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dovianax โ BIRTH OF MACHINE
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Published: 2010-05-03 17:35:56 +0000 UTC; Views: 16886; Favourites: 420; Downloads: 495
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Transformers WERE actually created by a Spaghetti Monster!
One thing I always found fascinating about Transformers was the theology of it. But something I've found even more fascinating was the debate on the theology of it. Mostly surrounding the origins of your favorite transforming robots.
First we are told about the Quintessons, and how Cybertron was a giant factory to manufacture robots. Then Furman would add an almost religious tone to the mythos with the addition of a Spark and the story of Primus and Unicron.
I personally prefer the Quints idea. It just makes more sense, giving the Transformers a chance to evolve from humble beginnings and bring themselves up to the point where they are now. Also, having the Autobots be consumer goods and the Cons military hardware makes more sense in the grand scheme of things because rather than have a grand creator make them all first and then they magically choose sides, you are giving them a core programing, or a "nature" that they simply can't escape by mere choice, which can justify a war that spans millions of years.
Of course, this is only my opinion, and I'm sure many of you out there will chime in with your 2ยข, making this debate even more fascinating. After all, this is cartoon religion . Ahh the ridiculousness of it.
As for the piece itself, I always wanted to do a twist in Michelangelo's birth of Man piece illustrating the Quints in the Godly position. I did the piece in rendered pencil first, adding color through Photoshop thinking it'd be easier. I guess it was, after I got used to the whole mess. By the way, for as much as I hated the Quints when I was a kid, they sure were fun to draw. So how about bringing them back IDW... And bring on the Sharkticons while you're at it.
Anyways... enjoy!
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Comments: 127
Heh. Good one. I went with the Quint explanation myself...and took a twist on the Primus legend from events here on Earth. In my version, he was an ordinary person who got deified in the re-telling of his story as eons passed.
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Sounds familiar... Hehehehe...
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Aw scrap. I hate the Quintesson origin and always wrote it off as them lying about their claim to the planet (obviously they may have invaded it multiple times). But it obviously varies from continuity and I guess there are ways to reconcile it with the Primus/Unicron story with the Cybertron having been an organic planet in that universe until they found Primus' essence and stored it in Vector Sigma (which is also my theory on the AllSparks from the films and Animated).
Lastly, I think the notion of the Autobots and Decepticons being consumer and military hardware takes away from their free will (but then so does the notion of Unicron's scratches at Primus' body leaving his essence to influence the Decepticons).
Anyway, enough fan mumbling, I think your piece was laugh out loud funny and hope you can do other versions of The Creation of Optimus Prime with Primus, the AllSpark and so on.
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Well, as much as I hate the Furman take on things, in the name of fairness, i might just take you up on that someday.
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Heck, I don't know if to laugh or stare in awe, this great!
I think Furman had plans for bringing the Quintessons to the IDW-verse, but then... well, AHM happened, I guess.
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Who says you can't do both?
I really hope he doesn't. We already know how he feels about them and i just know he's gonna shit all over it.
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XD
I wouldn't worry about that, he seems to have been banished to the no-man's land of Bayformersland.
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I would just add to the debate that, in G2 comics, Furman further developed the concept: Transformers had a nature they could not escape, until they started becoming self-aware, and felt a need to go beyond their pre-programmed limits.
That's something I appreciate of, and I like to think that's what defines a sentient being.
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I agree, but if they had a full capacity to use free will and judgment their war wouldn't have lasted MILLIONS of years!!! Even us hairless monkeys know when it's time to throw in the towel, but after such a long time it's kind of obvious that something within these guys just can't switch off when it comes to War and their factions.
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This is brillant on so many levels! And the "Spaghetti Monster" reference... priceless :*D
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Oh, THIS is going to be a fun one to comment on!
So I don't forget--that's a magnificent rendering of Optimus in his "classical" form. I really like the way the light from the Quintesson is falling across Optimus--you did great stuff with the shadows. You nailed the feel of the original painting, too--Optimus looks just about as unconcerned as Adam does in Michelangelo's version.
On the matter of the origins of the Transformers--personally, I've mashed together the canons to reconcile them (as much as they can be reconciled) and clear matters up for purposes of my own fic-writing and RP. Vector Sigma and the Matrix are a couple of problems, as is Optimus' death and rebirth in the classic cartoon. But with some fudging and a little embroidering of canon, most of it fits.
When I write or play, Autobots have Sparks, which are roughly equivalent to a human soul, in that they're the root of individuality, and that when it leaves the body, the bot is dead.
