What are your fan fiction gripes?

'bulkhead captured his lips with his own'

........bulkhead. lips.



bulkhead.



lips.



I just... no..............

 

It's a challenge, but in a really fun way that keeps me engaged! I know I was struggling to get motivated enough to write humans by the time I migrated from homestuck perseveration to transformers perseveration, and I'd have an even tougher time trying to go back now. It keeps things so exciting!

Like, ahhh, I'm excited now, I apologize in advance

Spoiler: long post? long post.

The extra anatomical bits are fun, but the body type variance is a DELIGHT. It makes it tricky sometimes, because I can't use shortcuts that work well for humans or trolls, like your heart fluttering, or breathing too fast. But I can write about someone's spark flaring or struggling to ventilate, or about the way their fans spin up faster when they're frightened or hot for someone, all that.

Like, the variance, so. Some characters don't have mouths. That's the biggest tricky thing, because kisses and changes in expression are such good tools for writing romance. And actually, some characters don't have mouths. Some characters have mouths, under masks, so that sometimes even their good friends aren't sure whether they have a mouth or not. I can think of two characters who have holes through their cheeks. Some characters have claws, some characters don't have faces period, a few don't do the whole 'feet' thing. You get some serious size differences, which come up in at least two of the canonical couples (Rewind and Tailgate barely come up to their partners' waists, if that). Some people have extra eyes, some have no eyes, the guy who can turn into an electric chair also can shock people from his root mode. I've written about disenfranchised, poor miners having trouble with their joints from the grit in the mines and not being able to afford replacement parts, or dealing with their bodies rusting because they aren't getting medical treatment.

I've written one character basically pulling the pigtails of another (pitch flirting), and when he snapped and tried to round on her, she did a deadweight thing except her wing caught on a door and instead he landed right on top of her. Another thing where lying in your boyfriend's lap means nearly taking out his eyes with your wings whenever you move (and trapping his arms however you lie). Overheating can be a very literal thing, where you can start burning out parts in your own body as you go. One fic I read, a cybertronian was going through reentry on earth, and had some emergency patch repair jobs that weren't holding, and his sensors wink out one by one, and his memory starts returning corruption errors until he lands in the ocean.

Depending how authors want to write things, a common fanon addition is that cybertronians have electromagnetic fields that pretty much function as short-range teleempathy, where you can read it when someone is upset or frightened or happy or any strong emotion-- or you can write people holding their EM field in tight so that people can't tell what they're thinking. Sometimes the characters have different psychological needs based on what they turn into, like, there's one epic fic where one character turns into a car and the other is a carrier model (read: he was a tape deck in the eighties, but calling him that would be silly now). So Jazz needs independence and freedom and he needs to be able to move and do things, but Soundwave is programmed to protect and possess, because that's what he does with his cassettes. It's a loving family, but it's a family with a hierarchy and Soundwave is compelled to stay in full overpossessive control, and they have to work out those significant built-in differences.

Characters get upgraded frequently and sometimes their frames get changed. One character muses on how bots started upgrading themselves bigger and bulkier as the war stretched on, and pre-war frames like his are unusual. One character went through such an extreme upgrade process that he can be reduced to his skeleton and still win fights. We've just been introduced to the idea that artificially constructed cybertronians experience a form of dysphoria stemming from the way their bodies were made for them, they weren't allowed to form on their own, like naturally born cybertronians do. The old corrupt government used to remove people's faces as a punishment, and leave them just with a single cyclopean eye and no real features. They'd take people's hands too, and leave them with claws (one character used to be a watchmaker, and is still doing... Not Great with the loss of his hands). In one timeline, when they decided that this punishment didn't have enough OOMPH anymore, they started replacing people's heads with screens that display text, no vocals at all.

Oh wow, sorry. LOST MY POINT IN THERE, but I'm not going back now. You run into a few restrictions for sure, including some where you don't have good workarounds. Someone can't blink, and maybe they can reset their optics, but it's not quite the same. But when you have a good idea of the physical thing you want to write and you have to slow down to find a good robot way to convey it, oh my god, it is SO MUCH FUN.

Like, Chromedome and Rewind. No mouths in play (though Chromedome apparently has one under there), big size difference (the scale on that second panel picture is accurate), and not even individual optics, they just have visors.



