Ask Vector Prime

I will.

Ask Vector Prime is a recurring feature where humans could submit questions about Transformers. Based on unknown criteria, Vector Prime selected certain questions and answers them to the best of his ability. Vector Prime will sometimes 'misunderstand' a question he'd rather not answer.

Vector Prime is aware of Transformers as fiction and as a toy line (similar to how the Marvel UK letters pages were answered by Transformers who were even shown working in Marvel UK's office). Vector Prime explains this as being aware of which universes were manifested as fiction in the Quadwal Cluster.

The column has occasionally provided important information not found anywhere else and, in the fan-run revivals, has clarified (and created) lots of obscure trivia.

Hasbro website

Ask Vector Prime started as a feature on Hasbro's official Transformers website, back during Transformers: Cybertron. The questions answered by Vector Prime varied widely in nature, but most concerned the universe where the search for the Cyber Planet Keys took place, the toyline and cartoon in Hasbro's own universe which parallel said search, or Vector Prime himself. Unfortunately, updates were rare, and ceased entirely after Vector Prime became one with time itself. Which is fair enough.

Through the site, Vector Prime had revealed the existence of two Transformers who have not been seen in any other form: a female Alternator, apparently from his home universe, and a Mini-Con with a disco ball alternate mode. He has also mentioned that he has met both Alpha Trion and Alpha Q, that, "yes, she is a girl," that he considers Safeguard his best friend, and that he is aware of (and impressed by) the story of Beast Machines. Additionally, it was here that he stated that "I am not here to blend." However, when asked about his weight, he simply said it depended on what planet he was on, and made no further comment on the subject.

It was this column that confirmed the Cybertron cartoon took place ten years after the end of Energon, and confirmed that Cybertron Sideways was the same character as Armada Sideways.

The AllSpark Almanac

Ask Vector Prime made a comeback in The AllSpark Almanac II in the form of easter eggs scattered throughout the book written in Cybertronix lettering. While questions were solicited on Jim Sorenson's blog a few months before the book came out, the few responses to that request seem to indicate that most of the questions were written by the Almanac II's authors.

Later, more questions and answers appeared in The Complete AllSpark Almanac.

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Ask Vector Prime
First published	May 13, 2015– February 15, 2016
Writer	Jim Sorenson, Hirofumi Ichikawa, Chris McFeely, et al.

From May 13 to September 30, 2015, Ask Vector Prime made yet another comeback in the form of a Facebook page created by the Transformers Collectors' Club as part of the Club's prelude material that led up to the BotCon 2015 comic story "Cybertron's Most Wanted". Similar to the original version from Hasbro's website, this new installment enabled fans to once again post actual questions for Vector Prime to answer on his Facebook.

Vector's answers continued to include a mix of jokes, evasions, and intentional misunderstandings. Many answers focused on Vector Prime's own history. A lot of universal stream designations were identified or introduced this time around, and many previously unnamed or partially-named individuals and teams would receive official names. A new type of answer, elaborate stories set in the distant futures or pasts of obscure universes, became a regular part of the feature.

On 5 June, he ended up in a crossover with sister Facebook page Rook - Axiom Nexus News: Investigative Journalist when Rook interrogated Vector Prime as to why he sounded like Rhinox. Prime trolled him for a while until Rook accused him of being a guardian of time and space pretending to be an old duffer, at which point Vector Prime complained to the journalist's editor.

Guest columnists

One of the hallmarks of the Facebook edition of Ask Vector Prime was the frequent inclusion of guest columnists. This started when the column took a hiatus between June 27, 2015 and July 8, 2015 before coming back, to facilitate...

Ask Sideways

He has many insightful comments about your mother.

On June 27, 2015, Axiom Nexus News journalist Andromeda reported that Vector Prime had been kidnapped by Sideways. Andromeda - Axiom Nexus News Reporter Shortly following this announcement, the Ask Vector Prime Facebook and Twitter feeds were taken over by Sideways. His tone was decidedly unhelpful, and he promised to "lie like a girder", as he gleefully made his way through Vector Prime's outstanding questions and answered questions directed at him. A lot of questions about obscure Transformers trivia got the answer of "sure, why not?", and invariably answers about who did any kind of atrocity were some variation of "me!"

After a few days, Sideways started to employ heavy sexual innuendo, which was initially well-regarded by the fan community.^[1] Unfortunately, it led to an answer about Airazor that, although unintentional in wording and overtones, the creators agreed was badly phrased, and thankfully edited out within an hour, immediately followed by an apology from the creators.^[2] Further questions that would have had such elements were toned down or cut out completely. (But the wiki remembers, Sideways).

