Originally Posted by Bidoofdude
Time travel! Separate timelines! There's probably some whacko way we can explain continuity in the Sunbow cartoon.
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I know what you mean about BWII and Neo having a much more Japanese flavour to it. And story wise both series were quite rubbish. BWII also had really sub-par animation quality, and while the animation improved in Neo, that series suffered from utter banality (up until the Unicron arc of the story which only happened at the very end, but suffering through the rest of the series to get up to it just isn't worth itwas much like super god masterforce for me, quite japanese-y, maybe too much for my taste, mind you I had a poorly dubbed copy so I enjoyed that chore even less).
Although there are three key differences between Super God Masterforce and Beast Wars 2nd:
* As a continuation of The☆Headmasters, Masterforce continues to travel along a divorced G1 cartoon continuity from the US series. And although the US cartoon no longer existed in 1988, MF still continued to make their concept on Pretenders and Power/Godmasters to be entirely different from that of Anglophone continuity. Also, Ginrai ≠ Optimus Prime
* The story of Masterforce was actually reasonably well written! Unlike Anglophone Pretenders, the Japanese Pretenders are able to mass shift and reduce themselves to human size. This allowed the Autobot Pretenders to live among humans as humans, and the Decepticon Pretenders to prey on humans as human-sized monsters. It was also interesting how they explained that the Decepticon Pretenders were the prime source of human monster myths across various cultures throughout time. The idea of Godmasters and Headmaster Juniors is more similar to the Anglophone version of binary bonding between humans/Nebulans and Cybertronians. The Godmaster took it one step further by linking it with mythical "Chi" energy, which ties in with East Asian culture that the show is targeting. #TheForce
* Good animation! Masterforce was clearly given a bigger animation budget than The☆Headmasters. The animation in this series as well as Victory and Zone are just magnificent. It was the first time that a Transformers series looked and felt like anime.BWII on the other hand has brilliant animation in the opening theme and theatrical movie, but the animation in the actual episodes is just rubbish. BW Neo was better, but it did recycle a lot of stock animation... like every transformation.
Yeah, but to be honest, the change in Airazor's gender didn't affect anything as far as the outcome of the story was concerned. In other words, it bore zero relevance to the continuity, and thus isn't really a continuity contradiction. Transformers are physically genderless robots, and Japanese doesn't normally even use gendered pronouns, so the only real difference is that the voice was male instead of female. And they kept the romance!
JP BW actually gave us the first TF same-gender Conjunx Endurae long before IDW did!
That's different because you're looking at a continuity split. And even if there is a continuity split, it doesn't make them different characters. At most, it makes them different versions of the same character. Whether they are the same person or not is a philosophical question which probably goes beyond the scope of this discussion. An example of this is Rewind in the IDW comics. He died. Got locked in a temporal cell with Overlord and the thing was blown apart. But there was a momentary split in time where two different versions of the Lost Light and her crew existed before the time stream was reasserted. When that happened, Rewind from a different time stream who didn't end up being locked in with Overlord and killed survived. Although his Chromedome died. Now Rewind and Chromedome from two different but now reasserted time streams have found each other. They were hesitant at first, but now see each other as being the same actual person that they'd previously lost in collapsed time lines. But are they right or have they fallen for different people who happen to be the same character.
Individuality Vs Identity
(this is a sub-topic that I teach in the Japanese Extension HSC course, so it's a topic that I'm quite familiar with
Both Rewind and Chromedome are the same individuals as the ones that were lost. They are not different individuals who represent the same identity, even though these individuals may have come from variant time streams. When we look at Optimus Primal/Convoy in the Canadian series and Convoy in BWII, they are the same individual. The Japanese one may arguably come from a divergent expanded continuity, but it is the same individual, not the same identity. Optimus Primal in the IDW comics on the other hand is the same identity but different individual.
An identity is the character, but not necessarily the same individual.
e.g. G1 Optimus Prime is an identity. G1 cartoon Optimus Prime, G1 Marvel Comics Optimus Prime, G1 IDW Comics Optimus Prime etc. are different individuals of that shared identity. On a grander scale, Optimus Prime as a character is essentially an identity, even across different continuity families (e.g. Prime, Movieverse etc.).
But in the case of Convoy vs Convoy, they are not just the same identity, they are the same character. Even if we accept that one is from a divergent universe, they are still the same individual. It's just that one may have experienced events that the other hasn't, but it doesn't make them different people. Especially considering that JP Convoy's story reasserts itself with the Canadian continuity, because it's followed directly by Beast Wars Metals, which is the Japanese dub of Seasons 2-3 of the Canadian series. In fact, the Beast Wars movie has three parts to it:
1. "Clash! Beast Warriors"; a segment reusing video from Season 1 to summarise that season.
2. "Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger"; an original animated movie which tells the story of Lio Convoy's Maximals vs Galvatron's Predacons & Majin Zarak. It culminates with a team up with Optimus Primal.
3. "Beast Wars Metals"; Japanese dub of the Season 2 episode 'Bad Spark.'
So the film very deliberately ties BWII in with the Canadian series. 2/3 of the film is actually dubbed material from the Canadian show, the original Japanese part only constitutes 1/3 of the entire film!
It doesn't hurt when Airazor's male voice happens to sound like this.
It came to be as a complete surprise. BW came out in Japan later than in the US and I had already started reading about the characters before online. So I was expecting Airazor to be female and I remember seeing the "Next episode preview" the week before, which showed Airazor (but without the voice), and I got all pumped. I even walked around telling all my friends that there was going to be a new female Transformer airing in the next episode for a whole week. Then when the episode aired I was all excited... and Airazor opened her mouth and she was a he!
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