Chromedome (the big guy) has needles in his fingers that he can use to hack into other people's brains, and can even mess with their memories, and Rewind has a camera attached to his head that is almost always on and recording, even here, where he's technically unconscious



If you have a spark that can handle it, you can even be wearing one or more layers of people suit, which you feel in the same way as if it was your own body. And let me tell you, the size difference for this guy and his people suit(s) are D I V I N E (he gets even smaller than he is here)



Most people turn into vehicles or machines of some kind, which are a little limited in how they interact with each other (or they turn into smelters or metal grinders or electric chairs, which do Not play well with others), but they CAN still do cute things like drive off on a cute belated honeymoon together. Or a number of others turn into animals or animal-esque forms, and you get SUPER cute moments like this guy proposing to his wife while he looks like a spiky firebreathing bird man with no hands.



With robot bodies, they're durable and resilient enough that you can even end up in crazy situations like this with your dangerously unbalanced doctor ex-bf, who wants to show off his fancy new hands



You've got moments like this, when a new baby is making her new body and seems to be imitating the frame of the mech who's been taking care of her, and it melts his cold, withered heart (she don't got arms yet in the top right, then gets them by the bottom right)



But this is hitting him extra hard, because he's the watchmaker whose hands and face were taken from him, and is still Pretty Fucked Up over it, and now the baby is doing the single optic thing and claws like his



Plus the other guy in the panel up there, he has religious beliefs about not repairing damage if it's only cosmetic, so he spends a good long while going around with only one horn until it gets replaced because Personal Reasons. And those marks on his face are self-inflicted (because what are emotions how do) and probably would have been also left there pretty permanently if not for those personal reasons. And on a completely unrelated note, you get robot-specific diseases, like a terminal illness where you basically rust from the inside out, or there's a spot where a medic re-engineers a corpse to turn it into a gun.

Spoiler: mind the robogore

There are all kinds of societal implications to be played with about mechs who are fussy about how they look and change up their body a lot, and it's not even all fanon (starscream ;-;). Whatever bits go with your alt mode are fair game for physical anything, and it can be sexual, or it can just be plain maintenance or polishing or what have you. Want to say that helicopter mechs have sensitive rotors? Go for it! Want to say that mechs who turn into jet fighters need ridiculous amounts of maintenance? Sure!!

There are mechs who turn into cities or colony-sized spaceships, where other mechs are trained to communicate with them, including patching directly into their systems. One of those actually let his people break him down into parts to use on their resource-poor colony, so he's technicallyyyyy alive but kinda not really. There's the idea that if you're unconscious or even dead, your body can be repurposed for other uses (one merry band of heroes is currently gallivanting around in a spaceship that is technically a corpse (not the first time that has happened), or ratchet has used his ambulance alt mode to jump start a dying mech to give him time to get back on life support). There have been times when big mechs can't follow into smaller spaces (see chromedome and rewind up above), and mechs have bodies with compartments, obvious or secret, and just! So many things!!!

I really did lose my point somewhere in there XD Basically, there are totally restrictions in trying to write robots, and there isn't even consistent fanon agreement, partially because fans, partially because the franchise isn't even consistent between continuities. I still can't get into saying 'she kissed him on his intake' instead of mouth, or calling fingers servos, even though I'm pretty sure that terminology is supported by at least one canon. Robots don't have skin, but do you write dermal plating? plating? Do they have noses or nasal ridges? Blinking? Optics flickering? Optics resetting? And even when you make a call, it can be a challenge to write it so that your words don't looks silly and derail the mood when someone is reading it.

But even though there end up being a LOT of tricky bits to work around once you get going, oh my god, the sheer number of options you have left keeps me SO INCREDIBLY ENGAGED. Sometimes I get set on 'but I wanted to express this thing!' and can't find a good workaround, but there are almost always a ton of options left to play with that I'd never get to use with humans. Using fans as a not-under-direct-control emotional indicator is one, static in the voice is another, letting someone touch delicate machinery or get their hands near a vulnerable joint, the extra stuff you get to discuss when dealing with the challenges of cuddling with someone who has a massive wingspan, the way when you have those size differences, that it's so doable (and canon) for mechs to pick up their partners to hold them. The extra AWWW factor when someone who doesn't have a mouth does a face bonp because even without a mouth, he really likes the idea of kissing. I feel a little restricted occasionally, because I'm used to defaulting to human sensations and actions. But as that infodump probably conveys, I get so incredibly excited by all the new possibilities that open up when I start writing about robots :DDDD