Listed roughly in the order that I started watching them. Spoilers for everything.
TF One:
This was the first piece of Transformers media that I watched when I was getting into it last year and looking back at it after experiencing a lot of the other continuities I think it's a good introduction to the franchise and merges a lot of the themes that I like. I actually watched this with my best friend Baxter who somehow managed to go into the movie not knowing that D-16 is Megatron and it was really fun to watch their reaction to gradually realizing this in real time. I liked the narrative of Orion and D-16 starting out as friends with the common goal of dismantling the oppressive and strongly class stratified system they live under (reminds me a lot of IDW, but with them being closer to start out with), but with the split point being what they think the method of doing that should be. I was a fan of the way the movie has D-16 gradually get more violent over the course of the story in a way that initially starts as totally justified righteous anger, so the viewer has to decide where exactly the line is drawn for them for when his descent into becoming Megatron is inevitable. I think, though, that the ideological divide between thinking the system can be reformed vs. thinking totally tearing it all down with a violent revolution is necessary could have been sold better if they kept the aspect of previous continuities where Orion was an archivist or some other position in the hierarchy higher than Megatron and thus had more invested in the existing system and subconscious reasons of personal gain through privilege to try to keep but reform it. It's a shame that we're not going to see more done with this continuity because the movie performed poorly in the box office.G1:
I absolutely adore G1 specifically because of the fact that they had no idea at that time that Transformers was going to eventually become a massive franchise that people actually took seriously and they were just making slop nonsense to sell toys. Absolutely love it. It's so fucking funny. I am as well just generally a big fan of silly dated animation of questionable quality. It is honestly also just kind of very comforting to me in its silliness (well, at least seasons 1 and 2) because I enjoy in a self indulgent way that everything is always fairly low stakes and you know that the status quo of everyone generally being ok will be reestablished by the end of the episode because this was before kids cartoons aired on TV were really expected or allowed to have an ongoing narrative across long stretches of time.Another aspect of the show that I really like that I feel like doesn't get talked about or used in other continuities a lot is that it's established from the very beginning that the Transformers being on Earth is universal public knowledge and humanity just has to adapt to the fact that they're here and their war has come to this planet. I feel like this is actually just way more compelling than the angle that most of the more modern stuff has taken where the existence of Transformers is some kind of government secret that must be kept hidden from the public. I feel like this approach is taken a lot because people feel like it's more "realistic" in some way, and I understand where they're coming from in that it seems on its face like it would be hard for everyday life for people on Earth to stay recognizable in a world where everyone knows about the Transformers and the war. I think, however, that this approach is kind of a cop out to avoid getting into the weeds of what the interactions between human and Transformer culture and norms and the gradual meshing of social interactions would look like and a refusal to take its own premise seriously. The idea of giant alien robots showing up on Earth is already unrealistic, just take it on its face and explore the implications. Not that G1 does that. It's slop nonsense to sell toys. I'm just saying that open knowledge of Transformers by all of humanity was where we started and I think as the franchise got more "serious" it was a shame to lose it.
TFA:
I liked TFA a lot and thought it was an interesting break from the status quo of Transformers media both in that it did the thing I mentioned above with G1 where everybody knew about the Transformers and that it had Optimus as an inexperienced younger person with the title of "Prime" not really meaning anything significant. I'm definitely sad that it got canceled and we didn't get any more of it. Honestly what I'm most sad we didn't get to see more of was Sari as a protagonist after the realization that she's technorganic and her figuring out what that means for her identity. She's like one of the only characters in the entire franchise who is canonically a Transformer whose altmode is a human. What are the cultural implications of that for her potentially connecting with her identity as a Transformer and also for her human side as well?Something that I've thought about a lot in relation to this is (even though TFA does have some woman Transformer characters) the IDW explanation for the uneven gender ratio being that the normative presentation for Transformers on Cybertron is masculine, and the whole confusing situation with Sari being a clone of her dad and also a girl and a Transformer. Like, I don't know, I think it would be interesting if she decided at some point in the future to explore normative Cybertronian gender presentation as like a gender to transition to that would be a xenogender for a human but not for a Transformer. I also genuinely wholeheartedly believe that Dr. Sumdac is a trans man because it would explain why his clone is a girl and also potentially why none of his family of origin seems to be around at all. It's also kind of fascinating that the explanation of where Sari's Transformer half came from is that he found an infant-shaped protoform in the wreckage of Megatron's crashed body and I don't think they really thought through the implications of that. Additionally I think Tom Kenny is the best voice actor for Starscream currently living and they should have had him do it forever.
