I wish everyone would agree to pretend AVP never happened, but it's not up to me.
The jankiness of TF lore: a feature, not a bug
- Thread starter Jackpot
- Start date
That was not always the case.
in the days when the US fiction was a cartoon relegated to early-Saturday reruns and a monthly comic fighting for rack space, I can distinctly remember that news that there were more full animated series involving the Transformers -- from the same country and studio that had brought us The Animated Movie, no less -- was quite the arcane knowledge. Fifth-generation tapes of Victory episodes complete with local commercials were passed around, Studio Ox models were pored over. And what's this? Another Return of Optimus Prime? What's that about?
The dub of Headmasters, when that became available to US audiences... Well, it came at around the same time as the World's Worst Fanfic, so it did at least generate some proto-memes and memorable quotes.
"Fortress Maximus, prepare for yer death today, yer gonna die!" is still a classic.
So, while yes, there are some unique tropes (such as BURNING JUSTICE) and pacing issues, the idea that one could hate the Japanese material for reasons other than the obvious -if still mercifully obscure- is kind of baffling to me.
Heck, back in the aughts the idea of keeping trademark by calling him Meister rather than "Autobot Jazz" (because it is his Japanese name! It is cool and Japanese.) would not be seen as absurd.
I don't remember any real hostility to JG1, just dismissal. I've always clamored for more accessible toys of those characters, and the response was always "No, too obscure" not "No, it sucks." And Haslab has absolutely put that to bed.
My distaste for the JG1 meta-continuity and AVP involve specifics of form, but there's also a more general issue that runs through all the Club multiversal stories too: for me, they go against the spirit of why TF fiction is a "multiverse" in the first place. That is, Hasbro's utter apathy toward the worldbuilding within their own brand.
I may be biased because of when I came into the online fandom, but it was in the mid-to-late '90s, after the fandom had established itself and some of its bedrock ideas, but before anyone in an official capacity had tried to corral the unwieldy mess of it all. For instance, the notion that "Everything with the Hasbro brand is canon" was already an explicit consensus, but as far as I can tell it hadn't come from anyone on high; rather, it was fans themselves importing the concept of "canon" as it had been applied intentionally by the makers of other franchises like Star Wars/Trek, Marvel/DC, etc. So in a sense, a truer statement would've been that nothing is canon, since the people in charge who would've been in a position to impose it may well have never even heard the word.
I was delighted by this state of affairs, where the theatrical movie was on equal existential footing with the coloring book where Gears needed to take a rest because his tires were tired. And where the long and short of the shared reality we fans were engaging with was what we could all see on the screen or page, with everything outside of those frames being up for grabs. Fanfic and fanart flourished. The creators of the contemporary mainstream fiction (BW) incorporated what had gone before into their work, but consciously treated it as "Arthurian legend" and left its details in soft focus. Hasbro continued to give neither effs nor rats' asses about what was the "real" story.
But then a different kind of fiction started to come out. In fairness to the Club creators, some of whom were friends of mine, they used the concept of the multiverse respectfully enough, generally allowing the component "universes" to go unmolested within the framework they were building. (Generally. The less said about what they ended up doing to their version of the Marvelverse, the better.) But it's impossible to embark on such a project without assuming an implicit authority, a right to determine things that had been otherwise undetermined about previous works (even if it's just putting them in a certain kind of box), and an implicit assumption that doing so is an improvement. Of course no one is holding a gun to my head and making me accept anything. But when, say, a footnote in a fan-written but official book about Animated influences how the wiki documents something about G1, I wince a little.
So I'm delighted to hear that the people behind meta-JG1 entirely disregard AVP - not because of my dislike of AVP in particular, but because of my dislike of both projects, and how such a schism reaffirms the principle that no one has the last word, no matter how meta they try to go. May all such towers of Babel fall! You know what's awesome? That there is no answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this thread. The less official sense-making, the better.
AVP was the worst kind of fanwankery. Just stuff put out there with little to no narrative value. The term "slop" gets abused these days, but AVP was slop.
Heh, in an ironic twist of fate, one such "Tower of Babel" that AVP itself caused to collapse was how the wiki had previously organized the many characters named "Sideways", but said AVP-induced collapsing turned out to be a blessing in disguise because of how said previous organizing was unknowingly at the time all based on a big fat lie.
