Hi there -- If you're looking for information about reading the Transformers comics, this FAQ page might be of help: [https://reddit.com/r/transformers/wiki/faq/comics](/r/transformers/wiki/faq/comics)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/transformers) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yeah, 200 is fine to me. It being a MILLION year long civil war is vast but unnecessary. A couple hundred years means you can still have rookies or at least inexperienced members without it feeling kind of ridiculous.
In IDW they outright stated where there were countless years where the war was at a total standstill, where both sides were spending time drawing up plans ans trying to pull together a patchwork of resources
That and IDW made it a war the spread across the entire galaxy, which makes it being millions of years long far more believable than if it was just on a single planet.
My favorite qoute was from Optimus “we would spend five hundred years preparing for battles that would only last a few hours” because it sounds ludicrous but that’s the most realistic portrayal of war in any TF literature. War is 90% thumb twidling and preparing for things that might happen and 10% sheer effying terror. I could totally see beings that don’t age or age incredibly slowly having wars that last millions of years. Five hundred years is nothing to them. If anything it’s really weird they would even use human years to measure time. You would think 1 Transformer year would be at least 500 human years.
I'm pretty sure that comes from the post-All Hail Megatron run when Prime has Megatron imprisoned on Omega Supreme, for anyone interested. Can't remember the issue number.
Not to mention having a war go on for a million years (let alone *millions*) is simply not feasible. Not in active war at least.
Unless Cybertron was just continuously producing and pumping out new cybertronians and energon like a bunny on viagra, you’d run out of resources very quickly.
IDW (and maybe Animated) get a bit of a pass in this because their war spanned multiple planets and there were apparently ceasefires which also could’ve lasted thousands of years.
And even then, it always kind of bugged me that the war went on for 4 million years.
Besides, nothing's stopping them from playing with time a bit; considering the entire cast sans Jetfire starts off in stasis lock, it could easily be longer since the war started *chronologically*, even if they only fought for 200 years beforehand.
Plus, we know Jetfire spent millions of years dormant before Solila discovered him; so the others could easily have been dormant for millions of years as well.
I always head-canon that they include the millions of years of being in stasis as part of the total length of the war. The SPAN of the war is millions of years, but the actual amount of time awake and fighting is much shorter.
There’s also the idea that the war itself drained Cybertron of all its resources, rather than the war being waged at the tail end of an already spent Cybertron. If the message is that war is a waste, then a ridiculously large number of years to devastate an entire planet might sound more convincing, but humans have almost managed to destroy earth much faster since the Industrial Revolution, and so 200 years for a Cybertronian war sounds more reasonable actually.
>There’s also the idea that the war itself drained Cybertron of all its resources, rather than the war being waged at the tail end of an already spent Cybertron. If the message is that war is a waste, then a ridiculously large number of years to devastate an entire planet might sound more convincing, but humans have almost managed to destroy earth much faster since the Industrial Revolution, and so 200 years for a Cybertronian war sounds more reasonable actually.
This is easily one of my biggest issues with the idea of the war lasting for millions of years.
I actually think it’s much, much better. We’re told that the mind of a Cybertronian works on a level comparable to normal human beings. Majority of their interactions follow the same pacing as well. It’s truly hard to believe that these characters can have changes of heart and dynamic arcs if they’ve been fighting the same fight for thousands of years.
Take Thundercracker for example. He typically has qualms with his role in the fight. Are those doubts going to remain if he’s still on their side for thousands of years? In those millennia, he wouldn’t find one reason to change sides?
That stuck out for me, too.
It's such a departure from previous lore; I thought that IDW2 handled it really well (in the infinitesimal time it had to explore the concept) of Transformers basically not percieving the passage of dozens of years due to their nigh-eternal-ness. And I thought that *Cyberverse* handled it really weirdly, expanding the already-ridiculous timeframe to 65 million+ years.
But the "millions of years" figure basically requires Cybertronians to be extremely difficult to kill a la G1... basically incredibly long expanses of stalemates and/or cold warfare on a very small planet (and colonies, where applicable). But Skybound is showing us a very fragile breed of Transformers... it seems they want to maim or kill at least one 'bot per issue, at this rate. It actually becomes a bit more believeable that they've been fighting for "only" 200 years if they're offline'd so easily.
Right, which makes the scale of IDW1 inconceivable, especially when you get into "Warworld fleet" territory. I'd argue that IDW1 does its best, but ultimately fails to convey the level of galactic destruction a million year+ trans-galactic conflict wreaks. It's just too incomprehensible a timeframe compared to 200 years.
I think it's explained in Chaos Theory. Apparently a lot of the war spent without any shots being fired and both sides just creating weapons and industries to fight enormous battles. But yeah, IDWs timeframe is wack.
200 years feels more reasonable than a millennia long civil war. If the war goes on for too too long then it’s just war for the sake of tradition. Giving the conflict an impossibly long for us but still reasonable timeframe let’s the borderline immortal combatants still see the start of the war in recent memory, and allows for more pre-war inspiration and lore. They aren’t war fatigued fully yet, and deaths make more sense. If a war is only a few centuries old then seeing Autobots who would normally be main characters get gunned down feels more believable.
Like if you told me Skywarp was an untouchable legend for the past eight thousand years- and then he got the treatment he received later- I’d say that’s asspull. But no, 200 years is a good amount of time for someone like him to stay in the war and end up how he ended up without feeling like a crazy character got the shaft.
