captainsnoop:

shit now i almost want to explain kiss players because the story of it is just so tragic and awful

fuck it, i’m gonna do it

so, believe it or not, transformers is actually pretty unsuccessful in Japan. Japanese audiences don’t like stories that focus on the bad guys as much as the good guys, they don’t like the idea of sentient robots being the heroes instead of human pilots, and they don’t buy toys of bad guys.

so Takara, the Japanese company that the American Hasbro is partnered with in producing and designing Transformers toys, is faced with a conundrum. they have this product that has relatively wide international success, but almost zero success in their home country of Japan. they can’t pull the plug on it because of their deal with Hasbro, so they’re left with this dud of a franchise in Japan while Hasbro rakes in the big bucks internationally.

Well, imagine you’re a business man in Japan and you need to change something to make it sell better in Japan. What do you do?

You open-palm slap the “naked anime girls” button as hard as you can and hope for the best.

Thus, Kiss Players was born. 

Takara and Hasbro had previously worked together to create a line called Binaltech in Japan and Alternators internationally. These figures were higher-end figures with officially licensed automobiles for their altmodes. They found pretty high success with fans in America due to their (at the time) high build quality. 

So, Takara took these high-end figures and started packaging them with figures of half-naked anime girls, trying to appeal to both nostalgia and otakus. The figures were also accompanied by a manga series detailing the adventures of the “Kiss Players,” a group of very young looking girls that were able to fuse with Autobots by kissing them. Fusing with the autobots involved the girls getting naked (with barbie anatomy, thank god) and piloting the robots from the inside. When the girls were done fusing with the Autobots, they would be… ejected from the autobots bodies covered in slime. 

Yeah. 

There was also a character in the story called Legion, who looked like Megatron with a giant fleshy tongue that looked like a big penis. 

Yeah…

Turns out, nobody liked this series. Not even the Japanese otakus it was aimed at. It was that creepy. American fans were revolted by the series and Japanese fans completely disowned it because they said it reflected poorly on their country as a whole. 

That’s right. Japanese fans were so ashamed of Kiss Players that they claimed that it was damaging the reputation of the entire country because so many international fans were saying that they expected nothing less from Japan.

Needless to say, Kiss Players was a complete failure. Now, nobody talks about it. Nobody mentions it. If anybody posts pictures of figures they own of it, they always make sure to mention they threw out the anime girl it came with. If you bring it up in passing or post pictures from it, you get banned from most Transformers communities. Everyone, all Transformers fans across the globe, have elected to completely forget this one part of the franchise. Nobody liked it and everyone would rather forget it ever existed.