Common premises of TF fiction: necessary?
Phillip Thorne
structured this way? Why did the writers include certain premises and
not others, leading to certain kinds of stories? Well, what premises,
and are they necessary to essentially Transformer-ish fiction, and if
we explain them one way then what are the consequences?
Here are three. Can you think of more?
1. Transformers have superluminal travel (ship or spacebridge) so they
can commute to other exciting locales.
Unnecessary. For a being with a million-year lifespan, spending a few
hundred or thousand on a subluminal interstellar trip wouldn't be
onerous. And there are plenty of stories that can be told on a single
planet or, if you need to stretch, star system.
2. The main battleground is the surface of Earth.
Explainable, if... The surface of a planet with an atmosphere is
convenient for at least one reason: heat sink. It's a lot easier for
a high-tech alien dispose of (and conceal) waste heat by conduction
than by radiation into vacuum. And for a high-tech alien who prefers
to transform into a vehicle, there are a lot more decoys here.
3. The Decepticons prey upon Earth and incur Autobot retaliation,
instead of tapping unclaimed resources in space.
Explainable if... Transformers can't operate long-term in space. In
most shows they can operate fine in vacuum, underwater, Earth's
surface -- but it's quite an engineering challenge for a machine to
perform well in all three. (Heat management, lubrication, propulsion,
etc.) "Exactly: they're super-advanced alien machines," you say.
Fine, but giving them *limits* imposes some rigor on the writers.
And if... The Decepticons (or at least this case of characters) don't
have the technical ability to use space resources as-is. They need to
hijack human technology (mining, metal refining, computer manufacture)
to bootstrap their own projects.
--
** Phillip Thorne ** peth...@comcast.net **************
* RPI CompSci 1998 *
** underbase.livejournal.com ***************************
Grebo
The always thinkin' Phillip Thorne <petho...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 3. The Decepticons prey upon Earth and incur Autobot retaliation,
> instead of tapping unclaimed resources in space.
I gotta admit, I've always forced myself to say "oh well" on this
one.
Otherwise I start wondering....
Why the heck can't Cybetronians figure out freakin' SOLAR POWER
SATELLITES?!?
Argh,
Grebo
Victoryleo
SOLAR POWER
SATELLITES?!?"
I think they have, Energon Shockblast had all those solar power panels
in his satelite mode,tank mode & robot mode.
Victoryleo
stronger than Prime ordeal.
Chad Rushing
>
> Here are three. Can you think of more?
Fortunately, they dropped the whole battle-for-energy thing almost
entirely after the ENERGON show and toyline. The fact that they would
battle over scarce resources is not too unbelievable, but it makes
episodes very formulaic and acts as a serious delimiter on what they
can or cannot do ("We don't have enough energon for a full-scale
attack."). Imagine watching M.A.S.K. with every show centering around
a fight over fuel for their vehicles.
> 1. Transformers have superluminal travel (ship or spacebridge) so they
> can commute to other exciting locales.
>
> Unnecessary. For a being with a million-year lifespan, spending a few
> hundred or thousand on a subluminal interstellar trip wouldn't be
> onerous. And there are plenty of stories that can be told on a single
> planet or, if you need to stretch, star system.
The reason why they will always have superluminal travel is because it
allows them to change settings in a story very quickly.
While the timeframes involved in sub-luminal travel would not be
impossible for TFs, it would mean that any human supporting characters
would be long dead before the next confrontation occurred on the next
planet. There would just be something odd about having the Autobots
take off for a planet in another star system, and the screen saying
"226 Stellar Cycles Later" when they finally arrived at it.
Just about all science fiction shows are guilty of this, so I just
ignore it.
> 2. The main battleground is the surface of Earth.
>
> Explainable, if... The surface of a planet with an atmosphere is
> convenient for at least one reason: heat sink. It's a lot easier for
> a high-tech alien dispose of (and conceal) waste heat by conduction
> than by radiation into vacuum. And for a high-tech alien who prefers
> to transform into a vehicle, there are a lot more decoys here.
