My Speculations on Cybertronian Morticians
Okay....so... This has been on my mind for awhile.
I've been thinking a lot about what Cybertronians do with their dead, what their procedures are for processing the deceased, how their culture views death, and what they believe about the afterspark. I know this is a bit morbid, but hear me out.
In canon, being melted down for scrap is often threatened in multiple continuities, and there are several examples where when a bot is growing old/is injured/is dying, they talk a bit about them being on their way to the scrap heap. There is also a lot of evidence that once a spark is extinguished, it either goes to the well of sparks or the allspark. What I'm curious about is what happens if a spark doesn't make it to the allspark for some reason, if that's even possible, or just what happens to the sparks once they're back in the allspark. Different continuities have different interpretations of what the allspark is and such, so I'm not sure if I'll scratch the surface of possibilities. Cybertronians place a lot of value on a bot's function while they're alive, and being called a scrap heap or anything related to scrap for that matter seems to be one of the worst insults in their culture. Calling someone scrap means that they are unfit to live.
ALSO- I've been thinking a lot about what a Cybertronian morgue would be like, since my character Grimspur was the Cybertronian equivalent of a mortician. I almost imagine a Cybertronian morgue being like some sort of twisted chop shop where bots come in, and the morticians run inventory on their internal components and sort out the pieces that can be transplanted, and then the rest is melted down for scrap. I see them as going through dead bots' parts and just like- sorting everything into piles after determining cause of death if it wasn't determined before the dead bot was brought in, taking out any parts that are in good condition to pass along to the hospitals, and then sending off the rest to the scrapyards.
The life of a Cybertronian mortician is probably pretty boring most of the time, because of how tough Cybertronians are and how long they live. Deaths are almost always caused by other bots, bad accidents, plagues/malware, circuit booster overdoses, suicide, and bots neglecting their health/not getting health care for long enough for them to eventually drop. (Of course there is the times when the functionist council committed genocide against certain model types that they saw as obsolete if we're talking IDW1) Almost all of their common causes of death are probably preventable one way or another. It might be that Morticians don't have to even show up for work some days because of how hard cybertronians tend to be to kill. I wonder how often live bots are mistaken for dead and are sent in to the morgues, only to be
Now- What I've been mostly thinking about is what happens when bots are dying off because of a plague? How do the morticians and clean up crews protect themselves from things like malware and rust infections? I think that Cybertronians would likely have EXTREME health and safety policies regarding handling the dead because they are a proud species that probably hate facing their own mortality. I imagine entrances on the morgues being one-way only, and that morticians would have to go through some sort of decontamination process when leaving the morgue in order to even get out of the building. Morticians would also probably keep themselves well groomed and maybe even use special waxes/solvents/cleaning chemicals on themselves to prevent rust infections and keep them from cross contaminating the corpses. I can see Cybertronian morgues also being away from the main cities and civilization, and having extreme lockdown protocols to protect the populous from plagues.
Another thing I've been considering is what if a dead cybertronian was part of a criminal investigation? I kinda headcanon that they might have TONS of drawers in cybertronian morgues for spare parts and husks of bots. There isn't hardly any likelihood of a bot rotting except for rust, scraplets, and corrosive environmental chemicals. Storage of dead bot bits probably involves just shoving the bits in a climate controlled, super dry drawer, and then waiting for the investigators to show up and do their thing. A dead bot's husk could theoretically be kept in the morgue indefinitely.
Cybertronian morgues would also probably be a HUGE player in disease control, because if there's a plague, they'd be one of the first places to be hit and one of the first places to potentially research plagues and collect samples. The morticians would likely record the factors of every bot's death and they probably have a super advanced computer system that runs calculations and sorts the medical records of every bot that dies and is brought in to find similarities so that they could catch a plague before it got nasty.
I wonder what kind of bots would be assigned as Morticians. Would cities bring bots online for that purpose? Considering how Cybertronian society works from my limited understanding of it, I can almost see the functionist council picking bots who are social outcasts and failures at their functions to be the ones to process and work with the dead, because it is literally just opening bots up, sorting out the good bits vs bad bits, and being faced with the mortality of their species every day. They would be some of the first to be infected if a plague was going through Cybertron, and they would possibly even be seen as unclean by the rest of their species because with how long lived Cybertronians are, they probably don't like to acknowledge the fact that their race can die. It would be a depressing and psychologically damaging job, to see case after case of deaths that could probably have been prevented, isolated from society and treated as if they're on the verge of being tossed on the scrapheap themselves. I think that any Cybertronian who chose to become a mortician would either have something wrong in their head, be curious about the potential mortality of their species, or just be pretty emotionless/cynical.
Feel free to send asks or anons regarding these headcanons of mine. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, even if you disagree with my headcanons. I just realized that how Cybertronians handle their dead is an untapped area of exploration and I’d like to see if anyone else in the fandom has ever covered this base.
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