When people replied to his answers, they could sometimes end up in a comment discussion with Sideways.^[3]

On July 8, Ask Sideways ended with the conceit that the TransTech had found him by tracking our questions to him, as detailed on Rook's Facebook page. A question from one such audience member blew his head up! (But Sideways Headmaster-linked with Rook and escaped Nexus 208.0 Epsilon.)

Grim Grams

On September 30, Vector Prime secretly departed Axiom Nexus on the behest of his brother Nexus Prime, much to the chagrin of the overworked Rook. After putting out a request on Cragun's List, Grimlock eagerly took the job, and celebrated by renaming the column Grim Grams. The Dinobot... did his best to work through the backlog of questions intended for Vector Prime while answering new questions about himself and his adventures. Ratings swiftly plummeted, prompting Rook—who was more concerned with the potential destruction of the multiverse—to fire the Dinobot and replace him with "someone clever"...

Swindle's Spiel

On October 3, Swindle - to be more precise, one of the three Swindles running Swindle, Swindle and Swindle - took the job, renaming the column "Swindle's Spiel". Although decidedly more coherent than his immediate predecessor, Swindle tended to turn potential answers into platforms to shill his various products. Swindle was fired on October 6 for subverting the terms of his contract. At the behest of his editor, Rook put out a call for someone "straightforward" and "earnest", which couldn't possibly bite him in the afterburner, could it?

Sentinel Shouting

NO! NO! WE ARE NOT DOING THE BLOODY GOOD LIFE! I BLOODY HATE THE GOOD LIFE! BLOODY, BLOODY, BLOODY!

On October 7, Sentinel Minor took over the column, this time renaming it "Sentinel Shouting". Unsurprisingly, Sentinel was rather confrontational and aggressive with his readers.

(Rook is a pretty bad judge of character.)

During his brief tenure, Sentinel talked about how he would handle things if he ever became Magnus: heavy 'law and order' policies, cutting all money from civil society and moving it all to warships, and squeezing the Decepticon lemon until the pips squeaked.

By October 9, Sentinel realized that he was corresponding with a bunch of organics. He didn't take the news well and abdicated the position. After Sentinel left, the editor tasked Andromeda with finding yet another replacement, as he had sent Rook to the Primax 1015.06 Kappa discovery party to help ease him of his stress. Due to Sentinel's abrasiveness turning away younger viewers, the editor pushed her to find someone popular with the younger crowd, to which Andromeda immediately knew of a bot for the job...

Bee's Backtalk

Kid-appeal is good for attracting viewers.

Later on October 9, Bumblebee became the fourth successor to Vector Prime for the column, renaming the column to "Bee's Backtalk". As expected, Bumblebee answered questions with audio clips put together, given his inability to speak.

On October 13, as Bumblebee was about to answer why things in the Tyran Cluster are prone to exploding, he suddenly found himself in the middle of a battleground as everything around him exploded, the Axiom Nexus News team losing contact with him (disappointing the editor, who was pleased that Bumblebee was able to stabilize ratings). As Andromeda was the one who found Bumblebee, she was tasked with finding his replacement, someone who, in contrast to Bumblebee's cryptic radio answers, could speak their mind in a straightforward manner.

Renegade Rhetoric

This modified screencap from Challenge of the Go-Bots lasted as long as it took for someone to realize Time Warner still held the rights. It was subsequently replaced.

And she thought it'd be a good idea to hire Cy-Kill. Okay, Beavis.

Cy-Kill hoped to use the page to convince us of the rightness of the Renegade cause and how cool they were. Thanks to leading questions from fans, the wiki got a whole lot of GoBots pages while it was running! Attempts at getting universe names went less well. Renegade Rhetoric also got to lampoon parts of Transformers, with Cy-Kill taking a dim view of certain tropes ("it's not as if I call my faction "Untrustworthy-cons" or some such rubbish").

He used the column to recruit agents and casually admit he had just bombed a government building ("a gentlemen never bombs and tells"). Eventually, Cheetor cracked down on his operation. With the help of his new combiner Monsterous, however, Cy-Kill and his new Renegade team evaded capture and chrono-jumped back to the Gargent Cluster. Of course, Cy-Kill had got ratings during his tenure, so ANN decided they wanted another charismatic baddie.

Shark Sonnets

No 5-7-7 violations here!

Soon, Sky-Byte answered
All the questions put to him.
And the fans rejoiced.

Confidence was low
Answers took form of haiku
To calm his waffle

Told he was boring
So he took a better job
Left with one last bow.

Spacewarp's Log

Being female probably isn't the most "different" thing about her...

With Sky-Byte's departure for a more fulfilling job at The Blue Deployer, Andromeda was once again tasked with finding a new host; this time, someone charismatic, who tells stories (but not a terrorist), with something different about them.

