picsofmegatron:

@supernovasoundwave Thank you and you’re welcome!! Unfortunately it isn’t at all explained why he had them. Like, ever really. I’ve always wondered myself. This would be a question to ask the writers of that comic. But here’s my theory.

See the thing is, is that lots of other bots in the first issue of Megatron Origin have helmets exactly like his (as shown below), so I imagine that the other miners were built on an industrial scale to have them as well. It couldn’t have been just Megatron who had them.

(None of the bots shown here are Megatron. The close one in the first panel looks like it but Megs doesn’t have any scars on his face). As you can see in the pic above, all the miners have helmets exactly like Megatron’s and thus probably head crests as well.

But for miners to have solar panels? In the dark? Makes no sense. There is no solar energy down there at all. Wanna know what I think they are?

Yeah, they were like whiskers. Imagine though it sort of makes sense. It’s dark down there and sometimes they’d probably run out of power so they couldn’t see in the dark. The Functionists probably wanted to save money and resources on building them and gave them shitty programming/no night vision.

So instead they built them with head panels. They’d take off their helmets (as stupid and as dangerous as that’d be but really miners were merely tools back then; easily replaceable so not like it mattered if one died) and allow the crests to fan out and the crests would scrape up against the ceiling of the mine shaft they were in or against the walls to let them know where they were in their surroundings.

They probably built the head panels like (and this is another theory I don’t think it was ever confirmed about Seekers) a Seeker’s wings. The head panels were probably sensitive to atmospheric pressures, vibrations from above to let them know if there was going to be a cave-in and they needed to get out of there/if ground was unstable, etc.

It’s seen in one issue of MTMTE where a young Megatron and Impactor go to the bar during the whole time-traveling thing and also in like the first panels of Megatron Origin that miners were indeed allowed to go up to the surface. If the head-panels were sensitive to atmospheric pressure, then it would make sense to want to shield them from this sudden change of pressure from way down deep in the mines to all the way at the surface. It’s sort of like having your ears pop on a jet when you’re ascending.

The helmets protect the sensitive panels from the pressure change by keeping them folded flat and not able to expand and ‘turn on’ (as I imagine that if they were folded flat, they would be ‘off’ to conserve a miner’s energy because it would be useless to run a pressure change/vibration-sensitive program when the helmet was on). So, thus, the helmet kept the panels down and the programming ‘off’.

Now it’s not at all explained why Megatron fanned his crests out after he killed his first dude in the gladiatorial ring but we see by that point of the comic that not a lot of the miners-turned-gladiators had their helmets after issue one so they could have gotten themselves altered to be better fighters. After all, it wouldn’t be good for your enemy to grab the sensitive crests and rip them off/out.

Megatron probably took his helmet off in an expression of grief of what he did (slight spoilers here but nothing too major: when he attacked the senator that fired them all, he was all like “NO WHAT HAVE I DONE” sort of thing super grief stricken so it’d make sense that he’d still, later on in the arena, feel grief or change in himself after he killed his first bot). So that particular moment was probably him expressing himself. Note that he doesn’t smile or anything or is proud of what he did. He looks… done. Tired. Like he just wants to sleep.

With that, it’s not known why Megatron and probably other miners had those head panels but tbh solar panels makes absolutely no sense so I personally think they were more like whiskers.