TFs: DARE TO BE STUPID

Oops, I am apparently drawing the thing. I need to tweak Whirl's body language and add a ton of damage to Rotorstorm, but apparently I had lots of art effort hiding in me waiting for an opportunity to burst out. If you had asked me two hours ago I would have said there wasn't a chance in hell I'd feel like figuring out how to draw a whole new robot today, and yet here I am. (also ignore rotorstorm's face/head it is bland and boring and off since it's just a placeholder 'cause the boy ain't gonna have a proper face by the time I'm done with him)

Spoiler: cr chamber illustration

 

Slash imagine Starscream looking back through a mini personal museum of Optimus Prime's old weapons and hardware, and putting on something REALLY excellent and ridiculous, like some ridiculously oversized Optimus shoulder armor and picking up an Optimus-sized gun, and Windblade is just like *shakes head*, and then Optimus himself walks in (with a ukulele). Everything about this crossover is so great.

And and and omg. The showdown between Megamind and Titan. Imagine STARSCREAM doing that.

Or their time on Eukaris was basically this:

 

YES, oh my god. Poor Prymo Pyro.

I'm trying to think of who plays a clear villain on Cybertron, but we're kind of running low on overt villains there and Starscream isn't really the mentoring type. :T Scoop was doing the sketchy things with prophecy and whanot, and Rattrap is super sketchy, but neither of them is really a Titan type. Devastator as controlled by Scoop, maybe? But that's still not a great match and Devastator is kind of lacking in personality. The closest I've gotten happy with is Prowl, for trying to grab too much power and not quite managing it and being super bitter that everyone doesn't love him for what he's doing, but even that isn't a very good match.

 

My trouble with Rattrap is that I have trouble seeing him getting as out of control violent as Titan got in the movie. Even his power plays are pretty chill in the comic. But OH, I just had a thought. What if, instead of a serum, Starscream stole the enigma of combination to make his new nemesis? Instead of a public museum, it could be like, an artifacts of the primes vault or something, and that would mean it's also pretty reasonable for him to run into Windblade down there. A combiner is overpowered enough to outclass even your average survived-four-million-years-of-war soldier, and the people who go into these things tend to lose their sense of selves and some of them get a BIT out of control.

Slash that gives an excuse for the big epic climax where

Spoiler

Wheeljack can make his big heroic not-quite-a-sacrifice, and Starscream can Wheeljack Wheeljack Wheeljack the combiner apart to save the day

 

aaaaaAAAAAAAAA I'M SUPPOSED TO BE SLEEPING, YOU CAN'T GIVE ME IDEAS LIKE THIS

shit shit shit

I need to maybeeeeee do a thing (maybe not tonight, but SOON)

And what additional context does this give to Whirl's attempt to mercy kill Springer post-Overlord? Would he be still reeling from that extra loss out of nowhere that he hadn't been expecting, and that he doesn't think he even deserves to feel as a loss?

OH SHIT. So Whirl was in the Wreckers when this was going down. He wasn't involved with that particular mission, so he wasn't one of the ones where Springer told them the candidates and had them vote on them. So. DOUBLE WHAMMY. Whirl finds out, after the fact, that he and Rotorstorm almost ended up on the same small team and he didn't have a fucking clue. And two, BAM, like a day on the team, Rotorstorm is dead, lots of people are dead, and Springer is only a semi-survivor. And Whirl was in a kiiind of shaky position on the team. Springer was a little worried about his stability, and it isn't clear whether he communicated that to anyone else. But being on the Wreckers was also pretty much the biggest stabilizing force in Whirl's life. Springer at least should have been keeping an eye on Whirl's mental health, as team leader. With him out of the picture, would anyone even have noticed if Whirl was in an especially bad place? Maybe Impactor should have been watching, but... he took Guzzle and peaced on out to go do war shit. The only other person we know was hanging out with Whirl was Roadbuster, and he's not doing so fantastic on the mental health front either, and he was hyperfocused on Springer. I doubt anyone was paying any attention to Whirl at all. I don't know where I'm going with this, but this is interesting, this is super interesting.

edit: oh no, this is getting awfully close to whirl's suicidally self-sacrificing days. what would he feel because he wasn't on the mission and rotorstorm died, and whirl thinks he should have been there, because he was the one who really deserved to die instead? i mean, that's pretty dependent on the accidental abuser interpretation, but. i have emotions now.

 

omg, would bernard be metalhawk?

 

Canon mentioned that he knew Jetstream had changed his name, but doesn't say anything about knowing what he changed it to! Just that he changed it. My personal favorite combo is that he'd recognize Whirl if he saw him in person, but wouldn't know the name 'Whirl' if it popped up.

And OH, his history with joining the Wreckers is actually really interesting. After Simanzi (which gave him some really nasty ptsd and led to the obnoxious cover personality he has in canon), he applied for Wreckers membership, then rejected it when it was offered. No timeline indicating whether Whirl was on the team at that point, I don't think. After that, he took up a teaching position at the IAA, which was the school where Jetstream had abused him. At some point, without his knowledge, Rotorstorm was added to the Wreckers reserve list. After the Decepticon Surge (during AHM), Rotorstorm did some nice heroic military things, and since he'd also been on the reserve list for a long time, Springer approached him to offer him membership.

There's all kinds of interesting ways things could play out, depending on how you want to fill in the holes in canon. If Rotorstorm subscribed to Fisitron's datalogs, he would have known that there was a 'Whirl' on the team, but he may or may not have known that Whirl was Jetstream. But considering the Simanzi ptsd and the way he applied for and rejected Wreckers membership, he could have been deliberately trying to keep his distance from the team and might not have subscribed to the datalogs at all. Or there's the stuff Springer said about how he was worried about Whirl's stability and he wasn't going on this mission, etc., so when he was talking to Rotorstorm, if he went through the team membership, Whirl's name might not have come up at all. Lots of ways to play it! I personally favor him not knowing Whirl was Jetstream, but recognizing him in person, because it allows for the most painful amounts of interpersonal drama and angst.

Oh my goddd, I know, right? There's so many painful directions to take this, and I could totally see him even hiding it from Rung, because that might be one part of his past he's most ashamed of, and he already hid plenty of the rest of his past from Rung, until Fort Max pushed the issue. I'd really love to see him digging into some more of this moral injury business with Cyclonus or someone else who'd be likely to understand it. Cyclonus would be tough, because they've got that antagonistic past. Maybe not Rung, because he might understand on a theoretical level, but I really want to see Whirl talking with someone who understands it in an intensely personal way. The amount of trust and intimacy it would get him to open up about that, though, that would be a real tricky thing to approach. Iiiiii need to think through my Whirl ships, or maybe just brace myself for some serious solo introspection writing.

 

Oooooh, I didn't even think about the not-quite-history between that pair of characters. Why does absolutely everything in Whirl's entire past hurt so good?