Character
A character is a fictional depiction of an entity, usually a Transformer, that might or might not have a toy representation. If there is a toy, the character is usually, but not always, based on the toy and intended as a means of promoting said toy.
Over the course of the numerous Transformers series and toy lines, some characters have changed their names, while in other cases, characters have appeared that share a name with another character but are separate individuals. Many characters also have counterparts in other continuities they may or may not share a lot of similarities with.
Hasbro's attitude towards the importance of characters has changed a lot since the launch of the Transformers brand in 1984.
What is a character?
Broadly speaking, every individual Transformer, human, alien, or other sentient being covered on this wiki is a character. Remember that sentient includes non-sapient beings like the Insecticon Bob and Freya the dog, as well as "are they technically alive or not?" artificial intelligences like the Diagnostic Drone and T-AI.
Most characters has received some kind of fiction that describes their personality, defining characteristics, and unusual abilities; this may be as simple as a bio on the back of a toy packaging, or as elaborate as an appearance in one of the many live-action Transformers films. And those that don't have fiction of some form but do have a toy? Well, they're still characters.
In many cases, characters can appear in multiple different works of fiction simultaneously; iconic characters, like Optimus Prime or Bumblebee, have starred in multiple distinct continuities, often at the same time. These depictions generally adhere to a singular "idea" of what the character represents, but these individual portrayals can vary wildly between tellers: see the Hasbro/Marvel depiction of Chromedome as a quiet computer programmer versus his The Headmasters portrayal as a hot-headed shonen hero versus IDW Publishing's portrayal as a moody mnemosurgeon. Similar cases exist throughout Transformers media. In some cases, one particularly popular incarnation of a character may go on to inform future developments; while based on his original Headmaster toy, the bio of Chromedome's 2016 Titans Return toy, for instance, notes that the character can perform mnemosurgery on other 'bots.
In some cases, non-toy characters may appear in several different supporting media, such as the various humans who have gone by the surname "Witwicky." Some of them might be turned into toys later on, due to the (often unexpected) popularity of those characters; the various Witwickys, for instance, have received several toys under the Masterpiece banner as accessories alongside the larger Transformer figures.
Relevance
As a toymaker first and foremost, Hasbro didn't put much emphasis onto characterization during the earliest years of the Transformers franchise; the marketing department saw them as mere products—expected to have a two-year shelf life before they were replaced by new toys and new characters. It would be Marvel writer Bob Budiansky that provided early toys with names, roles, and characterizations, turning them into full-fledged characters that would, in turn, find their way into the Marvel comic and Sunbow cartoon. As a consequence, Hasbro only bothered to register a small number of trademarks in the 1980s, such as "Optimus Prime"[1] or "Soundwave".[2] Unbeknownst to Hasbro, however, their Transformers media blitz meant that children had connected to the various characters. Kids didn't just see them as colorful robot toys—for all intents and purposes, the toy was that character.
In 1986, Hasbro would release The Transformers: The Movie. The 1984 toys that had kicked off the franchise—Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Prowl, etc.— had largely left store shelves by this time, and Hasbro saw fit to begin the movie by "clearing the deck;" hoping to advertise the 1986 toyline, the opening battle of Transformers: The Movie would feature the abrupt and violent deaths of many of these beloved characters, leaving the story free to focus on that year's brand-new toyline. The backlash amongst young fans that this decision generated would eventualy lead to the cartoon writers resurrecting Optimus Prime some years later, but the incident caused Hasbro to realize how much of a crucial role recognizable characters had played in the success of the Transformers line.
Beast Wars, the next Transformers show to hit the airwaves in the 1990s, turned the limitation of its expensive computer animation into a new advantage; as introducing all of the Beast Wars toys in the show would be impossible, the writers chose to focus on a small handful of Maximals and Predacons, rotating the characters in and out to keep up with new toys on the shelves. The end result was that each individual Beast Wars character had a greater amount of screentime than the oft-bloated cast of the 1984 cartoon, allowing the writers to tell deeper and more multifaceted stories involving these characters. With some exceptions, this tactic would become the general approach to most Transformers storytelling: a small onscreen cast supported by a larger group of toy-exclusive characters.
