User talk:Sabrblade/BotCon 2025 report

At BotCon 2025, for the first time since the last Fun Publications-run BotCon in 2016, brand new officially-licensed Transformers fiction was released. This fiction included a couple of three-page pack-in comics published by Yolopark and printed in the instruction sheets of the two BotCon-exclusive Yolopark model kit sets, on-package bios and tech specs, packaging blurbs, and action cards (plus a script reading). The two Yolopark kits were a two-pack consisting of Soundblaster and Glyph (redecos of the AMK Mini Series releases of Soundwave and Bumblebee, respectively, with a new toy-accurate headsculpt created for Glyph) and a single-pack release named "Cliffjumper" (a red redeco of AMK Mini Series Bumblebee using the same new headsculpt as Glyph and based on the original red variant of G1 Bumblebee's 1984 toy).

When first unveiled, the Cliffjumper toy was originally presented as a brand-new female Decepticon character named "Ladybug", and was all set to be released as such. However, a situation arose behind the scenes that forced the "Ladybug" name to be changed to "Cliffjumper", complete with the toy's Decepticon allegiance changed to an Autobot one. No explanation was given prior to the convention, but many fans were unhappy with the change and speculations ran rampant for why this happened. Surprisingly, it had absolutely nothing to do with trademark issues.

Three panels discussing both this name change and the two pack-in comics were held at BotCon 2025. The first was held at 8:00pm on Friday, June 13, hosted by the writer of the Cliffjumper comic, Pete Sinclair. The second was held at 3:30pm on Saturday, June 14, hosted by the writer of the Soundblaster & Glyph comic, Jesse Wittenrich (now "Jesse Wittnoto", having changed his name since he got married, but still uses "Jesse Wittenrich" as his credited name). The third panel was the final panel of the weekend, held at 1:00pm on Sunday, June 15, hosted by lead organizer/showrunner and Agabyss head Hany Agaby, as well as active Agabyss member Derek Bigesby (this was not a panel dedicated to the comics like the other two were, the Ladybug situation was merely brought up again during the Q&A session and explained even further by Hany).

I, Sabrblade, was in attendance of BotCon this year and was determined to investigate as much as I could about the situation with the Ladybug-to-Cliffjumper change and the true officialness of the new BotCon fiction released this year. After an exhaustingly long weekend of taking diligent notes and documentation at the above panels, as well as speaking at length with all four individuals mentioned above (Hany, Derek, Jesse, and Pete), I have compiled together everything regarding this situation that I learned during my stay at BotCon 2025 all into this comprehensive report written for posterity, in order to create as complete a picture as possible for TFWiki.Net.

Strap yourselves in for a whirlwind adventure involving such topics as universal streams, circular reporting, Pete's creative input, multiversal shenanigans, and so much more. This is sure to be a wild ride!

The name change

The BotCon 2025 Yolopark Cliffjumper toy first came about from a desire to get a second use out of the all-new headsculpt that had been created for Glyph's new toy. It was decided to base the deco on the old red-variant Bumblebee toy from 1984 and turn it into a brand new character. From there came the obvious leap to the name "Ladybug" for a red VW Bug. Pete didn't originally know that other fans had used that name way back in the day for fan characters based on the red Bumblebee, but it's not rocket science for anyone to come up with that name for a red VW Bug, it's so obvious. That the name had also been used for fan characters previously didn't matter or factor into this. It was an independently-made decision.

Once they had the name Ladybug picked out, it was approved, everything was approved, by Hasbro. Which was no small feat, considering that it was a new female character with a very cute-sounding name in a toy brand that has historically been aimed primarily at young boys. To give an example of how tricky it can be to get Hasbro's approval on things like this, back during Robots in Disguise in 2015, Fun Publications had wanted to make a new toy of Fangry as a redeco of the Warrior class Steeljaw toy. But the Hasbro marketing team at the time wouldn't allow it because the toy would have been primarily colored pinkish-purple, since Fangry is a pinkish-purple character. At the time, Hasbro had made the marketing decision of "We don't do pinkish-purple toys for boys." There were certain colors that they just didn't market to boys or to girls. It's a market research thing. They've proven things for mainstream toys that do not sell well for certain demographics. Of course, a lot of girls also collect Transformers toys and most of this is very old-school thinking, but this thinking was still in effect back during 2015, so Fun Pub couldn't make Fangry just because he was pinkish-purple. Anyway, after they had Ladybug all approved, a painted test shot of her Yolopark toy was unveiled online for all to see. And very shortly after this initial unveiling, TFWiki went ahead and made a new character page for her.

Now, BotCon has been around since 1994, and up until 2002, it technically wasn't an "official" event. The exclusive toys and fiction of those years were official, and Hasbro did have an onsite presence at those years' BotCons, but the events themselves weren't actually licensed conventions during those years. It wasn't until 2002 that they had actually "put a ring on it" and made BotCon an "officially official" event, with Hasbro finally and formally giving BotCon an official event license for the convention. This continued into the OTFCC years in 2003 and 2004, and when Fun Publications took over from 2005–2016, it was formally "BotCon: The Official Transformers Collectors Convention". But now, in this "post-official" era of BotCon, we here at TFWiki.Net now refer to BotCon as an "unofficial" convention, to distinguish it from the likes of Hasbro PulseCon and Cybertron Con, which currently are considered "official" convention events. I even got to talk with both Hany and Derek all about this, and explained to them at length how there have been discussions about the terminology we use here on the wiki to refer to conventions not directly endorsed or hosted by Hasbro. Thus, once Ladybug's wiki page was first created on here, the word "unofficial" was used to refer to the mention of BotCon 2025 as an "unofficial" BotCon on Ladybug's page.

