@Petra StopThePrimesFromNamingShit2k17 That is incredibly depressing (also getting poor Ambulon-the-leg stuck with that name is just cruel wtf) and I am tempted to blame Shocky because I strongly suspect that any sort of scientific fuckery on the 'Con side is hist fault, can you confirm that
@TheOwlet Cannot confirm or deny but I will say Ambulon manages to run into one of the only situations where transforming into a single leg is useful!
@Petra HOW THO (for real, how do you end up being useful when you're literally a disembodied leg. Do they mount him on something and kick someone's ass in catapult fashion is that what happens?)
@TheOwlet I guess you'll have to read MTMTE some time and find out! Or I can spoil you on it under a spoiler.
I think IDW does reference Devastator as being the only natural combiner in ages, and the enigma couuuuuld have been involved, but the storytelling framed it like the enigma had been lost forever, I thought. And I want to say there are references to combiners insistent history, though the enigma may or may not have been involved with any of those. Plus Monstructor is technically a combiner! A mad science frankencombiner who's even more out of control then your average combiner, and I'm not sure he can properly de-combine now that he's been assembled. (also the names of the other bots in Ambulon's group are AMAZING. I don't remember all of them, but I do remember Abdominus and Arm-or. Everything about mtmte is AMAZING, 11/10, definitely recommend)
@Petra curse you, Kaida is already waving them in front of me and I know there are like A Fuckton of them comics. Just spoil me I feel like being in this thread I have probably been spoiled already because i have no self-control and click all spoilers.
@spockandawe I'm reframing that to 'don't let the giant robots name anything jesus christ who thought this was a good idea' But do tell me more about the Frankencombiner and don't be shy about spoilers. Give me that sweet sweet knowledge *grabby hands*
If you start with just mtmte and skip the two crossover events, it's much more manageable! There's a little overlap between storylines, but mtmte is mostly off in space on the party bus. Minus the crossovers, I want to say it's like... ~55 issues? Or Last Stand Of The Wreckers is a much much shorter miniseries about redshirts and propaganda done by the same amazing writer who's driving mtmte right now. Though if you check that out, I definitely recommend looking up the extra prose stories too.
Spoiler: Okay so Ambulon defects to the Autobots and trains as a medic and ends up serving in a remote medical outpost at a place called Delphi. Delphi gets struck with an artificially designed plague. Since everyone seems to be getting it and then basically liquifying on the inside and dying, the medics aren't quite sure what's spreading it, although they do their level best not to touch the liquified bits with their bare plating. It turns out they ALL got infected via a 'sound-bomb' released earlier, with infection being able to spread after that via the, well, liquid goop. But symptoms only show up after someone's transformed at least once. Since Ambulon turns into a literal mothefucking leg, he never transforms as a matter of course, and is thus left perfectly healthy. EDIT: And since he's asymptomatic, he's not puking goop on anyone, so I don't think it can spread from him either at this incubation stage, although it still needs to get dealt with. Some of the patients are okay bc they're too sick from other stuff to transform, although with everyone dying around them there's less people to care for them.
Ahaha, I'm not AS on top of this as I wish, because a lot of it happened in the phase one comics, which were of.... erratic quality. Jhiaxus is a mad scientist type with a history of majorly fucking up the people he experiments on, and I thiiiiink think he was the one responsible for this. Monstructor was an attempt to artificially create a combiner, which has happened a number of times (bots joke in the current comics canon about how hard the leaders have been trying to get more combiners). But I think Monstructor is the only successful one. "Successful" because dude is crazy as heck, and has all the single-minded destruction going on that other combiners have, but without a leader steering, or intra-combiner cooperation. He doesn't show up too often, because combiners REALLY throw off the balance of your story if you're not careful. But Optimus has a fight with him in early, early phase one, Omega Supreme has fought him in the past, and... I lost track of all the combining that was going on when the enigma showed back up, but SOMEBODY killed him. Monstructor was actually less interesting as a character than I would have hoped, because he was more of a tool and less of a CHARACTER :p He was pretty much always being controlled from the outside, and didn't have much will of his own. I do wish we'd gotten more, because it was a cool idea, but I also don't know what I would have wanted the writers to do with him.
@Petra that's amazing also that sounds like the robot version of a hemorrhaging fever i am deeply interested in how a soundbomb works to transmit a disease (hostile override of selfrepair nanites? ohhh the possibilities....) @spockandawe Yeah I can see how that would be a problem in writing, if I understand that correctly, they're essentially mobile WMDs which makes them hella tricky, especially if you remove any remaining bits of personality. Though the concept of a frankencombiner is still hella interesting by virtue of existing.
Devastator was the first successful non-Enigma combiner, but was built by Shockwave and Bombshell. Successful because the IDW Constructicons all have roughly the same personalities anyway. Also, fun fact: some bots who are part of a combiner need to regularly combine in order to retain mental stability. The Constructicons are such bots. The Aerialbots just don't decombine at all. Speaking of, the Aerialbots' bodies and minds reconfigured themselves on their own, essentially, to be able to form Superion. The combining was a coping mechanism against an outside influence, but the reconfiguration was done without any other scientists/engineers/medics involved.
Yeah, there's got to be something encoded in the sound that gets processed in the brain and then overrides some stuff. Basically a very clever way to hack? One other character is protected from the initial infection bc he's in a soundproof room at the time.
Ahhh, I always forget about Superion XD Who's extra interesting, because a few of his component bots get killed, and there are volunteers to basically be subsumed into this other entity. It doesn't get lingered over, but it's FASCINATING. Spoiler: suicide stuff? Given characters like Whirl, Chromedome, and Red Alert, I wonder if that would have been an appealing option for someone who's given up on life and wants to stop being THEM, but doesn't necessarily want to die. Maybe less Red Alert, but with Whirl the thing that sets him off in the moment is getting kicked out of His Group, and Chromedome just... revolves around other people so much. I'm not noodling through that in more detail while I'm on mobile, but that is so INTERESTING.
ok I BLAME YOU ALL FOR THIS but I finally made a transformers OC. Her name is Jet Lag. She's a seeker and she flies into walls a lot. (seriously, for real. I should have come up with her a long time ago.)
welcome to hell!! welcome to hell!!!! eta bc quickposter's regret: you should bring her to the Shitposting Rave to join the robot takeover play with the other Seekers!!
A (chain of) threads over in Galley's Turn, the RP forum! Kind of just an in-character hangout space, low/no-pressure "game" where people can drop in and out without worrying about things like "context" and "continuity". (Or fandom or lack thereof. OCs, canon characters, and multiple iterations of both are all welcome!) We make new threads every thousand pages because otherwise the page numbers go wonky apparently, so this is the most recent one! The OOC thread is here as well if you ever need it. edit (I am incapable of putting all my thoughts down in one go tonight apparently): "robot takeover" is a joke about our ever-expanding herd of robot OCs, who occaaaaaaasionally clog up the rave because the entire/a good portion of the Dramatis Transformae gang is online at once but we aren't off in our Real RP Thread for whatever reason :P
