User:The Wadapan/sandbox/repurposing
Being a fiction-first encyclopedia, TFWiki's toy coverage can often be inconsistent. The topic of this sandbox is a common failure mode for articles, where a single toy is used as the basis for two characters which are sufficiently distinct (at least for the purposes of the site's organisational schema) as to warrant two separate articles. The concept of "repurposing" as a shorthand was used on the wiki to document this practise, with toy writeups often being duplicated across both articles. Maintaining these redundant writeups is labour-intensive, or just doesn't happen.
The wiki's organisational schema was conceived at a time when each new Transformers series marked a significant reinvention over those preceding, and it was rare for characters except Optimus Prime, Megatron, etc. to recur more-or-less unchanged across these series. For many years, however, the direction of the franchise has been moving towards a more "continuity"-agnostic paradigm, where the same character can show up again and again from series to series, and where everything broadly resembles G1. It's up to readers to understand our schema, navigating between multiple pages to get the full context for the history of a single character.
In response to this slow paradigm shift, the wiki has developed two main tools. The first is Template:OtherVersions, an infobox which goes at the end of a character article to crosslink to other articles that exist for the "same character", just in different continuities. This infobox is buried at the bottom of the article, if it's even been applied at all, which it usually hasn't. The second is the shorthand "continuity transplant", used to mean a character lifted more-or-less unchanged from a separate continuity family. This is an entirely made-up concept and no official Transformers writer has ever thought about using a character in these terms. Sometimes, the prior term "repurposing" is also used to refer to the same practise. This results in nonsensical sentences along the lines of "Barricade (this continuity) was repurposed as Barricade (that continuity)". I previously brought up that I felt this was silly, and proposed merging a bunch of obvious cases, which basically everyone was reasonably opposed to. User:Broadside mocked up an alternate solution which makes use of Template:Main to put a link to the relevant information exactly where the reader expects to find it; I felt that this was a great compromise and unambiguously a substantial improvement which would make navigation far easier for readers with next to no upkeep required and no further erosion of the continuity-family-based organisational schema. In cases of so-called continuity transplants, I'm also experimenting with the idea of using Template:Disambig3.5 in conjunction with Template:OtherVersions to have the link at both the top and bottom of the article, as in Bug Bite. More liberal use of Template:Main could also be used to get rid of redundant toy entries, by having repurposed entries simply consist of "Hey, this toy exists, and it was repurposed as this character in this story for xyz reasons," with the main article linkout to the full toy writeup.
I've more recently observed that there are also many cases of almost the opposite situation: huge catch-all (G1) pages, or otherwise characters with a long fictional history, or with lots of toys, where the fictional history of the character and the history in toys are entirely divorced from one another. There's often no way to tell which toy a character appeared as for given events in their biography, or vice versa, what events depicted the character using a specific toy. You just kind of have to look at the pictures, if there was space in the article for pictures.
To help address this, I've put together a new template to specifically cover "toy -> fiction" navigational relationships. Did the toy get used for a "continuity transplant" of the same character? Was it used to represent a character in a specific story? Was it repurposed as a different character? Did a so-called "virtual retool" (another made-up phrasing I've sidestepped entirely here) of this toy appear in a story? In each of these cases, the template can be used to give a link in a consistent format, which will help readers understand where to expect this information in a toy write-up and what exactly it means. In many cases, the information is already there, but my hope is that the existence of the template would help formalise and encourage the addition of this kind of information going forward. I hope it will also let concepts like repurposing, continuity transplants, and virtual redecos be handled more consistently in toy coverage. The tradeoff, as ever, is that templates are unintuitive and offputting to new editors.
I don't currently have a proposed template to cover "fiction -> toy" relationships—along the lines of "In this mobile game, Bumblebee is depicted according to his Reveal the Shield toy." The wiki's fiction writeups being mostly in-universe means it'd need to be a note template of some kind. Hopefully, though, you can get an idea of what I'm trying to address with this template. Feel free to add more examples. I'm interested to hear your thoughts!
The syntax for the template is as follows: {{toyappeared|repurpose=y|virtual=y|as=|in=|with=}}
Snow Cat appeared with this design in the Beast Wars: Uprising prose story "Derailment".
Ratchet's vehicle mode appeared with this design in The Transformers: Lost Light issue #19.
Bumblebee appeared with this design in the Transformers Legends, Transformers: Battle Tactics, and Transformers: Earth Wars mobile games.
