Thread of Thoughts, Questions (and Maybe Even Answers) That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

[LordGigaIce]

...they really were trying to be Aligned before Aligned was a thing.

Transformers never had a unified continuity. From "go" the Marvel comics and Sunbow cartoon were irreconcilable.

Trying to synthesize a "unified" continuity is nothing new earlier. Beast Wars picked bits from Marvel and Sunbow G1 freely to craft its backstory, and some of the earliest fan discussions online were about people arguing preferences between Marvel and Sunbow, with a lot of energy dedicated to people posting their preferences as to what they preferred to take from each for their personal canon.
The personal canon threads here and elsewhere are testaments to this, a proud tradition of Transformers fans explaining what continuities they preferred and what they took from everything else to craft their own head canons.

This only grew as the franchise eventually expanded beyond just the broad "G1 to Beast Machines" continuity family with RiD, followed by Armada and the rest of the UT. Toss in the Movie and Animated... and suddenly it wasn't just different aspects of G1, there was a whole multiverse of Transformers stories, character concepts, etc... that fans pulled from.

And it wasn't just fans. As stated, the Beast Wars writers drew from both Sunbow and Marvel G1. Beast Machines used a plot point from G1 as a central story element. RiD, the UT, the live action movies, Animated.... they all referenced each other, taking elements from past incarnations, working them with new ideas to flesh out new continuities.

In this sense nothing Aligned did was bad, or even offensive. It was doing what fans and other creators had been doing for years, launching a new Transformers continuity that pulled at plots and ideas from past stories as part of its own world building and character concepts.

The objectionable part of Aligned was trying to be The Final Word And Unified Version From Now On.
For a franchise that didn't even have a unified continuity even when there was only one continuity family, much less multiple new continuities since, it was awfully arrogant. And fundamentally unworkable.

These past discrepancies and continuities happened for reasons.
Be it separate creatives on separate projects who wanted to do their own thing, market forces forcing a reset (the first continuity reboots happening because Beast Machines bombed and a massive rework was needed), or both in tandem.

Nothing was going to change these realities once Aligned was launched. And indeed, that showed early, with the WfC game, the comic adaptation of it, and the book sold as a tie in all presented different versions of events, and even character names. Not to mention Prime's writing staff not wanting to be beholden to Hasbro's mandates for story and Rescue Bots being forced into Aligned against Hasbro's wishes, and IDW just refusing to play along...

Hasbro tried (we talked about how they shoved Aligned and IDW references into the sub scripts for the subtitled releases of the Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory) but ultimately this didn't work either. Market forces popped up as Prime's toyline sales weren't great, the Hub's viewership was down, and Archer and Alvarez were shown the door and suddenly the continuity that was going to be The One Way Things Are Forever ended up as just another continuity reset in a long line of them.

All the while fans and creatives are still doing what they've always done. Drawing from past continuities and mixing those ideas with new ideas to create new head canons or continuities.

tl;dr the desire to make the disparate past all work together isn't unique to Aligned, it's something that's always been there with this franchise. Aligned was just the one that thought it was special.

 

[LBD "Nytetrayn"]

Some days, I can't decide whether I prefer what we have here with 42.8 quadrillion different iterations of Transformers, or what Japan has with like, 40 years of G1 with various other stuff orbiting around here now and then.

Or a bunch of rhyming PSA shorts.
"Before crossing, look both ways,
Or be reduced to crimson paste!"

"When your favorite cleaner is just out of reach
Just mix ammonia and a bottle of--"

 

[LordGigaIce]

Some days, I can't decide whether I prefer what we have here with 42.8 quadrillion different iterations of Transformers, or what Japan has with like, 40 years of G1 with various other stuff orbiting around here now and then.

I find it amusing that the first hard continuity reset was only a reset here. RiD was presented as an all new continuity but in Japan it's part of the same mega continuity... somehow... right down to Fire Convoy being a different character from Optimus Prime.

And then when Japan did get on board with a continuity reset with Armada they got a little too eager with it and made their version of Cybertron, Galaxy Force, another reboot. Against Hasbro's wishes!
But then they backtracked and said it was part of their version of the UT after all...

Even though both the GF and Cybertron shows make more sense if you just watch them as stand-alone series.