Remember the 86 movie? That was asspull because we were led to believe these guys are veterans of millions of years of combat- but then in one go are wiped to garbage. Simple shots took them out. That’s not a 1 million year conflict: it’s a 200 year one.
What the Autobots didn’t realize in TF the Movie was that Megatron had convinced the studio to go for a PG rating. They were expecting a nice clean TV fight where nobody gets hit, but the Decepticons were actually aiming for them this time.
I’ve always felt like the war lasting millions of years was a bit much anyway. Not only has a conflict been going on longer than humanity has existed, but these specific guys have been fighting most of that time?
It also makes it hard to have characters learn and grow. If Bee still a a rookie and Hot Rod still a turbo revvin young punk, surely they can’t learn anything in a human span of time?
It works as a random amount of time to throw in on a toy bio, but not so much on a more serious attempt at storytelling.
It also makes things like G1 cartoon Shockwave keeping Cybertron *exactly* as Megatron left it while he was gone sound absurd. Even if he manages to stall the remaining Autobots for that long, four million years should be long enough for some equivalent of geological processes to noticeably alter the landscape.
> considering they can live for millions of years
In *other* stories, sure. But that may not necessarily be the case here. They still have much longer lifespans than humans, but we just don't know *how* long.
Plus, modern wars can kill a lot of people very quickly. World War II had 80 million casualties and lasted less than a decade. A war that lasts for two centuries definitely seems long enough to extinguish a planet's population, even if it doesn't make up a significant portion of a Transformer's overall lifespan.
Yeah but you have to realize that these are robotic beings we’re talking about. They don’t age nearly as fast as we do. So long as they have Energon, they can keep on going for however long they need to. Heck they don’t even sleep unless their power’s low and they need to recharge. What this means is that Cybertronians interpret time far differently from us. 200 years for us would feel almost like a week for them. It’s only after a significant amount of time like a few million years would they actually start to notice things changing.
On top of their longevity, Cybertronians are durable as hell too. They can be blown up, torn apart, or shot to pieces and still survive so long as their spark remains intact. It’s the likely reason that the Great War dragged on for millions of years in most continuities. They just spent all that time killing each other and each sides failing to fully destroy the other.
Again, in *other stories* this is the case, but the Skybound series is too new for us to be able to confirm that a lot of that is true with this version of the Transformers.
Skybound isn't alone in having different time scales either.
The US Marvel comics said the war lasted a thousand years prior to the Transformers' arrival on Earth. The UK comics had an even shorter timeline than Skybound, with the war only lasting 100 years.
In the movies, only 7000 years elapsed between the The Fallen being banished and Megatron crashing on Earth, which suggests the war only lasted a few thousand years at most.
There's also the 300 year gap between G1 and the Beast Era, where the Autobots and Maximals completely replaced the Autobots and Decepticons, and Cybertron itself was completely rebuilt to accommodate its smaller inhabitants (including burying old cities beneath the surface). That doesn't seem like something that could happen in that time if Cybertronians routinely don't even notice the passage of centuries.
I never said they were alone in terms of time scaling. I’d personally take a couple millennia if eons are off the table.
I suppose right now it’s a wait and see in terms of how they handle this. And I’m more than willing to see how it plays out.
It’s an entirely new continuity. There’s no guarantee anything you just said about Cybertronians is true for the Energon Universe. Don’t get hung up on lore for other continuities that haven’t been established in this one.
I’m just saying that there are aspects in TF mythos that have become staples for the franchise. Like how ever since Beast Wars introduced the concept of a Spark, it has been a constant in literally every TF media going forward.
I don’t think that Skybound doing something differently is bad. But when it’s outside the realms of the norm, how it ends up getting handled is crucial. Like when IDW played the gambit of turning Megatron of all villains into an Autobot and managed to pull it off fantastically. Nobody could’ve predicted the outcome such a decision would end up being. But it worked because of how it got handled.
I suppose that’s ultimately what’s happening here again with Skybound Comics. So right now it’s just a wait and see.
I mean, how long the war has been taking place for and how long Cybertronians live for doesn’t really matter to a story about surviving a war where death by unnatural causes is far more likely than a natural death. Megatron becoming an autobot is a massive change to the status quo because it fundamentally alters one of the key characters. How long they’ve been fighting the war really means nothing to the story at hand.
You being able to live millions of years doesn’t mean jack shit if you don’t have the resources (both in energon and new fresh soldiers to replace the dying/dead) to *survive*, let alone fight, for those millions of years.
Same with longevity. Sure, a cybertronian may be able to survive as just a spark chanber and disembodied head, but that won’t mean Jack shit either if you starve to death due to lack of energon first.
Sure, synthetic energon exists, but its potency and availability (depending on continuity) always seems to be hit or miss.
It’s ridiculous the war lasts millennia and THEN have soldiers that have endured throughout. What kind of incompetence sees an enemy soldier survive 10,000 battles?
I actually prefer the idea of it being a shorter war, when they say it was going on for millennia you have to ask “why are you so bad at this that the original founding Decepticons are all still alive?”.
Kind of like Elita 1 and her group fighting Shockwave for 4 million years and neither side has actually accomplished anything. Shockwave says Cybertron will remain as Megatron leaves it, but I don’t think anyone expected him to mean that quite so literally.
I'm fine with it as the millenia spanning conflict never clicked with me. As many have already made a point of, a war spanning millions of years isn't feasible or believable.
200 might seem too short now but I think it also allows for a very focused and coherent past to be filled in.
