#unit:e

[rescuebabiesau]

Mindscapes

As we see in TFP's "Sick Mind," cybertronians' mindscapes can take on many different forms (Megatron's had him constantly combating Autobots without end on a derelict Cybertron until Bumblebee's presence made him self-aware)

So here's my idea of some other bots' mindscapes (at least in my AU and in the context of someone invading their mind for intel)

Chase's is a seemingly endless corridor of bookshelves, every shelf filled to the brim with books and only he knows where in all of these shelves and books is the information someone might want. Most books have police code, laws from all across the galaxies, and the like, but his personal information is hidden within the books and they look the same as all the others from the outside.

Blades' is filled with screens. TV shows, replays of conversations he's had with others, scrolling information on repeat- and it is all at full blast. Anyone who might enter his mindscape would be bombarded with sound and bright light from the screens, and they're everywhere, keeping what's important well hidden.

Boulder's is a massive garden/greenhouse/indoor forest. There are plants, animals, and sculptures all over, with winding paths between them that seem to lead to nowhere. Any important info has been placed in secret compartments of statues, tied to the legs of animals, or buried in the roots of plants- but not all of them, and some is hidden in cryptic notes written on diagrams of inventions and buildings that are plastered to the walls. He holds the key to the many locked doors that only lead deeper into the greenhouse.

Heatwave's is an almost exact replica of Griffin Rock (formerly it was Cybertron). He's formulated his mindscape specifically for ease of access for him, but lack of ease for any invaders. Important information is carried by civilians, but its like encountering an NPC, you have to know the right things to ask to get that information. He also has his own defensive walls that manifest as the island's rogue tech, and finding him specifically in the mindscape is hard, as he has made the tunnels under the island his personal way of traveling, and their true entrances don't match that of the real tunnels in the physical world.

Bumblebee's is a nebulous mixture of Cybertron and various locations on Earth. Entering Unit:E's hangar will actually transport you to a small bar nestled in the corners of Iacon, and then going back through that door will spit you out in the middle of the Arctic, and then again onto the halls of the Decepticon ship Nemesis. Bumblebee can be anywhere, doing anything, and there's multiple versions of him, so you can never really know which one is the true Bumblebee just chilling in his own memories.

[solarzilla]

Many of Prime's problems could be foretold by the offing of Cliffjumper so early one while wasting money on a popular celebrity who simply costed too much.

It didn't help that the writers wanted to keep doing their own thing despite it being in job to connect back to the rest of the Aligned continuity. Remembered seeing that season 3 focusing on the Star Seekers was just a rumor as nothing had actually developed. Either that or or a wild west setting on Cybertron involving the Maximals

prob best Unit:E didn't take off as none of these other Hasbro franchises besides Joe haven't been relevant in years until IDW started doing stuff with them and it had already been too late as 2015 RID was already underway and ironically connected back to Aligned continuity more than Prime. And they were basing their success on a movie based on a freaking board game and a comic issue where it was only available at a convention where a lot of kids don't have access to, along with it still just being Prime's first year.

I also feel like Hasbro not taking advantage of some kind of crossover between tfp and Mlp when the early 2010s were the height of fandom popularity was also a big miss as well, with tf finally crossing over very late and near IDW's end, with only MLP having lasting popularity when compared to Prime

[hasbr0mniverse]

Exploring The Hasbroverse! Hasbro planned a relaunch of Inhumanoids in the early 2010s called Primordia. It would have been part of a Unit:E crossover from Transformers Prime, including Inhumanoids guys alongside Stretch Armstrong and Candyland.

[thewadapan]

It's always a nice surprise to see people benefitting from the work @jalaguy and I did for the TFWiki community blog! While Sonic comics are mostly outside my wheelhouse, I did read and enjoy TKP/Bobby's recent review of The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Figured I'd take this opportunity to publicly pull back the curtain a little more on my original reading guide, because the curation of it took place entirely on Discord. I'd gotten frustrated by a lot of extant reading guides online, which were all heavily influenced by the absolute dogshit editorial choices made by Andy Schmidt for The IDW Collection: mainly, a painfully chronological approach which frontloads a bunch of boring and bad prequel material that readers have zero context for, simply because it's set earliest in the timeline. That's an insane way to read comics.