However, as we shall soon learn, people in this day and age have to be careful about the words that they use, and companies have to be more careful about the words they see in use. Since the word "unofficial" was on the TFWiki page for Ladybug, regardless of the fact that it was being used in a specific context that referred only to BotCon 2025 itself and not at all to Ladybug herself, someone from Hasbro (apparently from their legal department) saw the word "unofficial" on Ladybug's page and either misunderstood or just flat out ignored the specific context of how it was being used. They saw the word and wrongfully made a connection between "unofficial" and Ladybug herself, leading them to believe that Ladybug herself was unofficial. Like a preexisting fanmade concept instead of something completely new that BotCon had more recently come up with all on their own.

Further unhelpful to this was the fact that there was no existing red Decepticon Bumblebee toy named "Ladybug" that this Yolopark figure was based on. Since all of the other kits Yolopark has released have all been based on preexisting Transformers toy characters, Hasbro assumed that this Ladybug figure would follow suit, failing to realize that this was supposed to be a brand new character making her world debut. Thus, Hasbro was like, "We technically don't have a Ladybug figure, so let's scale that back." Likewise, on Ladybug's wiki page was the character artwork by the artist who was hired to create said artwork for the toy's packaging. The artwork had been uploaded to be the page's mainpic, but which was done well in advance of the convention, before the artwork would first see use in an official capacity. The person from Hasbro saw that artwork and, having seen the word "unofficial" on the page, mistook it for fanart, further leading them to believe that this female Decepticon red Bumblebee named "Ladybug" that BotCon was wanting to make a toy of was some fan-created OC that originated from the online fandom, instead of an entirely new character conceptualized by BotCon.

With this misunderstanding in mind, Hasbro was like, "Well, we can't put out an unofficial toy. We can't do unofficial toys." And the folks at BotCon tried to explain the misunderstanding to Hasbro and convince them to let them keep the character as Ladybug. But this was one of those cases where this Hasbro person had something like 80 other projects going on in their mind, so they weren't fully listening and were like, "Oh, no no no, it's fine. It said 'unofficial'. Let's just go move on with another name." So, much to their dismay, they suggested a few other potential names (one of which was "Volks") before Hasbro decided, "Well, we just want to keep it simple. We don't want to confuse anything. Let's go with 'Cliffjumper'."

Now, Hany actually did try to convince Hasbro to reconsider: "Okay... It's not Cliffjumper. Look at the foot. It's the red Bumblebee, it's unused. And it's supposed to be a Decepticon." But Hasbro was adamant: "No, you're gonna call it 'Cliffjumper'." This is when they got the idea to make a story for the toy, to provide some kind of explanation for why this female red Bumblebee is named "Cliffjumper". And that wasn't part of the original plan for this year's Yolopark exclusives, which was to do the exact same thing they did last year: Put out some new toys but with no pack-in fiction. The most that Ladybug was originally going to get was a little blurb on the box explaining who she was and what her original deal was. It was this whole kerfuffle that led to them deciding to create some new BotCon-original comic fiction for this year's Yolopark exclusives. It's likely they would have first tried to collaborate with Yolopark on some new official fiction like this next year, but doing so this year was absolutely not originally on the table before this situation happened and led to them going forward with making new official fiction for this year. In other words, had the wiki not made Ladybug's page so soon after her initial reveal and stuck the word "unofficial" on the page, Hasbro would have never seen it and never forced the name change to occur. And if the name change hadn't happened, there never would have been any new BotCon comic fiction officially published by Yolopark in 2025. But because her page was created so quickly and did have the word "unofficial" on it, that consequently led to the creation of new official Transformers comic fiction for BotCon 2025.

That's right. WE brought this about. WE made it happen. This is the biggest "egg on our face" case of TFWiki-induced circular reporting since dimension-hopper Sideways. This was all OUR doing. All because of our business-as-usual use of the word "Unofficial". The sheer unexpected irony that this great big kerfuffle is all. On. US... That is hilarious.

This is why Jesse reached out to Jim earlier this year asking us about changing the word "unofficial" on both Ladybug's page and the Unofficial Conventions page, because Hasbro took enough issue with that word that they forced the character's name to be changed to "Cliffjumper". In our defense, we had no way of knowing what all was going on behind the scenes at the time, and couldn't have known that our use of that word would have such major repercussions on this situation. But what's done is done, so now we have a new female Cliffjumper who used to not be Cliffjumper but now she is (in both the real world and the fictional world). And as for why they simply didn't go with the name "Stinger" instead of "Ladybug" back before this whole mess happened, Jesse did suggest it early on in the conceptual phase, but Pete really doesn't like Stinger or his name all that well, and they really wanted to create something completely new, an all-new character with her own unique name never before used in Transformers, in the vein of the original characters created by BotCon back during the Beast Wars years before they started making toys of established characters.

Full disclosure, this is no real shade thrown at us or the wiki. They consider TFWiki.Net to be an excellent site and "the greatest resource of all fandoms." It's just funny how our use of the word "unofficial" created an issue that ultimately kickstarted the creation of new official BotCon fiction, sooner than later. In hindsight, they honestly are grateful and amusingly appreciate that the wiki's use of the word "unofficial" inadvertently created a bunch of new opportunities for BotCon. There are no regrets. They are thrilled that Ladybug was nixed to make way for Cliffjumper because of how it's opened up some other opportunities and ideas that they can now do with some other stuff. Though, Hany does wish we would use a different word instead.

