Continuity Snarl / Transformers

• The original cartoon didn't need later material to create its own snarls. Most infamously, the Constructicons were given a throwaway origin in their debut of being created by Megatron on Earth in the modern day, then a season later got a spotlight episode that revealed them to have been former good guys brainwashed by Megatron on Cybertron long ago, and then a season after that, a flashback episode suggested that Megatron himself was created by the evil Constructicons. The movie also created a lot of continuity issues: where did the Matrix come from if it wasn't mentioned at all before? What was the later season 2 cast doing? Why does Cybertron have moons now?
  • The most infamous of the movie's continuity questions is Cyclonus. In the final cut of the film, the body of the Seeker Thundercracker gets turned into Scourge, while the Insecticons Kickback and Shrapnel get turned into his soldiers, the Sweeps. Then the bodies of the Insecticon Bombshell and the Seeker Skywarp are turned into "Cyclonus and his armada." The "armada" in question is one guy who looks identical to Cyclonus... and in the very next shot, he's no longer around, and Scourge now has three Sweeps instead of two. Outside of animation errors, the armada would never appear again. So where did Cyclonus's armada go? And who among Bombshell and Skywarp "really" became Cyclonus? The shot composition implies Bombshell, but thematically it makes more sense for Skywarp. Some retcons have claimed Bombshell, others Skywarp. (One comic even had a lot of fun having him complain about never getting any recognition in his previous form, but never getting to say just who he used to be, and he also complained about how he was supposed to get an armada of minions but it never happened.) A lot of this is down to script rewrites, which originally intended Cyclonus to have been created from neither character and for the armada to be a large number of minions.
• The Japanese continuity for Generation 1 cartoon is notorious for its messiness, with TFWiki.net themselves calling it "a great and terrifying beast". While Western Transformers media has several different major continuities under the Generation 1 umbrella, the large majority of Japanese G1 media is in the same continuity of their version of the cartoon. At first, this approach worked fine with the anime sequel series to the original cartoon and Beast Wars, as they all followed one another in a linear fashion ^note most of the manga versions of these series didn't count, as they usually told completely different stories from their accompanying anime. Starting at the turn of the century, however, Takara began creating more and more stories within the continuity, squeezing them into the gaps between series and causing the timeline to grow out of control. Complicating things further is that many of these stories retcon the events of previous series in an attempt to make everything fit together. The Ask Vector Prime Facebook column would eventually handwave the continuity's problems, citing quantum instability caused by the partial destruction of Cybertron and, by extension, Primus, in Transformers: ★Headmasters as a possible cause.
  • In the three Japanese-exclusive Transformers anime series (Transformers: ★Headmasters, Transformers: Super-God Masterforce, and Transformers Victory), characters who died in The Transformers: The Movie show up alive and well, as if nothing happened. This is because the movie wouldn't hit Japan until 1989, leaving many of its events unknown to the Japanese audience/creators. These characters are Prowl, who appears in Headmasters, and Wheeljack, who appears in Victory. Prowl is especially bad, since he was explicitly name-checked as being deceased in the Japanese dub of "Dark Awakening". Later fiction would handwave these appearances by explaining them as being versions of themselves from the Binaltech universe, taking the place of the originals who really did die during the movie.
  • In Transformers: Scramble City, the narrator mentions that the Stunticons were built as counterparts to the Aerialbots. However, the two-part episode of The Transformers, "The Key to Vector Sigma", shows both of their origins and it was the exact opposite. The Stunticons were the first to be built and the Autobots later built the Aerialbots as a response.
• The UK version of The Transformers featured backup strips titled "Earthforce" throughout 1990, focusing on a unit of Autobots led by Grimlock. While it was largely its own thing, it often tied into events happening in the main book (such as Grimlock trying to revive his comrades and the approaching threat of Unicron), but such events were referred to before they happened in the main book, among many other problems that makes it impossible to reconcile the two. What makes this one particularly annoying is that Earthforce is also where Grimlock got most of his Character Development: he starts as a violent, tyrannical loon in the main book, then slowly mellows out into a more reasonable and goodnatured sort, until he becomes a mature (if crude) leader during the comic's last issues. Without Earthforce (which is where the middle bit happened), Grimlock kinda just completely revamps his style between appearances. Ask Vector Prime stated it took place in an alternate timeline, but TFWiki.net says events similar to Earthforce had to have happened due to the aforementioned development and in On the Edge of Extinction!, half of Grimlock's crew (e.g. Ironhide and Sunstreaker) were part of Earthforce.