I should clarify that my love for JG1 is specifically the trilogy of Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory. Victory and Armada battle it out for my favourite Transformers show, and it really depends on my mood when you ask me.
The meta stuff through the Legends manga and other assorted Takara sources is far less my speed... but I prefer it to AVP because at the very least it works its fanwankery into a narrative. A silly, over the top, nonsense narrative, but a narrative none the less. A good chunk of AVP was just Jim Sorensen going "and the Wingdingus merged with Primus in the Gamprix.6453728.Eleventus universe" and it's like... cool. What does that add? At least Takara's stuff tries to tell a story.
Still, I share your general disinterest in that stuff. It all gets a bit naval gazey.
I'm so glad the real meaning of that phrase is being understood. For so long it was mistakenly believed that the BW showrunners considered the G1 characters to be to the BW cast as Arthurian heroes are to us, but that was never the case. The Arthurian comment was in reference to how the BW showrunners saw Transformers. It's like Arthurian legend, a core canon but with a wide variety of sometimes contradictory stories, and it's up to present day authors to pick and choose what they want.
I hated that. AVP needs to be ignored and so too does the Allspark Almanac that doesn't refer to Animated.
I don't hate all of it- giving names to the FFoD Primes made sense because those guys probably should have had names anyway, and the names chosen had a lot of play in the franchise already so really no harm no foul- but on the whole the exercise came off as very poor form.
Hasbro has people who care about the franchise's lore working for them, but those people weren't the ones approving this stuff. And the people writing the Almanac knew it. That's how they got away with stuff. They knew some Hasbro drone would just make sure they weren't doing anything obscene and when that low bar was cleared they were rubber stamping it.
AVP and the Allspark Almanac were really just about gaming the system in place to get some official """backing""" to some ideas. I wouldn't mind this if this resulted in stories worth something, but no, they never did. Again, for all the faults you can find in the Takara Legends comic, at least there's a story there. AVP and the AA just said stuff, and because Hasbro went "sure, whatever" it all got to stand as "canon." As I said, gaming the system.
I think that's what I found so egregious about Aligned. This is a franchise that, even when there was only one continuity, didn't have one continuity. The story books, the comics, the cartoon... just everyone doing their own thing with the same basic setup. Then you add in RiD, the UT, Bayverse, Animated... and now this new thing is going to be the One Continuity That Matters? Sure, Jan.
And of course it didn't work, and Aligned is just one continuity among others.
I say this because it illustrates that nothing is the final word when it comes to stuff like this. The Marvel Furman origin got picked up as the basis for Hasbro's CoP, but then Skybound came around and was like "I'm gonna lean all the way into Sunbow."
AVP, Legends, anyone can say whatever they want. And it stands only as long as it takes for someone else working on the franchise to do it differently.
The whole comic scene is an example. A lot of angst about Skybound comes from IDW fans adjusting to the fact that their thing isn't the new hotness.
But that's how everything is with Transformers. There's whatever the current thing is, and it's the most important thing. Until the next thing.
And that's probably for the best. We're about forty-two years too late to force this franchise into a single cohesive vision
I'm really old, and all I remember of fan response to/view of JG1 was a sort of deep-cut fondness. Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory were always spoken of as these really cool things, the legend of sorts growing due to its nicheness at the time. Some of this was getting to see more toys in animated form, some of this was the grass being greener on the other side, but I remember there being a lot of love for this. It was so commonplace that I wondered if, when I totally didn't get the appeal of the Sentai-ing up the mythos that was done in Masterforce, something might be wrong or underdeveloped with my tastes.
Even now, they seem to largely be regarded as their own fun thing. I'm not sure where or when the dismissiveness or dislike for it was flourishing, but it was likely in different circles than I tend to occupy.
I've been in this frame of mind for some time too. When it first got going I was intrigued by the possibilities. Big lore fan eager to be getting more lore, go figure.