Naming conventions
Despite having realized the role that strong, likeable characters played in their franchise, Hasbro continued to take a somewhat scattershot approach to the names of Transformers characters for some time. As Hasbro repeatedly rebooted the Transformers franchise in the late 90s and 2000s, while "core" character names were generally safe, it was common to shuffle pre-existing names around, sometimes tacking them onto characters that were utterly unrelated to their original uses. Part of this was, of course, an effort to maintain valuable Trademark ownership of "major" names for future use, but it did lead to some oddities. Examples include "Soundwave" the heroic Mutant bat from Beast Wars, "Grimlock" the upbeat excavator from Robots in Disguise, and "Wheeljack" the brooding young Autobot-turned-Decepticon from Armada.
Conversely, 2004's Energon franchise would feature several characters obviously physically based on "Generation 1" characters, but their names were being used elsewhere or otherwise unavailable, giving us "Shockblast" and "Downshift" who were heavily recognizable as new takes on Shockwave and the original Wheeljack. (This of course is to say nothing about their in-fiction portrayals... and in these two cases in specific, they had little in common with their visual inspirations, personality-wise.) This was an issue on both sides of the world; in Japan, the Armada Mini-Con "Sureshock" was named "Arcee", which meant that when the direct-sequel series featured an Omnicon blatantly designed after Generation 1 Arcee and called "Arcee" in Hasbro markets, Takara had to give her the name "Ariel".
It was not until 2007, and the launch of the live-action film series, that the trends would shift heavily and various "legacy" names would slowly find their way back onto a solid "archetype," with that year's Transformers film featuring a handful of Autobots more-or-less based on their Generation 1 personalities. Subsequent mass-market franchises, such as that year's Transformers Animated franchise, and 2010's Transformers: Prime, would continue to realign character names with their Generation 1 appearances and personalities. Though these installments would also introduce brand-new characters to the series... sometimes using old names from minor characters and effectively becoming "the" character associated with that name, such as Prime Knock Out and 2015's Robots in Disguise Strongarm.
Changing attitudes and brand unification
The debut of the Aligned continuity family hit right at the beginning of the Hollywood nostalgia boom, due in part to the recent debut of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its new approach to comic book adaptations. This pop-cultural shift would prompt Hasbro to develop a more coherent approach to the jumbled Transformers multiverse. 2010's War for Cybertron video games were the first installment of the Aligned franchise, a distinctly G1-esque take on the Transformers continuity that featured just about every major cartoon character in some capacity, all more-or-less faithful to their original designs and personalities.
Though the Aligned continuity would subsequently deviate from this aesthetic, the idea seems to have struck a chord with Hasbro; in late 2016, Hasbro would reveal a new "evergreen" style for just about every major Transformers character, beginning with ancillary side merchandise and eventually bleeding into the mass-market through IDW Publishing's ongoing comics, where many major characters would be redesigned into these new forms. 2018's Cyberverse franchise would see many characters sporting these evergreen bodies.
On the other hand,Hasbro and its licensors have been unafraid to create brand-new characters; 2014-15 brought the debut of Windblade the Autobot cityspeaker and Victorion the female combiner. Additionally, many IDW-original characters such as Rung or Aileron have proved popular with fans, with some even seeing mass-market release as new toys. As fresh faces represent new storytelling opportunities and, more importantly, new toys, it's safe to say that the Transformers franchise will never run out of new characters to introduce.
Characters and the wiki
- See also: Continuity family
Unlike many other popular sci-fi franchises, Transformers is not a single long-running story set in one universe, à la Star Wars or Star Trek; rather, it is a vast entity made up of many smaller series, most of which are mutually exclusive to each other — in the Generation 1 family alone, the cartoon, Marvel comic, Dreamwave comic, and IDW comic continuities all tell stories that, while broadly similar, are fundamentally irreconcilable.
On the MediaWiki, we therefore align characters by what we call "continuity family;" basically loose groupings of franchises that follow a rough internal theme/continuity. For instance, every appearance of the "Generation 1" version of Fortress Maximus can be found under Fortress Maximus (G1). No matter how divergent one portrayal is from the other—the cartoon's portrayal of Maximus as a nonsentient battlesuit, his Marvel Comics depiction as a weary pacifist-turned-reluctant-warrior, or even his IDW depiction as a toughened prison guard—we consider that, since they all appeared in different versions of what we call the "Generation 1 continuity family," they are different incarnations of the same character.
