#also when i say lore around how hard it is to kill cybertronians is barely acknowledged i mean that like

[lord-squiggletits]

Honestly another one of those worldbuilding things unique to an alien robot race is I wonder how Cybertronians' long, nearly immortal (at least in the context of organic lifespans) lives would affect their views on punitive versus restorative justice?

Ignoring the inconsistencies for a moment (and the fact that this lore is almost never acknowledged), in IDW1 it's written that Cybertronians can live basically as long as their sparks keep burning PLUS it's apparently so hard to kill a Cybertronian for good that suicidal people have to go to specialized euthanasia clinics to be thoroughly executed. (This also helps explain how a war lasted 4 million years and didn't make them as a species go extinct.) So given their near immortality, it does kinda bring to mind some questions like

Is imprisoning someone for a certain number of years even a meaningful punishment for a species with life spans in the millions of years? Does it just mean that average prison sentences are somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years? In other words, do Cybertronians just do "human prison sentences, but to a Cybertronian scale" or would they even view a time based imprisonment/other punishment as meaningful at all?

Does the fact that Cybertronians are so hard to kill affect their views towards the death penalty? As an example, do they view their near immortality as something that would be cruel to end via execution because it deprives someone of possibly millions of years to reform? Or is the death penalty strongly supported BECAUSE their immortality makes them see ending someone's life as a fitting punishment for crimes?

What about how often crimes like murder happen? If it's really hard for Cybertronians to kill each other/themselves, then a lot of crimes would end merely as assaults and not murders, aka the people involved would all survive, aka restorative justice might be more necessary in this society when "coexisting with that guy who's attempted to kill you at least once" is a common scenario to have happen. And even if there is punitive justice, well, the guy just goes to prison for a few thousand years and comes out virtually unchanged bc he and you and everyone are basically immortal.

I know "the writers are human" and all, but sometimes it feels like worldbuilding around Cybertronian age ranges is really underutilized. Like, in pretty much every series except maybe IDW2 Cybertronians don't seem to differ on their views of time/lifespans compared to humans. Like the fact that the plots of many shows/comics (at least in certain series/seasons) take place in the space of weeks, months, or maybe a couple years is rarely commented on by these beings who live for millions of years, and it doesn't seem to affect their society much. Not even with a Tolkien ent-esque style of moving very slowly and pondering things deeply before moving. If anything Cybertronians tend to be very...reckless? Prone to fickleness of the heart and mind?