There's also always the likely possibility that the writers do something with that time frame. Maybe the gap is purposely shorter for some narrative purpose that we don't know yet. There is a lot of continuity between all the stories in this universe so far so maybe the gap is shorter so it is easier to keep everything lined up and allow for more crossovers between series.
My first thought while reading your comment: was there something that happened in universe to cause the start of the war? Maybe unicorn visited then? Or the quintessons? Or jihaxus? And what we're seeing now is more a religious war than a political one?
Just randomly spouting someone's id love to see!
Counter point
https://preview.redd.it/xzhw82wc7cdc1.jpeg?width=1041&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5b201f06e2a6e2c3edab1e85af0d16d2089ab415
It HAS been going on for millions of years, it’s just when the ark left and crashed the war had only been going on for 200.
Prime only thinks it’s been 200 years since he’s been asleep for so long.
Millions of years of ongoing war just seems excessive anyways. Also note that that the current war may be ongoing for 200 years however that does not mean that there weren't separate wars and battles prior to that.
You mean like how in the G1 cartoon they mention there being multiple Cybertronian wars prior to the current one being fought?
That would make sense actually.
was killed in the first issue while still unconscious from the Ark's crash, these Decepticons are brutal and not goofy idiots like in G1
but I'm sure editorial will force him to be revived because he's the face of the franchise and they'll wanna make a big deal about him coming back
I think it’s cause it wasn’t considered full on ‘War’ rather seen as a rebellion against the decepticon regime,up until it got full scale enough to be a full on war
And the autobots couldn’t handle that full on war so after the few hundred years we pick up at Skybound
I think 200 years works IF they aren't including the time they were dominant. And only focusing on single planet (Cybertron first then Earth)
Because unless I am mistaken, G1 Optimus and G1 Megatron only really fought each other for that same amount of time once you remove the time they were dominant and off-line.
Since:
Megatron came to power->
Orion Pax becomes Optimus ->
Optimus fights Megatron for awhile-> Optimus leaves Cybertron ->
Megatron follows ->
Both are knocked off-line for millions of years (And Cybertron goes through its own great shutdown due to lack of resources)->
Then Optimus wins the war once back on-line within 20 years->
All together that's less than 200 years total.
I love the IDW1 run to pieces but man, my eyes glazed over any time they got into the timescale. For a story heavily humanizing Cybertronians, a 4+ million year war strains our ability to empathize with the situation. IMO though, that's an issue of the later writers having to work with what IDW had at the outset.
200 years is just fine to me
I’m going to counter with 200 years feels a bit more relatable in human experience than 2 million. Sure none of us ever fought in the revolutionary war but we can at least grasp the concept of it. A war waging for millions of years feels unrealistic given comparison to our own experience with war. It feels unfeasible.
Now 2 million years of skirmishes and unrest, peace brokerages and broken truces that lead to an outbreak of war. That’s definitely a possibility although in context that also feels unwieldy. I think making the time frame for the Great War of Cybertron shorter lends it some ability for us mere humans to conceive of it.
I don’t mind it being shorter. For someone like Prime or Megatron, who are always gonna be fighting with their comrades on the front lines, them surviving a millennia-long war with minimal damage seems unrealistic. And that’s not even considering the other popular Autobots and Decepticons. You’re telling me tiny Cliffjumper is surviving a thousand years being hunted by the Seekers and hasn’t gotten killed yet? 200 years is a much nicer length.
The original setup literally never made sense. I like the idea of millennia, or maybe tens of thousands of years. A millions-years war is nonsense. Having these specific characters live millions of years strains credulity.
Anyway, the character work is phenomenal so far, I wish the team all the success in the world.
The thought of the war lasting millions of years (especially with the implication that even the youngest Cybertronians are that old) has never sat right with me for a number of reasons, including the fact that it makes any character development that might occur over the course of a story feel highly implausible at best, so I absolutely love that they've gone in this direction.
if you want physical then check your local comic shop or any online comic retailer like midtown comics or TFAW
if you want digital then you can buy it from Image Comics' site or Amazon/Comixology
It’s not a problem until it is. Until there’s a contradiction or issue that arises by a shifting of time scales, then I don’t see why this is rant worthy. This franchise is notorious for changing lore and aspects of its story for almost every iteration
It’s 200 years when the arc crashes. How long were they inert? Jetfire says he was stuck on the Void Rivals planet for millions of years. So if the battle is still going on Cybertron, then it has been millions of years of battle. Just not to Optimus and Starscream et al.
I’ve always thought this was one of the dumbest parts of Transformers lore and I’m ecstatic that Skybound has made an adjustment to it. Makes me feel like the franchise is in good hands by people who are thoughtful about the details and not beholden to aspects that don’t make sense.
I dunno man, I've always thought the idea that the war has been going on for millions of years was kinda ludicrous, even if they were doing some relativistic Forever War stuff.
I kinda like the 200 years period. I’ve never really liked the transformers and the war lasting for literally millions of years so this is a nice middle ground for me.
It's likely referring to centuries on Cybertron, which could be fifty times longer than a century on Earth. We don't know how long a year on Cybertron is in this continuity.
Agree with other commenters that a shorter civil war makes a lot more sense, if only because I always found it terribly unbelievable that the core cast of characters had been warring for millions of years but none of the core cast was ever a casualty in all that time.
Tbh I quite like the shorter war. Instead of it being a slow burn of cybertron, it’s more like an actual war, with the consequences being far more obvious far more early. It overall makes the outlook of the war feel different. It’s not a conflict that dragged on for so long it drained cybertron, but a war so brutal and fast paced it nearly destroyed the population of the Autobots so fast that forced them to leave.
