World-building Cybertron: Functional beauty
One of the great things about world-building an entire alien species and their world is one gets to redefine concepts we take for granted. Here I’m taking a look at an aspect of Cybertronian culture, bouncing off the canon of Transformers Prime and the background novels, and my question is, what is beauty?
We can all probably agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it is subjective, it varies, and many different cultures and communities have their own vision of beauty. But they all talk about beauty. Its form might vary, but it’s still a concept of its own. Beauty is something pleasant to look at, something good and desirable, and in everyday context usually talked about as a set of standards: these are the standards to reach for in order to obtain beauty.
So beauty can be defined as a set of desired features, and those features are all something that (most) people within a culture find appealing.
Considering how Cybertron used to be dominated by an ideology “form dictates function” and how all of Cybertronians were classified into different categories, in the novel Exodus into castes. In Transformers Prime there was talk about “increasing inequality among the masses”, and this notion fits the caste system lore. So Cybertronians were harshly divided, and this system of seperation was also regional: certain areas of the planet were focused on certain types of industries and thus populated mainly by certain frame types and castes. During the War for Cybertron we see this regional seperation becoming the lines between Autobots and Decepticons, and for example Kaon is called “the Decepticon capital”.
So if castes (and frame types and lifestyles) are this absolutely seperated, it would make sense that things like beauty standards that are so strongly subjective and bound to the culture would also vary. Thus, Cybertronian standards of beauty are based on function: beauty is fitting the assigned function admirably. What the function to reach for is varies by region, caste, and frame type.
There are areas focused on raw industries and mining, such as Kaon, Tarn and Blaster City, and those cities are populated by heavy frame types fit for that kind of work. Kaon also has the gladiator culture, so the region admires strong warrior types and most likely favors weapon mods.
Crystal City is the capital of arts and science, and thus home for intellectuals and innovators. It most likely houses several very different castes that are practically equal as far as social ladder is considered, but still very different. New things are favored, things like fashion and decorations and self-expression, and there are several subcultures with their own standards and norms.
Iacon is the capital, and usually capitals house the widest range of different people. There are the richest and the poorest. The high political power and the upper class, but also a lot of middle class workers, business owners and merchants, blue collar workers, and also the poor low caste people. In a society that’s founded on compartmentalization and functionality, different classes are most likely divided into different neighborhoods. This means that Iaconian beauty as one easily identified thing doesn’t exist, but instead several different classes focus on their own and try to seperate themselves from the others. The only real common thing is to try to look better than you are.
As for other regions, there are most likely cities built around certain industries like Kaon and Tarn are built around mining and factories. Each city has their own mix of people and their own focus, a regional identity of sorts, and they are more defined than Iacon that is a mixture of everything.
So Cybertron has several definitions of beauty, some of them so different from each other that a bot from one region wouldn’t even recognize another region’s beauty as such.
For example, a great beauty in Kaon is someone big and strong who flourishes in the harsh environment, someone tough, salt of the earth type, preferably dangerous. For some middle- or upper-class bot from Iacon that beauty would look crude and barbaric since those features have nothing to do with the life in Iacon. Iaconian would be practical, middle-sized city bot with clean and shiny paint and some neat upgrade or mod, because truly beautiful bots can afford that and they show that they care. A neat and clean bot is a sociable one, someone who fits the demanding capital social circles.
Other regions are like this as well, with their own sets of functions, standards and lifestyle ideals set by the local culture, and each definition of beauty is unrecognizable to someone who’s not part of that culture.
To sum this half-meta, half-headcanon thing up, I could say that my approach to Cybertronian beauty is function. Function is in the core of the culture of each region, and whether they like it or not that affects everything and everyone. Also there’s something truly appealing in the idea that beauty is indeed in the eye of a beholder, so much so that one bot’s beauty is ugly to another.