• A simple question: is Beast Wars part of the Marvel comic timeline, or the original cartoon timeline? The series has enough callouts to each that it could be both, either, or neither. Even the writers seemed to be uncertain, with the Vok having one Word of God origin that definitely lands Beast Wars in the Marvel timeline, and another that could fit anywhere. Not helping matters is the expanded universe, which has seen many an Armed with Canon attempt to fix things up. They usually instead add more snarls.
  • The most infamous of these Armed with Canon attempts was probably Dawn of the Predacus, a comic which attempted to provide a definitive answer for how one war led into the other. Its wiki page has twenty different bullet points addressing the errors within it, with the most bizarre probably being that most the crew in the series were all active in the Great War and have all known each other for centuries, two things that definitely aren't the case in the cartoon.
  • And then there's Prowl II, who is what happens when the Beast Wars snarl and the Binaltech snarl make sweet, sweet love while neither side knows what the other is doing. The short version is that he was intended to simply be a future version of G1 Prowl, and by the end, he was an amnesiac future clone of another universe's G1 Prowl with the soul of his universe's Chip Chase, occupying a body that originally held the soul of the Chip from the other universe, while the actual G1 Prowl is dead and the one from another universe is now a lion on the Omniscient Council of Vagueness. And this is considered the "fixed" version.
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise was initially created as a Continuity Reboot. Its original form, Car Robots, focused on a bunch of entirely new characters (Fire Convoy, Gigatron, God Magnus, Mach Alert), which the dub changed to more familiar names (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Ultra Magnus, Prowl), making the reboot even more definitive. Then, years later, it was declared that Car Robots was actually a part of the G1 cartoon timeline: the cast were time travelers (something brought up in early promo material, but not the show) who showed up on Earth in a brief window when most of the G1 cast was out of commission (which was why they didn't appear). However, Robots in Disguise is still its own thing, and even has a distinct continuity family (Viron), as opposed to being in G1 (Primax). Basically, Fire Convoy and RID Optimus Prime are completely different people (one is a subcommander of a dimensional patrol group, the other is an incarnation of Optimus) despite being 99% the same character as presented. Ask Vector Prime stated that Viron is still separate from Primax but after the events of "Cybertron is in Grave Danger!", someone with dimensional powers tried to fix the timeline as one of the side-effects was events from the Robots in Disguise anime being replicated into Primax.
• In Japan, Transformers: Cybertron is called Galaxy Force, and was supposed to be a sequel to Legends of the Microns and Superlink but was changed to be its own thing at some point in development, becoming a clearly standalone story (e.g. being set in the present instead of the future, the Autobot cities no longer being around, plot revelations and characterization from the prior two shows ignored, and Optimus saying he never heard of two robots combining, despite that being all over the place in Armada and Energon). Hasbro stepped in and said their dub was a sequel, which caused problems as the show didn't indicate this. While there was a fair amount of rewriting in the dialogue department, almost all the inconsistencies stuck around, and if anything, some got worse (i.e. Jetfire getting a new voice and accent). Fun Publications stated that it was due to the Unicron Singularity messing with the universe and everyone's memories (such as Overhaul and Scattorshot's Remember the New Guy? status). Takara later declared Galaxy Force to be a sequel as was intended, despite the fact that all the above problems still exist, and are, if anything, worse.
• Some characters are "multiversal singularities", meaning that every incarnation of a certain character (like, say, The Fallen) is the same being, instead of just some alternate version. This leads to some headache inducing retcons among other things, and may have been part of the reason why Fun Publications did away with the concept in 2015.
  • Sideways's whole existence is one of these. How bad is it? At TFWiki, many characters have a Disambiguation page (after all, think of how many unrelated incarnations of TF have an Optimus Prime?) Sideways is the only character whose disambig page has a "Fiction" section.
