Sideways (disambiguation)
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- Sideways is a difficult 'bot to define...
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.
The following Sideways have been documented throughout the multiverse. From one perspective, they might all be considered the same Sideways, occasionally interacting with himself via inter-dimensional shenanigans. Facts do not always line up entirely with this assertion, possibly, maybe, implying that at least some Sideways are not part of the greater agenda taking place. For the explicit sake of accessibility and to ease the conveyance of information, several Sidewayses have been documented on this wiki as though they are separate entities, even though they are frequently characterized as recurring versions of the same archetype.
| “ | 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. | ||
Major Sidewayses
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
- Tarantulas, another agent of Unicron who sometimes possesses some superficial similarities with Sideways, but is a separate character. (UNLESS HE ISN'T!)
Fiction
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
Notes
- In reality, Sideways is the convoluted result of multiple authors' competing authorial intent. While many sources have no indication that their version of Sideways is a cross-dimensional traveler, others have actively pushed this narrative for the character and incorporated other versions into it, despite the innumerable problems it created in forming a cohesive story.Fan reaction has been mixed in opinion in whether or not "All Sideways are the same guy." Add to the mix that (at least one) Sideways is an admitted compulsive liar, and it leaves this wiki with a hard time documenting this "Sideways phenomenon" in the traditional manner. As neither interpretation of the character is more or less valid than the other, the entirety of this enigma is documented here and on the linked pages.
- The case for the Sidewayses of the various different continuity families being the same individual hopping universes wasn't always airtight, and was built up over a period of several years. Until 2010, no fiction had clearly established him migrating from one universe to another, but even before then, circumstantial evidence abounded:
- The first Sideways, a Robots in Disguise toy, was packaged with Axer, whose on-package bio strongly insinuates that he had come from a Generation 1 universe through a black hole. The bios make no particular connection between the two characters, so there is no reason to think Sideways must have come from another universe as well. Nevertheless, the real-world pairing of the characters makes it easy to accept that he did, based on later evidence.
- The next Sideways, from Armada, was given an online bio via Hasbro’s Tranformers website of almost identical wording to that of the Robots in Disguise character. The Armada bio suggests that his duplicity is a new development upon coming to Earth, the result of being pulled in two mental directions by his Mini-Cons.[1] However, the cartoons and comics outright ignore this aspect of Sideways. Both develop him as a pure agent of Unicron, with his Mini-cons showing no indication of influencing his mind. This opens all sorts of cross-universal possibilities.
- The Robotmasters toy offers greatest credence towards all previous Sideways being the same character. It's named and colored after the Micron Densetsu/Armada toy, and some Robotmasters publicity material has declared that the character's first toy was indeed the Robots in Disguise Sideways figure. Since the entire premise of Robotmasters is that Transformers are arriving on present-day Earth through wormholes from across time and space, the idea that Sideways universe-hopped into the Robotmasters continuity is too strong to ignore.
- In 2010, the The AllSpark Almanac II presented Animated Sideways as pretty clearly the same individual as all the other previous Sidewayses, while also alluding to the movie version of the character.
- Lastly, the details of Sideways' dimension hopping were explicitly spelled out in an Ask Vector Prime entry in The Complete AllSpark Almanac, undeniably tying all previous iterations of Sideways together, while also establishing that not all of them were necessarily the exact same individual.
- A later addition to Ask Vector Prime/Sideways clarified further that there are multiple Sideways running about, crossing into one-another's dimensions and interacting with one another as separate entities.
- To reiterate, the wiki does not claim a say on the canonicity of Sideways's status as separate multiple individuals versus a single individual. That being said, we do our best to document information in a way that is convenient to our readers. Sideways, being such a unique (and sometimes controversial) case study, as such necessitated a unique approach in documenting him/them. Our decision to split up the character(s) in separate articles should not be taken as our stance on the issue. In short, if one is so inclined to care about this aspect of Sideways, one should consider this page and the list of "Sideways" linked within it as a sort of Schrödinger's article, taking neither side in the debate, simply presenting the facts as they have been presented to us.