Probably the main reason why most of the battles take place on Earth
is so that its human viewers can relate to the settings used. If
every single G1 episode had occurred on a planet like Webworld (or
even the Moon), I do not think most viewers would find it as
interesting. Reading about something happening to New York in SPIDER-
MAN comics is more interesting than reading about something happening
to Star City in FLASH comics because New York is a real place in the
real world.
Also, having battles take place on Earth means that humans are sure to
get involved, and human interaction with Transformers (either friendly
or hostile) seems to be a standard element of any TF story. If
anything, humans provide a contrast which emphasizes how large,
powerful, and (relatively) invulnerable these alien robots really are.
In addition, why do you think that recent shows always feature a young
kid sidekick or sidekicks? It is because they want the kids viewing
the show to relate to those characters and think to themselves, "That
could be me!" and "What would I do in that situation?"
> 3. The Decepticons prey upon Earth and incur Autobot retaliation,
> instead of tapping unclaimed resources in space.
A key element of the whole resources conflict is that the Decepticons
are -stealing- resources that belong to others, and the Autobots are
trying to stop them. If the Decepticons were tapping unclaimed
resources in space, then they are technically doing nothing wrong, and
there is no need for a conflict.
Also, planet-based resources might be much easier to defend from
attackers than an asteroid field out in space, and military bases
could be built around them.
> Explainable if... Transformers can't operate long-term in space. In
> most shows they can operate fine in vacuum, underwater, Earth's
> surface -- but it's quite an engineering challenge for a machine to
> perform well in all three. (Heat management, lubrication, propulsion,
> etc.) "Exactly: they're super-advanced alien machines," you say.
> Fine, but giving them *limits* imposes some rigor on the writers.
I am willing to go along with that explanation.
> And if... The Decepticons (or at least this case of characters) don't
> have the technical ability to use space resources as-is. They need to
> hijack human technology (mining, metal refining, computer manufacture)
> to bootstrap their own projects.
I have always chalked that up to plain laziness on the part of the
Decepticons and not lack of technological skill. It is easier to let
someone else invest thousands of hours of time and energy (and
resources) into developing something and then steal it from them than
it is to perform the development yourself.
- Chad
Grebo
> I don't like the current TF 2007 MOVIE & Animated Megatron tons
> stronger than Prime ordeal.
?
What does that have to do with anything?
JimS
I don't think it's that they can't figure it out. It's that solar
power takes time. If the cons throw up, say, 20 satellites and start
collecting power . . . what do you think would happen? Certainly, the
Autobots would knock them out of orbit. And the reverse is also
true. It's got to be much cheaper to destroy a solar power collector
than to build one, and by their very nature they're hard to conceal.
Add that to the idea that Cybertron doesn't seem to have a sun - at
least, not before Beast Machines. The Marvel comics were explicit on
this point, whereas in the Cartoon it's merely implied. Perhaps
Cybertron does orbit a planet, but 30 or 50 AUs out. Either way, it
explains why Cybertron isn't covered with solar power collectors.
JimS
Gustavo Wombat
> Be it G1, RID, A/E/C, you may be asking yourself: why are the stories
> structured this way? Why did the writers include certain premises and
> not others, leading to certain kinds of stories? Well, what premises,
> and are they necessary to essentially Transformer-ish fiction, and if
> we explain them one way then what are the consequences?
>
> Here are three. Can you think of more?
>
> 1. Transformers have superluminal travel (ship or spacebridge) so they
> can commute to other exciting locales.
>
In the Cybertron is out of resources scenario, the battle is going to
move off Cybertron. It ends up on Earth because we care about Earth.
All the other potential Transformers Universe where it ends up
elsewhere, we just don't bother with.
> 3. The Decepticons prey upon Earth and incur Autobot retaliation,
> instead of tapping unclaimed resources in space.
