A painful thought - we already know Whirl has been press ganged into doing the Senate's dirty work before, post-empurata. How far of a stretch is it from beating up Megatron to doing something like this, because they tell him, "Do this and we'll give you back your hands. We'll let you have your face back. You can be who you were again, on the most superficial level" And so Whirl does it. And he gets his hands and face back. And all the while, he learns to hate himself more; he takes it out on the people he's ordered to and acts like he's 100% fine, but all the while it rots away in him until finally he can't do it any more. He tries to stop. And so they take his hands again So millions of years later, Whirl's not interested in getting his hands or face fixed. He doesn't know what he would do with them anymore
Ohhhhhhhhhh, fuck. I am in pain. I am in lots of pain :CCCCCCCC what would he have done if ratchet had died in that one fight and first aid had tried to give whirl his hands like ratchet said to do
i swear to fuckin god it's like you people are out to get me. i feel TARGETED BY THIS, this is BULLYING
I fuckin power walked home from class, furiously typing on my phone and almost running across an intersection in front of a street car in order to serve u all up fresh Whirl angst hot out of the oven I live to serve
WHAT THE FUCK, STARSCREAM!! I WAS ROOTING FOR YOU!!!!! WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU (i am on exrid 16 and i'm not okay)
you TOAD!!!!!!! you little TOAD!!!!!!!!! EDIT: I APOLOGIZE TO TOADS!!!! that was out of line!!!! I APOLOGIZE FOR SLANDERING TOADS
Spoiler: mtmte 50, 51, etc Oh no but guys So Ratchet has a standing desire to give Whirl his hands if/when he dies, right? JUST WHAT CASUALTIES ARE WE LOOKING AT ON THE NECROBOT'S PLANET? I can't deal with this, you can't bring Ratchet back just to kill him, if that happens, I will die along with him But like, what if Whirl is given his hands (Velocity is there to do a transplant and everything), and his clockmaking skills are instrumental somehow, like maybe he has to do mechanical fiddly things with the quantum stuff, or with the organics in the pods. I can see story reasons why it might work to kill Ratchet and give his hands to Whirl, and there's still a lot of MAYBE in that equation, but it's more than ZERO maybe and I am not okay with this
Spoiler: exrid 17 See, I never was able to click with Metalhawk, for whatever reason, so I didn't actually end up caring that much :P Spockandawe is problematic: doesn't care when poor innocent cinnamon roll cybertronians are killed for political games
I wasn't really rooting for anyone but Wheeljack and a little bit Blurr for the longest time. Bumblebee, Metalhawk, and Starscream were all neck deep in the worst of the political slog, Prowl was being...well, spoilers - and I was like stopppp, I don't carrrre, I miss MTMTE ;-; And then the Arcee love hit me like a freight train
I didn't enjoy the series very much until I cleared DC, and then the universe starts to open up again. It was too much of a closed political system up until that point, I just couldn't get invested :P But I'm really into some of the places they're taking the story these days. Still not as good as the wacky space road trip, but it's definitely got my attention.
Spoiler: exrid 17 man i don't care all that much about him in particular, just.... "i thought... you were my friend..." MAN........ starscream you little worm. you pillbug. you tent caterpillar.
oh and yes wheeljack is my fav exrid so far (he and arcee share a tier, just slightly above ironhide and blurr and swindle) Spoiler: idk 14?? 15?? and if his head does not... de-explode fuckin PRONTO, i'm gonna be real unhappy :(
This is why one of my tags on AO3 was "Starscream does not know how to Friend." What an awful dude. I love him :3c
Spoiler: exrid 17 In his very, very minor defense, he's coming off a couple recent pseudo-betrayals in phase one. Betrayal isn't quite the right word, but like... people playing games behind his back. And in both cases, it was really tied up with his already-toxic dynamics with Megatron, where people pretended to be loyal to him, but were secretly working for Megatron the whole time. Even when he and almost everyone thought Megatron was for-reals dead. So in exrid, there was that the thing that went down with him and Wheeljack where Starscream was like 'oh yes, metalhawk, he's my friend!' and Wheeljack was like 'yeahhhh, he thinks you're up to no good.' And Starscream took that hard, so I can see why he'd jump on the chance to turn on Metalhawk before Metalhawk could turn on him. Not EXCUSING his actions, because it was still definitely a shitty thing to do. But Starscream is my problematic asshole fave, and I like burrowing into the reasoning behind why he does these shitty things. He's such a jerk, there was no way I wouldn't adore him.
Also at least as of exRiD 18-ish, the Constructicons are pretty good. They're kind of dumb and just want to hit people for fun, in the "I'll let you hit me if you let me hit you" kind of way. No hard feelings*, no ulterior motives. Precious murderchildren. * Spoiler Except for Spike Witwicky, which I totally don't blame them for.
