#forgot to mention I yoinked half of the images from internet

[saal-school-project]

Part 5

9th grade 

The entirety of 9th grade was online school. Well, actually, we did go to school for like a week, but that was mainly for the exams, so we can ignore the fact that they are not important. And you know how online school is; I don't need to explain much. It was chill. I had a lot of free time, which led me to develop quite a few interests that year.

I got into transformers.

I started getting into Transformers during that time. At first, some clips of Transformers Prime on YouTube were randomly recommended to me (it was exactly this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZAwYv_N-RQ). " And while searching for it to paste here, I also ended up watching a half-hour essay on Starscream's Wings, and it was mind-blowing, so here's the link to that too, I guess: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYk_ZFpo9A "). I remembered the show back when I was still watching TV; it aired on CN, and honestly, I never really liked the show back then. Then I realized the reason for that was the fact that I remembered absolutely nothing about the decepticons. Perhaps I decided to give the show a shot back then, and it happened to be an episode that Desepticons weren't in, and I decided that "this show is boring; I'm not watching it" and would change the channel whenever I saw it on. I can't think of another explanation. because the autobots in that show are really boring, like, Omg, why are you so boring? I'm going to be honest, as I've admitted so many things already that it's too late to turn back now. I watched the show solely for Starscream (yeah, Transformers do have weird names, but I love them for them, like imagine them being named Michael or something bruh). Have you seen his design? He has built-in heels, he is the skrunkly

To be fair, he looks kinda weird in this pic idk.

The other decepticons were fine too, I guess. Then I checked out other series too, because Transformers is a pretty old franchise, and as a result, there are many different cartoons and spin-offs about it. There is "G1", which stands for generation one. It's a really old cartoon that aired in 1984, but the whole show is basically just an elaborate toy commercial if you consider the fact that the toys came before the show. And oh yeah, they do have toys; thats the best part about transformers, to be honest, and they do actually transform. G1 toys aren't really impressive engineering-wise, but they get better over the years. There is also a spinoff called "Beast Wars," in which robots turn into animals rather than vehicles. There are other shows, comic books, videogames, and life-action movies that fans often like to ignore or denigrate as bayformers) (and we also do not talk about kiss players), etc. but let's get to the good part. If I hadn't stumbled upon Transformers toy reviewing channels (mostly jobby i guess) on YouTube, things would have taken a different turn for me, and I wouldn't be owning any Transformers figures now.

 From the start, I liked the character designs; yes, I'm also a character design enthusiast. Human designs can get pretty boring after a while; but with robots, you can have all different shapes, sizes, and colors, which is great if you want to make unique and memorable designs (I guess with humans, you can have unique clothing, but whatever!). The idea of robots transforming into vehicles was an excellent touch too; this way you wouldn't just slap on random shapes and hope for the best but instead figure out a way where the vehicle parts would go to form an astechnically pleasing robot, and the vehicle form should reflect the robot's personality too and even on its own be recognizable—we all recognize the Optimus Prime truck, right? All of that on its own impressed me, but what absolutely blew my mind away was this.

(Please politely ignore fact that it turns into a gun)

Yes, that robot indeed transformes into this.

(Here's another link if you want to watch it transform: https://youtu.be/_EvBRGjaXHM)

Never once did I think this level of engineering was possible. It's like black magic. Incomprehensible. I want to transform it myself to understand how it works better, but oh god, the prices are just... well, there are a few things to know about transformer figure collecting. There are official toys. Hasbro (American-based) and Takartomy (Japanese-based) companies own the Transformers franchise, or something like that. I'm not fact-checking. These are both, like, toy companies? Hasbro also owns Monopoly, so imagine stuff like that. The one I showed you above is a masterpiece figure, and the number comes from how many figures there were before in that toy line, so they just basically enumerated them. That above is mp36 (as in Masterpice and the 36th figure), and the character's name is Megatron. That figure is one of my favorites, and I would buy it if I had the money.

Masterpiece figures aim to recreate the characters' G1 appearance as faithfully as is physically possible while being able to transform and be posable at the same time. There is "mpm" too; it stands for "masterpiece movie," which is just life-action versions of the characters (live-action movie). Transformers have completely different designs thanks to the director of those movies, Michael Bay, which is where the name Bayformers comes from. Needless to say, all of the masterpiece figures are hella expensive; their prices usually vary depending on the size of the character, but no, it's expensive; there is no cheap masterpiece unless you buy knockoffs, which goes into the unofficial third-party market that I will get to in a bit.