The comics

With the name change set in stone, it was decided that there needed to be some kind of backstory for why this "Cliffjumper" looks the way she does, as opposed to being either a traditional-looking Cliffjumper or the brand-new character that she was originally meant to be. In Hany's words to Hasbro, "Listen, we can't put this toy out called 'Cliffjumper' and then not explain it. We need to at least now give some type of backstory to it. We gotta make it make sense. We can work with it, that's fine, it's cool. We'll call her 'Cliffjumper,' but we gotta give a backstory to it." So they got the idea to do a comic for her and asked if they could, and Hasbro said "Sure." And when trying to come up with a story for this new "Cliffjumper" toy, it dawned on them how the situation with this toy had some similarities with the history of other versions of Cliffjumper.

When the original Cliffjumper and Bumblebee toys came out at the same time in 1984, they shared the same transformation and each received red and yellow variants as well, but they were still different characters with different molds. But then in 2006, Classics Cliffjumper was released as a redeco of Classics Bumblebee with no new head (because Hasbro wasn't doing new heads for Classics at the time). This then opened the door for Cliffjumper to be an easy repaint for Bumblebee. They made Cliffjumper out of Bumblebee molds again and again, instead of giving him his own mold like the original. And then, to add insult to injury, there came a point in the 2010s where Cliffjumper was suddenly being killed off in multiple series, like in Transformers: Prime and the Bumblebee movie. So not only was Cliffjumper being stripped of his own identity by being treated like a "red Bumblebee" by Hasbro, but now he was being killed off enough times for people to take notice.

And now with this new Yolopark BotCon Cliffjumper, here we have the once and former Ladybug being stripped of her own identity and forced into being a Cliffjumper that was likewise just a red Bumblebee. This served as the basis for the story of her comic, a character who was stripped of her identity taking her life into her own hands to right some wrongs of the past. So they made a little three-page comic and Yolopark published it in the toy's instruction booklet. And since they made a comic for Cliffjumper, that led to them making one for the Soundblaster & Glyph set too, since it only made sense to make a comic for the main convention set if the secondary one was getting its own comic. And then they decided to do some action cards to go with the toys. Or rather, they were already planning on making some free cards for the convention, but with them making some officially-licensed comics they decided to submit those cards to Hasbro too, and those also got approved.

As for the two comics themselves, both of them are short three-page little stories that are very light in tone and meant to be very non-serious, cheeky little stories that are not at all supposed to be taken that seriously. However, I know several of us wiki users on here are still going to take them more seriously than their authors did simply because they involve such things as universal streams and (in the Cliffjumper comic's case) dimension-hopping and history-altering time-travel shenanigans. But let us try to keep in mind that these are just supposed to be fun and cheeky romps, not world-shattering epics. And to try saving everyone here from as many headaches as possible, I personally spoke to both Jesse and Pete at length about some of the nerdier aspects of these stories, thoroughly picking their brains in order to get as clear an understanding as possible about all the geeky multiversal stuff in these stories, since I recall all too well the many debates regarding universal streams that were had back in the Fun Pub years.

Here are photographs taken of all three pages of both comics, the on-package backstory text for both, and the action cards. Please read them before proceeding to the following sections.

Also released at the convention was a 5-page advertisement for the Cliffjumper toy and comic that was published in the convention's program guide, but after talking with some of the organizers, this ad is NOT something we have to cover since it was merely made as a fun little advert and did not go through Hasbro like the toys and comics did.

Creator commentary for each of them is provided below.

