Transformers Wiki (TFWiki.net) is a comprehensive source for all things Transformers, from media adaptations to collectibles. Its contributors are known for their dedication, having even raised funds to purchase obscure items for more accurate content.
The wiki began in 2005 as "Teletraan I" on the Wikicities platform. When Wikicities transitioned to Wikia (now known as Fandom), introducing changes that the community opposed, they shifted to an independent site, TFWiki.net, in 2008.
TFWiki aims to be a complete guide to the Transformers universe, covering all characters and products associated with the brand. It has gained a reputation for its accuracy and completeness. What makes TFWiki unique, however, is its humorous tone. While most wikis adopt a formal and educational style, TFWiki is known for its humorous and entertaining writing style. It features fandom jokes, cultural references, amusing image captions, and creative article formats (e.g. the G1 Autobot Wheelie's page is written in rhymes to mimic his speech style). The tone of TFWiki is akin to that of Uncyclopedia and TV Tropes, and in fact, terms like "Ruined FOREVER" and "Dull Surprise" used here originated on TFWiki.
Many actual Transformers staff members (mostly Promoted Fanboys) contribute to the wiki, including Jim Sorenson, Greg Sepelak, and David Willis.
Also check out the IDW Hasbro Wiki for the non-Transformers parts of the Hasbro Comic Universe, the GoBots Wiki for the tangentially-related Challenge Of The Go Bots, and Transformers: The Basics, a series of video guides to the Transformers franchise produced by prominent wiki editor Chris McFeely.
Not to be confused with the Team Fortress Wiki, the other TF wiki, which formerly had the domain "TF2Wiki.net".
This wiki provides examples of:
- Actor Allusion:
- Captions for actors' pages are bound to be popular quotes spoken by characters they've performed. To give a few examples:
- Clancy Brown: Mr. Krabs in SpongeBob SquarePants
- John Goodman: Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski
- Eric Bauza: Tiger Claw in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)
- Richard Epcar: Batou in the English dub of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex... well, an infamously nonsensical translation of one of Batou's lines in a Taiwanese bootleg of its OVA continuation Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society
- Will Friedle: Terry McGinnis/Batman in Batman Beyond
- Jun Fukushima: Kazuma Satou in KonoSuba
- Nobuhiko Okamoto: Ghiaccio in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
- Tomoaki Maeno: Zhongli in the Japanese dub of Genshin Impact
- Stephanie Shehnote : The eponymous Sailor Moon in the Viz Media English dubs.
- Tomokazu Sugita: Gintoki Sakata in Gintama
- Kenjiro Tsuda: Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monstersnote
- Sumire Uesaka: Carmeara in Ultraman Trigger: New Generation Tiga
- Ken Watanabe: Dr. Ishiro Serizawa in the MonsterVerse
- The list can go on forever, but it has to stop somewhere for now...
- Several captions for Dr. Morocco reference Tim Curry's role as Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
- The first caption for Kade Burns from Transformers: Rescue Bots and one of the captions for Jack Darby from Transformers: Prime references a certain past role of the latter's voice actor. The latter page also features a reference to another role Josh Keaton would go on to play.
- Aligned Bumblebee features a caption that references a certain franchise his voice actor in War for Cybertron was involved in.
- The caption for Robbie Daymond, who voiced Evan and Miles, refers to his role as Tuxedo Masknote .
- No surprise what the caption for Mark Hamill's page references. The page for the Transformers: Rescue Bots character, Woodrow Burns, also opens with a Luke Skywalker quote and the opening caption for the The Transformers: Titans Return episode "All Things Must Pass" and the captions for the Fallen in the Prime Wars cartoon are all things said by Firelord Ozai.
- The captions for the Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) episode "Blurred" and Aligned Blurr's page revolve around Max Mittelman's (Aligned Blurr) role as Saitama.
- If you look at Ped's entry on the wiki, you'll notice that every single image caption is a quote from Mandark. This is, of course, because Ped's voice actor, Eddie Deezen, also voiced Mandark.
- The caption for Emissary from The Transformers: Titans Return referring Jason David Frank's role on Power Rangers.