But then it quickly turned into a messy way for some fans, privileged with access (I'm sure there's a better way to say this, but anyway), to game the system and canonize their fanon for good or ill, sometimes with the excuse or justification of "it's just in this obscure side continuity of Yomama Delta 420.69, see, you can't even say what that is, ergo you have no reason to care that Shockwave is a DoorDash employee there". Between that and the Allspark Almanacs there was this whole weirdly incestual and/or masturbatory (sorry, I know this isn't the TF sex thread no one goes to) game of one-upnerdship that just drained all the fun out of it. A reference or two, I'm fine with, would even enjoy. But whole chunks of just "this is the change to this unrelated continuity I snuck into the literal margins, because this is an officially licensed publication and therefore real and if you EVER want to contradict me you'll have to get where I am" is just tacky.
The fact that the wiki basically follows this lead (and has to, I guess, since all of this is done with those canon rules in mind) diminishes the appeal of that for me too. This is one reason why it's not just this thing that happened once, this phase we went through once, that we can now let go of for peace -- this has had lasting effects on something we and official sources use as a reference and as one of our (for some) main ways of reviewing and re-experiencing the franchise. So much of it is still just there, kept alive by, again, the "how does this obscure purple alien being named Fatass affect you?" of it all.
The Sideways debacle, and the debacle about the debacle, is just one pointed example of this; I mostly viewed the discourse around that with a grimace, like why the hell did you people set up these things for each other to push back against anyway? The emperor having no clothes was definitely revealed there, and this potential fun wellspring of lore was indelibly revealed to be just this sad pissing contest.
Another case is the later "I want to name something" trend. Over time I've just developed more antipathy for "pushed" fan renamings of things like the clunkily (to Western audiences)-named Microns. To be honest, at the time, I was like YES, let's have a cooler or better name than "Bomb" or "Search" or "Crack" or "Bug". But even then, when I actually saw these (pre-AVP, and early-wiki, iirc) actually being renamed in Club materials I felt iffy about it. Like someone's Angelfire or Livejournal or Deviantart page just got pasted into the official venue's materials. And that feeling turned into resigned distaste by the time that became one of the Make My FanFic Official to-do list items on AVP, and "questions" were coming in about "what are the names of Hyakurai, Ichibi and Mugen?" (because those couldn't POSSIBLY be their REAL names, right?) and we started getting the Zephyr Blade Mini-Con Team and the Burning Rubber Mini-Con Team and the Moist Flatulence Mini-Con Team.
I've dwelled on this too much already. I've said a lot about this in earlier threads and I shouldn't be rehashing all that each time it comes up, but it's just... oh well. Currently there's also not much new to say that hasn't already been said better by others here, so I'll try and leave it at that.
Even now, they seem to largely be regarded as their own fun thing. I'm not sure where or when the dismissiveness or dislike for it was flourishing, but it was likely in different circles than I tend to occupy.
I've been in this frame of mind for some time too. When it first got going I was intrigued by the possibilities. Big lore fan eager to be getting more lore, go figure.
But then it quickly turned into a messy way for some fans, privileged with access (I'm sure there's a better way to say this, but anyway), to game the system and canonize their fanon for good or ill, sometimes with the excuse or justification of "it's just in this obscure side continuity of Yomama Delta 420.69, see, you can't even say what that is, ergo you have no reason to care that Shockwave is a DoorDash employee there". Between that and the Allspark Almanacs there was this whole weirdly incestual and/or masturbatory (sorry, I know this isn't the TF sex thread no one goes to) game of one-upnerdship that just drained all the fun out of it. A reference or two, I'm fine with, would even enjoy. But whole chunks of just "this is the change to this unrelated continuity I snuck into the literal margins, because this is an officially licensed publication and therefore real and if you EVER want to contradict me you'll have to get where I am" is just tacky.
The fact that the wiki basically follows this lead (and has to, I guess, since all of this is done with those canon rules in mind) diminishes the appeal of that for me too. This is one reason why it's not just this thing that happened once, this phase we went through once, that we can now let go of for peace -- this has had lasting effects on something we and official sources use as a reference and as one of our (for some) main ways of reviewing and re-experiencing the franchise. So much of it is still just there, kept alive by, again, the "how does this obscure purple alien being named Fatass affect you?" of it all.
The Sideways debacle, and the debacle about the debacle, is just one pointed example of this; I mostly viewed the discourse around that with a grimace, like why the hell did you people set up these things for each other to push back against anyway? The emperor having no clothes was definitely revealed there, and this potential fun wellspring of lore was indelibly revealed to be just this sad pissing contest.