A Cliffjumper(s) Tale

• Pete used a pen name for this story. Back when he wrote for Fun Pub, nearly everything he had written had been co-written with other authors. But because he wrote this story by himself, he didn't feel comfortable using his real name like he had whenever he collaborated with other writers. But he still made it quite apparent that it was him, never truly hiding that fact.
• Primax 625.12 Gamma corresponds to the release date of this comic, June 12, 2025. It is not a preexisting universe, just a new one that this female Cliffjumper originally hails from.
• Even though she is a Cliffjumper, the authorial intent is that she is a Decepticon, but they couldn't give her a Decepticon symbol (even as a bonus sticker included with the toy, Hasbro didn't allow it), so she is instead drawn with a blank rubsign on her chest in the first half of the comic.
• The Cliffjumpers of this universe being generic service bots with no unique identity is one big meta joke about Cliffjumper losing his own identity over the years by Hasbro making him just a red Bumblebee redeco instead of giving him his own mold.
• Fun Pub was known for doing multiversal stories, and this comic does so too because they simply like and enjoy telling those kinds of stories. That's just kind of their thing.
• It was specified that all the Cliffjumpers of this universe were non-sentient drones. Lady Cliffjumper (a nickname not from the comic that I am merely using for simplicity's sake in order to distinguish her from the other Cliffjumpers in this comic) was mad that everyone called her "Cliffjumper" because she looked like one of them. They mocked her for how she looked like those service drones, and thus branded her as one of them. So in revenge, she's thinking that if she's going be branded a "Cliffjumper", then she's going to be the one and only Cliffjumper. Since she was supposed to be a Decepticon, she starts out as a very unheroic, villainous character.
• Pick-Up is the Bat-Robô toy from the Brazilian Transformers toyline released by Estrela.
• The entire second page has a layout error with either every single dialogue bubble and caption box being printed higher up the page than they were intended to be, or all of the panel art being printed about a centimeter lower down the page than it was supposed to be. This resulted in such things as there being a large empty whitespace at the top of the page that serves no real purpose, the universal stream caption boxes all being printed in the panels above the ones they were intended to be printed in, and some of the dialogue bubbles obscuring some parts of the artwork that were supposed to be visible (like Lady Cliffjumper's face in Panel 2). A corrected version of the page was shown in a presentation at the 8:00pm panel on Friday, and the hope is to get the comic reprinted with the correction at some later point.
• When scanning the mutliverse for other Cliffjumpers, Lady Cliffjumper finding 99.98% of all other Cliffjumpers having died in those other universes is another meta joke about how Cliffjumper kept getting killed off in a lot of 2010s fiction.
• The censored "What the #%!&???" is a Deadpool reference. a reference to the Chris Evans scene from Free Guy. (the wrong Ryan Reynolds movie was mentioned at the panel)
• The time between Lady Cliffjumper scanning the multiverse and her decision to save all the other Cliffjumpers instead of killing them is meant to be either 10-15 days or 10-15 hours.
• Uniend 911.05 Alpha is the Transformers: Prime cartoon, first mentioned in The Complete AllSpark Almanac. Now, by saving Prime Cliffjumper from his death in the first episode, this would naturally change of the course of history for that cartoon, creating a new splinter timeline stream in the process per how the streams were used in things like the Ask Vector Prime Facebook. When discussing with Pete the time-travel logic of this story, he was mainly inspired by the time travel mechanics seen in The Butterfly Effect, Back to the Future, and the Marvel UK G1 comic story "Time Wars", which all instead used self-correcting timelines that overrode and rewrote the histories of the original timelines. But, this is just his authorial intent, so we don't have to interpret it this way and are free to instead think of this as a new splinter reality being created while the original TF: Prime cartoon remains unaffected. Remember, Pete didn't think that deeply about this since it's just supposed to be a cheeky little non-serious story.
• Tyran 207.28 Gamma is the IDW Movieverse comics, also first mentioned in The Complete AllSpark Almanac. Pete was very careful about not touching the Bumblebee movie proper, so in this case it is a different reality than the one that actually featured the death in question of this Cliffjumper that Lady Cliffjumper is preventing.
  • That said, however, this raises a few questions about how the scene of Cliffjumper's death from that movie would fit into the IDW Movieverse. I talked to Pete about this directly and he said that it is meant to take place at the same point in time as it does in the Bumblebee movie, so 1987. The thing is, IDW Movieverse Cliffjumper is alive and well in comics both set in the distant past (Defiance and Foundation) and set in the 21st Century (The Reign of Starscream and Rising Storm). And in all of these, he appears with a body based on his 2007 Movie 1 Deluxe class toy, which was a red redeco of the Camaro-bodied Bumblebee. So, for an equivalent scene of his death in the Bumblebee movie to have also happened between his past and present appearances in the IDW Movieverse, he would've had to have changed bodies in the interim and then switch back to his old look sometime after this scene but before The Reign of Starscream.
  • What's more, his death being averted by Lady Cliffjumper also now becomes a linchpin in his IDW Movieverse appearances, since this now means he was supposed to die in 1987 and what we see play out in The Reign of Starscream and Rising Storm is retroactively only made possible because Lady Cliffjumper saved him two decades earlier.
  • And then there is Dropkick. He appears alongside Shatter in this scene and Pete confirmed that Lady Cliffjumper slashing at the pair didn't merely disable them, but killed them outright. This now creates a problem with how we treat 2007 Movie 1 Dropkick and Bumblebee movie Dropkick as different-universe versions of the same guy (like we do for ROTF Lockdown and AOE Lockdown). The problem comes from the fact that 2007 Dropkick appears alive and well in both Alliance and The Veiled Threat, which are both tie-ins to Revenge of the Fallen set in the 21st Century, two decades after the scene where Dropkick and Shatter are now killed in their attempt to unalive Cliffjumper in 1987. Previously, there were debates about whether we should consider the 2007 and Bumblebee Dropkicks the same or different characters, and some were in favor of splitting them. Well, thanks to this silly little comic, we may now have a reason to split the two since this comic put that scene from the Bumblebee movie in the IDW Movieverse and then killed off the Dropkick from that scene before he could go on to appear in Alliance and The Veiled Threat. It's either that, or we adopt an off-panel "he got better" excuse that, admittedly, doesn't really have any real basis to go off on (this is the kind of minutia that we wiki nerds think so deeply about. Like I said before, Pete didn't think that hard about it since this comic was just supposed to be a fun little thing). But then again, Dropkick and Shatter dying isn't made explicit in the comic, just their being attacked and disabled, so their deaths are likewise only authorial intent.
• Malgus 1207.26 Alpha is the Transformers Animated cartoon, first mentioned in the original AllSpark Almanac book. Now, you might be a little confused about this one since Cliffjumper never dies in that show or any of its tie-in media. Well, in this case, Pete explained that at some unseen point after the cartoon and its "Season 3.5" fiction, Animated Cliffjumper died. This scene here is a new one set at that future point, and Lady Cliffjumper knocks out Animated Cliffjumper, takes his place, and Toxitron is simply too dumb to realize that it isn't the Cliffjumper he knows that he's speaking to. Lady Cliffjumper declines to take the deal that would have led to Animated Cliffjumper's death, which saves his life. So in this case, since it's a brand new scene, nothing from any preexisting fiction is changed, contradicted, or overridden. We get a whole new scene that simply alters the course of a history that would have happened but now never does or needs to happen since it's something completely new. In other words, they undid something that never happened. This was done simply so they could avert another Cliffjumper death in a well-known continuity, and so they could get a cameo appearance from "Number 2", a virtual redeco of Animated Elita-1 from last year's script reading "The Sewer-Side Squad" (which we do not have to cover; Number 2's appearance here is just a silent cameo with no ties to that story besides her affiliation with Toxitron. Think like Ursa Magnus's cameo).
• Lady Cliffjumper briefly taking the place of Animated Cliffjumper and rejecting the deal with Toxitron and Number 2 is a deliberate homage to a similar scene in Back to the Future Part II.
• By the comic's third page, Lady Cliffjumper has fully adopted and embraced the notion of her being a Cliffjumper, as a nod to how the toy started as a new character with its own identity and then ended up being a version of Cliffjumper.
• Primax 984.17 Alpha is the G1 cartoon, first mentioned in The AllSpark Almanac II. This first scene is set some 18 billion years into the future, at the very end of that universe's existence.
• 18 billion years earlier, the shot of G1 Cliffjumper on a conveyor belt is a reference to the flashback in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" when the Quintessons were seen building Cybertronian robots on conveyor belts in factories. This isn't to say that G1 Cliffjumper is as old as when the Quints ruled Cybertron, no, it's just meant to show G1 Cliffjumper right before he first came online. Lady Cliffjumper simply goes back in time to his date of creation, throws his not-yet-activated body into the trash heap, and then takes his place, creating a new history where she was the Cliffjumper of the G1 cartoon. Again, Pete took inspiration from the self-overriding histories of The Butterfly Effect, Back to the Future, and "Time Wars", but we are free to interpret this as yet another splinter timeline so that the G1 cartoon as we know it remains intact and unaltered.
• Robby Musso drew the Autobot group shot faithfully recreated from the first episode of the cartoon, complete with Jesse coloring it in with the original animation errors for fun authenticity, like Sideswipe's head and Sunstreaker's shoulder.
• Lady Cliffjumper still wanting to be "the Cliffjumper" in the end is because she is meant to still be a Decepticon at heart. And the one from the G1 cartoon was chosen because many consider that version to be "the Cliffjumper". Flint Dille even thought it was hilarious because he was not a fan of the Cliffjumper of the G1 cartoon for numerous reasons. So it's sort of like a seal of approval from a G1 cartoon story editor for killing him off.
• Nothing written in this comic affects anything Hasbro is currently working on. These old continuities mean a lot to us fans, but to Hasbro they are considered dead continuities at this point, meaning this comic was able to freely play around with them like this. Back during the Fun Pub years, they couldn't touch the main continuities of the time (save for Animated which they only did in direct collaboration with Marty Isenberg and Derrick J. Wyatt, and only after that cartoon was fully over). But now, "What's it matter at this point?" Current Hasbro doesn't care, so it's whatever.
• The Cliffjumper bio art printed on both the toy's box and one of the action cards is the original G1 Bumblebee art recolored in red by Jesse. It has never been released in red until now.

