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[caiusbackup]

As a small step towards remembering how to express myself non-fictionally, a new meme-like thing:

Give me a topic, preferably a fannish topic that I would be likely to have something to say about, and I will attempt to write you a few paragraphs of meta on what I think about the subject.

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Cybertron under Shockwave

[caiusmajor.livejournal.com]

I don't have a fully-realized headcanon on this; the canon is patchy and sometimes rather contradictory, and the glimpses in the fic were as often as not made up as I went along. That said, I'll try to give a general picture of how it works in my head.

The most important thing about Cybertron under Shockwave was the severe, severe energy shortage. Obviously it wasn't a complete lack of energy; the planet did stay alive for four million years, but it was a near-constant struggle for everyone alive and active on the planet to obtain and conserve the energy they needed to live, to fight, and to do anything else they might want to do with their lives.

Because of the energy shortage, Shockwave didn't have the resources to do much in terms of directly ruling Cybertron. Generally I have him with the technology to monitor the rest of the planet, but he would be extremely constrained in his ability to do much about either Autobot resistance fighters or rebellious and disobedient Decepticons.

He did, however, have more resources than almost anyone else--and a genius for using them that few could match. So while Shockwave was constrained in his actions, everyone else was much more so, and in general (because Shockwave was absolutely ruthless in deciding who was a waste of resources) the remaining Decepticons knew that following Shockwave's lead and staying on his good side was their best bet for survival. Or they died.

There were several groups of Autobots active during that period: Elita's group, Ultra Magnus' group, probably a few groups of the Autobots who showed up in season 2, and others who we never see in canon and quite a few who didn't survive the four million years. Even more than the Decepticons, they were constrained in their activities by the lack of energy, and they wound up spending more time scavenging and fighting with equally desperate bands of Decepticons over energy than mounting any sort of organized war effort.

I believe that there was also probably a relatively high level of informal cooperation between Autobot and Decepticon groups; sometimes they were just plain better off cooperating or trading than fighting, and the breakdown of centralized authority meant that it was easy to make private deals with bands from the other side. And, conversely, Autobot bands no doubt wound up fighting each other over limited resources; as did Decepticons, but that's less surprising!

And, in it all, Shockwave did everything he could to keep things running. And in Megatron's absence, if that means he had to make on occasional deal with Autobots, than so be it. I'm rather intrigued by the Dreamwave canon where Shockwave formed a government of all Cybertronians; obviously that was a different Shockwave, but I think this one has that in him, in slightly different circumstances. Probably too in love with Megatron to do much with it long-term, though.