Another case is the later "I want to name something" trend. Over time I've just developed more antipathy for "pushed" fan renamings of things like the clunkily (to Western audiences)-named Microns. To be honest, at the time, I was like YES, let's have a cooler or better name than "Bomb" or "Search" or "Crack" or "Bug". But even then, when I actually saw these (pre-AVP, and early-wiki, iirc) actually being renamed in Club materials I felt iffy about it. Like someone's Angelfire or Livejournal or Deviantart page just got pasted into the official venue's materials. And that feeling turned into resigned distaste by the time that became one of the Make My FanFic Official to-do list items on AVP, and "questions" were coming in about "what are the names of Hyakurai, Ichibi and Mugen?" (because those couldn't POSSIBLY be their REAL names, right?) and we started getting the Zephyr Blade Mini-Con Team and the Burning Rubber Mini-Con Team and the Moist Flatulence Mini-Con Team.
I've dwelled on this too much already. I've said a lot about this in earlier threads and I shouldn't be rehashing all that each time it comes up, but it's just... oh well. Currently there's also not much new to say that hasn't already been said better by others here, so I'll try and leave it at that.
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Do you know the actual quote? I don't, but I assume it would be somewhere in the Google Groups archives or something. I think my understanding has always been a blend of those two interpretations - that in-fiction, the G1 cast was indeed the stuff of Arthurian-style legend to the BW cast, but that this was also reflected in the ambiguity about what was factually true or not about them in the BW universe. The euhemerism of it all, if you will
Well that's where you and I part company, then. I mean, "hate" isn't the word I would use - I don't feel that strongly about any of this stuff - but that "wincing" I described happens when I see wiki articles talking about, say, Sentinel Prime as such-and-such dude that Rodimus saw. The play you say they'd already gotten happened long after 1986. You're not wrong that in-universe, there's no reason they couldn't have been named those things. But when I see it, I know the anachronism that's happening, and it bugs me. Edit: Okay, I just checked, and actually "Sentinel Prime" was a more-or-less contemporary name from the comics, as well as "Prima" and "Prime Nova". Fair enough for those. But Primon and Zeta Prime were from over a decade later.
I see the in-universe "truth" of TF kind of like nesting dolls, with shells being added as real-world time moves forward. You can stop at any point in the sequence and establish a "truth" at that moment, where the shell you're looking at is clear and concrete, but the smaller shells (previous series/seasons/episodes/issues - however granular you feel like getting) are obscured and constrained within it, and the bigger shells (future works) may as well not exist. For instance, from the perspective of BW, G1 included a period during the Ark's four-million-year slumber when future Cybertronians were running around inside it and taking the dormant occupants' sparks and whatnot. But remove the "shell" of BW, and those events go away too, as well as the concept of "sparks", and what's on the screen and the page is the only verifiable "truth". Perhaps those other events still could have happened, and speculation is fun, but they don't foreclose any other possibilities. Moreover, from the perspective of BM, sparks have an afterlife where they all coalesce into a collective existence called the AllSpark, which may or may not be what was called in BW "the other side of the Matrix". Also the Plasma Energy Chamber and the Key to Vector Sigma have diametrically opposed energies that somehow relate to a technorganic transformation that Cybertron is destined to undergo and that Vector Sigma has been manipulating events for centuries to bring about, including the fact that the Beast Wars happened at all. All of those ideas are both absolutely true and, if not outright false, at least fundamentally unknowable, depending on which "shell" in the sequence you're looking at.
The Almanac is a shell, and if you choose to focus on it, then yes, those are the names of those Matrix holders in the version of G1 that the Almanacverse contains. But if you want to look at FFoD as itself, then not only does that shell come off and disappear, leaving those characters tantalizingly unnamed, but there are any number of other possible shells that could go around it instead. When an outer shell is another story, I think this concept is more intuitive - see the "Arthurian legend" thing from earlier. But when the shell is something like the Almanac, which delivers the info through an authoritative voice-from-nowhere, it can come across more definitively than I think is warranted.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Yep! I kind of love how the Aligned project ended up for that exact reason. It seems like the TF mythos has an entropy to it that dissolves any attempt to concretize it sooner or later, often sooner. Insert "Always has been" astronaut meme here.
