I've been thinking about the amount of mentally ill lost-lighters and I'm pretty sure Minimus has OCPD or something very much like it. I don't think it's OCD? The outward symptoms can look pretty similar but the causes are different, and he doesn't engage in ritualistic behavior that I can recall seeing, he just has insanely high standards of orderlyness and neatness and moral rightness that he can't really function without.
I think Velocity might be okay? Edit: Also whatever neurodivergence that Thunderclash has only makes him better.
I'm fairly sure I interpreted his desire to stay hidden most of the time to be a deep rooted but relatively well managed anxiety disorder.
Sooooooooooo, I know I've seen this before for Drift, but just imagine the mechs who spent time living on the street having deeply ingrained food-related issues, like food anxiety or hoarding, and they may have been off the streets for ages, but they still struggle to break those habits, especially when they're stressed out. Imagine Whirl or Soundwave or Ravage dealing with that kind of thing, hmmm. Or! Even better, imagine them reacting to someone in-story realizing they deal with that kind of thing-- it pings my Interesting Things button in a way where I don't know what to do with it, but I want to do something.
Because I have an awful bias and don't think we have much about Rodimus prior to his interactions with Orion Pax-- how much do you think his tendency to overindulge and then self-destruct comes from not having any degree of structure or security even prior to him lighting his home city on fire? Abandonment issues and daddy issues aren't built in a day!
I like that a lot!! And I think that fits in some with a post I've tried and failed to articulate like three times today, about how so much of the cast is so mentally fucked, and they get so little in the way of support from the captain of their ship. Like okay, sometimes things are not exactly in his control, like with Chromedome grieving. But say... with Red Alert, Rodimus feels guilty on the page for not doing better by him. He was in one of the best positions to notice Ultra Magnus's downward spiral, and didn't. Trailcutter was already feeling kinda miserable, and then Rodimus accidentally made him extra miserable, and didn't even realize. Plus the whole thing with the vote, where he definitely didn't have a clue how much of his crew was so unhappy with him. It's kind of like... he doesn't expect to get that kind of support from anyone else, so he doesn't see i coming when people expect it from him. It's not like he doesn't care about people, he's just really bad at taking care of them. I'd totally believe that was tied to him growing up with super skewed standards for what counts as structure and security. His baseline conception of how much suffering counts as suffering is super skewed, plus it doesn't exactly seem like mental health is exactly on his radar. I mean, Rung is there, doing his thing, sure. But on a plain social level, the way he treated Trailcutter in his spotlight issue was... not nice. But then you look back at his past just on the page, and you look at Nyon and the Magnificence and stuff, and his reaction to trauma is 'welp, better shore my own psychological walls up, because nobody's gonna help me with it.' And that's without even extrapolating to what life in Nyon might have been like before things reached that final tipping point, or all the abandonment/daddy issues with Optimus. This is interesting. I like thinking about this a lot. and because what are priorities, I kept getting distracted trying to type that up, because my brain jumped straight to 'how can i wedge this into some delicious megarod fic?'
Well to be fair they killed a whole lot of bots because the show started and there's a lot of debate about what the vehicons and eridacons are.
:3c It's okay, my priorities are horribly skewed too. I've been thinking about Rodimus and his failure to provide that structure (running through the halls shouting 'who's up for a fight' anyone?) as a captain for a while. Which, it's interesting that he bothered to put himself in that position at all because Hot Rod was super averse to being put in charge, and I wonder how much of this quest and his determination to Be A Captain And Stick It Out is like... responsibiliy to the legacy of the Matrix? I mean, Optimus led the entire Autobot faction, surely he can manage a ship, right? (Optimus is also way older and had a hell of lot more experience in a relatively structured system to grow up in. If Rodimus is one of the sparks from that hot spot they hit back in time, that means he's never grown up in a world without Sentinel or Zeta Prime in rulership, where it's a constant back and forth of rebellion and terrorism. That is not a structure!) Which is interesting in contrast to Megs, especially recently. I still think it's kind of significant that we never get to see Optimus's or Rodimus's statues, because I get the feeling that OP's has a field that isn't significantly smaller than Megs, and I imagine Rodimus has one that's pretty fucking big himself. There's a lot of bots that are having to deal with post-war issues, but I think there's a really interesting schism between Chromedome/Rewind/OP and Brainstorm/Rodimus/Getaway, for instance. Pre-war versus wartime bots, where you see a lot less ability to deal with impulse control in the wartime bots. (I mean, I guess you could say that Getaway has impulse control-- he's certainly a pretty skill manipulator-- but I'm not sure that he's actually able to steer himself off a path once he's set on it. So less an impulse control issue and more of a self-control/self-inhibition issue? I am throwing words at the screen and hoping they stick.)
An excellent playlist for all you Rewind fans. Spoiler: Tracklist 01.a technologic feel good / wittzy wilhelm 02.dying to live / mike lavish 03.shove it / santigold 04.many moons / janelle monáe 05.madness / deltron 3030 06.tidal tendencies / hawk house 07.am i free / wax tailor 08.twilight zone / lupe fiasco 09.who will survive in america / kanye west 10.we be feat. ursula rucker / wax tailor 11.we are winning / flobots 12.good bye emily feat. gabriella hanninen / parov stelar13.q.u.e.e.n. feat. erykah badu / janelle monáe
https://en.shindanmaker.com/526291 Tells you your spark type! Diagnostic Result shaina 's sparktype is: Isomeric-Negative allenna 's sparktype is: Unknown Shared Type manicpixiedreamdragon 's sparktype is: Ferrum-Negative
Kite Winter (me!): Unknown Shared Type Tempest Dive: Ferrum Positive Apostasia: Vitreous Positive Kite (the speedster transformersona): Isomeric Positive Husk: Vitreous Negative
IvyLB: Vitreous-Positive Nichrome: Vitreous-Negative Refractor: Ferrum-Positive Inject: Vitreous-Positive Jumpstart: Point One Percenter (I... oh. my god.) Chase-Off: Vitreous-Negative (I... will not do the other six >_> maybe later) (fake edit: I lied) Cloudchaser: Vitreous-Positive Spintrack: Vitreous-Positive Lensflare: Vitreous-Negative Dropbeat: Vitreous-Negative Firewall: Vitreous-Positive Augeo: Isomeric-Negative (HUH either my preferance for certain names (rhythm, syllables, letters?) seems to prod the algorithm towards the vitreous types OR my luck is just like that) ETA: Ivy Leif Briar gets diagnosed as a Point One Percenter :D
Swiftwing 's sparktype is: Ferrum-Positive Burlesque 's sparktype is: Vitreous-Negative Ignis Animus 's sparktype is: Point One Percenter Silverweave 's sparktype is: Vitreous-Negative Flux 's sparktype is: Point One Percenter Paradox 's sparktype is: Point One Percenter PR 's sparktype is: Vitreous-Positive Moony 's sparktype is: Vitreous-Positive (WE MATCH AW I CAN BE A SPARK DONOR)