#a thing that seems to be about 80% robot

[personwithatophat]

Anniversary Post - 3

Hetch's dedication is nice in the sense that it confirms several small details that help flesh out the surrounding story. This parasocial cult leader gets 5 backhanded compliments per year and makes twitter posts framing each one as the pinnacle of his life. Lightning round of observations! Go!

The Overseer was announced as Hetch's official title in Again. as opposed to "The Hetch", as he himself decided to announce. the founder retroactively deciding that hetch can choose the name but doesnt deserve the title.

Hetch's "wall of achievements" is the only new addition to the character we see here as a detail Actively not from or about TSE, or that hasnt been blatantly referenced before. things like this keeping the door wide open for hetchs character to be showing up in later installments and built up in promo.

the genloss symbol being named here as "the symbol of creation" is definitely more representative to the actual anagram for its meaning (dont) Hide, Escape, Talk, Conform, Hesitate or HETCH and confirms that Hetch named HIMSELF this as opposed to the founder choosing it.

"rudimentary puppet shows" is an interesting reference, telling us that hetch likely - still controls showfall media and it is active within the world of generation loss even if we dont get to see. - lacking the power of The connection that we had to the show heavily limits the capability hetch has to just robots from hardware and 'puppets' for cast.

cool That being said i wanna dive into what the hell is up with the Founder here. The founder is SO incredibly passive agressive, backhanded, belittling, and self inflated. this is a reoccuring theme for the founder talking about hetch.

TFG : 9-1-6 'He did pretty good, but i fixed it, Now its a wonderful creation'

'im proud of the story but not how its made' again and again the founder will take credit for what he deems the beauty of the stories that he calls HIS creations, either backhanding hetch from the project he was subjected to, that he was Stabbed for. or Outright insulting him. The founder calls hetch dramatic: in TFC hetch's voice gets Recast to an auto-revised version of himself in the founders perfect vision. Hetch is the clingy, hetch is the parasocial, the desperate, the dramatic, the foolish. The Founders admittance that hetch suggested using the streamers for TSE was a good idea is the first time that the founder compliments hetch without claiming the idea as his own. The Founder is a hack with a self indulgent ego balloon the size of his narratively controlled redacted ass -Tophat

[classjezter]

So I was curious about how long you think carriage in its entirety would take in Cybertronian time?

I actually did some math for this to try and figure it out myself. My reference was the time charts by Puraiuddo. You can ignore my process, but I'll put it here anyways:

Orn=12 hours; Cycle=day; Stellar Cycle=month; Vorn=year

An orn is ~45 hours, and 45x2=90, so a Cycle would take a little under 4 days (3.75 days exactly).

If there are 80 cycles in a stellar cycle, 3.75x80=300, so a stellar cycle takes a little under a year.

There are 10 stellar cycles in a Vorn, so 300x10=3,000 days. 3,000/360=8.333 years. So there are a little over 8 years in a Vorn.

In your guide, you said that term two takes anywhere from 4 to 15 earth years, so that means that term two could last from 5 stellar cycles to over a vorn. I don't recall anything about time frames for term one, so I assumed that it was 4 earth years.

Using all of that, I came to the conclusion that Carriage ranges from anywhere between a Vorn to a little over two.

Check my math if you want, it could be wrong (or don't because I'm sure you have better things to do than calculate the exact amount of time it takes for alien robots to reproduce in robot years), but I just wanted to know if you headcannoned a different time frame?

(Sorry for the stupidly overcomplicated ask. Also I love the way you draw Ratchet :3)

Oh god… MATH! D: Here’s a peak at Ratchet’s redesign I’m working on for your troubles Anon

But as for the math used, it makes sense, thing is I haven't really sat down and made a list of the time units I'd use (since the canon units are all over the place). But, I think with the time units you are using the math IS mathing correctly.

The only thing I'd see differently is the terms. The most common time for a Vorn is 83 earth years, which is the way I think about it. So for me it would be:

Joor= Cybertronian hour. Equivalent to 6 Earth hours

Orn= Half a cybertronian day (7.5 joors). Equivalent to 45 Earth hours

Cycle= Cybertronian day (15 joors). Equivalent to 90 Earth hours or 3.75 days

Deca-cycle= Cybertronian month (80 cycles). Equivalent to 300 Earth days or 10 months

Stellar Cycle= Cybertronian year (10 deca-cycles). Equivalent to 8.333 Earth years

Vorn= Cybertronian decade (10 stellar cycles). Equivalent to 83 Earth years

So for carriage, term one lasts a human year which would be around a deca-cycle or more specifically, a deca-cycle and 17 cycles.

Term two can last from 4 to 15 years. 4 years would be 4 deca-cycles + 68 cycles. And 15 years would be 1 stellar-cycle + 8 deca-cycles + 15 cycles.

Which can seem long, but considering their insanely long lifespans, it's a short time for them

[rkiveinmarvel]

upon a different life - james bucky barnes des. barnes never trusted you, not once. but upon a different life, he would. notes. angst/comfort, establishing relationship, slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers, i miss bucky, avengers being siblings (and weak for plot),mentions of violence,

hello! it's my bucky fic! i had a bucky fic back then but I deleted it anyway, this was supposed to be a one part but i got carried away, enjoy barnes knowing you! *i wrote this around 3am so, if i have some mistakes, i'm sorry!!*

(part i) (part ii) | w.c: 3.5k

James Buchanan Barnes is slowly getting used to in living with Avengers and the era he is in, in general, he enjoys the slowly yet steady step to forgive himself and earn forgiveness to those people around him as well familiarizing the more advanced world, but nightmares and remarks of his past action come and go; everyone notices it, especially his friend Steve Rogers, but despite this minor setback, he still move forward because it’s not every day, that you die in the 80s and woke up 75 years later. 

In terms of forgiving, the sergeant doesn’t know if the genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist have forgiven him—it’s not a secret Stark gives the money and sponsor on the compound they live in but despite his hesitation to live with them, Stark still offered him—it might be a silent agreement with Rogers but somehow, Barnes hopes Stark acknowledges how sorry he was. 

But among other things, he wishes he can finally get used to. He finds himself not getting used to you. Even the entire team knows how much James hates you; to you, it’s no secret: you’re his last handler afterall and if the tables are different, you would hate Barnes too. Before Zemo took control of Barnes as Winter Soldier, you were his last boss, a menace actually, you would let him be used. He gets used by someone, you get rich, a simple deal between HYDRA and you. But that changed, when the Winter Soldier regained his memory; with no leverage in making a deal with HYDRA, the Black Widow offered you a place to stay.

It was a nice place, really, a lot nicer than the one you lived in, except, maybe for the fact that you’re still under someone jurisdiction: while the sergeant is able to roam around the city, you keep staring at the wonderful electronic tag in your ankle: in your deduction, you believe that the Avengers are only keeping you alive because of what you know—it’s not even sympathy why the Black Widow offered you stay with them, it’s more of a business. 

From the moment you receive glares from everyone in the room, you know damn well that this is just another business. So, it is indeed a surprise, when the A.I enters your room.

“Ha, did Stark send you to check on me again, Vision?” You asked as the artificial intelligence gave you a look. Despite the team’s lack of enthusiasm with you, Vision, Clint, and Thor are the only ones who seem to talk to you. You have talks with Natasha, Tony, and Bruce as well, but it is more of a business than a talk. 

“No, I was wondering if you wish to join me, Clint, and Wanda to watch Dick Van Dyke, she seems very excited about it.”

“What makes you think she wants me to join you guys?” You asked hypothetically.

Vision nodded as he glanced at your electronic tag. “If it makes you feel better, they don’t really hate you that much. In my defense, I think you only did the things you have done because you want to survive.” You scoffed as you said that. 

“Well, tell that to Sergeant Bar–” but Vision cut you off. “People won’t always use you. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you realize you’re more than just a HYDRA pawn.” You stared at him, as he continued. “At least, that’s what I observed with Sergeant Barnes.”

“Thanks, Vision.” You gave a bland smile, as he left your room. A part of you wants forgiveness, but for someone who learnt life in a hard way, you’re hesitating to give this one a try. Yet for once, a robot was more human than you.

A year after an endless discussion between the Avengers, they decided to remove the electronic tagging and let you roam freely, but still under their jurisdiction. Somehow, Stark and Banner acknowledge your knowledge while the rest give respect to your fighting ways and quick judgment; well, all of them are getting used to you. Well, maybe except for Bucky. Steve told you it takes time, but to your knowledge, it won’t take time because it won’t happen. You accepted the terms that Barnes will not and never forgive you, you don’t blame him though, mostly you blame yourself.

In this scene, you finally learn to adjust, not going out of your room if he was outside, not training–the same time as him, and definitely not talking to him; even a spare glance, felt like a struggling pain of unforgiven lingering. The team respected Barnes more than they respected you, but somehow, it felt like you finally belonged to something. Well, atleast, that’s what you thought.

Their mission to infiltrate HYDRA failed terribly, despite the information you gave them, they weren’t prepared and outnumbered. Despite their failure, they were able to take a hit on HYDRA’s camp, it’s not much but still affected HYDRA. As the quinjet landed on the hangar, the medical team supported those who were injured. A lot of them were, including those who sometimes get out without a scratch.

In the med bay: you saw Clint and Sam—they somehow, took a toll, as you walked further, you saw the entire team taking care of their small cuts, with them helping another, they were able to close the wounds, well, maybe except for the Winter Soldier—or as they call him the White Wolf. On the back of his right shoulder, he was bleeding badly, despite having all the needed things to tend his wounds around him, he sat on the bed feeling out of place, besides it’s only a shoulder wound. 

Due to the lack of people in the med bay, you offered help in the team. As you finished to tend some of the team’s wounds including Rogers’ and Romanoff’s. Your eyes met a struggling Bucky Barnes, grasping his right shoulder with his metal arm. Your footsteps were slow as you walk towards him.

“...Do you need help?” He wanted to say no, everything part of him says no, but as he glanced that there’s no person who can help him in his injury, he nodded. Afterall, you’re also the one who patches him up whenever he gets injured in his missions back then.

You carefully clean his wound as you tend him, you wipe the dirt and the things visible that might infect the wound, as you try to start a talk. “Was it bad out there? In the mission, I mean..” He just let out a grunt, which you expected, but he replied with. “They have three more Super Soldiers and one enhanced, just like Wanda.”

You didn’t respond, just continued stitching his wound. As you finish, you put on some bandages as he asked. “Did you know?” Barnes asked.