Then theres Hasbro; now Hasbro makes relatively cheaper toys targeted at children currently consuming the myriad of Transformers content out there as opposed to Takaraatomy making collectible figures for people who back in the day grew up with G1, so they are now grown adults and can afford those steep prices. These toys come in three classes: leader class, voyager class, and deluxe class, with deluxe being the cheapest and smallest and leader being the biggest and most expensive of the bunch. I personally own 1 leader class, 1 deluxe class, and 4 voyager class figures.

Here’s some of my figures:

My first and favorite figure is this one. His name is Skyhammer.

I got more but I dont have pictures of them.

Honestly how i got these figures has a story on its own as toy stores rarely sell them due to their prices being too high. I got most of these second hand.

Those were the official figures. and then there are third-party figures. the meat of the topic. It's basically just companies other than Takara and Hasbro making figures, and their legality is kind of questionable as it borders on intellectual theft because they own the copyrights for the Transformers franchise. but that doesn't really concern us. Another thing about third-party services is that what you get can drastically vary in quality; it could be an amazing figure or it could be really bad. You can't really be sure until you personally hold it in your hands, but Toy Rewiev channels have got you covered. Don't worry. Third parties are usually for official masterpiece-class figure quality, but they are a little cheaper. Then there are knockoffs. Knockoffs are just knockoffs; they literally just copy the official figures engineering and just remove the Aoutobot/Decepticon logo or something like that and sell it for cheaper. These companies are often Chinese for some reason, and the engineering can be more mind-blowing than the officials. Saddly, I don't own any third-party figures; I was so close to buying one, though. But, uh, I don't know about buying something that expensive overseas; I didn't want my package to get stuck in customs, so I decided against it.

There are also non-transforming transformer figures; it's just an articulating robot mode. They do this because it's more aesthetically pleasing. There is a term called kibble, which refers to pieces that have no clear purpose in one mode but are there only because they are part of another mode.

Usually shellformers suffers from this the most. Look at all those penguin parts in the robot mode. Making those parts removable is an option, but that would be partsforming. No one likes partsforming.

 some of the kibble is accurate to the character's appearance on TV, it is part of the character's design. but they are not; there are extra parts that stick out, and then there is less than excellent kibble management.

Oh god look at this things backpack.

So if the figure doesn't transform, they can just focus on making it more accurate and posable; it's just an action figure. And, oh yeah, most of the time, the fact that a figure transforms can hinder its poseability. and I think poseability is very important. and a non-transformable Transformers figure is just... meaningless? Like, why are you taking away the best part? I personally wouldn't buy one.

GUNDAMS

Now you can't be in the Transformers fandom for too long before you inevitably hear about Gundams too, and vice versa. They are very similar, minus the transformation, and the robots are way bigger and more pilotable now. They are both old anime that aired around the 1980s, and they are both about giant robots. The best part of both of them is the merchandise.

Gundam merchandise is now available in the form of model kits. They come in pieces. You cut the pieces out of the sheet of plastic with a pair of side cutters before you assembled them like Legos. In the end, you have an action figure of a robot. and they are more customizable than transformers; you can paint them and add details as you like as you build them, unlike transformers.

But I prefer transformers over gundams because you can only build a gundam once (technically, you can disassemble it and build it again, but thats a pain), whereas you can transform transformers as many times as you like. Gundams are also more fragile; I learned that the hard way when I broke my first gundam the day after I finished building it. but then I got another one. Here are some pictures of my Gundams.

Here’s my gundams. Well there is only two of them:

My beloved first gundam, high grade beyond global. Don’t  ask why that pose. This is like, the last picture I took of him before I accidently broke his leg.

I like this picture. He’s standing on one of my many journals.

Gundam model kits also have classes like Transformers toys do, but they are called grades from small to big: SD grade (basically just chibi). high grade (mine are both high grades, so they are small). real grade (real grade is small like high grade but way more detailed) Master grade (bigger) perfect grade (even bigger)

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This is enough, right? I mean, I've got more things to talk about; we barely scratched the surface. I could go on, but I feel kind of tired now. sooooooo goodbye?