This past weekend my first Transformers story “Dawn of the Predacus” bridging some of the gap between G1 and Beast Wars launched at Botcon. The book told the story of the last 48 hours of the Great War and the betrayals and sacrifices that lead to the eventual status quo of Beast Wars. I am a huge Beast Wars fan and a huge G1 fan and these are continuities I love and characters I adore. I want to extend a huge thank you for all the wonderful messages of support and the great reviews people have given me, and for the excellent, deep and well-considered questions I’ve seen on some of the forums. As a fan myself there’s a lot to go through and I always appreciate it when creators make themselves available to give a greater understanding of the work and respond to aspects that weren’t clear.
One of my usual go-to’s for TF information in terms of both breadth and depth has always been the tfwiki. On viewing the recent entry for Dawn of the Predacus I found a few inaccuracies and a number of notes which seem very confused or based on misunderstandings so I thought it’d be helpful to go through them and address them to help clarify and expand on aspects of continuity. On that note for those that haven’t read the book yet:
“Three hundred years ago, Optimus Primal, Rhinox, and Rattrap (in their "Dawn of Future's Past" bodies) are flying around in the Axalon. Let's break this down:
Rattrap shouldn't know Primal yet. It's pretty clear, starting in "Beast Wars (Part 1)", that Rattrap is someone who is new to Optimus Primal's command, and also that Optimus Primal himself is new to command.”
The amount of time Rattrap has know Primal has never been stated. With robots living millions of years how recent is recent? Optimus Primal is in charge of a science and exploration vessel. It is stated in the story that the the ship and it’s crew were not special - they were nearest to the thing that needed investigating. He is not a great commander or a military commander, he is in charge of a ship. But previous fiction has established Primal being present at the end of the war and he is present but he is not an active participant.
Rattrap seems to name Optimus Primal within a scene in this book. Because of how his face looks? It's not clear.
The fact that Primal has Optimus Prime’s face and yet, in the show, is pretty low ranked has always been a bit of a contradiction. In the book the Primal Council is established and Rattrap, ever a bit of a jerk, is making fun of both Optimus’ look and the people who gave him the mission. Eventually that name would either be earned or be stuck with him. Originally I had planned for Primal to be named “Primal” as part of induction into the Primal Council as head of Science but I felt that elevated his status too far too soon given what had been established in previous stories. But the face and the name coupled with his supposed lack of rank are hard to reconcile within the show unless there is a connection like the one I have made. I have tried to make it less of a stretch.
As this story predates the existence of Maximals and Predacons, and there is no indication that any sort of downsizing has taken place, apparently in the past the Axalon was scaled to Generation 1-sized Transformers and... eventually shrunk after the war ended...?
Of the characters we see they are all pretty much on a G1 size scale. The Axalon was a small ship by G1 standards and a big ship for BW bots. It is a natural extrapolation that their cities and tech would have to be adapted and retrofitted to accommodate smaller, more energy efficient forms. So if the Axalon was a 3 levelled ship for example, it would later be subdivided to have 6 levels. Transformers had become weapons of war and while newer technology was heading in the direction of more energy efficient or smaller (or both) there were also so many losses that there was less competition for resources. So downsizing everyone prewar was not necessarily the way things went.
By scaling everyone down after the war the idea is that they could no longer cause the sort of devastation that their archaic, energon guzzling modes could achieve even if hostilities did resume. Their understanding of transmatter over the next 300 years is what enabled and expanded technologies like transwarp, cloaking, biological/technological hybrids, time travel etc. It also potentially contributed to more energy efficient forms beyond technologies we have already seen before.
Had this been part of a mini series as originally intended there would have been an establishment of Micromaster and Pretender tech as a starting point to the ultimate abilities and configurations later on. But as people already knew about Micromaster and Pretender tech I assumed that people would naturally connect to those dots as they had already without seeing that process happen.
Also - Transformers have been shown repeatedly to have the ability to mass-shift. Suggesting that bodies may change in style, shape, size etc is not a concept that has I have created, indeed it’s essential to the premise. It is never stated that every Transformer downsized before the war.
