This chapter contains, first and foremost, a reference table for the real-world inspiration behind names and titles, but also a collection of my thoughts while I'm writing and posting it, which will grow more extensive as the story advances. If you are bored by meta-discussions by authors on their own works, feel free to skip this entirely, and if not, you're welcome to dive right in :-)

Just in case anyone is wondering, here is the list of all the authors and playwrights and their works and references that I (ab)used for this fanfiction, listed by order of appearance, complete with my apologies for liberally borrowing all of the below for my purposes. If you want, tell me how many of them you you guessed ^^

Cybertronian version = Original
Roll on, Roll out! = … really, that one's obvious. And if it isn't, I'm gonna say Power Rangers
The Turning of the Screw = The Taming of the Shrew (despite the similarity to the Henry-James-novel, it's Shakespeare I was looking to)
Sense & Sensory Ability = Sense & Sensibility
Mecheo & Femliet = Romeo & Juliet
Shakespark = William Shakespeare
Mechlet = Hamlet
Dreamworks = Fluxworks
Rescue Mecha = Rescue Bots
A Mid-dry-season's Recharge Flux = A Midsummer Night's Dream
Mechtrius = Demetrius (from play above)
Ra-She (Arcee's role) = She-Ra
Sun Saber (because the Temple wouldn't be happy) = Star Saber
The Three Fusion-Cannoneers = The Three Musketeers
CSS Distant Skies = USS Enterprise
Plane Coasting = Jane Austen
Pride & Predacons = Pride & Prejudice
Mechtacus = Spartacus
Shakespark in Love = Shakespeare in Love

The holovid industry and its role in Cybertronian society

This being an AU, I permitted myself to mess around quite a bit with what I know about Cybertronian society. The first and foremost premise of this fic is that the whole society, laws, rules, everything, are based on their interpretation of ancient texts, which come in the form of plays. The most important of those plays are the myths about Primus, Unicron and the thirteen original Primes. The way I imagine it, back in the first days of Cybertron, in order to spread knowledge and awareness of Primus and the Thirteen, the first priests in the Temple of Primus organised public shows where the myths were re-enacted by specially trained priests, followed by public discussions on what could be learnt from the events depicted and what the audience should take away, both on a personal and a societal level.

This, by the way, is heavily inspired by and based on the existence and function of mystery and morality plays in medieval Europe, Greek theatre and passion plays.

Some of those discussions turned into inspiration for spin-off plays, which in turn were enacted alongside the mystery plays by lay actors, contributing to the discussion. Over the course of time, more and more of those plays were written, some of which were incorporated into the Temple-approved canon, while others were considered as not adding enough to the discussion, and lay entertainment – basically, the Cybertronian version of trash TV.

As the number of plays grew, so did the demand for more actors, which resulted in the Temple appointing certain actors as "Prime", indicating that they were trained to the standards the Temple held, and basically licensed to act in the original mystery plays.

Society developed further, institutions specialised, the Temple stopped training actors and left it to the Academy of Arts, who then also got to appoint new Primes, although the Temple still gets a say in who is actually chosen, and also in which studio is given permission to shoot a new version of one of the canonised plays. The Iaconian studies generally come out on top of this due to their proximity to the Temple and the first Academy of Arts, and their productions are what would be considered blockbusters in our world.

Which, if I may say so, is probably the part about this fanfiction that most challenges my own suspension of disbelief XD Let's just pretend Cybertronians are theatre nerds and either really into their myths or into their Primes, shall we? ;-)

As more cities developed, they also jumpstarted their own holovid industries, but with the canonised plays pretty much under embargo, they had to look elsewhere. So naturally, they started making use of the plays that never were canonised and adapted those in their own particular fashion. Tarn, with its huge military influence, went for action holovids – basically anything with huge mecha and explosions, and if they so happen to be soldiers, all the better (and now you know how Optimus came to star in The Three Fusion-Cannoneers). Die Hard or The A-Team would be shot in Tarn. (Just so we're clear, though, Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now would come out of Polyhex if the studios there had the shanix for it.)

Vos, with its huge population of fliers, naturally went for everything flight- and space-related: They got the CSS Distant Skies, shoot stuff like Armageddon and sometimes get someone in from Polyhex to do stuff like A Space Oddysee.

Polyhex, just like Megatron says, is populated by geeks. They don't do alien invasions, they don't do external-influences-threaten-our-planet, they specialise in independent holovids and dystopian scripts, much to the annoyance of Iacon and the Temple. Scriptwriters from Polyhex are fairly frequently hired by Tarn or Vos, because they have great ideas, but their scripts are then carefully rendered more palatable to the general public.

Kaon pretty much only has two studios: Matrix Studios, which does sparkling holovids, and an unnamed studio which does robo porn. Yep, that's it. Iacon, Vos and Tarn all have their own sparkling holovid branches, but Alpha Trion loves the kids best and knows what they want to watch :-) His reasons for moving Matrix Studios to Kaon instead of staying in Iacon, where he started out, are his own, and likely more complex than anyone can even fathom XD

Other cities may have studios, but they pretty much struggle to survive.

Since the holovid industry is so divided by city, there is a lot of frametype-casting going on, although that doesn't mean there aren't a few mecha who make it in other cities. If you want to make a career in Iacon, however, you had better study at the Academy there, otherwise the best you can get is a one-sentence-dies-within-five-minutes role.

Or the bad guy.

In terms of which plays are canonised and which aren't, I mainly chose to stick to books and plays which frequently turn up in "100 best … of all times"-lists. They are therefore extremely euro-centric, since most of the works on there are European, if not from the Anglosphere. That decision, in turn, was based on me messing around with the titles, so I had to try and stick to stuff my readers would be able to recognise without too much trouble (with a few self-indulgent exceptions …). The Temple realised at some point that they couldn't simply make do with putting on the same myth again and again and again, and started to take their pick from the plays written by other authors. Just like the real literary canon, the process of what ended up being canonised and what didn't is, at best, explained by the "literary value" ascribed to a specific play … with very few mecha knowing what "literary value" actually is.

Other than in the real world, though, most mecha on Cybertron have actually read all of the plays on the list, which might just explain why they can stand to watch a hundred different versions of Sense & Sensory Ability.

Although … *eyes DVDs on shelf*coughs* Maybe I shouldn't be talking.