The Sound of Science

• The decision to pair up Glyph and Soundblaster came about from wanting to use a legacy BotCon character and another character that both diehard fans and casual fans could appreciate, in the convention two-pack set. Glyph fit the bill for the BotCon character since Yolopark already had a Bumblebee mold that BotCon hadn't used yet. As for Soundblaster, diehards would recognize him as him, while casuals could recognize that he is a version of Soundwave.
• When coming up with a story for the comic, Jesse struggled to think of a scenario that would bring Glyph and Soundblaster together since it sounded weird that these two would fight each other or even encounter each other at all. Glyph doesn't even fight since she's a non-combatant civilian scientist and explorer. But with Soundblaster being "an evolution of Soundwave," he would have some interest in science and figuring out how things work. So Jesse came up with an idea that Glyph was searching for an ancient artifact for the sake of history that would also happen to have value to the Decepticons. "She doesn't care if it's powerful, but Soundblaster wants it because it is powerful. So that would be how they would eventually meet each other." But since Glyph doesn't fight, "they gotta encounter something else that would be the conflict." This is where the Vector Prime hologram came into the story, which would explain the nature of the artifact as a warning to those seeking it.
• The ending of the comic was inspired by the old Masters of the Universe pack-in comics where the stories had open-ended conclusions that were like "There was a finale, but there wasn't a finale because you kept playing the story with the toys."
• Primax 704.31 Epsilon corresponds to July 31, 2004, which was the first day of OTFCC 2004, at which several pieces of Transformers fiction were released. At first I thought this might be the world of the BotCon-original Transformers: The Wreckers comics since the second and third issues of that series were released at that convention (well, "rereleased" in the second issue's case), and because this story features Glyph on the planet Archa Nine, both of which were featured in those two Wreckers comics. However, it becomes apparent by the end of this story that this is actually the world of "Shell Game", the convention program comic that starred Megazarak.
  • Previously, Jim Sorenson had greatly fleshed out the world of "Shell Game" via the Ask Vector Prime Facebook, but the AVP version of "Shell Game" was presented as a Robots in Disguise 2001 universe, designated as Viron 704.31 Epsilon. When discussing this with Jesse, I initially thought that the wiki could simply reconcile this new Primax designation with the old Viron one by simply adding it to the existing one's page as an "also known as" kind of alternate name, with a redirect going to the same page, since we already have so much cross-pollination between Viron and Primax articles as it is.
  • HOWEVER, I then reread what all had been written about this universe on AVP and realized that reconciliation was impossible, since the AVP "Shell Game" world was way more ingrained within the RID 2001 cartoon's world than I had previously remembered. So, I talked to Jesse again at the convention, and then reached out to Jim on Discord after the convention, with a new proposal that sounded workable to both of them: To simply treat the vanilla "Shell Game" comic's events as existing in two different worlds, one in Viron that also includes all the AVP stuff, and one in Primax that also includes "The Sound of Science", leaning into the original ambiguity of the comic's vague continuity from back when it first came out.
• Glyph's little drone Dustoff-6 appears to be a virtual redeco of the Generations Thrilling 30 Legends class Targetmaster version of Blazemaster.
• The last page further leans into the original ambiguity of "Shell Game" by having the hologram of Vector Prime act a little confused if this universe is a Primax one or a Viron one (despite the comic's first page establishing with certainty that this is a Primax one, making Vector's confusion feel like a cheeky nod to the fact that there also exists a Viron version of this universe).
• As a jokey aside, Glyph remarks that Vector Prime has at times been "known to have... embellished" things that he's said.