  • Out-of-universe, first we have the RID 2001 toy, then the Armada toy which uses the same bio, reworded to add Minicons. Then the Armada character, an agent and offshoot of Unicron. Then the Cybertron character: same name, same gimmick, different revelation about who he is. These are considered to be the same guy, officially. Then the explanation of Cybertron's differences from the connected Armada series — Unicron exists in all dimensions and as such, all are affected by the black hole — better known as the Unicron Singularity. As "multiversal singularities," Primus, Unicron, and their direct creations exist in all dimensions as the same person. This would mean that Sideways can exist in multiple universes and seem to have a complete, differing history in each, but it's always still him and he'll always be Unicron's herald. The Animated Expanded Universe makes Animated Sideways and Movie Sideways maybe the same guy, and colors him like Armada Sideways… without anything beyond colors to say that he's also that one. Movie Sideways is cut in half and reappears in the next movie (the likes of which is no big feat for Armada Sideways, who can take many forms and whose true form seems to be energy that looks like multicolored television static), and his toy bios treat him as a manipulator like Armada and Cybertron Sideways, suggesting that he is Armada Sideways or at least just like him… but toy bios say a lot about movie characters that clashes with the movies, and a lot of movie Decepticons have the same or similar body types. And then there's a completely different yellow-and-purple Unicron-connected motorbike guy, Tarantulas, who predates Sideways but has had several references made to further link the two. Canon as it was understood at the time of the Unicron Trilogy would seem to make Armada Sideways the true identity of all the others, but there just kept not being any sign of that in later appearances - or any acknowledgement of different series existing in The Multiverse in any television, film, or mainstream comic incarnation. Finally, they embraced the fact that sense cannot be made of it: the "Ask Vector Prime" column, where fans can ask things of the ancient Time Master and get in-character tongue-in-cheek answers, has Sideways take over for a little while when the question is asked - first he reminds us that he's a lying liar who lies, and tells us that all, some, or none of the past ideas of who he is are totally true… or not.
  Sideways: Everything you think you know about me was a lie told by me to confuse someone, or conjecture from someone who'd be in no position to know. So yeah, maybe I'm a fragment of Unicron, because maybe Planet X used to BE Unicron. And maybe I'm his avatar made manifest and untethered once he collapsed into a giant singularity. And maybe I'm from the Cybertronian Empire.^note "Ask Vector Prime" gives a connection between Planet X and the Cybertronian Empire. Assuming you take Ask Vector Prime as canon at all. And maybe I'm just an ordinary Autobot who went crazy from Powerlinxing to the wrong Mini-Cons. Maybe I'm all of those things, or none. And you know what the best part is? You'll. Never. Know.
  • Although, Jim Sorenson, author of the Allspark Almanac, the guidebook that implied the connection between movie Sideways and Unicron Trilogy Sidways, later characterized the book as matching the Animated series' penchant for "in-jokes and Easter Eggs", possibly meaning he wasn't being serious about the connection. While writing for Ask Vector Prime, he made sure to classify Sideways as a non Singularity.
  • Indeed, the entire "multiversal singularities" concept turned into this pretty quick. For instance, the Unicron of the cartoon rather clearly isn't a multiversal god; he had a canon origin as having been created by a scientist. The Fallen, who was always intended to be one rather than retconned into one, ran into this when a version of him appeared in the live-action films as a completely incompatible figure. Vector Prime straight-up dies in Transformers: Cybertron, yet nobody acknowledges this. Word of God on Transformers: Animated is that Primus doesn't exist there, throwing into question how Animated fits into it. And then when Aligned kicked off, it created a list of the Thirteen that excluded Logos Prime (who is very obviously intended to be one) and added Alpha Trion (who has a long history in multiple continuities that's utterly incompatible with him being in the Thirteen, or being the same guy as all his alternate counterparts, including having clearly aged in his G1 appearances, and his Mirror Universe counterpart being evil.), prompting the explanation that the Aligned continuity is somehow separate from the others... which doesn't erase all the problems. Rather than making the Thirteen seem cooler, the whole thing ended up just raising hundreds of questions, so much so that the concept was erased by Cosmic Retcon. Good thing, too, because the eventual revelation that the Arisen was Optimus Prime would have handily snapped the entire system in half.
  • The Fallen's application ran into a particular case of this. In the Transformers multiverse, contradictory stories are explained as the result of the audience looking at a parallel universe — for instance, a toy bio where a character who is dead is treated as alive means that there's a universe where they survived or came back. This is also the case for multiple adaptations of the same story — the novelization of an episode's plot takes place in its own universe to the episode. Now combine that with the above information about The Fallen and the massive amount of ancillary material surrounding Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, and you have the apparent situation where the Fallen dies at the end of the movie, somehow survives, travels to the universe of the novelization, lives out his entire long history in the exact same manner and enacts the exact same scheme, dies in the exact same way, travels to the universe of the comic book adaptation, to the read-along storybook, to the video game, to the portable version of the video game, and so on and so forth, failing miserably every single time.
• The Transformers Film Series had many comics based off it, and they were generally not known for being friendly with each other. Due to having to pull hairpin weaves between the storylines of films that were clearly written as they went, with said films ignoring any worldbuilding and characterization the comics set up, while also doing the nigh-obligatory toy plugs, you had a very tangled continuity. Massive casts appearing between the events of the film and then vanishing, dates and the overall timeline not matching up, and writers losing track of what everyone else but them had done. A lot of John Barber's early fame came from the fact that he managed to patch most of the holes left by the first three movies, pushing the various comic efforts into a relatively cohesive timeline. Thankfully for those writing the comics, they more or less ended after Transformers: Dark of the Moon, meaning they didn't have to deal with Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight's retcons to the franchise's backstory.