4. Cybertron is out of resources -- definitely implied by #3 above,
but the root cause. It's a civilization that has run it's natural
course on Cybertron, and must now either expand or die.
5. Transformers history has been lost to the ages -- Whether it is the
Quinissons and their many experiments in the G1 cartoon, or the
budding in the G2 comic, or the restricted information on the Great
War in BW, or the Maximal's missing memory in BM, or the lost Fortress
Maximus in RID, or the Minicons on Armada, or the great pools of blue
energon in Energon, or the planet keys in Cybertron, or the AllSpark
from Animated and the Movie, or the first Ark and the Pretenders and
the seeded Energon in IDWverse or Shockwave's cloning experiments from
DW, nearly every Transformers series has been based on the lost
secrets of the ages coming back to cause problems. At least Animated
and the Movie have the Autobots knowing about the McGuffin that they
found.
Transformers are always presented as a culture that has lost it's way
and fallen from greatness. It's a common enough trope in science
fiction, appearing the Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and
certain episodes of Star Trek, among countless others, but it's
surprising that with this many Transformers universes, they all have
this as a key element.
And it's not like there's something about futuristic, sentient robots
that need to have their forgotten past popping up all the time... The
futuristic sentient robots interacting with present day Earth should
be enough drama on their own.
6. 4 million years of stasis lock for G1. Or 50, in the case of
Animated. And some unknown time for the minicons in Armada... Partly
related to the ideas behind #5, here it is the Transformers themselves
that are lost to the ages.
Much of this isn't needed, but it wouldn't quite feel like
Transformers without it.
Gustavo!
JimS
> 6. 4 million years of stasis lock for G1. Or 50, in the case of
> Animated. And some unknown time for the minicons in Armada... Partly
> related to the ideas behind #5, here it is the Transformers themselves
> that are lost to the ages.
The 4 million lost years kind of bothers me, from a dramatic
standpoint. Why introduce this idea if you're not going to go
somewhere with it? Especially in the cartoon, where Shockwave and
Cybertron were reintroduced almost immediately. If the Transformers
civilization was extinct except for a small crew on Earth, that'd
work. Or an idea executed along the lines of what Dreamwave did, with
the Transformers on Cybertron evolving in a different direction than
the Transformers on Earth. But as it stands, most official fiction
just glosses over the 4 million years.
JimS
Grebo
The sharp Jim Sorenson <jimsoren...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The 4 million lost years kind of bothers me, from a dramatic
> standpoint.
<snip>
> Or an idea executed along the lines of what Dreamwave did, with
> the Transformers on Cybertron evolving in a different direction than
> the Transformers on Earth. But as it stands, most official fiction
> just glosses over the 4 million years.
Yes. This is why I love (love Love LOVE) Dreamwave's idea of "The
Great Shutdown". Although I'm not super-keen on it happening because
Cybertron was healing itself (or whatever).
It would have been kinda cool for the G1 TFs to finally return to
Cybertron and find it totally without power, and everyone there in
stasis lock. Then they'd have to try and figure out a way to revive
their home planet -- the Autobots trying to do so without screwing
over the humans, and the Decepticons totally not caring about that
little detail. :-)
Grebo
SteveD
<Gustav...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Transformers are always presented as a culture that has lost it's way
>and fallen from greatness. It's a common enough trope in science
>fiction, appearing the Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and
>certain episodes of Star Trek, among countless others, but it's
>surprising that with this many Transformers universes, they all have
>this as a key element.
Good point. What's interesting about it is the number of characters who
*aren't* obsessed with "restoring Cybertron's GLORIOUS past!" - most of
them are quite happy to get on with their lives and live in the present.
-SteveD
SteveD
wrote:
>1. Transformers have superluminal travel (ship or spacebridge) so they
>can commute to other exciting locales.
