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Beast Wars: Uprising

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BWUprising logo.jpg


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You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Beast Wars: Uprising is a 2014-2016 publishing imprint of the Transformers Collectors' Club's Timelines fiction that radically re-imagines the setting of the various Beast Wars cartoons into an elaborate doorstop sci-fi epic of a continuity with a cast of thousands chronicling the dramatic fall of the Autobot and Decepticon hegemony and rise of the new generation of Maximals and Predacons as related via a fantastically nerdy series of prose stories and comics by Club proprietor Fun Publications.

Contents

Overview

Beast Wars: Uprising
Alone Together:

Uprising prose:

Uprising finale:

Uprising bonus content:

Other:


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Evolutionary Revolutionaries

Beast Wars: Uprising focuses on a dystopian, late 24th century Cybertron, ages after the conclusion of the Great War. Forcibly disarmed and exiled to their homeworld by the vastly superior Human Confederacy, the decrepit Autobots and Decepticons have become the immobile Builders of Cybertron, constructing the Maximals and Predacons as their successors. In addition to maintaining most of the essential functions of society, the Maximals and Predacons also provide entertainment and preserve the devolved Autobot-Decepticon conflict via gladiatorial matches. Unsurprisingly, however, the planet descends into war as Lio Convoy launches the Grand Uprising against the Builders. His Resistance battles Micromaster troops and Maximal and Predacon loyalists for control of their homeworld.

The Beast Wars: Uprising universe was first glimpsed as the backstory for two characters who played significant roles in other Timelines stories: the profiles for "TransTech" Blackarachnia and Depth Charge released in Collectors' Club magazine issues #25 and #49 (the writers sought to explain why Blackarachnia might side with Alpha "steal people's souls and hang 'em from the ceiling" Trion).[1][2] The actual name Beast Wars: Uprising was first given in a Collectors' Club tweet on February 14 2014[3] and the setting was finally seen in full in that year's magazine comic arc Alone Together, which promoted their new toys for Rampage and Trans-Mutate.

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You know you're in for a good nerd book when there's a big map like this in the front.

Jim Sorenson was approached by Fun Publications to develop the world further in a 2015 prose story promoting their Eject and Lio Convoy figures—one which would also serve to continue Blackarachnia's storyline. At first he found the "Beast Wars meets The Hunger Games" conceit unappealing, but was inspired by contemporary social movements such as 2014's Ferguson protests to craft a story about a marginalized people rising up against a corrupt authority (and to name individual entries after social phenomena).[4] Over the next two years, he and co-writer David Bishop produced eleven more prose stories, which together cemented the world as one of the darkest interpretations of the Transformers story.

For the most part, each prose story focused on new sets of cast members drawn not just from the Beast Era but from all across the franchise's history. Many Mini-Cons appeared as Micromasters. Characters with beast modes or animalistic robot modes were repurposed as new, analogous Maximals and Predacons. As the majority of the stories were set before any characters obtained their more recognisable beast forms, various vehicular figures were given "virtual" redecos to create Cybertronian forms for most of the cast. To help address the gender imbalance typical of Transformers fiction (particularly at the time), the authors would occasionally establish existing characters (particularly those who had no specified gender) to be female.[5]

In keeping with the intent of the original 1996 Beast Wars cartoon, Beast Wars: Uprising uses an ambiguous mishmash of the Marvel comic and the Sunbow cartoon for its version of the Great War (for instance, Grimlock takes his speech patterns from the cartoon but his personality from the comic) — though it throws in a number of elements from the contemporaneous IDW comics (such as Conjunx Endurae and functionism) for good measure.

A comic cobbled together out of screenshots from the Beast Wars cartoon, "A Change to the Agenda", was published in the seventieth issue of the magazine. It was intended to provide an "origin story" for the Beast Wars: Uprising universe, but as it was written after the fact many of its details didn't really match up with the lore established by Sorenson and Bishop.

The prose stories are chock-full of geeky minutiae on just about every page — obscure characters and locations from all across the mythos, hidden cybertronix messages (and even full-blown secret stories), GoBots, and numerous pop-culture homages... but when you hire the guy who penned the nerdiest thing ever to nerd, what do you expect?

