Aligned continuity family

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The 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 "Aligned" from Hasbro statements referring to this as a new "aligned continuity".

Creative vision

The 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, one of which was officially confirmed as being "based off of" Aligned continuity. That one and several others present each character as an amalgam of traits from disparate continuities, ranging from Generation 1 to the Unicron Trilogy to the live-action film series and more (see below).

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 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."

Where, exactly, this leaves the Aligned fiction in relation to the rest of the multiverse is unclear. Other contemporary fiction has continued to tell stories set in older universes, so it seems at least that Aligned material is not meant to supersede the continuities from which it draws.

Continuities

Hasbro consistently refers to all 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 that sometimes conflict. For that reason, this wiki takes the more cautious route of calling it a "continuity family". Branches of fiction include:

Hall of Fame profiles

In May of 2010, before any Aligned franchises had launched, Hasbro announced a "Transformers Hall of Fame" honoring characters and people associated with the Transformers brand. The spot for one inductee was put to a fan-vote: Five character profiles were published on Hasbro.com, and users could cast a vote for one of them. Most of them were described with a combination of traits from various 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. Later, a Hasbro Q&A answer stated that Jazz's entry is based on Aligned continuity. The character does appear in War for Cybertron fiction, but with no particularly Cyber-Ninja-like attributes.

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.

Generations toy bios

A handful of toys were created directly from War for Cybertron designs and sold as part of the Generations toyline. While lacking the phrase "War for Cybertron" on their packaging, the release of the first wave was timed within days of the games and novel, and their on-package bios are basically in sync with that fiction as well. Megatron's, for example, focuses on his penchant for upgrading his body with "bleeding-edge" technology, which may be an allusion to his lustful utilization of Dark Energon. Bumblebee's says he was once a "chatterbox" but is now a "silent warrior", which appears to be a bridge between his War for Cybertron and then-upcoming Prime portrayals; however, it's not strictly accurate because in Prime he can still vocalize, just not in words.

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, incorporating the Exodus notion of space bridges being a lost art and Megatron's backstory as a Kaonian miner.

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.
• The subtitle-less Transformers toyline launched in 2010 and its companion line, Generations, share some of the Aligned spirit, since they likewise contain characters and concepts from previous franchises with little separation. But the only real connection between those toylines and Aligned material is the small number of previously-mentioned War for Cybertron-inspired toys. Hasbro has referred to the Power Core Combiners subline as "exist[ing] in the modern world continuity", but the context of that statement doesn't suggest a specific reference to Aligned.
• The Hubworld Transformers: Prime TV special featured footage of BotCon attendees taking a Transformers quiz, with the questions being what Optimus Prime's original name was, what his job had been, and which soap opera was the Autobots' favorite. The soap opera (As the Kitchen Sinks) is from the Generation 1 cartoon, but the "correct" answers to the first two questions were said to be "Orion Pax" and "data clerk". Aligned continuity is the only source where both of those ideas are true. This seems to reflect Hasbro's current policy of treating Aligned material as the default Transformers "truth". (Something similar occured durring the Dreamwave era, where the DK Ultimate Guide treated that continuity as default "truth," so this in not a completely new phenomenon.)