  • A particular sufferer of this is Arcee. In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, she appears as a trio of bike girls that get very little dialogue and seem to act as The Dividual, and two of them get blown up in the climax. Given just how vague the information on Arcee was, despite a patently strange concept, most writers seemed to have a very hard time keeping things straight—not helped by her bios referencing things that were cut from the film, such as a combination ability. The result was that whether Arcee was a single character with three bodies or three separate characters, whether they could combine, and whether any or all of them were alive or dead, were things that could vary depending on who was writing at the time. Oh, and if the three bodies do have separate names, it's anyone's guess as to what those names are and which bike has which name. Not helping things at all was that Arcee was a preestablished character in the comics (based on a cut concept from the first film that got a toy) who didn't have anything resembling the above lunacy.
  • Lockdown is another case of this: In IDW's comics, he's basically his Transformers: Animated self, then in Transformers: Age of Extinction, he's a bounty hunter who's loyal to the "Creators" and views the Autobots and Decepticons as basically squabbling children whose messes he needs to clean up. In Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark he has his movie look but his motive is using a time bridge to travel back in time to the Battle of Chicago and help the Decepticons win so he can have his best-paying customer back. Finally, in Titan's comic, he has his movie look, is a member of the Decepticons and doesn't appear to have any loyalty to the "Creators", as the comic presents him going to capture Optimus Prime for them as just another job.
  • For Bumblebee, John Barber wrote Transformers: Bumblebee Movie Prequel, based off a early script where the film was still a prequel as it takes "Bumblebee was on Earth since World War II" and ties it into the universe Barber had written earlier. The film relegated the prequel to an Alternate Timeline as it depicts Bumblebee as freshly arrived on Earth during the 80's.
• The Transformers (IDW) ran into an issue with the Battle of Sherma Bridge, established as the second encounter between Optimus Prime and Megatron, when they published an entire mini-series, Autocracy, about them forming an Enemy Mine to deal with Zeta Prime. Officially, Sherma Bridge took place before that team-up, but its status as a battle doesn't fit with the Decepticons focusing on guerrilla ops rather than open warfare prior to the Autocracy series.
  • The Transformers: All Hail Megatron was pretty infamous for generating these, due in part to initial uncertainty over whether it was a Soft Reboot or a full-on one. Characters shown to be dead or critically injured show up alive, Megatron suddenly has obtaining the Matrix being his main motivation when he'd never cared about it before, the Insecticons are suddenly recent creations when they showed up earlier, a lot of characters shift to cartoon-inspired characterizations... it required another four issues just to try and clear things up a little, which actually ended up raising some more questions (since when did Scourge exist?) John Barber devoted a good portion of his early run to explaining most of the stranger errors, usually in pretty crazy ways.
• The Aligned Continuity, despite its intent to tie everything together, formed a Continuity Snarl after only a few months of existence. According to the powers that be, the video game Transformers: War for Cybertron, the novel Exodus, and the TV series Transformers: Prime are all part of the same continuity. The problem is, the plots for Exodus and War for Cybertron are so disparate and contradictory as to be completely incompatible. The Prime cartoon largely chose to quietly sweep these discrepancies under the rug and ignore them, and encourage the fans to do the same. War's sequel Transformers: Fall of Cybertron makes some attempts, though Prime's sequel, Robots in Disguise makes things worse as Bumblebee, Sideswipe, and Grimlock don't seem to recognize each other. Producer Adam Beechen later said that Grimlock is a common name among Dinobots and that RiD!Grimlock isn't FoC!Grimlock, but a different character. TFWiki.net takes this a step further and presents the Sideswipes, as well as both versions of Kickback as separate characters as well.
  • Later statements by Hasbro have clarified that War For Cybertron, Exodus, and Prime are part of the same continuity in the same way that the original Transformers cartoon and the Marvel, Dreamwave, and IDW comics are all part of the G1 continuity — that is, they share similarities in aesthetics and characterization, but are not necessarily consistent with one another. The fandom generally uses the term "continuity family" to refer to such an arrangement, and this difference in terminology is part of the reason some fans continue to grumble about discrepancies in canon between the three works.
  • Even that doesn't satisfy all, just because War for Cybertron is so G1 Prequel-y (its main cast is G1 characters and only G1 characters and their pre-Earth designs were largely based on The War Within, Dreamwave's G1 prequel), and in terms of its aesthetics and characterization, it has essentially nothing to do with Prime aside from the broadest strokes. In fact, by several accounts, it wasn't intended to be Aligned at all in its early stages, and was essentially rebranded as part of the new continuity later in development. There were some occasional attempts at Arc Welding, but for the most part, the Cybertron duology and Prime didn't make too much effort to hook their plots together.
