I thought that I'd take a look at sparking some discussion (that wasn't about ARGs and anime-themed games) with regards to our Great Big Story Map -- by which I mean the Continuity Family Tree.
Since at least the 2003 Universe line, there have been various efforts, some fan led and some official, to categorize the various media that made up the Transformers story franchise. Eventually, the Transtech (who are better than you) were introduced and we got a look at the Universal Stream system. Streams were grouped into clusters, which represented various continuity families. Here's a canon example, while over here is a fan-made one.
Okay, so that we all know, then Hasbro conceived of the Binder of Revelation circa 2010 and tried to create a Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash with "Aligned" continuity, with varying degrees of success.
Then came the Shrouding, which is supposed to make dimension-hopping a lot harder than it has historically been (and severely curtailed the Transtech's abilities to see other universes, making them slightly less better than us), as well as a push towards fiction focusing on Current Product and less on All The Other Stories, No Matter How Popular. (IDW's 2019 continuity seems to have been a byproduct of that to some extent, even as it supplanted a shared "Hasbroverse"....)
Anyway, after RID2015 and Rescue Bots, there's been a lot of ongoing Neo-G1 content (IDW 2019, IDW Beast Wars 2021, Netflix's War For Cybertron "anime"), as well as new material either using the "evergreen" designs (Cyberverse) or seemingly unconnected to anything prior (BotBots, the upcoming Earthspark series). The former is easy enough to categorize in the existing system, but the latter stuff puts us on uncertain ground we haven't been on since 2001 or so. Which is interesting, as I was one of those outliers who politely disagreed with making RID2001 its own cluster.
Anyway, we know that a cluster doesn't have to have a lot of material in it -- the Robotix continuity family has a limited comic, a cartoon miniseries, Spacewarp's Log.... and that's likely to be it, as Hasbro sold off the Robotix toyline some time back.
Now, I don't presume to know more than the Transtech (who are, after all, better than us), but I'm curious to see what the fans think. Is the "new new" material one cluster or several? What names might we bestow, in the lack of any official designation, to the post-Aligned universes?
And while we're at it, are there any revisions that could be suggested to the map as it stands? (As I wrote above, I would fold RID2001 into Primax alongside its Japanese counterpart, even though Primax is a hefty chunk of any universe list. But that's just a thought....)
Since at least the 2003 Universe line, there have been various efforts, some fan led and some official, to categorize the various media that made up the Transformers story franchise. Eventually, the Transtech (who are better than you) were introduced and we got a look at the Universal Stream system. Streams were grouped into clusters, which represented various continuity families. Here's a canon example, while over here is a fan-made one.
Okay, so that we all know, then Hasbro conceived of the Binder of Revelation circa 2010 and tried to create a Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash with "Aligned" continuity, with varying degrees of success.
Then came the Shrouding, which is supposed to make dimension-hopping a lot harder than it has historically been (and severely curtailed the Transtech's abilities to see other universes, making them slightly less better than us), as well as a push towards fiction focusing on Current Product and less on All The Other Stories, No Matter How Popular. (IDW's 2019 continuity seems to have been a byproduct of that to some extent, even as it supplanted a shared "Hasbroverse"....)
Anyway, after RID2015 and Rescue Bots, there's been a lot of ongoing Neo-G1 content (IDW 2019, IDW Beast Wars 2021, Netflix's War For Cybertron "anime"), as well as new material either using the "evergreen" designs (Cyberverse) or seemingly unconnected to anything prior (BotBots, the upcoming Earthspark series). The former is easy enough to categorize in the existing system, but the latter stuff puts us on uncertain ground we haven't been on since 2001 or so. Which is interesting, as I was one of those outliers who politely disagreed with making RID2001 its own cluster.
Anyway, we know that a cluster doesn't have to have a lot of material in it -- the Robotix continuity family has a limited comic, a cartoon miniseries, Spacewarp's Log.... and that's likely to be it, as Hasbro sold off the Robotix toyline some time back.
Now, I don't presume to know more than the Transtech (who are, after all, better than us), but I'm curious to see what the fans think. Is the "new new" material one cluster or several? What names might we bestow, in the lack of any official designation, to the post-Aligned universes?
And while we're at it, are there any revisions that could be suggested to the map as it stands? (As I wrote above, I would fold RID2001 into Primax alongside its Japanese counterpart, even though Primax is a hefty chunk of any universe list. But that's just a thought....)