Conversely, largely-identical versions of the same character may be split up across several pages according to their continuity family of origin. Airachnid, for instance, originally appeared in the Transformers: Prime cartoon (you can find a summary of her adventures there under "Airachnid (Prime)") and was later imported into the IDW Generation 1 continuity as more-or-less the same individual, with a few key tweaks to blend her into the story organically. However, since this version of the character appeared in IDW's Generation 1 continuity, we consider "Airachnid (G1)" to be a different version of the character, if only for organizational purposes, as she appeared in a different continuity family. Following the end of the first IDW continuity, another version of Airachnid appeared in Star Trek vs. Transformers, a G1-inspired series—meaning that this take on Airachnid shares an article with the IDW version of the character, but not her Prime incarnation.
- Why Do We Do This?
If the Airachnid example seems a bit silly... well, it kind of is, but it's important to note that her case is a bit of an outlier, and that has a lot to do with changes in how Hasbro and its licensees have been treating characters since this wiki's creation. MediaWiki was founded during the reign of the "Unicron Trilogy", a time when Transformers toys and media was not anywhere as numerous and diverse as it has been in recent history, and was pretty strictly regimented, which would be the case for many years as Transformers would get a full hard-stop reboot every now and then. While previous characters might end up with analogues in whatever new franchise pops up, they were usually heavily re-interpreted for said new franchise, such as how the character "Bulkhead" from Animated would get reworked to the similar Prime "Bulkhead". And both are completely different from the previous holder of the name, from Energon (well, aside from being green).
And really, how useful do you think lumping every iteration of Starscream together, regardless of franchise, would really be?
For the first 30 years of the brand, it was rare, if not nigh-unheard-of, for a character to basically be "transplanted" from one very-different franchise to another with minimal changes until the height of IDW Publishing's original comic run. While that series is considered "Generation 1" many writers began to pull popular characters from other non-"G1" franchises and drop them into the story. While this has led to some quibble, as an organisational tool, it does in general work better to have the IDW "G1" version of Knock Out from Prime have his own separate page for his adventures.
Of course, there's always extra-outliers and troublemakers, thus the need for some flexibility in special circumstances.
Gray areas
With a franchise as large, sprawling, and convoluted as Transformers, it can sometimes be hard to tell what separates one character or toy from another; this section goes over some of the more common "gray areas" that have cropped up during the history of the wiki, often involving the thorny issue of toys and how they relate to their in-fiction depictions.
Micro-continuities
Most Transformers franchises are supported by a toyline and one or two "pillars:" usually a television show or comic book designed to advertise the toys. In some cases, however, early promotional material has created entirely new continuities, which we call "micro-continuities," out of a handful of promotional materials. In some notable cases, these have created entirely new characters by conflating other characters together. Most infamous was the very first Beast Wars comic, which treated the setting as an extension of the Autobot-Decepticon war on contemporary Earth and depicted Optimus Primal and Megatron as merely the newest forms of the original Optimus Prime and Megatron.
The Beast Wars television show would quickly clarify that Primal and Megatron were their own characters, who hailed from the distant future; as a result of this comic, however, you will find early Beast Wars figures on the toy pages for both Optimus Prime and Megatron—because this comic established that, in at least one small continuity, those toys were Optimus Prime and the Decepticon Megatron.
Repurposing
In some cases, a toy might simultaneously represent two or more entirely different characters. This was more common during the tail end of the Generation 1, when the Hasbro and Takara lines began to diverge; for instance, any Headmaster toy could—depending on if you lived in Japan or the US—be interpreted as either an organic Nebulan in armor, or a small robot colonist from the planet Master. In other cases, the cause might be a miscommunication (or disagreement) between Hasbro and Takara: While Hasbro intended Armada Thundercracker as a different character than Starscream, whom he was redecoed from, the Micron Legend cartoon made the "Thundercracker" colors an upgraded form of Starscream, and Takara released their version of the toy under the name "Starscream S" ("Super Mode"). The English Armada dub of the cartoon tried to "fix" the error by having Starscream remark that he "look[s] like Thundercracker" in his new colors.
These early divergences gave way to the practice of "repurposing," interpreting a preexisting toy as a new character or applying it to a completely different individual as a new form. Fun Publications was particularly fond of this practice; the Shattered Glass series would frequently grab obscure redecoes and reinterpret them as new characters—for instance, depicting the evil Autobot Seaspray with the body used by the obscure movieverse Decepticon Storm Surge. Wiki-wise, this means that you'll find Storm Surge's toy on Seaspray's page, even though no such toy of Seaspray "really" officially exists—it's a question of using your imagination.