Most lists would just kind of throw out a list of individual issues with little (if any) colour commentary, implicitly asserting... "trust me, I've done the research!" But as someone who's read all the material, you can see when they clearly haven't.

And the thing is, IDW's Transformers comics really just are that complicated. They were the product of many hands. Not everything fits together. It's not a single grand unifying vision with a consistent narrative thread. What few official attempts at curation were made by IDW (mostly in the form of trade paperbacks) are actively misleading. The wiki itself gives a determined reader some help in working out how it all fits together, but also... not really.

So my sleight of hand with the TFWiki's reading guide—and the use of the phrase "reading guide" instead of "reading order" was deliberate—was basically to not actually give you the reading order at all. Instead, it's a comprehensive overview of the salient, relevant information about how all these books relate to one another. The intention was that an engaged reader would follow along, and at each turn, make that active choice of... "am I skipping this one?"

But since its release, I've had a lot of feedback—often indirectly, like this, with people taking that next step of actually applying this information to bash out a reading list—that most readers really would just rather a list of the good comics to read. Nobody wants to read fucking M.A.S.K. So increasingly I have been giving thought to maintaining the comprehensive overview, while also having a suite of curated reading lists. Like, compare that article, to this recent image I threw together for someone on twitter who just wanted to read More than Meets the Eye. One of these is obviously much more helpful than the other.

Anyway, now it's time for me to play spot-the-difference with Bobby's list.

Obviously all the Hasbro Universe stuff is missing. Good choice, it's almost all irrelevant and bad.

New Avengers/The Transformers is omitted without mention. Extremely based choice. Spotlight: Ramjet is thus moved into publication order, which is fair.

Egregious extra stuff like "Hail and Farewell" or Continuum or UNIT:E or Aw Yeah Revolution! or the deleted scenes are dropped, which makes total sense. I mostly included them for historical context, not because I think anyone should actually read them. I definitely think James Roberts' prose stories are far, far more worth your time than basically anything Shane McCarthy or Mike Costa wrote, and I say this as someone who doesn't even like those prose stories that much.

Spotlight: Blaster and Spotlight: Arcee are delayed until after Devastation; I can't really tell why, but neither can I particularly justify their existing placement in the order, aside from that I just wanted a bigger chunk of Spotlights.

Spotlight: Wheelie is moved a bit earlier. I don't get this at all; it was the last to be published, and it's completely unrelated to everything else. With Klaus Scherwinski being partially responsible for the story, it feels more of a pair with Spotlight: Mirage to me.

Megatron Origin and Hearts of Steel are swapped. This is neither here nor there—I guess maybe the intent is to have Megatron Origin lead directly into All Hail Megatron? The Infestation 2 issues are skipped, which is justifiable.

Spotlight: Prowl is bumped up a little. Genuinely wonder why, it's not for publication order reasons. Sidenote—what's the vibe, do people really think Spotlight: Prowl was actually ever planned for the ongoing before people started complaining about Costa's Prowl? Signs point to no.

"Police Action" and "Chaos" are interleaved together for simplicity. This is one case where I actually agree with Andy Schmidt; the two storylines are entirely unrelated, and while that kind of interleaving makes sense on a serialised monthly comic timescale, it's narratively confusing for an archival reader. Like, "Chaos" is already one of the most incomprehensible and overcomplicated comics IDW put out, without weaving in a completely separate plot. I find it funny that the interleaving is now viewed as the simple "default"; for me, reading from my old Humble Bundle CBZs of the series, it's actually easier to just read one trade paperback after the other. For a long time, everyone was reading this stuff by trades. But now, everyone has to use the Perfectly Legal Websites, and it's a completely different story!

The More Than Meets the Eye Annual has been moved after issue #8. This is honestly one of my biggest IDW reading order pet peeves. The trades put it there, but as written it's set between the two Scavengers issues, and that's when it was intended to be published, too. Personally I just don't think that clumping the Scavengers two-parter together is important enough to justify getting non-chronological with it.

