TFs: DARE TO BE STUPID

Prowl transforms from root mode to alt mode and suddenly Verity is sharing the cabin with a bunch of guns the same size as she is

 

Oh, so, the panel I went to this weekend, so, okay. Apparently after the american cartoon was over, the japanese cartoon ran from that point. Rodimus is in charge, Optimus is dead (slash his alt mode corpse wound up behind a truck stop and was purchased by some random trucker dude? and piloted by him? and none of the autobots recognized this as optimus????). One day, this random dude, Cerebros, shows up, and nobody knows much about him, but Kup is like, 'yeah, I guess I kinda knew him ages ago,' and Rodimus is like 'YOU'RE IN CHARGE NOW, THESE ARE YOUR AUTOBOTS, I AM YOUR LOYAL FOLLOWER.' And one of the things that frustrated this panelist was that the japanese cartoons threw fallibility and weakness out the window, Cerebros is ALWAYS the strongest, and he's ALWAYS right, and all the autobots ALWAYS trust him 100%.

I don't know much about the transformers media between then and now, but I wonder if it's a deliberate deconstruction thing that Cerebros in the current comics is nnnot exactly a stranger, but he doesn't seem to have been closely involved with any of the main cast, he comes from a sketchy background with the Institute, he wants to do experimental brain things but Fort Max doesn't trust him enough to give him the green light, and he seems very much to want to be friends with people and be liked, but people are reluctant to really trust him. And even when he does a sketchy brain thing to get a crucial win in a nearly unwinnable situation, the person he did it to is like 'SERIOUSLY NOT OKAY, YOU NEED TO STOP.'

I'm too lazy to read up on the full history of this character, but that contrast really stood out to me

 

Also, a thought. Optimus and Megatron both dealt with a FUCKLOAD of moral injuries over the course of the war, and it's really fascinating that both of them reached a tipping point of ENOUGH but went in opposite directions in how they dealt with it, so that they ended up pretty much swapping their modus operandi. Megatron realized all the moral injury things that had been happening and was like okay, this is a bad trend, after some introspection time I have decided to go cold turkey,no more personally doing violence for me, except in extreme circumstances when others are at risk. Optimus was like okay, no more moral injuries, because everything I do is right, no introspection needed, I'm just gonna assume that I know best and that there isn't any hurt to go along with these hard decisions, because whatever I make is definitely the best choice.

Gah, words are hard this late at night. But secretly thinking of everyone in terms of moral injuries is super fun and I want to keep doing it.

Edit: completely unrelated, but on the note of niqab-wearing Soundwave, I found this piece of apparel called a batula/battoulah, which is largely out of fashion, and only really seen on women over 50 or women in rural areas. BUT IT'S SO BADASS AND PERFECT FOR A FACEPLATE SUBSTITUTE AND I LOVE IT

Spoiler: large

 

Optimus, Megatron, and Starscream would be decent candidates to fight over the matrix in any continuity. I'm... hm, actually I think it might not have existed in TFA and barely showed up in TFP, but the matrix is a pretty consistent element through most continuities. If you wanted to do TFA because the designs are more streamlined, another contender in the fight could be Sentinel, maybe Sentinel vs Optimus vs Starscream, whatever set of characters you felt like drawing. And in general the matrix has a very good shape to be fought over! It's very grabbable, is slightly smaller across than the average Cybertronian chest, very distinctive shape.



(oh, and even without knowing the continuity, if you wanted to pillage G1 cartoon character designs, they're simpler designs than the current comics, but the same basic shapes. You could probably get any characters fighting over anything at all without having to justify anything. G1, where the personalities are made up and the characters don't matter!)

I'll try to see if anything else comes to mind as I work. There's a Mystery Snowflake Object in the recent MTMTE chapters, but catching up far enough to even get context for that would be a lot of work :P Characters could probably fight over the Allspark cube thing in TFA, or maybe a generic datapad tablet-looking thing in any continuity. If you wanted to do TFP any of those super-weapons they were hunting down towards the end could be candidates, especially if you wanted to get ambitious with the thingamajig that turns you insubstantial. A generic energon cube could work in any continuity, or if you wanted to take visual cues from the bar scenes in MTMTE, a glass of beverage could work too.

To me, the matrix seems like the most interesting option, but I'm not the one drawing the assignment or with any idea of what it entails! But it is incredibly easy to poke me into noodling on about ten million ideas about any given special interest topic, so just nudge me again if you want me to ramble further.

 

I have cleared an object off my wip pile! That's exciting!

It is TFP Megatron being all abusive with Starscream (sfw), but hey, sad-exciting is still a flavor of exciting :D (it is a rewrite/restructure of an earlier thing I posted way back in the thread, with some of my favorite phrases recycled, if any of it sounds familiar to people who have been around a while)