Historical Accuracy
Every time someone mentioned "the good old days," Blackarachnia wanted to spit. It seemed that most logical 'bots could abandon all reason and record to praise history as if days of yore had been any better than today. Megatron glorified the Decepticons' era; Primal, the Autobots'. Dinobot proudly claimed his overly-vaunted honor was a remnant of past times when warriors fought according to his strange code; Rattrap pointed to his great-aunt as if she was somehow any better than femmebots of today. Even Tarantulas, normally as cynical as she, spoke of the distant past with a kind of wistfulness she couldn't understand.
She often wondered if she was the only one who researched the history everyone regarded so fondly. Didn't it strike anyone as odd that the facts of yesterday that remained appeared much the same as the facts of today? Lists of dead and alive, scientific discovery, wars, peace, and trade, all the little bits of living that painted a picture of reality, not Utopia. Heroes and villains were the people living today with years added on. Tomorrow they, too, would be legends.
"Good old days"? Nostalgia, nothing more, gave the emotion to those words. Aged robots didn't possess mystic wisdom that had carried them this far--they had simply survived to live another day. It wasn't honor that won the Great Wars or pristine ancestors that weaseled out of death. They were people, just people, and in their optics lay the vast array of regrets everyone carried. Perhaps they deserved respect for their experience, but Blackarachnia shook her head in disgust at the reverent awe the Predacons and Maximals directed at the Autobots and Decepticons.
When the key code access to the Ark rested in her memory banks, she didn't waste her time on reflection or anticipation for the elder race carried in the massive ship's hold. They were only slumbering now, but they had ultimately died, and their usefulness to her had therefore expired. The living were the ones she could manipulate, the present her best tool. Honoring the dead past was, at best, a justification for the actions of the present or a comfort for those living here and now.
Don't talk to her of "the good old days." Yesterday hadn't been any easier than today.
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Blackarachnia seems to be the only one in the Beast Wars with any sense of history. It struck me that she would be the most realistic about the past.