Seibertron wrote:I don't even understand why Gobots is getting a comic. Can they just officially assimilate Gobots into Transformers once and for all and call it a day at long last? Is anyone truly nostalgic about Gobots over Transformers? If they are, I might have to rethink what I want to do with
https://www.gobotron.com and
https://www.machinerobo.com 
Oddly enough, I do technically get more nostalgic for Gobots than Transformers
in general.
By which I mean, I don't get
nostalgic for TF because it's the one thing I never gave up being a fan of, so it's never really been in the past for me. I get an occasional feeling of nostalgia for specific stretches of the franchise like the early '90s when I was collecting all the Marvel U.S. books I'd foolishly ignored, and the late '90s when Beast Wars was miraculously saving the whole TF franchise, because it gave me this feeling of hope against all odds when it seemed like I was the last fan who still cared, difficult to explain now to fans too young to remember when TF wasn't a permanent fixture of pop culture, and Hasbro could have just allowed it to drop dead at any moment. This feeling's at it's strongest when I make the mistake of talking to some geewunner my own age who apparently wishes the franchise had died during that era despite knowing nothing about it, because that makes me wish I still was the last Transformers fan.
Gobots, on the other hand, was strictly a mid-to-late '80s franchise that doesn't have much existence anymore. Sure, I recently bought that Bike-Robo with the extra CyKill-esque faces, but since those MP-quality toys are Machine-Robo, any of us who enjoy them as GoBots are technically just repurposing them, right? And that can only be nostalgia because of the legal roadblocks keeping it from its former glory.
To our fandom, Gobots has been first and foremost the butt of jokes about it being the lame wannabe competition to Transformers. And frankly, the stupid, stupid names of so many of its characters, and the entire franchise, were genuinely asking for it. But considering it nothing but lame non-Transformers is really just an archaic holdover from a time when they were on equal footing as direct competition for TF. And it wasn't just Gobots: perhaps even most fans old enough to remember the dawn of TF have forgotten, but those were just two of dozens of toy robot lines competing for space in every toy section, adding to what made the mid '80s the golden age of toys by virtue of the sheer number of franchises in the game, whether or not they had corresponding cartoons to tell their story. Most of these had no mythos beyond a little text on the back of their packaging, but nearly all had that air of mysterious origins across the Pacific that imbued them with alien-ness, something Transformers balanced perfectly with the relatability of its characters. Of course, we knew TF was easily the best, and deserved to win any competition, so most of us just dismissed them. Gobots alone posed too serious competition to just dismiss, so we s#at all over it instead. I was no exception, but sometime in the last few decades, I realized that in doing so, I'd failed to fully appreciated those toylines for what they were; I'd forgotten how much I loved that childhood forest for love of just my favorite tree.
THAT's what
I get nostalgic for. And Gobots is my most reliable link to that era.
So no, Gobots should absolutely NOT be completely assimilated into TF, and Gobotron should not be just another version of Cybertron somewhere in the multiverse. This new comic, however, doesn't look or sound that interesting. Sure, it'll get people talking about Gobots in the present tense again, but I foresee yet another restart becoming necessary not too long afterward.
And when that happens, can't we have one damn TF universe where the Gobots, Zybots, Convertors, Robotrons, Bug Bots, Parasites etc. also exist, but on different planets with no direct evidence of being created by Primus or the Quintessons? Both Sunbow and Marvel's post-Movie eras showed that Transformers were just one of many disparate races of sentient robots, all alien to each other, so it's hardly unprecedented, but not really explored at all. The mission of that universe's Lost Light could be to investigate whether there is some forgotten connection to TF: Flip-Trons, Four Star, and other lines that had literal KOs of Diaclone molds would surely turn out to have some actual heritage, like botched Quint experiments using computers other than Vector Sigma, while others would turn out to have no connection at all. Since most of those franchises are dead and forgotten, would anyone sue or demand that much in royalties?
Or maybe that just makes sense to me because I didn't understand which cartoons shared continuity when I was 5. I always thought Dr. Archeville was just Dr. Braxis disguising himself so he could sneak into the superior giant robot cartoon, just like Cobra Commander donned that trenchcoat and fedora to sneak into Season 3 as Old Snake. Add in what I assumed were the Rock Lords showing up on He-Man and She-Ra, and all the action cartoons I grew up on are forever tangled up in my mind. That's the book I want to see. I'm so far behind on IDW that I won't get to Revolution for a while, but no matter how bad it sucked (seriously, was any of it as bad as the Jem movie?), I don't ever want Hasbro to give up on making that idea work. And Gobots should always be a part of that whole, distinct from Transformers.
Posted: Sat Sep 08, 2018 9:00 am
in the sky?
.
