#emberstone

Hypocrisy, Erasure, and What the Show Refuses to Face

“No one returns to Cybertron. No one names their ancestors. No one admits what they are.”

Transformers: EarthSpark pretends to be about new beginnings, family, and empathy — but at its core, it’s a show built on refusal:

Refusal to reckon with the past

Refusal to respect canon

Refusal to let characters be accountable

Refusal to tell the truth — even inside their own fiction

Let’s talk about what EarthSpark hides — and why that silence fractures everything it tries to build.

🌌 I. Elita One Was Ariel — Daughter of Alpha Trion

In G1 and extended lore, Elita One was once Ariel, rebuilt by Alpha Trion. She was part of Cybertron’s ancient legacy, a direct daughter of one of its spiritual leaders.

EarthSpark never mentions this. Not once.

Elita, who leads and protects, who speaks of nature and peace, has no past, no people, no self.

Instead of honoring her roots, the show gives her hollow lines about loving Earth and talking to trees — while ignoring her planet, her trauma, her legacy, and her link to one of Cybertron’s most powerful myths.

Elita isn’t silent because she’s at peace. She’s silent because the show erased what she was.

🪨 II. EarthSpark Avoids Cybertron Because It’s Afraid of Guilt

The characters never go back. Not even to visit.

Why?

Because Cybertron holds:

War crimes

Abandonment

Cultural death

Children left behind

Colonies forgotten

Souls erased

Returning would force Optimus, Elita, Bumblebee, and others to see what they’ve done — or what they failed to stop.

So they stay on Earth, pretend Earth is the future, and act like history never happened.

This isn’t hope. It’s cowardice disguised as healing.

🔮 III. Emberstone vs. Allspark — Are the Gods at War?

The show frames the Emberstone as a mystical, benevolent force — but never answers how it relates to the Allspark, the mythic source of Cybertronian life.

This raises disturbing questions:

If the Emberstone births Terrans… is it competing with the Allspark?

Would the Allspark see the Terrans as aberrations?

Could the Terrans be seen as apostate children — born of a rogue force, a rival god?

The show sidesteps this. But in doing so, it avoids the cosmic stakes it quietly created.

If the Terrans are not Allspark-born — are they truly Cybertronians? Or are they the start of something the Allspark would reject — or try to destroy?

🤖 IV. Nightshade and Sam — Who Gets To Be Seen?

Nightshade’s identity is celebrated — but not examined. Their approval of human nonbinary teen Sam feels safe, surface-level, and overly sanitized.

What would it look like if EarthSpark truly addressed:

The Terrans’ lack of gender or identity formation without others?

The trauma of not knowing who you are unless someone reflects you?

The fear that without the Malto kids, they would cease to exist?

Nightshade’s nonbinary identity deserves to be honored — but it also deserves to be written with complexity, pain, and power.

Instead, we get platitudes — not reflection.

And the show doesn’t even touch the deeper symbolic tension:

If Sam Witwicky — the mythic human from G1 — were in EarthSpark, he’d either be ignored, rewritten, or flattened into an ally archetype.

EarthSpark doesn’t explore humanity. It selects it — to make itself feel good.

💔 V. Everyone Is Too Proud or Too Numb to See Each Other

The adults — Optimus, Elita, Dot — do not question themselves. The kids assume the Terrans are just like them. No one asks what the Terrans need, what they are, or what they might become if left alone.

Empathy is preached — but critical thinking is absent.

Everyone feels, but no one sees. Everyone speaks of peace, but no one names the wounds they refuse to treat.

And so, the Terrans:

Become mirrors

Become tools

Become symbols

Symbols for hope. Symbols for new beginnings. Symbols for a peace that no one has earned — and no one knows how to protect.

🧵 Closing Thought

“EarthSpark hides from its own legacy. And in doing so, it forces its new children to carry the weight of lies it was too proud to face.”

EarthSpark showed off some other examples of the life Quintus Prime created prior to the Terrans, and for simplicity's sake, outside of the Quintessons, the other two lifeforms were a slug thing and something that lived in water. Some have assumed the water things were Sharkticons, but they don't quite match up with the ES versions of them.

I wondered if they too are Transformers, and leaned into robot mode designs, mostly experimental ones, though the slug ones are based on the Animated versions of the Mini-Cons. (The most recent episodes in the third season do show some Transformer corpses aboard the Quint ship, starting they were other Emberstone creations so I wasn’t far off in the end.)

The logo next to the Terran one was a hybrid of the Autobot and Ammonite logos, as a fan plot I had in mind involved a team of evolved Autobots coming from Cybertron to Earth, led by a former ally of Optimus, Regulus Magnus coming to Earth to see what's going on down there.

In Earthspark, the Terrans are brought forth into existence by a cave saturated with the power of Quintus Prime’s relic, the Emberstone. 

(Quick aside, I love that Earthspark’s title is a direct reference to this. Earth = stone, Ember = spark.) 

But who is Quintus Prime, and what is the Emberstone? 

Quintus Prime: 10th Formed, Among the First to Go 

Traits: Idealism, Perfectionism, Creativity, Growth

As outlined in the Aligned Continuity’s Covenant of Primus, Quintus Prime is described as highly intelligent, being a sort of scientist among the Thirteen Primes. 

Now, we can’t assume that the backstory for Quintus Prime will be the same in the Earthspark continuity! However, the Aligned Continuity has given us most of the currently available information on the Thirteen Primes, even if it may not 100% carry over to Earthspark-- We’ll have to wait and see. 

