Even allowing for the "haters" comment to be facetious for comedic effect as suggested by the emoji...
That would be accurate.
I am as content to leave this here as you are, but I hope you can consider what I've said.
I have, yes. And thank you for it. It never hurts to be told how your stuff may come across, even if you didn't intend for it. It's all too easy to get lost in your own head.
I'll just say this... what I'm getting at is deeper than just Skybound or this scene.
With CyberWorld you have some people- and I'm talking general fandom here, I do think we as old heads on this forum are a bit more well reasoned- who have lamented this franchise's inability to do new things and then go "not like that!" when CW does new things.
It's broadly an issue overall where this fandom does seem to not know what it wants, while being vocal about what it doesn't like, and even moments generally considered "good" can get turned around in the discourse.
This is complicated because fandom is not universal and not everyone will be saying the same stuff... but I do think there's something to discuss here.
If I worded that badly, or came off as overly defensive about Skybound/"go the offensive Prime" and hit below the belt at some others then that's on me, and I do apologize.
Jetfire I remember thinking was great, although even then it felt like not a lot for Leader class.
I do love the toy, as I said he's still my collection's Jetfire, but it was the first time I felt like Leader class was.... diminished?
Animated had a simpler aesthetic then either the UT or the Bay movies, so their Leader figures seemed surface level simpler, but they still clearly had the mass, moving parts, and electronics the earlier Leaders had. With Jetfire it felt noticeably "lesser."
As an aside, I think AotP Megatronus and Onyx are back to something approaching pre-T30 Leader bulk? Clearly they're lacking the electronics, but that's just an industry thing it seems. They feel substantial. Anyway, I think T30 was still early in the aftermath of the great oil price hike of 2012 where they didn't quite know how to do this "Transformers" thing on these limited budgets compared to, say, the UT, Bay films, or Animated.
That's fair. I was referring mainly to T30 having been "the IDW toyline" at the time thanks to the Dark Cybertron tie-in; it was at the time the highest level of direct representation the comics had had in the toyline. A slew of Dark Cyb era looks, all in one go. These days we get the occasional direct match, but some are filtered through the shared-tooling tradeoff. (Still, again, they've turned up some bangers.)
The IDW look is one that I think Hasbro has tended to struggle with? It's very stylized and almost anime mecha? And when I say IDW I specifically mean stuff from Dark Cybertron on.
In TR, for example, we got Sentinel Prime, Chromedome, Rewind, and Brainstorm that all specially pulled from their IDW looks...for the head. But their bodies are all fairly standard G1/Generations style.
In T30 moulds like Bumblebee/Goldbug/Goldfire and Skids/Crosscut had more IDW designs in the body, but that came with stability issues. The BB mould's chest never sat flush, Skids couldn't stand... etc...
It was probably a case the worst time to tackle a big problem- low budgets while trying to do something pretty stylized.
The team these days seems to have more budget to play with than the T30 days, or at least is better at making smaller budgets work for them.
So I do hope they use a comic-centric SS subline to see if they can do some of those stylized IDW looks well. The more out there stuff from AotP suggests they can.
'cause holy hell. IDW1's run was nearly fifteen years. It's wild we've never got a definitive IDW1 style Optimus or Megatron outside of Legends.
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