...40 years of G1 with various other stuff orbiting around here now and then.

Crazy take here... Hasbro is kinda doing that and has kinda-sorta made the Aligned concept work, just without the delusions of grandeur.

Archer and Alvarez leave Hasbro, the Binder gets put in a drawer... but since then Hasbro's brand team has kinda treated G1 as the foundations for everything? I'm not even talking about Generations skewing more towards being G1-referential, I'm talking about fiction.

The Evergreen designs replaced the Aligned designs as the template for what these characters should look like, and they skew G1.
Additionally the two major shows/continuities since Aligned's RiD '15 have been Cyberverse and EarthSpark, two shows that have used Evergreen designs, through their own unique design filters.
And while both are their own unique continuities, there are a lot of similarities. Both pull from the same grab-bag of G1/IDW/Aligned ideas.

You could make a compelling argument that Cyberverse and EarthSpark are, in fact, part of either the G1 or Aligned continuity families. EarthSpark especially leans a lot on G1 vibes for its lore, if not G1 continuity.
Heck, they're no more their own things then the Machinima or Netflix shows, which are treated as "G1."

But I said they could be seen as subsets of G1 or Aligned. Which?
Well that's the point. Why not both? Or neither?

Aligned had delusions of grandeur of being The One Continuity From Now On. And since the people at the helm of it left, Hasbro has, in a much less grand fashion, pushed the brand in a direction where even two separate shows that are technically their own continuity could be seen as subsets of other continuity families by the standards the mega-fans use to track this stuff. No there isn't one continuity that is The Way Things Will Be Forever but the brand is uniformed enough now that everything is various shades of the same broad thing.

Some days, I can't decide whether I prefer...

My own question comes down to... do I like this approach?
On one hand part of me misses RiD or Armada or Animated, or the movies going "here's a whole new aesthetic and designs." There was more uniqueness. ES and Cyberverse Optimus look very similar, and both are just flavours of G1 Optimus. Previously the broad G1 rule of "red truck" was kept but there was more willingness to reinvent. And Megatron got a new look every few years too.

At the same time... is that just rose coloured glasses on my end? I remember the fandom in 2005-06 being not really high on Cybertron Megatron, and being kinda tired that he had no consistent through line. The decision after that- that he'd always be some variation of his G1 design and usually (but not always) a tank was met with a lot of support. It's only after decades of this that the wild and unrelated Megs designs from the the UT or RiD seem appealing.

Additionally... most franchises don't re-invent themselves totally every time. Every new Batman show still has (broadly) the same cast of characters with the same general aesthetics. Batman's costume might get tweaked in every new movie or show but it's still Batman. No one complains about Commissioner Gordon always being there so we can get some new OC who would serve basically the same function.

Aligned's desire to be the the one way things are forever was overly ambitious and delusional, but the post-Aligned plan of keeping Transformers fairly unified and recognizable across multiple iterations... isn't any different from what far more successful and long-running franchises have been doing this whole time anyway.

 

[lastmaximal]

I want a new Unicron Trilogy. Not reissues thereof, but a new decidedly non-G1 take that they commit to for a while.

Let the G1-inspired stuff and the Movie stuff run, nothing needs to stop that. But give me another line that's just free to be more, to innovate more broadly. Keep a few things: the factions, the leaders, some of the basic lore. But we're well past time to make some new stuff up that's fun and interesting whether or not it fits established brand canon.

 

[Princess Viola]

absolutely not, we must rehash g1 forever and ever. and even the new stuff that isn't g1 must adhere to the evergreen designs in order to at least be visibly recognizable as the same characters as g1

 

[Donocropolis]

I want a new Unicron Trilogy. Not reissues thereof, but a new decidedly non-G1 take that they commit to for a while.

Let the G1-inspired stuff and the Movie stuff run, nothing needs to stop that. But give me another line that's just free to be more, to innovate more broadly. Keep a few things: the factions, the leaders, some of the basic lore. But we're well past time to make some new stuff up that's fun and interesting whether or not it fits established brand canon.

Not ENTIRELY convinced that we won't see some of this in Cyberworld? There's still a Megatron, but he's a bull now, and Optimus is some kind of 4WD truck instead of a semi. It's going to have G1-esque elements, sure, but they don't seem to be too afraid to mix things up.

