Cybertronian (faction)

The name or term "Cybertronian" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Cybertronian (disambiguation).

This article is about the empire built up by the Second Generation Decepticons. For the term in Generation 1 cartoon, see Decepticon Empire.

The Cybertronians are a faction from the Generation 2 portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

The emblem of the Cybertronian Empire. They're not Decepticons, honest.
....
Or are they?

The Cybertronians, also known as Decepticons, Second Generation Transformers, and other combinations thereof, are Transformers descended from the Decepticons on Cybertron in the time after the Ark's fateful crash on Earth. They were created by the rediscovery of "budding", a mitotic means of reproduction that diminishes the influence of Primus's life force. As a result, the Cybertronians as a whole are marked by a distinct amorality.

They share many of the philosophies of their Decepticon ancestors but otherwise do not take kindly to being associated with them. The Cybertronians view themselves as something better, a stage of Transformer life far surpassing the others. In fact, their self-appointed pedestal is so high that they can barely conceive of non-Transformers as alive at all. They left Cybertron eons ago and have since spent their time cyberforming other planets, eliminating natives with clinical detachment.

Obviously this puts them at odds with the Autobots, who view all creatures as worthy of protection, but it also causes them to view other Decepticons with revulsion: Not only will the throwbacks sometimes ally themselves with alien races, but they also experience pleasure in sadism, a savage affront to the Cybertronians' "rational" ideals. And yet, despite their forward-looking ethos, the Cybertronians for some reason serve the Liege Maximo, one of the 13 original Transformers and the progenitor of all Decepticons.

Like some other isolated Transformer groups, the Cybertronians have adopted a unique, uniform appearance. With a few exceptions, they color themselves in green and silver with the occasional yellow highlight, and like proper villains, they have a thing for spikes, horns and skull motifs.

We are a hand opening -- spread across the four corners of the universe. Closing, we are a fist of iron, mighty enough to crush worlds! We are fire, a wrathful flame to purge the stain of lesser life from the canvas of the cosmos. All that we see -- is ours by right.Jhiaxus get all poetical when he's upset, "Escalation!"

Fiction

Marvel Generation 2 comics

You so do not want a night like this to end up on Facebook.

The first of the Transformers that would later form the Cybertronian faction came to life about 4 million years ago during the reign of Trannis. In need of more troops, the Decepticons had rediscovered the long-forgotten practice of budding. They were able to rapidly expand their population using this method, unaware the new troops were lacking in the emotional (read: loyalty) department and that this process also generated something else, which would millions of years later become known as the Swarm. The Power and the Glory

During the reign of Straxus, the Cybertronians-to-be united and left Cybertron, as they were unable to feel any emotional attachment to it and objectively recognized it for the used-up husk it had become. War Without End! Perhaps called by the Liege Maximo, they came upon the ancient Transformer and agreed to serve him. The Liege Maximo had the army split; Most of the troops were put to work guarding and maintaining the Liege Maximo's planet-spanning Hub, while a fraction, the elite, was placed under Jhiaxus's command and sent out to conquer and eco-structure any worthwhile planet they'd encounter so that it could become part of the Hub. A Rage in Heaven!

Do not question the cold rationality of his bat-wings.

In the human year 1993, Jhiaxus's forces were operating from the K'Tor Cluster, their base the Cybertronian flagship the Twilight. Up until then, the Cybertronians had been able to keep under the other Transformer factions' radar, but the growing number of "little Cybertrons" didn't stay unnoticed. Fragmented portions of the Autobot army were the first to become aware of the lingering threat. They initially fought the various smaller eco-structuring parties with hit and run tactics while analyzing the unknown foe, then called in the rest of the Autobot army when it was clear the threat was too big for them to handle. Grimlock called Optimus Prime to one of the eco-structured planets he thought abandoned, but moments after explaining the situation, the Twilight opened fire on them. Instead of killing them, Jhiaxus had the Autobots captured to talk his vision of sense into them. Optimus Prime and Grimlock were brought before his throne, where he explained the history of his faction as well as how the war between the Autobots and Decepticons was a relic only believed still relevant because they had missed the past 4 million years. The Autobots weren't much impressed, stealing back their shuttle and escaping the Twilight to fight another day.

"But Prime, isn't it better to fight and die?"

