It's a shame really, the back story to the transformers is epic. If you are going for one big continuity it really spoils it when none of the media ties in fully. There isn't much point in going for one big back story and a big over arching story if your not going to do i right and make sure it flows and that everything like books, games and tv shows all match up. If they ain't going to do it properly they might as well have just kept on with the old multi-verse way of telling the story. Just my opinion, I will still buy the books and games and watch the show I just wish the back story was more cohesive
I'm slightly confused.... so the 13 a book? A comic? an online text story? Or just a cast of characters to finally build?
I'm feeling good about the explanation they came up with for the small number of females, where Solus was 1/13th of the original 13, therefore female TFs will only make up 1/13th of the total population. That idea manages to explain the gender imbalance in-story in a logical and non-insulting way, which is a nice change. Infinitely better than Furman's "angry transvestite" explanation. YES! That was my favorite thing in the panel. They confirmed that from now on the fiction will be developed first and the toys will be dependent on that, instead of the other way around like it has been in the past. Fiction first, toys second, just as it should be! Hopefully that means we'll never have to watch the fiction sacrifice its quality just to introduce the next new gimmick. I am LOVING Hasbro's new focus on Transformers as intellectual property instead of just a toy product!
re; continuity errors - I'm locked on the 'Star Wars' tier system, sort of. Though for me the movies/cartoon would be top canon, then the comics, then the novel, then the video game. Though with Aligned I may have to switch novel and video game, but eh. Toys & tech specs are subsidiary/bottom tier canon, and used only for support/thoughts, a la, "I WONDER WHAT WEAPONS HE HAS..." (because otherwise Rosanna the Kiss Player is a hell of a powerhouse. you have no idea.) Yes I wish it ~ALL MADE SENSE~. Yes I wish there were less plotholes/"WTFs" than IDW during Andy Schmidt's run. Yes I'm leery of what they're doing. But I'm also going to give the Hasbro guys a chance to show me what they've done before I scream ruined forever. Even then, there's always me saying 'screw it' and just pulling out the fanfic files to make my own fix. I'll probably blame Unicron.
Bringing Nova Prime in would be awesome! And I too would like to see illustrations in Exiles! You and me both, buddy! Agreed. Having a female member amongst the 13 makes female Cybertronians perhaps more a 'type/'make/model' rather than a 'gender' amongst Cybertronians. As there are mini-cons, combiners and animalistic beast-type TFs, there are female-types as well. They could make for different types of early tribes on Cybertron: the mini-con tribe created by the original mini-con, the beast tribe created by the first beast Cybertronian, the combiner tribe coming from the first combiner Prime, the female tribe descending from Solus, etc.
Better. Lucas's treatment was two pages; this is 354 pages and has artwork. I reckon it's more like the stories Tolkien wrote in the trenches (which were completed as The Silmarillion by his son) which were heavily referenced by The Hobbit (Gondolin, Elrond, the Necromancer) and then informed The Lord of the Rings ("the story was irresistibly drawn towards the older world, and became an account, as it were, of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told"). The Transformers Vault has scans of its pages about Optimus, the art of Prima and apparently a map of Cybertron detailing where the characters come from (which is why Exodus mentions Prowl and Ironhide lived in Praxus). Now that I think about it, perhaps I would prefer to flip through rather than read the binder; I wouldn't want to spoil too much of the surprises about the Thirteen now. "Enemies of brothers, murderers of lovers, heroes of the insignificant, and cowards of the mighty." I'd prefer the novels, games and cartoons to reveal more in their own time: how ironic that stories that are familiar myths to Transformers are such prized secrets to humans.
To be honest, I'm not completely sure how I feel about the whole O-13 concept just yet. There are some ideas I like, some I don't. I'll have to wait and see where it goes. That's pretty much how I took it. The only difference being that they're all going to be using the same origin concept. Much, like someone pointed out, like the G1 cartoon was to the G1 comics.
Some people just whine whine whine. . . we got spoiled last year with the Generations reveal and so it hurt worse with less toy reveals this year. Plus after revealing all the toys last year and getting the rug pulled out from under them from the retailers you can understand Hasbro's attempt to try something new this year. As an attendee I really appreciated that they were showing us a lot of news that in years past would have been hush-hush. As for their explanation of Solus Prime, they said that transformers do not have a gender per se but archetypes. Female or girl transformers are a result of us humans forcing our limited gender view of man/woman boy/girl onto the transformers.
This. I'm going to tell myself forever that the pronouns we use (or they use, when speaking English) don't exactly match Cybertronian, which is more gender-neutral. And that 'brother' basically means 'sibling'. -still gonna use 'she/he' when writing them, though, just for my own ease. Because I'm human and I do that.
Using she for the fembots are fine. Lots of languages outside of english assign gender to everthing from cars, windows, etc. "We" a group of male is male, "we" a group of females is female, & "we" a group of mix females and male is male.
"a beat" What's a beat? Oh wait...my bad a "beast" must be a minor typo. I'm good, but still no toys of them, man that kinda bites. Hopefully that will change if not I'm cool with it.