That's right, every Maximal from the cartoon was an Autobot, and every Predacon from the cartoon was a Decepticon. Several Maximals and Predacons who didn't appear in the cartoon are also Autobots or Decepticons. They exist concurrently with every major Generation 1 character you can think of. It's pretty weird that these characters would go on to regard their peers as enigmatic legends, while dismissing them as "energon guzzlers" due to their relative size.
That’s not right. There’s a reason why most folk are not wearing badges and referring to themselves as parts of units. But there are Transformers who are aligned and wanting to be parts of those factions without formally being part of them. A lot of the frameworks have fallen down. Again the mini (which could still yet happen) would have made this clearer but Cybertron had, for a time, enjoyed the Golden Age as established at the end of s4, with only pockets of rebellion with Galvatron et al off the map. Many factions thought they were more important than others (including the largely recluse Tripredacus Council) but when Galvatron comes back he reignites, rallies and re-energises the non-Autobot factions. Mostly though just the future Maximals on the front line would have been Autobots.
It is not unlike the fact that during WWII there were the overarching Axis and Allied powers but also factions and leaders underneath as well as supporters, sympathisers and those who supported sides in secret. Megatron glorifies what the Decepticons are and especially what G1 Megatron represents and he fancies himself as the leader. He isn’t but that is never going to stop him from trying. In a wider 6 million year view it would be viewed as the Autobot/Decepticon War the same way as Axis/Allied but there is always a bit more to it than that.
Compounding this, everyone who eventually ended up in the Beast Wars were pretty important to the end of the Great War.
Not really true at all. None of the crew of the Axalon stopped the Great War, they stopped a planet wide catastrophe being bigger than it was, and even then it was more by luck than design. Had they not been there the war would still have ended it’s just that the Tripredacus Council would have won. The only ones that actively brought the war to an end the way it did were the Tri Predacus council, along with Tarantulas and an unseen Ravage.
Beast Wars Megatron appears to be the Decepticons' most important non-Galvatron military leader, bossing Predaking around.
Megatron is an opportunist who sought to take advantage of a power vacuum. Predaking was established as not being the sharpest tool in the box in the cartoon and was easily manipulated by BW Megatron. And whoever leads Predaking has an advantage, because he isn’t smart but he IS powerful. That’s why he blocked further communications with the Tripredacus council because he knew his authority would be immediately countermanded. This was his his chance to usurp power. That’s also why when he finds out Predaking is gone he and his troops look crestfallen, he lost his biggest link to the Decepticons as a symbol and as a weapon. Megatron is a master manipulator but his string pulling pales compared to the Council. Megatron is not known to Tigatron and none of the Autobots recognise him because he isn’t a big player but he has BIG ambitions.
Tigatron and Airazor are incredibly important Autobots, to the point that Prowl says that Tigatron is "respected by all sides for his desire for peace," sending him as an emissary to the Decepticons due to his widespread reputation. Apparently nobody recognized this critical historical figure when he was reborn later on Earth.
No-one recognises anyone when they are reborn on Earth, including (mostly) the bots who are reborn! No-one really refers to the pasts of the reanimated Maximals or Predacons. The show requires you to accept that the guys appearing are not people they know, yet are part of the crew? And that the reformatted protoforms with no memory of their past are not tragic victims worthy of comment as friends that have basically died? That seems like a much broader stretch than the ship consisting of not just crew and suspended crew but also blanks, etc. The vast majority have no or limited knowledge of their pasts, and the BW cartoon no-one reacts significantly to their fellow crew coming back in a familiar way. Primal never lamented that Silverbolt was someone he knew that had had his entire life’s wiped away. Silverbolt refers to Cybertron as the home he never knew. Tigatron’s identity circuits are damaged. Unless they were awake when they crashed no-one really references their past except for Protoform X.
Primal was incredibly removed from the events on the ground in this story, he witnessed almost nothing first hand and was in space through much of his career, so there is no real stretch to say that he would not necessarily know much about the histories of ALL the crew/passengers.
Protoforms are no longer new members of Optimus Primal's exploration team in stasis for the journey to other planets. Stasis pods are now life support vessels for Autobots and Decepticons who were critically damaged by transmatter the Tripredacus Council members weaponized from Unicron, with "protoform" now describing a quantum state of being suspended between dimensions and realities. Optimus Primal takes possession of these stasis pods, stating that he'll "do what we can for them," implying that he'll carry these guys around in his ship for the following 300 years.
