ahhh there are a lot of places to start;; it’s pretty difficult to get introduced to everything so i’m sorry if my answer is a little long & confusing haha!

i got into the fandom via the movies too but this was back in 2008 before a lot of good comics came out, so i was a total loss for a starting point as well. i just started looking at the wiki and watching all of the g1 episodes (the original cartoon from the 80s) but those were confusing as well, seeing as they have A TON of characters and they don’t introduce any of them very well. and it’s just. horrible in general. but also hilarious, and a source of a lot of fandom in-jokes. so i’d suggest watching it- if only just for the experience of it and none of the plot or real content haha!

then i went on the watch transformers: animated, which is the cartoon that was on tv when i was getting into the fandom a lot. it has remained my favorite tf series since i watched it, i really really love it! if you can push past the animation geared toward younger kids, it’s really amazing. the cast is all great and its funny imo.  i really cant reccomend it enough;;;;

if you want more serious animation but a surprisingly shitty plot, i’d suggest transformers prime, it’s more recent and it looks REALLY gorgeous, but the writing is utter shit.

also- don’t let the dated CG ruin beast wars for you, it’s also incredibly good. beast machines, not AS good, but people give it a lot of shit that i feel is unwarranted. imo, it’s better than the writing for tf prime.

as for comics, i personally started with reading all hail megatron. i thought it was really badass in the beginning, but i didn’t really know who anyone was (except all the major decepticons, it also got really bad in the last half of the series) so it was slightly confusing. i’d recommend reading regeneration one, last stand of the wreckers, death of optimus prime, then branch off into more than meets the eye and/or robots in disguise. in general the idw stuff is good, same with some marvel stuff. i’m not hugely into the new windblade comics but the art is really great and in the end they’re worth the read!

in general, no matter which series you start with, there will be like 98293823 robots that you point to and go “who the fuck is that” and the most i can say is just go to tfwiki and look them up. sometimes you won’t even know their names, i ended up with weeks of just googling “who is the shark transformer” and stuff like that in an attempt to learn their names and stuff hahaha

yeah, in the end, there are a ton of shows, a ton of comics, and  LITERAL UNIVERSE OF CHARACTERS;; imo its a really difficult thing to get into, but once you have like an idea of whats going on and whos who, it becomes really entertaining and omfg im sorry this is so long lmaooo :3

EDIT;; also if youre into the movies- id DEFFO suggest you watch the 1986 transformers movie and the subsequent episodes of the original cartoon. i feel like that’s where the new movie trilogy’s plot might be headed?? at least i hope so