The script reading

There was also a live script reading performance titled "Unpaid Bounty", which was advertised as both a Yolopark-sponsored event and a tie-in to the Cliffjumper pack-in comic. It was a comedic story (as is typical of these script readings) set in the world of the G1 cartoon, or rather, the altered G1 cartoon created at the end of "A Cliffjumper(s) Tale", wherein Lady Cliffjumper had replaced the original Cliffjumper as "the Cliffjumper" of that universe. The story was set in the year 2010, a few years after the events of "The Rebirth", during the time of a hypothetical fifth season of the G1 cartoon that featured characters from the 1988 toy range (like Doubledealer and the Firecons) interacting with preexisting characters from the cartoon (like Goldbug, Sideswipe, and Swoop). While the actual cartoon did get a "Best Of" kind of fifth season with new live action featuring Powermaster Optimus Prime and the human boy Tommy Kennedy, those segments weren't referenced or acknowledged in this script reading.

This script reading was fully recorded and is supposed to be released online at some later point, complete with a proper sponsorship intro from Yolopark.

Afterward, I talked a great deal with both Jesse and Pete about the Yolopark sponsorship of the script reading and the specificities of Hasbro's approval when it comes to convention fiction and the old Collectors Club fiction. Yolopark did agree to sponsor the script reading, with actual sponsor fees exchanged between both parties. I also learned that there was a LOT of fiction from back during the Fun Pub era that Hasbro never actually looked over for approval. Things like the online prose stories, the convention script readings, and every single post made on the Ask Vector Prime Facebook and the others of its ilk. Fun Pub was given full approval to create these pieces of fiction, but no one from Hasbro actually read any of those things before they were published. The only things Hasbro actually did look over for hands-on approval were mainly the printed media, like the comics released at the convention or in the magazines. Physical media. Digital and verbal media, meanwhile, were never examined by Hasbro's eyes, but that's because they didn't need to be. The only approval that Fun Pub had from Hasbro in regards to publishing all that non-physical media was merely the permission to make it.

Now, this is NOT a call for us to remove every single piece of Fun Pub-made media that Hasbro never actually looked over. Perish the thought. This is merely to explain that Hasbro's approval of everything Fun Pub ever released wasn't so cut and dry. There was more nuance to it. And for this year's script reading, BotCon actually went to the effort to make a formal arrangement with Yolopark and pay them a proper sponsor fee for the script reading, which is even set to be released online with Yolopark's logo in the intro. They even consulted Flint Dille and Michael Charles Hill over the story, two writers who were directly involved with the G1 cartoon back in the day. Everything was done completely above board and on the level, arguably even moreso than back when Fun Pub would produce script readings.

Cliffjumper herself

With all that said and done, it now comes down to the question of, exactly, how we are to cover this new Cliffjumper. Originally, we had simply given her her own page back when she was named "Ladybug". But we've since deleted her page when it came to light that the toy would be named "Cliffjumper" instead. But when that was first made known, it was clear that she would still be a female character even as a new Cliffjumper, but we also had no insider knowledge of anything that went on behind the scenes. But now we do. Now, we know everything. And then some.

Even though both Pete and Hany insisted in person that she is still supposed to be a new Decepticon character that was once named "Ladybug" in her home universe before ultimately accepting and taking possession of the "Cliffjumper" name that society had mockingly branded her with, I don't think we can actually use that name because it is never actually used in any of the canonical material that she is featured in. Her toy bio only uses "Cliffjumper" (because it's just the G1 toy bio with male pronouns changed to female, which Hasbro had no objections about), her action cards likewise only use "Cliffjumper", and the comic only goes as far as Pick-Up using "La-aa" at one point before she corrects him to say "Cliffjumper".

The script reading, meanwhile, has a scene where Goldbug affectionately refers to her as "Cliffjumper, my favorite ladybug," a nickname that she finds irksome and wants Goldbug to stop calling her that. The script reading also has an obvious callback to her backstory in the comic that jokingly acknowledges her having been a Decepticon from another universe, phrased to begin with the words "It's not like you're a..." And she deliberately abstains from confirming (or denying) that statement, all in a firmly tongue-in-cheek fashion typical to these convention script readings. And the rest of the story didn't press the issue any further.

(And we certainly can't use "Lady Cliffjumper" as that nickname is purely an invention of my own making, created strictly for this report.) EDIT: Turns out the name "Lady Cliffjumper" actually DOES appear on the back of the toy's box written in Cybertronian text! I completely overlooked that when I came up with that nickname for her!

