by Rtron » Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:06 pm
- Motto: "Stop, please."
Hi, I'm a lifelong fan of Transformers since I watched Beast Wars when I was a kid. My love for the alien robots was cemented when the first live action movie came out, a movie I still love (mostly because of the designs and breathtakingly good visual effects and sound design), even if I consider all of the sequels to be pretty much crap. While I wasn't there for all Transformers fiction as it was coming out, I do my best to dig up the old stuff and give it a chance. My favourite Tranformers fictions are the Marvel G1 comic, Beast Wars, the 2007 movie, Transformers Animated, and the IDW comic.
However... Does anyone else feel that everything since Bayformers/Animated doesn't have enough new elements to be considered something new? Maybe it is because my first TF fiction was Beast Wars, but it seems to me that everything is a retread of G1 this days. The movie, despite sharing names with G1, felt new by virtue of the extremely alien Transformers, and the introduction of the Allspark. But from then on... It's been a constant retread of the old version of Autobots vs Decepticons. There's a lack of brand new characters the way Bulkhead, Lugnut, Barricade, or the whole cast of Beast Wars used to be. Windblade is the only wholly new post 2008 character I can think of. Don't get me wrong, I love the Masterpiece, Studio Series and War for Cybertron lines: design wise, I think that we're at one of the best points Transformers has been in years.
But fiction wise? It feels like nothing new has happened since 2008. Even the IDW comics, which I love, seem to have a huge reliance on old G1 concepts, and even then, it's comics, so very few people outside those who are already fans have probably experienced those stories. Does anyone else feel this way? Like we need a new high profile reinvention of Transformers fiction, the way Beast Wars and the first live action movie were? Something that feels completely new, something that will surprise us and enrage the G1 purists again?