Hey, I agree with you. I think it's lazy and cruddy too. (For what it's worth, though, from what I've seen of Exodus, it basically amounts to telling about events that happen "around" the game. Actual events that happen in the game's storyline are usually just kind of alluded to or glossed over. "And then the Autobots fought Trypticon and won.") But as for things like Prime being called Orion Pax in Exodus and Prime but just "Optimus" in WFC...yeah. (That said, I think WFC is supposed to be the most "mainstream" of the new universe, and definitely before Hasbro came out about this whole aligned continuity thing, they were definitely pitching it to people as a prequel/reboot of the G1 cartoon. Mainstreamers won't know that Optimus Prime was named Orion Pax before he was Optimus Prime, so he just becomes Optimus before that. Or...someone on WFC's writing team really didn't like Orion Pax. Or they didn't feel like having you play through half the game as "Orion Pax" instead of Optimus Prime, The Franchise Star.)JediTricks wrote:Visuals are one thing, though how War for Cybertron and TF:P can exist in the same universe is baffling, especially Soundwave; but I'm talking about stuff like Dark Energon having different behaviors and meanings, having more understanding in WFC and then less understanding in TF:P, and being entirely opposite actions when Cybertron is infected by it; or Sentinel Prime and Zeta Prime being different characters yet both being Optimus' direct predecessor (and Hasbro's "Sentinel Zeta Prime" thing doesn't really address how WFC attends to the character, IIRC); and WFC and Exodus tell stories of the same war yet with at times entirely different situations.
I don't like the idea of there being a "greater TF story" in that sense, I think that's more restrictive than anything else. But then, I've been dying for a series with no Prime or Megatron for *years* and the comics are finally giving it to me...Imagine if Hasbro said IDW's continuities needed to align with this now. I'd definitely be out.It's that they're all made without any intended intention to tie into the greater TF story, they are produced to stand-alone with less restrictions as to their storylines.
Nah, Aaron Archer came up with all the concepts for the shows--the whole thing with the Minicons, the whole thing with Energon's whatever-the-fuck, and Cybertron's whole going-to-different-planets-to-get-the-keys thing. Takara just put it through the Japan Filter and messed up a lot of it.Also, Hasbro is only a helper monkey on the UT, there are enough storylines and elements from those 3 shows to prove they were produced as much for a non-US audience, if not moreso.
I'm honestly thinking what happened was Hasbro had all these kind-of similar things that were already being worked on, and then haphazardly decided they were all supposed to fit together, and thusly wrote some vague rules. Or maybe the vague rules came first, and Hasbro has been lax about some of them. I dunno.I like WFC though, Exodus and TF:U sounded interesting, so it is a curiosity to me to have Hasbro claim all these clearly different entertainment vessels are related and telling the same story. If you told the Aligned canon as a single narrative, you'd have characters appearing and disappearing in the same paragraph, and contradictory sentences leading into each other. I find that odd considering Hasbro is trying to build a larger new Transformers ethos and yet it doesn't seem to fit together all that well from the outset.
I've got this little mental version of it. To me, Prime is obviously meant to be the flagship of the canon, if such a thing can even be called a canon. Obviously whatever happens in Prime is how Hasbro sees it going down. If the novels or games deviate from this, it's on their head, I feel.Lucas has so much "expanded universe" materials that the Star Wars universe is now broken up into levels of canon, that's how fractured it can be. Movies are one level of canon, Marvel comics are a lower level, Ewoks & Droids cartoons still a different level, the new cartoon a TV level while the previous cartoon a lower level, and so forth.
Shooter was also a stickler for typos and making sure things were spelled correctly. He was very concerned with comics reading well.I think the key here was that mistakes which confuse the story were less acceptable, but in TF sometimes color is the only clear element to differentiate a character in a shot, a lot of the TFs are drawn somewhat similar to others.
