Shokaract

Shokaract is a Predacon from the Beast Wars portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Now you FEAR ME... now you don't!

Once a low-level Predacon Warrior known as the Hunter, Shokaract chanced upon the dark essence of Unicron himself. Recognizing Unicron's unrivaled power, Shokaract used the Chaos God's life force to create the Matrix of Conquest, a twisted version of the Autobot Matrix of Leadership. With Unicron's dark power at his fingertips, Shokaract now pursues only one goal: to become Overlord of the Universe.

“	Foolish, doomed creatures! The fires of a living god beat at my dark heart! The end of everything is upon us; the long night of oblivion beckons—for you ALL! ....and you in particular.	”
—Shokaract to the army against him, and then to Sandstorm specifically, "Terminus"

Fiction

3H comics

This is gonna hurt...

At the dawn of time, Primus foresaw the eventual rise of Shokaract, and sired the twelve Transformers of the Covenant to lay in wait on distant Protos and hone their skills for the day they would eventually face the tyrant.

Shokaract's reign was to some extent made possible by actions taken by Megatron when he took over and ruled Cybertron. By the 32nd century C.E., Shokaract had completely enslaved Cybertron and most of the known galaxy. From his citadel at Korumcan, he directed his heralds Antagony and Cataclysm to exterminate uncooperative alien races and break and demoralize the few scattered Cybertronian resistance fighters.

The resistance spawned the Predacon/Autobot hybrid warrior Windrazor and sent him back to the ancient past to destroy the dark essence. Herald, Covenant, Schism, Paradox

But Shokaract himself followed his would-be assassin back in time, handily routing Windrazor and the Maximals. As the battle progressed, dozens of Maximals and Predacons from various timelines and realities would materialize on prehistoric Earth and join the fray, only to be more or less instantly and effortlessly disintegrated by Shokaract.

Roused from their seclusion in J'nwan, legendary ancient Transformer heroes and villains would also arrive to fight the dark lord, and they had somewhat better luck. But the battle was finally decided when the Covenant converted themselves into raw energy and entered the Matrix of Conquest. In that alternate plane they were able to sever the link between Earth's ancient past and Unicron's future deposition of the dark essence there—erasing Shokaract's origin and causing his immediate nullification. The surviving Transformers who had fought him managed to teleport back to their dimensions of origin just before that entire reality went *POOF*. The lowly Predacon grunt who otherwise would have found the Dark Essence and turned into Shokaract was last seen continuing to be a lowly grunt, of no importance whatsoever. Terminus

IDW Beast Wars comics

He's cranky when he doesn't get his morning Angolmois.

Once a lowly Predacon soldier, Shokaract found capsules of a strange energy source while on a routine scouting mission. Attempting to analyze them, he had little time to react as the energy invaded his body. He laid dormant and non-functioning for many stellar-cycles while inside his body the energy raged and tried to make him its puppet. His will proved superior, and he was able to direct the energy towards reformatting his damaged body. His final mastery of the substance he now knew to be Angolmois came with the forging of a container for it, an object he called his "Matrix of Chaos". Thus empowered, he exhibited many new abilities, including interplanetary teleportation and weather control. Beast Wars Sourcebook

Upon returning to Cybertron, he gathered malcontents to his cause, including Antagony, the Cyborg Beasts (well, three of them), and the Unicron cultists known as the Blendtrons. Shokaract sent these new followers out to gather Angolmois and use it to facilitate his ascension to demigod status. Within the temporal limbo he was consigned to, Magmatron's astral self witnessed the end of this terrible chain of events, Shokaract's revitalization of Unicron and drawing of the Chaos-Bringer to devour Cybertron. Having been trapped in a loop of endlessly watching Cybertron die, the Predacon general resolved to find a way to prevent this. The Ascending #1

As Big Convoy began to investigate a series of Angolmois-related incidents on Cybertron, it was revealed that these events were beginning already, Shokaract's power growing with each application of the energy source. However, Shokaract was being manipulated by Unicron and the Blentrons to act as a "vessel" of some sort. Unicron stressed that Shokaract was not to know of the part he would play in the dark god's plans. The Ascending #2

Shokaract raised a monolithic structure from the substrata of Cybertron to serve as his tower fortress. Big Convoy followed the trail of the Angolmois incidents to this fortress, and Shokaract decided to show the Maximal leader's task force his newfound power. He was warned by the Blendtrons that his ascension was not yet complete nor stable, but he ignored this and engaged the Maximals. Though Shokaract easily dispatched even Big Convoy, Magmatron threw a munky monkey wrench in this victory by manipulating the timestream so that Lio Convoy would return to Cybertron in time to prevent Big Convoy's death. However Shokaract had allies of his own, as his heralds led by Antagony returned with more Angolmois. The time of his ascension was at hand! The Ascending #3

His minions distributed Angolmois to the public and provoked widespread violence, creating negative feelings that fed his Anti-Matrix. He was able to fight off a Maximal strike team but was defeated by the machinations of Magmatron, who had him chronally displaced so he could see he was merely a pawn of Unicron. Aghast by this, Shokaract tore the Anti-Matrix from his chest, killing himself in the attempt. The Ascending #4

Toys

Beast Wars

Don't even breathe on me.

• Shokaract (Ultra, 2000)
  • Accessories: Spring-loaded triple barrel missile launcher, 3 missiles and 1 rifle

A BotCon 2000 exclusive, Shokaract is an extensive brown, blue and teal redeco of Beast Wars Rampage. He came in packaging superficially resembling late Japanese Generation 1 toy packaging.

Shokaract transforms into a Transmetal king crab with a third tank mode. In beast mode Shokaract features fully articulated crab legs and pincers that can open and close and be posed in a variety of angles through the use of ratcheting joints. His tri-barrel Gatling missile launcher was stored on the underside of the beast mode, with its barrels flipping to the front during vehicle mode. In this tank mode, the crab legs fit together to form a road wheel network for Shokaract's rubber treads to be fitted over and roll upon. Rolling the tank activates the wheel in the missile launcher, having up to three missiles fire off.

In robot mode Shokaract is an imposingly large figure, with a decent level of articulation due to his ball joints, but because of the fact he wears most of his beast mode as a sort of backpack, he is quite back-heavy. His (very) small laser rifle and his triple barrel launcher can be held in both of his hands.

In the years since his release, many fans have grown leery of transforming or even excessively handling Shokaract due to the amount of "chromed" paint that totally covers his crab carapace. This material has proven to be extremely brittle, prone to cracking or chipping, which reveals the underlying plastic colors as a very obvious visual blemish. This is irritating enough on standard retail releases, but on a very limited convention exclusive figure it can make people downright neurotic. Particularly worrisome is that Shokaract's tank mode is held in place by chromed pegs fitted into chromed sockets.

Notes

• One of 3H Enterprises' original ideas for Shokaract's color scheme was to make him black with a red X. Fortunately, far more imaginative colors prevailed.

External links

• Shokaract at TFU.info