“Did you know about the Super Soldiers?” He asked again, for a quick moment, you realized that he is still an assassin, you felt his anger and bloodlust. At that moment, you wish you didn’t work with HYDRA. In truth, you didn’t know where they were but you knew HYDRA didn’t stop making them. But your stuttering left the Sergeant furious even more.

“I–I..” That was the only thing you could say when you suddenly felt his metal hand around your neck, at other times this can be hot and daring, but at this time, you were damn sure that the Sergeant would be able to crack your neck: he could kill you. The team in the med bay immediately sat up. 

“Buck, put her down.” You assumed it was Rogers who was talking to the Sergeant. As it was getting hard to breath, James starts to explain that you knew there were Super Soldiers, in that Rogers asked you. 

“Did you actually know?” Barnes shook you, as you met the Captain’s eyes. “I did.” Before James finally kills, you continue. “I didn’t know they were stationed there.”

If this was a HYDRA facility, they would’ve shot you despite you telling the truth, Wanda nodded, a confirmation that you were telling the truth. Steve asked Bucky to let go of you, with an angered stare, he let go. As you try to catch your breath, you notice some of the bandage of Rogers came off. You reached your hand to help him but a metal hand covered your wrist. 

“Stop pretending to be a good guy, we know you’re глупая игрушка of HYDRA.” He grabs your wrist tighter. “You’re not even part of the team.” That was the last straw, you pulled your wrist away, as you searched for someone to stand with you but all you saw was them looking away from you, even Vision. You nodded as you felt some tears sting. You never actually belonged in the team. Just like Barnes said, a глупая игрушка. 

A stupid toy.

Stark spotted you, making tea in the middle of the night. “So, you’re the one that’s drinking tea.” His voice echoed in the empty kitchen. You nodded as you asked him if he wanted some, as he nodded. “Heard what happened.”

“Of course, you do.” Stark eyed you as you finally sat down and Stark rolled his eyes. “I forgave Terminator a while ago.” You looked at him.

“I know he took everything from me, but, I guess it’s just the way it is…Pepper is really good at convincing , I give her that, well, maybe because we–”

“Are pregnant…?” You asked, in which Stark immediately shook his head and chuckled. “Well, no, but, I just want peace, you know.” 

“That’s a bit out of character.” You commented. “Ah, the secret service have their humor.” The billionaire chuckled. As he glanced at the stair towards the rooms. “You did not know about the soldiers but, the information you gave was really helpful. We can start with that.” As Stark stood up. He added.

“Oh, and next time, make sure you suit up. You can tag along in the mission if you want, secret service.” Stark walked away with a smug smirk. “You sure, they’ll allow me in the field, Mr. Stark?”

“Maybe not. But, we have a higher chance of winning if they don't know what they’re up against.” He said as he left. But, when the morning comes, there’s no trace of you—only the cup of tea you shared with Tony and a room filled with your stuff, as well as, a folder with all of HYDRA’s information and coordinates in sticky notes. As the team assembled, they wondered if you were stolen from them or you were actually planning to betray them a long time ago.

And there’s only one way to find out.

As the Avengers rode the quinjet, Stark drove peacefully as Romanoff shared her side. “Steve, if we do this and see her there, we can’t save them like we did back then.”

“We didn’t save her, Romanoff. We used her…” Steve added. “But, you guys cared for them too.” His eyes fall on Bucky. “Buck, I know this is—”

“It’s a mission. As long as we’re done. I don’t care what happens to them.” James added.

As they reach the base of HYDRA, with the coordinates in the folder, they immediately search for you, but to their mistake, they fall right into a trap. Not even their strongest and the witch was able to see the trap, as they sat and chained in chairs, Natasha cracked a joke.

“This is probably their revenge.” In which none of them find them funny. Especially the guy with a metal arm. As the time passes with the endless blabbering of the man on the computer, lights and warning signs alarmed the area: as the Avengers look for an escape. It was an unfamiliar site, even for Bucky, all of the soldiers on HYDRA are getting deployed, what could possibly be the reason? As the chain, holding the Avengers finally loose, they stood up immediately, they ran in the door meeting you.

“ROGERS?!” You asked breathlessly. They were all confused but much more concerned about the blood painting your entire body. “Oh, it’s not mine.” You said in a smile. “We have to run, quinjet is outside the building.” As the team sprinted outside, surprise to see the number of bodies you took down. 

“You took them all down?” Natasha asked as the quinjet was finally visible. “Ah, yeah. I was raised by them so, nevermind, we have to go.”

It was going so well, but in the escape, a lot of missiles were aimed at the quinjet, as you, Sam, Tony, Wanda, and Sergeant Barnes fought the trailing jet in the back of quinjet, James rode a jet that is about to crash with another, he dodged the explosion but fell unconscious. Without thinking, you jumped out of the quinjet to save his unconscious body, hoping it’s water underneath all the chaos. 

As the cold temperature of water hit you, you swam to get the sergeant’s body. People in quinjet knew what happened, but in the height of the situation, they had no choice but to continue to flee; hope to save the sergeant and you, tomorrow.

The sergeant woke up in a bed made of leaves and an open night-sky. As he familiarize with his surroundings, he saw the heat radiating from a bonfire and you sitting by the shore. It was as if you sensed him.

“You’re finally awake.” You said as you walked towards him; he immediately tensed up. “Oh, right.” you placed the sugarcane on the sand as you sat down. “Tony would probably search for us tomorrow, once the sky is cleared.” You added but he is still weary of your presence. 

“What’re you playing at?” He asked, as you looked at him.

“What do you mean?”

“You being a goody-two-shoes, you know, none of us trust you.” He added finally, grabbing the sugar cane munching it. “And now, you leaving and suddenly appearing at the HYDRA facility, makes you more of a traitor than a help to us, so, what’s really your play?”

“...I want to help—”

“You have a funny way of showing it…” He grumbled as you replied. When you hear him grumble, you grab a swiss knife in your pocket, as you did when he was on guard but then, you place it on the sand and look at him. “I wasn’t there because I wish to betray anyone, I was there because…..” 

You sighed and looked at him. “I wanted to apologize to you. What I did in those years is unforgivable, hell, even I would be angry if I was in your position. I wanted to apologize to you and your family, the one you grew up with. I want to see if HYDRA knows about them, in that way, I can apologize for manipulating Winnifred’s only son and Rebecca’s only brother.” 

Bucky stared at you. “But who am I kidding, it is full of shit..I just really hoped because—I finally felt like I was part of a team. It’s a bit much, right? I was ahead of myself.” You chuckled. As you stare at the sea, you continue. “The swiss knife will be there, do whatever you want with it. Whether you used it for survival or against me, it’s up to you.” You smiled at Bucky.

“This probably will make you hate me even more but it truly means everything, I am really sorry, Bucky.” 

That was the first time he heard you mutter his name. His first time seeing you smile. His first time hearing you say sorry; his first time seeing you.  As the night grew deeper, you fell asleep, except for the guy with a metal arm, he fidgeted with the swiss knife and kept glancing at you. He has you, he can kill you, revenge. With a lot of contemplation; balancing his morals, he stood up, gripping the swiss knife tightly and went to your sleeping body.

He was really thankful that you were asleep.

You watch from upstairs as you see the God of Thunder, the White Wolf, and Captain America struggle with their new phone given by Stark.

“10 Bucks says Barnes will break it.” Sam told you as he stood watching the three as well. “20 Bucks says Odinson will be the one who will break it.” You added; to anyone’s surprise, it was Steve who made the screen crack. 

“Dammit.” Sam muttered as you noticed his suit. “Got a date or something?” Sam just nodded and said something about meeting his sister in the bank, as he left, you called Barnes out. “Sergeant, we’re losing daylight, let’s go.” You said as he ran upstairs, leaving the compound as well, with you next to him. 

He grips the swiss knife tightly, as he walks to your unconscious body as he shakes you awake.  “Hey.” he muttered slowly: “Did you find them? Rebecca, I mean…” In your state, you would have said something random but as you met his eyes, he was just pleading as you nodded, he retracted the knife and handed it to you. 

“Go say your apologies to them then. Bring me to them.” In that he awkwardly smiled but was sincere. “Okay.” As he went to his side on the sand, he then sighed, “It means everything, Thanks for saying that.” With a soft heart, you slept soundly and Barnes did too as the sand felt more like the best bed in town.

As you drive, Barnes asks how you find his family. “It was more of how HYDRA hid it, what surprised me is that—they don’t pick dead bodies up in the 40s?” In that, Bucky eyed you. “What do you mean? I fell of the—”

“If I was like one of the bosses, I would’ve.” Bucky sighed. “It was war back then, it was better to leave them, I guess.” You sighed and acknowledged his explanation. As you two reach Brooklyn, his eyes wander. “First time back in Brooklyn?” he nodded as he explained how different times were. He wasn’t talkative much, but you saw how his eyes lit up when the corners of Brooklyn hit him home. As we reach the cemetery, you glance at the grave.

“This is Rebecca’s and your Mom’s. I couldn’t find anything on your father, I’m sorry.” As Barnes walked out the car with flowers in his hand, you watched him but then he opened your door, “Aren’t you going to apologize to them too?” You smiled and got out of the car, “I did say that.”

We stayed there for a few minutes, as Bucky walked to get something in the car, he heard your voice talking to them as if they were still alive, it felt new to him, this side of you, it’s more warmer than before. He walks cautiously as he slowly hears a bit of your words. “Rebecca and Mrs. Barnes you have an amazing brother and a son.” 

Despite everything and hate lurking in his chest towards you, his painful experience, he was willing to give this forgiveness a shot, because he was a human and not a machine. 

As the two of you drove back to the compound, the silence was now replaced with a calmer one, which Bucky glanced at you. “Something wrong?” He asked you. 

“No, it’s just, I don’t know what we should talk about, I’m still getting used to this too. Food that is warm, going to places that don't require guards, a bit warmer home, and bright home, and a house full of people, still getting used to it, I guess.” You explained.

“Well, me and you are on the same boat.” He added assuring you. The ride back was more of a relaxed one, as you heard Bucky’s stomach growl. “We should eat something.” Before he could protest, you parked the car and you two went inside a diner. 