The Transformers #43-44 come a little bit later. I don't know why this is, and if I'm being honest I don't remember any of that shit well enough to meaningfully justify why we had it the way we did in the first place. I think it's because of chronology with Combiner Hunters...?

Presumably so as not to have The Transformers issue #45 on its own, it's been clumped up with the following arc. Which means there isn't an obvious place for Redemption to go, so it's been repurposed as a break between two consecutive arcs of The Transformers, as the entire season finale has also been moved up to be clumped with issue #50. I think that's the logic here? Like, I get it, I don't like having issue #45 on its own either.

Action Man is skipped from the list proper, although it does get a mention later. This is a crime.

I also really wish the M.A.S.K. Annual had been kept in there, because it's not by Brandon Easton, but rather by the cowriter of First Strike, and it has some Transformers content in it, and I think it's really funny to pretend a M.A.S.K. book is required reading.

First Strike #0 has been missed, which I thiiink is just an oversight?

But yeah, it was in many places a really pleasant surprise to see stuff exactly as we had it, as if to say, "yep, that works!" In retrospect, we made some fucking choices. Putting Spotlight: Grimlock where we did is the kind of subjective bullshit people would be totally justified in ignoring. Siloing the Autocracy trilogy off as its own little skippable pile of garbage, or putting the Dark Prelude set of Spotlights in such a seemingly bizarre spot, definitely seemed like they'd be the first things someone would undo. Really glad to see it!

I'm definitely due some kind of IDW Phase 2 reread, but I always flipflop about how to go about it. Before Revolution, More than Meets the Eye and Robots in Disguise are practically joined at the hip, and you do genuinely miss out on stuff by reading just one or the other. But then after the relaunch, they're two almost completely independent story threads. It's wild how much that stuff falls off.

And speaking personally, I've always found that interleaving them just kind of makes me hate Barber's stuff? Which sucks, because Barber is a great comics writer—in many ways a better comics writer than Roberts! But fuck me, early on, More than Meets the Eye is just in a league of its own. It is so much funnier and more meaningful and narratively intricate. Every break to read another chunk of the Bumblebee/Starscream/Metalhawk political drama is a chore. It's eating your broccoli so you can have dessert. Of course, by the time of Optimus Prime and Lost Light, it's a different story.

(I think what I really want to do next is the Barber/Scott auteur run. I've not done it before. I wanna see how that one works. Some of that material, I've only ever read the once!)

Ultimately, I'm just like... there's no good way to read this stuff. It is all inherently imperfect. That's comics, really. Hopefully Bobby's list helps an entirely new bunch of people to discover the good stuff!

Okay! Without further ado, here's my IDW Transformers (main continuity) reading order that I said I was putting together, complete with a lot of commentary to try and help new readers understand what's what and where to start.

(I'll probably have to make some minor corrections here and there, but this should be good enough for now.)

[swapauanon]

As someone who is deeply critical of GI Joe, I actually WASN'T as negative towards the sequel hook in Rise of the Beasts as you might think.

I mean, yeah, at its worst, GI Joe winds up just being a combination toyline/military recruitment ad, and it is basically impossible to COMPLETELY detach it from those roots (even if IDW freaking tried their best after Revolution), but GI Joe is not the only non-Transformers Hasbro property.

Micronauts movie anyone?

MASK?

Will Hasbro finally do something with UNIT:E?

Or heck, maybe they'll have some social commentary and make Joe Colton the latest Cobra Commander.

(Probably not that last one, as cool a plot twist as that would be.)

Regardless, as long as they DON'T use Cobra-La, it can't possibly be worse than anything Michael Bay made.

[jemandtheholograms]

A page from Unit:E (2011)

Synergy introduces her as "She is Jerrica Benton, but that is only for now..."

Via scans-daily on dreamwidth use the Unit:E tag posts are by @iconuk01

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime, what are Jack, Miko, and Raf up to after Bumblebee eventually returned to earth and established his own team however long later?

