Welcome to—hey, quiet down over there! Welcome—I said, QUIET! Welco—alright, everybody SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, and LISTEN!! This is a class, NOT a free-for-all!

*ahem*

Welcome to Beast Wars History 101. Attendance to this class is free, and if you’d please take out the course syllabus you’ll see that—

"Beast Wars isn’t history!"

--is too! Ah, slag. Everybody, meet the guy from the cheap seats. He’s kind of hard to miss. He’s the guy in the back row with the heart monitor next to him.

"Beast Wars isn’t history!" he’s saying. "You can’t even HAVE a class called Beast Wars History 101!"

Oh, it’s true that the actual Beast Wars never happened. If they had, we would have a bunch of Decepticons and Autobots running around the world right now. We obviously don’t, so the Beast Wars didn’t happen. However, the show itself is a historical event.

"It’s just a show!" the guy in the back is saying.

Just a show? Ha. Do me a favor, and humor the crazy person. The next time you’re in a bookstore, look up the historical fiction section. I can almost guarantee it’ll be one of the largest sections in the store. For some reason, human beings are fascinated with what MIGHT have happened, or what people were thinking and/or doing while something was happening. Authors have written thousands of historical fiction books from prehistoric times like Jean Auel in her Earth’s Children series to the World War II era ‘Memoirs Of A Geisha’ by Arthur Golden. Some are historically accurate, with people and events that really happened, but some are written purely from imagination. How are the Beast Wars really any different than historical fiction?

The show is a story set on prehistoric Earth, and it just so happens to be a cartoon. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then how thick of a novel would Beast Wars the Book be since a cartoon is merely a series of pictures? All of the features are there for the makings of a classic tale: it starts in the middle of the action, there’s right VS wrong in a fight for the future, there’s character development, humor to lighten the seriousness, culture development (including hints of Cybertronian religion and, of all things, small details like swear words), and even mystical events like Optimus coming back to life and Rampage’s supposed immortality. It’s far more in depth than the normal Saturday morning cartoon, so how can you call it ‘just a show’?

"It’s still just a show," the guy in the back is saying, his heart monitor beeping. "There’s no books in the stores, are there?"

Maybe not in the stores, but that’s because it’s beyond the fans’ control. Hasbro owns the rights to the Beast Wars and its characters, so as long as it doesn’t see fit to publish anything, there will be no Beast Wars books. However, if you’re willing to write without making a profit, there’s definitely a market for you. The world of fanfiction is vast, and it’s expanding every day. There are literally hundreds of fanfics about the Beast Wars throughout the Internet. Compiled together, the book would be enormous!

"Just fanfics," the guy is saying dismissively. "Nothing original."

Riiiiiiiight. The only difference between a regular short story and a fanfic is that previously invented characters are being used in it. The challenge of coming up with a plot and then writing the characters into it is still there. The challenge of looking at the personality of the characters as shown in the cartoon and then predicting how that character would act if they were in a certain situation is no easy task! With original writing, you can make up a character and say THIS is how my character would react if this were to happen. It’s not as easy when you’re working with a previously established personality. It becomes more like studying an actual person and then saying, this is how I THINK he or she would react if this were to happen. The possibilities are endless with fanfiction because of the interpretation of how someone would act. One author thinks THIS will happen; that author thinks THAT would happen.

I’m not saying it’s any easier or harder. Again, it’s historical fiction. Homer mentioned Cassandra briefly in the ‘Illiad’; Marian Zimmer Bradley wrote Kassandra as the main character in ‘The Firebrand’. Cassandra was a living person from history—in a way, Kassandra could be considered a previously written character. Does that make Bradley’s novel a fanfic? After all, someone had already established the character. It just so happens that Homer’s not going to come back from the dead and sue Bradley for making a profit off of his character. Beast Wars fans have to deal with Hasbro when it comes down to that, so we stick with putting our stories on the Internet. It doesn’t make them any less than other literary works; we just don’t get any money from writing them.

And so what if they’re not original? You can add original characters, if you want that. Can you honestly read fanfics by Taratron, Beastbot, Jennifer (Stevens or Parsons), Ivyna J. Spyder, JEDI, or anyone else and tell me their work is inferior to any other short story or novel? Whether they are funny or serious, authors put everything they have into writing. I’m sure publishers would look at some of the Beast Wars fanfics on the Internet and say, if only we could put that into print. It’s the value of the work that shows, and Beast Wars obviously had to be something noteworthy to have drawn enough attention from writers of such quality.

And speaking of quality, there’s another point that should be mentioned. It’s not just the fanfics that distinguish Beast Wars. It’s not just historical fiction in words. The picture is the part that inspires the thousand words, after all, and the fanartists should be honored. Writers aren’t the only ones that have made Beast Wars more than just a show.

