Some country song on the radio included the line "my girlfriend ran off with my car" and I can't explain why I'm laughing to the NormalTM parent driving Thanks yall :P
the wiki said snare wet himself when overlord showed up, so I was looking for evidence in canon, but then that first panel showed up, and it was all I could think of. I realize none of this excuses me or actually explains everything, but it's all I've got :V also this panel comes to you from the same page as where we get canon confirmation of robot assholes. a ~cozy little jailbreak~, is that what we're calling it these days?
You don't need to rely on your own words. You just need to hunt around in the glove box or under the seats until you find a copy of Beethoven's 5th featuring Freddie Mercury and let him do the talking:
*arrives two days late with starbucks* Spock why must you give me even more soundwave feels... (also incidentially i have seen/read decent lenght soundy fic where he loses his cassettes bit by bit and the trauma of it and it was very well written to the point of me going 'ohno it updated' and then reading that with considerable trepidation so there's that)
Ok, so quick question what are cassettes??? TF wiki gave me something about Transformers turning into cassette tapes, and that doesn't seem correct in context of this thread.
That is actually right! They're... well, standard TF fanon (maybe even canon?) calls them symbiotes to the cassette player transformers (Blaster and Soundwave in G1, only Soundwave in IDW and TFP) but basically they're minibots who transform into cassette tapes and are used for spywork because they're small and hard to notice but the carriers (the players) can hide them in their chests and pull information from them by doing so. Most fanon focuses on the "symbiote" facet more than the actual cassette player aspect but that is what cassettes are!
family photographs edit: I'm being a racist against autobots by only showing off the good son, so here's blaster with one of his kids: Spoiler: gif showcasing a beautiful piece of 80s animation, also dithering on whether it's rewind or eject for like one frame double edit: no wait i think that's actually both eject and rewind it's just they dithered on BOTH of them on which one it is/forgot to recolor the reused animation frames because this movie is a primusdamned masterpiece y'all.
Soundwave and Blaster were designed in the 80's when cassette player/cassette tapes were a reasonable disguise. Of the media you've seen, Laserbeak appears in Armada but afaik Soundwave does not. Nobody was in the RiD episodes we watched. A later design of Soundwave in Transformers Prime has Laserbeak attaching to the front of his chest instead of docking inside. None of the other cassettes appear, thus leading to discussions of whether something happened to them.
I mean realistically I think it's probably because the original show seemed to be trying to have as many characters as possible. Presumably to sell more toys. And tfp, being a show much more concerned with the quality of the storytelling, seemed to have made a deliberate effort to have a cast of a smaller, more manageable size. But it's still an interesting source of headcanons.
Oh, I know part of this! The big thrust of the original cartoon was to put a storyline to preexisting toys to sell the toys, so a big cast was definitely something they went for. But also it wasn't just giving some toys a storyline a la G.I. Joe or Rom. Nooo no no. Too easy. Thinking too SMALL. This was about taking TWO Japanese toy lines, mashing them together, and stitching together a cohesive storyline to make it work. And then the eighties movie was mainly there to kill 90% of the cast to make room for new characters toys. Iirc, one toy line was about robots(/mecha) who turned into cars and were piloted by humans, and the other one was about robots who turned into other household objects. Which is why you get Optimus turning into a truck and Soundwave turning into a... cassette player the size of a normal made-for-humans cassette player. Fake edit: I went and did a sanity check, here you go. So Soundwave (and company) and Megatron came from a toy line were robots came to earth and transformed into household objects to protect kids. As you do. With those handguns kids just have lying around. And Optimus and the other vehicle-looking guys were from another toy line where humans drove vehicles that transformed into mechs and I guess they fought or something? At first these were generic vehicles, but a few years into production, they started imitating actual real-life models, which would eventually carry forward into transformers. (hilarious other google discoveries: microman was the household objects line. which had a robot that transformed into a vehicle. which was the inspiration for ANOTHER toy line called diaclone, which was about transforming mechs that people piloted and used to fight. transformers is the ultimate mashup result, the fruit of an unholy union between a toy line and its own child. it looks like diaclone had a LOT more characters that carried forward, even the dinobots and insecticons, but there's less information out there on the microman line. I'm assuming reflektor was from that (and perceptor? mister microscope? I want to know his secret origins), and megatron and soundwave and pretty major players, so it's not totally one-sided) As of the current IDW lineup, the basic THING is that cybertronians can turn into... just about anything. Anything at all. Robot version of human fauna? Sure! Robot version of cybertronian fauna? Go for it! Memory sticks! Laser pointers! Minesweepers! Microscopes! Three-part camera men! Two-headed mutant dragon lady! A projector! A leg (that was the result of artificial experimentation but still) ! A parasitic.... head.... THING. More than once, actually (heyyy, scorponok) So in this universe, the earliest alt mode we see for Soundwave is some kind of alien recording whatsit. Handheld size, for Cybertronians (the comic plays games with science handwaveium and mass shifting). Ages later when he's on a mission on earth, we see him take on a cassette player alt mode. And right now, uh... I'm not even sure what he turns into. The cassettes in the old cartoon just existed, they were a thing that happened. But in the comic, those were other cybertronians retroactively modified to be compatible with him and to dock in him. Ravage, Laserbeak, and Buzzsaw were cybertronians with animal-type root modes, and it's unclear what they turned into or if they turned into anything. Frenzy and Rumble were just short, and weren't really given an option about becoming cassettes :P And Ratbat was a humanoid senator person who was prejudiced and unpleasant, and Soundwave had him locked into a bat-looking root mode and made him a cassette as punishment. :P Blaster doesn't have his cassettes in this universe, because the Autobots didn't do as much with experimental body modifications, but his cassettes nominally exist as independent people, though the only one we've spent much time with is Rewind. (I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT HOSTS AND CASSETTES. They are The Best. I think transformers prime has non-cartoon canon material confirming that soundwave used to have more than just laserbeak in that universe? since his chassis is so nice and slim there, I don't want to see cassettes docking inside him, but I'm dyyyying to see art of them docked externally, the way laserbeak does. all of the family at once.)
RE: TFP Soundwave, you're right, he has at least 3 casettes in the War For Cybertron game, though as far as I know they only show up in his boss battle in the Autobot campaign, where you have to lure him out from behind a barrier by damaging them until he comes out to defend them. I felt pretty bad about that. I would have felt worse if they weren't such little pains in the backside to fight.