 

[LordGigaIce]

I want a new Unicron Trilogy. Not reissues thereof, but a new decidedly non-G1 take that they commit to for a while.

Let the G1-inspired stuff and the Movie stuff run, nothing needs to stop that. But give me another line that's just free to be more, to innovate more broadly. Keep a few things: the factions, the leaders, some of the basic lore. But we're well past time to make some new stuff up that's fun and interesting whether or not it fits established brand canon.

Cyberworld seems more of a departure from the "Evergreen" look than anything in a good while.

The key thing is, though, that Hasbro and the brand are in very different places today than they were when the UT was formed.

Yes, Hasbro's brand teams are full of passionate, talented artists... but let's be real. The driving force here is money. The switch from G2 to the Beast Era, or the switch from the Beast Era to RiD and then the UT wasn't born out of artistic desires to do different things... they happened because G2/Beast Machines flopped and they needed to shake up the status quo to re-invigorate things.

Ultimately that's why Archer and his team were shown the door, when Prime's lines failed to meet expectations.

As fans we can long for the UT and the new ideas and designs it ushered in, but it was ultimately born out of cold, calculating financial sense; what we're doing isn't working, let's try something else.

While Hasbro as a whole isn't doing great these days, it seems as if Transformers is doing relatively well for a division in the company? There doesn't seem to be any huge sense of discontent with the way the current brand is headed, and so that's why the status quo is being maintained.
Something as different as the UT only comes about because of necessity. If the status quo makes the bean counters happy, inertia will keep it going.

As I say that... I do think it's interesting that Cyberworld and its more creative designs seem to be coming off the heels of Hasbro's not great recent financial news. Maybe not as big of a shakeup as the ones that ushered in the Beast Era or UT, but a shakeup of sorts none the less.

 

[Sabrblade]

Ultimately that's why Archer and his team were shown the door, when Prime's lines failed to meet expectations.

Well, that, and the fact that they initially tried to promote Prime as a show that could stand on its own without the need of a toyline to support it, which just made people beg for toys even more.

And when they did finally make a proper toyline for it, it was aimed at a much younger demographic than how the show was trying to be "Transformers, but like The Sopranos", full of kiddie gimmicks that really weren't popular with the show's older demographic.

 

[Sabrblade]

Missed this before...

And then when Japan did get on board with a continuity reset with Armada they got a little too eager with it and made their version of Cybertron, Galaxy Force, another reboot. Against Hasbro's wishes!
But then they backtracked and said it was part of their version of the UT after all...

It's not entirely as clear cut as that. It's true that when the show first started, Galaxy Force presented itself as a new universe separate from its two predecessors. And it is true that, around 2007, there was a new timeline published on Takara's website that gave the impression that Galaxy Force had been retconned back into being in the same universe as LOTM and Superlink, but that timeline has since become lost media and no one properly translated it at the time, so we presently can't verify what it actually had said.

However, a later timeline published in an issue of Figure King magazine did something peculiar. While it did include Galaxy Force and its backstory lore on the same "Worldline" as LOTM and Superlink, as if the three were all part of the same universe, the section of the timeline covering the present day events of Galaxy Force said that the black hole was created by the destruction of Unicron "in another universe". Because this wasn't further explained, it made that magazine timeline a little confusing.

Finally, with Q-Transformers recently getting subtitled in English, an episode of that shows second season had the characters talk about the history of the Unicron Trilogy, in which they unambiguously describe Galaxy Force as being its own separate universe despite still being considered the third part of the "Micron Trilogy".

So I guess we're just supposed to take Galaxy Force as being its own universe, but with the black hole having been formed by Unicron's destruction at the end of Superlink puncturing the fabric of reality from one universe into another, implying that Galaxy Force is like a next-door neighbor universe of LOTM and Superlink. And this actually doesn't contradict the backstory of the black hole that was given in Galaxy Force, which said it was formed by the disappearance of an evil god being trapped inside an object similar to the Matrix (which the Energon Sun at the end of Superlink fits the description of, since it's a large ball of holy energy from Primus himself, like what a Matrix is except huge).

