YMMV / Transformers: EarthSpark

• Adorkable: Optimus, believe it or not. He struggles to go from commander to Team Dad. He's got "dad jokes", makes texts full of emojis, and generally has difficulties with trying to be approachable. But it's all done with such complete sincerity and honest desire that you can't help but root for him.
• Applicability: The treatment of Transformers on Earth and one of Robby’s friends making ignorant comments about the Terrans in, “Home” brings to mind the current situation regarding the rights of LGBTQ+ people in America as well as many other social issues such as immigration and racism.
• Base-Breaking Character: Megatron. Some fans considered the take on him becoming a more heroic character a fresh perspective and a new dimension to his personality, others were disappointed that he has been turned from the Omnicidal Maniac they loved to hate into an Adaptational Nice Guy that they barely recognise.
• Awesome Music: Megatron's main Leitmotif that accompanies him when he first arrives on the show and can be heard in some of his fight scenes.
• Catharsis Factor: Croft's death in The Last Hope Part 1, and Mandroid's death in Part 2. Considering how unethical they both were no tears were shed.
• Character Rerailment: Where most post-G1 incarnations of Optimus Prime have had their stoic, serious side emphasized to the point where it totally dominated their personalities, this version has regained the more casual streak of Optimus from the first two seasons of the G1 cartoon. He quips and engages in casual conversation and during battle scenes, he occasionally displays a more sarcastic side, and he has absolutely mastered the art of texting using only emojis.
• Complete Monster: Dr. "Mandroid" Meridian is a brilliant human scientist who harbors a bigoted hatred for all Transformers after he lost his arm in their civil war. Routinely kidnapping Transformers to experiment on them, Mandroid butchers their bodies and drains them of their Energon, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. His malice extending to anyone who allies themselves with the Transformers, Mandroid regularly tries to kill the Malto children and their parents, and mind rapes their Terran allies into his slaves. Mandroid further arranges false flag operations that endanger hundreds of humans just to stir up anger towards Transformers. In his final gambit, Mandroid murders his partner Croft, turns himself into an abomination of alien technology just to slake his destructive desires, and tries to set off a device that will kill every single Transformer on Earth—including Mandroid's own Sharkticon minions. Even after his death, Mandroid returns in the tie-in game Expedition through an AI duplicate of his consciousness and manipulates Bumblebee into retrieving the pieces of a Decepticon superweapon, intending on reassembling it in another attempt to wipe out the Transformers. Though the loss of his arm is a legitimate grievance, Mandroid is defined as nothing but a prejudiced, wannabe "savior" of the world, and is directly called out by the benevolent Dot—a fellow amputee and victim of the war—as being motivated by his own blind hate and lust for power.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Starscream seems to suffer from some form of PTSD, mainly due to his abuse at the hands of Megatron. He dislikes being touched, he has issues with boundaries, and when he sees Megatron again he hallucinates Megatron still sporting his old Decepticon badge rather than the GHOST version he currently wears.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Most of the fanbase jumped on the theory of the exploding cassette from Bumblebee's story actually being Rumble, since he's curiously absent from the typical duo of him and Frenzy.
  • It's a common fan theory that Mr. Smelt is actually an undercover Knock Out's holomatter avatar, due to Mr. Smelt sharing a voice actor with Knock Out's Transformers: Prime incarnation.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Fans reacted to the news that Shockwave was meant to be reawakened from Ravage stealing the remote for his stasis pod to give to Starscream by wishing it had been kept, as it follows up on the ending of "Decoy" and seems less contrived than his pod stopping working with age at the exact time Megatron and the Terrans were in the area.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Megatron admits in one of the earlier episodes that one of his main methods of leading the Decepticons was through intimidation and discipline through violence. While it was mostly Played for Laughs back then, it gets significantly less humorous when we see how they ended up affecting Starscream in a later episode.
• Ho Yay: The interactions between Megatron and Soundwave in "Decoy" can humorously be taken as if the two had a bad breakup.
• Jerkass Woobie: Starscream is a notorious backstabber, schemer and berates those around him. He is also clearly suffering from some sort of mental trauma, hinted at being the result of considerable abuse at the hands of Megatron.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A lot of fans came to see a heroic version of Megatron and Optimus on the same side.
• LGBT Fanbase: Nightshade is a non-binary main character in a major Transformers show, in which many LGBTQ+ Transformers fans (especially non-binary and gender-nonconforming fans) expressed happiness towards. This step in representation even received several articles such as this one and this one.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • When Optimus’s face underneath the mask was first revealed, many fans found the design to be… interesting, to say the least. Once the series dropped, fans warmed up to the design, though it didn’t stop the GigaChad jokes.
  • Soundwave’s MILF hips^ExplanationPeople couldn’t help but take notice at Soundwave’s design including very wide hips, prompting jokes like Soundwave being a Pixar mom, having child-bearing hips, or, playing off the first two, being referred to as a MILF. Many have even begun openly calling him attractive, both jokingly and genuinely.
  • The writers' barely disguised fetish^ExplanationFans noticed that a lot of episodes have the Cybertronian characters end up Bound and Gagged. This resulted in a joke that the writers must have a thing for seeing Cybertronians tied up and helpless.
• Memetic Psychopath: In "Friends and Family" Bumblebee makes an off-hand joke about Soundwave accidentally exploding one of his cassettes due to energon starvation. Lots of fans jumped onto this scene and half-jokingly declared that Bumblebee was a sociopath who thought telling two kids about the death of an enemy combatant's child would make for a good mood-lifter.
