Zombie Starscream wrote:If you count only the ones that are strict canon (unless they all are,) then it's easy to follow everything.
But if you allow for time travel and dimension hopping, then stuff gets screwy and confusing.
And if he's a ghost, how is he able to travel to a time period to where he's still alive, even though he's in some sort of hibernation, like in Beast Wars?
How he got to the time of the Beast Wars we may never know (maybe it was via a similar Transwarp portal like the one that the Axalon and Darksyde came through back in the first episode), but his arrival in the 90s during the Stargate Battles was explained clearly.
Here, Starscream's ghost had been inadvertently transported back in time from the future when, in the present, the giant space warp gate called "The Trigger" had been damaged by a Decepticon attack in an attempt to activate it. When the warp gate was switched on, the then living Starscream was about to unitentionally pass right through it, but Megatron blasted its structure at the very last second, knocking it offline and narrowly (and likely unintentionally) saving Starscream. However, when Megs blasted it as the living Starscream passed through safely to the other side of it, a hole in space-time had inadvertently opened in that brief moment right as it immediately shut off. This hole brought the ghost of Starscream from the future into the present, though nobody took notice to this because it wasn't something that could be visibly seen happening. It wasn't until the living Starscream's reflection on a window started talking back to him later on that anything had been suspected of happening. But it still makes better sense than Starscream's ghost appearing from nowhere.
Diem wrote:I always assumed that it went Starscream's Ghost, Ghost in the Machine, the various mangas, Possession.
If they happen in anything other than (in-universe) chronological order then Starscream really doesn't take advantage of his future knowledge often enough.
The problem with anything occuring after "Ghost in the Machine" is that Starscream gets a new, physical body at the end of that episode. He's then sent tumbling off uncontrollably into space, never to be seen again in the cartoon (still in his new solid body). If his ghost were to appear following this, he'd have to have lost this new body of his somehow, but there's nothing to support this.
Even the Japanese fiction says that, by 2025, he's fighting against Bumblebee, Jazz, and Grimlock somewhere in space. And I'm not sure how they'd be able to do this if he were a ghost again.
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