Ironhide mini-series

[andersonh1]

Costa needs to nail that down.

Why? We haven't nailed that down for ourselves, why should we have it nailed down for alien robots?

If Costa is going to write a story where the plot hinges on what exactly makes a Transformer alive, I'd like to see some consistency with earlier depictions. He's been good at referencing or following up on older stories up to this point, so I hope he's done the same here. But it feels like a piece of the puzzle is missing.

[Onslaught Six]

I don't know if I'm reading too much into this or not, but this bit of the initial exchange between Ironhide and Alpha Trion is interesting:

AT - ... I've brought you back to life. Sorry my page wasn't there when you awoke. He was on another mission for me.
Ironhide: Wow. That wound was mortal? I used to take hits like that one all the time. Well, thanks.

As if being 'brought back to life" was no big deal to him. That seems strange.

Sounds more like Ironhide (or TFs in general) used to be able to sustain a lot more damage than their current forms, or something, rather than Ironhide dying all the time. Kind of a backwards reference to the TFTM shuttle scene, perhaps?

[Shockwave]

Well yeah, but that's kind of my point: We haven't even figured out conclusively the whole spark/soul/lifeforce thing in humans, so I don't necessarily need to be figured out with TFs. In fact, part of me would like it to turn out that they're just as mystified/confused by what happens to them as we are about what happens to us. In this context, Ironhide could be seen as a successful version of Frankenstein's monster.

Shockwave
-Ironstein.

[Dominic]

That is way to mature an angle for the franchise at this point. They tried that once, (Furman writing under Tokar), in the 90s, during G2.

I wager enough of the fandom has real-life problems with the kind of epistemology, (knowing what one actually knows), what you are suggesting requires, never mind applying it at a fictional level where the potential for confusion is arguably higher.

Dom
-likes the idea though.....

[andersonh1]

Even so, I'm still left with the question: how did Ironhide's spark get from the body on Earth to the body on Cybertron?

I understand the forces of life and death being mysterious, even for Transformers. But if you're going to write a story in which the plot depends on some understanding of that process, then some of the details need to be nailed down, and they need to be consistent with past depictions. Otherwise the story will fail to have credibility, because it will simply seem as though the author is making it up as they go along.

[Shockwave]

Even so, I'm still left with the question: how did Ironhide's spark get from the body on Earth to the body on Cybertron?

Who says it did? At this point, it might just be essentially a sparkless drone with Ironhide's memories. Or it might have his spark. I could actually accept the idea that the Transformer "Spark" isn't necessarily a corporeal object as has been seen in the past, but more of an ethereal thing that transcends space and time. This has certainly been implied before as well, in both BW and BM and even in subsequent series. It wouldn't be that hard to beleive that Ironhide's spark left Earth, went to whatever "Allspark" lifeforce thing exists for TFs and then went into Ironhide's new body on Cybertron.

I understand the forces of life and death being mysterious, even for Transformers. But if you're going to write a story in which the plot depends on some understanding of that process, then some of the details need to be nailed down, and they need to be consistent with past depictions. Otherwise the story will fail to have credibility, because it will simply seem as though the author is making it up as they go along.

Kind of like religion!

[Dominic]

This is one of the reasons I am not a fan of stories with mystical jibber-wanking. Writers are expected to come up with "realistic" and workable depiction of things that we have not even managed to figure out in real life.

Making it it up as they go along really is the only way to do it. The important thing is *why* the writer is doing it. (Nobody needs more Greek hackery that was written just to tell a story.)


Dom
-ah the Greeks. Never before (or possibly since) have so many stories been told by so many people....with so little talent. (Hellenized Jews, the Transformers Fan Club and the Harry Potter fandom might give the Greeks a run for their hack-money though.)

[andersonh1]

Even so, I'm still left with the question: how did Ironhide's spark get from the body on Earth to the body on Cybertron?

Who says it did? At this point, it might just be essentially a sparkless drone with Ironhide's memories.

That's a fair point.

Or it might have his spark. I could actually accept the idea that the Transformer "Spark" isn't necessarily a corporeal object as has been seen in the past, but more of an ethereal thing that transcends space and time. This has certainly been implied before as well, in both BW and BM and even in subsequent series. It wouldn't be that hard to beleive that Ironhide's spark left Earth, went to whatever "Allspark" lifeforce thing exists for TFs and then went into Ironhide's new body on Cybertron.

That's about the only way this could work, and it's pretty much the theory I'm going with.

[Shockwave]

Or it might have his spark. I could actually accept the idea that the Transformer "Spark" isn't necessarily a corporeal object as has been seen in the past, but more of an ethereal thing that transcends space and time. This has certainly been implied before as well, in both BW and BM and even in subsequent series. It wouldn't be that hard to beleive that Ironhide's spark left Earth, went to whatever "Allspark" lifeforce thing exists for TFs and then went into Ironhide's new body on Cybertron.

That's about the only way this could work, and it's pretty much the theory I'm going with.

This would also explain how Dinobot's spark got from Earth in the past to Cybertron in the "present" and then was able to return when Rampage died.

[Onslaught Six]

We can't sit there and try to retroactively apply new definitions to old fictions. It doesn't work that way. Unless we get a BW reboot where everything happens exactly the same but a little different now.

It's like trying to shoehorn sparks into the G1 cartoon or comics. It can work in IDW because IDW is a new continuity, but you can't say something like "In TFTM Prime's spark left his body," because sparks didn't exist then.