Their escape was monitored, but Jhiaxus's allowed them to get away so he could follow them to their base and destroy the entire Autobot army in one fell swoop. War Without End! Along the way, the Autobots noticed their attackers and entered the K'tord Nebula in hopes the stories about that region of space would discourage the Cybertronians from pursuing. They didn't, causing both Autobot and Cybertronian to fall victim to the influence of the nebula's inhabitants. The strength of will of both Optimus Prime and Jhiaxus eventually prevented the soldiers from slaughtering each other till the last mech standing, and the two factions agreed to a momentary truce that allowed the Autobots to leave unfollowed. Primal Fear!

With Optimus Prime in doubt about how to handle the Cybertronian threat, Grimlock led an unauthorized mission to blow up the Twilight. Having stolen a Cybertronian maintenance shuttle and some security codes, the Autobots got inside the Twilight, but since the Cybertronians had security heightened since first contact, the Autobots were welcomed by more armed forces than they could hope to defeat. They surrendered, and Jhiaxus had them shipped off to the Liege Maximo, who was interested in learning more about his troops' only worthwhile opponents. Fortunately for Grimlock and co., Optimus Prime and the rest came to save them well in time. Devices and Desires!

To understand the visions he was having of a lingering threat other than the Cybertronians, Optimus Prime had himself through the Matrix linked up to Cybertron. The images he was shown taught him the origins of the Cybertronians and their psychological differences from other Transformers, but he broke the link before learning about the Swarm. The Power and the Glory Realizing the Autobots alone could never defeat the Cybertronians, Optimus Prime went to the Decepticons to propose a temporal alliance. Instead, Megatron stole the Matrix, confident the Decepticons could deal with the threat alone. The Gathering Darkness Megatron had an advance party of six sent to the K'Tor Cluster, but only Skullgrin returned, dying anyway seconds after relaying what had happened. Seeking revenge, the Decepticons launched a grand attack on the Cybertronians. They were utterly defeated. Megatron himself barely survived, New Dawn causing him to reconsider the Autobots' proposal of a temporal alliance.

Meanwhile, Jhiaxus's "annoyance" with the Autobots' (and Decepticons') efforts against his faction reached a peak. Vowing to destroy all not-Transformer life in known space with greater brutality and speed, he hoped to draw out his foes and get rid of them once and for all. Indeed, when Ethos came under attack, the Autobots came to the natives' rescue. Cybertronian victory was denied however, due to the Decepticons joining the battle to rescue the Autobots deal the Cybertronians payback for last time. Escalation!

Elsewhere, on the planet Karn, another Cybertronian unit was busy slaughtering the locals when they came face to face with the Swarm and didn't live to tell.

The freelance peacekeeping market is pretty oversaturated these days.

Back on Ethos, Jhiaxus was inspecting the remains of his best troops when he was approached by Starscream, who offered to lead the Cybertronians to the Autobots' and Decepticons' hideout ánd get them past security if he would be given a suitably aminent position in the Cybertronian army. Jhiaxus accepted Swarm and organized an immediate attack. Tales of Earth Part Six Though taken by surprise, the Decepticons and Autobots had little trouble turning the tide in their favor, at which point Jhiaxus sent in the second wave and issued an order for all battalions to abort their current mission and head to Earth to participate in the showdown. This order would have some unforeseen consequences, as one of the called battalions came under attack by the Swarm, which also consumed their ships and computers with the order to head to Earth. The Swarm made that goal its own.

Throughout all this, the Cybertronians had undertaken a successful mission to lay claim on the Decepticons' Warworld, but also made the mistake of letting Starscream on board. Starscream stole the Matrix still stored away in the ship and used it to fuse himself with the Warworld. Total War! Whichever Cybertronian ship dared approach he had destroyed, Tales of Earth Part Seven fuelling Jhiaxus's rage over the failure of everything he had recently been trying to accomplish to critical levels. Once he had left to deal with the Warworld matter personally, Rook, Jhiaxus's right-hand man, contacted the Liege Maximo about the increasing problems.

Aboard the Twilight, Jhiaxus was the only Cybertronian not willing to realize the assault on the Warworld was wielding no results but the massacre of his own troops. More so, when Optimus Prime managed to contact the Twilight with a plea for an alliance against the Swarm, Jhiaxus answered by ordering the destruction of Earth, Dark Shadows! regardless of his own troops still there. San Francisco was obliterated, but the rest of Earth lucked in due to the timely arrival of the Swarm. Tales of Earth Part Eight Jhiaxus believed the creature to be an Autobot trick, though the rest of his troops sincerely doubted that. As both the Twilight and the newly arrived X-S warships, it became devastatingly clear Jhiaxus had been wrong. With the warships and their crews destroyed and the Liege Centuro off his rocker, the remaining crew of the Twilight made a run for the escape pods and fled. Jhiaxus stayed to fight and get his revenge on Optimus Prime, whom he blamed for all that had gone wrong. But like Earth, Optimus was saved due to the arrival of the Swarm, which ate Jhiaxus.