Dear Jasper Journalist,

After graduating from high school in 2014, Jack enrolled in a prestigious military academy. By 2040, he had become an influential member of the government’s “UNIT:E” initiative, where he helped establish a diplomatic alliance between Earth and Cybertron. After graduating from university at the age of fifteen, Raf became the founder and CEO of an influential software firm. By 2064, his corporation had invested a significant portion of its money and resources into establishing the first joint human-Cybertronian settlement on Mars. Miko moved back to Japan and eventually founded a successful rock band that toured both Earth and Cybertron.

[mazamba]

So I Was Looking Through The Inhumanoids Wiki...

And they had some WILD plans for the series.

Apparently, Transformers Prime was part of what would have been Hasbro’s first attempt at a Shared Universe.

Action Man and Gi Joe are a given, but that Unit-E they kept bringing up was going to have links with the Inhumanoids, Stretch Armstrong, and, I shit you not, Candyland.

Inhumanoids was actually going to be released in 2010, but they cancelled all but TFP somewhere along the line. Then we know what happened to that when they cancelled most of their season 4 and 5 plans.

If Hasbro could just stick with ONE of its plans, they could make something truly epic one day.

https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Unit:E

[askdeathshead]

Dear Death's Head, ever been in a band?

Dear Tune Talker,  It would depend on what you consider being in a band, hm? For a short period of time I unwillingly served as an amp for some truly unruly teenagers. I would list it in the top five times my body has not been under my own control, yes? Not a pleasant experience and the music wasn’t even well made. In times where work is low, I have occasionally served as a bodyguard for bands in need of protection. One earth band ventured into space after developing an alliance with that universe’s Autobots and required protection from the enemies they had collectively made. I rarely see many superheroic teams in the Cybertronian focused universes so this made the experience a unique one, right? They paid handsomely, had much better music, and I even was able to co-op some useful Hologram technology from them. I must admit I still try to obtain Jem’s latest singles when I’m nearby that timeline. I doubt they’d approve of my actions while listening to them but it’s always good to have something upbeat while hunting down targets. My own personal showtime, yes?

[fauxpeacemxker]

Tag drop part 2 (characters and places), DO NOT REBLOG:

♚MIRROR;; ,  ♚DROPKICK;; ,   ♚B-127/’BUMBLEBEE’;;,   ♚OPTIMUS PRIME;;, 

♚MEGATRON;; ,  ♚DECEPTICONS;; ,  ♚AUTOBOTS;; ,  ♚ENEMIES;; ,  ♚ALLIES;; ,

♚HUMANS;; ,   ♚CHARILE WATSON;; ,   ♚GENERAL JACK BURNS;; ,  ♚DR. POWELL;; ,  

 ♚SECTOR SEVEN;; ,  ♚UNIT:E;; , ♚CYBERTRON;; ,   ♚EARTH;; ,  ♚SPACE;; ,  

 ♚PITS OF KAON;; , 

[nothingavailable]

My SCP Story Overview

https://archiveofourown.org/works/37047691/chapters/92439373

Contact GOIs:

Plumbers

Secret Scientists

Lobotomy Corporation

Military Extra-terrestrial Research Facility

Magnus Institute

Earth Protection Force

Private Anti-Biohazard Service

Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance

Federal Bioterrorism Commission

Terrasave

Blue Umbrella

X-Files Unit

Area Fifty-Something

Sector Seven

NEST

Cemetery Wind

Transformers Reaction Force

Unit:E

G.H.O.S.T.

Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron

Shadow Board

Cognito, Inc.

D.H.O.R.K.S.

Mutant Response Division

Damage Control

Time Variance Authority

World Heroes Association

Hero Public Safety Commission

A.R.G.U.S. {1, 2, 3, 4}

Diclonii Research Institute

Commission of Counter Ghoul

Fire Defense Agency

Tokyo Army

Special Fire Force

World Heroes Force

Death Weapon Meister Academy

Hypnos

Digimon Data Squad

Time Force

Space Patrol Delta

Grid Battleforce

Galactic Guardian Group

Soul Society

Special Forces

Outer World Investigation Agency

Tokyo

Alphabet Project

S.H.I.E.L.D.

