Okay so the reason why we disappeared for a while there is because we became determined to turn the Cybertronian calendar spreadsheet into a fully automated spreadsheet that shifts the dates according to the year, and we didn't know how to do anything when it came to spreadsheets so it was all self taught on the spot as each issue came up (and there weren't any guides for the whole process so we had to figure it all out ourselves), but its done now!
Here's an example of what we get (this is the Cybertronian calendar year for present day)
Obviously this is all based on our Sanus Ingens AU and hard scifi work, but its a cool thing to generally have access to and use, so feel free to ask for a specific year, the longest part of making this now will be just the time it takes for the PDF to convert to images, so basically no time at all
Bumblebee is an insecticon royal, yes, but he doesn't actually like the idea of leading his future hive. He wants his hive to be very family-like, like his carrier's hive that he grew up in, but that doesn't magically make a hive's population not need leadership. So, as the treaty starts to look more and more real and Bumblebee starts feeling more and more comfortable with the idea of starting a hive soon, Bumblebee's processor is subconsciously tracking potential counterparts that could compensate for his lack of care for leadership.
Unfortunately for Bumblebee, he spends most of his time post-war around Starscream. Who very much DOES want to be in positions of leadership. He's got ALL the ambition that Bumblebee lacks for his future hive.
This doesn't immediately make Starscream the winner though. Starscream is far too willing to view those under his care as underlings and disposable pawns, which is not compatible with Bumblebee's ideal "family" hive.
Starscream stays as a potential candidate for this "co-ruler scouting" that neither he nor Bumblebee are aware of for a very long time. Other potential candidates came and went of course, but with the war over, finding the right kind of ambitious folk that don't crumble under the pressure of rebuilding society or abuse the power of their positions is very difficult. Starscream only manages to stay because Bumblebee tasked himself with making sure Starscream did things right, and Starscream miraculously was improving (slowly) with that help.
Eventually after a long, difficult, and relapse-filled character arc, the time comes where Starscream's "pawns" are at risk, and Starscream is in the position to decide their fate. When he decides to put in the work to save these nobodies who he has no personal connection with instead of just leaving them to sort out the situation on their own and probably die, there's suddenly a click in Bumblebee's processor, and Bumblebee becomes aware of Starscream now suddenly being categorised as an IDEAL candidate to co-rule his hive.
This is horrible news to Bumblebee. Because he was unaware of his tracking of Starscream's progress, all Bumblebee can think is "did my coding just decide that the chronic backstabber was an ideal partner to lead with?!"
And so Bumblebee tracks Starscream's progress AGAIN. Though aware this time, he's hindered by having ~feelings~ now, and there are far too many daydreams about their future hive. Poor mech is gone at this point.
On top of going through an absolute mess of a denial phase, there's also the looming issue that Starscream doesn't know Bumblebee is an insecticon, let alone a royal insecticon, who want a hive. So Bumblebee is struggling with the idea of potentially courting Starscream with insecticon coding that will make itself more and more apparent the further their relationship goes (and the longer the courtship takes), and he hasn't even asked the guy out yet! And Starscream being a disaster of a mech when it comes to feelings is NOT helping!
Poor Bumblebee is going to have a rough time if he sets any form of courting in motion.
Combining is less of a rigid relationship structure and more of a relationship "medium". Those who can combine don't need to find a gestalt, and even if they do that gestalt can look like anything. They can be pseudo siblings (or actual siblings), an assorted family dynamic, friends, queerplatonic, practically conjunxed, ANYTHING, its up to them.
Additionally, a gestalt can FUNCTION in a variety of ways. For example, the Combaticons are basically family, they're close and well in tune with each other, and the way they've developed the gestalt bond allows for easy thought transfer and a sense for each other's health and well-being, this makes Bruticus a very stable combiner, even if most outside the bond don't think so (Bruticus is made of some incredibly volatile and quirky people, so he himself is equally volatile and quirky). On the other side of this is the Protectobots' dynamic, which is professional, distant, and sometimes even antagonistic, truly a gestalt formed as a tool in war, their bond is closed off and thought transfer is difficult, and they can't sense each other at all, resulting in Defensor being a pretty unstable combiner.