Sorenson and Bishop have expressed interest in producing revised versions of their prose stories, but—with Fun Publications having lost the Transformers license and with Beast Wars: Uprising being arguably one of the least accessible Transformers stories to date—the future of the continuity remains uncertain.

Creative team

Alone Together was written by S. Trent Troop and Greg Sepelak, with Jesse Wittenrich and Pete Sinclair writing the prologue. Art duties were handled by Naoto Tsushima, with Evan Gauntt on colors and letters by Jesse Wittenrich.

The prose stories were written by Jim Sorenson and David Bishop (starting with "Head Games"), with Jesse Wittenrich, William Mangin, Josh Burcham, Hosono Tomoya, Christopher Colgin, Dan Perico, and Robby Musso providing illustrations.

Toys

The prose story authors described the Uprising universe as being populated by characters primarily using toy designs, whether by repurposing physical figures or coming up with "virtual" redecos.[6][7] The latter kind were necessary as a result of the story's focus on Beast Wars characters, despite the fact that they only obtain beast forms towards the end of the series—and when they do so, the intent was for them to be technorganic, meaning characters without existing Transmetal bodies would look different from their original toys anyway.[8][9][10] As a complete list of repurposed figures and "virtual" redecos would be farcically long, the below list merely includes Collectors' Club figures appearing contemporaneously in Uprising stories.

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Lio Convoy
Transformers Collectors' Club BotCon 2015 BotCon 2016 Legends

Naming conventions

Beast Wars: Uprising made a point of drawing from characters throughout the Transformers franchise, not just the presumed G1/BW setting. In order to deal with the prolific name reuse in Transformers, a Cybertronian social convention was invented by the creative team that discouraged Cybertronians from having the same name as a previous Cybertronian.

  • Minor differences in spelling were deemed acceptable to distinguish citizens from each other, allowing the existence of Blackout (based on the G1 Micromaster), Black Out (based on the Armada Mini-Con), and Black-Out (based on the movieverse Decepticon) in Uprising.
  • The rule about name reuse was apparently developed as the Uprising story went on, first mentioned and elaborated upon in "Micro-Aggressions". Therefore, while it was typical for G1 characters to have the traditional spelling and BW characters to be spelled differently, proto-formers mentioned or introduced early on managed to snag the traditional spelling sometimes, leading to the classic Seeker "Sky Warp" and the classic Constructicon "Skavenger" getting alternate spellings.
  • On other occasions, proto-formers were given completely different names based on foreign releases. The Beast Warriors Snarl and Inferno therefore became "Diablo" and "Formikon" after their Italian toy names, in deference to the G1 characters of the same name.
  • In some instances, a character was split into two distinct versions of themselves when name reuse was not an issue. Botanica and her preliminary name "Binary" became separate characters to serve story purposes. A number of Unicron Trilogy Mini-Cons with multiple decoes were split as well (e.g. the aforementioned Black Out is based on Armada Blackout's Powerlinx deco while Black Out's partner Search takes on Armada Blackout's regular deco and Japanese market name). The same occurred for some contemporary Titans Return toys (e.g. Apex, based on the revamped Titans Return form of Hi-Q was characterized as a separate individual from Hi-Q himself).
  • And in a few instances, characters with the same name were merged. Thus, Deluge the G1 Autobot and Deluge the G2 Decepticon are the same individual, Wideload the G1 Autobot and Wideload the Classics Decepticon are as well, and Crazybolt the Beast Wars Neo Predacon takes on some elements of his Robots in Disguise counterpart.
  • Only 3 intentional exceptions to this rule are known: Megatron, who is vainglorious and sees himself as worthy of the original Megatron's name; Galvatron, who is a reincarnation of the original Galvatron; and Rampage, who has a general disregard for societal norms.

