Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Monday, June 07, 2004

Oh my lord. Breakdancing Decepticons. I am going to file this in my "reasons why the war between the Transformers went on so long" file. Clearly they were enjoying the social life. Soundwave, of course, was always goign to be the one doing the dancing. He probably had salsa class on Wednesdays, on the grounds that it's a great place to meet women. Women dig Soundwave, because he has a cool voice and is a single parent.

The main reason for the interminable length of the Transformer wars, by the way, barring the fact that an inordinate amount of time was spent developing technologies that looked cool but were almost immediately copied by the other side (triple changers, combiners... they could have just stuck with rocks and had the whole thing over by teatime. No, not transforming rocks. Just rocks)and had no strategic effect whatsoever, was that whatever time they did not spend on R&D they plowed into demolition. It was always a far better idea to be a Transformer in a Transformer battle, almost guaranteeing survival, than a piece of scenery. The Transformers have a proud history of *demolishing* things. Scarcely a day goes by without one of them, through collateral damage, malice or incompetence, blowing up something big and important. So, they destroyed their cities without leaving a dent in each other, in much the manner of equally shit warriors the A-Team, the fatalities being from disruption to public services and confined primarily to civilians. As per usual.

This seems credible. However, by 2004, according to the movie (or 2006, depending on who you talk to), Cybertron was in the hands of the Decepticons, the Autobots having been driven off onto its two moons and their bases on Earth. Therefore, at some point there must have been some breakthrough by the Decepticons that enabled them to win the Cybertronian war. After long cogitation, I have reached the following conclusions.

1) Transformers are, in general, pretty hard to kill. This was what always confused me about the death of Optimus Prime – surely they could just replace the damaged widget, hammer out a few dents and have him roadworthy again? All most peculiar. I suspect a JFK-style cover-up.

2) With the exception of Optimus Prime, Autobots cannot fight for toffee.

3) With the exception of Megatron, neither can the Decepticons. The level of ordnance unleashed in a Transformer battle expressed as a ratio of the amount of actual structural damage done to the shapeshifting metal beasties themselves would make any quartermaster weep. Basically, they suck ass.

Except…clearly everyone had been putting in some work during the twenty years between our modern tales and Transformers: The Movie, as some of the shots were actually hitting their targets. The joy of practice. However, if I recall, not one Decepticon is really wiped out by the Autobot shelling – they are loaded into Astrotrain injured and dumped in space later.

All this leads us to only one possible timeline.

Somewhere between 1984 and 2004, intensive training allowed the Transformers on both sides to improve their accuracy to some level involving actually hitting each other once in a while. The fact that both achieve this bespeaks some sort of independent contractor.

Unfortunately, once their shots actually hit Transformer once in a while, they discovered that their guns were utterly ineffectual. Against oil tanks, towers, rock formations, futuristic buildings…all good. Against Transformers, utterly cack. Completely ineffectual. Embarrassed silence settles over the battleground as the warring factions realize that they may as well have spent the last three million years down the (no longer extant) pub.

However, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, superior Decepticon science (or, to put it another way, Soundwave. See above) produces a gun that *actually* works on Autobots. Nice one. Autobots thus driven headlong from Cybertron, although reports from survivors of Decepticons using guns that did more than blister paint were largely dismissed; as confusion had turned to boredom and increasing ataraxy, and thence absolutely enormous drug abuse among the disenfranchised and deeply unengaged (both literally and figuratively) warriors. After all, what point was there in eternal vigilance when a surprise attack would at worst melt your wheels, if the enemy had a chance to play his weapon over your body for about half an hour before you turned around?

So, the element of surprise is still intact when the newly-functional Megatron attacks the Autobot shuttle. Which is why Prowl, Ironhide, Ratchet, Brawn et al go for the traditional tactic of running in to close with the enemy, since there really isn’t much else to do. Before crying, “Oi! Shit! That hurt! OK, time out! TIME OUT! Stop shooting at us!” and expiring in some consternation.

So, in conclusion, for a long time the Transformers were indeed unilaterally shit, but between 1984 and about 2001 they could have conquered the universe, had they only tried using their pathetically inadequate weaponry on literally any race other than the Transformers themselves. This, I fear, is one of the perversities of galactic history.

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