Hiiii I'm gonna ramble abt themes of European Alchemy in tf >:) I study the subject a lot for my uni electives so I have a good amount of knowledge, may be back to infodump even more later teehee
So. Alchemy has been pretty explicitly referenced several times in a handful of continuities, w/ alchemist prime and the Quintessons. But also, in every continuity, the cyclic nature of Cybertron's imperfect golden ages and subsequent falls into ruin, to various degrees, is very much analogous to the goals of the European alchemists. So much so that perhaps Cybertronians themselves are both the material and the alchemist, each generation and each faction sharing the goal of a perfect, immortal golden age of Cybertron.
"But what even is alchemy?" Good question! How did you get into my house! Anyway! European Alchemy arose in a time when ppl were getting real nerdy about scientific discovery and understanding the natural world, and people were throwing spaghettis at the wall from all sorts of pots to see who cooked. Alchemists wrote fanfic of Big Name Thinkers in an attempt to gain credibility, and copied the homework of Ancient Egyptian artisans who made stuff shiny and golden. Since gold doesn't oxidize, they figured it was an immortal metal. They also figured that all metals start off as 'boring' ones like lead and stuff, and over time mature into gold in the 'womb' of the earth (there's a lot of pregnancy stuff in euro alchemy it's a whole thing lol). In the pursuit of figuring out how to harness this, to transmute 'base' metals into gold, not just superficially but down to their very essence as a form of seeking immortality, alchemists would toss a buncha elements together in various ways. This actually led to the development of some techniques and equipment still used in modern chemistry!
Ok infodump over for now I will prob be back lol, I left. A lot unsaid but don't wanna yap toooooo much :P I'm curious if u can see where I'm going with some of this based on the stuff I've already mentioned >:) like. There's soo many connections I've thought like 5 new ones while typing and re-reading this I'm starting to suspect there's a scene in G1 or something where they flash "THIS FRANCHISE IS AN ALCHEMY REFERENCE" onscreen that I blinked and missed or smthn
that’s really interesting! g1 really feels like it definitely references something about alchemy, there’s a lot of science and testing in it
i dont have a lot to say about this really ,, but i’m definitely interested in what you have to say! looking forward to learning more heheh