On the extreme ends of this are the Constructicons and the Stunticons. The Constructicons are so closely bonded that their individuality blurrs, they're fully in tune to the point that, if things are calm and they're mentally well enough, they can speak THROUGH each other, and they can share senses and feel each other's pain as if it was their own, Devastator is INCREDIBLY stable, there is no separating Devastator by force or manipulation, they will uncombine when they are ready and not a moment sooner.
The Stunticons on the other hand is the gestalt bond at its worst, they all HATE each other. They're forced together under Motormaster, and they have zero thought transfer (outside of Motormaster's attempts at breaking into their minds, though he's not inclined to bother trying unless a specific situation calls for it). They don't ever combine willingly, its always Motormaster triggering the combination, and Menasor can only stay together for as long as Motormaster can wrangle four unwilling and out of sync minds, which overall leaves Menasor with no real mind to work with, he's all instinct and impulse, and is completely unhelpful in any situation, the Stunticons are best left uncombined, they (excluding Motormaster) prefer it that way.
A Host's symbiotes can choose to undergo a simple procedure to gain full independence, no longer needing a Host to charge or travel long distances and opening up the possibility of their form growing larger (though this doesn't always happen), but not all symbiotes feel the need and many prefer to stick with a Host.
Solus' alt type was what is known as a Host or Carrier alt. Its something that allows someone to carry around multiple minibots (though a specific kind of minibot, who are designed to fit in and function best with their Host) even in root. Because Solus was the one with this alt, and Solus is the one who added reproductive organs to what ended up being the primary blueprints, any Cybertronian born with a Host alt is guaranteed to have healthy fully functioning reproductive organs (as opposed to the standard unhealthy or even dormant reproductive organs many Cybertronians are born with). This in combination with the nature of the Host alt tends to give the general impression that all hosted minibots are their Host's sparklings, but this isn't actually the case.
Because of their extreme association with high fertility and forgeborn parenting, at one point functionists who were against the forgeborn (because of their nature of bringing extinct traits back from the afterlife with them) wanted all Host alts gone, and succeeded in fully wiping them out during the first functionism era.
Unfortunately for the functionists, Host alts are only more likely to be able to reproduce than the average Cybertronian, not the only ones who can. It did take a while, but eventually a Host alt spark carried the Host alt trait into their next life, and slowly the Host alts began to recover. Still, even in current day Cybertron, Host alts are incredibly rare.
"Sex" or "gender" as humans know them is kind of irrelevant to Cybertronians, as there is no need to differentiate each other based on reproductive organs with everyone having the same stuff. Feminine and masculine concepts are just something that they never socially developed in any sense.
Instead, Cybertronian gender is based on one's alt and its method of transportation (or lack of transportation as the case may be). They're not typically focused on as much as human genders often are, though functionism did make an attempt to make it the CORE of who someone is, it just wasn't something that stuck even during the prime of the functionism eras.
[Hooo boy this is a long one]
Grounder, Flyer, Sedentary, and Space were considered the primary genders for a while, and when contact was made with organic planets with liquid oceans Sea was added to the list.
Additionally there are extra genders;
Apparatus is a specific gender branching off from Sedentary, the bots with this gender felt that Sedentary didn't quite fit their method of "transport", and made Apparatus quietly at some point during the first functionism era, bringing it into awareness after that era ended and they were safe to talk about their alts in this way without being reduced to them.
Beast became its own thing due to the first functionism era, with many beastformers finding comfort in establishing their methods of transportation as something that felt different from another alt that traveled via land, sky, or sea. Usage of this varies, some consider this to be leaning into functionism, some feel more in tune with a travel-based gender, and some consider themselves to be both Beast and a travel based gender.
Combined was something brought on by gestalts who felt that being forced into the gender of Grounder while combined regardless of what their individual genders were was insulting, but some gestalts didn't feel right with being considered their individual genders while combined, and gestalts genders didn't all match, so the new gender was formed. Not every gestalt takes the Combined gender on while combined, but also some gestalts keep the combined gender even when separate, it really just depends.
Spark is a catch-all gender that ignores the need to base someone on their alt. This gender was first established by monoformers early on in Cybertronian history, and then, not too long after, it was brought into popularity by triple changers who didn't want to go by one or both of their alts. After the second functionism era ended and Optimus and Megatron's era of the war began there was a wave of frustration over having had to fight for their right to not be reduced to their alt for the second time in their history (the time between the functionism eras was too large for anyone to have personally experienced both, but the first era was well known and recorded), and so Spark became widely used as the default assumed gender (until a preference was stated, of course).
