Sometimes, it doesn't pay to examine a hobby too closely
Especially when the fiction associated with that hobby was aimed at ten-year-olds and slapped together haphazardly back in the 80s, which then became the mythos-core for a quarter-century of more fiction aimed at ten-year-olds.
And although several products could fit this description, I speak especially of Transformers, the collection of battling-alien-robot stories cobbled together to sell rather nifty and artistically engineered chunks of plastic.
There are so many holes in the Transformers mythos that you could drive Optimus Prime and his trailer through it sideways, but one thing in particular is bugging me at the moment. Namely: in order to be who they are and do what they do, Cybertronians would need certain levels and types of technology. But given the necessary tech, it becomes painfully obvious that a 20-foot-tall robot built largely out of joints and hinges is one of the most ineffective forms that a robotic intelligence could take.
Once you have controllable forcefields and/or remote manipulation tech (whether in the form of TK, tractor beams or antigrav), you may as well just pack all your parts into a sphere and armour the hell out of it, then use the fields for picking things up and getting from A to B. Having jointed limbs, exposed tyres and extra volume/surface when you're a warbot is just dumb, as is devoting a significant percentage of your mass to mechanical shapechanging systems. And any branch of the fiction which allows subspace is worse - why have any of your mass hanging out on this side of the dimension barrier getting shot at if you can tuck it away like a dust-speck-sized TARDIS?
The only thing that even remotely makes sense is that there's something seriously screwed up with Cybertronian psyches, and it's been specifically rigged to be nearly impossible to bootstrap out of, which probably means that there's some kind of active suppression going on by a higher power which prevents a fairly intelligent, self-aware and moderately individualist species capable of intragalactic (and sometimes interdimensional and time-) travel from either delegating the forced-evolution problem to a computer or being restructured more efficiently by a wandering alien design consultant.
I suspect it's a set of deeply-rooted compulsions, among which seem to be:
1) Must be able to transform (thus Nucleon and the Beast Machines virus causing mental/physical breakdowns, and bodiless detention centres most likely causing mental deterioration after extended incarceration)
2) Must protect/control the planet Cybertron
Interestingly, the first compulsion seems to have been a later addition to Cybertronian physiology. My own guess would be that the ability to switch bodyforms and sensor suites allowed a more advanced form of digital garbage collection in the Cybertronian brain, sort of taking the place of human sleep and allowing mental obsolescence to be staved off much longer, leading to longer 'lives' at the expense of general mental flexibility, speed of archived memory recall etc. Few Cybertronians from pre-transformation days would still be operational, and those would either be senile, have spent the time in stasis, or have learned some mental garbage-collection tricks of their own (and probably be a bit less prone to behavioural pattern reinforcement, as well as not actually needing to transform to stay sane, assuming they came late to transformation-capable bodies).
Thoughts?
And although several products could fit this description, I speak especially of Transformers, the collection of battling-alien-robot stories cobbled together to sell rather nifty and artistically engineered chunks of plastic.
There are so many holes in the Transformers mythos that you could drive Optimus Prime and his trailer through it sideways, but one thing in particular is bugging me at the moment. Namely: in order to be who they are and do what they do, Cybertronians would need certain levels and types of technology. But given the necessary tech, it becomes painfully obvious that a 20-foot-tall robot built largely out of joints and hinges is one of the most ineffective forms that a robotic intelligence could take.
Once you have controllable forcefields and/or remote manipulation tech (whether in the form of TK, tractor beams or antigrav), you may as well just pack all your parts into a sphere and armour the hell out of it, then use the fields for picking things up and getting from A to B. Having jointed limbs, exposed tyres and extra volume/surface when you're a warbot is just dumb, as is devoting a significant percentage of your mass to mechanical shapechanging systems. And any branch of the fiction which allows subspace is worse - why have any of your mass hanging out on this side of the dimension barrier getting shot at if you can tuck it away like a dust-speck-sized TARDIS?
The only thing that even remotely makes sense is that there's something seriously screwed up with Cybertronian psyches, and it's been specifically rigged to be nearly impossible to bootstrap out of, which probably means that there's some kind of active suppression going on by a higher power which prevents a fairly intelligent, self-aware and moderately individualist species capable of intragalactic (and sometimes interdimensional and time-) travel from either delegating the forced-evolution problem to a computer or being restructured more efficiently by a wandering alien design consultant.
I suspect it's a set of deeply-rooted compulsions, among which seem to be:
1) Must be able to transform (thus Nucleon and the Beast Machines virus causing mental/physical breakdowns, and bodiless detention centres most likely causing mental deterioration after extended incarceration)
2) Must protect/control the planet Cybertron
Interestingly, the first compulsion seems to have been a later addition to Cybertronian physiology. My own guess would be that the ability to switch bodyforms and sensor suites allowed a more advanced form of digital garbage collection in the Cybertronian brain, sort of taking the place of human sleep and allowing mental obsolescence to be staved off much longer, leading to longer 'lives' at the expense of general mental flexibility, speed of archived memory recall etc. Few Cybertronians from pre-transformation days would still be operational, and those would either be senile, have spent the time in stasis, or have learned some mental garbage-collection tricks of their own (and probably be a bit less prone to behavioural pattern reinforcement, as well as not actually needing to transform to stay sane, assuming they came late to transformation-capable bodies).
Thoughts?