So Beast Wars happened and it was a bit comedic, but Japan basically did a gag dub of it. Also, they made Airazor male instead of female, so when she started a romance with Tigatron, they basically just made them gay, for laughs. Also the eventual dub of Beast Machines, which was years delayed, basically made Silverbolt and Nightscream gay (again as a joke), and Blackarachnia made fun of them and called them "gayboys."
Anyway, between seasons of Beast Wars, Japan just needed more, so they made their own Beast Wars anime. Two of them, in fact. But they aren't about the same characters, or even take place at the same time. They take place in the far future or something (even compared to Beast Wars). And the two of them are about two different sets of characters, none of whom are at all related to the regular Beast Wars series. But they do transform into animals.
Airing Beast Machines was delayed in japan, they didn't bother airing it at first. Instead they did a series called Car Robots, which was dubbed as Robots in Disguise in English, and was used a reboot. But not in Japan. In Japan, Car Robots takes place in the original continuity. The Optimus and Megatron in that series are not the original Optimus and Megatron, nor are they the ones from Beast Wars. Also there was another guy called Galvatron in one of the Beast Wars anime, and he's not this Megatron either, or the original, or the one from Beast Wars. They're new guys who just have similar names. Anyway I guess Car Robots takes place in the present? Which would place it before Season 3 of the original cartoon? I'm not clear on this.
Anyway, I don't know why I wrote all this because in the end, I still can't comprehend how they tried to say that the Unicron Trilogy was all supposed to be in the same continuity as everything that came before, when they weren't even made to take place in the same continuity as each other, but that's where Kiss Players comes in. Not only does Kiss Players put the Unicron Trilogy together, it tries to make sense of the entire fucking mess that came before, and connect the Unicron Trilogy series to that, too.
Later, they even published an official timeline that tried to say even everything that came out later, including the live action movies, was somehow the same continuity as G1. I think everyone just fucking disregards that though because that's just plain bullshit and they never did some sort of Kiss Players story to try to mash it into making sense.
Meanwhile, in the west, they accidentally got themselves into the same conundrum of trying to say everything was the same continuity when they tried to say there was only one Unicron across all continuities. But this got fucked up when they did that one game that mixed the War for Cybertron continuity (which they tried to make the "main" continuity, saying it was the same as Prime, Rescue Bots, the second Robots in Disguise cartoon, and a bunch of comics and novels) with the Bayformers universe. That fucked everything up so much that they had to do a whole comics event where they did some DC Comics style shit that rewrote the entire fabric of the universe so they could say that Unicron was actually a different guy in each universe again. But it's not like it made things any better, since by this point the comics had gone full SJW and tried to argue that somehow a race of asexual robots could be trannies, and on the other hand you had Bayformers. The cartoons are still okay, I guess, but I just can't bring myself to give a shit about them.
Oh yeah, also I should mention how despite Beast Wars kind of combining all G1 continuities and just saying they all go together, there are also a bunch of comics that go with the G1 Marvel US comics but say they don't go with each other. So there were also Marvel G2 comics, which are pretty much a straight continuation of Marvel G1, but Marvel UK comics, which were basically filler (but good filler) to the Marvel US comics, aren't canon, even though they were written by the same guy who wrote the end of US G1 and all of G2. Then many years later there were things like Regeneration One, which is another sequel to Marvel G1, written by the same guy who did G2, but now he says G2 isn't canon to this.
In the middle, there's a text story called Alignment which is again written by this same guy, and functions as a link between G2 and Beast Wars, but in the process mentions elements from UK and even Japanese stuff, clearly for fanservice more than anything, but it just shows how stupid it is to say things like this aren't canon. Alignment was a convention exclusive story, but it wasn't at the official Transformers convention, so unlike a bunch of other convention exclusive stories, it's not technically canon, even though it's by far the most important one and is basically the closest you'll get to an ending to G1, in addition to showing how it connects to Beast Wars.
None of this is even getting into how the Movie is sort of canon to both the cartoon and the comics, but they say it isn't, even though it's quite heavily referenced, especially in the UK comics, but the UK comics have tons of different alternate future timelines that characters keep going back in time and erasing and replacing with new timelines, resulting in two different Galvatrons (who is future Megatron) running around at the same time as two different Megatrons. Keep in mind though, these UK comics are by far the best piece of Transformers media that exist, so don't think I'm saying they're bad. Just that they're complicated as fuck.
I just realized a guy in this thread already linked to the /v/ thread I copied this from, but fuck it.