But for now, I think it’s worth going over what’s been established for this character in the Covenant: 

He has a highly analytical mind, which has been applied for strategic purposes in forming methods to defeat Unicron in the earliest days of the Primes, and for creative purposes in the creation of new and unique lifeforms via his personal relic, the Emberstone. 

He was the 10th Prime to be forged by Primus, to help combat the encroaching influence of Unicron upon a delicate and still-new Cybertron. 

Famously, Quintus Prime worked alongside Megatronus (The Fallen) and Liege Maximo to create new forms of “beasts”, which led to a serious rift between the Primes-- Many of whom wanted this beast-generating project to be shut down. 

This disagreement led to the debate in which Solus Prime was killed by Megatronus, and following her death, Quintus Prime backed down from any responsibility regarding his involvement in the creation of the beasts (possibly out of an inability to cope with the fact that he had personal involvement in the instigating incident, although the concept was Liege Maximo’s idea in the first place)-- Which led to an outright physical battle between all of the remaining Primes. 

With the relationship between the Primes irreparably strained, Quintus Prime left Cybertron in search of planets rich in base elements and base metals; Upon finding a suitable planet, he proceeded to create the Quintessons. 

It is not known what happened to Quintus Prime, although Alpha Trion guessed that perhaps he was killed by the Quintessons, once they no longer believed him to be useful to them-- But of course, this is only Alpha Trion’s conjecture. 

The Emberstone: Restoration and Creation

It has been described most thoroughly in the Aligned Continuity material, in which is has life-giving properties. 

Not only can the Emberstone accelerate natural processes with the correct base elements to construct new lifeforms, but it can also restore life in already extant beings-- The Emberstone has been used to essentially bring those felled in battle back to life, although it is not entirely clear if this was outright resurrection (being restored from a fatal wound) or just a form of accelerated healing (being restored from a significant injury that may have been fatal if left untreated). 

In Earthspark, Quintus Prime left Cybertron (we do not know if the preceding events were the same in this continuity or if there may be a different reason why he left), and used the Emberstone to seed life across many different planets. 

Ultimately, the Emberstone ended its journey on Earth, where it remained in place, until it was discovered and disturbed by the Malto siblings. 

Upon being activated by the Malto kids, the Emberstone sent out a surge of life-giving energy, thus creating the first Terrans: Twitch and Thrash. 

While we know the whereabouts of the Emberstone, we do not necessarily know where Quintus Prime is. 

His presence does seem to be at least partially inherent in the Emberstone itself, although whether this is some kind of cosmic projection or if he may in some way be tethered to the relic directly is not yet clear-- Or if there may be some other circumstance involved. 

As Earthspark is only in it’s first season at time of writing, there’s still a lot that hasn’t been established for this continuity as of yet! 

But we do know that Quintus Prime, for whatever reason, does have some kind of connection to Earth, and seems able to enact some degree of his own personal power on Earth as well-- Either as an extension of himself channelled through the energy of the Emberstone, or perhaps something else may be at play. 

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Ultimately, I’m really happy to see more of the Thirteen Primes material being re-used or re-adapted to a new continuity, and I’m excited to see where things go from here! 

I love cosmic space god-entity stuff, and the Primes have always been extremely interesting to me. :) 

As always, thanks to everyone who bothered to read through all this!!! <3 

I’m making a list of Earthspark themed posts I’d like to get started on soon, including a few that some of you have messaged to me-- Thank you! :) I’m always happy to take suggestions or talk about stuff in any Transformers continuity that you might find interesting! 

Gonna be discussing some spoilers for the first episode of the show here (both stuff that was revealed in-episode and also just theorisin') Aight, so, Quintus Prime!!! I am so so SO hyped to see one of the OG Thirteen getting more love, especially Quintus! Cyberverse set the bar big time with Maccadam/Alchemist, hoping we’re seeing a trend being set here! Even if we wouldn’t have known it was Quintus speaking if it wasn’t for the name drop in the end credits, I’ll hecking take it. Mayhaps we'll even have some flashbacks where we get to see Solus Prime do something cool other than dying, ehh?

Gotta say, it doesn’t look good for my poor boy. His line seems to be a recording, so it’s entirely possible Quintus is straight up dead by now. (I do have to admit, thanks to my horrible auditory processing, I thought he was speaking a Cybertronian language, and only realised he was saying “Legacy of hope” after translating the scrolling Autobot glyphs, which say the same thing on loop. It’s unclear if he’s rigged the cave with some kind of universal translator or if we’re just hearing the words in English for our benefit, but either way, it’s interesting… And also strangely poignant?

The thing is, Quintus Prime is famous for creating the Quintessons, so if he’s confirmed to be in it, they’re probably not far behind. Which begs the question… Why’d he make this cave in the first place? The cool swirly rock can probably be safely assumed to be the Emberstone, which is a very important artefact to leave lying around for just anyone to discover and possibly (mis)use. If he knows the Quintessons are coming, a weapon to defeat them with might make more sense from the Transformers’ perspective, but Twitch and Thrash have made it clear they’re not really interested in fighting, they’d rather play and learn cool stuff. Quintus is a pacifist who loves all forms of life, so it makes sense that he didn’t want to build a weapon. The Quintessons thrive best by sowing fear and mistrust between organics and Cybertronians, so Quintus left behind something that would bridge that gap, something which shows how organics and mechanoids can not only co-exist, but actually thrive and need each other. A legacy not of war, but of hope. That’s a message I can really get behind for the TF franchise!

Like, Shockwave knows it's on Earth and he was planning to create a protoform army anyway. If he got unfrozen and dug up the Emberstone, could he also create some robot kids? (Although I doubt he'd want to. But what about Soundwave or Starscream?)