The Razor's Edge

 

Writer: Ben Yee

Publication date: July 6, 2007

This is a prose story published on transformersclub.com, with a prologue in Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #14. The prologue and epilogue are set two weeks after the season one Beast Wars episode "The Spark," which introduced the show's second female character, Airazor. She and her fellow Maximals are trying to stop Megatron's latest madcap scheme, some made-up adventure that never happened on the show. Some fantastic literary writing here:

"Good work! Now let's go – AAAAHHH!!!"

He aimed his dinosaur head arm up at her and fired several lethal blasts into the air.

The majority of the story, however, is an extended flashback (very, very extended) to Airazor's past on Cybertron, when she was known as Wing Saber. The chronology here is very confusing, mostly because of Dawn of the Predacus, where Airazor had already been reverted to a protoform at this point. I guess she got better? Then became a protoform again later? I should probably stop considering Dawn of the Predacus, it was written way after all these other stories and seems to have only paid their continuity lip service at best.

Also, the Maximals and Autobots are apparently engaged in open war with the Predacons. Specifically engaged in the Great War, in fact. So is this the same Great War that the Autobots and Decepticons were fighting back in G1 times, or is this another Great War that started later? There's also an apparent conflict where it's said that the Pax Cybertronia is currently being written, and when it's completed the fighting will officially stop, but then at other times they talk about it in past tense as if it's already written and the only fighting is against renegade Predacons who have been disowned by the Tripredacus Council.

Wing Saber leads a three-person squad consisting of herself and two other female Maximals, Who and Cares. They're sent by the Maximal elders to investigate Predacon activities on the planet Nibari, home of green centaur aliens. The Predacons, under the command of a mysterious Leader misgendered as "it" to preserve the mystery of his identity for one whole scene before the author forgot and started defaulting to masculine pronouns, have taken over the planet and converted the Nibarians' factories into manufacturing plants for soulless, brainless robot foot soldiers. The Maximal Girl Squad teams up with the horse people and effortlessly plants a secret command code into all the robots so they can take control of them when it's convenient for the plot.

But the Leader of the renegade Predacon army at last reveals himself: oh my god, it's G1 Megatron! The Maximals are only mildly surprised to see him, like if the U.S. Army was fighting insurgents during the Iraq War and came face to face with Hitler. "Hey isn't he supposed to be Galvatron?" asks nobody.

They challenge Megatron to ritual Cybertronian combat. Megatron grouses that that's supposed to be one-versus-one, but the girls say that since they're so weak and small it's only fair that all three of them fight him at once. Megatron's like "yeah all right." They meet at dawn and start blasting the shit out of Megatron, whose armor falls off revealing that he was actually Flamewar wearing a Megatron costume from Spirit Halloween. Why do they keep putting Flamewar in these Beast Wars prequels? Who gives a flying fuck?

Flamewar says that one day the Decepticons will destroy the Maximals, because the Predacons suck. So I guess that whole thing about her going to work for Beast Wars Megatron in the last story didn't pan out? Did they forget to read that one?

This sucks hard. It's way, way too long, almost 50 pages, and feels like reading an unedited first draft of an amateur fanfic. There are constant misspellings, incorrect punctuation, weird formatting, pronoun disagreement, stupid made-up alien names, and a random > thrown in for good measure. Worse, it's so, so boring. Who gives a shit about Airazor's backstory that she doesn't even remember on the show? What was the point of any of this?

On the positive side, at least there was no mention of Deathsaurus.