Transformers: The Basics

[LordGigaIce]

Making all of them Primes all traces back to the naming of Vector Prime and his lack of carrying a/the Matrix, years before the 2007 movie's success kicked off the Binder's development.

See I had very little idea of who or what the Thirteen were when Cybertron was current. Just that it was a thing somewhere and maybe important.

So when Vector Prime showed up I assumed he was a past Matrix bearer who'd time travelled to help out the present day Autobots for reasons (something something Unicron something something Primus something something darkest hour).

I didn't make any connections to the Thirteen at first, much less assume Vector meant they were all Primes.

Had there even been just a throwaway line about Vector being one of Optimus' distant predecessors as Prime all of this could have been avoided.

Or who am I kidding? They'd have found another way to make it dumb.

 

[Sabrblade]

Forest Lee nailed it down in the first page of the first comic he ever wrote for Fun Pub:

So even before the Cybertron cartoon first premiered in Toonami, the Thirteen all being Primes had been set in stone without any regard to what being a Prime actually meant anymore. Just "special", which is so vague and superficial that it might as well not mean anything at all.

 

[LordGigaIce]

See I didn't read my first FP thing until... well... must have been 2008 at the earliest?

 

[Sabrblade]

See I didn't read my first FP thing until... well... must have been 2008 at the earliest?

Same, though for me it was more like 2010, I think.

But I did read fan forums with members who did read the Fun Pub stuff. I also read Wikipedia, and eventually TFWiki when it became its own thing separate from Wikipedia.

And later episodes in the Cybertron cartoon did eventually see Vector Prime mention the Thirteen once the English version started adding easter egg references to the scripts and off-screen dialogue to pad out moments of silence from the Japanese version.

 

[Sabrblade]

One thing we also haven't mentioned was how the decision to make Optimus being the Thirteenth Prime reincarnated was a late decision. As Chris said in the video, absolutely no Aligned media besides the Covenant book ever mentioned it. Not the novels, not the video games, not the Prime, Rescue Bots, RID2015, or Rescue Bots Academy cartoons, nor anything else. And all of these media that released prior to the Covenant book's release treated the Thirteen's relation to Optimus as their being his predecessors/ancestors, not his siblings.

The Covenant book released at the tail end of 2013 in that December, which was not only after the end of the Prime cartoon but also after the HasLab department that Rik Alvarez, Aaron Archer, and Andy "Who cares about continuity?" Schmidt were a part of had been shut down in 2012. So, while we don't know for sure how far back before its release the book first went into production, but it likely would have been first written only after the master plans for the Aligned continuity's future would have already been derailed and in the can. At which point, the decision to make Optimus be the Thirteenth Prime may very well have come about after the collapse of HasLab, or even at the tail end of its existence since Aaron seemed to know about it enough to imply that it was made before HasLab went under. People rag on Rik for supposedly being the one behind the decision, but the book's credited author is Justina Robson. For all we know, she could have come up with it on her own and been given permission to put it into the book.

 

[lastmaximal]

This could all have been avoided if the Thirteenth Prime were Skull-Fckr.

 

[LordGigaIce]

And all of these media that released prior to the Covenant book's release treated the Thirteen's relation to Optimus as their being his predecessors/ancestors, not his siblings.

Didn't they do a thing where Cybertronians had "zodiacs" that tied them to two of the Thirteen, with Optimus stated to be "aligned" to Prima and Alpha Trion?
That doesn't really work if Optimus is their brother

 

[Sabrblade]

Didn't they do a thing where Cybertronians had "zodiacs" that tied them to two of the Thirteen, with Optimus stated to be "aligned" to Prima and Alpha Trion?
That doesn't really work if Optimus is their brother

All the more evidence that the decision to make Optimus be the 13th was a later decision.

I wish I could read the Binder.

If anyone else wishes to, PM me.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

The Ultimate Guide was so much better than all this.

 

[LBD "Nytetrayn"]

Sigh...

But ffs Aaron. I know you weren't a super nerd about this stuff, and in a lot of ways that was a boon to your era... but if you're doing something like this? You kinda have to be a super nerd?
Not knowing who Logos was does make sense since he only existed in a Takara-exclusive story that hadn't even been fully translated at the time, but how does the head of the Transformers brand team, in 2010, not know who the Last Autobot is?

I'm not even a Marvel G1 fan, and I knew back then at the age of 23. Just... jeeze. I know this comes off like Comic Book Guy levels of snark, but my point is you kinda have to go to that level of nerdom for what the Covenant/Aligned was supposed to do.

Just... know the lore you're trying to synthesize. Do your research. TFWiki existed back then. It was super easy to do deep dive on this stuff.

Yeah, this is kinda what I was saying when the subject of Archer's -- for lack of a better term -- ignorance came up before.

When I asked Aaron why it had been decided to make the Thirteen all Primes (since they originally weren't Primes back when Furman first introduced the group as a concept), he told me it was simply to make them all sound special. While he agreed that making them all Primes begged the question of what exactly it now means to be a Prime if not an Autobot leader chosen to bear the Matrix, he also chuckled at how that's no longer a concern of his since he's not with Transformers anymore.

 

[LordGigaIce]

While he agreed that making them all Primes begged the question of what exactly it now means to be a Prime if not an Autobot leader chosen to bear the Matrix, he also chuckled at how that's no longer a concern of his since he's not with Transformers anymore.

Rik Alvarez recently said something about Optimus being the Thirteenth being a late decision and that the hope was someone would come up with a better idea later to override it.

The dumb thing is that people have. Be it IDW1's "the Arisen," IDW2's take that the current Matrix bearer was the Thirteenth, EarthWars going with Nova, the Prime Wars cartoon going with Sentinel, or TFO going with Zeta... almost every piece of fiction that touches on the Thirteenth goes out of its way to not make it Optimus, or least leave some doubt/wiggle room.

While I don't love all of these (Nova and Sentinel each now have enough going for them that I don't think they work/need to be the Thirteenth) they're all better then it being Optimus. And at any point Hasbro could have gone "ok we're switching gears to that."

AotP was the perfect chance to do it because it must have been in the planning stages when TFO was in production, so someone at Hasbro should have called an audible and gone "it's Zeta in the movie, it's just going to be Zeta from now on."

The timing was there to synthesize it all, but they didn't. AotP doubled down on Optimus being the Thirteenth. Thing is AotP has no tie in media, and I don't see outside creators suddenly warming up to the idea now, so we're probably going to get more alternative takes in the future.

Stuck in this limbo where Hasbro officially says one thing but every adaptation just ignores it for something else.

 

[Sabrblade]

The thing is, the most likely reason no one at Hasbro has overridden the idea of Optimus being the 13th is because Mark Maher is a HUGE fanboy of the Covenant book and LOVES the idea of Optimus being the 13th. He genuinely thinks it is awesome and either doesn't know or doesn't get why the fans hate the idea so much. He unironically thinks it makes Optimus even cooler.