Names
- See also: Renaming
Transformer names have come and gone over the years, a combination of changing trademarks, new cast members, and Hasbro's increasing awareness of the vagaries of non-US slang (the reason why we'll never see a Transformer named Slag or Slapper again). The practical upshot of this is that Transformer names can and have changed drastically over the years. Combined with our approach to structuring character pages, it can sometimes be vague as to whether or not a character from one continuity family could be said to be have a counterpart elsewhere: for instance, should Energon Shockblast be considered a version of Generation One Shockwave, as Generation One Bumblebee is to his Animated counterpart? This debate takes an interesting turn when one factors in the existence of the Cybertron Mini-Con Shockwave, who hails from the same continuity as Shockblast... but has nothing in common with any of the other Shockwaves or Shockblasts.
The reverse can sometimes happen, where a functionally identical toy is released under a new alias. This was the case with 2006's Classics line, which released a handful of Cybertron Mini-Cons under entirely different names: Dirt Rocket and Thunderwing for Classics, Offshoot and Nightscream for Cybertron. Are they close enough to count as the same character? The answer to this question, is, ultimately, up to you.
Robots in Disguise
The 2001 Robots in Disguise franchise is an oddity in the Transformers franchise, as it has the dubious honor of being considered part of two very different continuity families simultaneously. Originally, the series was conceived as a reboot of sorts after the conclusion of the Beast Era, a back-to-basics tale that returned the action to contemporary Earth and featured vehicular Autobots. Outside of one Japanese-exclusive piece of fiction, both Robots in Disguise and the Japanese version, Car Robots, were largely unconnected to the Generation 1 continuity that had come before. All seemed well... until the day that Takara declared that Car Robots was not a reboot, and officially tied the series into Takara's own elaborate G1 cartoon continuity—but only Car Robots. No similar proclamation was made for Robots in Disguise, and to this day the American version of the series stands alone, unconnected to any other fictional universe.
On the wiki, at least, this means that Robots in Disguise characters who have received additional appearances elsewhere in the Generation 1 continuity family, such as Sky-Byte's supporting role in IDW's comics, are consolidated onto a single page to avoid a redundant and nigh-identical "Sky-Byte (Car Robots)," page, even though the Japanese Car Robots and American Robots in Disguise franchises are considered two entirely separate continuity families.
Multiversal singularities
One of Hasbro's earliest attempts to tie together a cohesive Transformers mythology was the creation of "multiversal singularities:" the story pitch was that there there was only one of them ever in-fiction, existing as higher-dimensional beings who could inhabit multiple universes simultaneously. The first character that got this treatment from Hasbro was Unicron, starting with the supporting fiction for the 2003 Universe toy line, depicting him as the force responsible for abducting many heroes and villains from across the multiverse to aid in his restoration. Subsequent fiction would reconcile his various conflicting cartoon and Marvel Comics backstories by describing all of his various incarnations as a sort of "virus" that could manifest in different universes through mystical or mundane means. On the wiki, this meant that we organized Unicron's page as a single, long article, detailing all of his exploits throughout the Transformers multiverse, rather than splitting them up into "Unicron (G1)", "Unicron (Armada)..."
Other notable characters demarcated as singularities included Primus, Unicron, and the Thirteen. This admittedly high-concept premise... didn't really work as planned; immediately, it became clear that many of these so-called singularities had radically different characterizations and origin stories across multiple continuities, which made the entire concept harder to rationalize as the Transformers multiverse continued to change hands. The most infamous of these was the treacherous Decepticon Sideways; while some fictions implied he was one supernatural 'bot jumping from one dimension to the next, others seemed decidedly mortal, and still others tried to bridge the gap between these two extremes, which caused no small amount of debate on the wiki as to how to best organize Sideways's page.
As things grew more fraught, some more fiction from Fun Publications would put the entire concept to rest by retconning the concept away entirely, through the in-fiction medium of the Shroud, which retroactively nullified the entire concept of singularities—G1 Unicron was his own guy again, as was Armada or Prime Unicron. However, owing to their legacy as singularities, and their status as very important characters within Transformers lore, we at the wiki have continued to consolidate their information all onto a single page, even though each of their fictional appearances are now recognized to belong to entirely separate characters. The exception to this rule is Sideways, who is now treated like most other Transformers characters and has had all of his appearances split into separate characters by continuity.