Insecticons might have their own gender/s, but it is kept out of reach of non-Insecticons as its too dangerous to risk an accidental outing by something as casual as accidental pronoun usage. Insecticon gender/s might become known after we get around to making them the treaty is well established and Insecticon rights are solidly in place (which would take quite a while).
Pronouns list:
(In Nominative/Accusative/Prenominal possessive/Predictive possessive/Reflexive order)
Okay, so Cybertronians have terms for parents (creator, carrier, sire).
And they use the terms mentor/mentee for those forms of relationships.
But there's an in-between point, something that's not quite parental, but also not quite a mentorship. When a primeborn sparkling comes into the world, there's a lot of baseline knowledge they have already, they don't need to be taught to speak, or walk, and the only protection they need is only really from issues that may come from their inexperience. This type of guardian's role often tends to lean towards specifically helping the sparkling get their feet under themselves and find their place in the world.
The term for this kind of guardian is "adsum", and the term for the sparkling in relation to them is "discor".
Under some circumstances, a forgeborn might find themselves with an adsum. In tragically young orphan cases, they might pick a creator term for their new guardian, but if they're orphaned after a certain developmental stage they're more inclined (or, depending on your perspective, SOCIETY is more inclined, and so the sparkling mimics) to refer to them as their adsum.
A creator, mentor, and an adsum have very similar roles in a young Cybertronian's life, but they also have their differences, and many find these differences to be important.
Bumblebee is a stealth Insecticon, born from a hive-like line of Insecticons who typically followed bee-like social structures. Believe it or not, Bumblebee himself was selected to become a royal, and is capable of starting his own hive if he wants. He's decided to wait until the next "peacetime" or the actual end of the war to give that any proper thought though.
When Bumblebee left his hive to start out on his own, he wanted to join the autobots but had no contacts or safe backstory to work with, even his stealth alt wasn't great, it was just a little too obviously something he wasn't used to.
Lucky for him, Bumblebee stumbled across Cliffjumper, who was in the early phases of joining the autobots. Cliffjumper figured out the little prince pretty fast, but he wasn't raised to view Insecticons poorly, and when Bumblebee mentioned wanting to be an autobot Cliffjumper set things up to pass Bee off as his slightly more sheltered twin who ended up with a different mentor. With Cliffjumper being primeborn - a cybertronian born from a hotspot rather than from a forge - and Bumblebee being presented as his twin, it made Bumblebee secretly being an Insecticon less obvious of an idea, since all Insecticons are forgeborn.
Bumblebee stayed fully stealth in the autobots for a very long time, until a situation arose where he was forced to tell Optimus about his heritage. Optimus kept it a secret, though he did ask that Bumblebee tell Jazz, as it was best that the head of spec ops and Bee's team knew. Jazz didn't do anything unusual when Bumblebee told him, but Bee suspects that he already knew, maybe even knew the whole time, its hard to tell.
Bumblebee's opinion of the decepticon Insecticons is...complicated. He gets the general idea of what they're going for, and why everyone being stealth isn't particularly helpful for attempting to gain equality, but also in the end they are decepticons, and they don't seem to be reluctant in the slightest about being asked to do cruel things for the sake of the war. In the end, he treats them like any other decepticon, their shared heritage doesn't change the consequences of their actions.
The Insecticons were created as an attempt to work around energon shortages early on in the 400 million year war. The idea was to shift dietary needs away from energon and towards non-energon material, any material would do, because anything else would be at least harvestable from somewhere. Unfortunately, the project failed catastrophically too early on, the Insecticons were endlessly hungry, and they multiplied too quickly when actually fed energon. Energon was just too energy dense to be replaced by anything else. So the funding was cut and their support was lost. Some of the scientists on the project worked on improving the Insecticons quality of life, lowering their chances of reproducing from consuming too much energon to help their bodies actually KEEP the energy gained, but other than that not much could be done.
Insecticons were viewed very poorly in early years, seen less as sapient cybertronians and more as actual pests or even monstrous failed experiments. There were many attempts to wipe them out throughout the war, but there always managed to be some remaining, and their numbers always recovered.