That guy in the back is fussing with his heart monitor. It’s beeping at him as he protests, "Fanart is NOT original! It’s drawn from the show!"

Um…not really. Oh, it might not be original because, of course, it’s still done using previously created characters, but drawn from the show? As in, traced or copied? The cartoon was done mostly with computer, but I don’t know of many fans that have the equipment or the skill to match Mainframes in what they did with the show. Besides, that’s animation. What I’m talking about is the art, and it goes well beyond something that resembles a cartoon. From a purely art angle, the work of artists like Darkheart and Zinou compare with Julie Bell, a popular artist who does spectacular paintings of metal. The fanartists’ pictures understandably feature a lot of light gleaming off of metal, which from personal experience I know is hard to draw. Robots are made of metal, and to draw a single picture with that kind of light detail on each curve and angle takes more than somebody doodling on a piece of notebook paper (not that there hasn’t been some great stuff done on notebook paper…). These people are real, talented artists who put their best effort into their work. Taken from the show? Compare one of Shendew’s drawings to a screenshot from Beast Wars, and then YOU be the judge. Art like that isn’t done by tracing the lines or changing a few colors.

*Beep beep beepbeepbeep* says the heart monitor. "But it’s JUST A SHOW!" the guy in the back is shouting. "There’s nothing behind it! No characters thinking, no action that led up to the show—nothing but what the writers wanted and how many toys Hasbro wanted to sell!"

You know, that is kind of strange. You’d think that it’d be just a cartoon. The writers invented it and Hasbro produced it, and there’s really nothing inside those Maximals and Predacons. Sometimes it hits me that I’m getting worked up over…what? A TV show?

Yet here I am, saying that Beast Wars is part of history. Sure, the writers and Hasbro put the show on the air. But our IMAGINATIONS made up for what wasn’t shown! A textbook can tell you what happened in history, but a writer can go beyond the dry history book and ask ‘what if this happened?’ or ‘what was he/she thinking while this was happening?’ Beast Wars fans have been doing that for the show ever since it started. We started with what was given to us, and we built around it.

Message boards occasionally carry huge debates over theories from the show. It’s treated like an alternate reality where we try and explain how things came to be. Whatever happened to the Autobots and Decepticons? How did the Maximals and Predacons descend from them, and are they still around? Are Cybertron and Earth still associating? How much human interference and influence is there on Cybertron? Do the protoforms have memories from their previous lives? Are personalities programmed or learned? How does going back in time fit with the original Transformers show and Earth’s history? Do Cybertronians have children? Is it sex, sparking, or what? What level of science and technology are they really at, and how do you write the details in a fanfic?

The explanations range from whimsical to magical to logical, and the depth each one adds to the show is amazing. Just to be able to link your own personal take on the theories all together in a story coherently..!

So of course I can’t look at Beast Wars as just a show. It’s historical fiction, developed and expanded. It may be a cartoon, but that doesn’t really matter. Maybe cartoons are underrated.

That heart monitor is beeping up a storm. "Okay, so it MIGHT be more than a show. That still doesn’t make it history!" the guy in the back row is insisting. "All the fans will move on, and Beast Wars will be dead!"

Dead? Oh, I don’t think so. There’ll probably always be someone like you who says that, but I’ll never believe it. The original Transformers show has gone 17 years without dying out, so why would Beast Wars? People don’t travel across the country and over national borders to attend Botcon because the shows are dead. From an entirely capitalist perspective, the convention wouldn’t have been supplied if there wasn’t a demand for it. I don’t see that demand going away any time soon.

Try and see it from my point of view: just because the authors stop writing fanfiction and the artists start drawing something else, it doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten. For me, I would have never improved my writing skills at all if I hadn’t taken up writing fanfiction. That’s going to affect my life, one way or another. For other fans, their writing or drawing might be one of their biggest accomplishments so far in life. Friends have met in Beast Wars roleplaying and on message boards. Maybe they’ll leave the show behind as the years go on, but will they really forget? It’s kind of like high school in that fashion; it’s a part of your life for the rest of your life.

History doesn’t always mean the big, flashy events that get written in the textbooks. It can be personal history, too. It can be the fanfic that got the most feedback from readers; it can be the painting that you think is your best work; it can be the character you fell in love with; it can be the people you met who laughed, cried, and debated with you. It’s whatever left an impression on you. The fans may move on, but history has been made. And while you may never see any reruns of Beast Wars, you never see any of history, either. It lives on in classes, books, and paintings, but also in fanfiction, websites, and fanart.

*beepbeepbeepbeep!* "The show is dead!" the guy in the back row is still insisting weakly.

Well, in a way. The Beast Wars ARE history...but history never dies.

Any questions, class?

*beep…eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--*

Hmmmm…so THAT’s what a flat-line looks like…uh-oh…er, class dismissed. Please leave the room in a quiet and orderly manner while I go call an ambulance. Again.

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