This is an incomplete picture. The story states that they will do their best to recover them but that it may not be possible. This is the ORIGIN of the technology that makes protoforming possible not the END of the technology. Most will be brought back, some cannot be. Some are irrecoverable blanks. Primal makes it his mission to bring them back and we know that he succeeded at least in part. We also know that the Axalon had prisoners on board that were not referenced until they showed up in the cartoon. There are THREE HUNDRED years in between this and the next piece of continuity, the story does not end here, there is no disconnect between these 2 points, they are not either/or points of contradiction - they LEAD to each other.
The protoforms on the Axalon are ABSOLUTELY members of the exploration team, but some of the protoforms are also criminals, blanks, the rescued Tigatron and Airazor. I was not rewriting Beast Wars, I was connecting the dots between then and now.
It is worth bearing in mind that the need to put functionally immortal timeless robots in stasis, especially at a time where faster than light travel was available, is itself an odd use of technology. Or that firing them into space would be safer than crashing with them. They announce the stasis hold is failing, but it can’t be worse in the hold than the vacuum of space? I have however not questioned anything pre-established just added to the understanding of it or rationalised it where appropriate. Take for instance the fact that the Tripredacus Council mention their Decepticon ancestors despite Tarantulas stating that he and the council have different origins to Autobot and Decepticon. s2 and s3 contradict but a connective thread is suggested by the roles people in the story had/have.
Airazor is in one of these stasis pods (labeled "Airazor") and Tigatron is not, which makes the events of "Dawn of Future's Past" pretty implausible.
This was a point which was discussed when writing the story and does require more explaining because this forms the wider backstory rather than what is in the book itself. It is the only part that without more information does potentially contradict DoFP.
The fact that Airazor is back in DoFP confirms that many of the protoforms are brought back following the end of the story. In DofP neither of them is using the name they know each other by here and neither of them look the same as they do here, so again there is no reason for them to recognise each other. Airazor is plainly not killed or unrecoverable in the story precisely because she does appear in DofP. I chose to show those characters having a moment because I felt that fans primarily of the show would feel shortchanged if they did not have a moment.
For cartoon only watchers they would see a connective point between that and this and readers of DoFP would see two characters who knew each other (prior to a tragedy) looking very different, with different names not recognising each other or their own connection as the circumstances they meet in are at a time of urgency. They are both then spark transferred in that story to the Axalon.
The wider story that was developed to fully explain the events post this book were that Tigatron, a century down the line, when most of those in stasis have been recovered, still hasn’t been able to recover Airazor. Like so many in Beast Wars her identity circuits are damaged and he is told that she may be in stasis forever as a blank or near blank condition forever. OR she can be given life with a new identity. Tigatron knows he has been selfish, never wanting to give up on her, and relents for them to go ahead, that life should triumph but he cannot be there to see it. She goes out to live a new life with only fragments of her past intact. She is brought back as the character she is in DofP with a different name and no real recollection of anything that went before.
They effectively become the star crossed lovers who always meet with tragedy. They are separated in DotP, don’t recognise each other in DoFP, grow close in BW only to be abducted and later merged by the Vok. There was no sensible way in which this back story could be placed in the one shot, and ultimately it seemed unnecessary because the fact that she is brought back in some way is explicit in DoFP.
It is implied that Generation 1 Inferno becomes Beast Wars Inferno. He is hit by transmatter and loaded up onto the Axalon in a stasis pod labeled "Inferno." Pre-beast forms of Silverbolt and Blackarachnia are seen walking around hand-in-hand.
Implication is not the same as confirmation. One of the main points of the story is that characters take the names of those who have fallen. There is more than one Silverbolt for instance, more than one Prowl, etc. As I have stated elsewhere, if it isn’t confirmed it isn’t the case. The POSSIBILITY for a connection exists as indeed it always did (BW Inferno was made from a Maximal protoform after all) but the confirmation does NOT exist in the story I told. I cannot rewrite the cartoon to have someone say “Hey isn’t that old G1 Inferno’s stasis pod?” Nothing has been changed, nothing has been retconned. If there were a story reason to have Inferno back as a Maximal in a future story then that could still happen.
