the ruling Council of Predacons, didn't want rouge elements that they cannot control messing up their plans, so the reason they not attacked was they were gathering their strength and likely stock piling enegron, thou I expect Megatron, once taking over Cybertron, likely sent the vrius that cippled everyone on Cybertron to where the Predacons were based and I expect the home world of the Predacons was the planet Char which had likely been developed by the Predacons, yet their dream and goal is to reclaim Cybertron from their oppressors the Maximals!
I'm not sure why you bothered cross-posting it with the 3P versions; they're literally half the size of the official toy, so it makes sense they're half the price.
I'd actually say that given how long lived Cybertronians are that even tens of thousands of years isn't enough for the Autobot/Decepticon War to pass into the realm of myth and legend for the Maximals and Predacons.
Nightscream's "eons" remark was likely written with little to no regard for how long an eon actually is- it was just meant to convey "a long time ago."
That being said an "eon" has a flexible definition. It is any significant geological period between five hundred million and one billion years.
So Nightscream's "eons" remark, if taken literally with the plural, could be anywhere from one billion to two billion years. Or if you wanted to fudge it you could say it's something like, say, seven hundred and fifty million years or something like that. "Eon" technically refers to geological eras on Earth so the team is a bit nebulous without Earth's geological record for reference, but these numbers are all acceptable for the term in a broad sense.
My point is that "eons" as a unit of time finally starts dealing with the amount of time you'd need for the Autobots and Decepticons to pass into the realm of myth and legend for the Maximals and Predacons. For a race where you can still have people walking around from ten million years ago and it's not a big deal you'd need to start pushing into the billions to get that kind of distance and historical-mythological drift.
As a counterpoint on that, consider the reliability of memory. If someone is 10 million years old but can only remember the last 1 million except for vague impressions, , then couldn't something that happens 10 million years ago still be a legend? We're all assuming that all the Transformers remember everythign perfectly, and that they have records backing it up. Theyr'e robots so that is a fair assumption. However, technology also breaks down, which was used to good effect with the example of Kup in IDW1, who never bothered with upgrades and as a result they had to do the whole Pretender Shell Body thing for him when he broke down too far. All it would take is for a transfer to not be perfectly 1:1, and maybe some old memories they never really access get garbled, but because they bot doesn't think about that time period, they don't notice. Given enough upgrades or repairs over enough time, and their memories about their past could become as vague as an 80 year old human trying to recall what their typical school day was like when they were 8. Throw in massive wars wiping out records(which we have a great example of in the G1 bots not having records of the Quintessons anymore when they show back up) and you can definitely have legends and myths that happened within the lifetime of living Cybertronians, as they can't even recall themselves how it went other than "that seems right".
300 years is likely still too short for that to have been the transition logically, but you don't need to go to half the age of our solar system for it to make sense either.
300 years is likely still too short for that to have been the transition logically, but you don't need to go to half the age of our solar system for it to make sense either.
Counter-counter point- even if that was true you still have guys like Alpha Trion just... around... in the modern era. That was one of my big annoyances with IDW1's treatment of the mythological past on Cybertron. Not only was it not really that long ago comparatively speaking but also Alpha Trion is one of your civilization's founders and he's still around and lucid. How is there any ambiguity to legends and myth???
Like if we had a dude alive and well and we could confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the Biblical Abraham then I'd like to think we'd collectively go "hey man we have some questions we'd like cleared up."
But this kind of stuff again happens when people apply the pop culture view of human history- static with no real understanding of timescales- to fiction about robots who live millions upon millions of years.
That's my assumption, I'm afraid. Look, human memory is fallible. And highly subjective to misremembering, false memories, and just good ole' bias. Ironically if this were Go-Bots all of this would make more sense since despite being mostly robotic their brains are organic.
But alas we're dealing with Transformers who have, as far as I know, fully synthetic and robotic brains.