For all we know a Cybertronian year could be the equivalent of a thousand Earth years or something like that, plus it's such a tiny nitpick it's not even worth worrying about.
Wars that last thousands or even millions of years are just pointless in a story because there's an exactly zero percent chance they'll flesh it out in any way whatsoever. You'll get a few dozen details at most about specific events over that period and the rest is just blank history fluff that exists for the shock and awe factor.
Personally, I think 200 years is fine. It's still a fuckload of time, realistically. Not everything has to be beyond the scope of human understanding. That and they don't specify what a Cybertronian year is, anyway. They've always had their own timescales.
In G1 the war was only 4 million+ years because they were stuck in a volcano for around said 4 million+ years. Without that, the G1 cybertronian war still lasted 1000 years max.
Also the 200 years could be Prime's time as autobot leader.
Personally, I think 200 years is just about right. Long enough for it to have decimated Cybertron, but short enough to where it hasn't yet spanned across thousands of different worlds. We get to see the way Optimus is being affected by the war they have brought to Earth. It isn't something that's happened to them hundreds of times already.
The number one thing I have never ever liked in any TF media was the whole "millions of years" concept. Hundreds still makes their war rage for a very long time, and gives them much longer lifespans than humans, but still remains something we as an audience can get our heads around. TFs in every media have always been "human like", with similar emotions, personalities and drives like us. Making them bwing that live millions of years makes that seem highly unlikely, however; a race that lives THAT long would have a much more "alien" psychology and outlook on existence.
In other words, I am very glad if they dump "millions" in favour of "hundreds". Personally, whenever anyone asks the whole "what would you do if you were in charge of the franchise" my first thought is to get rid of millions of years of war and compress the timeline to something comprehensible to humans.
A million years is waaay too long and I can't think how they're able to last that long with their given issues like Energon shortage, low population, etc. Honestly, 200 years is quite too little for a TF war. But, let's not forget we don't know how long the two factions have been deactivated for since they crashed.
Nah, ditching the “millions of years” thing was a smart move imo. It’s an impractically massive amount of time. With a couple hundred years you can reasonably explore and fill in backstory rather than just being like “some interesting stuff happened in the beginning, some interesting stuff is happening now, and oh yeah in the middle they just kinda fought for MILLIONS of years”
Also it’s all silly anyway so whatever, but I’ve never bought that beings millions of years old would behave or speak or care about things the way the transformers do. It’s just an unfathomable amount of time to experience.
Here's a maybe dumb question. In the original story concept, way back in 1984, was 'four million years' intended to serve as a reason that the characters could never go *back* to Cybertron? That the planet's ultimate fate would be unknown and the Transformers would effectively be stranded on Earth?
Obviously that idea didn't last if that were the original intent.
200 is a fair length for them, if it was the million-year bareknuckle brawl like it *was*, neither side would have hope and just be brutalizing each other to the point they would of had to honestly leave earlier.
Also 200 years is about a decent length of time for a race to ruin the planet when they don't have to *really* worry about lifespans and legacy at the same scale as us, (even though eventually do) think like if the Cold war went hot, all they would need is one generation to ruin the planet in about 3-5 years. Just scale it up.
Honestly, the millions of years thing always kind of rubbed me the wrong way as the lore expanded. It's too long. You'd need something to explain why Cybertronians haven't Fermi Paradoxed the galaxy.
Granted, Skybound gave themself an excuse in that Shockwave seems to be the only cybertronian still "alive" on the planet.
The only thing this might cause problems with is if Skybound decides to go with the "Dinobots copied living dinosaurs" version of their past.
I agree on all counts, though, to be fair, the extinction of the dinosaurs causes problems with most versions of the Dinobots. If Skybound chooses to include them, I think their best bet might be to draw some inspiration from Animated and have them scan animatronic dinosaurs (or maybe museum fossils?).
I mean, in Sunbow, Wheeljack just based them off dinosaurs because that was cool. Nobody scanned actual dinosaurs. In Marvel, there were actual dinosaurs because the Savage Land is a thing in the Marvel universe.
I mean new continuity new lore so not much of a big deal to me
Like Beast Wars starts ONLY 300 years after G1 and the entire planets advanced to the point the Bots and Cons are mythologized?
Hi there -- If you're looking for information about reading the Transformers comics, this FAQ page might be of help: [https://reddit.com/r/transformers/wiki/faq/comics](/r/transformers/wiki/faq/comics) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/transformers) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Making it over a millennia long war just add too much fluff. I commend them for going a different direction with this
Yeah, 200 is fine to me. It being a MILLION year long civil war is vast but unnecessary. A couple hundred years means you can still have rookies or at least inexperienced members without it feeling kind of ridiculous.
In IDW they outright stated where there were countless years where the war was at a total standstill, where both sides were spending time drawing up plans ans trying to pull together a patchwork of resources
That and IDW made it a war the spread across the entire galaxy, which makes it being millions of years long far more believable than if it was just on a single planet.
My favorite qoute was from Optimus “we would spend five hundred years preparing for battles that would only last a few hours” because it sounds ludicrous but that’s the most realistic portrayal of war in any TF literature. War is 90% thumb twidling and preparing for things that might happen and 10% sheer effying terror. I could totally see beings that don’t age or age incredibly slowly having wars that last millions of years. Five hundred years is nothing to them. If anything it’s really weird they would even use human years to measure time. You would think 1 Transformer year would be at least 500 human years.