- Sawtooth's page tends to quote the Crimson Fucker himself from Hellsing Ultimate Abridged. note
- The page for the version of Blitzwing seen in Bumblebee features a image caption for one of the toys released quoting Lobo, who was voiced by Blitzwing's voice actor David Sobolov in Young Justice, Injustice: Gods Among Us, and LEGO DC Comics Super Villains. note
- The caption for the Fallen for the video game Forged to Fight mentions the film Sushi Girl, which makes it a dual Actor Allusion as Duke, the main villain of the film, was played by Tony Todd, who voiced the Fallen in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, and Crow, one of Duke's lackeys, was played by Mark Hamill, who voiced the Fallen in the Prime Wars Trilogy cartoons (and the design for the Fallen from the cartoons was even reused for the game).
- Animated Wreck-Gar has only lyrics by his voice actor "Weird Al" Yankovic.
- Some of the captions for Targetmaster Peacemaker have references to John Cena's character from The Suicide Squad and the character's own spin-off show.
- Captions for actors' pages are bound to be popular quotes spoken by characters they've performed. To give a few examples:
- Adaptational Goal Change: In the Ask Vector Prime series, one post states that the Fallen betrayed the other original Primes out of jealousy and sought to take Prima's Star Saber for himself, compared to how the original comic version is stated to have acted out of love for chaos and seeks to free Unicron upon the universe.
- Affectionate Parody: For the most part, it's written by fans who make it clear that they do love the franchise, and most of the humor gently lampoons the silliness inherent in Transformers. That said, when the wiki deals with the particularly awful installments of Transformers media... then the kid gloves come off.
- all lowercase letters: All of the captions for the Robo Power Activators and Go-Bots toys (except for Activators Optimus, which has no caption, and Activators Topspin, whose caption is a Boomhauer quote) are written this way, complete with the occasional baby-talk to emphasize their Super-Deformed and particularly childlike looks:Activators Bumblebee: an i like ta tawk and tawk and tawk and tawk! qwiet is silly!
Activators Recon Bumblebee: look daddy look look im batman!!
Go-Bots Bumblebee: ima big boy today
Activators Starscream: i wanna play leader i wanna play leader waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Activators Megatron: owie owie i hurt my face
Activators Ironhide: gwwwwrrrr im a solja
Go-Bots Optimus Prime: woobwoobwoobwoobwoob
Go-Bots Sideswipe: wen i grow up i wanna be an astwonaut!!! - Ascended Fanon: Discussed and listed here. "Canonizing is the act of inserting a previously apocryphal or pseudocanonical bit of fancruft or omitted authorial intention into canon. It's kind of like fanservice for continuity freaks."
- Ascended Meme: Some memes get ascended from the wiki to other media thanks to some of the official writers being editors. Including things like the official Alternate Universe classifications from Transformers: TransTech being essentially fictionalized versions of the wiki's classification scheme, and Transformers Generation 2 Redux Streetwise's personality being based on his wiki page.
- Awesome McCoolname:
- They declare that Greg Killmaster has "the best name ever in the history of things that rule", enough so they speculate his wife Laura Killmaster must have fought her way through scores of suitors to share it.
- Various characters have been declared to have ludicrously awesome names, including Terrorcon Sinnertwin, the Decepticon Slayride, the combiner Ruination, the Titanmaster Shreddicus Maximus, and the Destructicon Lord Imperious Delirious.
- Berserk Button:
- The disambiguation page for Cannon takes serious issue with misspelling the word "canon", as it states that cannons shouldn't be confused with "Canon, the story material which is considered to affect the overall continuity" three times before launching into a rant about how they're different words and how some official products have made this mistake.CANON AND CANNON ARE DIFFERENT FREAKING WORDS, AND IF YOU TELL US ABOUT HOW SOME STORY IS "NOT CANNON" ONE MORE TIME, WE WILL MURDER YOU.
With a CANNON.
Starting with whoever was responsible for Classics Megatron's packaging, followed by whoever named the Turbomasters "Canon Masters" for some European markets. - The wiki really, really hates such practices as toy-swapping (the act of putting a different toy in packaging and then returning it to the store for a refund, which one can get away with thanks to liberal store policies in the US and Canada, and essentially giving the toy-swapper a free toy while the false toy gets put back on the shelf for some poor schmuck to buy), and toy scalping (the act of buying up a large amount of toys to create artificial scarcities and then re-sell the toys for a much higher price than the MSRP).
