Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
The movie origin is kinda like that too - the Transformers who became Decepticons under the leadership of Lord High Protector Megatron were soldiers in Cybertron's defence forces and fought in the front line. Optimus Prime and the Transformers who became Autobots were relagated to more 'back seat' duties such as guarding the AllSpark and conducting excavations and doing scientific research etc. Ironhide was part of the advanced defence forces and would've been part of Megatron's Decepticons, but early on in the piece he felt morally conflicted after the Cybertronian military reorganised itself as the Decepticon army, and defected to the Autobots.

RE: Defiance.
Really? Cheers, I didn't know/remember that. That makes the Movie backstory a bit more bearable IMO. Now if they can just dispense with the magical Allspark and include transformation as an 'evolutionary quirk' I'll be set. Oh God I'm thinking about this way too much again...damn.
Quote Originally Posted by Lord_Zed View Post
The only problem with that origin story is it doesn't explain why all the TF's spontaneously get individual personalities with which they make those conscious choices. If the TF's were all just tools that decided the Quintessons were bad then wouldn't they be more like Skynet at the Quintessons are John Connor.
No Wi-Fi on Cybertron?
Seriously, I'd be going for a slow evolution of individual personality through acquired experience a la the Puppet Master (and to a lesser extent the Tachikoma) from Ghost in the Shell. Other examples would be R2-D2 and C-3PO (Children of the Jedi has a good example of this when C-3PO talks about his feelings towards memory wipes), or 'Andrew' from Asimov's Bicentennial Man. Prime retained his memories of being Orion Pax, as did Galvatron from Megatron, so it's quite possible the pre-Transformers would continue developing as they were recycled and upgraded by the Quints, and if I was being offlined and brought back over and over again 'cos my creators were too lazy to build more 'bots I'd get pretty ticked sooner or later too. Likewise, A-3 and Beta's group who started the rebellion were basically a small, rag-tag splinter cell of revolutionaries rather than there being a spontaneous mass uprising across Cybertron.
Quote Originally Posted by RageOnTheRoads View Post
But it would be just as easy to imagine that the highly advanced aliens could posses technology that removes the spark from the body, and then stores the raw energy and memory on a small device no larger than my thumb nail.
Floppy disk or nothing!