As a stark supporter for Car Robots being part of JG1 proper, I find this whole situation with EarthSpark to be downright insane, absurd, and foolishly taking literally what was never a literal flashback in the first place.
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You might still go mad trying to make sense of it, though.
Counterpoint- IDW has nothing to do with either the Sunbow or Marvel Comics versions of G1 but we count it as "G1."
And Beast Wars is understood to be a sequel to G1, even though its own backstory is a mix and match of Sunbow and Marvel.
In that context, is EarthSpark being viewed as a version of G1 so nuts?
It's all bs and asspulls... I'm just saying that ES isn't as distant from "genuine" G1 as some other stuff we consider "G1" these days.
That isn't the issue, though. EarthSpark being a "Primax" (to borrow a TCC term) universe isn't a problem (it very well could be; the wiki just doesn't classify it as one simply for ease of organization, and because it hasn't been given any such classification officially, but I digress). The problem is it being a splinter spin-off world of the G1 cartoon universe, specifically.
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I would split off IDW, but I'm not in charge yet.
Personally, I never saw IDW as "G1", no more than the live action movies or TFOne or anything else.
More like an "Ultimate" Transformers, or like TMNT 2012.
It's probably time to drop the classification system. The one outlet that was actively maintaining it lost the licence and no one in an official capacity seems keen to revive it. The more new fiction that's added will make it more and more outdated.
Au contraire, mon Capitan. The current BotCon fiction that is licensed is still actively using the system.
Plus, the original writers who invented it in the first place are Wiki editors. They did so as a means to present the wiki's organization system from an in-universe perspective, but in such a way that is purposefully meant to appear as obtuse and illegible gobbledygook that is not to be taken seriously by the characters (a concept that the fans have sadly rarely ever grasped since the system's introduction).
I'm unsure how wide ranging the reach of the new limited BotCon fiction is.
As for the rest of it... yeah, that's the issue I have. AFAIK the idea was to present the multiverse as vast and complex with the wink and nod idea being that your head canon could be in there somewhere under the piles of faux Latin and decimals.
But fans obsessed over it and insisted it be used as a real categorization system 🫤
What could possiblye go wrong? It was a genius move.
Everyone knows fans have no time for illegible gobbledygook that functions as a deep cut AND a way to operationalize and flex their lore knowledge AND lend their fanfic an extra veneer of legitimacy. Who wants any of THAT?
No sane fan would bother nitpicking about nonsense like which one is Brawl and which one is Brawn, and how X-Brawn is not a Marvel mutant or The Artist Formerly Known As Brawn. Or what this tiny sentence in the margins of this book about Animated is actually saying. Or the names of every single Sugar Shocks. Fans are infamously disinterested in minutiae, especially if you couch it in a code and cover it in nonsense. Ba-weep-graanagh-weep-ninibon? Tsche-chu-chu-che? It will never catch on.
Everyone knows fans have no time for illegible gobbledygook that functions as a deep cut AND a way to operationalize and flex their lore knowledge AND lend their fanfic an extra veneer of legitimacy. Who wants any of THAT?
No sane fan would bother nitpicking about nonsense like which one is Brawl and which one is Brawn, and how X-Brawn is not a Marvel mutant or The Artist Formerly Known As Brawn. Or what this tiny sentence in the margins of this book about Animated is actually saying. Or the names of every single Sugar Shocks. Fans are infamously disinterested in minutiae, especially if you couch it in a code and cover it in nonsense. Ba-weep-graanagh-weep-ninibon? Tsche-chu-chu-che? It will never catch on.
The jivety wiki over on Fandom unironically using the universal clusters or whatever the hug instead of the actual real franchise names was peak what are those idiots doing tho NGL lmao
They thought this was somehow better than just how our good wiki does it
sets self on fire
Because that's literally the opposite of what they are.
They are a coherently and logically structured cipher for known information.
That doesn't mean they're good, but they're bad for a very different reason.
The Greek letters and numbers only indicate out-of-universe information.
That means they are very unnecessary for out-of-universe discussion.
And nonsense technobabble in-universe.
The cluster names are the only part that have any actual value.
Unless you use the full designations specifically for Easter eggs (which is the exact opposite of wanting fans to ignore them).
But the idea that there being a systematic catalog-like classification at all is inherently "obtuse" or (as one of the people responsible once said) "off-putting"?
What? How?
In terms of how clunky-sounding they are, they're not worse than, like, star catalog numbers, which are used all the time in not just formal scientific papers but also in popular science articles and (often just shown onscreen and not said out loud) even in YouTube videos.
They're barely more "obtuse" than addresses.
Meanwhile, the "Worlds" classification system introduced by the Legends manga is also still in use in the New Legends "End of G1 Universe" manga, with the second chapter taking a cheeky dig at the universal streams system by noting how the Legends system is "nice and simple, even children understand it." lol
I wouldn't say that at all.
Fandom, by and large, sucks. I say that as a member of multiple.
Oh, if anyone has just cause to say that of this particular fandom, it's me. And I have receipts (and scars).
But I also have good convention memories, a TM2 Dinobot on card with "Talk For You!" penned by Scott McNeil on the bubble, the wiki pages for the Cybertronic Spree and YTV to my credit, and a 69% "like" ratio to my posts on this board. Even a published fanfic (the occasional dog barked, to quote Douglas Adams).
So I guess I take a certain pleasure in being the fan with a sad enough life that I actually worked out a scheme for the Transtech (who are better than us) to classify our universe. But I digress....
I find it curious, though ultimately coincidental, that my name for the Earthspark cluster (Vitalix) alliterates with Viron (the RiD-2001 cluster), and that both ended up in the category of "this is a seperate continuity family in the US, but G1 in Japan". That really wasn't a factor in my picking the name, though.