Kurona wrote:Sabrblade wrote:I don't think there's anything that said Vector Sigma had a hand in making Unicron. Only Primacron is credited with such, and he was able to make Tornedron by himself without Vector Sigma's help.
I could have sworn there was something to do with that multicoloured thing in the cave in
Call of the Primitives being Vector Sigma in Japan and having to do with Unicron's creation...
Ah, that thing.
Yes, there was a big retcon made in 2006/2007 involving that swirly colorful thing, but only in Japan and 20 years after the fact.
The sole descriptor given to that thing within the episode was "the Primacron's assistant", while the episode's script gave it the designation of "the Oracle" (not to be confused with the similarly-named Oracle of Beast Machines that wouldn't come to exist for another 14 or so years). The Japanese version of the episode likewise didn't give the assistant a name, but the "Oracle" name from the English script did carry over into some Japanese guidebooks as well.
In both the English and Japanese versions of the episode, the Oracle was merely said to have been Primacron's assistant, whose body was shown being destroyed by the newly-created Unicron when the latter attacked both the former and Primacron. His essence (which the animators depicted as looking
exactly like the Matrix with no explanation given) fled his body and ended up on the world that Grimlock and co. later met him during the episode, where he told them his story and encouraged them to fight Tornedron.
When the 2006/2007 retcon was made years later, however, said retcon set out to combine the Oracle with Vector Sigma, Primus, and the Beast Machines Oracle, all so as to turn them into a single person so as to give the Japanese G1 cartoon continuity its own incarnation of Primus, one that would fit with both the Western interpretation of the character as the "creator-god of the Transformers" and the pre-established notion of Vector Sigma having been the life-giving entity of the cartoon universe Transformers.
In this retcon, the appearance of the Oracle's essence resembling the Matrix was taken at face value, so as to say that the Matrix is the life essence of Primacron's assistant in the same vein as the Matrix being the life essence of Primus in the Western TF fiction. Because, now, apparently, Primacron's assistant
is Primus, or this universe's version of him, at least.
Anyway, another component of this retcon was the scene in which Grimlock and co. all meet the Oracle in that cave on the alien planet. The retcon declared that scene to now take place in the past, with Grimlock and co. not only having just flown to that planet, but having also time traveled into the ancient past offscreen too. This was done for the purpose of declaring said planet that the Oracle resided within to be Cybertron itself in its pre-technological organic state that it was revealed to have once been like in the Beast Machines cartoon (a notion that was kept in that show's Japanese dub, Beast Wars Returns).
With this planet now being ancient pre-tech Cybertron, the retcon would further develop the Oracle in the Kiss Players Position storyline, in which he took on a much more Primus-like role (by this point in his life even calling himself "Primus") in which he'd help the Kiss Players fight against a resurrected Unicron and his Sparkbot minions in a story arc that was heavily nerdy with tons of references. Like, Primus resembled his Lucky Draw figure that was a gold-and-orange chrome redeco of G1 Rodimus Prime, Unicron looked like his unproduced G1 toy, Unicron's defeat provided an origin for how the Angolmois of Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo ended up on Earth, and the aftermath of the fight saw the creation of Brave Maximus from Car Robots. When all was said and done, Primus then transformed into a new spherical form, Vector Sigma, in which he returned to his pre-Cybertron world to sleep.
And this point is when the retcon established the Quintessons as having discovered Cybertron and turned it into a machine world, cyberforming the planet with the Key to Vector Sigma, and subjugating Vector Sigma's power to create the consumer goods and military hardware robot races. The consumer goods robots would also eventually come to acquire the original shell that held Primus's essence, calling it the Matrix of Leadership.
After all this, there was one more piece of Japanese fiction made more recently that seem to lean more
into the original cartoon origin of the Transformers instead of away from it like this giant retcon did. A manga story titled "Controverse" saw Primacron put on trial by the Quintessons for his creating Tornedron and unleashing it upon the universe. During this trial, Primacron made claims of having created all machine life, including the ancestors of the Quintessons themselves. Obviously, the Quints in this arrogance disbelieved him, and even disbelieved his claim of having built Unicron, as they considered Unicron to be a force of nature, a god even, whose actions are comparable to natural disasters that Primacron couldn't possibly hold responsibility over in their eyes. But then later, Primacron seizes control of all the "primitive" animal-based Transformers in the room... including all of the
Sharkticons, adding weight to his claim of being the progenitor of all mechanical life in the universe!
However, the very end of this story provided some wiggle room for the above Primus retcon. At the end of the story, Wheeljack asks Primacron directly about the nature of his race, if they are truly living beings if Primacron could just artificially create their souls. Surprisingly, Primacron chose to answer enigmatically with an analogy: "I will say I can build a fire, but I wouldn't say I created the flame." This implies that Primacron knows how to
build the living machines, but that the soul (i.e. - the spark) that grants them life was not his doing. Thus, it can be inferred that it was his old assistant, the Oracle, who had the power to create sparks, rather than Primacron himself, weaving everything back into the big Oracle/Primus/Vector Sigma retcon from before.
Phew!