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lastmaximal

Administrator
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
Everyone had known that reboots were possible when Aramda came around... but like... it was still fun to speculate.

Which is kind of my point with this rambly trip down memory lane. None of these fan theories ended up being accurate, but they were fun. They fueled speculation, got people hyped for the shows, even if everyone's theories ended up being wrong.

We've kind of lost something with everything being so thoroughly streamlined that speculation doesn't have a chance to grow. Stuff is shown off and fully announced, and any lingering questions get answered by the brand team or the showrunners on social media.

There's no going back, social media and how it's changed creator/fan interactions has changed forever, but I still think it's worth pointing out that something has been lost.

It was a fascinating in-between state. Reboots were possible and increasingly familiar, but not quite the norm yet, with all that implies. The Ultimate universe in Marvel had been going for a short while but was still kind of this novel, exciting, unpredictable experiment. Dreamwave's G1 was initially billed (I very hazily remember this from an old Wizard article) as filling in the gap between Season 2 and the Movie, so even that was still in the old paradigm of maintaining continuity. And this was well after the mid-90s marketing-driven Marvel reboots had ended up being haggled down to soft reboots or alternate universe things to keep that audience somewhat interested.

Even in adaptations, "something deliberately being different from the original (in small and large ways)" was still something audiences in different areas saw as an aberration rather than the done thing. For every Hitchhiker's Guide fandom that half-expected each adaptation to go its own way in some respects, there were Marvel fans who occupied themselves with complaining that Movie Wolverine was too tall. Out-and-out reboots that started entirely new things were kind of daunting, which is an artifact of the inertia of holding onto a continuity or status quo for so long. But the possibility they represented was indeed fun, and that's something I sorely miss now -- the sharp irony is that everything's a damn reboot or new universe now, but we haven't gotten any Generations-line fiction in years, and the last time we did it was the WFC "aNiMe" that was... certainly a thing that existed.

I do think that was part of what made the fan experience interesting. I think it came from gaps being present and left as gaps, not either filled in by official media created to fill in those gaps (and I'm not even talking about ridiculousness like AVP here), or distracted from by more more more product (or media not necessarily meant to fill in those gaps) to occupy us with. And that wild west feel of everything being a possible frontier, with space left for us to fill in the gaps in our own ways, was powerful. The quality of the theories and the fanfic would vary, of course, but I remember avidly seeking them out for the fun of seeing how this writer or that played with the concepts.


Either way... I donno man, I just read it differently. The BW Ark stuff is grounded in the idea that if history is altered the present as we (and the characters) know it will cease to be. So Cheetor referring to Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots from the most momentous conflict in Cybertronian history, as "our" ancestor seems fitting.

But in BM's The Search it's just Primal and (what we think is) the essence of Optimus Prime. And Primal refers to him as his ancestor. It feels more personal, more direct.

I genuinely don't care one way or the other about whether or not it was a direct line of ancestry in Primal's case (I do remember seeing this somewhere, maybe a Skir Q and A, and shrugging at it mattering so much to some even then), but I do agree that "he's our ancestor" is a very different thing from "my ancestor".
 

LordGigaIce

Another babka?
Citizen
I genuinely don't care one way or the other about whether or not it was a direct line of ancestry in Primal's case (I do remember seeing this somewhere, maybe a Skir Q and A, and shrugging at it mattering so much to some even then), but I do agree that "he's our ancestor" is a very different thing from "my ancestor".
All of this does prod at the question of how things like "family" and "ancestry" even work with Cybertronians, but tbh this was a thing even back in G1. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe were brothers going back to the first wave of G1 toys/characters.

It's a weird aspect of the franchise that has never really had a satisfying explanation, but I also don't think it needs one. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker consider themselves "brothers," whatever that means. And I just assumed Arcee was Rattrap's great aunt, whatever that means to Cybertronians. And Optimus Prime was Optimus Primal's ancestor, whatever that means.

But I do find it funny how so many fan assumptions and creator/fan mistakes happen during the Beast Era.

Another one was the belief that the BW writers had stated that G1 was akin to Arthurian lore to the BW generation, this far off, distant, almost mythological history.
Only that was never what was said. What was said was that the BW writers saw all of Transformers as it existed at the time being akin to Arthurian lore- a collection of disparate ideas and stories that form a larger "canon" that modern writers could pull from to tell new stories. So it wasn't "the Autobots and Decepticons are akin to Arthurian myths." It was "we as writers treat what's come before as malleable mythology we can pull from, like authors have been doing with Arthurian lore for centuries."
 

Platypus Prime

Well-known member
Citizen
I can't criticize anyone, for my own shelf I put HasLab Optimus with the Origins Autobots, HasLab Micromasters, and Star Saber in place of the Car Brothers, Spy Changers, and Train combiners simply because I had them, they fit visually (for me) and I liked them. On the other side I have in progress Deathsaurus, the core class Dinoforce and some repurposed Safari armored dinos, and Year of the Goat laser Prime with plans for the AOTP Combaticons, and an Encore Fort Max with full ToyHax stickers and a TFSS Pretender shell, replacing the RID Predacons, Decepticons, and Grand Maximus.

If anyone ever sees the setup and has a continuity stroke, I will simply explain that it's 'as described in Kup's war stories'.
 


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