Still, all these attempts to cull the Insecticons effectively worked as "natural selection" (as much as genocide is "natural"). The surviving Insecticons were always the ones who hid best, and when a coupling with a triple changer brought a stealth form into the equation the Insecticon population could finally move beyond the boundaries of running and hiding, and they were finally able to blend in with other cybertronians. This, inevitably, was the only Insecticon line to survive that era of their race.
Another factor that "natural selection" picked out for them once Insecticons became inherently triple changers was a tendency to stick together in large groups. If they collectively blended in together and watched out for each other they were more likely to survive, and thus Insecticon colonies were born.
Over time, Insecticons slowly became more accepted as they revealed their heritage to closely trusted friends, there was a shift in understanding and people were more likely to see them as fellow cybertronians just trying to get by in this ridiculously long war. Unfortunately, around this same time functionism was on the rise, and Insecticons were "placed" below even beastformers (an attempt to lower sympathy and bring back the Insecticon cullings).
When Megatron broke "peacetime" and brought his and Optimus' era of the war, many Insecticons joined him, refusing to hide their Insecticon traits or use their stealth alt. They viewed all the hiding and secrecy as counterproductive to the goal of Insecticon equality. This had the side effect of making it seem as if EVERY Insecticon had joined the decepticons, and when the faction made a moral shift away from their initial goals of equality this reinforced negative stereotypes of Insecticons, and stealth autobot and neutral Insecticons faced more bigotry than ever.
Generally the point of Sanus Ingens (literally in the name, if you can understand not just latin but lazy shitty latin) is stupid bonkers excessive hard scifi worldbuilding with fun fully functional charts and weird cultural things, and we do enjoy maintaining that when it comes to character arcs and overall storylines, its fun to thematically tie our worldbuilding and character arcs together, BUT, at our core......we're unfortunately just massive shippers. That's just our preferred medium of character analysis and exploration. We try not to be excessive with it, you would think being averse aroace would make that incredibly easy, but no, we want to be in the labs analysing attraction through the lense of character dynamics and growth. Not much we can do about that, believe us, we've tried.
Anyway, this is context for the current topic rotating in our shared brain.
Optimus Prime.
We've been calling Megatron and Optimus' era of the war the "MegOp era" in our personal notes (not on this blog tho, wanted to avoid confusion) because its shorter and also pretty funny, but we don't think MegOp is what we'll be going for in Sanus Ingens, the vibes just aren't quite right, more can be done with those two separately, with them maintaining a platonic bond as the treaty drama settles and normal life on Cybertron starts to actually look like normal life (it would also be funny if they became best friends, like everyone thinks the Megop war created ~tension~ if anything, but no. Besties.)
Initially after deciding that we were like "alright then, they'll be flying solo" but recently the idea of slapping Optimus with a weird out of left field option has been plaguing us. This was triggered by ShockOp tag browsing, because IDW really brought a wild vibe to ShockOp that we love, but we don't know if we want it to be Shockwave either, regardless of how we go about Shockwave as a character. Still, we want something of that level of weirdness. Not Optimus' long time rival, or one of his friends/someone from his faction, or a nobody background character that gets people asking "who?" rather than "why?". Something strange needs to have happened to bring them together and them being together needs to continue being strange afterwards. I think it would be a good way to develop Optimus specifically beyond the limitations of the war.
Its probably just gonna need to be something we let cook in the background for a while until we think of something, but the concept is haunting us.
Each city-continent of Cybertron has its quirks, at various points in Cybertron's history there were continent lockdowns, resulting in some ethnic traits forming along forgeborn genetic lines.
One of the most extreme cases of this is the Praxians, who developed a whole new section of the processor capable of immense storage, analysis, and general processing. Its hard to say which came first, the tac-net or Praxian culture, but they are practically a requirement for each other, so maybe they formed alongside each other.
Praxians have a culture that can basically be summed up as "extreme multitasking". They're immensely hyperactive, and their lives are dense with activity.
The tac-net is capable of up to eight lines of thought at once; three for long term dilemmas and plans, three for immediate future thoughts and actions, and two on the side typically assigned to entertainment, idle thought, and emergency extreme processor demand. This makes keeping a Praxian fulfilled an incredibly demanding task.