- The disambiguation page for Cannon takes serious issue with misspelling the word "canon", as it states that cannons shouldn't be confused with "Canon, the story material which is considered to affect the overall continuity" three times before launching into a rant about how they're different words and how some official products have made this mistake.
- Bilingual Bonus: The introduction for their Multilingual Packaging page is first written in English, followed by the same text repeated twice in two different languages that change upon refresh — the list of languanges is quite expansive, including among others Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Swahili, Finnish and even Pig Latin.
- Blatant Lies:
- On Duke Hauser's page, it tries claiming that the characters, plot and enemies of "Space Age Jack" (from The Big Broadcast of 2006) just happens to resemble that of G.I. Joe in every respect is pure coincidence.
- The Liar Starscream clone/Animated Ramjet's page is completely honest in every single respect, and definitely not immediate contradictions of all evident facts, right up to and including his voice actors.
- On the topic of Beast Wars: Uprising Run-Over, who speaks entirely in The Simpsons quotes, his page's caption states "we wouldn't know anything about this", while linking to G1 Kup's page, where the captions are nothing but Abe Simpson quotes.
- Caption Humor: Many picture captions, screen captures, etc. have joke captions. For example, on Human, a comic panel of Transformers near some giant humans is captioned "Humans come in both Tall and Venti." (A reference to Starbucks cup sizes.) Note that this isn't a constant. Some articles actually do have serious captions, like the article on the Matrix (mostly).
- However, they advise against this for new editors, who can easily fall for the trap of just changing/adding captions to shoehorn jokes that may not land, as opposed to actually adding or expanding content in the articles themselves.
- Compensating for Something: The "Compensating for something" joke (implying that something large and grandiose is meant to make up for a Teeny Weenie) is considered a Dead Horse Trope, and has an entry on the list of jokes and captions the wiki is sick of.We're sorry, but this wiki has exceeded its quota of "compensating for something" jokes.
- Dark Age of Supernames: The site has a page called "Blastification", named for Hasbro's tendency during the 2000s to use "blast" in the names of a lot of toys, mostly for trademark purposes (mostly naming both the Depcticon and G.I. Joe characters named "Shockwave" to "Shockblast"; while Hasbro would be able to trademark "Shockwave and use it for the 'Con again, the Joe kept the "Shockblast" name).
- Deadpan Snarker:
- All over the place, as it's pretty much the wiki's default tone, but particularly in the image captions and the Fandom articles.
- While the wiki does prefer articles to be as informative as possible, particularly poor works or bad lines of reasoning (like, say, the infamous IDW Beast Wars Sourcebook) get at least a few shots of sarcasm somewhere on the page.
- On occasion, the wiki gets snarky about the Captain Obvious nature of some captions on other, more "serious" wikis. Like, for example, on the top image for G1 Hot Rod.Caption: (On a picture showing Hot Rod and Daniel Witwicky running through a field) Without a dry, informative caption, we'd never know which of these is Hot Rod.
- Any particularly infamous or low-quality episode, comic, or toy will have its wiki page written in varying degrees of resigned irritation.
- Death Is Cheap: There's an entire page talking about the many deaths and resurrections of Optimus Prime.
- "Dear John" Letter: The page for the dubiously-named molecule breaking-up weapon is a riff on this, being written in the style of a breakup letter.
- Decomposite Character: The site decided to follow suit on the Word of God that declared the Grimlock from Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) that he's as a separate entity from the Grimlock in Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, and likewise treats the Sideswipe and Kickback from RiD 2015 as separate characters from the G1-esque versions in the Cybertron games.
- Dude, Not Funny!: The wiki's stance on toy swapping, especially because the victims of this practice are usually young children.The main problem of toy swapping is simple: children. Fans and collectors usually know what the toy they're looking for is supposed to look like, so they most likely won't pick up a swapped toy, unless they're not paying attention for whatever reason. Therefore, the most likely victims of this practice are parents who buy a toy for their kid. Imagine the look on a child's face when he gets Movie Leader Class Optimus Prime for his birthday, opens the packaging and finds an old, beat-up Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime inside.
And no, this is not funny. Really not. - Dull Surprise: There is an entire page on blank expressions that are meant to convey various emotions.A range of emotions from horror and despair to fury and triumph is here summed up by a single, slack-jawed facial expression. Hey, even Optimus Prime can do it with his faceplate!