Notes

  • Despite the title Beast Wars: Uprising having been assigned to the continuity from the very beginning, there were originally no plans for an actual uprising of any sort to take place—when tasked with fleshing out the universe, Jim Sorenson had to pitch Fun Publications on the idea of a rebellion![11]
  • Being set in the late 24th century, Uprising contains a number of references to Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • Jim Sorenson revealed the titles of three more prose stories which he might have written had he had more time: "False Equivalencies", featuring Immorticon,[12] "Virtue Signaling", featuring Maxima,[13] and "Other Victims", featuring the Vok.[14]
  • An early idea for BotCon 2016's exclusive comic would have involved the Uprising storyline, depicting Magnaboss as an antagonistic Builder creation.[15][16] For more information, see the page for that comic.
  • When asked about a possible Uprising incarnation of Vector Prime (star of Sorenson's previous work on Ask Vector Prime), Sorenson stated there probably wasn't one, but that Safeguard was probably a Targetmaster in this universe.[17]
  • Uprising sometimes based Cybertronians on franchises adjacent to Transformers, such as Vampire from M.A.S.K. or Fennec from Battle Beasts.[18]
  • Sorenson cited his favorite characters to write as being Wolfang and Longrack.[19]
  • Early in Beast Wars: Uprising, the term "protoform" is used with its conventional definition as a developmental stage for Cybertronians, sometimes used analogously to "child", or more clinically as the basic form of Maximals and Predacons. "Intersectionality" introduced the phrase "Proto-races" to refer to these groups, which entered regular usage in "Not All Megatrons". "Cultural Appropriation" briefly used the phrase "Proto-Cybertronian". In "Safe Spaces", the term "proto-formers" first appeared, which by "Derailment" had become the most common term used to refer to the Maximals and Predacons; presumably to match this new term, "proto-races" was no longer capitalised. Often, "proto-" can just be used as a prefix, as in "proto-sized" (in "Trigger Warnings"), "Proto point one percenter" (in "Cultural Appropriation"), "proto-scale", "proto-nations", "proto-soldiers", "proto-punks", and the "League of Autonomous Proto-States" (all in "Derailment").

