So, I've been hearing lots of stuff, that Prime messed up the plans Hasbro had for The Transformers Aligned Continuity. I don't know the full story, so can someone help??
Hasbro execs wanted a more consistent and streamlined continuity, hence why they wrote the Binder of Revelation (which I think became the Covenant of Primus). But some of the writers and animators wanted more artistic freedom and more stand-alone, not to be restricted by prior work. This was combined with the show going overbudget, therefore they had to squeezed nearly all the plans they had into the second series, and Beast Hunters were thrust into the third.
There were arguments surrounding aligned continuity from the Prime show team, specifically one of the TFP episodes (flying mind) depicted the Nemesis as a sentient being from being infused with dark energon. Yet in this episode, the Decepticons are awestruck as if they didn't know that Trypticon had been reformatted before. The FOC game, (which was in aligned) established that the Trypticon had become the Nemesis. The truth is that the writers of Prime did in-fact know that the Nemesis was Trypticon (proof being that there are TFP designs of Trypt.) but had ignored it overall leading to some undisclosed drama about why they didn't. But probably because they wanted to follow their own story route without being chained to WFC/FOC.
Basically, Hasbro was trying to get their new TV station, The Hub, up and running and they needed a new flagship Transformers show, since their blundering led to Animated getting cancelled. So they decided to instead base the show off of the new, popular War for Cybertron game. They directed the team in charge of creating Prime to write the show as a sequel to the game, amongst other things included in the design binder (many of which, like a new concept for the 13, went against pre-existing canon). But the creative team that actually sat down to do the show decided they wanted to do their own thing, and instead disregarded significant chunks of the binder and the game when creating the show. One example, other than Flying Mind, is Dark Energon itself. In the WFC game series, Dark Energon is synthetic. It's an extremely potent yet unstable and unpredictable superfuel that's manufactured on a space station. Yet in the show, Dark Energon is explicitly explained to be the lifeblood of Unicron, and thus is an anti-Energon of sorts.
The kicker being that there was absolutely no follow up to Not-Trypticon Nemesis. Ever. That episode happened purely to almost literally deus ex machina the plot of four coordinates at once purely to set up the following episodes. It's never brought up again.
They probably should've considered that before accepting the job of making a direct follow-up to WFC. Because that's what "Prime" was supposed to be.
WFC feels like a prequel to the G1 cartoon, but FOC feels more like a hastily put together story trying to tie Prime and the WFC games together.
The slides originate from TFcon Charlotte in I think 2015 at Rik Alavarez' panel talking about his experience with the Aligned continuity. I wish someone could find me a picture of the Phase One slide, for the life of me I cannot seem to find it. While I'm sure there's some nuance missing from the claims on these slides, they do a good enough job giving us a look at how things were behind the scenes. It sounds like it was a shitshow, and the expensive waste of effort that is the Binder of Revelation seems to have scared Hasbro from making future big investments in TF as a franchise at least for the time being. So for now they're content to produce painfully safe content like Cyberverse, the new IDW continuity, the machinima series, presumably the Netflix series if RoosterTeeth doesn't implode on itself by then and so on. That one quote in particular is pretty sad: "Cost over $250k to produce - lives in the bottom of drawer." From what I've heard the B.O.R. was an impressive effort that took a lot of different authors and contributors to make happen, yet it seems its fate is to be forgotten. What I'd give to be able to look inside of it just to see how ambitious it could've been.