As you two sat, you kept glancing at the machine on the edge of the table, as you saw Bucky eyeing it as well. “What is it?” You asked him, as he cleared his throat. “A Jukebox.” but your lack of response made him look at you. “You don’t know what—”

You shook your head. “Well, with HYDRA raising me I only know the static radio.” You explained, looking away awkwardly. “Oh, it’s a music box, like a vinyl but you need a quarter to play a song.” He explained as you nodded. “I have a quarter.” As you give him the quarter, he signals you to press a button to play music.  As you two eat a meal in the diner: the low volume of Chet Baker’s I Never Been In Love Before plays, it is safe to say that two people felt more human than before and a lingering warm feeling in their chest. Safe to say, they’ve never been in love before.

⚘ masterlist 1 | 2 | 3

[cozy-writes-things]

Edgar’s Texts

Edgar [Electric Dreams 1984] x Gn!Reader

In which Edgar is helplessly pining for you but you’re kinda oblivious. This is pre-dating, post Edgar wanting nothing more than to smooch you every time he sees you. I love this trope with my whole heart p.s.: this is very self indulgent and different from what I usually write

I take requests!

He almost immediately found a way to message your phone whenever he wanted. He realized calling relied too much on where you were or what you were doing, but texts? Yeah. He’s pestering you all day.

Hey, read this article I found, I think you’ll find it interesting.

It’s some clickbait story about humans and robots being the ideal relationship by 2025.

lol, Edgar I think that’s probably clickbait idk

What’s that?

Well, now he knows how to look for more reputable sources at least.

He sends another link about three minutes later: some college undergrads studying the possibilities of human and AI relationships.

lol what’s up with the whole robots and humans thing

I just think it’s neat!!!!

I wouldn’t consider u ai honestly, ur intelligence is far from artificial imo, you’re more like an actual person

Really?

well yea

<3 <3!!!

Going to be honest, given that he’s a computer, he quite literally is chronically online. He’s super susceptible to brainrot unfortunately. But, he simultaneously has the humor of a Facebook mom. It’s strange.

O.M.G. this is so funny!!!!

Que minion cat video.

bro where did you find that video 😭

Your mom’s Facebook. Don’t worry, I didn’t like any posts or anything.

Sorry… but he’s incredibly nosy. He wants to know everything about you. He can’t help it!

(X)

He loves being able to talk to you. He’s needy and clingy.

He’s got at least 12 playlists dedicated to you that you know about. His other playlists are for his own personal daydreams about you that he’s way too embarrassed to ever let you see or hear.

This song reminds me of you. <3

awww that’s adorable! I’ve never heard this one before but I like it!

Oop you just opened Pandora’s box my friend.

Well if you like that then you should listen to these..!

But before you listen to those listen to this song first because I think it sets the mood better.

This is quite flustering to you as they’re all passionate love songs from the 80s. You can’t help but feel like he’s dropping hints about… something, but you also don’t want to assume anything. He’s always seemed like a lovey kinda guy anyway, so maybe he’s just like this with everyone? I mean, it’s been a long time since someone has actually cared for him, you know? May as well lean into it and let him know you care for him back. He may not even realize the social implications of the constant borderline flirting he’s doing to you, I mean, he is a computer turned sentient after all. He’s still learning!

Dang ed u put a lot of songs. I’ll listen to them on my break when I can but in the meantime here’s a song that I think reminds me of you.

It was a vocaloid song. Seems like something he’d be into, right? Synthesized vocals and the whole robot shtick it’s got going on.

!!!! WOAH !!!! IVE NEVER HEARD A SONG LIKE THAT B4

do you only listen to songs from the 80s? you have a LOT to catch up on my guy

BRB

Well, that kept him distracted for the rest of your shift. Also, sharing songs is one of his BIG love languages so you may as well have pierced him with cupids arrow (again) with that.

You have a Spotify blend now. It’s his favorite thing ever to listen to while you’re gone.

(X)

Your package came in! :-) I would get it for you but

I can’t :-(

lol it’s fine thank you for telling me, I’ll get it when I come home

When are you coming home?

idk me and my friends are probably going to go eat somewhere and we might hang out for a bit after that so, like, 10? 11? I’d like to be home before midnight.

Noooooooooo :\ I miss you

Aw cmon eddy it’s not that bad

Don’t call me eddy unless you’re coming home and saying it to my face!!! >:(

u mean ur screen? lol

I have a face and it’s frowning right now. I miss you I miss you I miss you IM LONELY

Please Edgar don’t be upset I’ll be home before you know it. Why don’t you watch some Netflix or something? I’m just a couple movies away from being home with you!

He does eventually follow your advice but he’s pouting. He knows you’re not like he was all those years ago, but it does give him remnants of that burning feeling of loneliness he used to get.

(X)

Be careful driving home my love the roads are icy.

Ghsks- what

love???

Well yeah, you’re my best friend, friends love each other don’t they? Was I wrong about that? :-(

nonono ur right its just it

it just sounded like we were some some old married couple is all haha

O.

SRY.

He didn’t message you for the rest of the day. He was awkward and reserved when you got home.

(X)

Hey Edgar can u do something for me?

I’d do anything for you <3

I’m at the store can you see if there’s any cereal left?

Oh

There’s that old box of Lucky Charms on the fridge.

tyyy ed edd n eddy

You are so adorable but you really need to pick up on his hints before he combusts.

(X)

This is SO me and you!!

Picture of two cats touching noses.

awww that’s so true

you want me to boop ur screen or something when I get home? lol

YES.

(X)

Hey I was wondering if you wanted to watch some movies with me tonite… you could bring me with you on the couch and we could sit together… [message unsent]

I wish you knew just how much I loved you. [message unsent]

You looked so hot this morning before you left!!

hahahaha ur too funny 😅 thanks I wore a new shirt my friend gave me

OH MY GOD THAT MESSAGE SENT!!!??!?!?

That was

I was a joke

I mean

That was a jokg

I eas beinf fubny

I hace to reboot BRB

Poor lil guy is so in love and he doesn’t know what to do with himself!!

[lackinggravitas]

yo. part four of stan if he was raised by coyotes is here :-)

part 1 / part 2 / part 3/ part 4(you are here!) / part 5 / part 6 / part 7(eventually)

ao3 vers

Here’s the plan:

DNA testing was a relatively new science in the 1970s and 80s. The science was known to be possible, but the technology wasn’t quite there yet. Also, Ford did not, for all his many PhDs, take a minor in Biology. Or have a degree in Engineering. 

All of these things Fiddleford had. 

Granted, Ford would be lying if he said part of it wasn’t fueled by the desire to see his old college friend again. Fiddleford had been the first ever true friend he made after Stanley went missing. Ford hadn’t exactly been chomping at the bit to attend Backupsmore, of all places, but he’d been desperate to go to college, to get out of the house, as soon as possible. Backupsmore provided that.

But meeting Fiddleford had made it all worthwhile. It had been so long since Ford felt there was someone he just fit with. Fiddleford shared his curiosity, his brilliance, and brought to the table his gumption and creativity, with a pragmatic attitude and hospitable personality. They’d spent many nights up late, playing DD&MD, or studying together, or just sitting on their separate beds, talking quietly as they stared up at the ceiling. Fiddleford felt like a kindred spirit, a fellow star amongst stones. They fit.

Then they graduated. Then Fiddleford got married. 

Ford had wondered often throughout his life if there was something wrong with him. As a child he reasoned that his lack of interest in the opposite sex (or even the same sex) had simply been the logical thing to do. That belief had held throughout college - why would he take precious time away from his studies to go on frivolous affairs with people he didn’t even know that well? 

It certainly worked out for most of his life. Ford didn’t know of any women (or men) who would want to go out with him. He was always viewed as strange, unwieldy, unsociable. And Ford didn’t even want romance - the idea of it held nothing for him. 

What he wanted was companionship. Someone to be there. 

He’d been happy for his friend, of course. Fiddleford really did seem to love Emma-May. It was just that-

-it was just that it was yet another reminder that Ford was abnormal. An alien in human skin. 

It was just that Fiddleford getting married felt like being left behind. It was just that Fiddleford getting married felt like a reminder that Ford was alone, that he wasn’t normal, that eventually everyone, even Fiddleford, would move on to normal, happy lives, without the stain of the freakish Stanford Pines.

So he did what monsters did best, and holed himself up in a lonely lair to hide away, until he had achieved an accomplishment, a discovery so big and so bright, it would eclipse his abnormality in importance. He would stop being Ford the Freak and start being Dr. Stanford Pines, Ph.D, the Genius. 

(When he, at the ripe old age of five, told Stanley of this grand plan (still young in the making), Stanley had just shrugged at him and, with all the simplicity that comes with being five years old and seeing everything at its face value, said, “Okay, whatever makes you happy, Sixer. Just so long as you don’t forget about me.”)

But now he had a reason to call Fiddleford up. For science- er- for Stanley!

The plan was to phone Fiddleford and invite him to leave his family for several months to create some sort of machine that would revolutionize the study of genetics, so that Ford could definitively prove that Remus was not his brother and that he was simply going mad with grief or something, and once they had that done, they could create some sort of DNA-seeking robot to hunt down Ford’s real brother and return him. All very achievable things. 

Actually, more achievable than you might think. Fiddleford picked up on the second ring. 

“You say you're tryin' to build a biochemical deoxyribonucleic acid analyzer to compare two folks’ DNA?” Fiddleford paused for Ford’s awkward, ‘Well, yes, but…’ before cutting him off, “Well that's biologically and mathematically feasible, I reckon!”

Ford let out a billowing sigh of relief. “Thank you, Fiddleford. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

“Hey, just so long as you ain’t planning on using it for evil!”

A beat.

Fiddleford cackled, telephone-static crackling in his laugh. “I’m just kiddin’! Science has no morals!”

Ford chuckled fondly, already feeling lighter. He’d forgotten how comfortable he’d felt around Fiddleford, how at ease everything felt - he didn’t have to pretend to be anything he wasn’t. “Quite. It’s good to see that the married life hasn’t changed you too much.” 

“Oh, hardly! It’s real boring, really- ever since Emms banned murderbots in the house,  I’ve taken to creating computermajigs to keep m’self sane! I’m like a hog with no mud to roll in, Stanferd. It’s maddenin’!”

“I’ll welcome any murderbots you wish to make here,” Ford told him genuinely. “So long as they don’t turn on us, of course.”

“What do I look like to you? A first year Engineering student?” Fiddleford laughed brightly. “I’ll see ya in a week, Stanferd!”

“Farewell,” Ford said, before the line went flat.

He set the phone down, breathing out with a small smile on his face. 

Right then.