So we have to deal with the reality that machines are capable of storing FAR more information, and doing so perfectly. Not tainted by bias, or a misremembered detail. When you record a video on your phone, your phone doesn't later change it to reflect its mood.
Given that we're dealing with machines I don't think "everyone just forgot" is a satisfying answer.
IDW1 tried to answer this with "information creep," which is basically what you're describing. Technical errors, lost or corrupted memory files, etc.
My issue here is that this was basically introduced to cover for their own internal continuity issues? How does Nova Prime's era both fit the semi-mythological past yet also be recent enough that people from then are still around? Information creep! That's me reading into authorial intent, which maybe isn't fair, but it's how I see the concept. I'm sorry.
It seems likely that while some technological degradation would occur with some- maybe those who didn't undergo upgrades or who experienced damage that caused memory lose- the large scale cultural amnesia that would have to happen just doesn't seem possible to me with a race of machines and the multiple ways machines have of recording history in as objective a way as possible.
I'm not so sure. We can only confirm the story of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades Star Cluster- that there are six sisters but one was driven away- because we are able to roll back the star charts and see that 100,000 years ago the star cluster had seven stars but over time one drifted so close to another that they became indistinguishable from the naked eye. That's an endlessly fascinating look into a bit of primordial human storytelling and mythology we were only able to confirm because we literally rewound the sky. There is no one alive from that era, no written records, nothing but scant artifacts and a story we had to look up and back to even confirm it actually was that old.
So the idea of events that occurred within the lifetime of Cybertronians currently living being the realm of myth and legend just... doesn't sit right.
Like King Arthur- ok. King Arthur was far more recent than the Seven Sisters. IF King Arthur were real the earliest stories about him place him in the 5th or 6th centuries CE. Why don't we have proof of him if he's relatively recent? Well because Britain used to be part of the Roman Empire and when the Western Roman Empire collapsed society collapsed along with it and so Arthur was active during a time when, due to a series of societal collapses and wars, literacy and writing was at an all-time low. We have no contemporary sources of Arthur because if he was a real person there would have been very few people around to actually write his stuff down in his lifetime due to said wars and societal collapse.
But here's the thing... robots don't forget how to read. Take a human who grows up in the chaos of post-Roman Western Europe where the infrastructure and social systems his grandparents enjoyed are just simply gone and that human may go his entire life never learning to read and write. But a robot... is never going to have that problem.
I mean I get your point- a large enough conflict in Cybertronian history could result in the physically destruction of records and maybe even kill off large segments of the populace alive from an earlier age but we're dealing with a technologically advanced robotic race here.
We're just bald monkeys limited by our biology but we're starting to make breakthroughs that push data storage beyond the physical. Cloud technology is just the most latest step in potentially all of our information- or at least backups of it- being stored in spaces beyond the physical. So if we're pushing that frontier I have to think a robotic species that's cracked FTL travel has a firm handle on data storage that won't just be gone forever after a particularly brutal bombing campaign.
Finally... creative freedom.
You tell a story about the Autobot/Decepticon War on Earth and you need to keep it recognizable as present day Earth.
But if you tease out the idea that this war would have to be half a billion to a billion years old to pass into the realm of myth and legend to the Maximals and Predacons you can do SO MUCH that isn't constrained.
Half a billion years- let alone a billion years- is so far into the future that you can tell any story you want. What's humanity like? Is it even recognizable as humanity? What's Cybertron like?
You'd have a totally clean slate to tell pretty much any story you'd want.
This is great discussion and good stuff, stuff that would have driven me nuts years ago. Its not the best in universe explanation but i just roll with either of these.
BA's 300 years actually mean longer than we think it does cause these years are different (i know, i know)...
The period between 1984 and the 2010s and beyond were/was so wild, cybertronian tech advanced so quickly ALOT actually happened to *make* 300 years seem like a long time...
Or the corrupt, secretive, oppressive Maximal Elders have hid and manipulated the records of history so thoroughly its hard to tell when anything happened before their rule.
