User:Broadside/Sandbox:ContinuityFamilies
A continuity family is TFWiki.net's term for a group of distinct but closely-related individual continuities. It is not an official term, but it is an extremely useful organizational tool, providing the essence of how we divide one page from another.
For example, the Generation 1 franchise has always comprised multiple separate continuities, most prominently the original cartoon and comic books. Therefore, there is no single "Generation 1 continuity", but many (many many) related ones. It would be madness to make a separate page for every single incarnation, of, say, Starscream, so we group all of his portrayals across the Generation 1 franchise into the same article, considering them a united "family." And, just as a single franchise can contain multiple continuities, so can multiple franchises encompass a single continuity. For example, Beast Wars is a separate franchise from Generation 1, but its storyline draws heavily upon Generation 1 continuity, so it is considered part of the same continuity family, and Starscream's appearance in the Beast Wars cartoon is also included on the same page.
Determining where one continuity family ends and a new one begins is an inherently subjective matter and occasionally a cause of debate (see Quibbles below). One general guideline that fits most cases is that a new family is begun when a series is a) a fresh continuity, b) within a separate franchise, and c) significantly different in cast, theme, style, etc. Robots in Disguise was the first series to break from tradition in all three criteria and therefore form a new family.
Under this organisational scheme, most Transformers media falls into one of seven categories:
- Generation 1
- Robots in Disguise
- The Unicron Trilogy
- The live-action film series
- Transformers Animated
- The "Aligned" continuity family
- Cyberverse
Other series exist that do not clearly fall into one of these (such as the Go-Bots toyline, Kre-O shorts, Battle Masters and, er, Angry Birds), but the majority of Transformers stories reflect one of these "visions" of the brand. Though some fan-targeted official media has homaged TFWiki's use of continuity families in the form of universal clusters, Hasbro itself notably does not subscribe to the idea of the brand being divided into "families" — to them, Optimus Prime is Optimus Prime is Optimus Prime, no matter the differences in style and continuity.
Specific continuity families
Generation 1
The source from which all other Transformers continuities are ultimately derived, the Generation 1 continuity family was made up of multiple separate continuities from the very start; the Marvel comic, its UK-exclusive side-stories, the original cartoon and the childrens' storybooks ran side-by-side from 1984, each telling related, but incompatible takes on the same basic story ideas. This continued into the era of the Generation 2 revival in the 1990s.
While the "Beast Era" marked a significant departure in terms of visuals, cast and story, the events of the Beast Wars cartoon firmly establish it and its sequel series as part of the Generation 1 "mythos". The Generation 1 setting and characters have been revived and revisited since the 2000s with comic series from Dreamwave and IDW, new Generation 1 toys and other media. TakaraTomy, in particular, has focused on expanding its own take on the Generation 1 cartoon timeline.
The Generation 1 family is by far the most extensive in the Transformers multiverse, primarily due to being the most iconic iteration of the brand — after all, if you ask someone what Optimus Prime looks like, most people will picture the original. Perhaps as a self-perpetuating side effect of this, there's a tendency by fans to view new media or toys as "G1 by default" if it doesn't fit clearly into one of the other families.
Robots in Disguise
The first Transformers series to break from the Generation 1 family was the 2001 Robots in Disguise franchise. Curiously, it originated as Car Robots, a Japanese-exclusive series that — while not clearly placed in any existing continuity — was not treated as any different from previous Japanese-exclusive series that fit loosely into the Generation 1/Beast Era timeline. However, when Hasbro imported the series to fill time during the production of Armada, the series was treated as a full reboot, with faction leaders Fire Convoy and Gigatron reimagined as new versions of Optimus Prime and Megatron.
Thanks to the lack of any overt ties to the Generation 1 series in Car Robots, western fans initially assumed that it had also been intended as a full reboot, and thus there was much uproar when a timeline from the Japanese Kiss Players franchise explained how the events of the series fit into the Japanese Generation 1 cartoon timeline.
The scope of the Robots in Disguise continuity family is limited, including only a television series, a short comic story from the 20th Anniversary Transformers Summer Special and many characters who only exist as toys. Perhaps as a result of its confusing origins or its relatively low profile, most revisiting of Robots in Disguise concepts and characters since the series ended have come in Generation 1 series, such as the IDW Generation 1 continuity and the Transformers Legends manga.
Unicron Trilogy
The "Unicron Trilogy" is the first Transformers continuity designed from the ground up as a full reboot, with Transformers: Armada marking the first time Hasbro and TakaraTomy worked together to create a new Transformers franchise from the start; as such, it includes reimagined versions of classic Generation 1 characters like Optimus Prime, Megatron, and Starscream.
The Unicron Trilogy, so named by Aaron Archer for the key role Unicron plays in each series, includes the Armada, Energon, and Cybertron toylines and all related media. While both Armada and Energon were supported by both cartoons and comic books, the collapse of Dreamwave Productions meant that the only tie-in comics for Cybertron were exclusive to the Transformers Collectors' Club.