Where Sparks come from--up through Optimus' generation, that was usually Vector Sigma or another of the factory nodes built deep in the depths of Cybertron by the Quintessons. When the Quints first designed Cybertron, they included programming and activation nodes wherever they would be convenient. The nodes for the commercial products were naturally coded with software to program and Spark tractable droids with imperatives to coordinate and cooperate to get the work done. Nodes that handled primarily military hardware had a slightly different set of programming imperatives, meant to make droids who could not only fight, but also cope with the vagaries of warfare--i.e., disruptions in the chain of command due to casualties, unexpected hazards, massive damage well away from a safe repair bay...the differences in functional priorities are why Autobots tend toward gregariousness, loyalty, and a lot of casual chatter, while Decepticons as a rule don't much like anyone, even each other, don't hesitate to shift their loyalty to whoever seems strongest at the moment, and aren't exactly masters of conversation.
Over time, the demands of various customers got more detailed and complex--and the Quintessons reprogrammed and upgraded the activation nodes accordingly. What they didn't foresee was that some of that programming would eventually become self-aware, and start replicating itself. The droids started acting strangely, suffering odd breakdowns, and even disobeying commands, because they were now being programmed with the rudiments of individual minds.
The Matrix was originally just the database of experiences shared among bots sophisticated enough to handle it and add to it. The early contributors were both consumer products and military hardware--it only became the Autobot Matrix after A3 (a.k.a. Alpha Trion) gathered up as much of that database as he had in his personal files and could find in other sources from the Golden Age and coded it all into a device that would also pick up Transformer history going forward that the matrix became The Matrix.
Judging from how Optimus acts and some of the things he says in the mid-80s cartoon, he doesn't consistently remember his own early history. Presuming that robotic life forms don't forget unless their memory cores are damaged or someone tampers with their memories, I think Alpha Trion somehow blocked a few crucial chunks of Optimus' memory--and did it without leaving traces. (One of my pet theories about Autobot psychology is that they get a bit panicky when they can't recall something. We humans are used to forgetting whether or not there's another box of macaroni in the pantry and where we left the book we were reading. Decepticon programming allows for a lot of damage, to memory cores as well as everything else. Autobots, though, have a carryover from their pre-sapient days--a memory gap may contain some important instruction, so the safest thing to do is to seek immediate repair whenever a memory problem is detected.) Why Alpha Trion made Optimus forget so much--even the fact that he was (re)built by Alpha Trion, I have no idea--but it left room for the Cybertronian concepts of Primus and Unicron to develop. The Quintessons (the slave masters and those who'd deliberately kicked Cybertron out of its orbit and into deep space to starve the rebellious robots into submission) were replaced as creators by Primus, a deity that believed to be the Power that somehow created Cybertron and its inhabitants, and programmed each Spark to be a unique individual. At that point, most of the activation nodes the Quintessons had built were long since inactive, either shut down or destroyed. There may have been multiple nodes referred to as "Vector Sigma"--the Autobots and Decepticons who ventured into the depths of the planet looking for it didn't go looking for another one once they'd reached Vector Sigma and had their new comrades up and running. Primus was far more palatable a concept than the thought of being the product of a neglected factory computer downloading whatever program options it happened to be processing at the moment into a body designed and built by the descendants of droids who hadn't supposed to be capable of thinking at all.
Unicron, on the other hand, was borrowed from the mythology of the rest of the galaxy. The world-eater stories had filtered their way to Cybertron in the days before the expulsion of the Quintessons, and Unicron made the perfect demon to the Primus deity.
Perpetuating Transformer life got more difficult when the last activation node--the last Vector Sigma--finally went offline. That and the energy starvation of Cybertron were the real reasons for what Maximals refer to as the Great Upgrade. The big energy-hungry Sparks and bodies of the Great War era just couldn't be fed (especially once contact with Earth was lost, for whatever reason)--so those who were still alive downsized, which gave them better fuel efficiency but dramatically cut down their lifespans, if the crew of the Axalon are any measure of the average ages of Maximals. If memory serves, to them, the Great Upgrade was about three hundred years ago, but not one of them personally witnessed it. The changes in the culture also seem to indicate shorter generations.
I think Maximals (and presumably Predacons) use what was for the Great War generation something of a backup-kludge method of reproducing. The rather simplistic minds of the Dinobots Wheeljack created are probably a side effect of his using his Spark to "give them a jump". It worked, more or less, and perhaps in a few centuries the Dinobots' Sparks would have "grown" into full-strength Sparks, but it was a long way from safe for WJ and didn't produce full-fledged Autobots in a few minutes the way Vector Sigma did. After Vector Sigma went offline, though, "jump-Sparking" was the only way to Spark new Cybertronians. Which makes them the first Cybertronians to have children in the sense that we biological types think of it. That process, whatever it is, might also shorten a bot's lifespan. It's probably safer for all concerned if there are more than two "parents", just to make the draw on each individual "adult" smaller, and to mix up the programming imperatives a little more. The mixing is why there can be individuals like Dinobot and Blackarachnia among the BW generation--before the Upgrade, personality programming that complex--and that deeply conflicted--just didn't happen often. Vector Sigma tended to align programs along the lines of military hardware or commercial products.