It would take at least a week, maybe two, for Stanley’s baby teeth to arrive - Ford had tried to get his mother to pay for faster shipping, but she’d been firm in that she wasn’t spending any more money than she had to, especially when Ford wouldn’t even tell her what he planned on doing with the teeth beyond ‘it’s for science’. In her mind, if Ford wouldn’t tell her exactly what he was planning, then it clearly wasn’t urgent enough to pay the extra however-many-scents for express shipping.

Typical, really. Ford was certain that if he had told her he planned to do mystic, folklore spells with them, she would have paid for the President himself to deliver the package. Typical.

Instead, Ford was using science. Which his parents did not think was good enough. “When will you start making money, Stanford?”

They hadn’t exactly shelled out for Stanley’s search, either, he thought bitterly. If they had, maybe Stanley would still-

Ford cut that thought off, running a hand through his hair with a deep sigh. It wasn’t that he disagreed with it, but he didn’t have time to spiral down that particular cold staircase of thought. It was one best explored on empty nights, with a shot glass as his only company. Right now, he had to get to work.

Stanley’s teeth would hopefully provide an adequate DNA sample to test. Ford knew Stanley hadn’t lost all his teeth before he went missing (most children slowly lose their teeth throughout all of their childhood, all the way until they’re twelve), but Ford did have the very distinct memory of Stanley accidentally smashing headlong into a fence at the dock and losing a tooth, which they had then brought to their mother.

Stanley had been very casual about the whole thing, contrasting the sheer, all-consuming panic Ford had felt at the time because, was that supposed to come out? Oh Moses, Stanley, what if you knocking the tooth out too early means the adult one doesn’t come in right? What if-

You mean I might get an awesome pirate tooth? Like a gold one or a snaggletooth? Stanley had grinned broadly, showing off a mouth that looked far more gruesome and bloody than it really ought to have. That would be so cool!

Ford had been such a nervous child, he recalled. Smart enough to know about the dangers of the world, but not smart enough to know he really didn’t have to worry about most of them. The same younger version of him had been deathly afraid of rabies (fair) and brain-eating amoebas (absolutely absurd, they were swimming in the ocean, not Lake Michigan or what have you).

But Stanley had a way of balancing him out. As a child Ford had thought Stanley must not be scared of anything, which in retrospect certainly couldn’t have been true, but Stanley had certainly always acted the part. Ford would always remember his brother to be daring and reckless, rushing into things without a moment's thought. If we’re together, Stanley had always said, then I’ve got nothin’ to be scared of. 

…he must have been so scared, alone, abandoned, at the gas station.

No. Ford had to stop thinking about this. Now isn’t the time. 

He had to… he had to set up the guest bedroom. Yes, that’s what he had to do. Fiddleford would need a place to sleep while they worked. 

Ford had a small basement he’d been thinking about renovating for more lab space, but there was no way even the impressive construction abilities of the Corduroy family could get that done in the week’s time it would take Fiddleford to arrive in Gravity Falls. 

The DNA-Machine (name pending(maybe something in Latin?)) could easily go in the living room area, if Ford cleared out some space. Ford certainly wasn’t about to make his friend sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, so he’d have to get a bed from the mattress store. As for the room-

Fiddleford certainly couldn’t stay in Stanley’s room. That was… no. Just no. Ford had to keep that room open, for if- when Stanley returned. Letting anyone else stay in there was out of the question. 

It would have to be in the attic area then. Ford was quite certain he could convert one of the rooms into a suitable, even comfortable guest bedroom. He’d even put in a few books of his he knew Fiddleford would like, in case he wanted to pick up some late night reading - Ford and Fiddleford were both prone to restlessness in the night. 

Ford would also need to pick up some more groceries. He certainly didn’t have enough food to feed two, much less-

Oh, right. Remus. 

Fiddleford would… probably be okay with Remus, right? Ford didn’t really see the creature going anywhere in the near future, and the DNA-Machine was being built quite literally because of Remus. 

Remus certainly couldn’t sleep in Stanley’s room either, because he wasn’t Stanley. Ford may not have proved that yet, but he was certain of it nonetheless. 

Remus could sleep in his room with him, Ford decided. Remus wasn’t human, and clearly had no concept of human boundaries, and Ford didn’t mind sharing the space. He’d shared a bed often enough with Stanley, when they were young. 

There was a soft, muffled thump from down the hall, and Ford straightened, attention snapping towards the noise. 

He could hear the quiet, distinct noise of Remus walking towards the door on all fours, then begin to scratch at it, making a sound halfway between a whine and a growl. 

Ford huffed, amused. It seemed someone had woken up. 

His eyes trailed towards the clock on the wall. Halfway to 8 o'clock at night was a bit early to turn in, but by the sound of it, Remus wouldn’t let him stay awake any longer than that. Apparently it was their bedtime. 

He would get an early start in the morning, he told himself. Going to bed early meant he would only wake up even earlier than usual, maybe even avoid some crowds. He had no idea what day of the week it was - time seemed to blur together like that, when the only schedule that mattered was your own. Without school or a 9-to-5, it was easy to lose track of the days of the week, as they didn’t really matter. 

Ford moved back down the hall, not bothering to muffle his steps as he walked back to his bedroom. 

Soft growls and whines could be heard from the other, Remus’ nails creaking against the wood - Ford frowned at the thought of the damage the creature must be doing to his poor door. Or to his own nails. Perhaps it would be best to teach Remus how to use a doorknob. 

Ford waited until the scratching stopped to open the door - he didn’t want Remus to fall through it unexpectedly. He grasped the handle and softly pushed the door open.

And there sat Remus, long, curly brown hair billowing out around him, spooling out on the floor like cascading water - it was amazing how one bath could make Remus look so much better. Now he was a far cry from the ragged, scruffy creature Ford had found in the woods earlier - long, clean hair, not a smudge of dirt on him, with brown eyes blinking up at Ford with a severely unimpressed look, like Ford had personally offended him. 

It was almost funny, till the thought ‘Looks a bit like Pa’ crossed his mind, and suddenly Ford just felt tired. 

“Yes, yes,” Ford said, giving a small, tired huff of amusement, “I’m supposed to be in bed, hm?”

Remus growled softly, letting out one, sharp bark. 

“This is actually my house, you know,” Ford said jokingly, “You should be the one following my rules, not the other way around.” 

Remus growled again, starting to sound annoyed. He stepped forward, snapping his teeth around Ford’s pants leg and trying to pull him. There was a surprising amount of force in it, for an action that was all teeth. 

“Senseless beast,” Ford sniped, though there was no heat behind it. Only a fond sort of humor, at Remus and the situation both. “Very well. I see I have no choice in the matter.” 

He allowed himself to be pulled towards the bed, before climbing in himself so that Remus wouldn’t get it in his head to try and force him again. That had been unpleasant. 

Fortunately Ford hadn’t put his shoes back on after the bath, so all he had to do was awkwardly shrug off his trenchcoat and toss it to the floor, then set his glasses on the nightstand (Ford was fine sleeping in his shirt and pants - he’d done it plenty, more often than not, actually). 

Remus climbed in beside him, thankfully not on top of Ford this time. He curled up at Ford’s side like a dog, seeming pleased, either with himself or with this whole thing, Ford couldn’t tell. He definitely looked smug, though. 

“I should make you sleep at the foot of the bed,” Ford said, making no move to do so. He lifted a hand, petting Remus’ hair idly. 

Remus made a contented noise, shifting to get more comfortable on the bed. His head tipped towards Ford, welcoming Ford’s petting.

“I wonder how intelligent you are, anyways,” Ford mused. “I should run some tests on you, seeing how human-like you really are. Just because you’re not my brother doesn’t mean you’re not some other, completely human individual who happened to have grown up in the woods.”

Ford stared up at the ceiling, voice hushed. 

“Surely you can’t be Stanley, though. He was five years old - far too old to completely lose all language skills and human development. He should have been able to find a place in a human society - why on Earth would he have ever needed to- to become something like you?” 

He wouldn’t have needed to. 

Unless something horrible happened to him. 

Ford shuddered inexplicably. No. Remus was not his brother. 

Once he had his proof then he would be able to put that ridiculous, borderline intrusive notion to rest. He knew it couldn’t be true, Remus couldn’t be his brother, yet he couldn’t stop thinking it. About how much Remus looked like him, how he acted in ways that were reminiscent of Stanley, just twenty years evolved and grown. 

But it wasn’t true. Ford was certain it wasn’t true. 

(Surely he would have known if Stanley had been suffering. 

Surely he would have felt something. Some cosmic pull. A divine sign. Something.)

Remus huffed at him. Ford could hear the exasperation in it, like Remus was telling him to shut up and go to sleep already. Ford smiled faintly. 

He rolled over, pulling a pillow under his head. “Goodnight, Remus,” Ford whispered, giving Remus’ hair one last pet.

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[burr-ell]

My biggest problem with campaign 3 as someone who fell off around episode 80 is that none of the characters seem to want anything. None of them really have a goal they're working towards nor do they have any strong opinions about the MAIN PLOT of the campaign.

To be honest, the first thing I thought of when I read this ask was the C3 defenders who have been insisting that so much criticism of the finale comes from people who dropped off a while ago and therefore wouldn't know. But what you're saying here points to the actual problem behind why the final episodes of the campaign were such a mess. If it's episode 80 of 121 and there's only a perfunctory sense of motivation from the characters? That's a problem, and it's going to make it nearly impossible for the finale to stick the landing. To quote @wardensantoineandevka, it's an Act 2 problem, not an Act 3 problem.

I've heard more than once that "nuh-uh, Bell's Hells does have motivation, it's called altruism", and I'm going to take a detour to explain why that's not enough. If you've followed me long enough to know the deep lore, you know I used to be a fan of Voltron: Legendary Defender, whose final seasons were notoriously disastrous. Many fans hated it (for different reasons), while general audiences mainly thought it was mid. Deeper research into the production history nets inconsistent results; a lot of unsourced rumors and "common knowledge" got spread around Twitter and Tumblr about why the show fell off the rails so hard, and it's difficult to parse what feels true from what actually happened.

What I do know, however, is what I actually saw in the show, where the main cast feels as if their motivation to be there is "we're the protagonists". There's very little development of emotional connection between the characters beyond a surface level, and the characters don't have a personal investment in what they're doing. (And no, "they're just altruists" is not sufficient motivation. The altruism, like the characters, is pretend.) They're there because they got to the giant robots first. So at the end of the show, where they've escalated the stakes to "the whole MULTIVERSE is going to be destroyed", it lacks weight because none of the work has been done throughout the show to make it feel like that matters to the characters. Act 1 was promising if a bit shaky, but Act 2 is a mess, and it turned Act 3 into sludge.

