Beasties' age?

[Phoenix]

After seeing Worpex' portrayal of Air Razor, which actually gives depth to a character I disliked in the show due to the lack of personality she showed there, I found myself puzzled by the players' focus on the character's age.

She had been found by one of the "younger" maximal's, although, the whole concept of age seemed to allude her. She hadn't been considered part of the youth like Cheetor and Aurora yet she felt as if they had lived more than she had.

This brings up the question of how age and maturity is measured among the beast warriors. I always assumed that the maturity level of the character was linked to the age of their sparks, the spark being the host of the personality in a way. I made this assumption based on how many, if not most, of the characters emerging from the pods having little recollection of their former lives.

In this sense a character could be reprogrammed, yet still maintain some aspects of their former personalities. Or take the enigma of Optimus Primal, for instance. His body was completely destroyed, yet the introduction of his spark into a new body kept his personality as well as memories in tact. Could the spark, if accessed a certain way, maintain a copy of events that occurred to said character (or memories if you will) but most were unable to access this?

Medically there are many different forms of amnesia, and not all of them will revert the individual back to a childhood state. If you can't remember your past, such as if the character's memory chips were damaged, I'd argue that the character has a form of amnesia. In AirRazor's case I think she is considered older than certain characters by others based on the history of her spark and the way she acts more so than when her amnesia-inflicted self came online on Earth. Thus why the others tend to consider her older than some, even if she can't remember.

I do feel like correcting one little tidbit, however. Aurora's spark did not come online before episode 5.5 so that is essentially when the character was 'born'. So Aurora has not 'lived longer' than AirRazor.

Any thoughts on this subject?

[NaitoKage]

Age has always been a weird thing in transformers.. Between Kup,Wheelie,and Hotrod you have a old man, a child, and a teenager that eventually becomes an adult only through the matrix.

Partially, I see age being as two factors. Programming, and length of existence. While I don't see transformers "aging"as they're nearly immortal, though could be possible..I rather see them upgrade to an older look like metal beards and such.. As they age mentally to reflect an outer image based on social culture.

Or we could just go BW Neo comic approach and say transformers do age, as the Tanuki Heinrad's time ability had the nasty side effect of randomly transforming him into a withered old geezer and young maximal. This could be the result of either being made of living metal, or effects from incorporating biological technologies.. but that still doesn't explain Generation 1s.

[Phoenix]

Yeah, something peculiar happened between G1 and BW.. In G1 the transformers could be millions of years old, yet in BW the massive change of size and technology somehow took place within 400 years of G1.. Due to a lack of energon on Cybertron, when the ending of the Rebirth trilogy stated that Cybertron had regained its energy supplies. Who knows what kind of party they had to have to run out in the 400 years to follow..

Either way this change also appeared to change the expected lifespan of the transformers from millions of years, to a mere couple hundreds. All of a sudden they talk of their ancient ancestors which only took place a few centuries prior.

[NaitoKage]

Once again, it should be stated that the G1 cartoon is not what Beastwars follows as Canon. Only the G1/G2 comics. So the restoration of Cybertron didn't happen, supposedly Beast wars technology is an offshoot of Pretender and Micromaster technology. The reason for this being more then likely that the writers couldn't get ahold of the old episodes of the transformers cartoons, so they got backissues of the comics and used those for lore instead, which.. makes sense since Transformers wasn't released onto VHS and dvd for awhile.. heck, DVD as a format didn't exist until the end of the series. Guess that's why the golden discs looked like Laser discs..

[Phoenix]

I never did read the G1 comics.. alwways hated the idea of pretender shells and microbots or whatever they were called.. the single issue of a G1 comic I read involved a story of human sized functioning cars/jets doing a wrestling match against a human. It was pretty horrid..

Guess there was a reason I avoided bw like the plague until I finally gave in and watched iit when the dvds first came out.

[Blackrosefencer]

Partially, I see age being as two factors. Programming, and length of existence. While I don't see transformers "aging"as they're nearly immortal, though could be possible..I rather see them upgrade to an older look like metal beards and such.. As they age mentally to reflect an outer image based on social culture.

I agree with this theory. I think the idea of "aging" for transformers is, like NK said, mostly a factor of length of time that their spark has been online. They would ultimately have to "age" in some way. I mean, every living being changes and develops over time. And if you think of a transformer as a living robot, then they have to have that characteristic of change over time as well. Of course they don't grow in the physical sense; their changes are more in relation to maturity and their mental age. When a spark comes online, that could be thought of as their "birth." They would be thought of as a child since they just came online and have no memories or experiences. The longer their spark is online, the more they learn and the more their personalities develop and change. They, in a sense, "grow up" at least when it comes to the decisions they make and the reactions they have to certain things. They don't make many physical changes as far as growth is concerned, but they do grow. The longer a bot has been online, the wiser they become (in theory...there are obvious exceptions). Much like a human child looks up to his or her grandfather or great-grandfather, a bot who is online a long time is approached in this same way....as someone who has seen it all and would be able to give good advice and great stories of times past.

