Beast Wars: Uprising
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
Beast Wars: Uprising is a Generation 1 continuity based on the Beast Era and featured in various comics and prose stories from Fun Publications.
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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 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] The actual name Beast Wars: Uprising was first given in a Collectors' Club tweet on 14 February 2014[2] 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.
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).[3] 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 redecoes" to create Cybertronian forms for most of the cast.
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
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The prose story authors described the Uprising universe as being populated by characters primarily using toy designs, whether physical figures or "virtual redecoes". As such a list of figures would be farcically long, the below list merely includes Collectors' Club figures appearing contemporaneously in Uprising stories. |
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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
- 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,[4] and "Other Victims", featuring the Vok.[5]
- An early idea for 2016's BotCon comic would have involved the Uprising storyline, depicting Magnaboss as an antagonistic Builder creation.[6]
