Micro-Aggressions

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Me Grimlock now Maximal!
"Micro-Aggressions"
Publisher Transformers Collectors' Club (online exclusive)
First published April 2, 2016
By Jim Sorenson
Illustrations by Christopher "IKY" Colgin
Continuity Beast Wars: Uprising
Chronology late 24th century
Page count 15pp

Old heroes of the Great War now find each other on opposing sides in the Grand Uprising.

Synopsis

Long before the Uprising, Grimlock and Hot Rod 'downsized' at war's end. But Grimlock illegally had his spark transplanted into a Maximal protoform and tried to kill the Builder Assembly. While Hot Rod has tried to reform the corrupt system from the inside, convincing others to become Micromasters and forming a cross-faction alliance, Grimlock wants to rip down the whole stinking edifice. Hot Rod sees Grimlock and the Resistance as wrecking any chance while Grimlock sees the Autobot as a traitor to his badge.

Bladez, Pincher, and their mercenary Predacon crew formed a monstrous combiner and raided the Forever Vaults, killing all guards but Cop-Tur, to retrieve the "G-Virus". After putting the word out, Grimlock arrives to buy it. In payment, they get all the information the resistance has on the Human Confederation...

At "Micropolis", a de facto city constructed from Micromaster bases, Hot Rod has been fully fueled—a rare occurrence on the fuel-starved Cybertron—and called in for a mission. His command team informs him of the threat and that the Assembly would like the G-Virus back in one piece (Hot Rod is not impressed with that requirement). Knowing how Grimlock thinks, Hot Rod realizes the rebel will deploy the virus at the next Game—where Councillor Ratbat will be present, showing the world that everything is under control, and where Resistance prisoners are being forced to fight to the death!

Grimlock finds his small crew having a fun game of "everyone punch everyone" and snaps them out of it, before they make a sneak attack on the Games in Tesarus Arena. The Builders have an ambush set up though and Grimlock's team, despite giving as good as they get, is rapidly whittled down while Hot Rod engages Grimlock directly! The two fight viciously, each accusing the other of brutal moral failings, but the advantage is with the rebels: the Builders are too sluggish to evacuate the area and can't even tell there's a real fight on. When Snapper, the last rebel standing, steps in, nothing can stop the G-Virus being used...

...until Hot Rod tells Snapper what it is: all that remains of the mad tyrant Galvatron, the absolute worst Transformer to ever live, after his vivisection. The virus will turn everyone it touches into Galvatron replicas! Grimlock admits to it, saying this will terrify the Assembly and undermine their ability to function by turning twenty thousand necessary Builders into psychopaths. But while the Builders are too fuel-starved to move, the Maximals and Predacons in the arena are not and will be transformed as well!

Snapper destroys the virus, causing Grimlock to swear the Resistance will have him killed, and surrenders to Hot Rod. The Autobot promises the Predacon will be well treated and kept out of the Games.

And in the Micropolis infirmary, Cop-Tur succumbs to that brief exposure he had to the virus on its theft. Galvatron gets out of bed, kills the nurse, and drives out to Primus knows where...

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Maximals Predacons Builders Others

Quotes

"You've always gone too far, Grimlock!"
"And you never go too far enough, 'Chosen One'!"
—Hot Rod vs Grimlock

Notes

Errors

  • Grimlock refers to the Human "Confederation" while "Head Games" referred to the Human "Confederacy". It is uncertain which is the more correct parsing.
  • On page 5, Hot Rod is informed by Drillbuster that the Builders say they want the G-Virus contained, but halfway down the page he seems to forget this, and has to be told again by Countdown.
  • On page 9, Snapper is referred to as "Spittor".

Continuity notes

  • Greasepit and Hot Rod remember the events of "Head Games", wherein their friends and comrades got massacred. This is attributed to the poor suckers being on quarter-ration fuel as security guards weren't considered important enough. Greasepit specifically mentions the death of Crumplezone.
  • Related to that, Grimlock was mentioned as being one of the prisoners inside Fortress Maximus.
  • Exactly how Galvatron almost doomed the race is established in cybertronix text sneakily placed in the story, detailed below in "Human Confederation trivia".
  • Eject is mentioned as having visited the Forever Vaults to check out Cop-Tur's research. Evidently, Eject got the name and color scheme for Galva Convoy from Galvatron.