As far as Airazor, it seems like she is still a mere child since she does not have any memories of her time before coming online on this planet. This is all her perspective of herself, of course. In terms of length of time that she has been online, she is not as young as Cheetor or Aurora. But, to her, she feels as though she is even younger because she doesn't know her "age." At least Aurora has the certainty that she has not been in existence before her life on this planet, but, for Airazor, she does not have this same certainty making her feel young and immature. Whatever memories or experiences she did have that would shape her actions and reactions, she cannot access them.

As far as Arachnitron is concerned, she also seems to have a similar problem where the idea of "age" is concerned. She is one of the "younger" bots, but she is has been online longer than Cheetor. Speaking of her physical age only she is older than Cheetor. But, unlike other bots, she has had little experiences to help her to mature at the same rate as others. She was in an orphanage for some time, but after that, she was locked away in a research facility. She was sheltered from most things that would have helped her to learn and grow; for instance, interaction with others, training and education, and the opportunity to create memories to learn from. She was left alone in a cell almost all her life and when she was around other bots, she was tortured and experimented on; and so, in that sense, one could argue that she is mentally younger than Cheetor. She is experiencing for the first time what many others have already had the opportunity to experience as we could see from the Hybrid's reaction to seeing her reflection for the first time. She didn't mature in the same way that other transformers did and so, like Airazor, her "age" is also difficult to pinpoint since she would, inevitably, act younger than she actually is.

[WorpeX]

Interesting topic! I agree with what NK/BRF said.

As far as retaining memories go, I have no idea how that works. OP blew up and came back with his memories in tact. Perhaps being in a stasis pod wipes the memories of the user? I don't recall anyone who was acquired from a pod during the show having any recollection of their past. Although, that would then sort of defeat the whole purpose of a stasis pod... but thats a discussion for another time.

Edit: well, actually, Ramage did remember his past. But his pod wasn't the same as the others...

[NaitoKage]

Well.. the spark and memories you can either take two ways.. either the spark holds the memories, or it doesn't. For the unreleased episode Dark glass, Rattrap was going to attempt to recover Dinobot from his downloaded memorytracks in Sentinel. I almost wonder if Optimus Primal's memorytracks were also downloaded and used when Rhinox got his spark back. On the otherhand, Starscream as a spark was able to remember everything.. so maybe the sparks do hold the memories..

in G1, they didn't really have sparks.. but were able to do things like store memories on a earth floppy disk, or Cybertronian prisons had a habit of extracting cons datatracks from their bodies and leaving them in storage..

[Phoenix]

I wouldn't really say they didn't have sparks in G1.. They definitely had something, as proven by Starscream's ghost showing up from time to time, but they never referred to it as a 'spark'. It just wasn't addressed, much like how the matrix of leadership was never mentioned until the movie and beyond and it was made clear the Decepticons never had such a device of their own. The sleeping Optimus Prime had his spark removed at the end of BW before Primal puts it back stating "All is as it should be" too.

In one of the worst episodes of them all the combaticon Brawl's personality was hosted in a weird computer component that was recovered by some human students and used in an experiment of theirs which makes little sense if you ever saw the Starscream's Brigade episode where the combaticons were created by inserting a glowing personality component thingy that could very well be a spark like device into dead robot forms. Whatever those components were, they obviously housed personalities as well as memories.

Personally the idea of a 'spark' kind of grew on me. The Dinobot case made little sense though, since Dinobot 2's "spark" was actually part of Rampage's, and with the destruction of the latter Dinobot 2 suddenly gained the memories, personality, and honor found in the original Dinobot. Just how much had been downloaded into the computer? In that particular case it seems as if the spark was nothing more than a life force without any personality or memories, yet Optimus Primal's spark obviously hosted both personality and memories. Perhaps Rampage was just different in that sense and as such his spark-twin was too.. Or they just messed up when they wrote that.

It didn't seem like Optimus Primal had been wiped to a clean slate to me when he flew the pod up there to stop the vok weapon only to be destroyed by Megatron's intervention while shouting his name. Megatron had intended to kill Tarantulas that way, a fact Tarantulas seemed well aware of when he snickered "Good bye, Optimus Primal" as our favorite monkey went flying. Several little odd things in the show if you think about it.

[una]

Yeah, I didn't really think about until I really thought about the whole 300 years thingy. I mean the Autobots and Decepticons were billions of years old.

It really doesn't make sense that their lifespans had dwindled.

I would think they could live even more with the upgrades like live forever unless some external cause.

I always tried to guess the characters' ages in Beast Wars, pertaining to this 300 period. It doesn't work especially since I feel many of our characters have been around more than just 100-200 years.