AIIIIGHT HERE WE ARE GENERAL TRANSFORMERS THREAD TALK ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE CONTINUITY AND CHARACTERS AND SHIPS AND META AND IF DINOBOT IS THE BEST EVER (YES) AND HOW RIDICULOUS THE FANDOM IS SOMETIMES AND DEFINITELY HOW AWFUL KISS PLAYERS WAS (WHY) come to me my transfans and wallow in the joy that is space robot cars punching each other (shoutout to @mazarinedrake for being the dude what linked me to TFA and got me into Transformers in the first place, after only having watched Beast Wars as a kid. Thank you, dude, it's still one of my favorites.) - ETA: I was asked to add a link to TF comic reading order to the top post, so here y'all go!: Transformers Comics reading order.
See I'm just getting back into this after a few years of having Homestuck Blinkers on, so I'm not up to date on the fandom so all I can say is: Whaaaaaaaat. Last I checked the IDW Comics were generally seen as going to shit after the debacle that was All Hail Megatron, with Last Stand of the Wreckers being considered a shining nugget of gold among all the shit. Also I've just finished watching RID and it's great. Not as good as Animated, IMHO, but good enough to get me RPing with them. Like the one thing I would change would be that I'd add Sunstreaker. Because Twins. I have a problem.
After rewatching the 1986 movie on a whim, a friend and I decided that we were going to watch G1, both of us having not seen it since early childhood. Oh man. So many animation errors. Like, every third scene he's in, Optimus's torso is blue. What happened, dude? Feeling down? Understandable, totally understandable. Also we'd forgotten that the dinobots were originally 1: built, and 2: for reasons that boil down to "because I can!" Good job, guys, that didn't go badly at all. I've somehow not managed to watch anything later than Beast Machines. I have, however, been keeping close watch on the toylines. There are some damn nice third-party figures, like Fansproject's Function X headmasters, or Mastermind Creations' Predaking combiner. Plus Toyworld is making a dinobot combiner which is super awesome. It is not emphatically not the Beast, which I find disappointing because I'd love a hideous, jumbled, monstrous combiner made of dinosaurs, but a dinobot combiner is still so exciting.
Ah, I wasn't around for G1 when it first aired so I don't have the nostalgia value making it, well, watchable for extended periods. It's pretty harmless fun and I would probably have enjoyed it as a kid f it had aired on the TV at all, but the times I've sat down and tried, I haven't been able to get through it. Which is sad in a way because G1 is the only series where Sunstreaker and Sideswipe get any real air time. (Such a problem. SUCH a problem.)
Hahaha, I've never been much into the twins, but G1 definitely gave me my enduring love of Cliffjumper in all situations. Traitor is such a good episode and i ship cliffjumper/mirage so badly send help. (I also really love Tracks and Raoul's episodes. i ship that too ughhhh my life is full of shipping pain) You could always just watch the good episodes or the ones with lots of Twins-- aren't they basically featured in Hoist Goes to Hollywood? It's not really a show you have to watch in order, and there's definitely some episodes I have never been able to sit through. Speaking of G1 and its horrible episodes, I feel like it is my civic duty to link the notes on B.O.T. for all to consume and marvel at. Jesus christ. AS FOR IDW it's definitely come back up in popularity! Like, of course all the fans are always mad at it because have you met Transformers fandom, but in the way that means they LOVE it and have favored artists and writers and everyone is super into either MTMTE or comic-serial-RID-which-is-unrelated-to-either-the-cartoon-or-anime, or sometimes both.
So basically Transformers is the incoherent clusterfuck that it's always been, and the Fandom is as batshit insane as it's ever been? Good to know. Man I've always had a love for Twins in any series, but with Transformers it's like... this whole other level. Because, like, the canon explanation is that Twins share a split spark, right? So they are literally two halves of the same whole. And to me that's beautiful. I'm such a sap. SUCH a sap.
I mean, 80s Transformers, like many other cartoons of the time, was mostly a means to sell toys, so it's not particularly surprising that it's a low-budget, no-quality-control mess. I'm not sure what excuses the later series have. Beast Wars was pretty coherent, although since I was 10-ish the last time I watched it maybe I'm not the best judge.
No, Beast Wars was legit really well done, it definitely still holds up and the characters are really excellent. Because good CGI was and is really expensive, the american CGI shows are usually smaller and more character-focused, which does the show good! BW and TFP are both some of the better series in the canon, and TFA followed the same model of small, character-focused teams with more tightly controlled goals and continuity, which is honestly a better format for most shows than the continuity-is-nonsense, conflict-of-the-week-only G1 format. (I can say nothing of the goodness of CGI re: Beast Machines, Energon is completely unwatchable, and I never finished Cybertron because jesus christ thirteen goddamn episodes of racing why, so I guess technically BW and TFP are the exceptions, but they're such GOOD exceptions.)
I know plenty of people who say endlessly good things about Beast Wars but I've personally not been able to get through it, yet. I didn't watch it as a child so the nostalgia goggles aren't there to help me get through the kind of awkward animation that I'm sure was great at the time but sometimes hindsight is a bitch. Like, I believe all the good things that get said about it. Perhaps a re-release with spiffed up Animation would be a good idea?