- Everyone Has Standards: Even the rather irreverent TF Wiki is noticeably disgusted by Carbombya, has a commented-out note on Hiroshima Prime warning any would-be caption writer that they're "WATCHING YOU, BUSTER," (though the caption is just a joke on how he looks) and has some shame in regards to the character model for Thunderblast from Transformers: Cybertron. They also got rid of the Tiny Tina captions on the Rescue Bots Academy Whirl page as they felt the theme was wildly inappropriate for a preschool character.
- Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Played for Laughs with the distinction between "Canon" and "cannon", with the disambiguation page threatening anyone who mixes up the terms to be murdered with a cannon.
- Fanon: Discussed/explained alongside Fanon Discontinuity in their article on Personal Canon.
- Fanon Discontinuity: The editors really want to pretend that The Beast Within never happened. The same can be said for "B.O.T.", Energon, and the Combiner Wars cartoon.
- Foreshadowing: The Prime Wars Trilogy section on Metroplex's page has a caption that was made the day before Hasbro announced their purchase on the Power Rangers franchise.
- Fridge Logic: Invoked when discussing over "Continuity errors" portion of an episode, but this is way more common in the early G1 where Early-Installment Weirdness gets frequently brought up.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: A popular style for all humanity-specific articles, such as the ones for Kissing and Humanity itself, is to write them from the perspective of beings who are unfamiliar with and bewildered by the topics.A kiss is a peculiar sort of bonding ritual involving (sometimes mutual) oral contact, especially among humans. The reasons for this strange phenomenon are usually beyond some Transformers' understanding, resulting in many an uncomfortable line of questioning. Are these fleshlings transmitting data? Is it an energy-transferral process? Why are they doing it in my back seat?
- I Need a Freaking Drink: The article for The Transformers episode "B.O.T." is pretty much one long appeal to this trope, capped off with "Good God, I need a stiff drink," at the very end. Anything involving Kiss Players also sometimes invokes this sentiment being used in the article.
- Internal Homage: Catalogued with great glee down to the most obscure instances.
- In the Style of:
- Many of the articles are written in a way that homages a character's personality and/or speaking style, such as Wheelie's article being written entirely in rhyme (while being functional and informational the whole damn time), or the ones for Starscream's clones. This, along with its impressive accuracy, is a big reason as to why this site is so popular.
- For non-character examples, the introductory paragraph about multilingual packaging is presented in three different languages that change with every refresh, and the entire page for Marvel Comics is written in the style of Stan Lee.
- Every episode of the Transformers: Robots in Disguise anime starts off with a haiku in honor of Sky-Byte, the poetic Sharkticon from the show.
- The opening paragraph of Monstructor's page is written in the style of H. P. Lovecraft, since the old Dreamwave More Than Meets The Eye profile books depicted him as a near-Lovecraftian horror.
- Ironic Echo: Shattered Glass Rewind's page has an inversion of his More Than Meets The Eye counterpart's last words to Chromedome.
- Irony: The location of the Autobot base in the movies being Diego Garcia. Lampshaded to Hell and back. Observe.
- Knowledge Broker: To an extent, in that in addition to documenting the cartoons and comics that are easily seen by anyone, the wiki has a knack for also tracking down rare and obscure corners of the franchise. They've even gone so far as to pool together money to buy a rare toy catalog with things like obscure prototypes just to get to scan and document it. Though thankfully for us, they offer the knowledge for free.
- Ludicrous Precision: Silly percentages will occasionally pop up when discussing a subject already riddled with pedantically specific explanations. For example, the Trukk Not Munky! page mentions that Optimus Primal being an ape, not a monkey, was intended to be part of the mockery from the start, resulting in a net 34.5% increase in snide.
- Merchandise-Driven: In addition to the fact that this phenomenon having its own page, it's subtly lampshaded elsewhere multiple times, such as in the article regarding the many deaths of Optimus Prime.
- Messianic Archetype: Inverted. The article on Jesus refers to him as being a possible Optimus Prime archetype.
- Missing Steps Plan:
- This passage from their article on the orbit-disruptor cannon:Behold Megatron's plan:
1. Use the orbit disruptor to knock Earth's Moon out of its orbit.
2. Control the world's tides with a device Soundwave made.
3. Flood one canyon.
4. ???