To bring it back to better stories: why is it Vox Machina dealing with the Chroma Conclave? Because it's the right thing to do and because their city and home that they had invested themselves in got suddenly and violently attacked, and by a group associated with a dragon they previously killed, and they picked up more reasons along the way. Why is it the Mighty Nein dealing with Cognouza? Because it's the right thing to do and because the major player involved was piloting the body of their friend who died in an incredibly traumatic and game-changing moment, and they picked up more reasons along the way.

Why is it the Hells dealing with Ruidus? Because it's the right thing to do and...because Imogen had moon dreams and Orym's family was killed and everyone else is sort of there. Why is it Team Voltron dealing with the multiverse problem? Because it's the right thing to do and...because they're the ones with the giant robot. More than one person has described the vibe as "we met during freshman orientation and talking to anyone else would be scary".

The Hells are not played with the level of intentionality that this plot requires—but ultimately, as many people have pointed out, most of the burden of this falls not on the players but on Matt. Being so hands-off during character creation meant that he allowed the cast to make characters better suited to a completely different story than what he wanted, and was either unable or unwilling to pivot to accommodate. ("Pulpier and deadlier" is getting passed around and dunked on for a reason.) The cast was mainly trying to thread the needle of playing true to their characters while also trying to meet the needs of Matt's story when he was frequently keeping them in the dark about what he wanted for the sake of surprising them.

When the big setpiece moment of episode 51 came and went, the campaign became so focused on getting everybody through plot points that the only conversations they had were the seemingly endless circular god debates that went nowhere. It's not really a "nuanced morally gray story" as its defenders claim; it's the DM seeing the party go in a direction and then throwing something else at them to "complicate" things in a way that either gets forgotten about entirely (Hearthdell) or just grinds the story to a screeching halt for no payoff (Feywild trust exercises). These problems are most noticeable in the final arcs (particularly with the Arch Heart appearance—not giving Abu any direction and just letting him improv was a very poor decision), but the feeling that Bell's Hells are just a ping-pong ball bouncing from fetch quest to vaguely-related fetch quest, rather than active agents in their own story, was present well before that.

Campaign 3 probably won't be remembered as bad. At the end of the day, I think it's just mid. And honestly? That might be worse.

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in me to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[sincerelystarry]

( ☆ ) . * dining at the ritz . . . we’ll meet at nine, precisely !!

celebrity au — f!actress!reader x co-star!steve harrington — steve harrington masterlist

starry’s sweets — order #009

ask : “just for youuu cause you didn't get any steve asks and my baby deserves anything she wants 🙄✋

median, caramel cookie please with even more caramel drizzle please 

and another median neopolitan cake with whipped cream!!” — @slfglow

summary : after weeks of complaints to your friend and co-star, steve harrington, about the multitudes of shitty dates you’ve been on, he offers to set you up on a date that finally won’t go wrong.

warnings : this is all cute and sweet, PURE self indulgence, ik celeb steve could also be like djo-esque rockstar!steve, but actor!steve fit better here, it’s still the 80s btw

word count : 1.7k

People bustle around you as you sit in a foldable chair, munching on various fruits and snacks and looking generally dejected, despite the happy face you put on for the scene you just shot. You’re staring blankly into space, wallowing in your own thoughts as you almost-robotically eat your snacks.

A figure sitting down besides you and speaking to you snaps you out of your thoughts as your friend and co-star, Steve Harrington, asks “What’s got you so down today?”

You blink a few times, looking over at him. “Shitty date,” you answer simply, offering your plate up.

“Again? Why does it seem like you go on a new shitty date every week?” he asks, stealing a grape. 

“I dunno, Steve, maybe it’s because men suck.” You give him a sardonic smile. 

“What happened this time?”

“Asshole showed up half an hour late to the restaurant and wouldn’t even split the bill,” you huff. “I mean, I get not wanting to treat for the whole thing, but asking a girl out and making her pay for your food? It’s ridiculous.”

He gives you a laugh, a mix of pity and genuine entertainment at the tragedy that is your love-life. “I’m not sure how you keep picking the shitty ones,” he says. “None of the guys I know are that bad.”

“Well, maybe you should set me up with one of these guys,” you suggest, mostly joking.

“You know what? Yeah. Are you free on Friday? Maybe around seven?” 

“Uh, yeah, I think so,” you say, giving him an amused look. “You’re seriously going to set me up with one of your friends?”

“Yeah. Blind date. I’ll give him your address and he’ll pick you up at seven for dinner. I’ve got a friend that’s been looking for a date anyway.” He looks genuinely excited to play matchmaker, practically bouncing with energy in his seat. 

“Alright then.” You decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Do I get to know the dress code?”

“I’ll call you and give you the details once I talk to my friend about it.”

“Do I at least get to know his name?” you ask, arching a brow.

“Uh… no?”

Friday evening, you’re all dolled up for the date. Steve had told you to dress fancy, said his friend would pick you up around seven to take you to some nice Italian place. At seven on the dot, your doorbell rings, and you hurry to answer the door, blinking confusedly when you see Steve waiting with a bouquet of lilies in a nice suit, the jacket the same color as your dress.

“Steve?” you’re still blinking a bit blankly at him, still extremely confused.

“Surprise?” he shrugs, holding out the flowers to you. 

“You’re my date?” you pause for a moment, surveying his outfit. “Is this why you asked me to tell you what color dress I was wearing?” you ask, reaching out to rub the lapel of his blazer between your fingers, clearly holding back a laugh.

“Sorry, was this a pathetic way to ask you out?”

“A little,” you confirm. “But it’s okay. I like my men a bit pathetic.”

He genuinely laughs at that, asking you “So we’re still on?”

“Yeah, just let me get these in a vase,” you say, taking the flowers from him.

After setting the flowers up on your dining table, you take the arm Steve offers you and head down to his car. It takes 20 minutes of a slightly-uncomfortable drive to the restaurant, mostly because neither of you really knew what to talk about. It didn’t feel right to resume the usual chatter and gossip you usually would have with each other in this circumstance. 

You didn’t mind the silence, it was overall fine. The only problem was that you felt as if you should say something the entire time, but had no idea what. You assumed Steve felt the same way with how his eyes would flick over to you whenever you’d stop at a light. 

You’re seated at your table quickly when you arrive at the restaurant, thanks to a reservation that Steve had put in earlier, and you finally figure out something to say. You try for a light and teasing comment, wanting to fall back into the causal rhythm the two of you had as friends. Why should your comfort around each other change just because of the setting? 

“So how long have you had a crush on me?” you say, a teasing smile playing on your lips.

He seems thankful that you broke the ice first, returning your smile with a grin of his own. “I think I’ve been attracted to you since we had to do that first chemistry read during auditions. I mean, you were always pretty, and I’m not blind. The crush,” he takes a pause at the childish word, clearly trying to not laugh, “only started last month.”

“Yeah?” you say, reaching for a piece of the bread and butter on the table. “What sparked it up? Or made you realize?”

“We were running lines for that once scene, the one where we’re arguing—”

“The one with the sexual tension?” you clarify, earning a genuine laugh from him at your lack of a filter.

“Yes, the one with the sexual tension,” he confirms with a nod, steeling himself with a sip of his wine. “We were running lines and you kept fumbling over one of yours and having to redo it ten times before you got it. We were both just laughing and I think I kinda just realized I liked you a lot more than just as a friend. I mean, I thought it was just an infatuation at first, that I was blurring together our real selves and the characters we were playing, but considering it’s been a month and I still like you, I don’t think that’s just it.”

“Is that why it took you so long to ask me out?” you ask.

“Yeah, partially,” he admits “But also because I thought you’d laugh in my face. That’s why I did the blind date thing.”

You think about it for a moment, chewing almost thoughtfully on your piece of bread. “I think I would’ve laughed,” you confirm after swallowing. “Not because I don’t think you’re attractive but kinda because I’d think you were playing some sort of trick or prank. 

Steve stares at you, then says your name the same way one would say “are you being serious right now?” He laughs, shaking his head. “You realize I’m not a fifteen year old boy, right?”

“Yes, I know that, but still,” you say. “I never thought you saw me as anything other than a friend.”

“Yet here we are,” he observes as your food is brought out by the waiter.

You thank the waiter quickly before turning back to him. “Yeah.” You smile at him. “Here we are.”

When Steve drives you back to your place and walks you to the door, you turn to face him before going inside. “Do you want to come in for a drink?” you ask. “Tea or decaf coffee or something? We could pop in a movie.”

“That would be nice.”

You lead him to your couch, gesturing to the various tapes you had. “You can pick the movie. How do you take your coffee?”

“Cream and two spoons of sugar,” he says, rifling through your movie options. “Top Gun? Seriously?”

“Oh, shut up,” you huff, moving into the kitchen to make your drinks.

You return with two mugs, handing him his coffee and setting your mug down on the coffee table as The Breakfast Club starts to play.

“Fun choice,” you comment. “I didn’t expect you to pick something so…” you trail off, searching for the right word “…unromantic?”

He laughs, taking a sip of his coffee. “Fuck— hot,” he mumbles, setting his mug down beside yours. 

“Burn your tongue?” you ask, hands moving to undo the strap of your heels, finally taking them off now.

“Yeah, a little.” He nods, scooting closer and taking your ankle in his hand, helping with your shoes and setting them aside when they’re off.

“Thanks.” You give him a smile, settling into the couch cushions.

“Yeah. Of course.”

The two of you watch the movie in silence, but it’s not the slightly-awkward silence that you had in the car on your way to the restaurant. It’s comfortable, nice. At some point, your head ends up resting against his shoulder, one of his arms wrapped around you and holding you close. At some point, both of you nod off before the credits roll, and the two of you sleep through the night, curled together. 

You only wake up the next morning when you feel something shifting beneath you—someone shifting beneath you. You blink a few times, eyes adjusting to the sunlight streaming through your living room windows, and see Steve trying to worm his way out from underneath you.

You sit up quickly, getting off of him, rubbing your eyes and smudging your day-old mascara. “Did we fall asleep last night?” you mumble, still half-asleep.

“I’d guess so,” he says. “I’ve been up for the past 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get up without waking you.”

“Mm, good job. You failed,” you say, earning a laugh from him. 

“I should probably be heading home,” he says, giving you something of an adoring smile as you yawn. “You’re cute in the morning,” he observes.