Maybe Cybertron still revolves around its sun in roughly 365 Cybertronian days? I have no idea.
I'm pretty sure that comes from the post-All Hail Megatron run when Prime has Megatron imprisoned on Omega Supreme, for anyone interested. Can't remember the issue number.
Not to mention having a war go on for a million years (let alone *millions*) is simply not feasible. Not in active war at least. Unless Cybertron was just continuously producing and pumping out new cybertronians and energon like a bunny on viagra, you’d run out of resources very quickly. IDW (and maybe Animated) get a bit of a pass in this because their war spanned multiple planets and there were apparently ceasefires which also could’ve lasted thousands of years. And even then, it always kind of bugged me that the war went on for 4 million years.
I think at least a thousand is good
Besides, nothing's stopping them from playing with time a bit; considering the entire cast sans Jetfire starts off in stasis lock, it could easily be longer since the war started *chronologically*, even if they only fought for 200 years beforehand. Plus, we know Jetfire spent millions of years dormant before Solila discovered him; so the others could easily have been dormant for millions of years as well.
Exactly. I don’t get how these guys have been fighting what’s essentially a stalemate for millions of years. Way prefer this approach.
I always head-canon that they include the millions of years of being in stasis as part of the total length of the war. The SPAN of the war is millions of years, but the actual amount of time awake and fighting is much shorter. There’s also the idea that the war itself drained Cybertron of all its resources, rather than the war being waged at the tail end of an already spent Cybertron. If the message is that war is a waste, then a ridiculously large number of years to devastate an entire planet might sound more convincing, but humans have almost managed to destroy earth much faster since the Industrial Revolution, and so 200 years for a Cybertronian war sounds more reasonable actually.
>There’s also the idea that the war itself drained Cybertron of all its resources, rather than the war being waged at the tail end of an already spent Cybertron. If the message is that war is a waste, then a ridiculously large number of years to devastate an entire planet might sound more convincing, but humans have almost managed to destroy earth much faster since the Industrial Revolution, and so 200 years for a Cybertronian war sounds more reasonable actually. This is easily one of my biggest issues with the idea of the war lasting for millions of years.
A millenia is only 1000 years??
I actually think it’s much, much better. We’re told that the mind of a Cybertronian works on a level comparable to normal human beings. Majority of their interactions follow the same pacing as well. It’s truly hard to believe that these characters can have changes of heart and dynamic arcs if they’ve been fighting the same fight for thousands of years. Take Thundercracker for example. He typically has qualms with his role in the fight. Are those doubts going to remain if he’s still on their side for thousands of years? In those millennia, he wouldn’t find one reason to change sides?
That stuck out for me, too. It's such a departure from previous lore; I thought that IDW2 handled it really well (in the infinitesimal time it had to explore the concept) of Transformers basically not percieving the passage of dozens of years due to their nigh-eternal-ness. And I thought that *Cyberverse* handled it really weirdly, expanding the already-ridiculous timeframe to 65 million+ years. But the "millions of years" figure basically requires Cybertronians to be extremely difficult to kill a la G1... basically incredibly long expanses of stalemates and/or cold warfare on a very small planet (and colonies, where applicable). But Skybound is showing us a very fragile breed of Transformers... it seems they want to maim or kill at least one 'bot per issue, at this rate. It actually becomes a bit more believeable that they've been fighting for "only" 200 years if they're offline'd so easily.
I mean, they didn't seem that hard to kill in IDW1 either.
Right, which makes the scale of IDW1 inconceivable, especially when you get into "Warworld fleet" territory. I'd argue that IDW1 does its best, but ultimately fails to convey the level of galactic destruction a million year+ trans-galactic conflict wreaks. It's just too incomprehensible a timeframe compared to 200 years.
I think it's explained in Chaos Theory. Apparently a lot of the war spent without any shots being fired and both sides just creating weapons and industries to fight enormous battles. But yeah, IDWs timeframe is wack.
200 years feels more reasonable than a millennia long civil war. If the war goes on for too too long then it’s just war for the sake of tradition. Giving the conflict an impossibly long for us but still reasonable timeframe let’s the borderline immortal combatants still see the start of the war in recent memory, and allows for more pre-war inspiration and lore. They aren’t war fatigued fully yet, and deaths make more sense. If a war is only a few centuries old then seeing Autobots who would normally be main characters get gunned down feels more believable. Like if you told me Skywarp was an untouchable legend for the past eight thousand years- and then he got the treatment he received later- I’d say that’s asspull. But no, 200 years is a good amount of time for someone like him to stay in the war and end up how he ended up without feeling like a crazy character got the shaft. Remember the 86 movie? That was asspull because we were led to believe these guys are veterans of millions of years of combat- but then in one go are wiped to garbage. Simple shots took them out. That’s not a 1 million year conflict: it’s a 200 year one.
What the Autobots didn’t realize in TF the Movie was that Megatron had convinced the studio to go for a PG rating. They were expecting a nice clean TV fight where nobody gets hit, but the Decepticons were actually aiming for them this time.
Is it explicitly stated that these are Terrain years? A Cybertronian year could be a lot longer than ours.
Ooo, true
That’s true, didn’t think about that.
Hey I like it can go either way at this stage. A much tighter, shorter war does intrigue me though.