The way I see it, we have a few options to explore:

• Option 1: We treat her as just an alternate-universe version of G1 Cliffjumper who happens to be female (since she never actually wore a Decepticon symbol or claimed to be a Decepticon in this comic), and put her toy and fiction on G1 Cliffjumper's article. However, she does interact with another G1 Cliffjumper at one point in the comic, and the Cliffjumpers of her native universe are all visually based on G1 Cliffjumper while she is not (as she's based on G1 Bumblebee's red toy).
• Option 2: We lean into the original intent of her being a new character and give her back her own article, but retitle it "Cliffjumper" with some sort of disambiguation tag. Though, we cannot use "(Yolopark)" since Yolopark is already making a model kit of the traditional G1 Cliffjumper, so there would be two Yolopark Cliffjumpers. An amusing option would be "Cliffjumper (Ladybug)", but I'm not sure we can go that far.
• Option 3: We lean into both the original intent of her being a new character and the authorial intent that her original name was "Ladybug" in her home dimension before she embraced "Cliffjumper" as her new name (after all, Pick-Up almost used this name before she stopped him), bringing back the deleted "Ladybug" article with that title intact, and note in her intro that she eventually changed her name to "Cliffjumper" (though, this option feels the most cavalier, going against Hasbro's final say on this character's identity).

There may be other options to consider but I'm drawing a blank on them at this point.

Though, we'll likely also have to create a new "Cliffjumper (drone)" article for the generic service bots in her home universe, since they are all mass-produced non-sentient drones and not individuals like G1 Cliffjumper is, despite being based visually on him. Think like the Vehicon drones vs. the Vehicon Generals of Beast Machines.

Comments section

Feel free to discuss any of the above in this section. --Sabrblade (talk) 01:20, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Whoa. Now that was... A lot to take in. Very detailed and well documented, Sabr. And all because a legal representative speed-read the Ladybug page and understood "this official Ladybug is exclusive to the unofficial Transformer convention BotCon" as "this official Ladybug is exclusive to the unofficial Transformer convention BotCon". Wowzers. Thank you for all your hard work!
For the page writing and naming debate, my suggestion would be to follow Option 2, but the disambiguation tag is a problem. Is there any precedent on the wiki for titling a page as "Name (Botcon)"? We've had pages titled "Name (3H)" but those pages 3H is the publisher of the stories, in this case it was Yolopark that published the comic in the instructions, which would lead us to calling the page "Cliffjumper (Yolopark)" if we were to follow the 3H naming scheme, which isn't ideal. Is calling the page "Cliffjumper (Ladybug)" not an option? Calling her page "Cliffjumper (Botcon 2025)" is a mouthful.
Side note, we may need to update Misconceptions and urban legends about Transformers#Other to reflect how five dead Cliffjumpers influenced the story for Ladybug. --Singularity (talk) 04:44, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

My gut instinct was pretty cut and dry. We should restore Ladybug and move it somewhere else to preserve the edit history; maybe to "Cliffjumper (A Cliffjumper(s) Tale)" or "Cliffjumper (ACT)" or even "Cliffjumper (Ladybug)", with notes sections on her own page and that of the comic story copiously explaining the mix-up and her origins as Ladybug. We could acknowledge the Ladybug name in notes, but as it is never used in fiction, she'd have to be referred to as Cliffjumper throughout. (I'm trying to think of a similar last minute name change on a solicited toy that's not as severe as Over-Run – Detour? Ellbat? Fistitron? ... Bumblbebee??)

BUT then I sat down and read everything again. And I'm not discounting my approach above, but I am admitting that it's properly wiki-brained in a potentially reader-unfriendly way. Her name is Cliffjumper, she comes from a G1 universe, her bio card describes every G1 Cliffjumper ever, and the ending of her story sets her up to spend 18 billion years in the G1 universe. She's G1 Cliffjumper. Her tiny interactions with the native Sunbow Cliffjumper aren't significant enough to make having two separate pages a necessity, in the same vein as both Optimus Primes in "From Here to Alternity" sharing a namespace (technically). So to counter-proposal my own proposal, we document she/her Cliffjumper's stuff on Cliffjumper (G1) and slap a Category:Variable gender characters on there and – to give a one-stop-shop hub for all the behind the scenes details that doesn't disappear into a notes section significantly further down the page – resurrect Ladybug to live in the cursed half-life of Category:Things that don't exist to fully document her development history. That's right – I'm emancipating the Decepticon Red Body Bumblebee Who Would Have Had No Pack-In Fiction away from the Fully Realised Dimension Hopper Cliffjumper, since without this mixup, BotCon wouldn't have produced a comic explaining the discrepancy in the first place!

Regardless, I'm feeling that we have to cover the script reading if only as a piece of Apocrypha, since it fundamentally enlightens the creator intent behind "A Cliffjumper(s) Tale". May god have mercy on our souls. — TheLastGherkin (talk) 05:47, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Another example would be Cackle. And Hyperlinq. Or the Cyberjet versions of Air Raid, Jetfire and Strafe, which were originally intended as mere running change variants of Skyjack, Hooligan and Space Case, and were sold as such in Europe.--Nevermore (talk) 07:05, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

I appreciate the very detailed summary, Sabr. It looks like the official licensed story has her as having always been Cliffjumper, never renamed, one multiversal variant out of many. Which would basically make her Galvatron II of Cliffjumpers. With just one tiny appearance, we could probably get away with featuring her on the Cliffjumper (G1) page.