Though Armada, Energon and Cybertron were all conceived as being part of the same universe by the Hasbro and Takara teams, the Japanese animation studio responsible for the Japanese version of Cybertron (known as Galaxy Force) ignored this, with Galaxy Force thus having no ties to the previous Unicron Trilogy cartoons. The English dub of the series tried to smooth over continuity and retroactively fit Cybertron into the timeline of the other two cartoons, and in 2007, Takara used a timeline on their website to retcon Galaxy Force into being a sequel to Micron Legend (Armada) and Super Link (Energon) as initially intended.
Live-action film series
Perhaps rivaling Generation 1 as the most prominent continuity family, the live-action movie family is built around 2007's Transformers, its sequels Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon, Age of Extinction and The Last Knight, and its prequel Bumblebee. The films are supported by a massive array of supporting fiction, from books to comics to video games; however, this tie-in material often contradicts other tie-in stories, and for obvious reasons, the movies will happily ignore and overwrite elements of these side stories if needed.
With the films themselves generally disinterested in exploring continuity between different installments, it has generally fallen to tie-in material to reconcile and smooth over unexplained elements of the timeline... though even this proved insufficient when The Last Knight and Bumblebee each provided completely contradictory backstories to the original movie. As such, even the film series itself contains multiple distinct continuities. Isn't that fun?
Animated
Released in late 2007 to capitalize on the launch of the live-action movie, the Transformers Animated cartoon introduced a new family with a distinctive visual style and story featuring a young, inexperienced Optimus Prime leading a team of Autobots in a post-Great War setting. The cartoon lasted for three seasons, supplemented by a comic miniseries, a Japanese manga adaptaion and other ancillary fiction.
Outside of a BotCon-exclusive story and toy set and a series of reference books, the Animated continuity family hasn't been revisited in any major way since the cartoon ended, but it remains a fan-favorite series for its sense of humor and strong characterization.
Aligned
Debuting in 2010, the "Aligned" continuity family — a semi-official name coined by fans — represented an effort by Hasbro to "align" their media output, creating the Binder of Revelation: a universe bible that all subsequent works, set in a new singular continuity, would be based on. Things didn't exactly turn out this way, however; the necessity of allowing individual creative teams flexibility led to many details not lining up, with the result that the overall "story" only really fits together if you squint.
The Binder of Revelation drew heavily on previous iterations of the brand, attempting to create the "definitive" Transformers continuity by picking and choosing the best elements from Generation 1, the Unicron Trilogy, Animated, the movies and more. "Aligned" launched with War for Cybertron and Transformers: Exodus in June 2010, chronicling the origins of the Transformers' war; both would later be followed up with the sequels Fall of Cybertron and Exiles. Later in 2010, the Transformers: Prime cartoon debuted the "present-day" story of the Transformers universe with a more serious show focused on long-term storytelling, and The Covenant of Primus would later reveal more of the history found within the Binder, including the full story of the Thirteen original Cybertronians.
Other media in the Aligned continuity family includes the preschooler-focused Rescue Bots and its sequel Rescue Bots Academy, the Robots in Disguise cartoon that served as a sequel to Prime, and the Japanese-exclusive Transformers Go!, along with various pieces of ancillary media and toylines.
Cyberverse
Quibbles
The concept of a continuity family is not an official one; it was generated by editors of this wiki as an organizational tool. While the "universal stream" concept lends an air of canonicity to the idea, so far only a small handful of continuities have been officially categorized according to that schema. So for the bulk of Transformers fiction, deciding where the lines between families are drawn is a subjective business, balancing both abstract guidelines and practical considerations.
Universe (2003)
The 2003 Universe franchise features a cross-dimensional storyline that touches upon every continuity family that existed up to that point (with even a character imported from the Go-Bots franchise). However, because the "home base" of the Universe stories is post-Beast Machines Cybertron, it is considered here to be part of the Generation 1 family.
IDW Generation 1 continuity
IDW Publishing's ongoing Generation 1 comics are included within the Generation 1 continuity family by virtue of being part of the Generation 1 franchise. However, looking beyond the fact that the Transformers in the cast are almost entirely Generation 1 characters, the continuity is nevertheless a full reboot. The backstory has little to do with any pre-existing history, and many of the characters are portrayed in unique ways. The question of whether or not, for example, the IDW version of Galvatron should be considered the "same character" as previous incarnations has been a contentious one, and it cuts to the core of where we consider an old family to end and a new one to begin.
Live-action film series
Where the IDW examples demonstrate this wiki's willingness to include diverse and fairly dissimilar continuities in the same family, the live-action film series shows the opposite. Several members of the main cast are clearly based on Generation 1 archetypes, but the aesthetic, backstory, and tone are different enough that many consider the films to be a new family. This was a focus of no small disagreement when the first movie franchise appeared, as some people considered the movie to be analogous to the IDW comics. Had the franchise never grown beyond the movies, it's entirely possible that the wiki would have ended up including it under the Generation 1 umbrella; however, the staggering breadth of movie-related media has made that option wildly impractical.
