Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

I'm "rewatching" TFP, by which i mean watching my fav bits and going thru the rest frame by frame looking for easter eggs. The animation on this goddamn show was SO GOOD, holy shit, I was absolutely spoilt by this being my first TF show.

Conclusions from S01 Ep06, Masters & Students:

• The catwalks inside the base are way more extensive than I realised, there's like three levels going on. They're now Miko's personal climbing gym, bc the Autobots don't quite grok the danger (although Bulkhead keeps a good eye on her bc he's already had to catch her a couple times) and Miko isn't about to listen to Jack when she could be climbing shit.
• Very few people realise that Skyquake is named after an Actual Thing so most of the time the people he meets immediately write him off as a fuckin edgelord because Skyquake??? Really? Sounds like complete bullshit.
  • Dreadwing was actually the edgelord, as his name indicates. Skyquake was just conspiracy-theory-adjacent.
• also fuckin hell it took two strikes for Bee to straight up destroy Skyquake, holy shit. Wonder what was up with that, if his altmode just gave him some huge glaring weak spot or if that's a flier's nightmare scenario. Imagine someone just being able to fuckin. Reach into ur body and pull out ur brain. Wow i need to write about that.

 

I'm watching Con Job now for nice interior shots of the base and wow, Bulkhead just lights up when he hears Wheeljack's voice! "He is 1000% the real deal, Optimus!" He smiles with his eyes when he speaks, it's so cute <33333

oh my fucking god the jackhammer literally crashed by the great pyramids. fuckin all of cairo got a show, presumably skdhfkghj

 

jfc wheeljack just pulled this one vehicon's clean arm off and hit another vehicon with it

 

fuck i'm in the middle of a completely different fic but i just had a bunny and i gotta write it down before it vanishes:

so, plot where breakdown defects - not really out of choice but because the autobots for some reason interrupt airachnid in the process of taking him apart. optimus decides to bring him back to the base and try to save his life. (it involves a jumpstart process where breakdown's spark fades to the point of not being able to power his frame at all, which naturally would lead to spark death except the autobots have optimus, whose spark is strong enough that he can comfortably keep everything running for as long as it takes to stabilise breakdown and bring his spark back.) this is mostly successful - breakdown survives, but he'd been so thoroughly dismembered that recovery will be a very long process.

which gives him and bulkhead (and wheeljack too) some time to sit down and mull over their shared past in the wreckers. :v im a sucker for ex-wrecker breakdown lol

haven't decided if i want to go the 'breakdown and knock out are bonded and knock out knows he's alive' route, which leads nicely into knock out defecting as well, orrrr if its more juicy to have knock out have no idea what's happened to breakdown (could be shippy or non-shippy tbh) and team up with dreadwing to go all roaring rampage of revenge on airachnid. actually no i think option 2 is juicier, lets call open season on the spooder XD

meanwhile optimus lowkey adopts breakdown, bc it comes out that breaky is closer in age to bee and smokescreen and dadimus gonna dad. this pisses breakdown off when he realises, bc there's nothing abt the last few months that he's been ok with and thinking he's being seen as a kid just ruffles his feathers big time. he ends up getting along best with ratchet, ironically, because ratchet is a persnickety grump and breakdown knows how to deal with at least 50% of that. also fowler, bc he recognises his voice from the orion pax rescue and that's startling enough to get a laugh out of him.

also miko is LOVING having bulk's Rival in the house, she wants to make friends with him and have him have the full vegeta experience lmao. she gets him hooked on slash monkey and shonen anime, and she always has an idea of how to deal with the boredom of being essentially housebound.

i need to rewatch the Relevant episodes of tfp to wrap my head around the bulkdown dynamic again buuuut tentatively i think bulkhead comes around first bc he's always struck me as a relatively mellow, flexible sort of person, whereas breakdown seems... slightly less so? XD The breakdown in my head that came along with this bunny is angry over a lot of things and i think it would be harder for him to let go of old dynamics when he's got so much else going on in his head.

 

wow i can write all sorts of explicit smut but kissing is Too Much for me apparently lol

 

every so often i look at some tfp megatron meta - especially megop related - and i just think "did we even watch the same damn show?"

the mech is a force of nature. he has about as much ability to be caring and gentle as a fuckin earthquake. he's literally always pushing people's boundaries, testing what they'll do in response. and it's not just optimus he does that to; he does it with jack, with starscream, with fuckin unicron. he uses force as a primary tool, like most of the time he doesn't even bother trying to bargain for what he wants, he double-crosses and discards others when he can't squeeze any more use out of them and he doesn't even try to hide it lmfao. if the writing for tfp were better i'd say he was brutally practical, which would make perfect sense for his backstory (but zombies and practical arent even in the same universe so). yeah, he's obsessed with optimus, but what exactly about that obsession makes you think he'd treat optimus all soft and nice if he ever got what he wanted??? it's so damn obvious that the thing he likes most about optimus at this point is the challenge of his existence. optimus is the one person he can't defeat, and that's what's held his interest!