  • The Aligned continuity gained a new one when both The Art of Prime and The Covenant of Primus decided to address the dead Prime whose arm Megatron stole for his Badass Transplant in "Alpha; Omega". According to notes for Megatron's design in Art of Prime, he stole it from Sentinel Zeta Prime, but according to The Covenant of Primus, it came from the Liege Maximo, one of the original Thirteen. For what it's worth, TFWiki.net has decided to go with the The Covenant of Primus explanation.
  • Speaking of "Sentinel Zeta Prime," he is an attempt to clean up a minor one. One source says the Prime before Optimus is Sentinel Prime and one says it's Zeta Prime, so Hasbro decided, "why not make them the same guy?"
  • Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark is a plot that involves both the Transformers Film Series and the Aligned universe, with the Aligned part being an interquel between War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron and the film section taking place roughly around Transformers: Age of Extinction. Among the problems is that Aligned!Megatron is shown in his rebuilt form from FoC—despite only getting it that that story, Lockdown having different motivations (being greedy and missing the war in the game, hired by Quintessa to capture Optimus in the movie), Stinger being with Lockdown (which is lampshaded in the 3DS version's bio saying he's mysterious), the Dinobots already being with the Autobots, and Movie!Optimus and movie!Bumblebee already in the forms they gain in the movie. It also portrayed the Aligned continuity family as being connected to the main multiverse after Word of God stated that it wasn't; "Ask Vector Prime" dealt with this by treating it as a portion of the multiverse that had been cut off from the rest and was now connecting to it.
  • Transformers: Go! takes place after the Japanese ending of Prime but the sheer number of differences In particular, Optimus is still alive whereas he had sacrificed himself in the Predacons Rising film means that is ignored by Hasbro save for a couple of Predacons appearing every now and again.
  • Season 1 of Prime ends with Optimus losing his memories of being Optimus Prime, resulting in him going back to the Nemesis with Megatron, having forgotten his villainy. However, one of the few things that the Aligned Continuity can keep straight is that Optimus got the Matrix and became a Prime when he journeyed to the core of Cybertron to reverse corruption caused by Megatron, deep into the war, well after Megatron turned on Orion, meaning that, while he would be rightfully confused, Orion should still know that he and Megatron were enemies.
  • The source of the corruption, Dark Energon, is another snarl. In War and Exodus, it seems like Dark Energon is something that's been around for a while, and it's never implied to be anything other than an artificial creation of Megatron's. In Prime, which takes place chronologically far after, it's discussed in dialogue as if it were a new discovery, and given a firm origin of being "the blood of Unicron" (who, in this continuity, is in the Earth). You can finagle an answer out of this, but it certainly doesn't seem that the two sides were on the same page.
• The comic Transformers '84 issue 0 and Transformers: Secrets and Lies are evidentially set in an alternate universe that combines elements from the US and UK Marvel comic because it manages to contradict them in various ways. One example is claiming that Fastlane and Cloudraker were the Man of Iron and the Navigator from the titular issue and as such died at the end and in the story, Pounce and Wingspan are killed at the end. However, in Transformers: Regeneration One, Pounce and Wingspan appear (where Wingspan is killed, go figure) and Cloudraker is one of the vehicle-mode flying Autobots attacking the Warworld.
• The Transformers - Megatron: Origins has Orion Pax, Ironhide, Ariel and Chromia show up at Fastback and Bumper's funeral as a reference to the cartoon episode "The Search for Alpha Trion". However, as the original IDW continuity was developed further, the four characters were eventually shown to be at locations that made it impossible for them to have attended the funeral; Orion Pax and Ironhide were fighting against Sentinel Prime's forces, Elita-One spent most of her life on the starship Carcer, and Chromia was born on Caminus. This means that we now have four Autobots who look like Orion, Ironhide, Ariel and Chromia, which definitely wasn't the artist's intent.
• In the UK annuals for The Transformers (Marvel), the 1985 annual was written to promote the toys that had not yet appeared in the comic and as such most of the stories don't line up. For instance, Plague of the Insecticons! depicts the titular characters as being awoken from glass tubes in the Decepticon base, not yet aware of their abilities and the Autobots don't know about them, whereas The Smelting Pool! depicts them as active on Cybertron. Likewise, Warpath is one of the Autobots on Earth, but wouldn't come to Earth until after The Bridge to Knowhere! and the Autobots are openly able to make contact with the government which doesn't fit with the comic itself.

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