The Taxonomy of Toy-Based Fiction, or a further look at Continuity Families

[NovaSaber]

I moved a response from the recent Timelines sub-toyline discussion over to here to mitigate thread drift.


Technically, AVP's analysis was more along the lines of "The Chronarchitect performed emergency surgery on a damaged universe when the local Cybertron was blown up." As Sabrblade points out, Cybertron got better anyway, and rumours of Primus' death were exaggerated.

I'm not talking about the specifics of what the answer said.

I'm talking about what prompted it in the first place, where someone simply asked for a universal stream for the Japanese G1 timeline and the answer was entirely based around "explaining" why the timeline incorporated bits from "multiple universes", which was bullshit because it didn't.
The Japanese G1 timeline published with Kiss Players material literally did not contain anything which had ever been specifically intended as not part of the G1/BW universe.
The most specific example being given was that that it incorporated "a Viron universe", even though Car Robots had in fact never been its own universe in Japan.

Actually, given Wrecker Hook, I even think Derik's false information about Robot Masters is a big part of why western fandom didn't realize Car Robots was in JG1 continuity until the timeline.

 

[Sabrblade]

Actually, given Wrecker Hook, I even think Derik's false information about Robot Masters is a big part of why western fandom didn't realize Car Robots was in JG1 continuity until the timeline.

When RobotMasters came out, Derik and others were all riding the high of the multiversal crossover story told in the Universe comics, and most just assumed RobotMasters was something similar to that what with it likewise being a big crossover story, not realizing it only featured time travel and no multiversal travel. This is evident in cases where AVP mentioned the Blastizone from RobotMasters and merely assumed it was used for multiversal travel (but thankfully, every instance of the Blastizone mentioned in AVP was vague enough to NOT state that assumption outright).