>
>Unnecessary. For a being with a million-year lifespan, spending a few
>hundred or thousand on a subluminal interstellar trip wouldn't be
>onerous. And there are plenty of stories that can be told on a single
>planet or, if you need to stretch, star system.
It's less a matter of personal necessity than military advantage and
personal preference. You could spend three hours a day travelling to work
and another three home, but it's more convenient if it only takes twenty
minutes. On the military front, faster is almost always better.
I'd note that BM didn't use FTL tech, and it was a rarity in BW. I'd also
cite Masterforce, except they did a lot of stuff like "God Ginrai is
taking off for the moon / he's there!", throwing away any mention of
travel time.
-SteveD
Gustavo Wombat
> Wruf!
>
> The sharp Jim Sorenson <jimsoren...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > The 4 million lost years kind of bothers me, from a dramatic
> > standpoint.
> <snip>
> > Or an idea executed along the lines of what Dreamwave did, with
> > the Transformers on Cybertron evolving in a different direction than
> > the Transformers on Earth. But as it stands, most official fiction
> > just glosses over the 4 million years.
>
> Yes. This is why I love (love Love LOVE) Dreamwave's idea of "The
> Great Shutdown". Although I'm not super-keen on it happening because
> Cybertron was healing itself (or whatever).
I didn't like "The Great Shutdown", but I loved that they were
actually using the 4 million years for something.
> It would have been kinda cool for the G1 TFs to finally return to
> Cybertron and find it totally without power, and everyone there in
> stasis lock. Then they'd have to try and figure out a way to revive
> their home planet -- the Autobots trying to do so without screwing
> over the humans, and the Decepticons totally not caring about that
> little detail. :-)
It also would have been nifty to return to Cybertron to discover it a
battle scarred, unrecognizable wasteland, with the shattered remains
of Transformers here and there, and possibly roving drones. Do the
whole Beast Machines thing for a bit, mourn for their lost
civilization, and then discover that they are actually on the surface
of Unicron.
Gustavo!
G.B. Blackrock
>
> Add that to the idea that Cybertron doesn't seem to have a sun - at
> least, not before Beast Machines. The Marvel comics were explicit on
> this point, whereas in the Cartoon it's merely implied. Perhaps
> Cybertron does orbit a planet, but 30 or 50 AUs out. Either way, it
> explains why Cybertron isn't covered with solar power collectors.
>
> JimS
The cartoon doesn't really think about Cybertron's placement in space
very well at all. I mean, after "The Ultimate Doom," Cybertron MUST
still be in our OWN solar system! (And, indeed, still wreaking havoc
on all manner of planetary bodies, not to mention our own Earth, even
well beyond it's being kicked out of our immediate orbit.) It
certainly comes back conveniently enough for "Rebirth."
My two cents,
G.B. Blackrock
Phillip Thorne
>>1. Transformers have superluminal travel (ship or spacebridge) so they
>>can commute to other exciting locales.
>>
>>Unnecessary. For a being with a million-year lifespan, spending a few
>>hundred or thousand on a subluminal interstellar trip wouldn't be
>>onerous. And there are plenty of stories that can be told on a single
>>planet or, if you need to stretch, star system.
On Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:42:34 +0800, SteveD <use...@vo.id.au> wrote:
>It's less a matter of personal necessity than military advantage and
>personal preference. You could spend three hours a day travelling to work
>and another three home, but it's more convenient if it only takes twenty
>minutes. On the military front, faster is almost always better.
I don't deny it's a *story* convenience. And depending on the society
of the characters, they may or may not care about long periods being
out of touch.
My point (which I obviously didn't make clear) is that, if you break
the scriptwriting habit of zip-between-stars convenience, can you
still write entertaining stories? And if so, how do they change?
This way: The characters, so long as they're interacting with the
short-lived humans, are stuck on one planet. And if the writers want
to show Somewhere Else, it has to be done through a flashback.
>I'd note that BM didn't use FTL tech, and it was a rarity in BW.