Note that if licensed storyline material had said this character started out as not-Cliffjumper and at one point had another name, not officially revealed, then she shouldn't be Cliffjumper (G1), she should be Cliffjumper (Yolopark). That YP created a CG1 kit wouldn't matter since that would never distinguish the G1 character. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 07:22, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

The story states that the "Cliffjumper" name was forced on Ladybug via similarity to the Cliffjumpers of her universe, though? Pick-Up calls her "La-" before being interrupted, even. (Yolopark) is fine, we don't need to overthink it just because Yolopark is making a Cliffjumper (G1) toy. Saix (talk) 07:47, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

It reads more like she's reclaiming the Cliffjumper name to me. It's she herself who interrupts Pick-Up to prevent him from calling her a name she has rejected. — TheLastGherkin (talk) 08:05, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Yes, she's reclaiming the name, but it wasn't her original name. "Endlessly my allies and enemies alike have branded 'me' with that identity." It reads as a meta joke of Ladybug/BotCon going "fine, I'll commit to being Cliffjumper". Saix (talk) 08:22, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

1 - Good lord. 2 - "Cliffjumper (Yolopark)" is probably fine, with a note in the G1 Cliffjumper entry where appropriate. -hx (talk) 09:47, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

I'm pretty firmly against coverage of the script reading. Releasing a toy in a Hasbro-sanctioned licensed toyline is one thing, but having a licensor's name on a thing with no Hasbro involvement in any capacity feels too far removed. Seems like a case where we put the important bits in the trivia sections of the relevant pages, and leave it at that. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 14:59, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Like I said above, every single script reading from the old days had "no Hasbro involvement in any capacity" either. Just because Hasbro was at those conventions doesn't mean they had any say about those old script readings (and no, that is NOT a call for their removal either). That's even how the likes of TFCon can get away with their own script readings. Hasbro doesn't care. --Sabrblade (talk) 15:21, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

But it was still under the auspices of a Hasbro-sanctioned event, and this one doesn't have that, even if the level of "involvement" is the same. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 15:24, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

The 1998 script reading wasn't at a Hasbro-sanctioned event. Those pre-2002 BotCons were like when Hasbro showed up and presented new toys at MegaCon earlier this year. We're certainly not gonna make a MegaCon 2025 page, are we? --Sabrblade (talk) 15:29, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

If those articles were made today, I think there'd be a much larger debate as to whether they stick around. The whole thing just feels out of scope. Like if someone tried making a page for the episode of Death Race where Optimus Prime appeared on the grounds that "well, Rooster Teeth was producing War for Cybertron Trilogy at the time, so that makes it kinda official, right?" It genuinely feels like a step too far, and potentially leads to a slippery slope as to what "counts" for our purposes. -- Cyberlink420 (talk) 15:36, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

I just now found out that Hasbro wasn't even at BotCon 1995. --Sabrblade (talk) 15:41, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

We cannot fairly compare the conference scene from 20-30 years ago to today. Script readings then were more newsworthy, especially when there was only one major conference every year and it was quasi-official, with the current design team attending and unveiling an entire year's worth of product and sometimes giving us a tour of their offices. I think the end of Hasbro's licensed involvement with Botcon and moving into their self-produced showcase events serves as a period at the end of the sentence. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 16:15, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Also, for whatever it’s worth, all the 3H script reading were referenced in the comics that did get Hasbro supervision, and so did most of the FunPub ones. There’s no one around to reference this one. Escargon (talk) 16:18, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

That was only because the development timelines of those cases allowed for it. The 3H and Fun Pub tie-in script readings were made either before or concurrent to the development of the prose and comics that tied into them. The Cliffjumper comic was the first piece of fiction written for this year, followed by the other comic, and then the script reading, so there was no way for the comic to refer back to something that didn't yet exist at the time of its creation.

Also, Thy, the office tours you mentioned only happened once, in 2007, a Fun Pub era year, and which only happened because it was held in Rhode Island that year where Hasbro is headquartered. --Sabrblade (talk) 16:30, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Yes, like I said, conferences sure were different 20 years ago. --Thylacine 2000 (talk) 16:39, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Yeah, especially since they were called "conventions". --Sabrblade (talk) 16:44, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Saying this largely as someone who has no opinion on these pages (I know I did all the old Fun Pub stuff but that’s my limit, I have no intention to touch these articles) but the Rooster Teeth comparison rings as false to me, since as I understand it that company at least had different divisions working on things across two different networks (best correlation I can think of to it is that Robot Chicken and Animatrd were being produced by Cartoon Network under entirely seperate divisions) while the Yolopark stuff was all under the same umbrella at one place. Not saying the script reading NEEDS a page mind you, but that’s my two cents. Escargon (talk) 16:06, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

I'm voting "no" on the script reading. That's a degree of separation too far. --M Sipher (talk) 16:40, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Seems it's already heading this way but I do think she should have her own article, in the same vein of the ROTB Wheeljack split: While she does take up the name and even usurps G1 Cliffjumper, she was conceived as a separate character from him. As for the disamb name, I think "(Yolopark)" or "(BotCon)" are fine? I don't know what traditionally gets used for such situations (if there have been any before). "(Ladybug)" may be a stretch since it's not a name she's officially associated with now. Or a goofy option would be to name the page "The Cliffjumper" since that's what she's trying to be. —BluJayWarrior (talk) 17:55, 18 June 2025 (EDT)

Isn’t the purpose of the Apocrypha tag for these edge cases? I’d say the script reading is in the same vein as Alignment or the Trial of Megatron. Cylasbreakdown (talk) 03:44, 9 July 2025 (EDT)