SAGE

whoa!!! oc art be upon ye!!

had a lot of fun in the @transformers-electric-metal zine!!

guy in front belongs to @lapisdragon01

Contributor Applications are officially open! You can find the links to the different applications below! We have also officially decided to support the Defenders Of Wildlife Charity! All profits for this zine will go entirely towards the charity! We plan to close contributor applications on March 31st, so be sure to apply soon!

Meet The Mods!

Meet Punnybee, the host of our zine!

Meet The Mods!

Meet Sage, our Art Moderator!

To start off the confusion, every design stems from 80s toys that already reuse models like crazy but because these ones are so COMPLICATED to design the recycling is even more prolific. We’ve got the same 8 guys walking around with the same body but different colours or maybe just an accent/detail or two that’s changed. That is IT. And it’s gotten so intense that there’s a whole culture around frame types both within canon and fanon at large.

But that’s not all!! Because there are also so many transformer anime. So there’s also this tendency for people to confuse transformers with other robot designs. You’ve got gundams and voltron and the angels from evangelion and literally every other mecha design out there all crammed into one lexicon.

It is all in one pot for most people. It is insanity. Then you’ve also got the fact that in IDW they introduce so many more background characters (did we not have enough already) and kind of start running out of designs so they just make characters all look almost the same and don’t give a single fuck. Not one.

But there’s MORE. Because even with all this insanity, transformers had the nerve to start changing characters around. So even if you get ratchet down in one continuity good fucking luck figuring out that’s the same person in another. Ratchet is easy, though, because his name is distinct and they keep his character and colours decently consistent if one of you fucks mention bayverse I will end you. Others aren’t so lucky. For example, good luck keeping track of either of the waves. I certainly couldn’t for quite a while.

Transformers has so many characters in it but they get swapped around and so many canons that also kinda get swapped around and nothing makes sense but I’m sure if you know enough it must start to. At some point. There has to be a pattern there of some sort.

As someone whose been been obsessed with transformers since I was six, I can hardly imagine how confusing some of this stuff must be to someone who’s new to it. Ever since I was little I could recognize at least 4 different continuities of Starscream by voice alone, not to mention the fact that I was already used to the fact that each continuity is basically its own world? I feel like that can be confusing to newbies, but I’ve never thought much about it until now because it’s just a Transformers Thing.

There’s also all the fan words! I’ve noticed this in transformers fanfiction specifically, you see a bunch of fanon stuff, and a lot of it ended up adopted into actual canon in later things! Some people who go really into the ‘Cybertronian terminology’ angle when writing fanfiction, I imagine that would be like Minecraft enchantment table language to anyone who doesn’t know what all that means.

On the topic of fanfiction, I’ve recently realized that there are so many continuity tags on ao3. Specifically for transformers g1. There’s the basic Transformers Generation 1 tag, then there’s the Cartoon Generation 1, then there’s the IDW Generation 1. I’ve figured that Cartoon G1 is, as it says, based on the cartoon and IDW G1 is the IDW1 universe. The basic G1 tag, though, seems to be a unique blend of both, along with every other random G1-based media. That’s not even getting into the fics that are continuity soup, where people pick and choose aspects from various continuities, throw it all together, and serve it. I love reading transformers fanfiction, but it (like the rest of the transformers fandom) is its own can of worms to figure out.

transformers poses one of the more interesting design challenges because it’s a balancing act of robots (creature design supposed to look mechanical and inhuman) a huge cast of diverse characters (need to be visually distinct enough that they can be differentiated at a glance, but still human enough that their very human characteristics still come through) and toys (you cannot make 150 individual moulds for these guys)

i think it’s easy to forget the sheer amount of face blindness and general barrier of entry to the franchise when you’ve been neck-deep in the fandom for years, but the fact that so many people have to force themselves to endure that initial confusion before they can really get into it is like, bad. From a character design perspective, if your viewers are spending months enduring the character designs before muscle memory takes over and they become more legible, that’s bad.

An answer to that is utilising more grounded body diversity that we see irl (recognisable, representative, distinguishing) But!!! you also can’t make them functionally humanoid (in a like, official style guide sense), because that’s missing the point. It’s an iconic relic of 60s/80s robots that we’ve seen fall out of fashion as fantasy character design becomes more explored territory and designs increasingly follow a formulae. But nostalgia for antiquated comic book art doesn’t have an answer for the fact these dudes are fucking illegible to anyone who hasn’t calcified the designs into their hindbrain through repeat exposure. Cubes are also hard to animate, they dont model or rig well, you’d basically be limited to puppets if you wanted to stay in budget for 2D and personally i’ve found every tf show that uses puppets looks… not the best. Threading the needle is tough.

Part of the fun of being in the fandom right now is that every artist sort of instinctually recognises this problem, and because there’s such a diverse art style range out there you can see everyone get more confident abt carving their own way through that jungle. Everyone gets the same problem and everyone tries their hand at solving it with completely different results.