Hasbro Comic Universe/YMMV

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Generally thought to have suffered from one. Given how humans are generally viewed in Transformers, bringing in more of them from other properties, and giving them equal billing to the Autobots and Decepticons didn't do much to endear long-time readers of the Transformers books. And on the flipside, the other properties that IDW brought in; their Uncanceled G.I. Joe ongoing and rebooted versions of ROM Spaceknight, Micronauts, Visionaries, Action Man and MASK; had nowhere near the level of media awareness of Transformers, leaving Transformers fans confused as to why IDW chose C-list franchises instead of bigger Hasbro names or other properties that IDW had the license to, while fans of the incoming properties expressed annoyance at their lore having to be bent to suit the Transformers mythos, such as Space Knight armor being a Cybertronian Imported Alien Phlebotinum.
• Broken Base: Oh it's quite a big one.
  • To its supporters, the HCU is Crazy Awesome, being a fun modernized telling of grand old ideas but to its critics, the lack of media awareness regarding the non-Transformers brands made it a doomed idea from the start.
  • The over-reliance on the Transformers comics (Visionaries invading Cybertron, Dire Wraiths hunting for Ore-13, Skywarp as a G.I. Joe). Logically it makes sense, they'd been ongoing for a successful eleven years by that point, but there are readers (both fans and detractors) who don't think that the other franchises should be relying on Transformers to reboot themselves. After all, at what point do they stop being their own franchises and just start being Transformers characters?
• Common Knowledge:
  • IDW was not forced to write the Hasbro Comic Universe. They had the ideas and the licenses, so they simply thought it would be a fun thing to do. Though plans for the HCU were announced at the same time as the proposed Hasbro Cinematic Universe, the timing was ultimately nothing more than a coincidence.
  • Despite what some diehard Transformers fans will tell you, this 'verse did not kill IDW's original Transformers continuity, which came to a close less than two years after the HCU debuted. Not only were the stories were already wrapping up, the sales throughout Phase 2 were on an unsustainable downwards spiral; and, other than a brief sales spike for the first issues of the relaunched series, the relaunch did pretty much nothing to the sales trends, which continued to decrease at the same level as they had from around the 51st issues to the relaunch. While the Hasbro Universe titles generally didn't sell great, they didn't affect the sales of the ongoing Transformers series at all. If anything, the opposite happened as many only bought other HCU titles for the Transformers cameos.
  • The HCU is not Merchandise-Driven. Not only does the licensing for comics work by IDW paying Hasbro for the right to use their characters, instead of the other way 'round for its television series, there isn't any merchandise to promote for most of the franchises. The most they got was a single toy box at SDCC 2017.
  • Rom is not a Marvel character. He was created by Parker Brothers, a company later acquired by Hasbro. When Parker Brothers licensed the character to Marvel only to quickly fold soon after, Rom's interactions with Marvel characters led some readers to assume that the Spaceknights and Dire Wraiths were original Marvel creations, and thus a They Changed It, Now It Sucks reaction to him ensued once he appeared outside of Marvel. All the Knights that weren't Rom however, such as Starshine, were in fact original Marvel characters, making them unusable in IDW's story.
• Cult Classic: Didn't pull the same figures as the Transformers books, and never had the same sprawling online community, but the hardcore fans signed on for life.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • He may have only had four issues to his name, but Action Man is quite popular among the fanbase.
  • Rom and his gloriously hammy dialogue. The fact that his Marvel comic was quite popular helped. He's even the IDW Hasbro Wiki's mascot.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A quick stroll on Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own will reveal that the overwhelming majority of Transformers fans who write about the later days of the 2005 IDW Continuity refuse to acknowledge the HCU and keep the action solely on the Cybertronians. The only thing that most of the Transformers fandom seems to have embraced is Stardrive, the orphaned Camien that Rom adopted, but don't expect the fan writers to ever mention her backstory or her Dire Wraith mutations. Even fanart of her has a 50/50 chance of having her in her natural blue paint rather than Space Knight armor.
  • Even those who like the verse aren't huge fans of Transformers vs. Visionaries. Word of advice, when you're trying to get people interested in a thirty year old franchise, don't open the book by killing off Kup, one of the most beloved Transformers of all time, and then making his murderer, along with her ready to enact Hostile Terraforming species, a Karma Houdini.
• Internet Backdraft: Let's just say that people were displeased by the lack of ponies.
• Hard to Weld Work:
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Incorporating the comics on their own would have been easy but the comics do try to, roughly, keep canon with the television show, limiting how readily and accessible crossovers could have been.
  • Littlest Pet Shop: Also lighthearted, plus Blythe's Speaks Fluent Animal power is supposed to be Magical Realism, so being integrated into the Hasbroverse means the power would have to be explained.
  • Pound Puppies: Also lighthearted, not to mention the intelligence of the Pound Puppies would also have to be explained if they were integrated into the Hasbroverse.
  • Trolls: Again, way too lighthearted.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Despite the fact that MLP sat out this verse, they would get their own comic crossover with the Transformers a year and a half after the HCU ended. And it got a sequel a year later.
• Just Here for Godzilla: An odd case of Godzilla having been here first. Many of IDW's Transformers readers still only read Transformers books after the HCU launched. And their only major reason for even checking out any other title was the occasional Transformers reference. A good example is G.I. Joe Vol. 5. While the Denser and Wackier tone proved off-putting to many Joe fans, some Transformers fans were very eager to see Skywarp finally receive A Day in the Limelight. In fact, a large complaint from the online community about ROM: Dire Wraiths is that it has no Transformers references.
  • Many other were checking the universe for Ensemble Darkhorse ROM, a character that went unused after Hasbro got the rights to him.
• Older Than They Think: Despite the outrage of many a Transformers fan at the other properties diluting the original IDW timeline, it was long implied that most incarnations of Transformers were taking place in a Shared Universe between all of Hasbro's properties. There have been crossovers with G.I. Joe as far back as 1986 and Prysmos often shows up as an Easter Egg on Cybertronian star charts.
• Snark Bait: Barring My Little Pony, and that generally wasn't until 2010, Transformers fans have never generally held Hasbro's other franchises in high regard. This universe's short run only threw more fuel on that fire.
  • ROM: Dire Wraiths‍'‍ large delays proved quite a source of laughter.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: The Transformers books. While it makes sense to centre the universe around the Transformers franchise considering they had strong sales and eleven years worth of books and mythology, the lore of all the other franchises had to be twisted around and bent to suit the Transformers franchise (such as both Rom and the Micronauts owing their existence to the legacy of Cybertron's Thirteen Primes). Transformers: Unicron was without a doubt the biggest example of this. Though it's ostensibly the Grand Finale of the HCU, it was clearly, and shamelessly, a Transformers comic.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Oh so common.
  • MASK fans weren't too thrilled on Matt Trakker's Race Lift which has so many Unfortunate Implications. The redesign was probably the result of the original Matt Trakker looking very similar to Duke and the artists wanting to avoid any confusion.
  • Many ROM and Micronauts fans would have preferred a continuation of the old comics set in the Marvel Universe rather than a full reboot.
  • While the Visionaries reimagining had its supporters, the more notable changes, particularly Darkstorm's demise and the redesigns, were not met with great cheers. Not helped was the Adaptational Villainy of the Prysmosian race nor the fact that they didn't get to do very much before Unicron showed up.
  • And a lot of readers of IDW's Transformers book just don't care about the Hasbro Comic Universe either way and were perfectly happy just reading Transformers comics.
• Too Good to Last: A Shared Universe between Hasbro's science fiction properties. There's no way this was gonna be around for long.

---

Back to Hasbro Comic Universe