Transformers references

  • Grimlock was made into a Beast Wars character by the toyline, and The Gathering and Beast Wars Sourcebook portrayed his IDW Beast Wars incarnation as indeed transferring his spark into a protoform. Appropriately for the mixed cartoon/comic background of Beast Wars, he's portrayed with his idiosyncratic speech patterns from the cartoon and his anti-heroic leader personality from the comics.
  • A Micromaster Hot Rod toy came with the Star Convoy toy, and thus his base is called the Star Convoy.
  • Another facility in Micropolis is the Dai Atlas Exchange. It is unspecified if the Exchange was named for an individual Cybertronian or, as with the Star Convoy, it is just a building name in this continuity.
  • Black Out is a Beast Wars: Uprising version of Armada Blackout, based on Blackout's "Powerlinx" deco. Meanwhile, Black Out's partner Search shares the name of Armada Blackout's Japanese counterpart.
  • Hot Rod refers to convincing the Protectobots, Aerialbots, and Constructicons to downsize, all of whom had Micromaster combiner sets in the 2003 Universe toyline. Fittingly, the Facebook edition of Ask Vector Prime had previously established those toys as representative of Micromaster characters in one Primax-influenced Aurex universe.
  • The Builder audience member who Snapper takes aim at is not named but appears to be a Beast Wars: Uprising version of Revenge of the Fallen Fearswoop, having only 1 optic, empurata-style. This is further solidified by Generation 1 Fearswoop having the name "Black Omen" in this continuity, as the author has taken care to avoid name reuses among simultaneously alive characters.
  • Snapper refers to Galvatron as "Spawn of Unicron".
  • Aside from the obvious name reuse, the Beast Wars Sourcebook established that the IDW version of Beast Wars II Galvatron named himself after Generation 1 Galvatron. This time around, Galvatron is literally born out of Galvatron!

GoBots references

  • It's already been established that a number of GoBots fled Gargent 984.08 Alpha for refuge in Primax 209.0 Gamma, integrating themselves in with the local Predacons, in a 14 May 2015 entry of Ask Vector Prime. Both Bladez and Pincher were Monster GoBots in the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon series.
  • Cop-Tur survived as the GoBots weren't sure if that was their Cop-Tur.
  • Bladez swears by the Master Renegade, his creator.
  • There isn't a Monster GoBot combiner but there is a monster GoBot combiner named Monsterous, which the "Renegade Rhetoric" incarnation of Ask Vector Prime portrayed as comprising Prime Predacons! This version of Monsterous, however, appears to be composed of regular cyborg GoBots.

Real world references

  • The title references microaggression theory: "brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership."
  • The G-Virus's name is coincidentally similar to that of the Resident Evil MacGuffin.

Human Confederation trivia

Each scene break contains cybertronix and when translated, it turns out to be the data Grimlock handed to the PredaGoBots! Roughly translated, it tells us:

  • Humans (or at least Transformers talking about them) stopped using BC/BCE and AD/CE, instead using BA (Before Ark, pre-1984) and SCA (Stellar Cycle of the Ark, 1984 and onwards).
  • Humans developed the first AI in 1 SCA (referring to TORQ III, from the Generation 1 cartoon episode "Day of the Machines"), landed on Mars in 8 SCA, constructed the first Warp Gate with the Autobots in 13 SCA (referring to the creation of the Trigger from the Battle of the Star Gate manga), and AI became ubiquitous by 30 SCA with neural interfaces by 33 SCA—or in 1985, 1992, 1997, 2014, and 2017 to you and me!
  • Earth Defense Command (founded 19 SCA/2003) was formed out of G.I. Joe Star Brigade (2003 referring to the EDC founding date given in Kiss Players).
  • In 33 SCA, the EDC declared all of human space off-limits to Transformers due to an attack on New Earth and in 39 SCA, the "Human Singularity" happened: Earth tech was surpassing Cybertronian. After the Decepticons attacked human colony Xin Shanghai in 39 SCA using a captured Autobot shuttle, the humans blew up a real Autobot shuttle, the Star Arrow, which was approaching Tamil Duniya for aid in 42 SCA.
  • Humanity formed the Human Confederacy in 45 SCA and the EDC became the Confederated Terran Colonial Fleet. The Scouring of Nebulos two years later caused the nascent Confederacy to impose an armistice on the Transformers and forcibly limit them to Cybertron and nine existing colony worlds. Galvatron responded by launching a massive invasion fleet in 49 SCA... and the humans vaped it, told the Transformers they could only have four colonies now, and sterilized the disbarred five worlds after a ten day "piss off" grace period.
  • Humans somehow conquered death in 70 SCA; split into the three branches of biologicals, circuitry-enhanced, and psychals by 80-90 SCA (unaugmented humans were second-class citizens); and in 130 SCA, started bringing back every dead human from history with the Eutychus Project.
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