5. Nearly limitless power! - G1 Starscream's page also has one:10: Try to overthrow Megatron
20: Fail
30: GOTO 10
- This passage from their article on the orbit-disruptor cannon:
- Mundane Made Awesome: THE CURLY STRAW, which the wiki discusses in a hilariously flowery, reverent, almost scared tone, blaming it for causing the Great War.
- Nostalgia Filter: Mocked in several captions in the article for the original series, which are written like they are vague recollections of how a nostalgic fan would remember the series now.
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
- The page for Canon captions several pictures of absurd things with variations of "This is canon", such as Megatron shooting at Cliffjumper (whose headlights are eyes for some reason) from a giant car, Darth Vader fighting Optimus Prime, a Super-Deformed illustration of Rattrap, and Bumblebee lubricating on Agent Simmons.
- The wiki clarifies in references that there's really a toy bio describing Nemesis Prime throttling Santa Claus and destroying his village.
- No True Scotsman: The True Fan page has examples of this, and links to The Other Wiki's page for No True Scotsman."Anyone who likes Beast Machines isn't a true fan."
"Anyone who doesn't like Simon Furman isn't a true fan."
"Anyone who thinks Rumble is red isn't a true fan."
"Anyone who likes Bayformers isn't a true fan." - Obfuscating Stupidity: Sometimes articles on crossover material will only include what was explicitly in the crossover, with other even commonly known facts being treated as apocrypha and hearsay. This has the humorous result of things like the relationship between Anakin and Luke Skywalker, if any, being unknown, and the supposition that Jesus, whoever he's supposed to be, is simply a Metaphor for Prime. For an informal example, the wiki initially referred to Street Fighter's Dictator character under the "Vega" name, since his relevant Transformers toy was Japan-exclusive for four years (Japan-only stuff means Japanese name under wiki policy, his page noted); Hasbro announcing they'd bring said toy to America in 2022 allowed the wiki to finally call him "M. Bison."
- Obviously Evil: Mocked to hell and back with Zeta Prime's page. Not a caption box goes by without a joke about it, and the first paragraph has this to say:"He's probably a pretty nice guy! After all, Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, and Zeta looks downright friggin' evil. Is that masked, horned face the face of someone who would torture and brainwash the dissidents and suck fuel from his own citizens to fuel his army? Totally! So if he were actually bad, he'd probably try to hide it a little, don't you think?"
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The caption for Pipes' death, instead of a snarky remark or a straightforward serious description, goes "I... um... I don't want to joke right now."
- Overused Running Gag:
- Some jokes have been so overused that the Wiki's caption policy page includes a list of "captions we're sick of".
- The "Bonecrusher Hates Everything" gag on his page was cut down after a while, with a commented-out note telling contributors not to add more.
- In a meta example, even the wiki points out how overused and lame "Transformers killing GoBots" jokes are."Cy-Kill often dies BCUZ GOBOTS SUX LOLOLOL!!!!111"
- Lampshaded in the caption for a character in the IDW comics named Meg, which calls out the "Shut up, Meg" joke from Family Guy as having never been funny in the first place, just mean.
- For sixteen years, Prowl’s movie incarnation had a Running Gag about how he may have better luck appearing in a forthcoming sequel after being cut from the original film in favor of Barricade. When the note was updated for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts when it was clear Prowl would again not be appearing, an admin deleted the entire joke, since the editor lazily wrote "oh forget it" and that plenty of other characters have been cut from the films besides Prowl.
- Painting the Medium:
- Several pages have unique formatting to fit their subject matter:
- Wheelie's page is written entirely in rhyme.
- The page for The Lone Gunmen is written in the Courier font, to make it look like a document from The X-Files.
- Rewind's page is formatted as a bullet point list of factoids with literary citations, except for his More than Meets the Eye incarnation ("Did you know that Rewind in the IDW Generation 1 Comics was too prominent a character to continue summarizing his story simply as trivia factoids?").
- The text on the IDW Hasbro Wiki's page for Xamot Paoli is entirely aligned right, to be the mirror image his brother's page.
- Objects that are fictionalized or lied about in-universe and things that failed to materialize in the real world (such as unpublished stories) are featured in the category "Things that don't exist." The description page for that category is a red link.
