We never see the Female Autobots after The Search for Alpha Trion (Barring Ariel in War Dawn)
and in Transformers the Movie we find out that the Decepticons have taken over Cybertron.

So where did they go?

I like to think they were still around on the Moon Bases and hopefully escaped from Unicron before he exploded at the end.

Though this does tie into the other larger question of where half the cast of the Cartoon ran off to.

Swivelbot

I assume they are in a mass grave somewhere, after Shockwave hunted them down and killed them. Shockwave didn't even know they existed before "The Search for Alpha Trion" so he hadn't focused his optic on them before that moment.

They were not around in "The Key To Vector Sigma," where they would be expected to be around Alpha Trion, based on the status quo from "The Search for Alpha Trion". And similarly missing in the entire 2006 Autobot-run Cybertron season.

I guess it also depends on how you view the scenes of Cybertron in general. Does the emptiness of MTMTE Cybertron mean that most Transformers have been killed during the Great War, or fled, or does their non-appearance just mean that the scenes we saw were in the empty parts of Cybertron.

I think the female Autobots are gone. Probably dead. I'd like them to have a better ending, but the simplest answer that makes sense is that they just died offscreen somewhere, between "TS4AT" and "TK2VS".

Further to Gustavo's post, I'll say that are enough inexplicable absences from cartoon episodes (and the movie) that you could handwave an explanation for why the female Autobots aren't in KtVS, but yes, the simplest explanation is that their little resistance cell gets snuffed out. In my personal timeline, I have their deaths happening between the Movie and Season 3, when Megatron claims Cybertron for the Decepticons--after Alpha Trion merges with Vector Sigma, the female Autobots are the only canon Autobots standing between the Decepticons and sole occupation of the planet. BUT there's enough wiggle room to drive Optimus Prime through, if you want to say they survived.

For me the more interesting question is what happened to the Female Autobots *before* Search for Alpha Trion. Elita's timeline is:

* Get rebuilt as Elita One
* Spend five million years fighting alongside boyfriend.
* Lose boyfriend.
* Spend four million years fighting without a good chunk of the army and in famine conditions.
* Reunite with boyfriend and agree to long distance relationship.

And for somebody like Moonracer the timeline's got to be more like:
* Get built in famine and wartime.
* Lose leader and a good chunk of the army.
* Spend whole life scavenging to stay alive.

The female Autobot side of the story is bleak as hell.

Velvet Glove (I mean, we're probably looking at the six survivors of dozens? hundreds? of Autobots left behind when the Ark launched)

VelvetGlove wrote:

> Further to Gustavo's post, I'll say that are enough inexplicable absences from cartoon episodes (and the movie) that you could handwave an explanation for why the female Autobots aren't in KtVS, but yes, the simplest explanation is that their little resistance cell gets snuffed out. In my personal timeline, I have their deaths happening between the Movie and Season 3, when Megatron claims Cybertron for the Decepticons--after Alpha Trion merges with Vector Sigma, the female Autobots are the only canon Autobots standing between the Decepticons and sole occupation of the planet. BUT there's enough wiggle room to drive Optimus Prime through, if you want to say they survived.

There’s a lot of wiggle room, but I think the wiggling needs to explicitly put them somewhere else for 2005-2006. There are some inexplicable disappearances in the cartoon, but most of the missing robots were missing during/after the movie, and that was such a bloodbath that I think that explains most of the disappearances.

I have two very different personal timelines that give the female Autobots a better ending, because I really hate them being killed offscreen, even if that is the most likely outcome.

First, they were rebuilt, and we just didn’t recognize them when we saw them again (for some reason, I decided that Kup was once Moonracer). This is obviously insane, and has no basis in canon, but is not contradicted by canon. There’s a Kup’s Tale fanfic with this as the twist, but we don’t trust Kup. (Plus, I think he might have said he was lying)

I also have an outline for a fanfic where they are trapped on a colony ship with an internal space bridge (borrowing the Titans from IDW), completely out of control (borrowing from Stargate: Destiny)

I do *want* them to live

> For me the more interesting question is what happened to the Female Autobots *before* Search for Alpha Trion. Elita's timeline is:

> * Get rebuilt as Elita One
> * Spend five million years fighting alongside boyfriend.
> * Lose boyfriend.
> * Spend four million years fighting without a good chunk of the army and in famine conditions.
> * Reunite with boyfriend and agree to long distance relationship.

I don’t think she spent 4M years fighting after misplacing her boyfriend. Shockwave didn’t notice that she existed. The female Autobots were scavengers who were either really stealthy until they weren’t, or killed anyone who spotted them (this requires enough resistance or infighting elsewhere that anyone killed by Elita-1’s team was assumed to be killed by someone else).

> And for somebody like Moonracer the timeline's got to be more like:
> * Get built in famine and wartime.
> * Lose leader and a good chunk of the army.
> * Spend whole life scavenging to stay alive.

We don’t know when Moonracer was built, do we? I don’t think we have any evidence one way or the other for when the population growth stopped. At some point, Alpga Trion got his hands on the Key To Vector Sigma, which likely stopped all population growth or replacement. I think that is probably an interesting story.

> The female Autobot side of the story is bleak as hell.

> Velvet Glove (I mean, we're probably looking at the six survivors of dozens? hundreds? of Autobots left behind when the Ark launched)

Bleak for pretty much everyone. Cybertron went from a populated planet to an empty wasteland. We know that some went off into space, and that the transformers diaspora is larger than the S1-2 cast, but it’s doubtful that this scattering is more than a tiny bit of Cybertron’s population.

Just a quick plug: Ivy Bohnlein (of TF:2k5, long ago) wrote a great fanfic, "Up From Underground", delving into just these issues around these particular Autobots, back in 1997.

Also a great read!

JB