Sideways (disambiguation)

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"He's Sideways! He's Sideways! You're Sideways! I'm Sideways! Are there any other Sidewayses I should know about?"

If you encounter a 'bot going by the name Sideways, do not trust him! Throughout the multiverse, the name is associated with cheats and liars. Most oftentimes, a Sideways's allegiances are to be questioned. Many of them claim to be helpful allies, but more often than not, they work for a greater evil. Some would assume Sideways to be cowardly, but their true strength oftentimes lies in their speed and their cunning. A quick getaway today can assure that greater machinations come to fruition tomorrow. Some Sideways are known to possess dimension-hopping capabilities, and tracking which Sideways is responsible for what in whatever universe can be a tad confusing. Some of them have claimed to travel to other universes to slaughter and impersonate their native counterpart, or that Sideways are cloned from one another to fulfill their roles in multiple parallel events. Sideways are true sowers of confusion, and even if one were able to see past all the lies, one would still be hard-pressed to make sense of the chaos that they leave in their wake.

Conceptual history

The idea of Sideways being a dimensional traveler who's the same across his cross-continuity appearances has been built up over time, with fans and writers extrapolating wildly from loose connections between his earliest incarnations.

The original Sideways, a 2002 Robots in Disguise toy, was packaged with Axer, whose on-package bio was adapted near verbatim from his original Generation 1 Tech Spec, with new material implying he'd crossed dimensions via a black hole. The online bio for Armada Sideways toy, released a few months later, similarly matched that of the Robots in Disguise character, with new material suggesting that his duplicity was the result of being pulled in two mental directions by his Mini-Cons—an aspect ignored by both cartoons and comics, which simply portrayed him as a pure agent of Unicron. Fans reasoned that if Axer was a dimension-hopper, then Sideways must be too.

It was misinformation surrounding the 2004 Robotmasters franchise that kicked this idea into overdrive. Robotmasters Sideways is named, colored, and described in bio in homage to the Legends of the Microns/Armada character. This alone would not imply them to be the exact same individual, but at the time fans understood the Robotmasters story to be about Transformers converging from various time periods and dimensions, not unlike the contemporaneous Universe series—when in truth, it's only time travel taking place within the main Japanese continuity. Cementing this idea was a claim that the Robotmasters website had included a note declaring the character's first toy to be the earlier imported-from-the-US Robots in Disguise Sideways figure—a claim that, years later, would be found to be totally spurious, with no evidence of such a note ever having existed.

Sideways subsequently appeared in the 2005 Cybertron franchise, intended by Hasbro to be the same faction-swapping character from Armada (a fact cemented by supplemental material like Ask Vector Prime). This idea was dropped in Japan, where he was given an entirely new name, "Noisemaze", with the cartoon—which was created to be separate from Armada and Energon—treating him as a new character.

In the 2009 movie Revenge of the Fallen, a character called Sideways appeared, with absolutely nothing else connecting him to any prior Sidewayses. However, riffing on the by-then-common fandom perception of the character, 2011's The Allspark Almanac II cheekily presented an Animated "Land General Sideways" whose design combined aspects of the Armada, Cybertron and Revenge of the Fallen characters, explicitly described as hailing from another dimension and implied to go on to become Revenge of the Fallen Sideways. Hidden Ask Vector Prime text in the Almanac's 2015 compilation successor The Complete Allspark Almanac would go on to explicitly state that, while not all incarnations of Sideways are the same exact character, all prior incarnations of Sideways were dimensional travelers who had crossed between multiple universal clusters.

Of course, if all that seems confusing, it's nothing compared to the subsequent Facebook-based Ask Vector Prime feature. Helmed by Almanac author Jim Sorenson, the online column was for a time taken over by Sideways himself, sporting the Revenge of the Fallen character's design and a goofy, snarky personality similar to that of Cybertron Sideways. This Sideways claimed to have been the one behind pretty much every instance of the character seen in the past, as well as many, many other events and disasters across the multiverse—however, in a depiction that seems even more fitting in retrospect, he was a self-admitted liar who seemingly took delight in confusing and frustrating everyone.

“	Everything you think you know about me was a lie told by me to confuse someone, or conjecture from someone who'd be in no position to know. So yeah, maybe I'm a fragment of Unicron, because maybe Planet X used to BE Unicron. And maybe I'm his avatar made manifest and untethered once he collapsed into a giant singularity. And maybe I'm from the Cybertronian Empire. And maybe I'm just an ordinary Autobot who went crazy from Powerlinxing to the wrong Mini-Cons. Maybe I'm all of those things, or none. And you know what the best part is? You'll. Never. Know.	”
—Sideways on his identity situation, Ask Sideways.

Given the ambiguity that results from a mixture of retcons and unreliable narrators, and the potentially enormous user-unfriendliness of sticking strictly to the "canon" versions of the character, we have decided to present each continuity family's version(s) of Sideways on their own page. Whether you choose to think of them as being all the same character, or all strictly separate, is up to you.

Major Sidewayses

• 
  "Unicron Trilogy" Sideways
• 
  Revenge of the Fallen Sideways

Full list of Sidewayses

• 2002 — Sideways, the Autobot from the 2001 Robots in Disguise franchise.
• 2002 — Sideways, the agent of Unicron from Armada.
• 2004 — Sideways, the Decepticon spy from Robotmasters.
• 2009 — Sideways, the Decepticon from Revenge of the Fallen.
• 2010 — Sideways, the Decepticon from Animated.
• 2015 — Your mom, who may or may not be another instance of Sideways.
• All other separate iterations, variations and other manifestations of the previously mentioned characters.

Other things called "Sideways"

• 2015 — "Sideways", the fourteenth episode of the 2015 Robots in Disguise cartoon.

Not to be confused with...

• Sideswipe
• Side Burn
• Sidetrack

Fiction

The Complete AllSpark Almanac

According to Vector Prime, the Sidewayses of the multiverse included:

• The Sideways of Tyran 509.12 Zeta, who traveled to Aurex 402.0 Gamma.
• A Sideways from the Viron cluster, who traveled to Aurex 802.23 Alpha, and made his way to "at least two or three other clusters" after that.
• Multiple separate Sidewayses from Tyran 609.23-XP Kappa, at least one of which traveled to the Iocus cluster via Nexus Zero.
• A Sideways from the Uniend cluster who briefly visited a Rovio stream.
• A Sideways from Fornax 813.0 Gamma, who traveled to Tyran 207.28 Gamma, survived being bisected, and was sent undercover to infiltrate Primax Autobots.

Vector Prime hoped this would clarify things, which was nice of him, if perhaps a little naive. The Complete AllSpark Almanac

TransTech

One Sideways traveled to Axiom Nexus and seized control of Vector Prime's Axiom Nexus News column. After Sideways cheerily said he was probably lying about everything, he said he thought all other Sidewayses were losers so he killed and replaced them, implied that he was the Revenge of the Fallen Sideways, and then went on to claim he wasn't Tarantulas and then implied that he was Tarantulas. His reign of uninformative terror was finally brought to an end when the TransTechs tracked him down, due to his frequent tripping of the Axiom Nexus Auto-Censors, and began trying to break into his hideout in the Heap. Shortly afterwards, a question from David Willis caused his head to explode, forcing him to temporarily Headmaster-link with Rook and escape to parts unknown.

Man, Sideways was a dick. Ask Sideways