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I feel like the most criticism the three JG1 cartoons got was when they were finally fan-subbed by TV-Nihon and later released on DVD in the UK and Australia, at which point English-speaking fans who first got to watch them realized that the writing for The Headmasters was as dull as a doorknob, characters like Arcee, Daniel, and Wheelie were all made worse from their G1 Season 3 depictions, and many resented the fact that they killed off Optimus again, in episode three.
Masterforce fared better in its critical reception, but some did superficially decry it for its heavy use of human "Power Ranger-esque" Transformers over authentic Cybertronians (ignoring simply how cool its story and action got as it went along), especially for its "crime" of "turning Optimus Prime into a puny fleshling" (refusing to wrap their brains around the idea of Ginrai being a completely different character who just happened to look like Optimus), as well as it feeling disconnected from the future setting of both G1 Season 3 and The Headmasters by resembling contemporary 1988 instead, and for simply how goofy the name "Super-God Masterforce" sounds in English.
Victory probably fared the best in its critical reception, feeling the most like a classic Transformers cartoon series with Cybertronian Autobots and Decepticons having futuristic space battles (matching the future setting that Masterforce seemed more agnostic towards), lots of cool new combiners and combiner-sized characters who could fight against the new combiners evenly, and having weighty moments of death and loss that gave the impression of it being like "G1 but sometimes mature".
I do!
It's actually from an old BWTF interview with Larry DiTillio, circa September 1997:I don't, but I assume it would be somewhere in the Google Groups archives or something. I think my understanding has always been a blend of those two interpretations - that in-fiction, the G1 cast was indeed the stuff of Arthurian-style legend to the BW cast, but that this was also reflected in the ambiguity about what was factually true or not about them in the BW universe. The euhemerism of it all, if you will
Also, there's no longer any need to search through those Google Groups archives for Bob Forward or Larry DiTillio quotes anymore, since I made this (as well as this for Bob Skir quotes) back in 2024.
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To be fair, this is pretty big ask and a ridiculous core concept for a sequel show that isn't specifically about multiversal doppelgangers and differences. "Here's your big franchise tentpole character, except it's not him, it's just someone's Megazord that happens to look exactly like him, especially 90% like that version in the US." Sure, the "puny fleshling" thing is stupid (I have blessedly not witnessed this discourse, nor do I wish to, I'll take your word for it), but it's not like this is some totally blameless and fine move they just demonized.
Thanks! Yeah, that's pretty clearly what @LordGigaIce was saying.
Impressive! I might spend some time in those...
Yeah, the reactions I saw that were the closest to negative were just snarky, and I thought not without fondness. Like, how can you not laugh at some of that dub nonsense? I saw Victory praised for its animation, and Masterforce I didn't see much chatter about at all. I think I came in late enough that the glow you describe had worn off, but I hadn't seen it turn too harsh.
It just goes to show how Japan was much more ready and willing to let go of Optimus and move on to other yearly lead heroes (being used to such a trend common to long-running series like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai), while America wasn't.
But at the same time, Takara wasn't gonna just not try to make money off the shiny new Powermaster Optimus Prime toy (which they made even shinier with new chrome paint), so they were in a bit of bind over how to sell the obvious new Optimus toy as a totally-not-Optimus new hero character, without simply bringing back the hero they had just killed off (again) just the year before.
At the very least, it seems Masumi Kaneda thought up an idea he wrote into the Masterforce manga but which didn't make it into the anime (for better or worse): That Ginrai was viewed by the other Autobots (both human and Cybertronian) as being like a metaphorical reincarnation of Optimus (keyword being "metaphorical" as opposed to him literally being Optimus's soul reincarnated into the form of a human). A sort of "This Ginrai chap is pretty cool, he reminds us of our deceased former leader, Optimus Prime."
I have a doppelganger. I've never encountered him, but I've known people who did, and I have seen him caught on camera in places where I can't have been.
So I'm really not bothered about Ginrai looking like Optimus Prime. That can just happen.
So I'm really not bothered about Ginrai looking like Optimus Prime. That can just happen.