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

...Ciencin only wrote a novel. He had nothing to do with the Dreamwave comics proper.

...That's... one tree in the forest, yes.

But, carrying on with the whole "Dreamwave walked so that the Aligned team could have a potato-sack race" angle, Hardwired was written to follow on from the first comic miniseries, and while two changes of writers (one at ibooks and one at Dreamwave comics) complicated matters, the two succeeding novels did attempt to bridge back to what would become "War and Peace".

While tie-in novels are not in and of themselves new (going at least as far back as 1968's Mission to Horatius, released while Star Trek was still an ongoing series on NBC), this sort of trans-media storytelling was still something of a new endeavour overall, and generally the province of "bigger" franchises such as The Matrix and Star Wars. For a vintage-toy-based storyline (Classics was still a few years away) to bridge novels and comics was... quite ambitious, and certainly with little in the way of precedence for the Transformers brand (unless you count Marvel-UK mixing The Animated Movie into their comic storylines).

So I guess my rewrite of FFoD would be to play up the lineage of Primes, giving us enough to see how each of them had a wildly different personality, and demonstrating that Optimus, as much as we loved him, was just the latest link in the chain.

(Looks at IDW-2005-G1)

The same is sort of true there, except we got "Genocidal Colonizer", "Elitist Twit", and "Every Problem Looks Like a NAIL, So Where's My Hammer?"

Ironically, Devastation's port of Nova Prime might have worked for this hypothetical FFoD if earlier versions of The Animated Movie's storyline had come into play. The notion of discovering Sins of Cybertron's Past might have gone well with Rodimus's character arc and the shaky peace that was promised at Movie's end.

For my part, well, going through some old Livejournal comments I rediscovered my retcon of adding Sunstorm to the deck of Season 3 plots. Starscream may be gone, but his clone (with Vector Sigma's Datatrax shoved into his head -- thanks, Shockwave) uses his phenomenal powers against Galavtron, Autobots, and "The Abominations" alike, depending on how clear his head is that day.

Can I call any time someone makes Waspinator talk like the Beast Wars cartoon "Mainframe-reverent"?

"Wazzzpinator not see problem with Nose-bot doing that."

*boulder falls on Waspinator*
*Scorponok dies*

 

[NovaSaber]

I find it amusing that the first hard continuity reset was only a reset here. RiD was presented as an all new continuity but in Japan it's part of the same mega continuity... somehow... right down to Fire Convoy being a different character from Optimus Prime.

I mean, they had to refer to an obscure manga to justify why the G1 cast weren't around at the same time, but all the characters being different characters from any G1 character they might have some similarity to was indisputably always the intent and accepted by fans even when we mistakenly thought Car Robots was a different continuity.

And then when Japan did get on board with a continuity reset with Armada they got a little too eager with it and made their version of Cybertron, Galaxy Force, another reboot. Against Hasbro's wishes!
But then they backtracked and said it was part of their version of the UT after all...

I'm not sure anyone ever backtracked. As far as I know, Takara Tomy never said it was separate, and neither We've nor Gonzo ever said it wasn't.

The difference between the show's continuity between regions is that Takara was content to just lie and not interfere with the actual show's production, while Hasbro forced the dub of the show itself to make changes (almost none of which actually reduced the degree to which it contradicts the other shows).

 

[LordGigaIce]

The same is sort of true there, except we got "Genocidal Colonizer", "Elitist Twit", and "Every Problem Looks Like a NAIL, So Where's My Hammer?"

Kind of switching gears, but this does seem like a thread for random thoughts and asides...

It bothered me how IDW ended up retconning every Prime between the Thirteen and Optimus as being evil in some way.

Nova/Nemesis Prime was interesting because he was a Matrix bearer gone bad. It raised so many interesting questions- how could someone be deemed worthy of the Matrix take that turn? Is the Matrix's sense of morality what we think it is? Does it even have one?

But instead of being an outlier that provoked some interesting questions, he just ended up as one of many villainous Primes. What's worse is that IDW Sentinel and Zeta even started to look like Nova with how their looks evolved in IDW.

 

[Donocropolis]

Kind of switching gears, but this does seem like a thread for random thoughts and asides...

