The Trivia Challenge will be suspended for April. Or maybe forever. No one really gives a fuck, right? Anyway, I've already used the A to Z thing to promote my books (a few times) and last year I talked about books/movies. Early this year I read a bunch of Transformers comics and it made me think: why not talk about Transformers for my stupid A to Z Challenge? I'm going to do one good guy and one bad guy for each letter. X-Z were a little dicey and weirdly E for the Decepticons. For whatever reason there wasn't a Decepticon with a name starting with E until the "Generation 2" toys in 93-94. Most of the characters are Generation 1 (US) and Beast Wars because I'm most familiar with those. There a few other odds and ends though.
I'm not going all that in-depth. It's mostly based on stuff I remember or have seen around. If I'm wrong about stuff, Christopher Dilloway can set me straight. Or maybe one of those annoying fanboys who has to start everything with, "Well actually..." who I just want to punch in the goddamned face. I'm not writing their biographies here, just kind of outlining who they are and where they've been.
As part of my "research" for this I rewatched the original cartoon on the TubiTV app on my Roku--it's also on the Internet and such. It's pretty funny how many bloopers there are throughout the show: characters miscolored, Aubobots with Decepticon symbols, in one episode the Autobot Sideswipe is standing right next to Megatron in the Decepticon base, and in the episode "Child's Play" four Autobots are lost in space and all of the sudden a fifth Autobot (Smokescreen) appears! This goof had big ramifications since Smokescreen was the main player in the next episode that was largely a continuation of the previous one.
One thing that occurred to me that while Autobots are always saying they care about humans and don't want to put them in harm's way, they're always letting humans hang around with them, mostly Spike Witwicky in the first two seasons. A few times Spike comes in handy, but far more often he's getting into trouble and needing rescued. In the "Dinobot Island" episodes he nearly gets fed to a pterodon's young and then about a minute later almost gets eaten by a brachisaur. In another episode Optimus Prime shields Spike from a blast and gets badly damaged, requiring Autobots to travel to Cybertron to save him. Even worse in the third season, Spike lets his young son Daniel hang around with the Autobots, which then puts him in harm's way, culminating in the fourth season miniseries with Daniel being crippled. At some point Child Services should really have stepped in.
On a related note, an episode of the old cartoon show and an issue of the newer comic book gave me an idea for one of my gender swap stories--with giant robots! The idea is that three giant robots come to Earth searching for some comrades who crashed on the planet. To move around without drawing too much attention, they transfer their consciousnesses into human avatars. Inadvertently the male robots transfer their minds into female human bodies. And then I kind of throw a little Third Rock From the Sun in there as the avatars are kind of inverse of each robot's personality: the youngest one is a middle-aged woman, the oldest one is a teenage girl, and the scientist is smoking hot trailer trash. They fan out and explore a small Arizona town and learn about Earth and its customs--including romantic customs--until they and their new human friends have to stop some evil robots from taking over the planet.
I only have the first draft done. It ended up about 65,000 words, which I guess makes it a short novel. I'll probably put it up for sale in a few weeks. This is the rough draft of the cover:
Anyway, the "Challenge" starts tomorrow. Til All Are One!
2 comments:
this should be interesting lol
Good choice for your A to Z topic.
A lot of authors write short novels these days, although it's not as good for KU. Good luck with it.
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