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Just had a friend point this out. Daleks want to exterminate us. The haydonites want to exterminate us. Just wondered.

Cylons too.
SKYNET counts as well, though it's less verbal, and more nuke and slay about it.
Oh, and Galaxy Note 7s want to kill us too, but we seem to have nipped that little uprising in the bud.

True, but the Haydonites only seem to have a hate on for Protoculture users. So there are ways to avoid their wrath I would think , unlike the Cylons, Daleks, Cyber-man, Skynet, the Borg, etc where just "being" is enough to become their next target.

The Haydonite and Dalek connection doesn't just end there, they both only have ONE eye.

So do Cylons. But Haydonites are snappier(at least less skanky) dressers.

However, properly speaking, Daleks are CYBORGS more akin to the Mechanoids in physiology, though Daleks were designed from the get-go as weapons systems(at least on paper; Davros saw them as a superior lifeform in his own twisted image). We don't know the Haydonite's background at all; they might be somebody's abandoned AIs now looking to take over the universe, starting with knocking off the Protoculture users, or they may be frustrated galactic garden maintenance roombas that regard the Flower of Life as the equivalent of finding weeds or ganja growing in their cosmic orderliness.

Except for the "created by humans" part, the reimagined Haydonites used in Shadow Chronicles are a fairly obvious copy of the Cylons from the Battlestar Galactica reboot that was airing right around the time development started, including having sabotaged humanity's military technology. Their fighters even look like old school Cylon fighters.

What is scary is that I think that is one of the best reasons for their motivation that I have seen. The "evil being talking over the galaxy" thing gets old as well as the need to control protoculture. Maybe they see themselves as guardians trying to save the universe from the evil that the flower of life and its addicts has caused.

I thought it was established the Haydonites are cybernetic orgnasims. The Haydonite Grant/Scott take down to rescue Janice-2 could be considered to "bleed", just like Invid mecha.

I always saw the Haydonites as a robotic version of Discworld's Auditors.

Lemme see...
Hooded robes over floating creature, check.
Haydonites want to wipe out the users of Protoculture, one of the most chaotic, mutagenic substances ever to exist.
Auditors want to wipe out chaos and illogic cause by the belief of humans.

Scott Bernard: "...ah..."
Death: DIDN'T THINK I WAS ON YOUR SIDE, DID YOU? IT'S A COMMON MISTAKE.

Actually the haydonite were more aggressive in the End of the Circle book. not murderous, but they had some content before the reboot of BSG.

Not really relevant, given that Harmony Gold explicitly disowned the novels around the time the movie's development started.

You argurments are actually really boring. They disowned what they wrote. Not that is was not written. I was just pointing out they had flavor back in the Sentinels and the follow up book. Like it or not they had more then a basic they use protoculture kill them.

Well, I'm sorry if you don't find the facts especially entertaining... but as objective truth doesn't often make for truly captivating reading, that's not exactly my fault.

It's pretty unlikely that Harmony Gold would draw on the Robotech novelization for inspiration, especially as they had just finished condemning it as a poor-quality inconsistent mess when "Robotech: Shadow Force" was finally announced.

However, from both the existing Shadow Chronicles material, it's pretty evident that Harmony Gold was taking a lot of pointers from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. Like the BSGr Cylons, they're a race of partly-organic cyborgs created by transferring a biological consciousness into an artificial body. They've got a hate-on for humans over an issue of human dependency and racism resulting from a war they fought in the ancient past, and are able to integrate a backdoor vulnerability into humanity's military technology in an attempt to destroy them by making their weapons unusable. They have a female-form infiltrator attached at the hip to a top military scientist. From the plot outline that was leaked, they even run into internal factional problems after some Haydonites in close contact with humans start to understand and experience the full range of human emotions. Their starships even look similar to the Cylon resurrection ship.

'course, their dress sense and fighter design are more evocative of the original Battlestar Galactica. They seem to go to the same tailor as Imperious Leader for red robes with black trim around the collar, and their fighters look like someone stuck the wings from the Cylon Raider in BSGr onto a classic Raider. About the only thing that doesn't look like it was borrowed from Battlestar Galactica is their faces... they all look like the Hal 9000 when they're wearing their hoods.

Really? General Edward's traitor story line? that was not novel driven? All the Sentinel Races including the Haydonites. Then we have the Regent and the divided Invid forces. They sucked the novels of lots of vital story bits. Just because you want to disown something does not mean it goes away. otherwise the warning if you put it on the net its there forever.


this is not a unique story arc. Not for either of these shows. sorry robots/droids betraying their makers have been there for generations.




The Original Raider was disk like. Wraiths are winged but do not look like either raider. The Haydon's wore robes to hide the fact they were floating cyborg/robot heads. Did they borrow concept designs? More then likely. Most things written and made into movies do these days.

Demonstrably driven by the old Sentinels comic books, in point of fact. The Prelude comic picked up right where the Waltrip Bros comics left off in the most literal sense, to the extent that Prelude's first issue had a lot of panels that were redrawn panels from the final issue of the old comics. Mind you, his obsession with bringing the Hunters down via backstabbing goes all the way back to the original aborted Sentinels series concept. IIRC his turning into a swamp monster is new though.




Those existed long before the novelization came along, mate... the Sentinels races and the Invid Regent leading the divided Invid race were part of the aborted Sentinels TV series. Tommy cut the number of ambassadors down by half but he even kept the original names from Macek's canceled series.

Just because something is in the novels doesn't mean it originated there.




Attempting to dismiss obvious correlation in the specifics by citing that a generality is not uncommon is not a valid argument.

It's undeniable that the Haydonites in Shadow Chronicles have a great many suspicious similarities to the fully reimagined Cylons from the Battlestar Galactica reboot that just happened to be on the air right when development got started.




Why'd you attempt to insert this in a block of text quoted from my post?

It's true that some visual coincidences are inevitable in sci-fi, but the idea that it's purely coincidental that everything the Haydonites use looks like it was nicked from Battlestar Galactica when the Haydonites themselves already demonstrably take an alarming number of "pointers" from the BSGr version of the Cylons is a defense that's just about impossible to swallow.




You... haven't forgotten that the topic here was the "similarities" between the Haydonites and other genocidal sci-fi cyborgs/robots, have you?

Also, in this case it's less "a homage here and there" as most titles do, and more a "borderline mockbuster" level of copying.

I don't know about this, personally I think the novels had pretty decent INTERNAL quality compared to the 85ep series. Where you see the biggest "mess" from the Novels stems more from trying to make them (Novels & Series) work together in a single universe (especially with the 2000-ish "reset"), when it is best to treat them separately. Then again the "continuity mess" by 2000 extended to include several other media, and HG really didn't take the best approach.


Seto is correct, the Novelization of the Sentinels comes from 1988 I want to say (I know the 85ep date from '87). I'm not to familiar with comic dates, but Sentinels OVA dates to 1986. So really the comics and novels where working from the same source material generated for Sentinels that couldn't be used (IINM Robotech Art III goes into details for what was planned for the Sentinel series), but they both did their own take with it and in some cases drew on the other for material (McKinney stated this in the author's note for Book 19 that he pulled ideas and such from comics).

So really pointing to the Novels doesn't show that HG is pulling from them given the Novels worked from the same rough outline as the comics for the aborted Sentinel series that was reduced to an OVA.