Sideways (disambiguation)

Sideways is a difficult 'bot to define...

Have you seen me?

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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 leaves 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.

Major Sideways

• 
  "Unicron Trilogy" Sideways
• 
  Revenge of the Fallen Sideways

Full list of Sideways

• 2002 — Sideways, the dimension-hopping agent of Unicron from the 2001 Robots in Disguise toyline.
• 2002 — Sideways, the dimension-hopping agent of Unicron from Transformers: Armada.
• 2009 — Sideways, the Decepticon messenger from Revenge of the Fallen.
• 2010 — Sideways, the evil robot from Transformers Animated who may or may not be the same as the first/second Sideways AND the third Sideways if you take his word for it.
• 2013 — Sideways, the Kreon from Kre-O, who might be any of the above Sidewayses - you get the idea.
• 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 thirteenth 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 seperate character. (UNLESS HE ISN'T!)

Notes

• In reality, Sideways is the convoluted result of multiple authors' competing authorial intent. While some Sideways were written with it being unlikely that the author was aware that Sideways was a cross-dimensional hopper, others have actively pushed this narrative for the character, despite the innumerable problems it created in forming a cohesive story. Some fictions could present a case for this not being the case at all. 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 are 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 the 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 on-package bio 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. 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 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 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 Shrodinger's article, taking neither side in the debate, simply presenting the facts as they have been presented to us.

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