No, he just disappeared without a trace after making a big fuzz.
Great continuity!
The Distorted Truth About Sideways
- Thread starter Sabrblade
- Start date
Great continuity!
A quick perusal of the Channel Awesome wiki gives the assertion that Mysterior and Mr. Enigma were (surprise!) the same person.
Wonder if that'll need some research too....
Anyway, I'd say he sounds like someone who should team up with a Spinister, but maybe not IDW(2005) Spinister, whose motivation was along the lines of "I'm gonna shoot that fire, it looked at me funny."
So, the plot may have thickened somewhat.
A discussion of events on Allspark Discord a couple of days ago brought forward an assertion that it was David "Walky" Willis (as close to a High Mucky Muck as a collaborative wiki has), and not Derik, who took Jim Sorenson's easter egg of Animated's "General Sideways" and insisted from there that (in this particular case) one name meant one character across multiple continuity families, and that this idea faced resistance within the wiki org even at the time it was put into effect.
All I know is I can't recall Walky and Derik agreeing on anything, so if they both came to the same conclusion that's an odd coincidence.
Unfortunately, aside from Sabrblade, Thy2K and myself, I don't think that there is currently a lot of cross-traffic between TFWiki and the Allspark, so these assertions are not likely to be verified unless someone who was in the inner circle of events was willing to spill what really happened and how.
A discussion of events on Allspark Discord a couple of days ago brought forward an assertion that it was David "Walky" Willis (as close to a High Mucky Muck as a collaborative wiki has), and not Derik, who took Jim Sorenson's easter egg of Animated's "General Sideways" and insisted from there that (in this particular case) one name meant one character across multiple continuity families, and that this idea faced resistance within the wiki org even at the time it was put into effect.
All I know is I can't recall Walky and Derik agreeing on anything, so if they both came to the same conclusion that's an odd coincidence.
Unfortunately, aside from Sabrblade, Thy2K and myself, I don't think that there is currently a lot of cross-traffic between TFWiki and the Allspark, so these assertions are not likely to be verified unless someone who was in the inner circle of events was willing to spill what really happened and how.
I don't have anything handy I can cite to back this up, but my memory firmly insists that the widespread understanding was already that Sideways was Sideways was Sideways across multiple continuity families and that ROTF Sideways was an apparent exception, and all the Almanac easter egg did was implicitly bring him in under the umbrella. If there was resistance to that in particular, it was probably less about Sideways in particular than it was about the Allspark Almanac II, which did a lot of stepping outside of the Animated box and poking into other parts of the franchise and a lot of people got really mad about it.
Read this. It's from 2006, years before Animated (and thus AA2) came along.
Did people mind as much, I wonder, when Sorenson asserted that Stretch/Tux immigrated to "Challenge of the GoBots" from the TF:Animated universe?
Now that I think about it, given the years of back-and-forthing on whether and how to cover GoBots, some likely did.
I know there's a contingent of GoBots fans who really don't like the idea that GoBots are the progenitors of, or the descendants of, or the offshoots of, Transformers.
ofc those ideas are bound to come up because GoBots is owned by Hasbro and it is very much doing the same thing as Transformers, and yeah. Hasbro's going to favour its native brand over the competition they squashed and absorbed. So any GoBots fiction is going to tie them to the Transformers somehow...
... but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of GoBots faithful dislike the idea.
As a fan of both franchises, I do very much enjoy when GoBots and Transformers are presented as co-inhabiting a shared universe (or even multiverse), but I definitely wouldn't want to see the GoBots shown as some sort of offshoot/ancestor/descendant of Cybertronians. GoBots, after all, are supposed to be cyborgs instead of true robots. I like it when the writers remember that.
Sadly, you're in the minority on that, as most people I see asking for more and more GoBots homage toys in Transformers just wanna see more Guardians as Autobots and Renegades as Decepticons, rather than as their own separate peoples.
Well, we just have to learn to live with the fact that MOST people are just, just awful.