H.A.M.M.E.R.

S.P.E.A.R. {1}

S.T.A.K.E.

A.R.M.O.R.

S.W.O.R.D.

A.C.O.R.N.

S.I.C.K.L.E.

S.L.E.E.P.

W.A.N.D.

T.I.M.E.

S.T.A.R. Labs

Providence

Men in Black

Special Alien/Extraterrestrial Containment Team

Guys in White

Silver Guardians

Earth Defense Command

Federal Bureau of Control

Chaldea Security Organization

G.U.N.

Global Defense Agency

For an extensive list see here.

[thecastingcircle]

Remember this?  Unit-E was a single issue giveaway comic from New York Comic Con in 2011.  It was a crossover between almost all the Hasbro-verse properties.  At the time it was one and done, but now we know what was going to happen next.

Last weekend at TFCon Charlotte, Hasbro writer Rik Alvarez hosted a panel where he talked about his experiences working on the Binder of Revelation, which was supposed to be the guiding production bible that made all of Transformers fiction into a single unified continuity. yo go re has talked about this project before, when Hasbro was trying to align the (quite obviously G1) War for Cybertron continuity with the (quite obviously not G1) Prime continuity.

Despite Hasbro's best efforts, the all-in-one continuity was, for various reasons, not a success (the cartoon creators didn't want to follow it, the comics would have had to basically nuke their entire line and start over [think "New 52"], the planned MMOchanged into a MOBA then never made it out of beta, Hasbro stopped making tie-in toys in favor of the movie, no one had The Hub channel anyway, etc. etc. etc.), and the Binder of Revelation, meant to be a 10-year plan, turned into a quarter-million custerfluck that is now shoved in a drawer somewhere, dead.

At any rate, TF: Prime was supposed to be the Iron Man 1 to UNITE:E's Avengers: it would have led into the massive crossover team-up, designed to help reinvigorate all the brands. Here's a little of what it would have entailed:

Beast Wars Dinobot

Prime Ratchet

Duke (unknown which continuity)

Matt Trakker

New Primordia character

Acroyer and Biotron from Micronauts

Stretch Armstrong

Prime's Agent Fowler would have been injured and rebuilt as C.O.P.S.' Bulletproof Vess

Synergy, the computer from Jem, would have been the team's Jarvis

Action Man - rogue GI Joe

Princess Lollipop would become a badass princess with a dark back story, with Candyland destroyed by monsters

Rom's appearance on Earth would have been the event that brought the team together

Leoric from the Visionaries

destroyed Autobot base would have become M.A.S.K.'s Boulder Hill

Primordia was considered an update of Inhumanoids

Biotron was to be reprogrammed with Destro's mind

Popular Micronauts character Bug is owned by Marvel, so the Sectaurs would have taken his place

And now none of it will ever come to pass, because of the failure of the Aligned continuity.

We don’t even know where to begin with this.  Yay, Synergy would’ve been the boss.  But Booo, there were no other plans for the rest of the cast of JEM. 

Hasbro went on and made a new show for Stretch Armstrong- that apparently has no buzz.

No mention of Battleship which had a major motion picture around this time.

Primordia was nothing more than Inhumanoids with a new name.  No mention of Earth Corps returning to fight them.  Our idea was that the Inhumanoids couldn’t talk to humans, but for the crossover we’d get Blythe Baxter (from Blythe Loves The Littlest Pet Shop) who has the ability to talk to animals and thus is the ONLY one who can help.  

The comic had Acroyer as the main character and he turned his nose up to the Candyland fairies and it was alluded to that Primordia and Candyland had beef.  

So apparently, Primordia destroyed Candyland (where King Kandy, Queen Frostine, and everyone else are ??????).  We love the fact that Hasbro said “Candyland?!?!  What the heck, why not?  Those bronies love girly stuff.” However, since the writing of this comic, the Candyland characters are in limbo because of a lawsuit over who actually created them.  