- Several pages have unique formatting to fit their subject matter:
- Preemptive "Shut Up": The page for Hiroshima Prime has one greeting editors when editing the page against wisecracks related to the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The actual caption, however, is just a joke about his appearance, being a Trailbreaker toy with shields that look like an oyster's shell.IF YOU'RE HERE TO CHANGE THE CAPTION? THINK LONG AND HARD ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO WRITE. WE'RE WATCHING YOU, BUSTER.
- Repeated for Emphasis: On the disambiguation page for Cannon, "Cannons should not be confused with:" is followed by three bullet points saying the same thing: "Canon, the story material which is considered to affect the overall continuity."
- Ret-Canon: The opening paragraphs for characters made popular by certain works have a tendency to be rewritten to accommodate the interpretations of those characters.
- Retcon: They've been known to occur, usually removing overused jokes or overly harsh criticism. The page for the Zone OVA used to be disparaging about the treatment of Cain and Emusa (stereotypically gay anime clichés), until it was changed to praise the two as an example of inclusivity (which... probably wasn't what Zone's creators were exactly going for).
- Rouge Angles of Satin: Cannon (disambiguation) exists solely because the editors were sick of seeing people misspell "canon.""CANON AND CANNON ARE DIFFERENT FREAKING WORDS, AND IF YOU TELL US ABOUT HOW SOME STORY IS "NOT CANNON", WE WILL MURDER YOU."note note For context
- Running Gag: Plenty, either on the pages or pointing out ones in the series, resulting in featured pages such as this one.
- "Argh", for when subject matter is particularly bad.
- The error listing "This was made" is rather popular for things that are really bad.
- Calling Prowl a prick.
- Calling Sentinel Prime a jerk.
- Skywarp pushing people down stairs. (As the talk page for him explains, this isn't anything from canon, but rather a riff on a piece of fan art and Skywarp's canon persona as mean-spirited Dumb Muscle.)
- RAVAGE IS THE ONE WHO'S WAVING
- Every image on Dinobot's page has a modified quote from Shakespeare as its caption, at least for the history section.
- Also, using Grimlock's speech pattern in his articles is another running joke. Yes, even with the RID anime one.
- The episode recaps for Transformers: Energon, usually on really bad episodes, stating "this is where people started to re-evaluate [previous unlikable series]".
- The "pain count" for each episode, which tends to list how many times a specific line of dialogue is used as filler.
- The pages for I.R.O.N., and some of its higher-ups have a minor thing noting how Obviously Evil they are, what with hiring a former leader of COBRA to be their C.E.O., in the forms of Suspiciously Specific Denial.
- The synopsis for the series finale of any series will end on the words "'Til all are one."
- Barricade's articles tend to bring up "ladiesman217", specifically in the capacity of Barricade scaring him for fun.
- Since Ectotron's first appearance in Transformers/Ghostbusters has him insist on being addressed by his full name (Ectronymus Diamatron), the wiki indulges him by repeatedly referring to him as such in any fiction section he's in. Hey, he asked.
- Shockwave's image captions saying everything is his fault (with the exception of IDW's reboot due to Megatron forcing Shockwave back into line.)
- Chiding Japan for not heavily promoting their toy gimmicks such as the Crossformers in the Victory episode Planet Micro - The Mysterious Warrior and ''Prime Swerve'''s Arms Micron toy.
- Movie Scorponok just wants a hug.
- The captions for individual issues of Void Rivals are one sentence summaries of their contents, all beginning with "Looks like the Void Rivals are [x]."
- The image captions for Generation 1 Bonecrusher's page reference and quote the infamous Batman comic "The Joker's Comedy of Errors!", calling him "a boner" who commits "boner crimes".
- Images involving characters cast in shadow such as this photo of Beast Wars Megatron◊ or the Animated and WFC sections for the Autobot High Council will involve someone needing to turn on the lights.
- Running Gagged: For years a running gag was that in images of massive shoulder kibble they would be captioned with a variation of "Why my shoulders hurt." in reference of the Armada fancomic. Eventually it was decided that was in poor taste and most of said captions have been removed, though some obscure captions remain.
- Serial Escalation: Every new article heading for "B.O.T." starts with an increasingly emphasized "Argh."
- Sanity Slippage: From the notes for Issue 21 of Optimus Prime, you get the feeling Chris McFeely (who did the write-up) was starting to get a wee bit frazzled counting Maximals:"It's literally impossible to tell if all these friggin' Maximals are Japanese or American characters and it feels like some of these guys have been in two places at once and some of them might have even been dead last issue and they're just crowdfillers anyway and now a lot of them are dead and god help us we're so tired of trying to identify them."
