Given how much of an anchor the Maltos are in this storyworld, they should call it... Lumpia. Because that stuff is DELICIOUS.
The Taxonomy of Toy-Based Fiction, or a further look at Continuity Families
- Thread starter Tuxedo Prime
- Start date
-------- 1122.11 Alpha (the series premiered on the 11th day of November, 2022, per the wiki).
(I'm comfortable with considering EarthSpark [and other G1-influenced modern series] as part of Primax, but I'm open to counterarguments.)
Come to that, the cluster names don't even really matter; the real meat is the date and format indicators (we could just call them all "Earth ###.# Type-A/B/C/etc").
For my part, I'd like to know if Hyperdrive was always meant to be his own character, or (as one fan theory has it) was an early design for what would become Thunderclash that got scaled down and renamed as Toei-G1 entered its Dying Days and Hasbro's European divisions were unwilling to commit to the higher price point the figure would have required.
All we currently have to go on is the design sheet and name. We can't be 100% certain, but it's likely that the process never got any further than that, at least for the character we "know". As a tail-end G1 Autobot Commander, we can surmise that Hyperdrive would have been super-duper-heroic (and his Toei variant would have had plenty of BURNING JUSTICE) -- but until AVP, we had no fiction to speak of. (And some would argue that we still don't, not really. Yes, we have a bio and quick rundown of all his super-duper-heroic deeds, but it's not quite the same as actual televised or published stories, is it?)
At least "Giant Decepticon Warrior/Soldier" (the Japanese word can be rendered either way in English) had some fiction, though it took Juniper's translations of Toei's model sheet for the fandom to be sure that he wasn't just a miscoloured Scorponok.
Challenge accepted!
Okay, so an animated series would be an Alpha stream, and Cybersnark provided the first stream/broadcast date. What we don't have -- and this is where we come full circle to when I launched this thread back in '22 -- is a cluster designation.
So, while it has "evergreen" designs, and used Toei-style animation for its flashbacks, the real distinctive point for the franchise (toy and cartoon) launch appears to be that this is "the cluster where Quintus Prime comes to Earth with the Emberstone, sentio metallico, and rarified Energon, and when the conditions were right, New Transformers were born on Earth from the resulting 'spot'". So... let's call it the Vitalix cluster, because Life Found A Way.
We have a Vitalix 1122.11 Alpha for the cartoon, and a Vitalix MYY.dd Beta for the toyline launch.
Now, astute readers will point out that I am not the Transtech (who are better than us). Nor am I Jim Sorenson, or Vector Prime, or in any way affiliated with Hasbro or TakaraTomy. I have no clout to speak of, and likely negative charisma when it comes to persuading people in the fandom. At best, I could add this new-ish cluster to the fanon wiki and hope.
But as my mother once said, "Don't ask the question if you don't actually want an answer," and for what little it's worth, here's my "stupid BS" attempt at one.
Dear Continuity Challenger,
I remember Quintus fondly, and always looked forward to tales that would feature the lesser-seen of our brethren. Megatronus and Solus have a tale for the ages, but Quintus' brilliance and the manifold possibilities granted by the Emberstone are well worth enjoying as well. This artifact figured heavily in empowering brave and loving human siblings in Lumpia 1122.11 Alpha, which also had a very engaging Grimlock... who sounded quite a bit like a gargoyle!
I remember Quintus fondly, and always looked forward to tales that would feature the lesser-seen of our brethren. Megatronus and Solus have a tale for the ages, but Quintus' brilliance and the manifold possibilities granted by the Emberstone are well worth enjoying as well. This artifact figured heavily in empowering brave and loving human siblings in Lumpia 1122.11 Alpha, which also had a very engaging Grimlock... who sounded quite a bit like a gargoyle!
And there's the problem. And we never will.
Says who? You? I'm not meaning to sound harsh and I don't want you thinking I'm coming after you... I'm just trying to make a point. You're... not anyone speaking in any canonical capacity. Neither am I. I could just as easily say "Maltix" as a nod to the Malto family, who are central to the narrative.
But neither of them have weight. Everything else about the system was codified when it was being promoted by licenced media. And neither of us- or anyone here- qualifies as that.
You pulled a name out of your butt, so did I. But either way it's just fan fiction, innit?
And we don't have a AVP to crying to to codify one or the other- or some other term- as """official"""
You assume I didn't really want an answer. I did. And the ones you and Cybersnark have provided prove my point that the system isn't functional now that the licenced media that spawned it has been discontinued.
You've both just proven that it's unable to actually categorize new post-FB continuities without a hearty degree of fan fic or trying to pretend that parts just don't actually matter, which itself seems like an admission that the system is not fit for service.
