#drunkcyclonus

Well, you can certainly make comparisons between the two, both being ancient, evil god-like beings of incredible power, who have been known to lay dormant until their terrible power is awakened. The Dreamwave Armada comic drew a closer parallel by portraying Unicron’s Mini-Con partner Dead End as having been driven hopelessly insane by exposure to Unicron, something that the most powerful beings in the Lovecraft Mythos do to human minds.

But, really, you can make that sort of comparison with any mythical “evil” from any legend or story or religion. Unicron is the Transformer “devil,” the ultimate evil in their universe - transpose what other devils from other stories onto that you would like. We can, at least, say that Unicron is not Cthulhu, because Cthulhu and the Elder Gods actually exist and Optimus Prime literally beat one of them up one time.

ye np!!

All evidence available suggests it’s not public knowledge. For example, Ironfist wrote about Megatron meeting Impactor in battle over the Manganese Mountains in “Wreckers Declassified,” in this passage:

It’s clear Ironfist doesn’t understand the significance of the words and the pair’s relationship. Likewise, as he reads this passage (in “Zero Point”) Roadbuster doesn’t pause to correct it or offer a rebuke of any kind, suggesting he’s likewise ignorant. And Whirl never expressed any understanding of why Impactor beat him almost to death when they first met one another in a prison cell, so he likely didn’t know either.

To answer your second question first, according to G1 Streetwise’s original profile, Transformers are built with seven standard senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, short-range radiowave transmission, magnetic sensitivity, and electric sensitivity. The exclusion of taste is in-keeping with the overly “robotic” way early G1 handled the physiology of its characters in comparison to a lot of modern media, but even back then it was a bit questionable, as there are plenty of examples of Transformers chowing down on Energon cubes - and other things - and remarking on the “taste” of them. But, perhaps what we perceive as them “tasting” something is just the infusion of the energy of energon triggering their electric/magnetic senses - take the Insecticons, for example, remarking on how the metal of Autobot City is “a little heavy on the electrons” as they chomp through it in The Transformers: The Movie. That sounds like it could be “electric sensitivity” masquerading as “taste,” right? As such, the presence or not of a “mouth” doesn’t really matter for “tasting.”