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The page Scale exhaustively documents all the ways this trope is in effect in Transformers, and is found in the aforementioned "Things that don't exist" category.
- Self-Demonstrating Article: Pages for characters with a strong personality trait or Verbal Tic tend to be written in that style. So Wheelie's page Rhymes on a Dime, while Animated Ramjet's is full of Blatant Lies, and G1 Perceptor's is bursting with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. The page for "Void" is an admittedly creepy example.I slumber...
- Self-Deprecation: On the page covering how the Internet is used in Transformers media, the opening notes how many things on the Internet are "quite stupid and a waste of time", with that bit of dialogue including a link to the wiki's main page.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The articles on Humans, and hot dogs, describe both in the most formal tones possible. Additionally, Perceptor's articles as noted in Self-Demonstrating Article above, and the opening paragraph to Spider-Man's article is this trope applied to his theme song.
- Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Smack in the middle, due to being a combination of carefully researched detail presented in a snarky, tongue-in-cheek style. They do try to keep it in the middle, though: If there're too many jokes on an article and not enough info, it undergoes de-snarking.
- Space Whale Aesop: Parodied in a caption on Beast Wars Megatron's cartoon continuity page:Remember, kids, grand acts of wondrous science and space flight like Voyager will only ever attract evil, murderous aliens! Be cool and don't study at school!
- Spin-Off: The IDW Hasbro Wiki was set up to handle all the non-TF titles (G.I. Joe, ROM, Micronauts, etc.) that were fused into the IDW continuity to start the Hasbro Comic Universe. It's a bit slow-going right now, however.
- Squee: In as much as a wiki can do this, when James Roberts wrote an issue for The Transformers (IDW), the issue's page had his name written in a much larger font than normal.
- Stating the Simple Solution: They consider Ask Vector Prime's answer to animation errors to be kinda awesome. They're apparently small anomalies in space and time that correct themselves immediately and nobody remembers them afterwards.
- Take That!:
- They call Wolverine "a completely unlikeable asshole" who makes "gratuitous guest appearances" in their article on the character.
- Their Cy-Kill pages usually point out how old and tired killing off this character is.
- Certain people known for bad work in Transformers tend to get a jab in at some point or another, with Shane McCarthy, Pat Lee, Andy Schmidt, and Dan DiDio being among them. Pat Lee tends to get it the worst, having the most detailed article out of all the people listed, primarily due to his ego, using Dreamwave for a money laundering scheme, and refusal to pay his workers (many of whom are still unpaid despite Pat Lee claiming he would do so).
- Certain pieces of work such as The Beast Within, Transformers Continuum, and Combiner Wars are often cited for their horribleness.
- Most of the pages detailing Titan Comics' Animated stories make fun of them for Designated Hero, Out of Character behavior, lackluster writing, and Afterburn (namely the Marty Stu nature of the character.).
- The trivia for Knock Out from Transformers: Prime takes a moment to castigate members of a Botcon panel who made some very insensitive remarks about his supposed sexuality.
- Drift's page take a moment to note that he's "Your horrible fan-character." (That is, Drift before he was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.)
- The page on B.O.T. is brimming with these, all aimed directly at the episode. One of the errors that's listed? "This episode was made."
- The page for Angry Birds: Transformers, in reference to a marketing officer claiming that the collaboration aims to appeal to old and new fans of Transformers, used to have a snarky remark that "Because that always works out swimmingly." As for now, it's removed.
- The fandom tends to pile on the Animorphs tie-in line as well, for being a prime example of that and the figures (minus the alien ones) being pretty bad.
- Not long after Shia LaBeouf's "I am not famous anymore" paper bag mask stunt at the Berlin premiere of Nymphomaniac, his photo on the wiki was promptly changed to that. The kicker? The caption was also changed at the same time, from "Sam and Squirrel Girl are slated to become a couple in Great Lakes Avengers/Transformers" to "Revenge of the Fallen was rough on us all."
- Any given episode article about Transformers: Energon will likely have one (excluding the Pain Count). The final episode even has a bit decrying how the whole series is ultimately pointless thanks to Cybertron pulling a Happy Ending Override on it, questioning why anyone bothered watching it in the first place.
