Kaon

Kaon is the dark mirror of Iacon. Where the capital is archives and councils, Kaon is foundries, arenas and the underclass that worked them. It appears in the Marvel comics as one of Cybertron's city-states and becomes, across the wider G1 continuity family, the accepted birthplace of the Decepticon movement: the gladiatorial pits where a miner named Megatronus fought his way to fame and renamed himself Megatron.

In the G1 cartoon Kaon is barely named, which is worth stating plainly because a great deal of what fans consider Kaon canon comes from later material. The cartoon's Decepticon centre of gravity on Cybertron is Shockwave's command centre and, from 1985, Darkmount and the Polyhex region in the comics. What the cartoon does supply is the substance of Kaon's mythology without the name: Megatron as a rabble-rouser who gathered the disaffected, brainwashed the rest, and turned a labour grievance into a planetary war.

Kaon's later prominence is a retroactive consolidation. Dreamwave, IDW, the Exodus novels and the War for Cybertron games all place the Decepticon capital there, with Darkmount as its fortress and the space bridge terminal beneath it. For a G1 encyclopedia the honest framing is that Kaon is a Marvel-era city name that fandom and later writers promoted into the Decepticon homeland, and that the promotion has since been folded back into how everyone reads the original cartoon.

• Kaon is never spoken aloud in the original G1 cartoon. Its Decepticon-capital status is entirely a comics and later-fiction construction.
• The name follows the same particle-physics naming vein as several Cybertronian places, a kaon being a real subatomic meson.
• Marvel's The Transformers Universe listing is the earliest published source for the name.
• The gladiator-pit origin for Megatron that everyone now treats as G1 backstory was formalised in the 2010 novel Transformers: Exodus, twenty-six years after the cartoon.