Whoo--long ramble. Can you tell I've spent a lot of time in traffic thinking about this sort of thing?
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LOL!!! Now there's a mouth full!
It's funny to see how everyone has their own explanation for the origins. I just hope Hasbro or Takara can come up with something that ties it all together without sucking!
You look like you pretty much covered all the bases, here's to hoping they do it too.
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Thats really awesome <3
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I am loving the deeper meaning found in Transformers being expressed through these works dude, keep it up!
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YW I will look at the pic from time to time for good ref if that's okay w/you
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Of course!!!
Glad you like it that much!
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This was one of the best satires of this piece i've ever seen,together with the Simpson's one!Well done!
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Oh wow!! Now THAT'S a compliment!
Thanks!
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LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL very original, love it bro
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Excellent picture! It's so nice to find someone who shares the (exact) same sentiments as me regarding Transformers origin. The Quintesson origin is just so much more logical and inspiring.
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hehehe... ain't it though!?
Glad you liked it!
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Love this piece!
I like to blend the Quint idea with the spark and Primus idea. My personal interpretation is that the Quints created the Transformers but never intended for them to be "alive". It was Primus who eventually took pitty on them and gave them sentience. I also like the idea of there being Transformer "atheists" who believe that they evolved their sentience as well as there being zealots for Primus (Sunstorm? XD). It also makes an interesting conflict about what the Matrix actually is. Some believe may its a link to their god, and others that its just a power item. But this is all just how I view the transformers world. ^_^
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But if the Quints did create the Transformers, wouldn't that mean tat they also created Cybertron and thus the concept of Primus would be null? Then again, in the Quints version, Cybertron's central intelligence is Vector Sigma, and in a sense, that could be Primus.
Yeah, I don't like the whole religious zealots or heralds like the "Fallen" and all that.
Well, according to the show, the Matrix is actually the accumulation of all Autobot knowledge stored after every leader before it falls. After a while it became a source of knowledge and power.
Glad you love it!
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Meh, just because the Quints created the Transformers doesn't inherently mean they created Cybertron. Though, I thought in the cartoon it said that Cybertron was originally an asteroid and it was the Transformers/the Quint slaves who built it up into the metal "planet" that it became. But yeah, Vector Sigma could be Primus. I kind of considered VS to be some sort of extension/tap of him.
I think zealots are fun. ^_^ Having extremes always makes things interesting and entertaining. ^^
I'm not just going off of the show though, but combining all the mythos and some of my own ideas to make it make sense/more interesting. I think the reason the Matrix has the accumulation of Autbot knowledge is that all Transformer sparks are pieces of Primus' spark and the Matrix is a link to Primus. Again, its just my take on things. ^_^ It just fills in the random (gaping) plot holes for me. ^_^
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I love you for putting words to this whole semantic mess that basically covers my veiws on it very nicely. Thank you for the brilliant veiwpoint.
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Very clever.
And great colouring.
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haahahaahhaahahaha soo awesome i love you
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Thanks for the love!
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wait, did the quintessons move to quintessa after the transformer wars started, or did they come from quintessa after the wars? its been a long time since i was the 5 faces of darkess.
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Well, they supposedly built Cybertron and the transformers to sell them as product, and they also used them as entertainment with the Arena combats, you know, the usual oppression. So then the robots rebel after they develop consciousness and realize that shit ain't cool. After that the Quints leave, and after a period of peace and development the Cons start to show what they were made for and began to dominate the Autobots and began to oppress them. For a while the cons dominated but the Autobots (being the more intelligent of the both) developed the art of transformation and brought the war to a stalemate. Then pretty much nothing has changed after that and been fighting ever since.
But that's pretty much the gist of it.
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i agree more with the quintesons building the transformers over the primus/unicron theory. but, unicron had to come from SOMEwhere, but then i suppose if the quintesons could build a planet, they could build a transforming planet.
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The Michelangelo them is nothing short of genius. The art is quite well rendered too. Your geometry is well maintained even with the complex pose that OP is in.
I'm with you on the religion, but it's a crazy subject. Despite my love of TF the whole premise is one big joke of continuity. Hell, in the cartoon alone there were three different origins of the Constructicons as well as Megatron.
But I do like the idea of worker programming vs. warrior programming. Makes the most sense and is easily conveyed.
Great work. Definitely worth a
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