All of what you and Sabr say is true, but deliberately setting that up in a curated narrative with a specific cast -- in a universe where this is not really the done thing unless you're Scourge and a Sweep, or Fastlane and Cloudraker, and even then those aren't the same -- is still going to engender certain responses that are entirely fair.
If you specifically set up a lead looking for all the world like Optimus Prime (but isn't), people are GOING to go "is he Optimus Prime" or "it's Optimus Prime" or "that dude morphed into Optimus Prime", or "why did they replace Optimus Prime with someone who cosplays as him" and not even necessarily be in any way in the wrong. That's gonna happen. That's a normal reaction.
Takara/Kaneda/whoever brought that on themselves by trying to eat their cake and have it too. They're not gonna not make money off this new design and engineering? Fair enough, but expect responses like this. No amount of dancing around it and trying to intellectualize it with metaphors and abstractions (really, that statement from Kaneda adds absolutely nothing and just draws more attention to it) makes people's stumbling over it less valid. I don't get any of the smugness about ha ha, these dodos don't understand what was done here. What was done here was silly and people are no-selling it.
If you specifically set up a lead looking for all the world like Optimus Prime (but isn't), people are GOING to go "is he Optimus Prime" or "it's Optimus Prime" or "that dude morphed into Optimus Prime", or "why did they replace Optimus Prime with someone who cosplays as him" and not even necessarily be in any way in the wrong. That's gonna happen. That's a normal reaction.
Takara/Kaneda/whoever brought that on themselves by trying to eat their cake and have it too. They're not gonna not make money off this new design and engineering? Fair enough, but expect responses like this. No amount of dancing around it and trying to intellectualize it with metaphors and abstractions (really, that statement from Kaneda adds absolutely nothing and just draws more attention to it) makes people's stumbling over it less valid. I don't get any of the smugness about ha ha, these dodos don't understand what was done here. What was done here was silly and people are no-selling it.
I just think characters looking identical to other characters brings unnecessary baggage for no benefit. You may come up with a half decent explanation but that doesn't take away from the fact that you needed to come up with and publish a superfluous explanation in the first place. Unless the point of the story is explicitly looking alike, there's really no reason to especially in this franchise where they could change one of his base colors and then he'd be a completely different character.
I was very, very curious about the idea of Aligned, specifically because this was an insane undertaking, and wanted to see how that might be approached. It was never going to be one unified thing, not properly, but the effort would have been very intriguing. Takara's made a very entertaining go of it themselves (then again, more so after the Aligning and post-Aligned, but I digress), and I love that kind of playing with the lore. Sheer feasibility alone was doomed -- how do you align ALL characters enough to write solid profiles? Even if you try to come up with a good list of core ones, there wouldn't be enough room. How do you do the same with even just the big key stories?
Then I started seeing how they were approaching it: immediately lost me with "everything small or a partner or whatever is a Mini-Con now", and never recovered from there. The designs merging G1 and movie looks were Not It. The decision on something absolute that had to be bought back bit by bit with things like "if you squint" was just a slippery slope. The Covenant came out, and it was what it was, and even my previously stated objections aside, what it was was kind of bland and formless.
Ultimately, while having the potential to be a fun exercise, Aligning everything was always doomed to be one thing: limiting. Distilling everything down to one true thing and then moving forward with only that is reductive by definition. Even if you had great writers at the helm, and they didn't, it would lose some or many things.
Alas, unlike it used to be, what Jackpot not-inaccurately called Hasbro's apathy toward curating its IP was replaced in this instance by the present-day corporate take on these which is just organized enough to meddle but not organized enough to really commit. This energy is kind of what I see in the Aligning and Evergreening: synthesize what you can into what we can consistently churn out and that's what we'll keep. To be fair, this is a necessary corporate move in this day and age, but I wish they weren't so... CONTENT with it. I mean, it's not like some good material hasn't come out of it, but I do miss the more unpredictable things that could happen.