Shortly thereafter, Rook reported to the Liege Maximo that seventeen battalions had been wiped out and that Jhiaxus probably too had met his end. The Liege Maximo was little impressed, seeing as only a fraction of his army had been lost and the other Transformers were oblivious to the true threat the Cybertronians posed. The day of reckoning would come... A Rage in Heaven!

Alignment

"Alignment" was written by Simon Furman without permission of Hasbro and is included here as pseudocanon to provide insight into authorial intent.

Several hundred years went by after the defeat of the Cybertronians, during which the wayward faction was able to avoid any contact with the other Transformers and essentially become forgotten. For one reason or another, the Cybertronians evolved into a more liquid kind of Transformer, becoming capable of altering their appearance at will. This also made them initially unrecognizable to the Autobots and Decepticons when eventually the factions clashed again.

What made the Transformers realize whom they were dealing with was the chance discovery of the Hub, which they did recognize as a network of little Cybertrons. This was dangerous to the Liege Maximo, who was close to his ascension to godhood (the universe would be destroyed in the process) and didn't need the Autobots or Decepticons trying to stop him. So, he sent millions of Cybertronian soldiers to attack the Autobots on Cybertron and the Decepticons on Pyrovar. Both the Autobots and the Decepticons had luck on their side, which gave them a victory they knew temporary, so each faction set out to fight back at the Hub.

Meanwhile, the Liege Maximo began the final part of the preparations he needed done before the moment he'd have access to godhood. Upon his call, all of the Cybertronians at the Hub gathered around his throne to return their sparks to their ancestor. The Autobots and Decepticons attacked soon after though, and the Liege Maximo was forced to revive a few troops to help deal with the threat. In the end, they lost and the Liege Maximo was destroyed. Alignment

Decepticons or not?

The Cybertronians have a complex relationship with the idea of being Decepticons. For example:

• Their insignia is different from the traditional Decepticon symbol, but the same insignia was also adopted by Bludgeon's Decepticons for unknown reasons during their period of exile outside of the Milky Way – at the same time that the Autobots also inexplicably took on a new symbol! (There is no in-fiction explanation for any of that, but the real-world explanation is simply that the new symbols were part of the Generation 2 brand.)
• In the first issue of the Generation 2 comic, Jhiaxus refers to his faction as "Decepticons", with Rook not understanding how the Autobots are different, as they are all Cybertronians and Transformers. The Autobots also consistently refer to Jhiaxus's faction as "Decepticons".
• The name "Cybertronian" is first used in the fourth issue by, surprisingly, Grimlock. Jhiaxus's faction doesn't refer to itself as "Cybertronian" until the next issue, with the Outpost D-109 overseer saying "flourishing Deceptic- er.. Cybertronian Empire".
• When Megatron's faction joins the fray in the sixth issue, Megatron calls Jhiaxus's faction "Second Generation Cybertronians, masquerading under the Decepticon banner," who are "no kinsmen" of theirs. This attitude would remain for the rest of the series, although at one point Megatron makes the same recovery as the Outpost D-109 overseer: "Whoever it was, it wasn't Jhiaxus's Decep- Cybertronians."
• Jhiaxus keeps referring to his full title as "Liege Centuro of the Decepticon Elite" until his demise.
• In this series, Transformer speech-balloons have unique designs based on the allegiance of the speakers: Autobots have one design, Dinobots have another, and both the Decepticons and the Cybertronians share a third.

Notes

• It is brought up twice that the ancestors in a lineage through budding can feel the deaths of the descendants. Despite that, no Decepticon but Onslaught (who is too young to have Cybertronian descendants in the first place) ever shows pain at the deaths of any of the entire Cybertronian faction.
• Generation 2 comic writer Simon Furman later wrote an alternate-universe version of Jhiaxus into the IDW Generation 1 continuity, where he was a scientist involved in guiding the technological evolution of planets towards a Cybertron-like goal. He belonged to a group of long-departed Cybertronian-supremacist Transformers returning from deep space as a threat to all. Furman also planned for the Liege Maximo to make an appearance, but that did not come to pass.