Circular reporting
As befitting a franchise that has run continuously for 42 years, the Transformers brand is a vast and sprawling one. However, as an intellectual property based around the inherently transient medium of merchandising, both Hasbro and TakaraTomy have, historically, taken a laissez-faire approach to storytelling and have shown general reluctance to compile any kind of official "lore bibles" or "development documents" designed to help new creatives in the franchise get up to speed with individual characters, concepts, or settings.[1]
As a result, the largest compendium of Transformers knowledge is, in fact, this very website you are reading this article on right now, and many creatives have confirmed that they have used our wiki when writing stories or looking for toy references. While wikis have a few advantages over "in-house" lore bibles—they can be edited by anyone, not just professionals, for instance—their main downside is that... well, they can be edited by anyone. Although we at TFWiki.net strive for accuracy and neutrality when covering Transformers topics, there have, historically, been cases where inaccurate or misinterpreted information or photographs on this very wiki have gone on to inform official Transformers toys and fiction. Wikipedia formally terms this circular reporting, but we opt to call the phenomenon citogenesis, based on the xkcd strip that satirized the concept.
Examples of citogenesis from the TFWiki
Tale of Two Tailwinds
In Spotlight: Hardhead, a Gorlamite (basically the Micromasters of this continuity) based on Tailwind, appeared with others attacking Hardhead and Nightbeat, however this at first went undocumented on the wiki. Years later in Before & After, James Roberts, probably considering him fair game, would depict a full sized Tailwind being bisected by Drift.
Studio Series Scrapmetal
The character that the wiki identifies as "Scrapmetal" was created through a complicated, decade-long tennis match between the wiki and Hasbro. In 2009, shortly after the theatrical release of Revenge of the Fallen, the wiki created a page for the then-nameless character under the half-jokey title "Ze little one". Rather than assuming that the character was a Scrapper clone, wiki editors at the time decided that he was his own character, as the scene where Constructicons went underwater featured a yellow Volvo excavator that didn't match to any of the other characters. "Ze little one" quickly picked up an ironic fan following, and by December of 2009 Hasbro called him "Scrapmetal" and identified his alternate mode as "the bulldozer."[2] The wiki documented this and moved on. Around the same time, Revenge of the Fallen Devastator's page noted that the film version of the character was formed from an extra bulldozer compared to the official list of his components.
Almost ten years later, Hasbro announced a giant, fully-articulated Devastator toy formed up from multiple figures from the Studio Series toyline. It is not 100% clear, but what appears to have happened is that whoever was planning the character selection looked at both Devastator and Scrapmetal's pages and decided to marry these two random tidbits by making Scrapmetal the extra bulldozer. Then, the individual(s) assigned to design Scrapmetal's toy consulted the wiki page to figure out who the character was and instead made them a yellow excavator with the robot mode of the concept art randomly chosen for the main picture of the article—the end result of the wiki stringing together tidbits of contradictory information from the movie.
Black Rortichi's antennae
For years, the main image for Black Roritchi on this wiki showed him against a black backdrop, which his equally-black antennae blended into. When Generations Selects Black Roritchi was produced in 2020 as a redeco of Fasttrack, it was given a custom head solely to remove the antennae under the mistaken belief that he didn't have them.
Color conundrum
Yellow Horri-Bull
In the IDW comic The Autonomy Lesson, Horri-Bull's colorization is apperently based on photos of a photodegradated example of his original toy that was once used on his page, when asked Josh Perez said he chose to use the yellow to "help him stick out a lot more".[3]
Fall of Cybertron Vortex
Legends Roadburner
In what can only be described as a fit of actual insanity, not only is Roadburner's appearance in the Legends mobile game based off of a catastrophic misinterpretation of this wiki's photography for the toy, misinterpreting his partner Wheel Blaze as white, (as opposed to the greyed-out photo this wiki uses for simplicity's sake) but it's highly likely he wasn't supposed to be in the game to begin with. Given that the theme of the event he appeared in was basically "These Autobots with military alt-modes do stuff," and the fact that Roadbuster would make more sense given Whirl's prevalence in said event... yeah. Not helping matters is that when in the process of typing "Roadbuster" into this wiki's search bar, Roadburner shows up first in the search results. Someone must have been in a hurry.
Beast Wars: Uprising Preditron
Silver Azimuth
Azimuth was originally a minor character who appeared in The Covenant of Primus. Beyond a brief namedrop, she went unseen for several years until 2015, when the "Ask Vector Prime" Facebook feature revealed that she sported a body based on the gold MC-6 Kronoform toy. However, when a different version of Azimuth appeared in 2020, in IDW's Transformers comic, she was colored silver—a mixup that almost assuredly stems from the photo on Azimuth's wiki article more prominently displaying that figure, with the "correct" gold figure tucked away on the far right.
War for Cybertron Trilogy Bailiff
Prime 10 Year Anniversary Igu
Non-TFWiki references
Warriorbot
In 2017, a Hasbro license, Open Road Brands, released a tin wall sign exclusively to Hobby lobby stores, meant to showcase the many faction symbols from the brand's history, but one symbol stood out. The self-proclaimed "Warriorbots" were never a real thing. So were did they come from? The answer can be found on the "Insignia" page on the Transformers Fandom (formerly Wikia) wiki from 2014-2017, with it being listed among the others. Meaning whoever designed it, used the page as reference.
Power of the Primes Dinobots
Lost Light vehicles
Earth Wars Cliffjumper
Soundwave's shins
When R.E.D. Soundwave was first reveled, many fans noticed that the toy's coloring was based on a wildly shared, but incorectly colored animation model due to the figure's shins.
Bumblebee Arcee
An ILM design presentation about the 2018 Bumblebee movie used an image of Fans Toys "Rouge" as a Generation 1 Arcee design reference for Bumblebee Arcee.[4]
IDW Megaplex
ReAction Perceptor
Notes
- In case it is not clear, the term "citogenesis" derives from the verb "to cite". Be not confused by the pronunciation; citogenesis is unrelated to the cytoplasm of cell biology.
References
- ↑ This is not to say that Hasbro is completely disinterested in ensuring some kind of consistency—the 2010 Binder of Revelation went on to inform vast swathes of modern Transformers storytelling, including the Prime and Cyberverse cartoons, and the 2019 IDW comics.
- ↑ Hasbro Q&A December 2009 at TFviews.com
- ↑ Post from Josh Perez on The Allspark
- ↑ Bumblebee: Developing an Epic Set Piece - ILM San Francisco