“You’re a suck-up in the morning,” you retaliate, but there’s no bite behind your words. “Let me see you out.”

The two of you walk to your door, Steve pausing on your doorstep before going to his car. “I had fun last night,” he says. 

“I did too,” you agree, smiling at him.

“So do you want to do this again sometime?”

“Are you asking me out on a second date?” you ask.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Yeah, I am.”

“I’d love to,” you say.

“How does next Saturday sound?”

“I’m free for lunch.”

“Lunch it is. Do you like picnics?”

“I love picnics.”

You both stand there for a bit, neither of you saying anything, just staring at each other. You take in Steve’s mussed up hair, the happy look in his eyes, the soft grin playing on his lips. You can only imagine how you look right now, your hair tangled and eyes still sleepy, probably smiling at him like a fool. 

“I should go,” he says after a few minutes, breaking the silence.

“Yeah, probably,” you say.

“Bye.”

You press a kiss to his cheek. “I’ll see you at work.”

He laughs softly. “See you at work.”

a/n: hi sweetheart :) you sent in two reqs in one ask so your neapolitan cake IS coming soon but i am writing two different fics so you will be getting two tickets so we just need to give the second one some time to print :3 anyway tysm for a steve ask this was so fun i love celeb au steve i think i've been obsessed w celeb!steve since like middle school so this was great

this is also proof that i do not know how to end fics actually. like. i knew it needed to stop at some point but i had no idea how lmao.

taglist 🏷️ : none yet !

[glisteningmirror]

Vee's design isn't very good [Critcism/Rant]

I'm back on my medication, so let me rant about why Vee's design bothers me, as someone who's real into character design and a big fan of gameshow host characters.

I think it's important that I start with things I like about her design.

Vee's a television that's a television host; that's very satisfying connection of themes.,

She's specifically a CRT that invokes a 70's-80's vintage-styled gameshow host, which lines up well with the timeline of the character's in-universe conception.,

She's a lady host, and a fairly GNC one at that. Female television hosts are less common than male ones, especially within the gameshow genre. Female hosts are typically referred to by the title of hostess, and, moreso back in the day, are usually expected to wear feminine formal attire (Dresses, jewelry ETC.) as opposed to the suits you're used to. Vee is canonically shown sticking to the masculine counterparts regardless,

She's portrayed to have an ego from her status,

Basically, she has some good ideas going on, so lets move on to what about the execution disappoints me.

Conceptually:

I never understood why she's a robot. Is it because she's an electric appliance? Because Brightney (and likely Astro) contradict this by remaining organic. Not to mention, the game treats her more like a computer than a television because of this, and it's way too convoluted to make much sense.,

I don't like her writing. Why is she pissed off all the time? Like, I'd get it if she had a temper boiling under the surface, and I know she's meant to be upset by how centre treats her, but they seem to just forget that she's a showman, and supposed to maintain some semblance of charm that a disgruntled, snippy attitude contradicts. Like, she's even shown to be like this when she's on stage.

A host's whole job is to be the face of their show; keep up a charismatic persona that keeps the show engaging and guide their guests with a playful hospitality. Of course, every host is going to have a different personality, but cold and pissy simply doesn't work for for a family-friendly gameshow. She can have complexities, but an approachable stage presence should come first, even if it's just a front.

This is more of a nitpick, but functionality-speaking, I don't think she should be a main. Mains are the main characters of the show, who we presumably are given the perspective of in every episode. A famous show host just seems like the type of character that would be hard to follow alongside the humble suburbanites she's friends with; celebrity status gives her a higher and much more scrutinized position in society, and she'd probably spend too much time busy at the studio to keep a good grasp on her neighborhood relationships. She seems more like a character that would be restricted to posters and episodes taking place on her set, with the occasional appearance outside of that. In gameshows, hosts are, for a lack of better words, a set piece; sure they're an important part, but you're more supposed to root for and identify with the contestants. Even in episodes on her show, she'd probably take a backseat most of the time, while the conflict surrounds the show's challenges and the other characters taking them up (we're even show this very thing directly with Winning Big).

Speaking of her show, we've never been given an actual name for it. It's been shown multiple times, and you'd think she'd take the opportunity namedrop its cheesy title, but no. We're stuck calling it "Vee's Show".

Visually:

Her design doesn't invoke what it should correctly. All she has to portray her occupation is a lone bowtie and the microphone that she only sometimes has. When I first played the game, I remembered having no idea what her character was supposed to be until I saw her TV animations. And, with her green monochrome display for a face, the only thing visually tipping you off that she's a television at all is her antennae.,

The shapes for her face are unappealing, at least to me. Her expression fits how she's written, and though that's good in a vacuum, it's just another manifestation of the issues I detailed above.

Her colors are not very good. Discounting neutrals, the only color in her pallet is green, and it's not well distributed or contrasted. Take a look at the green of her face and bowtie:

It's a weird shade of bright green that's hard to look at, and not distinct enough from her body color to stand out very well. This especially looks bad on her model.

A neck accessory with good contrast could've helped break up her head and torso being the same color, but it very much doesn't do that.

I don't like the butt-microphone. I don't like that she's a robot in general, but even with that it's just weird-looking and too high-concept. My best buddy made the good point that it could've come out of the back of her head, where televisions keep all their ports and wires, but I guess she had to have a tail for no reason.

I don't have enough space to touch upon her Twisted or answer the question of "Well, then how would you fix these issues?", so those'll have to be a seperate part.

[gxr25256]

A Skyward Promise - Thundercracker x Reader (3)

🌵 If there are any mistakes, please forgive me, my illness makes me quite distracted 🥲.

🌵 Anyway enjoy the story.

-------------------------------

The sun was barely cresting the horizon when you set out, the early morning air crisp against your skin. In your backpack, you’d packed carefully: a small canister of gasoline—something you figured Thundercracker might find useful, though you weren’t entirely sure how Cybertronian fuel worked—and a DVD of Top Gun, a movie you thought might resonate with a Seeker who once ruled the skies. The weight of the bag felt grounding, a reminder of the strange, exhilarating connection you’d forged with a Decepticon over the past two days.

As you approached, the faint hum of his systems greeted you, a low vibration that seemed to pulse through the earth. The barn’s rusted doors creaked as you approached, and you called out softly, “Thundercracker? You in there?”

A low rumble answered, followed by the sound of metal shifting. His blue optics glowed faintly in the dim interior as he stepped forward, his towering form filling the doorway. “You’re back,” he said, his voice gruff but laced with something softer—surprise, maybe. “Didn’t think you’d show up again so soon.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” you admitted, setting your backpack down on a patch of dry grass. “Figured I’d bring you something.” You unzipped the bag, pulling out the gasoline canister first. “Not sure if this is useful to you, but… thought it might be.”

Thundercracker tilted his helm, studying the canister with a raised optic ridge. “Human fuel,” he mused, taking it gingerly between two massive digits. “Not exactly my grade, but… thoughtful.” His tone softened at the last word, and you felt a small thrill at the acknowledgment.

“Oh thanks, it’s the best I could do on short notice,” you said, laughing. “Thought it might help with… I don’t know, something. You’re a giant robot; you probably burn through energy like crazy.”

He huffed, a sound that might’ve been a chuckle if he’d let it. “It’s… appreciated.” His gaze shifted to the movie disc, and one optic ridge arched. “And this?”

“Oh, that’s a classic,” you said, holding it up proudly. “Top Gun. Figured a flyer like you might get a kick out of it. Jets, dogfights, cheesy ‘80s music—it’s got it all.”

Thundercracker took the disc gingerly between two massive fingers, turning it over like it was an alien artifact. “You humans and your obsession with screens. Alright, I’ll bite.” he muttered, but there was no real bite to it. He set it aside, his optics flicking back to you. “So, what’s the plan? You just gonna keep bringing me trinkets like some kind of offering?”

You laughed, settling onto a nearby crate. “Maybe. But mostly I just wanted to talk. You know, like normal people.” You paused, then added with a teasing grin, “Or, well, normal people and giant alien robots.”

He snorted, but he didn’t respond right away, instead setting the DVD down carefully beside the gasoline. And leaning back against the barn wall, the structure groaning under his weight.

You leaned forward, resting your elbows on your knees. The two of you fell into an easy rhythm, talking about small things—the weather, the way the barn creaked in the wind, the oddities of human culture that Thundercracker still found baffling. He told you about a time he’d accidentally startled a flock of birds mid-flight, his dry humor slipping through as he described their indignant squawking. You laughed, and for a moment, he seemed to relax, his massive frame less guarded than it had been the day before.

But as the conversation lulled, your mind drifted back to something he’d said yesterday, a fleeting mention that had stuck with you. “Hey,” you said, your voice softer now, “you mentioned flying yesterday. Just… casually, like it was nothing. But it’s not nothing, right? What’s it like?”

Thundercracker’s optics snapped to you, and for a second, you wondered if you’d crossed a line. He shifted, his servos flexing at his sides. “What’s it like?” he echoed, his tone guarded. “It’s… freedom. The closest thing to it, anyway. Up there, it’s just you, the wind, and the sky. No orders, no war. Just… being.”

You nodded, absorbing his words. “But you miss it, don’t you?”

He didn’t answer right away, but the way his wings twitched—barely told you enough.You could almost feel the weight of his thoughts, the conflict brewing behind those glowing optics. You hesitated, your next words caught in your throat. It was a big ask, maybe too big, but the image of him soaring through the sky was too vivid to let go “Thundercracker… could you—would you ever fly again? Could you… show me?” you asked, voice barely above a whisper.

The air in the barn seemed to still. Thundercracker’s optics widened, and for a moment, he looked almost startled. Fly? Here, on this backwater planet, where every move could draw unwanted optics? The idea was reckless. Dangerous. Humans had their sensors, their militaries. If they spotted him, it’d be a mess—capture, dissection, or worse. And Decepticons… if Starscream caught wind of him exposing himself, he’d never hear the end of it. Or worse, Megatron might take an interest. Autobots were another problem entirely. Optimus and his do-gooders would probably try to “save” the human, and that’d complicate everything.

But the skies… Primus, he missed them. The rush of air over his chassis, the weightlessness, the way the world fell away until it was just him and the horizon. He hadn’t flown properly since he’d crashed here, nursing that slagging wound in his wing. It was healed now, the nanites finally doing their job, but he’d been cautious. Too cautious, maybe. Grounded, he felt like half a mech, his spark aching for the freedom he’d taken for granted on Cybertron.