That said, I've never been a stickler for names/fiction presented for toys. If Hasbro released a good Cy-Kill toy, I don't care if they call it Princess Ponyweather III and the box says that it's a Decepticon from the Unicron Trilogy, I'mma gonna buy it as hard as I can.
And similarly, there are folks at TFWiki who resented Jim's efforts in various media to wedge in a dumptruck full of "new" characters, plots and concepts from another franchise when there were plenty of stub-class about the Transformers brand that Rad White still had to tell us more about.
I wasn't among them, but I understand the sentiment.Then Scioli came along and things got really weird.
As someone who watched both series, and despaired that my father could not tell them apart (though looking back, both series had pretty similar premises -- the primary difference being that the Decepticons were a much more successful insurgency against the pre-war status quo), I liked the setup to "Echos and Fragments" -- where Gong and Sideways (oh not him again
) put the Challenge cast through the plot of TF:TAM rather than the movie we were expecting. I kind of wish the authors had stuck with that rather than keep swapping out casts -- because while some things will play out the same (Reign of Zero, anyone?), other will not, because the characters do not think the same as their Cybertronian counterparts, and will have different reactions.
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Fictionally, I would prefer that the Gobots are their own group separate from the Transformers. Practically, if they have to be represented as more Autobots and Decepticons to even show up in fiction and/or get an actual new toy, then I am okay with that. More Gobots in the world is a good thing!
I think that was Sorenson? Ask Vector Prime was what made it a "cluster" in the TF multiverse and Sorenson was behind Ask Vector Prime when it started handing out universe designations to everything.
I mean I get it. Honestly the whole thing is very whacky, and there's no easy answer in the nitty gritty nerd debate realm.
You need to come up for air and go "these are two competing properties that ended up under the same corporate banner... there's gonna be overlap" and just be happy with that.
I've got a friend who's very much a GoBots fan and he hated the Scioli run. It didn't help that his version of GoBots took next to nothing from the cartoon. It was essentially a top-down re-imagining of the concept with the GoBots' names and likenesses.
But even once people kind of got on board with that... SURPRISE! It was Transformers all along.
Again there's no easy answer here. Best I can advise anyone is to not get hung up on "official cannon" and just enjoy these characters and your toys of them in whatever way makes you happy.
The whole mess with "GoBots vs. TFWiki" basically boils down to a few creators having had some harmless fun with a few elements from the GoBots property that a number of fans then blew out of proportion and began to demand that the wiki provide full coverage for a property that the wiki was not obligated to fully cover. They could have just made a separate GoBots wiki to provide the coverage they demanded, but noooooo, they got indignant about it and specifically wanted TFWiki to do all the work for them. And when a separate GoBots Wiki was finally made, it was made by the TFWiki folks, but eventually got taken over by other folks who were finally willing to carry the weight on their own (and who weren't among the indignant ones who wanted full GoBots coverage on TFWiki).
And those initial demands were happening even before Jim Sorenson's AllSpark Almanac II came along to give GoBots its own the Transformers multiverse cluster name of "Gargent". Because, before that book came out, GoBots easter eggs were cropping up in Transformers comics published by Dreamwave, Devil's Due, IDW, and Fun Pub; Takara released their "G1GoBots" toy six-pack in 2004; Fun Pub expanded the lore of that six-pack with their "Games of Deception" comic in 2007 and the prose story "Withered Hope" in 2008. That latter story seemed to be what really cemented the Hanna-Barbera cartoon;s connection to Transformers in the eyes of many fans, and it was written by fan-favorite Fun Pub writers Greg Sepelak and Trent Troop. But they weren't trying to cram the H-B cartoon into Transformers, it was just a fun crossover story. Until the AAII gave it the "Gargent" name, the GoBots in "Withered Hope" could have just hopped over from a world set outside the TF multiverse instead of from a world inside it.