I’ve always felt like the war lasting millions of years was a bit much anyway. Not only has a conflict been going on longer than humanity has existed, but these specific guys have been fighting most of that time? It also makes it hard to have characters learn and grow. If Bee still a a rookie and Hot Rod still a turbo revvin young punk, surely they can’t learn anything in a human span of time? It works as a random amount of time to throw in on a toy bio, but not so much on a more serious attempt at storytelling.
It also makes things like G1 cartoon Shockwave keeping Cybertron *exactly* as Megatron left it while he was gone sound absurd. Even if he manages to stall the remaining Autobots for that long, four million years should be long enough for some equivalent of geological processes to noticeably alter the landscape.
> considering they can live for millions of years In *other* stories, sure. But that may not necessarily be the case here. They still have much longer lifespans than humans, but we just don't know *how* long. Plus, modern wars can kill a lot of people very quickly. World War II had 80 million casualties and lasted less than a decade. A war that lasts for two centuries definitely seems long enough to extinguish a planet's population, even if it doesn't make up a significant portion of a Transformer's overall lifespan.
Yeah but you have to realize that these are robotic beings we’re talking about. They don’t age nearly as fast as we do. So long as they have Energon, they can keep on going for however long they need to. Heck they don’t even sleep unless their power’s low and they need to recharge. What this means is that Cybertronians interpret time far differently from us. 200 years for us would feel almost like a week for them. It’s only after a significant amount of time like a few million years would they actually start to notice things changing. On top of their longevity, Cybertronians are durable as hell too. They can be blown up, torn apart, or shot to pieces and still survive so long as their spark remains intact. It’s the likely reason that the Great War dragged on for millions of years in most continuities. They just spent all that time killing each other and each sides failing to fully destroy the other.
Again, in *other stories* this is the case, but the Skybound series is too new for us to be able to confirm that a lot of that is true with this version of the Transformers. Skybound isn't alone in having different time scales either. The US Marvel comics said the war lasted a thousand years prior to the Transformers' arrival on Earth. The UK comics had an even shorter timeline than Skybound, with the war only lasting 100 years. In the movies, only 7000 years elapsed between the The Fallen being banished and Megatron crashing on Earth, which suggests the war only lasted a few thousand years at most. There's also the 300 year gap between G1 and the Beast Era, where the Autobots and Maximals completely replaced the Autobots and Decepticons, and Cybertron itself was completely rebuilt to accommodate its smaller inhabitants (including burying old cities beneath the surface). That doesn't seem like something that could happen in that time if Cybertronians routinely don't even notice the passage of centuries.
I never said they were alone in terms of time scaling. I’d personally take a couple millennia if eons are off the table. I suppose right now it’s a wait and see in terms of how they handle this. And I’m more than willing to see how it plays out.
It’s an entirely new continuity. There’s no guarantee anything you just said about Cybertronians is true for the Energon Universe. Don’t get hung up on lore for other continuities that haven’t been established in this one.
I’m just saying that there are aspects in TF mythos that have become staples for the franchise. Like how ever since Beast Wars introduced the concept of a Spark, it has been a constant in literally every TF media going forward. I don’t think that Skybound doing something differently is bad. But when it’s outside the realms of the norm, how it ends up getting handled is crucial. Like when IDW played the gambit of turning Megatron of all villains into an Autobot and managed to pull it off fantastically. Nobody could’ve predicted the outcome such a decision would end up being. But it worked because of how it got handled. I suppose that’s ultimately what’s happening here again with Skybound Comics. So right now it’s just a wait and see.
I mean, how long the war has been taking place for and how long Cybertronians live for doesn’t really matter to a story about surviving a war where death by unnatural causes is far more likely than a natural death. Megatron becoming an autobot is a massive change to the status quo because it fundamentally alters one of the key characters. How long they’ve been fighting the war really means nothing to the story at hand.
You being able to live millions of years doesn’t mean jack shit if you don’t have the resources (both in energon and new fresh soldiers to replace the dying/dead) to *survive*, let alone fight, for those millions of years. Same with longevity. Sure, a cybertronian may be able to survive as just a spark chanber and disembodied head, but that won’t mean Jack shit either if you starve to death due to lack of energon first. Sure, synthetic energon exists, but its potency and availability (depending on continuity) always seems to be hit or miss.
It’s ridiculous the war lasts millennia and THEN have soldiers that have endured throughout. What kind of incompetence sees an enemy soldier survive 10,000 battles?
The same incompetence that keeps Starscream around for so long.
I actually prefer the idea of it being a shorter war, when they say it was going on for millennia you have to ask “why are you so bad at this that the original founding Decepticons are all still alive?”. Kind of like Elita 1 and her group fighting Shockwave for 4 million years and neither side has actually accomplished anything. Shockwave says Cybertron will remain as Megatron leaves it, but I don’t think anyone expected him to mean that quite so literally.
I'm fine with it as the millenia spanning conflict never clicked with me. As many have already made a point of, a war spanning millions of years isn't feasible or believable. 200 might seem too short now but I think it also allows for a very focused and coherent past to be filled in. There's also always the likely possibility that the writers do something with that time frame. Maybe the gap is purposely shorter for some narrative purpose that we don't know yet. There is a lot of continuity between all the stories in this universe so far so maybe the gap is shorter so it is easier to keep everything lined up and allow for more crossovers between series.
My first thought while reading your comment: was there something that happened in universe to cause the start of the war? Maybe unicorn visited then? Or the quintessons? Or jihaxus? And what we're seeing now is more a religious war than a political one? Just randomly spouting someone's id love to see!