Merchandise and the multiverse
The in-fiction world of the Transformers is based around an elaborate multiverse, which more-or-less follows our own system of classification by continuity family; breaking down into a series of "universal clusters" that, are, in turn, made up of "universal streams," corresponding to real world continuity families and individual continuities. The rise of these universal streams as the primary system of in-fiction universal classification coincided with Hasbro's release of new, merchandise-oriented sidelines: Construct-Bots, Hero Mashers, Bot Shots, and so on.
As these characters seemingly represented new versions of old standby characters like Optimus Prime or Grimlock, the wiki initially gave each of these characters a separate page: "Optimus Prime (Bot Shots)," "Optimus Prime (Construct-Bots)," "Optimus Prime (Hero Mashers)," and so on... in spite of the fact that most of these characters were clearly based on either their G1 or movieverse selves, and the fact that almost none of these characters received any real fiction that would separate them from their namesakes outside of a handful of toys and maybe a commercial or two. As it soon became clear that the wiki would be overrun by these tiny, one-note articles, "Ask Vector Prime" would introduce a new cluster, "Iocus," which would serve as a "dumping ground" for all of these miscellaneous toys; under this schema, there would be one "Optimus Prime (Iocus)" page, which would consolidate all of the side merchandise as a single "character."
However, the Iocus cluster landed right as these miscellaneous toylines had begun stronger cross-promotional synergy with the main franchises, directly featuring characters from these series in their toylines. For ease of access, it was decided that all of these side appearances would be directly integrated under the character they most resembled, so Hound's Construct-Bots toy was moved to "Hound (G1)/toys#Construct-Bots," and so on. The end result of all of this is that while these side toys are cast in the image of G1, Movie, or Aligned characters, they officially simultaneously exist as their own characters, who hail from the "Iocus" universal cluster.
Some exceptions exist, such as those rare Kre-O characters who received enough fiction in enough forms to make this sort of sorting problematic. Thus, "Optimus Prime (Kre-O)" remains its own page, but the toys also appear on the various relevant other Primes said toys are based off of.
Official perspectives
Hasbro's position
Hasbro's handling of "character" is a lot more, well, big-picture marketing-driven. As a general rule, Hasbro is mostly concerned with if their latest Starscream is a conniving Decepticon second-in-command that (ideally) turns into a jet with visual cues taken from the original Starscream. What franchise they're in and how that relates to other franchises is not super-high-up in their concern outside of how they label a toy.
Effectively, a Starscream is a Starscream, and they're all "Starscream", all reflections of the same core jerk. They are aware that it is important as a selling tool to differentiate the live-action movies Starscream from the original from Cyberverse Starscream and so on because kids (and adults) get attached to specific incarnations of characters, thanks to media portrayals. While Hasbro has "crossed the streams" with merchandise many times by using older toys designed for a different franchise with a different aesthetic in a new line, this practice is usually reserved for "filler" product. The overwhelming majority of "Starscream" toys for any given line are going to be based on the core design for the franchise in question, especially new molds and bigger-ticket items. They are going to try and keep internal consistency of a character's portrayal within a franchise as much as possible.
Basically, Hasbro runs on the "squint test". The fine details of fiction don't particularly matter. They are not concerned with "continuity" so much as brand consistency. After all, they're not an information archive.
TakaraTomy's position
Japanese Transformers fiction is less fractured than its American counterpart: most modern Japanese fiction takes place in what we call the "Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity," which incorporates a variety of American and Japanese shows into a single semi-cohesive entity. Elaborate retcons that frequently split out or merge separate characters are common ways to explain discrepancies away.
TakaraTomy seldom weighs in on the dicey issue of character analogs in other universes. However, during a Q&A at the World Character Convention in December 2002, the head of Takara's Boys Division, when asked flat out if the (then just announced) Micron Densetsu Convoy (Armada Optimus Prime) represented the same character as G1 Convoy (Generation 1 Optimus Prime), said that no, he was a different character, more like Lio Convoy[3]
References
- ↑ United States Patent and Trademark Office file for the trademark "Optimus Prime", filed in 1984, registered in 1985.
- ↑ United States Patent and Trademark Office file for the trademark "Soundwave", filed in 1984, registered in 1985.
- ↑ Q: "...in the past, we've seen a variety of "Convoy" who are different characters, such as Lio Convoy and Convoy of Beast Wars. Is the Armada Convoy intended to be a representation of the G1 Convoy, or an original character?"