I don't think the actual company or brand commitment was really to making this One True Story, at least not how it was talked about and shopped around. I mean, the toy company needs none of that, as we're seeing now with Evergreen/Authentics and a loose understanding that "just put these characters in every line forever". You can see the lack of commitment into how even in the binder the narrative stuff kind of just peters out, as it should, because stories are to be written out there, not in the binder. What they might have wanted was just a baseline for everything to take off of. "Here's the kinds of stories that work here, here are some greatest hits that delineate key eras you can set stories in, here's how they work together" (with the ball being dropped on that last bit). What Archer and Alvarez and whoever else took it to be, or committed to, I can't say, but it sure seems like more than that -- and that didn't get delivered on for a number of reasons, not least of them just the sheer weirdness of forcing everyone who comes into the house to tell someone else's Transformers story or at least comply with it.
Ginrai is such a weird concept to me because my first experience with him was from a fan sub of Victory, that Anglicized his name as "Apex Prime." And Victory uses his full God Ginrai configuration, which was just distinct enough from the standard Optimus design that I could buy him as a new character and assumed he was Rodimus' successor. I didn't know "Apex Prime" was just a fan name for years.
And of course the Victory version of him is just the Transector brought to life so going back through and watching a properly subbed version of Masterforce and seeing that he's just a dude piloting a mech was weird and that he's just Ginrai was something of an experience. And then his mech comes to life and takes his name.
Him looking like Optimus is explained, in that the Autobots built a new body for Optimus for after they planned to revive him, but things go array and Ginrai ends up bonded to the lifeless body. This criticism is still valid...
... but it's just another example of Hasbro and Takara doing their own different thing with no regard for the other. Hasbro used the toy as a new form of Optimus, and Optimus even took that form in the comics (the only Western media at the time). Takara just said "eh no" and crafted the Ginrai story for Masterforce. Just another precedent to support the idea that Takara just disregards AVP.
Why did Takara decided to go that route? Probably because they were leaning into the Sentai aspect of things with the Headmaster Juniors and having Ginrai be a human piloting a mech was a better way to reinforce that. And as @Sabrblade said, Takara was far less attached to Optimus by this point then Hasbro was.
Funnily though they're probably more attached to Optimus then Hasbro is these days, if that's even possible. Just look at how the two companies handle Collabs.
I admit the focus on the Headmaster Juniors and Ginrai in Masterforce was a hard hill to get over at first, but I've come around to it. Mostly because it's so fun. There are also traditional Cybertronians aplenty too, so that helps. Still? Masterforce is just a fun show, even if it diverges from the standard Transformers formula.
And Headmasters is dull but I also find it has its charm. It's worthwhile if nothing else for giving us some time with Rodimus as The Guy where he's unambiguously treated as The Guy. Until he hugs off into space and passes leadership to Fort Max, but at least he keeps the Matrix! And that's character growth going by how Season 3 went.
And of course the Victory version of him is just the Transector brought to life so going back through and watching a properly subbed version of Masterforce and seeing that he's just a dude piloting a mech was weird and that he's just Ginrai was something of an experience. And then his mech comes to life and takes his name.
Him looking like Optimus is explained, in that the Autobots built a new body for Optimus for after they planned to revive him, but things go array and Ginrai ends up bonded to the lifeless body. This criticism is still valid...
... but it's just another example of Hasbro and Takara doing their own different thing with no regard for the other. Hasbro used the toy as a new form of Optimus, and Optimus even took that form in the comics (the only Western media at the time). Takara just said "eh no" and crafted the Ginrai story for Masterforce. Just another precedent to support the idea that Takara just disregards AVP.
Why did Takara decided to go that route? Probably because they were leaning into the Sentai aspect of things with the Headmaster Juniors and having Ginrai be a human piloting a mech was a better way to reinforce that. And as @Sabrblade said, Takara was far less attached to Optimus by this point then Hasbro was.
Funnily though they're probably more attached to Optimus then Hasbro is these days, if that's even possible. Just look at how the two companies handle Collabs.
I admit the focus on the Headmaster Juniors and Ginrai in Masterforce was a hard hill to get over at first, but I've come around to it. Mostly because it's so fun. There are also traditional Cybertronians aplenty too, so that helps. Still? Masterforce is just a fun show, even if it diverges from the standard Transformers formula.
And Headmasters is dull but I also find it has its charm. It's worthwhile if nothing else for giving us some time with Rodimus as The Guy where he's unambiguously treated as The Guy. Until he hugs off into space and passes leadership to Fort Max, but at least he keeps the Matrix! And that's character growth going by how Season 3 went.