Eightfold_Key

Prefacing this with “I like TF:One a lot, I think it’s a pretty fun movie in general and the best TF movie —and the best experience to onboard new people into TF— we had in a looooong time”. That said, I’m also someone trying to write a fanfic where I try to put things in the gaps that make sense and don’t contradict the movie canon (too much; whatever a character says may not be an absolute truth, whether intentionally or not) and it’s a frustrating experience, let me tell you that.

So. Here goes nothing:

The war that was almost won lost

Let’s start at the beginning —not of the movie, but at the start of this slice of history we know— and let’s look at how much the movie tells us.

What do we know about Cybertron before the war? Next to nothing, honestly. The Primes were the divinely appointed leaders of the Cybertronian people, they have ruled in peace and prosperity for an unspecified number of generations and it’s implied that they were once spread out across the entire planet. Now, you can’t draw one to one parallels between their level of technology and ours, but Iacon’s architecture definitely implies a civilization that has been around for a while.

I love the look of these buildings, it’s a really good shorthand for a civilization that doesn’t have to concern itself with hardship and scarcity that most of their buildings are crafted so beautifully. The art déco aesthetic of their architecture, the fact that the city’s skyline is made up of mostly skyscraper-equivalents and what bits of tech we see throughout the movie would suggest that their civilization was at least in the ballpark of our 20th century in terms of technology, so that could be another indicator that they have been around for A Good While. Why is this relevant? I’ll get to that in a moment.

So, we don’t know much about pre-war Cybertron, what about the war itself? That’s… also not a lot. We know that it was a brutal war conflict and that it lasted for thousands of years, but that’s where our factual information ends, mostly. Why did the Quintessons come? How big was that invasion force that they could drag this conflict out for thousands of years? And, for that matter, how many Cybertronians were there before the war and how many of them died in the conflict?

That last question in particular is fascinating for me, because during the movie we hear two conflicting claims about how the war was going:

Alpha Trion says that they acted on Sentinel’s intel (which ultimately led to the ambush and their deaths) because eliminating a group of Quintesson commanders could have ended the war. This mostly suggests that relatively few (in terms of planet-conquering invasion forces) Quintessons remained and they would have no suitable replacements left in the ranks that could be promoted to fill in if the Primes took out some of the commanders. Without leadership, the Quintessons would have been forced to retreat with whatever soldiers and resources they still had or their coordination would have deteriorated to the point where the Cybertronian defenders could have mopped up the stragglers. Either way, if an invading force is repelled or scattered, that is a victory for the defenders.

Sentinel, however, very explicitly says that the Primes were losing the war. He’s hardly the most reliable source even in the best of cases, but in this particular scene it’s only him, Airachnid (who, as far as we know, is his closest confidant and co-conspirator) and Alpha Trion there.

Why would he lie here? Alpha Trion —who in an earlier scene immediately and passionately corrected the young bots about the lies they were led to believe— doesn’t dispute any the accusations directed at him in that scene. Neither the accusation that they were losing the war, nor the jab about not having their priorities straight. He ignores what Sentinel says and threatens him with God’s divine retribution, which could just be a sign that the doesn’t think there’s any point in arguing with Sentinel, but we don’t have nearly enough information about anything to say one way or the other for sure.

So… we are at an impasse, right? Not completely, no. We don’t have any hard facts, but we do know two things:

Before the war, the Cybertronians were a thriving civilization, most likely occupying a huge part of their planet if not most of the habitable surface as a whole.

After the war, the only known settlement remaining is Iacon.

Let’s be super conservative with the estimation: let’s say that before the war, they had population numbers comparable to a human country. There are around 68 million people living in France. 83 million in Germany. Countries with a population below 25 million are generally considered tiny. For an entire planet it would be much more reasonable to think in the hundred millions or even billions (much less for a population that lives as long as Cybertronians), but as I said, let’s be generous and extremely conservative in this guesstimation. Let’s say 100 million Cybertronians as the peak of pre-war population, that’s a nice, round number.

How many live in current day Iacon? That’s also not an easy estimation to make because we never see how big the city is or even how much of it is inhabited, but we can give an estimated minimum for how many people live there as of the movie, because we see the packed stadium during the memorial race.

So, how many bots showed up for the Iacon 5000? Well, I’m eyeballing this really hard, but if the stadium is fully symmetrical then there are 24 segments to the stands, each segment has around 20 rows and each row has around 50 bots, which adds up to 24k give or take (reasonable enough).

How many bots stayed home and watched through a broadcast instead or skipped out on the race altogether? No idea, can’t even begin to guess. The city is remarkably deserted during the race (and it’s the only scene when we see it so empty; even during the night when they climb the train there is heavy traffic in the distance) but Sentinel specifically called a day off for everybody, so the short answer is: we just don't know. There are also other factors, since we don’t know how many of these bots were born after the war, but a good number of them had to. We know that there are at least a couple hundred to maybe a couple thousand cogless and they for sure were born after the war.

So, where does that leave us? With a current population somewhere in the tens of thousands or maybe low hundreds of thousands, all confined to one city. I would argue that it doesn’t matter how many bots there are, exactly, because that’s still not nearly enough.

Going from a country’s worth of population to just one city is a staggering loss of life. It doesn’t even matter if we add the hundred and change high guard members to this number, that’s still one hell of a lost war.

Is it possible that there are other settlements of comparable size out there? Possible, but very unlikely, for two reasons:

There is NO evidence in the movie that there are other settlements remaining. No mention, no throwaway line, no implication that there’s anybody else alive outside of Iacon as far as the characters know

It would mess with the logic of certain plot elements and needlessly complicate things

This worldbuilding already has its foundations made of quicksand and vibes, but there are several points where it should have come up, at least in passing, if there was any known settlement left. Here’s an easy example: if there was any settlement or even a sizeable outpost affiliated with Iacon somewhere, then Sentinel would be taking a needless risk framing the energon shipments as scrap metal. He could just say that the energon is for their friends elsewhere because they don’t have enough of their own and completely eliminate the potential risk of someone finding out about the actual cargo.

Or another: if there was a surviving settlement not allied with Sentinel (thus unknown to Orion and co), but rather still fighting the Quintessons, then Starscream and his people would have known about them. It would invalidate the high guard camping out in the middle of nowhere if there was another faction they could ally with. Even if Starscream himself was too proud to ally with this hypothetical faction, they should have been mentioned as potential allies when Starscream and the others were captured, even if the suggestion ended up being discarded.

There’s no proof that other settlements don’t exist as such, but there are too many places where there should be something if they did.

So. One city remaining at the end of the war. Population most likely somewhere in the tens of thousands when the Primes died. It might still be true that the Quintessons were similarly decimated and taking out their commanders would have ended the war, who knows. Such a devastating loss of life still casts the Primes’ leadership in a very questionable light. Imagine any country today; if the leadership mismanaged their resources to this degree, failed in their responsibility to the people so extremely that they lost 99% of their population, then at best they would be jailed and dragged to court if the survivors didn’t rip them to pieces there and then when the tally of the dead became public.