And those initial demands were happening even before Jim Sorenson's AllSpark Almanac II came along to give GoBots its own the Transformers multiverse cluster name of "Gargent". Because, before that book came out, GoBots easter eggs were cropping up in Transformers comics published by Dreamwave, Devil's Due, IDW, and Fun Pub; Takara released their "G1GoBots" toy six-pack in 2004; Fun Pub expanded the lore of that six-pack with their "Games of Deception" comic in 2007 and the prose story "Withered Hope" in 2008. That latter story seemed to be what really cemented the Hanna-Barbera cartoon;s connection to Transformers in the eyes of many fans, and it was written by fan-favorite Fun Pub writers Greg Sepelak and Trent Troop. But they weren't trying to cram the H-B cartoon into Transformers, it was just a fun crossover story. Until the AAII gave it the "Gargent" name, the GoBots in "Withered Hope" could have just hopped over from a world set outside the TF multiverse instead of from a world inside it.
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Fans blow stuff out of proportion? Noooo
It's tradition.Fans blow stuff out of proportion? Noooo
Heck, it's the very reason this thread about Sideways even exists!
So, in light of this, consider the following an addendum to my original writings on the first page.
"Crankshafts"
It is true that David "ItsWalky" Willis was one of the more vocal supporters of idea of the RID2001, Armada/Cybertron, and RobotMasters guys all being the same Sideways who was capable of jumping from universe to universe, but it was Derik's original claim about the RobotMasters one that really cemented the idea in both his and the minds of many a fan. Before then, he and other likeminded individuals were just looking for a reason to affirm the shared identity between the RID and Armada Sidewayses, all because of their similar bios and tech specs. Derik just so happened to provide such a reason, in a rare moment of he and Walky actually agreeing on something that further added to this idea becoming so widespread.
In 2008, Fun Publications had started up a new series of comics and prose stories under the label of Transformers: TransTech, based on the canceled sequel to Beast Machines but reimagined as its own new series unconnected to Beast Machines (due to Hasbro having already used Transformers: Universe as a Beast Machines sequel back in 2003). Set in the world of Axiom Nexus (a sort of hub city for multiversal travel), this series saw numerous characters from across the Transformers brand (and even from outside of it) meeting each other in theretofore unheard of interactions and hijinks. The six-part comic storyline "Transcendent" was the backbone of this series, with the three prose stories "Gone Too Far", "Withered Hope", and "I, Lowtech" all tying in and overlapping with it, all taking place within the same week or so of each other.
In 2009, a fourth prose story was pitched to Fun Pub, but was ultimately unpublished. Written by Walky and illustrated by Graham Weaver, "Crankshafts" told a rather isolated story largely unrelated to the other TransTech fiction (though, the story's epilogue had some vaguely loose hints of connection with a character affiliated with the Alpha Trion of "Transcendent", but I digress) and featured none other than a Sideways as the story's final boss antagonist. This Sideways was depicted with the "petty" voice and personality of Cybertron Sideways and had some rather unambiguous shapeshifting powers (think like Makeshift from Transformers: Prime) that he used to assume the likenesses of RID2001 Sideways, RobotMasters Double Face, Armada Sideways (minus any Mini-Con Headmaster), Cybertron Sideways, and even the yellow/orange/green Fox Kids redeco of Beast Wars Transmetals Waspinator!
The story attributed this shapeshifting ability to the "Trans-Phase Mode" of Armada Sideways as seen in the Armada cartoon, and was used in the story to generate static-y digital tendrils from the floor that ensnared Sideways's victims in the story.
Had this story been published, the idea of all these Sidewayses being the same guy really would have been canonized even before The AllSpark Almanac II and Ask Vector Prime came along and did what they did later, as it would have been the first outright instance of the RID2001 RobotMasters, Armada, and Cybertron dudes all being the same singular 'bot (plus Fox Kids TM Waspinator added to the mix, but one could just right that one off as a disguise).
But since this story wasn't published, it isn't canon, and instead the fan debates simply continued when ROTF Sideways and Animated Sideways came along.
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