Exactly. Both of those series managed to find plenty of stories on
*one* planet. Writers for sci-fantasy sometimes forget that planets
are *big* and varied places, so if they need somewhere exotic, they
put it on another planet... which requires some travel contrivance.
Which usually has unexamined knock-on effects. ("If they can do this,
why don't they just...")
>Masterforce, [...] did a lot of stuff like "God Ginrai is
>taking off for the moon / he's there!", throwing away any mention of
>travel time.
Visual SF tend to forget about travel time (possibly because they're
not written with maps and spreadsheets). "Iron Man flies from
California to Afghanistan... how many hours was he in the suit?" "The
Autobots hydroplaned from Oregon to the Middle East... shouldn't it be
night by then?"
It's especially galling when the show makes a big point of a deadline,
and then the characters seem to forget about it. (Side adventures in
s3 of "Avatar," I'm glowering at you...)
Phillip Thorne
>The cartoon doesn't really think about Cybertron's placement in space
>very well at all.
It wouldn't surprise me if the scriptwriters had two mental boxes, of
approximately equal size: "Earth" and "All Of Space."
>I mean, after "The Ultimate Doom," Cybertron MUST
>still be in our OWN solar system! (And, indeed, still wreaking havoc
>on all manner of planetary bodies, not to mention our own Earth, even
>well beyond it's being kicked out of our immediate orbit.)
It certainly would've changed the nature of G1 if the writers had,
say, shoved Cybertron out to around Luna's orbit (away from,
apparently, LEO). Or even if the explosion of Megatron's energy
freighter had knock^h^h^h^h^h pushed it into a different solar orbit,
and there was suddenly a world between Earth and Mars.
(And how does a point explosion not pulp the planet at the same time
it's propelled? More evidence for my "unstable energon has
antigravity effects" theory from early BW.)
>It certainly comes back conveniently enough for "Rebirth."
Points A and C make sense. Point B, the movie, in which the route
between Earth and Cybertron passes Junk and Quintessa, is... kinda
outta whack. (So, G1-Cybertron gets swapped for a different
G1-Cybertron from a parallel universe, this one with two moons...)
What is this, "Space:1999" travel physics, in which a world can fly
between star systems in a few weeks, and yet *slows down* every time?
Otherwise we're forced to believe that Junk and Quintessa are both
located in Sol's vicinity, possibly in the Kuiper Belt. Hey, the
Kuiper Belt is pretty darn big, and easy to lose things in. If the
Quintessons set up a homeworld there, it'd make sense that their
factory world and trash dump(s) would be in the same vicinity.
This would neatly explain the asteroid field that menaces Cybertron in
the G1 comic -- I'd more easily believe such an encounter if both were
in one star system, than random interstellar coincidence.
Phillip Thorne
>> I don't like the current TF 2007 MOVIE & Animated Megatron tons
>> stronger than Prime ordeal.
Later on Fri, 25 Jul 2008, Grebo wrote in surprise:
>What does that have to do with anything?
I sometimes have nightmares that I accidentally post totally random
non-sequiturs like this. I mean, I *like* non-sequiturs, and I even
wrote a personal e-newsletter called _The Non-Sequitur Express_ for a
while, but this is so out-of-left-field it makes you wonder if Deathy
was paying attention. Or was letting a cat walk on his keyboard and
transmit half-written drafts.
You know what I like? Cheap steel rectangular cookie sheets. They're
handy for sorting LEGO bricks while watching TV.
SteveD
wrote:
>(And how does a point explosion not pulp the planet at the same time
>it's propelled? More evidence for my "unstable energon has
>antigravity effects" theory from early BW.)
My own theory is that the energy radiation interacted with the warpscar
still surrounding Cybertron, making that particular bit of space itself
spasm and take Cybertron along with it. Possibly Cybertron was yanked back
to its original location, or somewhere nearby.
-SteveD