Hot Shot appeared with this design in the Armada cartoon until he obtained his Powerlinx colors in "Puppet".
Hot Shot appeared with this design in the Armada cartoon beginning with "Puppet".
This toy was repurposed as the mass-produced Guardminders in Super-God Masterforce.
Darkwing appeared with this design in Generation 2 issue #7.
This toy was repurposed as Ravage in the Beast Wars Metals manga.
This toy was repurposed as the Transmetal form for Packrat in Transformers: The Wreckers and other stories from 3H Productions.
This toy was repurposed as another version of Ravage in Hasbro product copy. In early 2000, Shadow Panther was offered directly to Western fans via the HasbroCollectors.com online service—but after a few months, it was relisted as "Tripredacus Agent" (the name "Ravage" being unavailable at the time due to trademark issues). The toy's online bio (a translation of the Japanese "Shadow Panther" bio) went unchanged, but was worded vaguely enough to apply to this new identity as well. The bio for the later Walmart-exclusive Transmetals 2 Tripredacus Agent established that the "former saboteur [...] adopted several aliases while involved with the Beast Wars", implicitly establishing that the Tripredacus Agent had previously gone by both Ravage (whose G1 function had been "saboteur") and Shadow Panther.
Like the other running-change redecoes of the Deployers, Rav was originally going to be renamed as a new character—in Rav's case, "Cro". Chro appeared with this design in Transformers: The Wreckers as Cryotek's Targetmaster pet.
Blue Big Convoy appeared with this design in the Transformers Legends manga and the Generations Selects Special Comic.
This toy was repurposed as the Vehicon drones belonging to Quake in Transformers: The Wreckers No. 1. Quake himself used the same design, but in his original G1 colors.
A tape deck which was the last surviving fragment of Soundwave appeared with this design in the Transformers Animated episode "Sound and Fury".
This toy was repurposed as Wreckage's new color scheme in Transformers: Alliance issue 2.
Lockdown appeared with this design in The Transformers: Drift and The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye.
- Lockdown appeared with this design in Transformers: Wreckers—Tread & Circuits issue #4, as a potential candidate for the Wreckers.
This toy was repurposed as Wheeljack in Fun Publications' Shattered Glass stories; he'd debuted with a similar design a couple of years prior in "Dungeons & Dinobots". As the Downshift mold had a sculpted-in Autobot insignia, this was picked out with purple paint—which, together with the Decepticon insignias tampographed onto his sides, gives you the choice to use him as either character.
This toy was repurposed as Prima in Transformers: Tales of the Fallen issue #4. The appearance of the Vok Novaroids in the Transformers Legends manga "The Road to Legends' Revival Chapter 5: LG-EX Big Powered Prologue Part Two" was based on this mold, with a new comet mode sporting a horrible mouth.
The appearance of Dead End in the Beast Wars: Uprising prose story "Intersectionality" was based on this mold, with a new head.
The appearance of Bludgeon's head in the e-HOBBY "Cybertron Magna Convoy" comic was based on this mold, with a new body based on Titans Return Hardhead.
The appearance of Devil Z in the Grand Maximus Transformers Legends comic was based on this mold, with a new head from Scorponok and BlackZarak's color scheme.
Beast Wars: Uprising characters
In Beast Wars: Uprising, Wing Saber is a mode locked transport.
In Beast Wars: Uprising, Photon T-34 is a Builder of Cybertron named simply "Photon".
In Beast Wars: Uprising, Transformers cannot share exactly the same name. Inferno is therefore named "Formikon", coexisting with "Generation 1" Inferno and Armada "Thunder".
In Beast Wars: Uprising, Mini-Cons don't exist. Synapse is therefore a Micromaster.
In Beast Wars: Uprising, Mini-Cons don't exist, and Transformers cannot share exactly the same name. Scattor is therefore a Micromaster named "Skat-or", coexisting with a hypothetical Uprising version of Armada Scattor.
In Beast Wars: Uprising, bestial Transformers are reimagined as proto-formers. Snow Cat is therefore a Predacon.
In Beast Wars: Uprising, bestial Transformers are reimagined as proto-formers. Psychobat is therefore a Predacon.
In Beast Wars: Uprising, M.A.S.K. vehicles are reimagined as proto-formers. The Shark is therefore a Maximal named "Aura".
In Beast Wars: Uprising, Battle Beasts are reimagined as proto-formers. Battlefennec is therefore a Predacon named simply "Fennec".