Her selection: Spacewarp, taking on the job until she could "punch, gamble, sneak, research, or flirt [her] way off-world".

After High Chancellor Optimus Prime started increasing the number of off-planet visas following Axiom Nexus losing contact with the rest of the multiverse, Spacewarp took the chance, quickly obtaining one (through legal means even!), setting off for more adventures.

The return

It's the end... but the moment has been prepared for.

Vector Prime returned from his adventures on November 1, Quadwal time. After the reorganization of the multiverse, this new Vector Prime was but a splinter of his former self; this particular iteration of Vector Prime had always existed as a more or less normal Cybertronian within Nexus 208.0 Epsilon, although he was vaguely aware that he had once been a part of something greater.

With the TransTechs' multiversal reach lost, Vector Prime was assigned to travel to the planet Nebulos, where the dimensional walls were thin and he could covertly "listen in" on foundational universal stream Primax 984.0 Gamma, with a Nebulan covert agent codenamed Safeguard...and a bodyguard named Scorpia. Vector Prime decided that the time had come to close his column, although he decided to tie up any loose ends before he left. Notably, this Vector Prime was substantially less interested in his reader's questions about who came from what specific reality, and at least once openly wondered about their desire to categorize unimportant trivia.

"Before I go, I just want to tell you: you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And you know what? So was I!"

He later promoted Axiom Nexus's new column, Spacewarp's Log, and was hacked by Cy-Kill to promote his pirate column, Renegade Rhetoric.

After several waystops, and after growing increasingly close to Scorpia and finally becoming Conjunx Endurae, he finally made it to Nebulos on February 15, 2016. The column ended and he thanked us for all our help, and promised that one day he shall come back. Yes, one day he shall come back. Until then, go forward for all your answers and prove he was not mistaken in his.

(On November 22 of that year, he did indeed come back and alerted us about the upcoming new GoBots story for the Collectors Club, hoping we at home could help out "my brethren". I think you expect too much, Vector.)

Mentioned characters

Main article: Ask Vector Prime/Mentioned characters

Contributors

The Facebook version of Ask Vector Prime was written by Jim Sorenson and edited by Jesse Wittenrich. Copy editing was performed by Louis Sun. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a column that ran for over nine months, there were many additional contributors.^[4] They included:

Writers

Artists

Actors

Notes

• At its peak, Ask Vector Prime had over ten thousand "engaged users", with a thousand subscribers and page views numbering about 400,000.
• Collected in a Microsoft Word document, it is over 500 pages long.
• Notably, Ask Vector Prime:
  • Featured the return of Richard Newman as Vector Prime and Peter Spellos as Sky-Byte and debuted Jon Bailey, the Epic Voice of Honest Trailers as High Chancellor Optimus Prime.
  • Introduced the idea that Maccadam might be secretly Alchemist Prime, which would go on to become a key plot point in the Transformers: Cyberverse animated series.
  • Provided English translations for the names of the entire cast of Transformers Online, two of which would go on to appear in IDW Publishing's comics under those names.
  • Invented names for pretty much every frigging Mini-Con team in existence.
  • Established some versions of the Thirteen as having visited Earth during the time of ancient Greece and inspiring/co-opting the legends of the Twelve Olympians, along with providing holomatter avatars for each of them.
  • Established the first female Optimus Prime, as well as declared a large number of gender-undefined characters as female.
  • Published G.I. Joe-style biocards for every toy-original Dark of the Moon human from Human Alliance.
  • Revealed the universe of origin of every character known to have participated in the Universe War.
  • Tied up several loose ends from Story of Binaltech, including resolving the Prowl II/Prowl 2 enigma and telling the origin story of the Protector.
  • Name-dropped every significant character and toy from GoBots and expanded on the Challenge of the Gobots cartoon considerably.
  • Completed the roster of the Convoy.
  • Fixed every animation error EVER with the introduction of "self-correcting" time and space anomalies.
  • Elaborated on the concept of transgender Cybertronians over a year before IDW's comics would explicitly tackle the idea.
• In August 2020, a fan continuation of Ask Vector Prime was started as a Tumblr blog written by members of this very wiki, including some past contributors to the Facebook page, and received a shoutout on the Ask Vector Prime Facebook page. Like before, it accepts user submitted questions and offers possible backgrounds and continuations for every character and story under the sun. However, as this blog is not produced under license from Hasbro, the answers provided are not canon for the purposes of the wiki and should not be referenced in articles.^[5]

See also

• Ask Vector Prime archive
• Ask Vector Prime Facebook archive
• Ask Sideways Facebook archive
• Guest column Facebook archive
• Chronological Axiom Nexus News archive

References

External links

• Ask Vector Prime on Hasbro.com (archived)
• Ask Vector Prime on Facebook