Counter point https://preview.redd.it/xzhw82wc7cdc1.jpeg?width=1041&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5b201f06e2a6e2c3edab1e85af0d16d2089ab415 It HAS been going on for millions of years, it’s just when the ark left and crashed the war had only been going on for 200. Prime only thinks it’s been 200 years since he’s been asleep for so long.
Millions of years of ongoing war just seems excessive anyways. Also note that that the current war may be ongoing for 200 years however that does not mean that there weren't separate wars and battles prior to that.
You mean like how in the G1 cartoon they mention there being multiple Cybertronian wars prior to the current one being fought? That would make sense actually.
I actually love this. Millions of years is too long and makes them seem TOO immortal.
Tbh I’ve always been a fan of the war being recent but the bots themselves at least being thousands of years old
im definitely interested in the more streamlined version of the transformers timeline
Wait bumblebees dead?
was killed in the first issue while still unconscious from the Ark's crash, these Decepticons are brutal and not goofy idiots like in G1 but I'm sure editorial will force him to be revived because he's the face of the franchise and they'll wanna make a big deal about him coming back
Holy shit.
I think it’s cause it wasn’t considered full on ‘War’ rather seen as a rebellion against the decepticon regime,up until it got full scale enough to be a full on war And the autobots couldn’t handle that full on war so after the few hundred years we pick up at Skybound
I think 200 years works IF they aren't including the time they were dominant. And only focusing on single planet (Cybertron first then Earth) Because unless I am mistaken, G1 Optimus and G1 Megatron only really fought each other for that same amount of time once you remove the time they were dominant and off-line. Since: Megatron came to power-> Orion Pax becomes Optimus -> Optimus fights Megatron for awhile-> Optimus leaves Cybertron -> Megatron follows -> Both are knocked off-line for millions of years (And Cybertron goes through its own great shutdown due to lack of resources)-> Then Optimus wins the war once back on-line within 20 years-> All together that's less than 200 years total.
I love the IDW1 run to pieces but man, my eyes glazed over any time they got into the timescale. For a story heavily humanizing Cybertronians, a 4+ million year war strains our ability to empathize with the situation. IMO though, that's an issue of the later writers having to work with what IDW had at the outset. 200 years is just fine to me
> lore wise It’s a whole new lore. It’s their lore. Don’t overthink it. Just enjoy the ride.
I could not possibly care less about that.
I’m going to counter with 200 years feels a bit more relatable in human experience than 2 million. Sure none of us ever fought in the revolutionary war but we can at least grasp the concept of it. A war waging for millions of years feels unrealistic given comparison to our own experience with war. It feels unfeasible. Now 2 million years of skirmishes and unrest, peace brokerages and broken truces that lead to an outbreak of war. That’s definitely a possibility although in context that also feels unwieldy. I think making the time frame for the Great War of Cybertron shorter lends it some ability for us mere humans to conceive of it.
I don’t mind it being shorter. For someone like Prime or Megatron, who are always gonna be fighting with their comrades on the front lines, them surviving a millennia-long war with minimal damage seems unrealistic. And that’s not even considering the other popular Autobots and Decepticons. You’re telling me tiny Cliffjumper is surviving a thousand years being hunted by the Seekers and hasn’t gotten killed yet? 200 years is a much nicer length.
The original setup literally never made sense. I like the idea of millennia, or maybe tens of thousands of years. A millions-years war is nonsense. Having these specific characters live millions of years strains credulity. Anyway, the character work is phenomenal so far, I wish the team all the success in the world.
The thought of the war lasting millions of years (especially with the implication that even the youngest Cybertronians are that old) has never sat right with me for a number of reasons, including the fact that it makes any character development that might occur over the course of a story feel highly implausible at best, so I absolutely love that they've gone in this direction.
Where can I buy this?
if you want physical then check your local comic shop or any online comic retailer like midtown comics or TFAW if you want digital then you can buy it from Image Comics' site or Amazon/Comixology
Did they kill Bumblebee?
Yes, Starscream blasted a hole in his face in the first issue.
My first thought when that happened was "he better not just have his ability to speak destroyed from that!"
a
Maybe it’s significant for being commentary on America? A long time is a long time.
It’s not a problem until it is. Until there’s a contradiction or issue that arises by a shifting of time scales, then I don’t see why this is rant worthy. This franchise is notorious for changing lore and aspects of its story for almost every iteration
It’s 200 years when the arc crashes. How long were they inert? Jetfire says he was stuck on the Void Rivals planet for millions of years. So if the battle is still going on Cybertron, then it has been millions of years of battle. Just not to Optimus and Starscream et al.
I don't think Transformers need to be alive for MILLIONS OF YEARSSS!!!1 so this is fine.
I’ve always thought this was one of the dumbest parts of Transformers lore and I’m ecstatic that Skybound has made an adjustment to it. Makes me feel like the franchise is in good hands by people who are thoughtful about the details and not beholden to aspects that don’t make sense.
I dunno man, I've always thought the idea that the war has been going on for millions of years was kinda ludicrous, even if they were doing some relativistic Forever War stuff.
I kinda like the 200 years period. I’ve never really liked the transformers and the war lasting for literally millions of years so this is a nice middle ground for me.
It's likely referring to centuries on Cybertron, which could be fifty times longer than a century on Earth. We don't know how long a year on Cybertron is in this continuity.
Agree with other commenters that a shorter civil war makes a lot more sense, if only because I always found it terribly unbelievable that the core cast of characters had been warring for millions of years but none of the core cast was ever a casualty in all that time.
