How they handled Devestator in ROTF was so unbelievably stupid. But yeah, having a big generic army isn't really good at all. It may make for cool action scenes of seeing the good guys take out enemies in style (even then I'm assuming that's what they'll do, maybe they'll just boringly shoot/slice them all). I really would've preferred if it was as simple as Scourge and the Terrorcons inside the big structure thing trying to summon Unicron, and the bots and maximals bust in to stop them. Then we can see how powerful the Terrorcons truly are as they hold off nine good guys and maybe even kill/severely injure a couple of them. But oh well, here's hoping the final battle at least looks cool. Also, that would be a nice change of pace from the Bay films where the good guys are always the ones outnumbered. This time we could've seen the bad guys be outnumbered.

 

Wasn't that AoE?

 

Well at first they were, I suppose. Since it was just Lockdown, Galvatron, and Stinger. But then they get the vehicon army lol

 

So three named badguys and a horde of generics...remind me what we think the set-up for ROTB's final battle was? Three named bad guys and a horde of generics, maybe with some robot scorpions or something?

 

honestly i have no expectations at all. Just 2 hours of mindless entertainment. Nothing life shattering. I hope there is some reference to Charlie and Memo but I doubt that will happen. Looking forward to see Pete Davidson's mirage

 

Similar but still quite different. For AOE, once the vehicon army was unleashed it was really just Hound and Bee vs the army while the rest of the bots got the dinobots and arrived to kill them all. Then it led into Prime vs Lockdown. For ROTB, it at least seems like an actual war (although minus an army for the good guys) and all the bots seem to be fighting alongside each other unlike in AOE where they were separated.

 

Same. I find the narrative that the Bay films have done nothing but harm to the franchise/are worthless to be highly disingenuous. I think we can all agree that all of the films have their faults, but they made Transformers mainstream and grew the fandom in a big way. I’m glad they exist.

 

….So why did they run straight to unicron with the second film in this continuity?

It would be nice if this small Autobot group went against a small con group and built up to the major bad guys…

perhaps Starscream and some other recognizable cons come to earth to finish what Shatter and DK failed at…maybe throw hints that Megs is coming or something

It seems like the plot for the next movie following BB would’ve been incredibly obvious….?

but it seems like they went a little too far forward

also the beast wars characters seem very random  …. I love beast wars but I’m just not sure why they’re there….

 

So I just realized Energon is 2004... boy, that feels like the show happen in around 99-00, not 3 years before the movie...

I am old.

Call me an elitist, call me gatekeeping, but personally I feel that becoming "mainstream" is a bad thing, not just for TF, but for any fanbase. The bigger the fanbase, the harder it is to filter the cancerous fans (or very hating... haters.)

 

That was funny tho

 

Indeed, in this case I really would call it a Faustian bargain, since for all the success and 'new blood' the movies brought in, there wasn't any of that by TLK.

 

The solution can be a bit tricky to put into practice: gatekeeping itself isn't a bad thing and like a bodies immune system it can protect the hobby from hostile invaders. But too much gatekeeping can prevent people with a genuine interest in the hobby out, which would be bad. In my experience it's usually the lack of gatekeeping that leads to issues because especially when a thing becomes mainstream there's a lot of new people to account for and the unfortunate reality is that some people suck. This was something the MLP fanbase had to deal with with the meteoric popularity of FIM.

Becoming popular / mainstream also often leads to the hobby / IP itself becoming homogenized in an effort to appeal to more people, which often leads to a lot of its identity being stripped away all for the sake of making it digestible for the most people. That means if your hobby is particularly complicated or intricate over the years they'll make it easier and easier to make sure the newbies don't feel alienated / intimidated, even if that means stripping away the good parts of a thing.

 

I dunno, this is a pretty modestly populated forum and we have our share of cancerous fans here, so I'm not so certain size has much to do with it. What 'haters' are brought in by Transformers being more mainstream?

Most franchises have ebbs and flows, and the Bayverse happened to exhaust itself after 4 very successful entries. It happens in movie franchises, and we're moving on with new movies that are taking a different approach. We have a Movieverse Toy Appreciation thread here that is 5,600 pages and counting and has been going strong for 10+ years, so the movie-enjoying community is still very much alive and well.

 

Mid

 

I find the whole defending gatekeeping thing kind of ridiculous. Yeah, more exposure can increase the chance of so-called "toxic" fans coming around but, for better or worse, that chance is always there. To me, it just sounds like some sort of hipster defense of "it was cooler when it was less mainstream" and trying to deflect criticism of complaining about certain types of fans that you don't like. Everyone will push back against toxic fans, but there is no need to keep anyone else out, no matter how casual.

 

Yeah, jury is still out on the "different approach" part.

As is just how much Hasbro values that movie-enjoying community. How's SS Skids and Mudflap?

To be frank, I think you're counting chickens before they hatch there.

 

Evolving and new blood joining is good actually. This is a franchise about toy robots, I think a lot of us need a reality check if “gatekeeping is good actually” is an opinion people don’t immediately shut down for being shitty. As soon as someone complains about something going mainstream it immediately sends up red flags. I want our franchise to succeed and evolve. Might not enjoy everything Hasbro does with the brand but the whole point of transformers is change, transforming and evolving, stagnation kills franchises. Plus the new kids growing up with transformers are far more important than us old blood who will eventually die out or move on. Fresh perspectives are only a bonus.

 

Bay stuff is still in Studio Series even if other things have popped up recently. Hasbro possibly wanting to avoid controversy by not including two controversial characters, no matter how unjustified, does not in any way show how much they care about the movie-enjoying community. Hell, Sam Smith on Instagram even said that Bayverse is the Studio Series "bread and butter", plus didn't you doubt both Galvatron and The Fallen and had a meltdown when you were wrong about those? Way to try to make what @Shadow25 said to be some sort of bad thing. The movie appreciation thread in the toy forum is great and is genuinely one of the few movie-related threads to not have people ruin it.

Plus MPMs still get made with Blackout coming out for the 15th anniversary, the first movie got a rerelease for the 15th anniversary, and then they released a boxset of the 2007 Autobots for the anniversary. So I'd say they do value the movie-enjoying community.

 

I wouldn't know, I'm still too busy enjoying the SS Fallen and Galvatron that were featured in the previous version of this quote of yours!