Some belated thoughts on That One TFO Fight
(aka overthinking the military logistics of transforming robots for fun while looking through Jason Scheier's instagram for TFO concept art)
"Why did D-16 beat Starscream so easily in Transformers One if Starscream is an ancient High Guard veteran and war hero?" seems to be a recurring fandom question, based on what I've seen as a llongtime urker, with the leading explanation being:
1) Masochism
2) Duuuh, D-16 has Onyx Prime's T-cog, of course he'd win
3) SS threw the fight
Now, the Doylist explanation is that the HG hideout is basically a giant Apocalypse Now homage (as Jason Scheier mentioned in this interview), and thanks to runtime constraints, the movie's HGs are basically violent social Darwinists LARPing Apocalypse Now in a crashed Quint ship too.
The movie also establishes that the HGs manage to survive for 50 cycles on the surface. During an energon drought. While being hunted by Sentinel (and presumably hiding from the Quints too).
And are still considered enough of a threat, militarily or symbolically, that Sentinel was still regularly searching for them during surface expeditions.
That's not a minor feat. That is "someone deserves a fucking medal for keeping this organization functioning at all" level of logistical competence, even if you believe the TFO RP book's framing that "Oh SS is too cowardly to go after Sentinel and the Quints directly and only raids energon tribute trains."
(…No offense to the RP book because I personally take a lot of inspiration from it while writing my fic, but my brother in Primus, that's not cowardice. That's literally how asymmetric warfare works.）
Anyways, my simple Watsonian explanation is this:
The skillset that allows you to keep a guerilla army alive for 50 cycles is not necessarily the same skillset that allows you to 1v1 Cybertron's angriest ex-miner who just found out his entire life was built on a lie.
Like, a commander's job, whether you are running a guerilla army or a conventional air force, is not "win fistfights." It's keeping an organization alive, functional, and effective under pressure.
That means logistics and supply chains and coordination. Morale management. Strategic decision-making.
And, most importantly, knowing when NOT to engage, because guerrilla warfare isn't about winning fair fights.
It's about wearing down the enemy's will bit by bit, effectively wasting their time and resources, and sometimes, building enough structure to eventually become a governing force.
(Or, in simpler terms: you don't fight a colonial occupation fleet and its puppet government head-on, because if you do, you'll fucking die.)
And yeah, I know, Orion referring to them as "the most legendary warriors in all of Cybertron" probably doesn't help either, but if you really think about it? The sorts of battles the HGs engaged in before the Primes' death would have been against the Quint fleets——the giant living ships we saw in the movie.
Aerial combat that was presumably done in their alts, as an actual conventional army, and relied more on formation discipline, chain of command, probably ground artillery support if they had any, and boring but essential logistics.
(And whatever material Orion read in the Iacon data archives——if we look at what the movie's opening implied——are far from uncensored or historically neutral. If Sentinel spent 50 cycles constructing a mythology around the Age of the Primes, then "the HGs were legendary warriors" is exactly the kind of statement that would survive censorship, but the details on how they fought? Not so much.)
(It's like if somebody's only knowledge of WWII came from patriotic propaganda posters.)
And after the fall of the Primes, they aren't even a conventional army anymore. Survival is the new win condition, and by guerilla war standards, "Still existing after 50 cycles" is already a significant success.
Thus, I don't think SS losing to D-16 means he's somehow a wimp or fraud or that he threw the fight.
Much like a decorated fighter jet pilot losing to an enraged construction worker in a bar fight says nothing about his, well, piloting skills, it just ain't where his biggest implied strengths are at.
…To use a stupid analogy, TFO SS isn't the PVP veteran. He's the MMO guild master from a faction the devs actively hate, who's probably suffering heavy burnout and held together entirely by spite, caffeine, and a burning desire to never let the dev team win, with a build optimized for endgame PVE content.
Meanwhile, D-16 has just respecced into some kind of broken PVP cancer build after the newest patch, and is running on pure undiluted gamer rage after learning that the lead developer lied about the T-Cog drop rate for F2P players and kicked the original dev team out of the company during the QuintCorp buyout.