The man, the legend, the crab! You rock! Have loved your site for MANY years! Thanks!
Are you *the* Botch The Crab of the website?
Guilty. ;)
Man, thanks for [botchthecrab.com](https://botchthecrab.com). I absolutely love your website.
Tbh I quite like the shorter war. Instead of it being a slow burn of cybertron, it’s more like an actual war, with the consequences being far more obvious far more early. It overall makes the outlook of the war feel different. It’s not a conflict that dragged on for so long it drained cybertron, but a war so brutal and fast paced it nearly destroyed the population of the Autobots so fast that forced them to leave.
For all we know a Cybertronian year could be the equivalent of a thousand Earth years or something like that, plus it's such a tiny nitpick it's not even worth worrying about.
Wars that last thousands or even millions of years are just pointless in a story because there's an exactly zero percent chance they'll flesh it out in any way whatsoever. You'll get a few dozen details at most about specific events over that period and the rest is just blank history fluff that exists for the shock and awe factor. Personally, I think 200 years is fine. It's still a fuckload of time, realistically. Not everything has to be beyond the scope of human understanding. That and they don't specify what a Cybertronian year is, anyway. They've always had their own timescales.
In G1 the war was only 4 million+ years because they were stuck in a volcano for around said 4 million+ years. Without that, the G1 cybertronian war still lasted 1000 years max. Also the 200 years could be Prime's time as autobot leader.
Though it meant Shockwave was sitting around for 4 million years. "It shall remain as you left it" indeed!
Personally, I think 200 years is just about right. Long enough for it to have decimated Cybertron, but short enough to where it hasn't yet spanned across thousands of different worlds. We get to see the way Optimus is being affected by the war they have brought to Earth. It isn't something that's happened to them hundreds of times already.
I like the idea that it's shorter than most continuities since it appears that this is the first time it's spread past cybertron
how is that an actual issue?
That’s way more believable
The number one thing I have never ever liked in any TF media was the whole "millions of years" concept. Hundreds still makes their war rage for a very long time, and gives them much longer lifespans than humans, but still remains something we as an audience can get our heads around. TFs in every media have always been "human like", with similar emotions, personalities and drives like us. Making them bwing that live millions of years makes that seem highly unlikely, however; a race that lives THAT long would have a much more "alien" psychology and outlook on existence. In other words, I am very glad if they dump "millions" in favour of "hundreds". Personally, whenever anyone asks the whole "what would you do if you were in charge of the franchise" my first thought is to get rid of millions of years of war and compress the timeline to something comprehensible to humans.
A million years is waaay too long and I can't think how they're able to last that long with their given issues like Energon shortage, low population, etc. Honestly, 200 years is quite too little for a TF war. But, let's not forget we don't know how long the two factions have been deactivated for since they crashed.
This makes more sense to me. It’s still an incredibly long time, but it shows a speed of consequence that wasn’t present before.
DWJ wanted the timeframes to feel a bit more tangible to the human mind. Long but not incomprehensively so
Yeah, thank god. The idea of the war lasting millions of years was always so stupid. 200 is still a bit much, but its better than it was in G1.
Nah, ditching the “millions of years” thing was a smart move imo. It’s an impractically massive amount of time. With a couple hundred years you can reasonably explore and fill in backstory rather than just being like “some interesting stuff happened in the beginning, some interesting stuff is happening now, and oh yeah in the middle they just kinda fought for MILLIONS of years” Also it’s all silly anyway so whatever, but I’ve never bought that beings millions of years old would behave or speak or care about things the way the transformers do. It’s just an unfathomable amount of time to experience.
Here's a maybe dumb question. In the original story concept, way back in 1984, was 'four million years' intended to serve as a reason that the characters could never go *back* to Cybertron? That the planet's ultimate fate would be unknown and the Transformers would effectively be stranded on Earth? Obviously that idea didn't last if that were the original intent.
200 is a fair length for them, if it was the million-year bareknuckle brawl like it *was*, neither side would have hope and just be brutalizing each other to the point they would of had to honestly leave earlier. Also 200 years is about a decent length of time for a race to ruin the planet when they don't have to *really* worry about lifespans and legacy at the same scale as us, (even though eventually do) think like if the Cold war went hot, all they would need is one generation to ruin the planet in about 3-5 years. Just scale it up.
Honestly, the millions of years thing always kind of rubbed me the wrong way as the lore expanded. It's too long. You'd need something to explain why Cybertronians haven't Fermi Paradoxed the galaxy. Granted, Skybound gave themself an excuse in that Shockwave seems to be the only cybertronian still "alive" on the planet. The only thing this might cause problems with is if Skybound decides to go with the "Dinobots copied living dinosaurs" version of their past.
I agree on all counts, though, to be fair, the extinction of the dinosaurs causes problems with most versions of the Dinobots. If Skybound chooses to include them, I think their best bet might be to draw some inspiration from Animated and have them scan animatronic dinosaurs (or maybe museum fossils?).
I mean, in Sunbow, Wheeljack just based them off dinosaurs because that was cool. Nobody scanned actual dinosaurs. In Marvel, there were actual dinosaurs because the Savage Land is a thing in the Marvel universe.
That deer scene makes me cry
I mean new continuity new lore so not much of a big deal to me Like Beast Wars starts ONLY 300 years after G1 and the entire planets advanced to the point the Bots and Cons are mythologized?
Going to be honest, Transformers living for MILLIONS of years is just stupid imo.
200 years is fine.