There are many different fandoms enjoying many different aspects of this brand. Whatever Transformers you’re in to, for whatever reason, my attitude is: if you like it you win!

What I get out of the brand has developed over the years. I grew up with the G1 cartoon and toys. (I cherish my original Grimlock and mourn the loss of my G1 Megatron, who went missing in action somewhere behind the garden shed.)

I drifted away from the brand when they relaunched it as G2 but dipped in from time to time. I loved the 2007 Animated cartoon. I was excited when they announced a live action movie but put off by the Bayverse aesthetic.

Bizarrely, in the early 2010s I began to have dreams about collecting the Transformers I had always wanted as a kid. A harmless side-effect of being subjected to daily multimedia advertising during your formative years. At least it would have been had my compulsion not been enabled by my wife.

My re-collecting began with a few rarer G1 figures, like Reflector and Ratbat. Then I discovered more toon-accurate lines. (Music Label Soundwave and Device Label Ravage remain my favourite representations of these characters to date, and their alt-modes actually function as a working music player and tool for industrial espionage, respectively.) My desire for better representations led me to break the £80 mark with my first Masterpeice toy: MP05 Megatron. This toy put me off Transformers for 5 years.

As I say, if you like MP05, you win. But I lost. The gun mode was too big for my hand, the robot didn’t scale with any other bot I owned, and the transformation was fiddly and unenjoyable. I couldn’t bring myself to transform him properly for storage or to get rid of him so he lay in a draw for 5 years: an expensive mess of robotic spaghetti, mangling my childhood memories. Fortunately (for Hasbro's bottom line) I met somebody who was a huge Megatron fan, and gifting MP05 to him eventually made my purchase worthwhile and unlocked the spending-spree I’ve been on ever since.

Generally, I collect good-quality, toon-accurate, G1-inspired, Generations-scale toys. I like posing them in cool scenes, but only ever display half my collection at once. This way, I enjoy all of my toys as I constantly re-discover and re-pose them in fresh dioramas.

- Poptimus and the Autotots, October 2020.