Sideways (disambiguation)

"He's Sideways! He's Sideways! You're Sideways! I'm Sideways! Are there any other Sidewayses I should know about?"

If you encounter a 'bot going by the name Sideways, do not trust him! Throughout the multiverse, the name is associated with cheats and liars. Most oftentimes, a Sideways's allegiances are to be questioned. Many of them claim to be helpful allies, but more often than not, they work for a greater evil. Some would assume Sideways to be cowardly, but their true strength oftentimes lies in their speed and their cunning. A quick getaway today can assure that greater machinations come to fruition tomorrow. Some Sidewayses are known to possess dimension-hopping capabilities, and tracking which Sideways is responsible for what in whatever universe can be a tad confusing. Some of them have claimed to travel to other universes to slaughter and impersonate their native counterpart, or that Sidewayses are cloned from one another to fulfill their roles in multiple parallel events. Sidewayses are true sowers of confusion, and even if one were able to see past all the lies, one would still be hard-pressed to make sense of the chaos that they leave in their wake.

Conceptual history

The idea of Sideways being a dimensional traveler who's the same across his cross-continuity appearances has been built up over time, with fans and writers extrapolating wildly from loose connections between his earliest incarnations.

The original Sideways, a 2002 Robots in Disguise toy, was packaged with Axer, whose on-package bio was adapted near verbatim from his original Generation 1 Tech Spec, with new material implying he'd crossed dimensions via a black hole.^[1] The online bio for Armada Sideways toy, released a few months later, similarly matched that of the Robots in Disguise character,^[2] with new material suggesting that his duplicity was the result of being pulled in two mental directions by his Mini-Cons^[3] (an aspect ignored by the Armada cartoon, which simply portrayed him as a pure agent of Unicron). Because of the Armada toy's recycled bio text, fans suspected that if the Robots in Disguise and Generation 1 Axers were the same person who had hopped universes, then the same might also be true of the Armada and Robots in Disguise Sidewayses.

It was misinformation surrounding the 2004 Japan-only Robotmasters franchise that kicked this idea into overdrive. In Japan, the Sideways/Axer two-pack had been imported unchanged as a "USA Edition" release, while the Sideways from Armada (known in Japan as Legends of the Microns) was called "Doubleface"—the Robotmasters Double Face toy was named, colored, and described in bio in homage to this character. This alone would not be enough to imply the Robots in Disguise, Armada, and Robotmasters characters to be the exact same individual, but at the time fans misunderstood the Robotmasters story to be about Transformers converging from various time periods and dimensions, not unlike the contemporaneous Universe series—when in truth, it was only time travel taking place within the main Japanese continuity. Cementing the idea that all three were same Sideways jumping from universe to universe was a fan-given claim that the Robotmasters website had included a note declaring Double Face's first toy to be the earlier imported Robots in Disguise Sideways figure—a claim that, years later in 2022, would be found to have been totally spurious, with no evidence of such a note having ever existed.

Nonetheless, the idea of Sideways being a dimension-hopper really took off with a number of fans, some of whom would even later go on to write and create new Transformers fiction under the brand's official license. Meanwhile, Sideways subsequently appeared in the 2005 Cybertron franchise, intended by Hasbro to be the same faction-swapping character from Armada (a fact cemented by supplemental material like the Hasbro.com Q&A column Ask Vector Prime). This idea was dropped in Japan, where he was again given an entirely different new name, "Noisemaze", while the cartoon—which was created to be separate from Armada and Energon—treated him as a new character, originally from the mysterious Planet X. In Hasbro's attempts to reconcile the many discrepancies between Cybertron and its two predecessors, they folded the Planet X backstory of Cybertron Sideways into the Armada character's history as a servant of Unicron, tying the two concepts back together with such media as the Cybertron comic series.

In the 2009 movie Revenge of the Fallen, a character called Sideways appeared, with absolutely nothing else connecting him to any prior Sidewayses. However, riffing on the by-then-common fandom perception of the character, 2011's The AllSpark Almanac II cheekily presented an Animated "Land General Sideways" whose design combined aspects of both the Armada and Revenge of the Fallen characters. The book explicitly described him as hailing from another dimension, and subtly implied he would go on to become Revenge of the Fallen Sideways, as if to make Animated Sideways the exact missing link needed to connect the originally fully-disparate Revenge of the Fallen character to all the other Sidewayses (or rather, as believed at the time, the singular dimension-hopping Sideways).

But then, hidden Ask Vector Prime text in 2015's The Complete AllSpark Almanac went on to confound all expectations by explicitly stating that all incarnations of Sideways are actually not the same exact character after all. And yet, to further muddy the waters, it also stated that, despite not being the same character, all prior incarnations of Sideways were still dimensional travelers who had crossed between multiple universal clusters. Of course, if that all seems confusing, it's nothing compared to the subsequent Facebook-based Ask Vector Prime feature. Helmed by Almanac author Jim Sorenson (one of the aforementioned fans who went on to write official Transformers fiction), the online Facebook column was, for a time, taken over by Sideways himself, sporting the Revenge of the Fallen character's design and a goofy, snarky personality similar to that of Cybertron Sideways. This Sideways claimed to have been the one behind pretty much every instance of the character seen in the past, as well as claiming responsibility for many, many other events and disasters across the multiverse. However, in a depiction that seems even more fitting in retrospect, he was also a wholly self-admitted liar who took great delight in confusing and frustrating everyone.

Given the complication and ambiguity that resulted from a mixture of retcons and unreliable narrators, along with the enormous user-unfriendliness of sticking strictly to the "canon" versions of the character, we have decided to present each continuity family's version(s) of Sideways on their own page. Whether you choose to think of them as being all the same character, or all strictly separate, is up to you.

Major Sidewayses

Full list of Sidewayses

• 2002 — Sideways, the Autobot ninja from the 2001 Robots in Disguise franchise.
• 2002 — Sideways, the agent of Unicron from Armada.
• 2004 — Sideways, the Decepticon spy from Robotmasters.
• 2009 — Sideways, the Decepticon courier from Revenge of the Fallen.
• 2010 — Sideways, the Decepticon general from Animated.
• 2015 — Sideways, the dimension-hopping serial liar from Ask Vector Prime.
• 2015 — Your mom, who may or may not be another instance of Sideways.

Other things called "Sideways"

• 2015 — "Sideways", the fourteenth episode of the 2015 Robots in Disguise cartoon.

Not to be confused with...

• Noisemaze
• Sideswipe
• Side Burn
• Sidetrack
• Tarantulas^[4]

Fiction

Ask Vector Prime

According to Vector Prime, the dimension-hopping Sidewayses of the multiverse included:

• The Sideways of Tyran 509.12 Zeta, who traveled to Aurex 402.0 Gamma.
• A Sideways from the Viron cluster, who traveled to Aurex 802.23 Alpha, and made his way to "at least two or three other clusters" after that.
• Multiple separate Sidewayses from Tyran 609.23-XP Kappa, at least one of which traveled to the Iocus cluster via Nexus Zero.
• A Sideways from the Uniend cluster who briefly visited a Rovio stream.
• A Sideways from Fornax 813.0 Gamma, who traveled to Tyran 207.28 Gamma, survived being bisected, and was sent undercover to infiltrate Primax Autobots.

Vector Prime hoped this would clarify things, which was nice of him, if perhaps a little naive. Ask Vector Prime, The Complete AllSpark Almanac

References