Some thoughts on the Cybertronian Civil War

[yvannairie]

(I refer to the geography and geopolitics of Cybertron I laid out in this post on a few occasions, so I recommend checking it out first.)

As much as it is true that Transformers Prime is a gateway drug, Aligned is actually my favourite part of the continuity soup in general, and the biggest reason for it is that all of the stories in it revolve around the same events, told in many tonally and structurally different stories, all containing historical revisions that actually contradict each other in several places and when interacting with it, and no clear One True Canon To Rule Them All. It's an excellent space to play fiction folklorist, trying to piece together yet another version that takes the most compelling elements out of all three.

Part of it is also just the amount of actual war media Aligned contains -- "War for Cybertron", for all its faults, has a really nice dramatic atmosphere, and I genuinely enjoyed the Exodus novel, including the parts that made me want to put it down because it got legit rough from how vivid the mental images it gave me were. In Aligned, the war feels like a tangible thing that happened, that will sometimes bubble to the surface in characters in ways you're not expecting.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to a civil war narrative for it, especially. Civil war narratives are notoriously prone to historical revisionism, conflicting accounts, and as a fun side effect, it allows me to craft a narrative arc encompassing the entire canon.

It's very easy to argue that the conflict that eventually turned into the war itself started out... kinda ugly. Like, "there is no clear good side or bad side" ugly. There's lots of good meta out there about the "righteousness" of Megatron's cause, and I am actually in broad agreement with the principles behind the uprising, but their methods from the start involved large-scale agitation, active sabotage and terrorism, and the novels go into detail about the way civilian populations were affected, even while the targets started out among the communities that could recover from it with relative ease (i.e. high-class residential areas and military installations). When the council-backed counteroffensive -- later conflated with the "Autobot" movement -- began, it wasn't just targeting Decepticon sympathisers, but rather all communities with working class mecha, any low-class residential area, any industrial region.

What became the land split during the war are very much laid out in the regional class divisions. Decepticon-controlled cities -- Kaon and it's client cities, most notably -- underwent early militia-led coups, allowing the ur-Decepticon movement to arm itself better and consolidate power, take control of key production and distribution nodes, in many case allowing those areas to go back to productivity when they were no longer going through suppressive policing. The harsh official response to a movement that had multiple peaceful wings at first just led to more people aligning themselves with the Decepticons, led to more sympathisers, which led to harsher policing, which escalated the conflict.

It could have easily taken several centuries of this sort of democratic backslide before the Decepticons stopped gaining the favour of the population, mostly because unlike the ur-Autobots that were still officially a branch of the ruling government and thus closed off access to actual authority from anyone who wasn't from the correct background, the Deceptions were an open organisation. And when there's unrest, there are opportunists -- most of whom had a much easier time gaining power and authority among the Decepticons, bolstering their numbers, and leading to them finally having the manpower to subjugate and form their own juntas to take control of different regions. This is how Shockwave ended up in control of Vos and Tarn, for example.

Orion Pax -- later Optimus Prime -- held an increasing amount of authority as the war progressed, but in the beginning it wasn't nearly enough to truly be able to affect the Decepticon rise to power after the diplomatic relationship between him and Megatron was sabotaged by the council. I suspect his keystone position eventually led to essentially an internal coup among the Autobots at some point, as they had to start relying on conscripts as well -- the majority of the officers may have been high-case and highly trained, but most of the infantry definitely weren't, and the Decepticon cause was very popular among low-caste warframes -- and among those conscripts were many of the people you'd expect Optimus Prime to induct into his high command. This in turn led to the priorities of the faction shifting, to a more defensive war, which then in turn made their image improve among the population, because they weren't just going around destroying places looking for Decepticons anymore, and were often even helping in rescue and evacuation efforts.

The idea of a clearly delineated Autobot vs Decepticon conflict could largely be understood as historical revision, and the faction archetypes are the end result of a few millennia of the focus and methods of the war shifting, as well as the war itself destroying a lot of "original sources" from the beginning of the conflict. Due to the self-governing way most of Cybetron's regions operate, it also wasn't until the majority of the planet had "chosen a side" that the war was truly even recognised to be on-going, which is why the timelines given for how quickly it progressed and how long it lasted are also quite unclear.

I also like the way this mirrors the arcs of the characters involved in the war. Many of the Autobots are conscripts, sure, but Autobots also are and were the faction of the "status quo", and many of them would have had to come to terms with whether or not the methods they were using were justifiable, and whether their personal goals truly aligned with the goals of their "side", which eventually led to the so-called Autobot "platform" becoming pretty much the opposite of what it started as. Similarly, we know a lot of the Decepticons were simply siding with what they interpreted to be the eventual ruling power, perhaps to the point where opportunists outranked any "true believers" to the cause.

All in all, my thesis for the war can be summed up like this: the way a war is waged shapes the people party to the war. As the commanding structures, the composition and the strategic capabilities of the factions change, so do the practical goals which in turn cause a shift in priorities, leading to the ideology driving their actions being interpreted differently. The eventual reduction of the civil war to a very black-and-white, good-vs-evil conflict is this way easier explained by the strategic developments of the war, rather than any inherent ideological disposition of the original conflict, especially when it can be argued that so much of the war was shaped by Megatron's and Optimus' relationship and methods over their politics.