/drools at the very thought of a BW remake god, I would empty out my bank account to fund that, screw the bills. (Alas, I don't think $150 is enough to make a three-season CGI TV show.) The animation does get better as they go-- Mainframe was about the only company making CGI cartoons in the early 90s, and they were still clearly working on the limitations of their artform over the course of Reboot and Beast Wars. By S2, it's already much better (even if they killed my favorite pred at the end of S1 >:| ) and S3 actually almost holds up! (i swear i'm not trying to damn it with faint praise, it's legit amazing that it still looks as good as it does now after-- what, eighteen years?) If you wanted to skip most of S1 and start with S2 I don't think anyone could blame you, as long as you watched the important episodes (probably the premier, finale, and episodes where they intro new characters, plus probably a couple others but I'd have to skim to remember which ones you'd need.) Or read the TFwiki summaries, that place is fabulous. SPEAKING OF... CHARACTERS... Have any of y'all actually watched all of Armada? 'Cuz I'm actually really fond of Armada!Starscream, who isn't so recent anymore, but Armada Megatron is the biggest dick and Armada Starscream is about the only Starscream you can really look at and go "yeah, Megatron's just being a dick for the sake of being a dick and all Starscream's traitorous actions can be directly traced to Megatron being abusive and awful to someone who's trying his hardest to do his best". But I have no one to talk to about this, it feels like. (Or about how Thrust is one of the most hilarious villains put to animation, with one of the most hilariously awful deaths ever seen.)
Sorry friend, the way I've been prioritizing my Transformers watching experience has been: Keep up with the current series > Rewatching TFA into oblivion > WATCH BEAST WARS ALREADY GODDAMN > Same with G1 but more relaxed > Armarda Something had to come at the end of the list. RE Animation quality: I found it super interesting when Prime was starting out watching the Animation get better episode by episode. Like, the models were the same, but the animators obviously got better at moving them around in ways that were fluid and, well, organic.
I'm not super into TF (I watch it/read it sometimes when it's on/around) but dad's been a fan since he was wee. He's not SUPER into it either anymore but remembers when it was p. much his special interest. So sometimes when I show him a post or something I think he'd like we end up talking about the various continuities and stuff even though neither of us are caught up and my knowledge is |_| while his is |________________|. Notably, once I mentioned how there's an entire trope dedicated to Starscream and he posited the theory that Starscream is Megatron's insurance against coups. Basically "If I die this asshole is first in line to take over and nobody wants that" so nobody tried to bump him off. That's why he puts up with all his shit- it just demonstrates to the other Decepticons exactly why no-one wants Megatron gone.
Ooooh, I like that theory. And of course then in the movie when Starscream declared himself leader and Megatron came back as Galvatron, he no longer had that reason to keep Starscream around... so he killed him to death without a second thought. It probably felt very cathartic, in Megatrons fucked up processor, to finally remove this thorn in his side.
hahaha that's a great theory, even though one of my favorite G1 episodes is the one where Blitzwing and Astrotrain team up to try and depose both of them at the same time (That's also the episode that has this excellent exchange: God bless G1.)
Oh man though, I've always wanted to write my own continuity. Like, there's just so much that could be done with it, y'know?
I've been rewatching clips of G1 for Reasons and I'd forgotten how stupid the Decepticon, and some of the Autobot, combiners are. Not as a concept, but in that when combined they're unable to think much beyond "Hulk smash!" And I really like that. It has a decent rationale behind it and gives a reason why they don't just use the combiners for everything; the combiners are just too clumsy and dumb for a lot of jobs.
Yeah, so what they did there was: They gave James Roberts (The Last Stand of the Wreckers guy) a book of his own, in which Rodimus (not hot rod) takes two hundred autobots on a nonsensical quest for the Knights of Cybertron and Cyberutopia and gets amazingly lost and basically it's like fanfic but canon. Secondly they ended the war and did a gritty political thriller about the Autobots trying to govern a neutral civilian population on Cybertron and deal with reintegrating the Decepticons into society and basically Starscream gets to be an amazing smug bastard and it's great.
Since this thread is suddenly relevant to a lot of people in the CDCF, despite all of our wishes. Having just binged through More Than Meets the Eye, yeah, it reads like fanfic. But it's the kind of unrepentant, I'm-having-fun-so-fuck-off fanfic that can be really great because the writer doesn't care what people think. I love it, except Rodimus grates on me. Also there are some great 3rd party toys coming out of it, like these absolutely adorable SD headmaster versions of various characters. Also a brilliantly engineered Chromedome and Brainstorm. No MTMTE Cyclonus or Tailgate yet, for those just joining us from the CDCF. Hasbro/Takara is mostly concentrating on Combiner Wars and generally are kind of garbage anyway.
Anyone else excited for tomorrow/tonight's MTMTE? My roommate and I have been talking and theorizing about it all day :D