• Older Than They Think:
  • New Transformers being created on Earth is a concept that goes back to the early days G1 era with the likes of the Dinobots in the cartoon and Constructicons in the comic. That said, the nature of the Terrans creation and their mental connection with humans is unique to this show.
  • All Cybertronians didn't view themselves as having gender back during the Marvel G1 comics run, with Arcee being an exception created to appease a group of poorly written Straw Feminists. However, this was inconsistent within the comics themselves and many fans disliked how the concept was explored under Simon Furman's pen, especially in both his Marvel and IDW handling of Arcee. Thankfully, Furman’s writing was retconned in future IDW comics and there is a much better representation of trans and non-binary characters.
  • Megatron not being an antagonist and having a working relationship with the Autobots was first done in IDW's Transformers comics. It was also shown in Machinima's Prime War's trilogy.
• One True Threesome: Elita-1 (Optimus's traditional love interest) being a more prominent character than usual, combined with Megatron (a popular choice for Foe Yay Shipping with Optimus) being much more heroic from the start and working with the Autobots, has caused some fans to ship Megatron/Optimus/Elita (or "Megoplita").
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The first thing that people tend to think of whenever discussing this series tends to be the "politics" behind it, particularly surrounding the Terran Nightshade after the show established they identified as non-binary. Following a brief scene first establishing Nightshade's gender, and a later episode having a subplot involving Nightshade finding kinship in fellow non-binary Sam, dozens of articles, online videos, even a Fox News report, displayed outrage over the show trying to "inject gender politics arbitrarily" and "brainwash" children, prompting just as many defenders calling out logical fallacies being used, how Nightshade as a character is in no way offensive, and that kids should be allowed to know about gender pronouns early in life rather than later, with it being their parent's job to teach them afterwards. Most talk of the series will inevitably loop back to it in someway, and even the shows IMDB reviews are shown to be a battleground between those disliking it and thinking it only has fans because Nightshade is LGBTQ+, and those who like it trying to stop the show from being review bombed.
• Shocking Moments:
  • While Megatron having a Heel–Face Turn isn't anything new, and has already been tackled in animation once before, this version being one of the good guys from the start and being on friendly terms with the kids' mother certainly came as a shock.
  • Steve Blum reprising his role as Starscream.
  • Nobody expected the flashback scene to be animated in the same style as the G1 cartoon.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: While most of the EarthSpark toys are reasonably close to their onscreen designs, this is not the case for Starscream, Skywarp, and Shockwave, whose toys are recolored Cyberverse releases. As such, they are wildly different from the in-series character models. This gets worse with Breakdown and Prowl, whose toys are respectively recolored from Wheeljack and Hot Rod from the last toyline.
• So Okay, It's Average: A reaction garnered from certain subsets of the TF fandom who feel, that while the show is by no means the worst, it does come across as very simple and stripped down compared to more thematically ambitious kid-aimed shows such as Beast Wars and Transformers: Animated. There are also some unfavorable comparisons to The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye (known for its efforts to push the envelope of what can be done with Transformers in terms of character depth and thought-provoking storytelling) for the shared element of Megatron's Heel–Face Turn. A lot of fans are more forgiving with the last one, however, since it's clear the show was made with a younger audience in mind.
• Unexpected Character:
  • While recent years have put heavy focus on G1 characters, no one was expecting the series to have such prominent roles for the likes of Elita-1, Swindle, Nova Storm, and even Skullcruncher! Completely left-field, however, is Swindle's brother, Hardtop, a Decepticon who hasn't been seen since the toylines for both Cybertron and the first live-action film. His relation to Swindle is even ripped straight out of his Cybertron toy bio!
  • Another unexpected character would be the disembodied voice of Quintus Prime (played by Clancy Brown no less) who is one of the more obscure members of the Thirteen Primes outside of the supplemental material.
  • Nobody expected Starscream's appearance in episode 8, nor the fact that Steve Blum reprised his role from the aligned continuity.
  • While Grimlock and Shockwave were already spoiled due to the deluxe class toys' packing cross-sells, absolutely nobody expected a new version of the Stunticon Breakdown, and the appearance of Tarantulas, and in his Transmetal look, at that, took EVERYBODY left-field. And then the cartoon dropped another character not put in the trailers: BRAWL.
  • The two-part first season finale features a pair of Sharkticons as Mandroid's Co-Dragons that he picked up while stranded in space, implying that the Quintessons might not be far behind.
• Watched It for the Representation: The main human family is African American-Filipino, with Filipinos rarely getting the spotlight in Western animation. Moreover, there's the LGBT fanbase coming in for Nightshade who declares themself as non-binary.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The series does not sugarcoat the fact that it takes place after a period of warfare, and handles a menagerie of serious topics in modern society. The fact that it actually features and confirms a number of deaths does little to dissuade.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • After the low reception from the War for Cybertron Trilogy and the controversy brought on by Cyberverse, EarthSpark sees the franchise return to its standards of half-hour episodes and union voice-acting. While fans were cautious about dipping their toes into the series, EarthSpark immediately won over numerous viewers, and the first part of season one drew almost instantaneous acclaim from fans.
  • When Alan Tudyk was announced as the voice actor for Optimus Prime, it was met with much skepticism, especially after the first trailer dropped and many were unimpressed with his performance. Once the series proper came out, however, many came around to Alan's depiction of the iconic Autobot Leader. Prime's new funny moments certainly help in that regard.
• Woolseyism: Nightshade's non-binary gender identity didn't translate in the Hungarian dub, mainly because of grammar rules but perhaps also because the country has banned gender studies and media laws prohibit LGBTQ+ content in children's media. So in this dub, Nightshade seems to have a form of dissociative disorder, thinking of themselves as multiple people stuck in one body to explain their pronouns.

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