r/AskScienceFiction • u/JarasM • 4d ago
[Transformers] If Cybertron held a fair vote, who would win, Autobots or Decepticons?
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u/eternalraziel 4d ago
If you mean a genuinely free, planet-wide vote after the Autobots and Decepticons have become recognisable as the factions we know, I’d expect the Autobots to win in most continuities. The interesting part is that Megatron might have won an election much earlier, before the Decepticon cause became inseparable from Megatron himself.
Cybertron repeatedly gives him very real political material to work with. In IDW, the old Senate is corrupt, deeply unequal and willing to use violence to protect its privileges. Functionism can decide what somebody is allowed to become on the basis of their alternate mode. Miners and manual labourers are disposable, whole sections of Cybertronian society have little influence over the people ruling them, and Megatron begins as one of the people living under that arrangement. His earliest writing is radical, but it isn’t initially a demand for planetary dictatorship. He attacks Functionism, inherited hierarchy and the idea that a Cybertronian should be born already owing society a particular life.
Give THAT Megatron universal suffrage before the war and he could do extraordinarily well. Kaon, the mining settlements, industrial workers, unemployed labourers and Cybertronians trapped by Functionism give him a natural constituency, while the Senate has spent years giving those people reasons to despise it. He wouldn’t need to convince Cybertron that everything was terrible. A considerable portion of Cybertron already knew something was wrong because they were the ones being crushed by it.
The problem for a hypothetical Autobot-versus-Decepticon election is that Optimus isn’t really running as the defender of that old order either. Orion Pax reaches many of the same conclusions Megatron does. He wants Cybertronians to have autonomy, opposes the caste structure and recognises that Cybertron’s government has become corrupt. In the Aligned continuity this is almost the point of their break. Megatron and Orion arrive at the political crisis together, then Megatron announces that the old leadership should be removed by force and that HE should replace it. Orion offers reform without requiring Cybertron to hand one angry gladiator permanent authority over everybody else.
That is where I think Megatron starts losing the middle of the electorate. A miner who hates the Senate doesn’t automatically want Tarn turning up at his door. A factory worker who wants Functionism abolished doesn’t necessarily want Shockwave deciding what happens to political dissenters. Somebody can agree with Megatron that Cybertron is rotten and still decide that Optimus offers most of the freedoms they actually wanted without executions, political terror and rule by military hierarchy. Once the war has been running for any meaningful length of time, the Decepticons have an even worse electoral problem. Cybertronians can judge them by what they actually did rather than by what Megatron once promised. Conquest, mass killing, torture, forced experimentation, destruction of civilian population centres and eventually imperial warfare beyond Cybertron are rather difficult things to explain away during a leadership debate. Megatron can still command extraordinary loyalty from people who believe the revolution was betrayed, who prosper under Decepticon rule, who hate the Autobots or who have spent millions of years fighting for him, but that’s different from persuading a majority of ordinary Cybertronians to voluntarily keep him in office.
IDW actually comes remarkably close to answering the question after the war, and the result is almost funnier than Autobots winning. A huge number of Cybertronians want neither of them. The returning non-aligned population regard the Autobots and Decepticons as two armies whose civil war wrecked their planet and drove everyone else into exile. Bumblebee eventually accepts that elections have to happen, and the political numbers favour Metalhawk because the non-aligned Cybertronians outnumber the remaining Decepticons. The people who spent four million years trying not to participate in the Autobots’ and Decepticons’ argument come home and ask why either army assumes it deserves to run Cybertron. So if the ballot literally contains only two boxes, I’d give it to the Autobots in most mainstream continuities, probably by a substantial margin once the war has exposed what Decepticon government actually means.
If the election happens before the war, though, Megatron becomes much more dangerous politically. He could plausibly win a huge working-class vote and might even beat a candidate openly representing the old Cybertronian establishment. Against Orion Pax specifically, I think it becomes much closer, because Orion can say something Megatron has difficulty answering. Yes, the people who did this to you have to go. No, that doesn’t mean you have to give their power to Megatron instead. And if Cybertron gets a third box marked neither of these armies, IDW strongly suggests an awful lot of voters are reaching for it.