The average Praxian was expected to hold two simultaneous careers. One would primarily take up their time throughout the day, and the other would be more spontaneous, putting the current task of the primary career on pause as the task of the secondary is done. Sometimes a primary and secondary career will even be arranged so there is no need to pause the primary - this is considered the ideal scenario, but its not easy to do, they might have essentially eight brains but they do only have one body with two arms.
Generally Praxian society was considered to be incredibly overwhelming for anyone without a tac-net, though if they were born and raised in Praxis they could easily work around the issue with some accommodations.
Praxis was bombed and it's citizens culled during the "peacetime" before Optimus and Megatron's era of the 400 million year war. Any remaining information about it's culture was sparse, and a lot of it was lost as even those with personal experience with Praxian culture could rarely understand the WHYs of the overwhelming practices.
The few survivors of the Praxian genocide were left with scraps of the culture that was built with and for their processors, and as new Praxians were slowly born with tac-nets inherited from their previous lives, there became a major issue of accommodating for an organ nobody understood, leading to Praxians being known for being incredibly neurotic as their unknown needs weren't met. They often become drawn to unhealthy lifestyles and mindsets simply because of how intense they are on the processor, making these things feel more comfortable to them despite the damage to their bodies, minds, social lives, and lives in general.
The term for a cybertronian born from a hotspot is "primeborn"
The term for a cybertronian born from a creator is "forgeborn"
A primeborn is born at developmentally around the same point as a 5-7 year old human (with some differences, like full coordination abilities and perfect speech). Their sparks come from the PureE stored in the centre of Cybertron, the core of their being freshly installed with blueprints that decide their form, alt, and abilities.
A forgeborn is born at developmentally around the same point as a 1-2 year old human (primary differences being a slight boost in coordination, basically no language skills, a strong grasp on communication with their creators via EMF communication, and the ability for RAPID learning. They will have picked up near-perfect speech by 6 Earth months old). Their sparks come from a combination of their creators, and, through their creators' sparks' connection to the afterlife, a random passed on spark. They retain no memories of their past life, but can inherit some blueprints from their previous life, preventing any cybertronian traits from truly dying out.
Hope nobody is a big fan of Streetwise because we did kind of end up making him a sad joke. We refused to make his story any brand of easy because he's a cop and all cops gotta at least spend time in the torture/humiliation blender before they can experience happiness (and even thats only allowed if they stop being cops), but Streetwise specifically got the worst of it, we've basically written him into a running gag that thematically he can not escape
Drift is a neutral who lives on a neutral colony titan (currently undecided/unnamed) orbiting Opifex.
The titan and colony maintain their neutrality by gaining most of their resources from harvesting energy from the gas giant, giving them stability and independence.
This independence also makes them a tempting target for pirates and thieves, and the factions always want to sway a titan to their side.
The colony doesn't take well to violence, generally they feel that the Cybertronian race is gaining a reputation in the galaxy for being violent brutes, and with the Quintessons as their parent race the Cybertronians cant afford that kind of reputation.
Still, their titan is being attacked, and someone needs to do something about it, so Drift has resorted to vigilantism, secret identity and all.
Deadlock is widely hated by the colony, and tends to be running from the colony law enforcement just as much as he runs towards invaders.
Deadlock will typically attack factioned invaders on-sight, but neutrals are given a single chance to state their intentions before he decides to attack (he tends to have a sense about if someone is telling the truth, but if they DO manage to slip something by him he'll dispose of them long before they have a chance to even realise they've been caught). He is incredibly brutal and efficient, following the logic that if he is going to betray his people's beliefs like this to protect them, he might as well make sure he does it right.
Eventually Deadlock's identity is revealed, and Drift is run out of the colony, though the titan allows him to stay and protect them, resulting in him living deep in the internals of the station where he is less likely to be found. He typically gets around inhabited areas via vents.
Some time after humans became aware of the cybertronians existence on Earth and good relations were established, the size difference between the coexisting races started to become a major barrier to proper integration, but the infrastructure designed by humanity couldn't just be changed a little to fit cybertronians, it would require a complete overhaul, even if it was just done for a single city too much would need to be changed.
Its not quite a proper solution to the original problem, but when some cybertronians offered to set up a shared human-cybertronian colony on Mars, there was no way humanity was going to say no, and it was a good way to continue building the bond between the races while giving humanity time to build places designed with cybertronians in mind at a less costly pace.
