Beast Wars: Uprising

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

Beast Wars: Uprising is a Generation 1 continuity based on the Beast Era. It has been depicted in Fun Publications comics and prose stories.

	Beast Wars: Uprising
Alone Together: Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Timelines: "Broken Windshields" "Head Games" "Burning Bridges" "Micro-Aggressions" "Intersectionality" "Trigger Warnings" "Identity Politics" "Not All Megatrons" (Finale Part 1) "Cultural Appropriation" (Finale Part 2) "Safe Spaces" (Finale Part 3) "Derailment" (Finale Part 4) "The Inexorable March" (Coda) Other: "A Change to the Agenda" "A Brush With Infamy–Prologue" "The Predacon Manifesto" "Book of Logos" "Lio Convoy: Unity Through Tyranny"

Overview

Beast Wars: Uprising focuses on a dystopian, late 24th century Cybertron, years 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 continue the Autobot-Decepticon grudge via gladiatorial matches. Unsurprisingly, however, the Transformer homeworld descends into war as Lio Convoy leads many Maximals and Predacons against the status quo for their freedom, launching the Grand Uprising. Thus Lio Convoy's Resistance battles Micromaster Builder troops and their MCSF and PSP loyalists for control of their homeworld. One of the darker interpretations of the Transformers franchise, not a single combatant faction can be considered truly "good": while there are heroic characters on all sides of the war, most of them are willing to commit various atrocities in the name of victory.

In addition to using a wide variety of Maximals and Predacons from the Beast Era franchises, the Beast Wars: Uprising stories make use of various characters with beast modes or animalistic robot modes, and repurposes them to represent new, analogous characters. Notably, the majority of the stories were set before any characters obtained their more recognizable beast modes; instead when possible, the authors repurposed other toys to represent their Cybertronian vehicle forms, which soon became a hallmark of the series. Similarly, many vehicle alt-mode Mini-Cons were repurposed to represent Micromasters.

The pre-modern backstory of Beast Wars: Uprising has been stated by the writers to be a hybrid of the Marvel comic and the Sunbow cartoon, in keeping with the intent of the original Beast Wars cartoon. For example, Grimlock speaks with his speech patterns from the cartoon but also has the badass warrior personality of his comic counterpart. Naturally as well, Uprising takes a number of elements from the contemporaneous IDW 2005 continuity, such as Conjunx Endurae and functionism.

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, GoBots, and numerous pop-culture homages... but when you hire the guy who penned the nerdiest thing ever to nerd, what do you expect?

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 have been written by Jim Sorenson and David Bishop, with Jesse Wittenrich, William Mangin, Josh Burcham, Hosono Tomoya, Christopher Colgin, Dan Perico, and Robby Musso providing illustrations.

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 customs.

Notes

• Initially, the Beast Wars: Uprising universe was only referenced in the profiles for Blackarachnia and Depth Charge in Collectors' Club magazine issues #25 and #49 as those characters played significant roles in other Club stories. When the writers were developing "TransTech" Blackarachnia's profile page for Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #25 was being written, a brainstorming session as to why Blackarachnia might side with Alpha "steal people's souls and hang 'em from the ceiling" Trion came around to the idea of the older generation being unable to move, and forcing the newer ones to fight in their stead, and voila. In 2014 Beast Wars: Uprising was first named in a Collectors' Club tweet on 14 February 2014., and the universe was fleshed out in more detail in that year's magazine comic arc Alone Together. The following year saw text stories which formally showed the beginnings of the titular "uprising".
• Author Jim Sorenson mentioned that while the universe was originally pitched as "Beast Wars meets The Hunger Games", he was inspired by contemporary social movements such as 2014's Ferguson protests when developing the prose stories. Hence, the titles of the prose stories are references to psychiatry-related social phenomena.
• 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, "Virtue Signaling", featuring Maxima, and "Other Victims", featuring the Vok.
• An early idea for 2016's BotCon comic would have involved the Uprising storyline, depicting Magnaboss as an antagonistic Builder creation.