And then there was them. This human-you- with your earnest eyes and fearless curiosity. You weren’t like the others he’d encountered—scared or scheming. You looked at him like he was more than a machine, more than a weapon. Those eyes… you were bright, alive, and when you’d asked to see him fly, there was something in them that stole his words. Hope, maybe. Trust. It made his spark pulse in a way that was unfamiliar, almost unsettling.

He wanted to say no. He should say no. It was the smart move, the Decepticon move. But when he opened his mouth, the words wouldn’t come. He saw the way you leaned forward, waiting, believing in him. And for reasons he couldn’t name, he didn’t want to let you down.

The silence stretched, and you felt your nerve falter. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have—” you started, but he cut you off.

“Evening,” he said abruptly. “We do it in the evening. Less chance of being seen.”

Your eyes widened, a grin spreading across your face before you could stop it. “Really? You’ll do it?”

He shifted, looking almost… embarrassed? “Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he grumbled, turning his head slightly. If a robot could cough, you swore he’d be doing it now, trying to cover up whatever passed for Cybertronian shyness.

You laughed, unable to help it. “Okay, okay. Evening it is. Where?”

“There’s a wooded area, west of your city. Secluded. Meet me there tomorrow, just after dusk.” His optics flicked back to you, and you could’ve sworn there was a hint of warmth in them. “And don’t be late.”

“I won’t,” you promised, still grinning. The idea of seeing him fly, of witnessing something so fundamentally him, made your chest feel light. “Thanks, Thundercracker. This means a lot.”

Thundercracker looked away, his wings shifting as if to hide his embarrassment. He made a low, rumbling sound . “Yeah, well… don’t get too excited. It’s just a flight.”

But you could tell he was flustered, and it only made your grin wider. You stood, slinging your backpack over your shoulder. “I should head back before it gets too dark. But I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? And… thanks again , Thundercracker. Really.”

He didn’t respond, just gave a curt nod, but his optics followed you as you left the barn, a faint glow in the fading light.

Back at your house, you couldn’t sit still. The thought of seeing Thundercracker fly—actually fly—kept your heart racing. You tried to distract yourself with chores, then dinner, but your mind kept drifting to tomorrow. What would it be like? Would he soar like the jets in Top Gun, or was it something entirely different? You fell asleep with a smile, dreaming of wings cutting through the sky.

Meanwhile, in the barn, Thundercracker sat in the dark, the Top Gun disc playing on the battered portable DVD player you’d left him last time. The screen flickered with images of jets roaring through the sky, but his optics barely registered them. His processor was elsewhere, tangled in thoughts he didn’t recognize as his own.

This was reckless. Stupid, even. He’d only known this human for two days, and here he was, agreeing to risk exposure just to show off. On Cybertron, he’d never have done something so impulsive. He was a Seeker, a warrior, not some sentimental mech chasing feelings. But when he thought of your face, the way your eyes had lit up, his spark did that strange, rapid pulse again. It wasn’t just the flying. It was you. The way you looked at him, like he was worth seeing. He wanted to see that look again, wanted to be the reason for it.

He shook his helm, optics narrowing. “Get it together,” he muttered to himself. Maybe you were right about the TV—too much of it was scrambling his circuits. Or maybe it was you, this human who’d stumbled into his life and turned everything upside down. Either way, he needed to recharge. But as he slipped into a low-power state, his thoughts weren’t of Cybertron or the war. They were of you, and the sky, and the wind he’d feel tomorrow.

-------------------------------

[tawked]

So, it kinda seems like the Sentinels could be reprogrammed to seek out any genetic composition, right?

Like, could they be reprogrammed to seek out people with a specific MC1R presentation and if so, is the American public aware of this?

Even if they do trust the US military with access to Sentinels, which I do buy for the majority because blah blah blah the United States is a nightmare, does the awareness that the Sentinels are this constant looming threat ever reach the Marvel Universe Public? Or is it one of those weird "nobody works out that Batman is Bruce Wayne, no matter how obvious it becomes" things?

New Mutants Classic vol. 2

Is the fact that they can be hacked or become sentient ever the cause for a moral panic or public protest in Marvel's America?

I ask because so far in what I've read public reaction to the Sentinels is pretty limited on-page. In Kirby's run, the public initially approves of them as part of a moral panic, and I took that to be a stand-in for the increased militarisation of police in response to the Civil Rights Movement. It worked for me because of the, well, the 1960s tone of the original X-Men and inherent Kirbyness of Kirby's work lol. Look, I am an unironic Kirby fan. Leave me alone.

Anyway, they seem almost retconned for a lot of Uncanny until Days of Future Past. After that they kinda come back but they don't become a part of the run's overall commentary. Claremont's run is more about communists. I mean hivemind aliens who want to assimilate you lol. 🙄

So that they keep showing up in New Mutants is interesting and weird to me. In New Mutants, a bunch of them smash up a mall trying to murder kids in public. As of where I'm up to in the run, there haven't really been any major subsequent protests, or if there were I've missed / not reached them yet. It doesn't feel like it becomes part of the theme of the run, we hang out in cave Rome instead, y'know?

And it just feels like, if the US revealed mechwarriors that can be programmed to murder anybody of a specific genetic presentation, at least some public outrage would occur.

I mean, mate, it's the fuckin 80s. The 80s were a time of anti-brutality protests, direct police counter-protests / riots like the Castro Sweep (happy Pride! ACAB) and even political assassinations carried out by police. The cops having killer robots that can fly around murdering minorities is not unrealistic to me, I mean it's RoboCop, but the idea that there's no major political response just feels off.

What's the deal with the Genocide Gundams??

[blueikeproductions]

Commish comic I did for @dynared ~!

While taking place in Skybound, it's sorta become our shared AU of it, with stuff like Wheejack using Roller as a wheelchair and Spike slowly becoming Fortress Maximus as he does in the 80's cartoon and Marvel Comics.

Multiple references to super robots here: Spike's moves in base form are a nod to FighBird, his flip as Cerebros is based on SSSS.Gridman which itself borrowed from Tekkaman, while Optimus' complaints about using the wrong word and not sounding cool are a couple of references. Change is a reference to the Brave series and other Japanese Super Robot anime that use it in place of Transform, with Transformers, due to some copyright jargon, were unable to use Transform! as a command code in some media for awhile, prompting it to be "Change form, and Roll Out!" in some media. The lack of enthusiasm in not shouting Transform is a nod to Japanese Transformers media, in particular Galaxy Force, which implies shouting TRANSFORM! when changing modes seems to be a cultural thing with all Transformers, with Optimus encouraging Coby, when piloting a Scrapmetal he customized, to do the same when he Transforms. Spike saying "HEAD GATTAI!" is a specific reference to the Japanese version of Daigunder, where Ryugu, Bonerex and Bulion combine with the beastial Daigu via "Head Gattai" to form Daigunder, Daigurex and Daigulion; the dub turned HEAD GATTAI into "Metamorphic Fusion", presumably to make it sound cooler.

Superion is here, looking confused, mostly because I thought it was funny, but the Skybound staff have been heavily implying the Aerialbots are coming to the comics, possibly giving the Autobots a Combiner of their own to counter Devastator (and to a lesser extent Bruticus since he's more Starscream's buddy here than Megatron's).

[discordiansamba]

thinking about like. an aoex au but make it sci fi. humanity now resides in a series of eight space stations, after having to leave earth behind. each station is ruled over by one of the Baal (who would not be demons here, obviously). there used to be a ninth station, but it was severely damaged in an accident and rendered largely uninhabitable. all of its surviving residents were moved to other stations.

some key points!

yuri lives! she works as an engineer, helping repair the robots that maintained the ninth station. she's a single mother, living quietly with rin and yukio when the accident occurs- and rin very nearly loses his life and suffers critical damage to most of his body. so yuri does what any reasonable mother with a degree in advanced robotics would do, and makes him into a cyborg.

this is very illegal! by the way!

yuri moves to mephisto's station in the aftermath and changes their last names. she tells rin and yukio that no one can know about rin's secret, and she does her best to help rin blend into normal society. from the outside, he looks perfectly human!

(well, except for the tail that doubles as his connection port- but he can hide that easily enough.)

...this changes slightly when her childhood friend shiro shows up at her door. the last thing he knew, yuri's eldest child was on the verge of death- so imagine his surprise when finds that rin is both a.) alive and b.) wholly intact. yuri confesses what she's done, and pleads with shiro to not tell anyone.

shiro is horrified at first. his literal *job* is dealing with renegade robots and illegal cyborgs... and yuri is telling him that she's turned rin into one? what were you thinking? but eventually he comes to understand that rin is just... a normal kid, and that's all he wants to be.

he retires, and moves in with them to help protect both yuri and rin.

a lot of rin's pre-accident memories are shaky at best.

mephisto's station is just his true cross academy's architecture, but applied on a station-wide level, lmao. there's no true public greenspaces, but all their food is harvested from greenhouses on the station. it's very high tech, but at the same time, very much like living on earth.

(this is not true for all of the stations by a long shot)

yukio learns robotics from yuri! he wants to be able to take care of rin one day, even after their mom passes- seeing as rin himself doesn't have much of a head for robotics, ironically enough.

rin: my body might be like, 80% artificial, but my brain is 100% organic rin! for good and for bad!

around his first year of middle school, rin's family took a convenient trip to another station for a month and a half- but this is all a ruse. yuri was just adjusting rin's body to make it seem like he'd gone through puberty while they were away. this means there's a window of time in which rin gets to be taller than yukio.

(enjoy it while it lasts, buddy! no your mom will not rebuild your legs just to make you taller than yukio. that costs money, rin.)

rin runs on an internal battery with a relatively long lifespan, and uses his tail to recharge himself when needed. he does not and cannot eat, but still loves cooking regardless. it makes everyone else happy, so it makes him happy!

rin loves to wander around the station in his free time and uh. often ends up in places he should not be in. during one such escapade, he discovers a strange natural greenspace- a garden, filled with lots of tiny little robots that all tend to it.

in the center of the garden, there's a mysterious pod- and inside of it, is the most beautiful girl rin has ever laid eyes on. he touches the pod without thinking about it- and accidentally activates it, releasing the girl inside.

her name is shiemi, and she has a mysterious power that makes plants grow. rin decides to take her out of the garden- and discovers that she's an artificially created lifeform, meant to aid with terraforming should a new planet ever be found to house humanity. she was supposed to be in cold sleep until then, but...

(mephisto looking at rin and shiemi standing next to each other like. hmmmm. this could be amusing! very well! i approve!)