- They take some potshots at Transformers: Deviations, a What If? comic where Optimus survived the battle of Autobot City. The wiki compares it to a weak fanfic from 1994, due to its premise (My childhood hero never died!), its treatment of almost every new character from the movie (They all die), and the fact that basically everybody hates Hot Rod for no apparent reason. And then he dies at the end after using the Matrix to defeat Unicron even though there's no reason it should have killed him when it didn't in the original story. They even lampshade the Psychological Projection in the "Other Notes" section of the page.
- Bill O'Reilly made a Newscaster Cameo in Dark of The Moon, and so the wiki has pages on both him and Fox News... neither of which are kind to the subject matter. In particular, they put the "News" part of Fox's name in quotes and take numerous shots at O'Reilly for his reputation as a sexual predator.
- The articles for Megatron: Origin take shots at the threadbare nature of the plot by having their summaries just be "some guy [performs action] for the hell of it".
- While somewhat of a Shout-Out to Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Jason David Frank's caption takes a jab at the one show that mimicked his success.
- T.J. Miller's page takes a shade at the one movie that ruined his career.
- Their article on Diego Garcia makes several pointed comments regarding the history of the islandnote .
- Their very brief article on artist Mike S. Miller takes a potshot at his infamous transphobia towards writer Mags Visaggio.
- Cartoon Network is made fun of for its part in the infamously poor timeslots for the various series that they've run. Unsurprisingly,
- A reading of their Funko Pop! page makes their stance on Pop figures' Black Bead Eyes, NFTs and Loot Boxes crystal clear: they hate them. An additional jab at Funko's NFTs can be found on the see also section for the "Ruined FOREVER" article, which contains a link to the page section on them under the title "Things that are actually, objectively terrible".
- Though the notorious international legal snarl of the Macross franchise is a minor footnote to Transformers that amounts to "Harmony Gold tried to sue Hasbro over G1 Jetfire in 2013, and his original 1985 character design is unusable outside of Japan nowadays", the wiki's Macross page nevertheless has an entire section that is an informal trashing of Harmony Gold... written primarily from a Macross point of view. It was later chopped down as most of it wasn't relevant to Transformers.
- Toy swappers (people who buy a toy, take it out of the box, and replace it with something else before returning the box to get a refund, effectively getting the toy for free) are treated with utter contempt, with the article outlaying exactly why and how those who engage in it are scum.
- Take That, Audience!:
- Many, many articles take jabs at the fandom's bad attitude regarding new entries, and changes major or minor. They even have a page on things that ruined the franchise "FOREVER!" It basically lists everything the franchise has ever produced.
- The page for the old Prizes in Disguise contest from 1986 has this caption.Pfft. Like Transformers fans have friends.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Invoked by the captions for Mega and Ultra Pretenders.Guys who can be in three places at the same time? Nope, no stories about them. More Bumblebee!
- Verbal Backspace: From the quotes section of "Human Error, Part I"Bumblebee and Bulkhead, making the transformation noise like so many of us do—DID. As children. Yeah.
- Wrongful Accusation Insurance: Provides the page quote, noting the many crimes Optimus Prime commits in his efforts to clear his name in the Transformers: Animated tie-in book, Prime Suspect, including ironically the very crime he was accused of, breaking and entering.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: In the article for Autobot X from the Transformers Legends mobile game, this is their response to the event description saying that Skywarp and Thrust talked Autobot X into turning on his friends:Seriously? Skywarp and Thrust talked someone into turning on their allies?
- You Need to Get Laid: As the first caption for Thunderblast from Transformers: Cybertron suggests, the wiki thinks the animators at GONZO have been away from their wives for too long. (Though the wiki makes no references to it, viewers of GONZO's Strike Witches can corroborate that declaration.)
- Your Mom: According to Sideways (Armada), Sideways "insulted your mom." The text "your mom" is linked to a disambiguation page.
- Your Size May Vary: Since virtually all of the different entries in the franchise contain at least some of the most glaring examples of this trope, the Scale page is one of the wiki's longest pages.
- Zombie Infectee: A caption on Rise of the Beasts Airazor's page likens her downplaying her corruption by Scourge to "that one guy" in a band of post-apocalyptic survivors "who hides that they got bitten by a zombie."