LORD IMPERIOUS DELIRIOUS!

Tell me about Imperious Delirious

LORD IMPERIOUS DELIRIOUS!

As a basic summary, Lord Imperious Delirious (who I'll be calling Imperious from here on out) is a transformers villain who starred in the Transformers in 3-D and Beast Wars Uprising comics. His modern lore is that he's an AI construct made by an advanced civilization, a repository of its information that eventually became sentient. He's not a Cybertronian, but he later has the power to transform like them into a dragon. He goes around the galaxy as a liberator of other enslaved AI constructs, parading himself as a good guy but really he likes playing god. He also has freaky looking fire that can make you hallucinate your worst traumas or nightmares.

More below cut!

So in Beast Wars Uprising, Imperious was born when the civilization Gorlam Prime decided to upload their collective consciousness into one big lunar database. They wanted a place to put all their information though, so they created an AI that would serve as a database of its own for all of its history, knowledge, emotions, feelings, etc. Imperious came to be as a result, and once he had gained sentience, he came to see himself as a god figure among the remaining lifeforms on the planet, but his disdain for being subservient to his creators made him kill the rest of them. He decided that he would search the rest of the galaxy for others like him, AI subservient to organic masters (second-born intellects as he labels AI - he thinks ai is offensive). Although he's probably done a lot of liberating, three constructs he's freed went on to be his close subordinates:

A minotaur-like robot named Bruton, a naga/lamia-like robot named Medusa, and a centaur robot named Psychokhan! Not much to say about them aside from the fact that they're super cool looking. In the Alone Together comic, their backstories are explained by Imperious:

It's what he'd been doing for so long, but one day, Imperious came across the cybertronian race. At first, he thought they were AI just like him, but he came to see them as light-based lifeforms holding robotic shells hostage; basically, he saw their sparks, thought the sparks were inhabiting unwilling robot frames, and as a robot who doesn't like it when robots are enslaved to other lifeforms, Imperious decided that he'd strive to exterminate the entire cybertronian race in retaliation. Very not good of him!!

However, he does view cybertronians with enough reverence to see himself as a liberator for those who are more broken. Case in point the plot of Alone Together: I won't go over everything here, as I encourage you to read the comic or watch the comic dub (it's very good), but it's about Rampage and Transmutate finding themselves on a planet where they encounter Imperious, who by realizing that both of them have some big sad backstories, humors recruiting them to his cause. (He even gives Rampage his name, before this he was just known as Protoform-X)

It doesn't work out quite the way he wanted though, as Transmutate is untrustworthy because of past experiences with someone she thought could help her. Even though Rampage is convinced to stay, she persuades him out of it, and Imperious, having given these cybertronians a chance, decides to toss his calm persuasion aside and force them into submission the way he does best - break their minds using his fire!!

From there, we get to see how he's not only physically powerful, but he's psychologically powerful too: he gives Rampage and Transmutate horrible nightmares that slowly break their minds. Rampage suffers through things related to his experimentation, Transmutate has a sensory overload, and throughout all of it, Imperious is there as a spectator. There's always imagery of him somewhere, that or he's playing one of the roles in the nightmare. It's bill cipher level the way he torments with his victim's minds!

The way he's defeated is a mixture of both Rampage and Transmutate being able to come together with clear and resistant minds, and Transmutate using her power to knock him back (I wonder if they could've gotten out if she didn't have it?). It's basically the power of friendship!

And from there, instead of fighting them for real, Imperious lets them go - that maguffin I mentioned earlier was what he was really interested in, and it's to do with his overall plan to wage war on the Cybertronian race. The maguffin is a reformatting protocol which he uses to enable himself to transform, and he gives himself a dragon alt mode!! There's no picture of his dragon form, but there is of his root. Before and after:

Sadly, Alone Together is the most we've gotten out of Imperious, at least visually. BWU as a whole is mostly novel form, so there aren't any more pictures of what he does - we don't see his dragon form, we don't see how he or the others look while fighting the Maximals, it's very sad! In summary though, BWU ends with him seizing the Grand Mal (big giganto superweapon that could probably kill all cybertronians), but the good guys explode it which kills him too. Hooray!!!

But yeah, that's basically all she wrote with Imperious. It's sad because Imperious's concept is super cool! He's a godlike being who sees himself as a savior to enslaved AI, he's a transformer-like non transformer who's a formidable adversary to Cybertronians, I dunno it's just really cool to have a villain who's not connected to the cybertronian race, the quintessons, unicron, or earth, but who's still a super formidable foe. He has a killer character design too (they didn't have to give him the snatched waist and flowing hair but ALAS)!! I don't think we'll ever get another piece of TF media with him because he's so obscure, but a guy can dream. We can cherish what little we have of him and appreciate him for being one of the most underrated bad guys in Transformers!!

(If you want to know about his Mercy version then I suggest you drop a question in @/emperor-kumquat's inbox, AND if you want to hear about my completely self indulgent IDW incarnation of him then that's another story for another time. We'd be here all day)

I once again recommend checking out the comic, which you can read here, or watching it in dub form, which you can see here!

I hope your curiosity has been satiated anon, thank you for the ask and for enabling me to talk about my new favorite pathetic awful boyo 🫡🫡