They do draw reference to this kind of thing at some spots! Like when someone is dying and everyone's like WELP *shrug*, and Tailgate is freaking out a little, everyone is like ???? what's your problem?, and he's like oh my god, I'm upset, doesn't anyone do upset anymore. He's naïve compared to the rest of the cast, but like... a lot of it comes down to him expecting people to act decently. That's not a really unreasonable thing to expect, you know? Even after he pulled a gun on Megatron the one time, he seems have come around to 'aw, he's a decent guy.' It's interesting because he stands in pretty sharp contrast to the rest of the crew, but if you take a step back and look, they're all super fucked up, and Tailgate's got a lot less trauma to deal with. (even the innocuous characters like blaster, his spotlight is a rough ride. ravage had a pretty shitty past before the war and was living on the streets. sunstreaker got traumatized to hell and back towards the end of the war. mirage too, oh my god, both his spotlight issue and then the things he dealt with wrt ironhide. rodimus's trauma didn't stop at nyon, just take a look at his spotlight issue. if you dig into any recurring character's pasts, things are almost always super screwed up)
Spoiler: CYGATE Makes it more delicious that Cy and Tailgate are accidentally-married already. And when it happened they barely knew eachother, what, a year perhaps? At Maximum?
Spoiler: CYGATE And consider how cute it becomes if Cyclonus was aware of it all along! It's like 'okay, yes, I accidentally let you drag me to Vegas and get hitched because you were dying, but I'm going to do the decent thing and not act on this or push you at all until you realize how things stand on your own and decide how you want to deal with that knowledge.'
Spoiler: cygate (Okay but now my headcanon for human!verses will forever be drunk, emotional "I AM DYING FROM THIS FUCK IT I LOVE YOU WE'RE MARRYING" Vegas marriage that Tailgate doesn't quite remember and no one can stop me.)
I leave for four hours and yall make FUCKIN AWESOME META How dare (A++ would cry again over these fuckign traumatized space robots)
JOYFULLY ROLLS AROUND IN ALL OF THIS META I think that even though Tailgate probably would be considered 'young' (not a child) his reactions to things actually match up pretty well with Windblade/Nautica/Firestar/etc.! Hell, even some of the neutral Cybertronians who come back-- they react with a lot of genuine confusion and what the fuck why the hostility even though they were definitely witnesses to a lot of the Autobot vs Decepticon atrocities. And even with the Functionists and Senate looming over them all, the flashbacks we see to the time before the war shows a lot of cybertronians being... pretty average, chill people, albeit with raceclassableism sort of built in and informing how some of their social structure works. Spoiler: 47-51 So Getaway being resentful of Tailgate? Oh god, that would make so much sense. Getaway being resentful of everyone who was forged/constructed before the war? Probably explains some of his animosity about things! Being an MTO is hell, and even if CC cybertronians were discriminated against like whoa, at least they weren't the robot equivalent of child soldiers. I mean, dude has no worthwhile moral system to work off of! I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even realize his capacity for sadism and cruelty, because he came right off the battlefield into spy service, where they gave him a gun that could force people to change their minds. And he's never been given a reason not to use it! Of course he'd fucking mutiny, and of course he'd make sure that everyone on the ship with him still would be loyal to him. Because he's been living in war zones and treachery and violence all his life, so he'd be looking over his shoulder at any and every moment. (Which, side note: I think it's interesting that every time they start to really hammer home the "Autobots lying to each other which leads to horrible deaths because secrets and subterfuge" we have a Scavenger side story. I like that dichotomy between Lying Autobots and Sort Of Genuinely Honest Decepticons, because it really drives home just how many schisms are in the LL crew versus the WAP crew. Even if Krok wanted to sell Grimlock, at least he was honest about it.)
Yeah, I mean, even if Cybertronians don't have children like humans do, I think everyone can agree that creating an entirely new person just to cram a bunch of war strategy into their heads and punt them out of a moving vehicle into a battlefield seconds later, fully knowing their average lifespan is going to be like 10 minutes, is a gigantic war crime and atrocity that both sides participated in. You shouldn't be able to create a life to fight for you like that. MTOs never got a chance to pick what side of the war they were on, and most of them probably got blown to bits before they could even form a coherent sense of self. You can't preach preservation of life (autobots) or the importance of free will (decepticons) while doing that. You just can't. Spoiler: Sparks Which is why I headcanon no new spark fields appearing. Primus disapproves of your war sins.
Like even if it's not a primus thing, they were, what, tossing out what should have been entire generations of sparks into situations that blew them away in 10 or 20 minutes? Even if basically all of those were constructed cold, that's... a thing. And then they razed cybertron. One way or another, I think they accidentally or deliberately finished off sterilizing cybertron.
Spoiler: Functionalists Ironically they still probably have a larger population than the timeline in which the war didn't happen, because the Functionalists end up being even worse.
Also, I wanna compare Spoiler: That whole functionalist arc Pre-war Orion Pax defending a field of sparks from being 'disappeared' because it's wrong to hurt lives that haven't lived with the later policy of MTOs. War eats away at all our morals, I guess.
Spoiler: functionalist arc GOD seeing all of those little "I haven't been worn down by war and indulged in war crimes" quirks, both there and in the telling stories flashbacks, really says a lot about what 4 million years of war will do to people. I mean, at this point Optimus Prime might as well stand trial too. I wonder how many flowers are wrapped around his statue courtesy of Censere.
Spoiler a real thing that pre-war prowl said: "I hope I never get to be as jaded and cynical as you, Orion Pax." .....BLESS....
Spoiler: sins of the wreckers OH OH an interesting thing! In Sins of the Wreckers, Mesothulas and Prowl were amoral war crime boyfriends partners in developing new technologies for use in the war. Until Prowl decided that he had a conscience after all and locked the guy in a dimension of mind-melting sensory overload. Mesothulas has since escaped and captured Prowl and one of the big, big things is basically that Mesothulas had a child. Okay, so cold constructed bots are a thing, but Ostaros was created using an entirely synthetic spark. And despite everything else that has happened between them, one of the biggest things Mesothulas wants Prowl to tell him is what happened to Ostaros. Now, despite all the atrocities he's responsible for, Prowl isn't a complete dick and did not kill Ostaros. He gave him a life (in his words, the best life he could think of, and the only one he could give him). Ostaros was an Autobot soldier and died in the war. And Mesothulas is devastated. It's a really heartwrenching moment, especially compared to the way most of these characters just... blandly accept massive amounts of death. Maybe Drift's reaction to an entire city he deeply cares about disappearing is about comparable to Mesothulas's reaction over Ostaros. And as far as Prowl tells it, Ostaros lived a life comparable to that of any other Autobot. I don't know exactly where I was going with this, but it's interesting seeing the contrast between this guy's emotional reaction to his child dying in war after living a life that was at least kind of full, and the big nonreaction everyone else seems to have to the massive, massive number of casualties from these MTOs, who died an average of only ten minutes after they came online. It's really interesting, all the themes this series plays with.
Heck, even before that, I'd have been kind of worried about Orion Pax. And this is nearly the highest emotional point we see for his character. I want to give giant sad space dad a hug :(