BA's 300 years actually mean longer than we think it does cause these years are different (i know, i know)...
The period between 1984 and the 2010s and beyond were/was so wild, cybertronian tech advanced so quickly ALOT actually happened to *make* 300 years seem like a long time...
Or the corrupt, secretive, oppressive Maximal Elders have hid and manipulated the records of history so thoroughly its hard to tell when anything happened before their rule.
There are some planets (Venus) where a day is longer then a year. So if Blackarachnia was talking about Cybertronian years then that's entirely dependent on how long Cybertron's orbit is.
ofc we all have to acknowledge that even though these are aliens, in contexts like this when they say X number of years they mean Earth years for the sake of the audience.
ofc we all have to acknowledge that even though these are aliens, in contexts like this when they say X number of years they mean Earth years for the sake of the audience.
One more thing I forgot to mention was that Dinobot once said the following to Tigatron in "Law of the Jungle":
"If Megatron takes the energon wealth of this world unopposed, he will begin a war. A war that will destroy Cybertron and shatter galaxies, until only one side survives. It has been this way for hundreds of stellar cycles, ever since Autobot and Decepticon first began the Great War."
But, as we've said, "hundreds of years" likewise sounds rather brief for Cybertronian chronology.
Dinobot said "stellar cycles" as in: one complete rotation of the known galaxy. A solar cycle is a day, a planetary cycle is a planetary year.
A "stellar cycle" is a Cybertronian year. 400 Earth days according to Larry DiTillio.
You're correct about "solar cycle" meaning "day", but "planetary cycle" is not a term that exists in any Transformers media.
Well; now I need to figure out where I heard that term...
Black Arcachnia could have just been flippant when she said that...
If only all the BW expanded universe fiction that's been made over the years didn't take her claim so literally.
They're not half the price, they're far cheaper than that. The cheapest one is 80 dollars. I compared then because they're similar toys. I usually try to compare various versions of the same character when possible. Perfectly logical.
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Tarantulas being a literal "Unicron spawn", too.
Full disclaimer: I actually don't mind him being a Unicron minion during the 2003 Universe fiction since every bad guy in that fiction was (and it'd suit his personality that he'd join up with what he'd consider the winning side and use that to his advantage), but having his creation being literally rooted in Unicron is just... ugh.
Also, backing up to when I previously mentioned that BWII said humanity disappeared from Earth "several tens of thousands of years ago", that's another thing that may not need to be taken as literal as it looks. In Japanese, the number "ten thousand" is the highest base number represented by a single Kanji character, that being 万 (man). To write any number higher, one must combine 万 with other Kanji that represent other base numbers. For instance, in order to write "four million" in Kanji form, that would be 四百万 (shihyaku-man), combining the Kanji for "four" (四, shi), "hundred" (百, hyaku), and 万, essentially multiplying each value to get 4 x 100 x 10,000 = 4,000,000.
Anyway, when BWII said "several tens of thousands", the spoken dialogue meant it as like "several 万". In some cases like this, when the Japanese use 万 to refer to a number of years and don't specify an exact amount, they don't always necessarily mean "10,000" literally, but more simply just mean "an absurdly long amount of time beyond human comprehension". A similar thing happened in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild when that game spoke of the history of Calamity Ganon as having attacked the kingdom of Hyrule in an event known as the First Calamity that occurred "ten thousand years ago". While the English version of the game gave that exact number of years by translating 万 literally, the Japanese version used 万 in its sometimes vague sense, to illustrate the point how ridiculously long ago that event took place to the point of it feeling more like a legend rather than confirmed history (even though it definitely was since there was plenty of physical evidence of it in the game's present day).
But the point I'm getting at here is, by considering the BWII timeframe of "several 万 years" to be less a literal amount of time and more just a general way of saying "an impossibly long time ago", the timeframe doesn't seem as much at odds with the ridiculous amount of time the Maximals and Predacons would need for the age of the Autobots and Decepticons to have faded away into myth and legend.