I have never watched Beast Wars or Beast Wars Metals or Beast Wars Returns. But I guess Optimus Primal/Beast Convoy had no Matrix, right? He wasn't the Supreme Commander of the Cybertrons either. In Beast Wars II Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger! movie, Magnaboss activated the teleport gate and transported Beast Convoy from Energoa to Gaia. When the Cybertrons saw him, they referred him as ''Legendary Supreme Commander Convoy''. While Beast Convoy and Lio Convoy were fighting against Majin Zarak, they synchronized their Energon Matrices and transformed themselves into Flash Lio Convoy and Burning Convoy. Burning Convoy and Flash Lio Convoy then hovered together and with the power of their Energon Matrices unleashed the "Double Matrix Blaster". And this leads many people say ''Optimus Primal/Convoy and Optimus Prime/Convoy were the same person in Japan''. I couldn't understand what it had to do with. In short, Ask Vector Prime Facebook page explained it: '' Q: Dear Vector Prime, Did Optimus Primal always have an Energon Matrix, or was that exclusive to the Beast Wars II special? A: Dear Special Speculator, Primax 1298.19 Alpha is an interesting case, an offshoot of Primax 498.1 Alpha that re-merged with its parent trunk. The underlying reality substrate of this (and its parent) stream was such that Convoys are granted Energon Matrices. When Convoy was pulled from Primax 1097.01 Alpha, his history subtly altered, such that Convoy was indeed equipped with an Energon Matrix, and was able to achieve the Burning Convoy power-up to help defeat Majin Zarak and foil Galvatron's scheming.'' So, the reason is, after Beast Convoy was pulled from the time of Beast Wars cartoon to the time of Beast Wars II cartoon, his backstory was altered. If you ask ''why did you open this thread'' because many people think ''in this movie, Primal is Prime'', and I'm pretty sure many people are not aware of Vector Prime's answer.
The thing with Ask Vector Prime is that it’s not canon, it’s just Jim Sorenson making up whatever fanfic ideas he wants and people take it as gospel, regardless of if it makes sense. That explanation, for example, explains absolutely nothing. All it does is basically say “Primal doesn’t have a Matrix, but when he was pulled into the BWII universe he got one.” I really, truly hate how AVP gets cited by fans and TFWiki as somehow being canon answers, despite being written years after the fact by someone completely unrelated to the source material.
Ask Vector Prime just looks like a hellhole of getting headaches with all it's talk about alternate universe names and numbers and shit
More often than not the club stuff just became TFWiki admins talking to themselves behind screen names to close up little issues only they cared about.
Or act out their own little fantasies/headcanon. It's always fun going to TFWiki to look up a character and find they're completely different from what you last saw, despite being the same iteration. It's not unique to Ask Vector Prime, (like how Spinister is now a savant doctor who's dumb as a stump because of MTMTE) but it's the worst example of retcons and revisionism that's totally detached from the original media.
The current iteration is not. At one point, it was officially licensed, canon media. In all, I'd say it's a lot of fun, but you're free to take all the answers with a grain of salt.
To look at the original question, I think it has to do with the fact that the second season of Beast Wars had yet to be dubbed into Japanese at this point. The writers saw an Optimus that was a leader and, completely understandably, assumed he would have a Matrix of Leadership. They couldn’t have known that the second season would come along and establish that Optimus didn’t have a Matrix at all. In-Universe, I like to pretend Primal was taken from a point in time when he had Optimus’ matrix inside of him and he was reverted back to his original body somehow because of some odd timeline energy tampering (he was thrown through time, it could have had some effects on his body, like how characters switched between bodies when BW Megatron shot G1 Optimus and created that time swirl)
yeah, it got shit canned out of canon when all the Funpub stuff did around 2014-16. Though the TFwiki staff will treat it like gospel because it was mostly them writing it.