It bothered me how IDW ended up retconning every Prime between the Thirteen and Optimus as being evil in some way.

Nova/Nemesis Prime was interesting because he was a Matrix bearer gone bad. It raised so many interesting questions- how could someone be deemed worthy of the Matrix take that turn? Is the Matrix's sense of morality what we think it is? Does it even have one?

But instead of being an outlier that provoked some interesting questions, he just ended up as one of many villainous Primes. What's worse is that IDW Sentinel and Zeta even started to look like Nova with how their looks evolved in IDW.

I didn't really follow the comics, but from what I gleaned by being in the fandom, that always irked me, too. I wouldn't even really mind a roughly 50/50 split, or most of them being generally good hearted if not always effective, but it always rubbed me wrong that every single pre-Optimus Prime is written as evil.

 

[LordGigaIce]

I didn't really follow the comics, but from what I gleaned by being in the fandom, that always irked me, too. I wouldn't even really mind a roughly 50/50 split, or most of them being generally good hearted if not always effective, but it always rubbed me wrong that every single pre-Optimus Prime is written as evil.

We didn't get as much exploration in IDW2, but I appreciated how it tried to course correct with Nominus Prime being the one to lead the planet through a massive war and energy crisis and laying down some laws to ensure Cybertron played nice with the rest of the universe and Sentinel Prime being brash and hardheaded, but broadly good natured and believing in Nominus' "give peace a chance" edicts.

It did a good job of exploring how Sentinel was flawed and inadvertently led to the rise of Megatron by not dealing with his rising fascism properly and why Optimus was a necessity to oppose Megatron without falling into the reductive EVERYONE WHO WASN'T OPTIMUS IS A FASCIST storytelling IDW1 engaged in near the end.

 

[Donocropolis]

We didn't get as much exploration in IDW2, but I appreciated how it tried to course correct with Nominus Prime being the one to lead the planet through a massive war and energy crisis and laying down some laws to ensure Cybertron played nice with the rest of the universe and Sentinel Prime being brash and hardheaded, but broadly good natured and believing in Nominus' "give peace a chance" edicts.

It did a good job of exploring how Sentinel was flawed and inadvertently led to the rise of Megatron by not dealing with his rising fascism properly and why Optimus was a necessity to oppose Megatron without falling into the reductive EVERYONE WHO WASN'T OPTIMUS IS A FASCIST storytelling IDW1 engaged in near the end.

Glad to hear that. It always struck me as trying too hard for an "OUR story is super dark and mature!" feel.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

There is not a single piece of IDW1 worldbuilding I would keep.

 

[Andrusi]

Can I call any time someone makes Waspinator talk like the Beast Wars cartoon "Mainframe-reverent"?

Yes! We can do anything we want. We shouldn't do this, though, because it would cause Death Valley to flood.

 

[Sabrblade]

There is not a single piece of IDW1 worldbuilding I would keep.

Not even Swerve's bar or the My First Blaster?

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Nova/Nemesis Prime was interesting because he was a Matrix bearer gone bad. It raised so many interesting questions- how could someone be deemed worthy of the Matrix take that turn? Is the Matrix's sense of morality what we think it is? Does it even have one?

Furman (who ironically created the whole Machina ex Deo aspect to the Matrix) didn't seem to think so, if the original Matrix Quest was any indication.

A few pages later, we learn that said Matrix decided to pull a different Covenant altogether and create Legally-distinct-from-Praetomorphs out of... curiosity.

All that would (weirdly) track with the Sunbow "repository of knowledge" aspect to the Matrix concept, and granted that Marvel (and RG1) Primus was a bit more aloof than most versions, but it seems a bit jarring given the mythology under construction at the time.

Not even Swerve's bar or the My First Blaster?

I invoked Swerve (and Trailbreaker/Trailcutter) in the comments to this video, over on the Tube of You:

As I've mentioned elsewhere, The Cybertronic Spree does occasionally acknowledge IDW material, as well as the documentary film that inspired them.

 

[lastmaximal]

There is not a single piece of IDW1 worldbuilding I would keep.

Fair. Me, I've nicked a ton from there, and when I have time to dive deep into IDW2, I assume there'll be fun stuff there too.