So I was very much hoping for an answer, and I got two. Much thanks
I mean all of this is fascinating and I agree with you! I'd love to know more about Hyperdrive, if he did become Thunderclash or if he was intended to be his own thing. Do we have more artwork hidden somewhere? Packaging that was mocked up? Maybe some prelim colour maps?
But assigning pseudo Latin technobabble and a string of numbers to "codify" a universal stream that amounts to a still image in Skyquake's light box gimmick isn't any of that. It's just... well... fan fiction
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I have to admit, though, for all my exasperation with parts of it, I appreciate the balls of creating an entire storyworld out of a prop image. Weirdly, its officialization actually kind of chips away at the charm of that a little, but still.
That said, I don't know that the stream system is rendered or oroven nonfunctional by Earthspark ending. Maybe there's something I'm misreading about that statement. Whatever moniker is applied to that storyworld (you know my vote, but I digress) or if it's aligned with one of the existing ones, would be a fan decision just like Primax or Xobitor or Iocus. Which is fine, it's how it works on the fan-run wiki.
Edit: ah, okay. What's missing is something to officialize it. I guess that just goes on the list of things for Sorenson's layout artists to work in the next time he publishes something.
That said, I don't know that the stream system is rendered or oroven nonfunctional by Earthspark ending. Maybe there's something I'm misreading about that statement. Whatever moniker is applied to that storyworld (you know my vote, but I digress) or if it's aligned with one of the existing ones, would be a fan decision just like Primax or Xobitor or Iocus. Which is fine, it's how it works on the fan-run wiki.
Edit: ah, okay. What's missing is something to officialize it. I guess that just goes on the list of things for Sorenson's layout artists to work in the next time he publishes something.
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Okay, here's one that doesn't just fall back on axioms; Earthspark has it's own toyline.
A toy of Earthspark Optimus Prime is not a toy of G1 Optimus Prime, and vice versa.
Saying the date of publication matters more for classification than the continuity family is...like saying modern dogs are more closely related to modern humans than Australopithecus.
And that's from our real-world perspective; for in-universe use it's even worse, because we don't even know what the numbers or Greek letters even mean to the characters using them.
That's my point. As annoying as AVP was, and as abused as it was by parts of the fanbase and the people running it, it was officially licenced fiction (itself the source of the issue, but I digress). Through AVP and other, more substantial and worthwhile efforts (prose, comics) FP was able to establish a comprehensive system that covered the Transformers multiverse as it existed at the time. I still think it represented a bit of an unnecessary barrier of entry to new fans, but it was internally fully functional so long as FP was around in some way to dish out official names for universe clusters.
But then FP's licence wasn't renewed, and that fiction stopped being made. And no one at Hasbro stepped up to save it.
That's notable because they did make an effort with SG to keep something that had been a FP creation alive and well, but no one at Hasbro did anything for the universal stream system. Legacy itself would have been the perfect chance to do it, with the theme of the line being characters from multiple universes converging but... nope. Not a whiff of it.
Closest we get is "G1 universe" or "Armada universe" or "RiD 2001 universe" etc... IE what many of us claim is the easier way to refer to these continuities.
So with the originators of the stream system now without the licence to make official media, and Hasbro themselves unwilling to keep the stream system alive... who declares what BotBots' cluster will be called? Or Cyberverse's? Or EarthSpark's? Or whatever comes next? Or whatever comes after that?
The cluster designations were officially named in official fiction. Not only would the community collectively deciding on names for new continuities the system doesn't account for take time (and would arguably be a waste of it*) but who actually imbues these names with any kind of official status like the old ones? No one.
At that point the Wiki might as well just start covering fanfiction and 3P figures into its efforts.
* I say it may be a waste of time because what's easier? Just referring to EarthSpark's continuity as "EarthSpark" or having a long internet argument over which unofficial and unrecognized pseudo-Latin fan term gets used for it?
Part of the problem here is that, as of today, EarthSpark is just EarthSpark. The show, game, and storybooks all seem to be in the same continuity, without any contradictions.
(The toys, of course, don't really need universal stream designations, because it's routine now to get multiple toys of the same character at different scales with wildly different engineering --they're all understood as interpreting the same character model.)
Now, if, say, someone in Japan published a "Beast Wars Metals"-style gag manga with the characters from EarthSpark as highschool students, or IDW put out an EarthSpark tie-in that ended up getting contradicted by subsequent TV specials, then we'd need to distinguish between "EarthSpark-A" and "EarthSpark-B."
(The toys, of course, don't really need universal stream designations, because it's routine now to get multiple toys of the same character at different scales with wildly different engineering --they're all understood as interpreting the same character model.)
Now, if, say, someone in Japan published a "Beast Wars Metals"-style gag manga with the characters from EarthSpark as highschool students, or IDW put out an EarthSpark tie-in that ended up getting contradicted by subsequent TV specials, then we'd need to distinguish between "EarthSpark-A" and "EarthSpark-B."