like ffs. he's charismatic, adaptive, he's inventive to a certain degree (or, well, we're told he is; what we see is mostly him galaxybraining his way through the show tbh), he's stubborn and determined enough to fuckin beat back unicron when unicron tried to possess him - all of those are fucking awesome traits and there's plenty of heroizing you could do there if you felt like it??? but so many people just go straight for characterizations that seem ripped from like MTMTE or maybe TFA instead of working with what TFP megs has got, and it bugs me so much!!!

like if u want loyal knight types, soundwave and dreadwing are right there. >.>

 

my kingdom for a megop teamup fic where he's still just a complete bastard.

bonus points for an optimus who gets along well with him primarily because he can sort through the needling and the challenges and figure out what megatron actually wants/is on about, and just like... doesn't take it seriously. megatron teases him and makes jokes and occasionally slaps his back too hard and optimus is just like "that's nice, dear." and then every so often he drags megatron out to a nice secluded arena and fights him to a standstill and that's their version of romantic walks on the beach or some shit.

 

MegOP, but they're both stubborn as rocks. People also forget that their canon backstory is Orion seeking out a notorious rabblerouser and Most Likely A Huge Fuckoff Criminal Mastermind Megatron to debate politics with him.

 

Y E A H. Orion Pax might be a compassionate, kind sort, but he's obviously not that concerned about having a nice quiet life. I tend to see Optimus as someone who needs a bit of difficulty in life, some project to work on, problem to solve, in order to feel fully immersed in living, and as long as we're talking megop happily-ever-afters here, I see Megatron's more ornery traits as being more or less complimentary to that. And Megatron seeks power, control, domination over others - perhaps in order to feel safe? wouldn't surprise me, with his background - to an extent that often is can be unhealthy for others, but clearly the end result isn't the only thing that matters to him. I think Optimus is one of a handful of characters that could satisfy his need for power without getting subsumed by it. (Soundwave too, probably.)

And as far as loyalty goes... sure, to some extent! But in fuckin canon, Orion Pax was more devoted to the success of the cause as he saw it than to Megatron personally, to the extent that he accepted the Primacy knowing, probably, that it was gonna piss Megs off! And Megatron was more devoted to the success of the cause as he saw it than to Orion Pax, to the extent that he fucked off having a tanty and refused to ever make peace with Optimus even though there definitely would have been opportunities, knowing Optimus. Both of them have things they rank above the other in terms of priorities, and idk, that's important to me in a ship. Can't stand it when ppl have them - especially Optimus - casting aside their prior responsibilities and values just to have a relationship, it feels so out of character to me.

I might however buy it in other continuities, lol. I haven't read IDW much but IDW OP strikes me as tired enough he might do it. And there are some delicious TFA megop stories with good-guy decepticons... I'm not anywhere near as married to the canon in either of those, too. Just wish that people would keep those canons' characterizations IN that canon.

 

I went full galaxy brain on tumblr r.e. the pangaea thing in Cyberverse and now I'm having Feelings about Grimlock wandering around the planet alone for nearly 200 million years skdhjfkj

Like. Wandering along coastlines leaving footprints in the sand, following the course of rivers up into mountains that no longer exist. Witnessing flood basalts, mass extinctions, the closing and rifting of oceans. The evolution of the modern world. He goes nuts over grass when they revive him bc there was none before. He fine-tunes his beast-mode alt on a succession of archosaurs for like fifty million years before the big theropods start showing up. He's wearing a postosuchus frame long after the real-life equivalents went extinct.

i gotta write this sdfgjhkg

 

taking some more tfp screencaps and bulk got a couple great single-frame expressions when he was trying to explain to miko why scraplets are fuckin scary lol



"I'm gonna need a drink after this. A few drinks, in fact."



"For fuck's sake, why did it have to be scraplets?"

 

imo i think it makes the meme even funnier that the 'approving' frame is actually part of bulkhead's scraplet rant. he's like "this is not good but it happens anyway and we just have to fuckin deal with it!"

 

He knows that no matter which way it goes, he's gonna end up the butt of the joke u_u)

 

bulk deserves more love skhdfkj he's so much fun and him and miko are so well suited to each other and Im Sad there isn't more with the two of them getting up to all sorts of shit haha

 

I wrote some OP/Ratch smut and in doing so updated a fic I haven't done anything with for nearly eight years. It's always so good to come back to something you weren't sure was going to get finished with new energy and determination. :D It's just a stupid 30 days of smut challenge but it's kinda fun lol.

 

skywarp with a tiktok account

 

somewhat annoyed by that one post on tumblr thats like "fear of disappointing optimus is the only reason the autobots arent as bad as the decepticons."

like. really???

 

haha what?? huh??? in what universe????

that is some peak telling-on-yourself in action right there, holy shit

 

i have half a mind to go scrape the episode plots for like... anything that could even resemble war crimes or crimes against peace/humanity (lol) or whatever and see how the sides stack up. like off the top of my head megatron's committed biological warfare at least twice, if you count the zombies, and in both cases it at the very least hasn't bothered the show decepticons enough to not help him do his shit. and sure, the autobots have a couple moments of not lookin so shiny, but they are miles better and optimus is only one of many factors in that.