It was either that or traumatized kids would have never left their rooms.
But yeah, I think it also undermined Rodimus' struggle to fill Optimus' shoes.

 

Dropping the ball on interesting plot or characters like in TFPrime & RID scourge are things I don't like.

 

I gotcha. Sounds fair enough.

 

People overplay the "traumatized" kid thing. I was 9 when that movie came out and loved every second of it (still do). Even as a child I understood that the deaths of those characters were to make room for new ones, but it also created a higher stakes story that had not existed prior to the movie and it made season 3 my favorite.

"Dark Awakening" was intended to be a final, epic send-off for Optimus and instead it was retconned into a weak transition to "The Return of Optimus Prime."

 

I dislike how no series expect movies and comic books is allowed to go past being 3 years old before being discounted anymore. I also dislike when a gimmick is in 2 out of 3 years of said toyline and it makes it inconsistent in its totality.

 

How very earth centric it can get at least in the cartoons. Always a very wide open space with no defining features other then rocks, cliffs, dirt and maybe trees.... Almost like they can recycle more art assets that way. Like I totally get why it is the way it is some times the budget just isn't there for anything more interesting.

 

I agree, but I hate the "original plan" even more.

 

The current trend of 'mature' shows. Honestly, the only show that has truly been dark for me is Beast Machines. It had a lot of intensity, emotion and concepts in it that made the viewing enjoyable for me. But all these shows we've gotten recently, starting with TFP, just feel pretentious and patronizing for me. Heck, the shows aimed at the kiddies (Rescue Bots, RiD15 and Cyberverse) do a better job at telling stories and having fun characters than what those so-called mature shows bring. Like seriously, TFP for me was torture (it and TFA get so much praise, but for me, they just were pretty painful to sit through despite some good things about them). Then came Prime Wars, and it just felt like more of the same (Prime Wars Windblade is just the same thing as TFP Arcee for me, an unlikeable bitch). It was so unbearable that I bailed out at the beginning of POTP. And the Netflix series doesn't seem to be any better from the few clips I've seen and I don't plan to watch it in full.

Also, Hasbro... please... stop shoving Optimus Prime and Megatron into every single show. I know they're iconic, but their presence just drags a show down (at least to me). Seriously, the only current show where neither has made me facepalm hard or make me wish it was another character (looking at you TFA Optimus) is Cyberverse. They weren't deep characters, but they were enjoyable and the writers did add some stuff to them that was pretty welcome. But other than that show, I just feel irritated whenever they are onscreen.

 

That’s probably the one I’d pick as well. While I’m most interested in the toys, I really want some decent content to go along with them. The Bay movies were pretty shallow, IMO, and the Netflix shows the past few years haven’t been anything to write home about…and they definitely haven’t made me want to buy any figures I might otherwise pass on. I like cool/fun figures…but I’m also a sucker for buying derpy toys that represent characters I really enjoy. Enjoyable and well-written TF characters have been in pretty short supply for quite a long time at this point. Season 1 of TFP was probably the last high-quality content they put out there.

 

I wish it was only one thing.

The silliness in the fiction like Lord Chumley, Professor Princess and Agent Simmons.

Lack of scale consistency in the toys. Can we at least get the scale printed on the packaging like other toylines?

The constant reboots.

In recent years, the decline in voice acting:

Combiner Wars Menasor
Netflix and Deveststion Starscream.
Pretty much every modern Soundwave outside the Bumblebee movie.
Movie Lockdown
Movie Drift
Brains
Movie Crosshairs

 

How people try to take this franchise seriously. The best of this franchise comes out when people embrace how fucking ridiculous Transformers is and can be.

 

Unpopular opinions would be sharing disapproval for something considered widely accepted or liked.

I guess this thread is more for things disliked that could be considered innate to the brand or common. Doesn’t have to be popular.

 

Like a lot of people have already shared, I dislike how over saturated Generation 1 has become in the franchise.

As a fan who was introduced by the movies when they came out and discovering just how different Transformers could be in each iteration before and briefly after, the G1 look has really lost all its novelty to me.

 

Animated Sentinel Prime

 

it’s part of the brand recognition. Plus they have to actively and continually use names otherwise they lose the rights to use those names. It’s just part of being a toyline first and comic books, cartoons and movies second.

 

People hating on shipping is common in all fandoms though, not just Transformers.

 

The Bay movies dragging the franchise into the sewer. The "good luck trying to find anything at retail" distribution. Store exclusives.

 

Oh my gosh I can’t believe I forgot about the horrible scavenger hunts you need to do at retail. Finding anything worth while that isn’t a one step changer or a hundred Chromias is pure luck for me.

 

The fact that this franchise has too many interesting characters to count, and a lot of them are severely underutilized to the point where many fans either don't know much about them or haven't even heard of them. Raise a hand if any of these names ring a bell:

Roulette
Road Rage
Lifeline
Glyph
Tap-Out
Gunrunner
Countdown
Skyjack
Wingspan
Pounce
Bombshock
Carnivac
Stranglehold
Submarauder

Raise the other hand if you actually know who any of them are. Now, start counting. How many of them have you seen outside of comics? How many were featured in comics you've actually read? How many did you learn the existence of only after seeing their most recent toys? How many of them even have new toys? And those are just a handful of neglected G1 characters. Don't even get me started on the other continuities.

Now, I get it, Hasbro is more likely to profit off of the more popular and well-known characters, but if those characters are the only ones given any time to shine, people will get tired of them eventually. So, here's an idea: for the next TV series, why don't we try mixing things up? Half the cast can be comprised of characters who are guaranteed to sell toys, and the other half can be obscure ones who at least have a chance of winning people over. Be sure to wait a while before releasing the toys, as well. Preferably not as long as they did with Prime, but long enough for viewers to get to know the main cast and decide which characters they want toys of. Most importantly, hire people who know how to write compelling characters and stories. If all goes well, Roulette and the others could easily become popular characters themselves. Not as popular as the likes of Optimus Prime and Megatron, perhaps, but at least popular enough to continue showing up here and there (and hopefully give some of the overused guys and girls a much-needed break) rather than fading back into obscurity.

 

The Fandom, which seems to repeatedly root for things to fail.