Bumblebee (2018):
I enjoyed this movie. I thought the designs were a visually appealing midpoint suitable for a live action movie between G1 and Bayverse scrapheap nonsense and thought the relationship between Bee and Charlie was really cute. When Starscream was onscreen near the beginning for like 2 seconds I pogged and pointed at him. I thought it was kind of strange that the two main Decepticons were completely random new characters invented for the movie that nobody would recognize considering how much screen time they had compared to the established Decepticon characters. I was annoyed by this and wanted to see my blorbos. John Cena saying "they literally call themselves Decepticons! That doesn't set off any red flags?" was funny. I don't really have a lot else to say, it was fine.Earthspark:
I have a lot of really strong emotions about Earthspark and complicated opinions. I really really liked the first season and got extremely emotionally attached to Earthspark Megatron. I thought his repaired friendship with Optimus and his relationship with the Terrans/Malto family and the whole thing about the Terrans being Transformer children adopted and fully accepted by a human family was really just so indulgently sweet and it made me feel feelings. I also really liked the first season's general focus on the fact that the war is over and the labels of Autobot and Decepticon are not binary descriptors of good vs. bad people and that there can be Decepticons who are sincerely trying to be good people. I really wish there had been more focus on how human society was adapting to Transformers living on Earth now that Cybertron was permanently inaccessible in the time that the original writing team had with the show. I have intentionally not watched any of the show past the end of season 1 because I didn't want to subject myself to it knowing that I would get upset but I have read the synopsis of what happens and I'm really disappointed and angry that they gave the show to an entirely different team who clearly didn't care about any of the themes and arcs the first season was trying to set up and just completely trashed everything about nuance and made it another bog standard "Decepticons are bad guys" story. The thing in season 4 about Megatron losing his memories and reverting back to being evil felt completely unnecessary and literally just like a final mean spirited "fuck you" to people who liked season 1. I will be reading a bunch of fanfic pretending everything after season 1 didn't happen because it really is that bad. It makes me feel ashamed to say I like Earthspark because people will think I mean the other seasons when I don't.TFP:
I still technically haven't finished the show so I will update this review when I do but in general I think TFP is resoundingly meh. Like, I don't know. I think it has some good parts (I think the whole thing with Earth being Unicron is kind of interesting I guess, I liked the bit where that human antagonist puppets Breakdown's corpse and tries to join the Decepticons and is then confronted with the fact that they still don't actually respect him because he's organic even though he tried to pander to them and betrayed his own human troops for them) but the story in general doesn't really compel me and I think the designs not having noses is ugly. I do like that it seems to be the origin point or first instance that I know of of Optimus and Megatron having previously been friends before the war and I like the specific spin it has on it where Megatron was his mentor and Optimus was like "I would have followed you anywhere but you're going somewhere that I can't support". I thought it was funny as fuck that they apparently prominently featured Cliffjumper in the promo material and then immediately killed him off in the first episode because they didn't want to pay the Rock to voice him for the whole show. I don't really have a lot else to say about it because I found it to be pretty middle of the road. I do actually have hazy childhood memories of watching this when I was in elementary school but I don't remember being wowed by it then either.
IDW:
IDW quickly became one of my all time favorite continuities as soon as I got to the issues that James Roberts wrote because just, wow, what an absolutely fascinating exploration of class and gender for Transformers taking the setting entirely seriously to its logical conclusion. As I said before I'm just absolutely enamored with them just explicitly spelling out that all female Transformers from Cybertron are trans women and experience transmisogyny. I think that's probably the best explanation you could go with when you're doing a new spin on a franchise that historically has too few female characters. I think it's just so interesting that in a society where almost all of them have the same single gender presentation the social stratifier that's the closest equivalent to gender for them is what their altmode is, and that it's gone into in detail the problems that a society that discriminates and assigns people functions based on their altmode causes. I really enjoy that they established that romantic relationships between two masculine-presenting Transformers are socially normative and have multiple of these couples featured prominently.Another thing about IDW that stands out to me and that I am really compelled by is their exploration of the idea of Megatron as a complicated figure and what a redemption arc for him would look like. They touch on the idea that he has caused suffering on a literally uncountable scale (there's a scene at one point where the crew of the Lost Light happens upon a planet where there are statues of everyone with a flower planted by them representing each person they've killed, and Megatron's statue is surrounded by an endless rolling plain of blue flowers, which is such a striking image) and the question of if after this, it would be possible for him to meaningfully be redeemed in any proportional capacity. They also state plainly that if he had not risen up and caused the war, everything that he was fighting against in Cybertronian society would have gotten exponentially worse and it would have descended into totalitarian hardline Functionism. There are some samples included in the comic of his political theory writing before he became a dictator and it was kind of jaw dropping for me because it was like, actual coherent leftist commentary on the society that the viewer had just been presented and familiarized with. It makes me sad that Hasbro has so far seemed pretty uninterested since in exploring the themes of the setting on a deeper level in the way that IDW did, but I'm happy that the comics exist and stand as an example of what Transformers *can be* with really good writing.