Hasbro clearly has no clue what to do with M.A.S.K., they don’t want to follow the cartoon’s continuity; okay, but they’re trying too hard and making it too convoluted.  

Hasbro/IDW hasn’t given up yet.  They’ve tried to make two mini series based off this premise.

REVOLUTION is coming! TRANSFORMERS, ROM, MICRONAUTS, G.I. JOE, ACTION MAN, and M.A.S.K.: Mobile Armored Strike Kommand will all cross paths in an epic 5-part bi-weekly comic book series this September!

[photobombingcryptid]

malika-carnelian​:

You sound like someone with a diplomatic funcion.

Is she hearing those words properly, right? It is true? Oh if only Ultra Magnus could hear this!

… Or maybe not, he was on a mission with the others and would always have something to say over the classic standard procedures. Malika frowned to the other side of the screen only for thinking at that, buthas wiped out the thought very quickly so that can answer to the speaker in a clear way.

:: Deal granted~ ::

:: Solely for avoiding misunderstandings We need to know about your intentions, as for me, I’m a member of the special Unit:E, under Special Agent William Fowler command, and since we didn’t identified you as an Earthling’s flying object, I’m taking the step ahead for having further informations to give to our Team. :: she is not gonna speak about the Autobots, unless it will be very necessary.

:: You are familiar with extra-terrestrial life form. Unlike what publicly accessible information claims. ::

That is, if he ignores the conspiracies and alleged true sightings and encounters.

:: Since you insist what my intentions are, I’m here for a vacation. Sight-seeing. I stick to remote areas, take some photos, leave. ::

He sends over a file containing the documents — forged but even to an expert eye they appear real.

:: I prefer if you call me Meme or whatever nickname you come up with. ::

@photobombingcryptid

:: Heh. Tell me more about it. ::

:: This answer gave me enough confirmation to my aloud thoughts. ::

Wait... is he—

:: Are you, by any chance, confirming that you're here for trouble? :: but by the look of the ship over the monitor, it could be a yes.

[crazyfanatic97]

RID AU #2

In which two very different humans are involved in the RID battles. 

The show starts out as normal, with things on Cybertron and the Prison ship crashing. 

The change comes in who the humans are. It’s been three years since TFP and Agent Fowler is semi retired. When Ratchet left the base and never came back they shut down Unit:E and locked all of the Cybertronian tech away in the hanger. 

He’s living in the country with his housemate, Miko Nakadai. Miko chose to go to college in America but because she doesn't have family, Fowler opts to let her live in his home..provided she doesn't play Slash Monkey past 8. 

Jack and Miko are dating but Jack is off training, he and Miko Vid Chat whenever they can. June is going to University to become a doctor and Raf has advanced to College. 

Things are normal for Fowler and Miko..until the Alchimor crashes into the woods behind Fowler's home. 

Underbite is stopped just like in the show but instead of moving or setting up in a Junkyard, Fowler revels that he still has the access codes to the Unit:E Facility. 

They just got to rebuild the Ground Bridge and keep is disguise. 

Thus the Bee Team is formed and Fowler is able to get things done without the need of a costume or two. If necessary sometimes he sends Miko in as a distraction. 

They do a slightly better job at keeping the whole in Disguise angle, and Miko and Grimlock are best buddies. 

Bee wonders if Miko just attracts big green Autobots to herself. 

[jemandtheholograms]

[askvectorprime]

It is rumored that a group of explorers known as Unit:E dwell outside of normal space and time, much as you once did. Have you ever encountered them?

Dear Teamup Teammate,

Although their Phase Station exists beyond the confines of space-time, much like our own Realm of the Primes, I did once briefly encounter an iteration of Acroyear and his teammates on a mission for this mysterious agency. I do not believe that they had intended to breach “our” multiverse; though I did my best to guide them back to one of their many megaversal realms, such a process is highly experimental and prone to errors. I am embarrassed to admit that their damaged vessel crash-landed in a world of candy, and trapped them in a molasses swamp for quite a long time.