Aligned continuity family

The New Aligned continuity family was launched in 2010 with the intention of being the foundation of most Transformers projects for the decade to come. Its core is a 400-page production bible that borrows elements from all previous "generations". The family currently comprises the War for Cybertron and Prime franchises, and it has some influence on Hall of Fame character portrayal.

Hasbro has not given this family an official title. We derived the name "New Aligned" from a Hasbro statement referring to "our new aligned continuity".

Creative vision

The New Aligned venture appears to be Hasbro's attempt at synthesizing a grand unified continuity out of all of the previous lore. An expression of this can be seen in the Hall of Fame profiles: While only Jazz's profile has been officially stated to be "based off of" the New Aligned foundation, it shares with the others a tendency to mix character traits from disparate continuities. For example, Jazz is pictured in his Generation 1 form but described as a "Cyber-Ninja" like his Animated incarnation. Soundwave, also looking like his Generation 1 self, is said to have a mysterious origin like his Cybertron counterpart, his partners are called "Mini-Cons" instead of "Mini-Cassettes", and he has his live-action movie incarnation's vulnerability to simultaneous sonic booms.

This is a significant departure from Hasbro's previous forays into meta-continuity, which preserved the integrity of old timelines as separate, coexistent universes within a single multiverse. In that schema, the New Aligned family would be simply one more universal stream added to the mix, beholden to preestablished concepts like multiversal singularities. But when asked about how a certain singularity would relate to the new fiction, Hasbro replied, "Anything you know from past generations of the brand may or may not be factual in the new continuity."

Whether all of that means the New Aligned family is separate from the rest of the multiverse or supersedes it in some way is unclear.

Continuities

Hasbro consistently refers to all New Aligned fiction as one "continuity", and while different storylines may appear to contradict each other, "reasons for the confusion will be revealed". However, that ideal is hampered by the fact that various elements of the fiction have separate creative teams with distinct visions. In that sense, the fiction can be divided thusly:

War for Cybertron video games

Created by High Moon Studios under Game Director Matt Tieger with tie-in games by Next Level Games and Vicarious Visions, these games' aesthetics and characterizations are heavily based on Generation 1; for example, Bumblebee and Soundwave speak words, despite both being quasi-mute in the Prime cartoon. Set in the ancient days of the Cybertronian war, the games' plot focuses on Megatron's quest to harness Dark Energon, which ends up corrupting the planet itself and leaving it uninhabitable for millions of years. Those events overlap a large portion of the simultaneously-released Exodus novel, but they differ in many details.

Exodus: The Official History of the War for Cybertron novel

Written by Alex Irvine, this book describes the beginning of the war and then, as mentioned above, covers the same ground as the War for Cybertron games with many differing details. (Hasbro did take a small stab at reconciliation by declaring Optimus Prime's predecessor in the games, "Zeta Prime", and the one in the novel, "Sentinel Prime", to be the same individual, "Sentinel Zeta Prime".) Irvine also wrote the War for Cybertron comic and the apocryphal short story Bumblebee at Tyger Pax, both set in the novel's pre-game period. The comic contains no major discrepancies, other than maintaining the "Sentinel Prime" name, but the short story features Bumblebee losing his ability to speak words before the game events.

Prime cartoon

Overseen by the team of Jeff Kline, Duane Capizzi, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, this show is set on modern-day Earth with a unique aesthetic somewhere between the live-action film series and Animated. Released five months after War for Cybertron, it also features Dark Energon as a primary plot element, but it seems to be a more mysterious substance with the added quality of being able to reanimate corpses. Also, strangely, Megatron is able to create an army of such creatures by crashing Dark Energon into the dead world of Cybertron, despite the reason for the planet's demise in War for Cybertron being its complete infection with the stuff. A prequel comic written by Mike Johnson shows events on Cybertron immediately before the cartoon, but it neither contradicts nor connects to the War for Cybertron storylines.

Notes

• Instead of giving this continuity family an official name, Hasbro has instead referred to it with brief descriptors such as "new aligned", "aligned", "modern", and "War for Cybertron/Exodus". VP of Intellectual Property Development Aaron Archer said at a BotCon 2010 panel that he had considered naming it "Epochs" but then decided not to.