Damn It Soundwave I Hope You Create At Least One Of Your Own Cassettes - Blog Posts

Cassette player from Cassette?

You know, I love cassettes in Transformers. (I love them so much that if you woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me what cassettes Soundwave and Blaster had, I could probably list them all by name.)

Many people underestimate them because of their size and the fact that they transform into cassettes and they are often reduced to the "children's" equivalent, but listen.. Just listen. In my mind, cassettes are not children at all, no, not at all, to go through such a war and stay alive, you know guys, they are definitely adults. Maybe teenagers close to becoming adults or this stupid period when you are kind of an adult, but you still need a "More adult adult". Moreover, in the comics, Rumble and Frenzy were actually miners, so let's keep that in mind, okay? In short, cassettes are quite adult and independent, this will be useful to us in my subsequent words.

In general, it seems like the show and comics have never said how strong this connection is between the cassette host and the cassette. What kind of connection is this? How do cassette host and cassettes work? Like… I don't remember it being said directly, but obviously there is a connection. (Remember how Soundwave feels pain from Ravage's death, or from Rumble's injury? Obviously the connection is strong, but what kind of connection is it?) How do cassette players and tapes work? HOW?

How the fuck does this work???

Well I have a couple of ideas about it actually, it may seem unusual, but here are a couple of my ideas.

It's pretty obvious that it's similar to symbiosis, where one species helps another in some way. While symbiosis can be parasitic in nature, I'm guessing that for Cybertronians it's more like a mutually beneficial phenomenon. Usually, creatures of different species enter into symbiosis, be it clownfish and sea anemones, or butterflies that feed on animal tears (they need it to get sodium). I think that cassette player and cassettes are more closely related. Aside from the obvious symbiotic relationship, where the one offers the cassette safety, care, and a secure life in exchange for some services from other side (like recording information, spying/intelligence activities, etc.), it seems to me that this could have a deeper evolutionary mechanism, for example for survival purposes?

Ever wonder why there are literally only two Cassette Host in the show and comics? It's literally just Soundwave and Blaster (Soundblaster doesn't count, he's a clone. Sorry, fans of that guy). It's also not really clear what niche they occupied in the caste system the Functionalists founded, but it's probably not a very high one since Soundwave was found on the street by Ravage. I think the fear here might be precisely because bots like them are capable of this type of symbiotic relationship. They don't need mods for it, they are designed to share their space and path with trusted Cassettes. This connection itself must imply that you understand each other on some deeper level. Maybe like Gestalts, a common type of internal connection that other bots can't recognize? I think that makes sense. You're basically slightly in each other's heads. The Cassette Host not only takes on the responsibility of providing the cassette, but also of regulating this internal connection, both emotional and physical. In return, the cassettes provide an unlimited ability to store and accumulate data (I think this is connected to their altform, that is, Rumble and Frenzy can be quite smart, they just don’t need it. A striking detail in this regard would be Rewind and how he helped Tailgate reduce the bomb’s radius, but there’s a lot that can be said about him). Understand? This increases the likelihood that the Cassette player and the cassettes act as a single, well-coordinated organism, it’s no wonder that the functionalists were afraid of this. This symbiosis can resemble from the outside both a family unit and a business gang, where there is a boss and cronies. In any case, here’s another thought of mine, what if…

What if, under certain conditions, a cassette tape could become a cassette player?

I know this might sound weird, but just hear me out. You know, I often come across the idea that cassette hosts can create cassettes, and that's a possibility, because my idea is based on that. Could a spark of such a bot be predisposed to create smaller sparks to provide security and support for those cassettes that don't have the ability to become cassette players? Look, we have a cassette host, it can have its own cassettes that it created, or those that were reformatted into this altform and taken under its wing. If the host is hurt or killed, cassettes can remain destitute and forgotten until they die, but what if, due to the symbiotic relationship of these Cybertronians, they have some kind of evolutionary mechanism? What if one host has enough cassettes that it realizes that it strains the internal communication and does not allow time for each? Then one or two cassettes created by the bot and having a predominantly humanoid form and also access to comfort and resources, begin to gain mass of the protoform, form a cassette deck and so on. They become new cassette players, provided that they have always been in this altform and have not been reformatted, I think the second type of cassettes is not capable of this mechanism. Why is this an evolutionary mechanism? Well, because perhaps earlier these two types of Cybertronians really belonged to different groups, but in the process of millennia and millions of years they were simply close for so long that they turned into one group. You know what, in essence, cassettes would be like an axolotl from our world (like… Have you seen an axolotl? They are actually not an adult version of an ambystoma)

This mechanism would essentially explain why we know only two cassette hosts and so many cassettes. Probably, before the war there were a sufficient and diverse number of them, but during the war many could have died and Soundwave and Blaster essentially picked up the destitute, deprived of communication and scared cassettes. None of the cassettes had the necessary level of comfort, fuel and other factors that would contribute to the evolution into a new host, you understand? In essence, this means that Soundwave and Blaster were loaded with an additional level during the war (that's why they look tired, taking care of so many charges is tiring…)

I can just see how after the war, with the improvement in the quality of life, one of the cassettes finally decided that the conditions are good enough, but there are too few hosts… It's time to evolve into an adult version and become a cassette player.

I hope Soundwave can rest and this won't be another world.