See also

References

  1. ↑ "I would like to hear Jim's answer for how he got his ideas for the universe. The initial initial spark way back in Transtech Blackarachnia's bio came from the idea that we wanted a bit of a sympathetic character. Even if she was working for a guy potentially more evil than SG Optimus Prime (that guy being SG Alpha Trion). So we pondered the idea of why she would go against the Transtech in such a conniving and twisted way - extracting sparks to steal the empty bodies for espionage meant she had to have a VERY good reason to go that far. That all led to the idea that the Maximals and Predacons in her universe were kept as slaves under an unreachable aristocracy. Just as the Transtech sat far above the Lowtech. But why would Maximals and Predacons exist if Autobots and Decepticons were still around? Ah, they're too old to fight and force the other factions to do it for them. The Games then entered into play when Eject was turned into a BWU character. As a guy obsessed with sports - and the chess analogy already in BA's bio - it made sense to make the Maximal/Predacon conflict into a sports thing. Especially with the gladiatorial background in so many TF universes."—Jesse Wittenrich, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  2. ↑ Jesse Wittenrich, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (dead link)
  3. ↑ @The_TF_Club, Twitter, 2014/02/14 (dead link)
  4. ↑ Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (dead link)
  5. ↑ "[Why do I sometimes make traditionally male characters female?] I hesitate to say it's random, but there aren't any hard and fast rules. One frustration I have with the TF mythology is the dearth of female characters, so for my stories I try to remedy somewhat. For characters with minimal fiction, I generally feel free to reimagine species and faction and personality and, yes, gender. Characters with no specified gender (Major Altitude comes to mind, as does Spacewarp) I'm especially prone to making female as it's not even genderbending in my head."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  6. ↑ "We usually come up with them as-needed in the story. We all liked the Titans Return Mindwipe and thought he might be neat for someone like Psychobat."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  7. ↑ "It's always my preference to have a preexisting toy design. non-toy designs mostly just slipped though the cracks. The exception to that rule was the Destructons, I wanted to keep their unique aesthetic while introducing the idea of them transforming, as teased at the end of Alone Together."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  8. ↑ "In my head, TM for Cheetor. I actually never gave Blackarachnia's body all that much thought. Since they were never depicted in artwork and we didn't write with a specific body and mind, you should imagine them in whatever body you think is most appropriate. It could even be a slightly mechanized version of their non transmetal body, like Ram Horn."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "AMA: Bish, Jesse, & Jim", 2017/05/22 (archive link)
  9. ↑ "The original idea was that all of the beast-upgrade characters would take on their TM bodies. Any that didn't have a TM or TM2 toy would become a mechanical version of their beast frame. If I had to tell Jim what toy to use for BA, it would probably be her TM2 toy. Although her Beast Machines toy (since it differed so much from the show model) would be tempting too."—Jesse Wittenrich, The Allspark forums, "AMA: Bish, Jesse, & Jim", 2017/05/22 (archive link)
  10. ↑ "For my part I honestly kind of imagined her as a metallic version of her first BW body - black and gold, kind of small and sleek. I don't think we ever described her in enough detail to really pin it down though."—David Bishop, The Allspark forums, "AMA: Bish, Jesse, & Jim", 2017/05/22 (archive link)
  11. ↑ Jim Sorenson in conversation at TFNation 2023
  12. ↑ "Sometimes we start with a character and then build the story around him or her. Immorticon was like that... I liked the name, and eventually a story clicked. (False Equivalencies, if I ever have the chance to write it.) Sometimes it's a request from editorial. Identity Politics came about because FP requested a story to help promote the FSS5 Scorponok figure. Sometimes the idea for the story comes first. Intersectionality was because I didn't like leaving Transmutate and Rampage hanging in deep space when the main thrust of the action was on Cybertron. The idea of the Beast Wars Neo Predacons as the heroes came from brainstorming."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  13. ↑ "The finale will have some flashbacks and the like about the past, but most of it will be in the here and now. Should the universe continue, I've got plenty of stories ranging from minus eleven million years all the way to the 34th century. That said, I like that the focus of the universe is the Maximals and Predacons, so I'd mostly want to focus on stories that are relevant to them. I think it's neat to get a glimpse of the mythology, but probably wouldn't write a whole story about, say, Jazz vs Starscream in 1985. But the story of Maxima, Virtue Signaling, is set in the past. So was the aforementioned Immorticon tale."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  14. ↑ Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/16 (dead link)
  15. ↑ "VERY early on in the process, I was asked to pitch an idea for what Dawn of the Predacus would have looked like in the BWU universe. It would have been a story where the ghost of Prowl (Prowl II maybe) was acting from beyond the grave to put together a Builder threat, the Magnaboss. In the end, the Tri-Predacus Council itself would have had to intervene to stop the rampage. You can still see the toys solicited as such: https://www.toyarama.com/store/2016-botcon-beast-wars-uprising-dawn-of-the-predacus-five-figure-combiner-wars-boxed-convention-set-non-attending-1-pc-p1414.php In the end, though, FP opted to outsource the comic to IDW, so that story got shelved."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  16. ↑ Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "AMA: Bish, Jesse, & Jim", 2017/05/28 (dead link)
  17. ↑ "I don't think there is a Vector Prime analog in this universe. If there is, I haven't found a place for him. Maybe in the distant past or future. Safeguard was probably active during the Great War and, being Targetmaster-y, probably isn't alive anymore."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  18. ↑ "Not as such. Quantum Harmonic Resonance is such that their analogues in this dimension tend to be Cybertronian. We've already seen that with guys like Fennec and will probably continue to do so. The same goes for MASK characters, like Aura and Vampire."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)
  19. ↑ "Oooh, that's a toughie. There's one from the first part of the finale who was really difficult to write for but came out very nicely. Wolfang was a hoot, but Bish did most of the heavy lifting there. Longrack was a lotta fun; I love his officiousness. There's a little bit of Arnold J. Rimmer in there."—Jim Sorenson, The Allspark forums, "Beast Wars Uprising: AMA", 2016/10/15 (archive link)

External links

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