Also, all three stasis pods are shown in 3 different rooms, lit by 3 different colours of light to accentuate that. They are not all on the Axalon because there are potentially THOUSANDS of affected individuals and even after the Axalon is refitted there would only be capacity for maybe a hundred? That should be a given that the Axalon does not take them all as we only see about 20 in the opening BW episode. The transmatter wave hit a huge portion of the planet, the Axalon (as a science and exploration vessel) takes as many as it can to help find a cure. As we know that protoforming becomes a stasis technology of choice rather than a weapon later on we know they must have succeeded.
Even if the two robots were Blackarachnia and Silverbolt (they are referred to as simply generics in the script and the colour scheme for what the wiki identified as “Silverbolt” was modelled on Airhammer) BOTH had their personalities (either whole or in part) overwritten in the show. If they were at some point crew on the Axalon they had to have existed beforehand, they had to come from somewhere. No matter who they were or what they did before BW they were effectively new people in BW. There is no way in which their existence in this moment in history undermines or contradicts anything in BW, indeed it is only logical that they had to have existed in some form before otherwise there would be no crew from which their BW forms would come from.
So how big a secret to Megatron/anybody was it supposed to be that Tarantulas worked for the Tripredacus Council? Megatron vidconferences with all four of them together at their shared headquarters, and later Tarantulas combines with them in front of everybody in the Great War's last and most important battle.
At this point they ALL worked for the Tripredacus council, even Megatron was supposed to follow their orders. Megatron leaves Predaking behind to storm the Autobot base and Tarantulas combines with the TP council MILES from the final battle where there are no witnesses. Predaking is left to take everyone on his battlefield out and by the time he’s fighting the TPC his enemies are either dead, disabled or protoformed. There are no witnesses, no-one to send word back. There is still a jamming field in place which is why Megatron tries to send Tarantulas back to get Predaking. He has no idea Predaking is dead until Tarantulas tells him.
The Council hide the fact that they can combine and who they can combine with. Megatron does not know how (literally) connected Tarantulas is to the Council, he has witnessed nothing that makes him think either the Council or Tarantulas have an agenda beyond what the Decepticons displayed. That’s why Megatron is shown a hologram of Predaking’s fate, (because he didn’t witness it), why the Tripredacus council do not appear in public until Megatron is down. It’s why Ravage fires from a distance - literally no-one knows what he did. Megatron does not know the full extent of the betrayal. If those following Megatron were party to the deception then the war would not have ended, instead they would have turned against the Tripredacus council. The whole point is that the TPC have engineered the events in secret to undermine Megatron, shock the troops into falling in line and end the bloodshed long enough for them to get their own plan back on track.
See also: Ravage. "Rumor has it" he was granted amnesty and rebuilt as a Predacon, but there's no indication this was done in secret at all, instead being a major part of thePax Cybertronia.
Ravage was a Decepticon whose activities at the end of the war were secret. Primal, established as someone who was not a major player in events, would only know rumours. Prowl et al would have been the keepers of record and deciders of detail. Ravage was a Decepticon, he was granted amnesty and was given a new form after the one seen in this story. A great many things would have been secret or rumours from Primal’s point of view. The audience’s point of view and Primal’s are not the same thing.
Remember Ravage's experimental transwarp cruiser? Unicron has a fleet of them sitting around in his head.
Not sure the 2 ships we see can be described as a fleet and neither are the Transwarp cruiser seen later! The Transwarp cruiser is curvier and more Egyptian in look. One of them is actually a folded up version of their base we see later on, and the other is a precursor of the vessel Ravage would pilot in the show. It’s like the Enterprise from Star Trek: TOS compared to The Enterprise-E. One leads to the other (with steps in between) but they are not the same ship. There are other (unseen) ships but none are transwarp cruisers. The plans for Ravage’s ship are seen at the end, but it has not been built.
That’s it for now. Oddly the points I thought would be the most contentious are not the ones that have tripped people up so if there’s anything you’d like to know more about or want to ask questions about please drop me a note! I had to plan out 300 odd years of connecting material and continuity figuring out how G1 s4 connects to BW and this one shot was originally part of a 4 issue story which would have shown more of the connective tissue and more of the big events that connect the dots. My hope is to one day get to tell the story of Galvatron’s return, the fall of the Golden Age, and the status of a number of Autobots before DotP and the some of the Cold War events after to properly begin to fill in some of the picture of a post-war world.