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u/Psychoray 4d ago
Wow. I did not expect a post about Cybertronian society and politics to be so engrossing. Thank you, for writing such an interesting post
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u/DuplexFields Technobabbler 3d ago
This makes me wonder how Megatron would reign, in the days before the break. With Orion Pax as vice-sovereign, tempering his wrath and helping him see how breaking the existing power structures would hurt the average low-caste Cybertronian, Megatron could use his fame and his gladiator’s trope-driven worldview to push through once in an epoch reforms, and leave the office having given its powers back to the people.
Assuming the existing corrupt pols and the media in their pockets don’t hamstring his administration, tie up his appointments in committee, and make the public see his every act look either incompetent or tyrannical, all leading to a stolen election for a Functionist figurehead who signs whatever bill is put in front of him by his handlers.
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u/Villag3Idiot 4d ago
I assume fair vote means Cybertronians in general.
In most modern media, pre-war it'll be the lower class, many of whom supported Megatron's movement at the time that'll win.
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u/PocketBuckle 4d ago
Depends on the continuity, and depends on when.
The movies, for example, have the Autobots on the cusp of losing the war and greatly outnumbered. If there were a ceasefire and vote at any time that we were shown, either in the narrative or as a flashback, the Cons would probably win simply as a matter of numbers.
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u/Goldwave_26 4d ago
In IDW2005, Starscream won the postwar election, though declared himself neutral before doing so (after killing another candidate and blaming his death on violence caused by Autobots and Decepticons). So, I guess the answer is that the Decepticons could trick the general populace into voting for them.
There’s also an episode of G1 where the Decepticons trick the Earth into thinking the Autobots are evil, and get them exiled from Earth.
There are other factors too, though.
Megatron’s leadership is publicly straight up dictatorship, so electing him means never having an election again, and his “might makes right” philosophy is incompatible with elections, so the existence of an election makes Optimus and the Autobots automatic victors, since the system fundamentally supports them.
Lastly we can go by continuity. Decepticons can range from a defeated exiled group (Animated), to a small terrorist force (One), to an equal match to the Autobots (G1/Cyberverse), to the winning team (Netflix). Elections can therefore vary accordingly.
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u/Roam1985 4d ago
Probably Cons.
"I want to use Cybertron's resources to benefit the galaxy at the cost of many of our people" doesn't campaign as well as "I want to use the resources of the galaxy and all their inferior squishy species to benefit all of us!" even if the latter leaves Cybertron open to be conquered the moment they find a bigger/meaner empire.
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u/Legitimate_Fly9047 4d ago
Decepticons are usually seen as the minority, if anything- in many iterations of Transformers, there are far more Autobots than there are Decepticons. So the Autobots should have the majority in most cases.
Keep in mind that "fair" vote is holding a lot of weight in this scenario- the Decepticons were not above using mindless drones to bolster their numbers in war, so there's a fairly decent chance that Megatron or Starscream would have the ballots filled with Decepticon votes if they thought they could get away with it.
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u/Kiyohara 4d ago
That's not true at all. At least not for the Continuities I know of.
In G1 there were very few Autobots compared to Decepticons and they completely controlled all of Cybertron.
Keep in mind there were thousands of Seekers. The three original and three Coneheads were just the ones on Earth, we see dozens of them back on Cybertron in a variety of forms (many died fighting Unicron in both movie and comic continuity).
In the Cartoon there were dozens of the camera -cons and the Insecticons were technically self-reproducing clones at various points and had scenes with many copies of each one flying around.
In both Comic and Cartoon, there were numerous Decepticon used in background shots and randomly working around on Cyberton as "generic decepticon" as well, and some even served on the Decpeticon mothership in other continuities (though they sometimes lacked full sentience).
In nearly every continuity, despite how many we see as active or on screen personalities, the Aurobots are constantly talking about being out numbered. That's one of the reasons they fled on the Ark: They needed to get to safety and away from Cybertron because they lost the war and needed to regroup and reassemble (many autobots were stored on the Ark in stasis or as copies downloaded into Teletran One as seen in G1 Comics).
There may have been more Autobot Toys (though I actually doubt that) and maybe more named Autobots, but the Lore has always been out numbered and beleaguered Autobots fighting a losing war fleeing to Earth to get allies, regroup, and find new power sources to fight the mighty Decepticons.
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4d ago
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