We can just call pieces of media what they're actually called. There was never any need to invent a classification scheme that reads like BSOD error codes.
This!
Why is this a problem? Why can't EarthSpark just be... EarthSpark?
Which Episode 16 also confirmed was just fanservice and that that "flashback" wasn't a completely accurate depiction of all the events that happened in it.
Man, I wish Keith David had used his Goliath voice for Grimlock. Was so looking forward to that, and was a little let down when he just used his natural voice instead. Don't get me wrong, Keith David's voice is still awesome even in its natural state, but his Goliath voice is just so cooooooooool.
Not a single thing besides the original line art.
...Unless you also count the line art for Big Bang, who was also conceptualized as the next Autobot leader after Dai Atlas just like Hyperdrive was. If I had to guess, Big Bang might have been designed first, then Hyperdrive was designed after Big Bang was discarded, and then Hyperdrive's design was used as inspiration for both Thunder Clash and Star Convoy (as Hyperdrive kinda looks like what Star Convoy and Thunder Clash would look like after doing the Fusion Dance together).
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Eh, to be a "barrier of entry" it would have to have been necessary to understanding the works it was used in, which wasn't really the case for anything except certain AVP answers.
And right after the War for Cybertron series had been obsessed with putting numbers and acronyms everywhere, even.
We don't need to know something's proper name to know that it exists.
"Are they different continuity families" and "would they be different clusters" are the exact same question.
"What are they called" is a different, less important one.
And? The tuatara is the only extant species in the order Rhynchocephalia...but it's still a distinct order.
I mean, most official uses of the universal streams actually did call for in-universe names for universes.
Well, you've certainly replicated the feel of the AVP columns!
Hm. I wonder if the "Vitalix" cluster (as I'm styling it) would be The One Where The Thirteen Posed As The Olympic Pantheon? Considering that in other Transformers universes you can't launch a dead turbofox from Cybertron but it lands on Earth, wouldn't it be interesting if artifacts of the Primes were deliberately left on that world for a change?
Oddly enough, as I quoted from TFWiki above, as far as Hasbro is concerned Optimus Prime is Optimus Prime, even when he's Ginrai (who is, of course, Optimus Prime and Japanese
).A general information source such as Wikipedia might well feel similar, obviously TFWiki can't and shouldn't have a single Optimus Prime page (as it is some of the franchise pages are getting ridiculously large and unwieldy). Thankfully disambiguation pages exist, of course, and for the A-list perennially-refreshed characters I could see those pages becoming the most prominent introduction for those coming to know more from the general or casual audiences.
Anyway, it's not just an administrative convienience that has us dividing the franchises and lines. There's often a story hook or branding that helps to categorize things: Armada-and-sequels universes are stuffed full of power-ups, Earthspark has a Transformer cradle on Earth, The Movies are messy but have a distinct look-and-feel to them that transcends the self-contradicting continuity. So it's not all that hard to vizualize a system where IDW-2005 Optimus and Sunbow Optimus, while distinct, are closer to each other than Armada Optimus, or Earthspark Optimus, or even TF Prime Optimus (as similar as he may sound....).
Hasbro, of course, is in this to sell toys first and foremost, so I understand their perspective, though like many a fan before me I try to find Watsonian answers even if I grok the Doyleist ones very well.
Just so it's clear, that statement mainly applied when it was John Warden (whom the quote came from) in charge of Transformers at Hasbro, and before then when Aaron Archer was in charge as well. But now? Now it feels a little different when we have the likes of Mark, Evan, and BMac running things (though, they technically aren't in charge, officially, but they have established themselves as the most public faces of the brand as of late) and they seem to be almost, if not just as, nerdy as we are.
They seem to recognize that Armada Optimus is different from G1 Optimus and so on. I mean, they've even gone to the extent of labeling nearly every single Legacy toy by universe on the box, something the old guard at Hasbro would have never bothered to do (save for the "Armada Megatron" and "Armada Starscream" labels we got for those two Generations toys, but those were exceptions rather than the norm compared to Legacy).
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I wonder about that. I know they answer to somebody, and they definitely answer to THE BUDGET, but otherwise I do get the impression that management supervision is a lot less overbearing than it used to be.
This is a minor thing many (many) posts later, but it's the funniest thing I saw in the whole thread.
For what "we" call "pieces of media", the names they are released under are mostly sufficient (only "mostly" and not entirely because of the fact that the same titles get used more than once).
But no character (except maybe fourth-wall-breaking ones) would or should say "the universe of the Cyberverse cartoon".
But no character (except maybe fourth-wall-breaking ones) would or should say "the universe of the Cyberverse cartoon".