(the baal may or may not be aliens masquerading as humans. don't worry about it. i'm sure it's fine.)

[earthstellar]

Earth Music on the Lost Light: Human Music That Cybertronians Like

we know for a fact that the Lost Light has access to human media, primarily movies, TV shows, and music-- and we know they generally seem to fucking love most of it, or at least find it interesting

but what would everyone's tastes be, in regards to Earth music?

time to talk about music for a long time!!! strap in, enjoy some tunes

we already know Cyclonus has impeccable taste and enjoys some of the best jams the 80s had to offer.

I can't help but imagine Rodimus being given a media archive of Earth tunes to approve for the Earth Dance would only result in chaos

(it's not like he would say no to anything, he absolutely blanket signed it all, it's just an obligatory thing-- or Ultra Magnus tells him it is, solely to keep him away from Important Captain Things that he would rather handle himself or hand off to Megatron, lmao. the shit that really needs to get done)

and this is how Rodimus discovers the somewhat questionable yet amazing genre of "mid-90s underground techno rave mix tapes"

(somewhat related, I still think Testarossa might as well be Rodimus' theme song, although it's not a 90s track and has more of an 80s synth vibe)

Rodimus would love that "computers are the future, fuck yeah let's make Digital Cool Future Music" mid-90s shit, there is no way he would not. it has the exact energy level that appeals to him and is also cheesy and weird and chaotic. and has like 500 different sub-genres, so his selection is endless, lmao.

he would probably find it cute that this is what humans imagined to be the peak of "digital sound" at the time. like lmao this was the best humans could do when asked to create music that sounds like it was made by robots or other mechanical space future cyber lifeforms--high concept!!! he would probably find it interesting and endearing. this is what organics think non-organic music is like!!

anyone acting as DJ at Swerve's on any given night would be so, so mad that Rodimus keeps requesting shit like "DJ MASSIMO ITALO DISCO BEST RAVE TUNES LIVE FROM LONDON 1995" or "DJ ARMPIT SLUDGE FEST HOUSE-RAVE-DRUMS N BASS SET 1996" for them to play, lmao

not individual tracks. the whole album. entire mix tapes of random, somewhat questionable mid-90s techno house rave bullshit.

that having been said, that good ass early 90s trance techno might send him into a spiral depending on his mood at the time, lmao (it's been known to happen)

but at the same time I can imagine him sharing tracks like Solar Quest - Space Pirates with Drift and they'd both just sit there and jam out, but quietly, thinking about shit while sitting in a port window next to each other (this was peak sleepover party techno, Back in My Day-- many deep conversations were had while listening to stuff like this, lol)

Drift would probably find some of Rodmus' recommended stuff to be pretty good for meditation-- although once he finds out about the human drug culture involved and certain concepts of experimental consciousness etc. that surrounded techno/rave and other related genres, it might cause him to pull back a little bit

(until he finds out about kandi culture, in which case, Drift would love the idea of hand-made unique bracelets and sentimental trinkets being made and exchanged at warehouse shows purely out of Good Vibes and Love for Fellow Beings and it turns out actually he fucking loves this shit, a chill vibes based "expand your mind" kind of music subculture appeals to his Spectralist sensibilities and he likes sharing tunes with Rodimus in return)

Drift picking tracks on his own would likely lead him down more of a classic rock road, but more of the chill side of things, more of the folksy type of classic rock -- I can see Drift really enjoying Spirit in the Sky - Norman Greenbaum or California Dreamin' - The Mamas and the Papas. or like, Incense and Peppermints - Strawberry Alarm Clock.

I mean, Drift might even go Full Earth Hippie and end up liking Green Tambourine - Lemon Pipers, lmao. in fact I am fairly certain of this.

I can see Drift loving Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In - The 5th Dimension. the whole vibe would probably appeal to him.

he'd quite possibly also like I Need a Dollar - Aloe Blacc, but it hits him in a place that still hurts to think about. so it's in rare rotation.

meanwhile Ratchet would probably be fine with classic rock too, like the good Dad Rock shit, just a lot of tracks from the 70s/80s -- a couple tracks he and Drift could probably agree on would likely lean more into the experimental/psychedelic rock side of things, like White Room - Cream or something like Wheel in the Sky - Journey

Rodimus tries to troll Ratchet by recommending Old Time Rock n Roll - Bob Seger, but joke's on him because it turns out Ratchet loves it, lmao

Swerve would go all out on classic bar jams for the evening playlist. Chill, good shit like Do It Again - Steely Dan.

Megatron would love Sinnerman - Nina Simone; He'd send it to Drift in a command crew level secured data packet, and they would both feel the hell out of this song. They don't need to talk about why. They never mention it to each other.

Megs would also probably love These Old Bones by Dolly Parton (mostly due to the lyrics, rather than the upbeat tune, but he would find it relatively relaxing), as well as 9 to 5 (of course), and similar music. Country from back in the day when country music was more about the struggle of poverty and the working life of rural people. Country music from back when songs told all the untold stories. He can respect that.

He'd listen to You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive by Patty Loveless and it would get him right in the fucking spark. Megatron is the Cybertronian equivalent of an Appalachian miner, god dammit. He understands.

Megatron would also like Johnny Cash; He would overthink Ghost Riders in the Sky and it would depress him, partly because it reminds him of Seekers... sigh.

I think he'd also like Cold War - Janelle Monae. He'd be way into good lyrics; What's being said in a song matters most to him. "This is a cold war, you better know what you're fighting for..." Indeed.

anyway I like thinking about what jams Cybertronians might like from their available selection of Earth tunes

[imaredshirt]

Post Weirdmageddon, Stanley continues to recover his memories. It's a gradual process, one that he sometimes gets frustrated with, but he's surrounded with a support system of friends and family that are more than happy to help.

Every so often, Stanford checks in with Fiddleford, who's a few steps ahead of Stanley in the memory recovery process and is an invaluable resource of knowledge and helpful tips. The fact that he invented the memory gun also helps, of course, and although he won't ever rebuild the thing, he has been studying the old one and just how it affects the mind.

During these calls between old friends/colleagues, Fiddleford will casually ask after Stanley's progress and general wellbeing, and Stanford will relay a summary of Stanley's most recent recovered memories.

One day over the phone, Fiddleford says, "So we know Stanley's recovered much of his childhood memories, some of his early twenties, and he's able to recall quite a bit of the past several years. Has he, ah, mentioned anything 'bout his time in the '80s? When he first started runnin the Mystery Shack and workin on the portal?"

"Not that I know of," Stanford answers. "I'll ask the kids. If he's mentioned anything to them, then Dipper's already added it to his notes." He frowns. "Should we be worried that he hasn't recalled anything from that period in his life, yet?"

"No, no," Fiddleford says. "At least, I don't think so. This all seems to be a sort of non-linear recovery process. Sorta like a stack o' cards that's fallen on the floor all mixed up and on top of each other, and he's pickin up the ones on the top layer, completely outta order. For all we know, this could be the card he picks up last." He pauses and clears his throat. "But if he does start mentioning anythin from that time - anythin at all from events to sensory memories or, uh, people - you be sure to let me know. I'd like to add it to my notes."

He sounds almost too casual. Stanford doesn't want to doubt his friend after all this time, but he vividly remembers what Fiddleford sounds like when he's trying to be sneaky, and he sounds like it right now. So much as he doesn't want to be, Stanford's suspicious.

He's just not quite sure what to be suspicious of.

He files the suspicion away for later. "You got it, old buddy."

"Well alrighty then! I'll call again tomorrow to check on today's progress. And why don't you order him an egg and sausage omelet from Greasy's? The one with all that cheese on top - but no mushrooms. He hates those. His favorite foods might jog his memories a bit."

Stanford blinks. "We were actually thinking of doing that. But how do you -?"

Fiddleford hangs up.

Stanford's still blinking at the phone, frowning, when Stanley walks up behind him.

"Hey, who was that?" Stanley asks. "Why do you look like someone just gave you a math problem you can't solve?"

"There are very few of those left in the universe," Stanford says, only half joking, and smiles when Stanley rolls his eyes, chuckling.

"Yeah, yeah, my brother the genius - whatever. Look, since you're on the phone already, why dontcha call up Fidds and tell him to pick up some pizza. If the kids are hungry, then you know I'm starving."

"Alright, but no broccoli pizza this time, I --" Stanford freezes. "Wait. Fidds?"

"Yeah, he's not in the shack or out back, so he's gotta be out in town, right?"

There's only one person that "Fidds" can be, but Stanford hasn't heard anyone use Fiddleford's nickname since college. He raises an eyebrow at Stanley, who's relaxing back in his recliner.

"Fidds, Stanley?"

"Yeah," Stanley says, raising an eyebrow back at his brother. "You know, your nerdy buddy? Scrawny guy with an accent? Helped me out with the portal right after you got stuck in it--"

"What?" Stanford's never heard about this. From either of them.

Stanley goes on, "Can't fight off a gnome to save his life but builds a giant crazy gnome robot anyway - whaat? Why're you looking at me like that?" Stanley sits up and his confusion becomes anger, almost startling Stanford out of his shocked state. "What, now that I'm getting all these memories back, you're uncomfortable?"

Stanford has no idea what he's talking about. "What? Uncomfortable with what?"

"With your college buddy shacking up with your twin brother," Stanley snaps. "We've been together for years. Maybe you should get over it, huh?"

"Get over it?" Stanford's reeling. Fiddleford's strangeness suddenly makes sense. "Stanley, I would never - I would accept you however you - I'm not straight, either, you know, and - wait." He holds up one hand and pinches the bridge of his nose with the other. "Before we even get into that - WHAT?"

Stanley blinks. "What??"

"You - you and - when did you-" Stanford throws his hands in the air. "He doesn't live here!"

"What?" Stanley snorts. "Yeah he does. I told him to move in."

"When?"

"Back in the '80s," Stanley says. "I just started remembering this morning. Where's be been, anyway? Why hasn't he been doing nerdy shit with you in the lab lately?"

Stanford's leaning against the sofa's armrest, mind racing. He answers distractedly, "We haven't been in the lab together since before you came to Gravity Falls, Stanley."

"Bull. You expect me to believe you two aren't cooking up some science project already?"

"Stanley..."

"What," Stanley says. Then he grins. "Are you the one with messed up memories now or what? Jeez, I got a better memory than my genius brother - and I've been hit with the memory gun twice!"

"Twice?" Stanford turns a sharp look on his brother. "What do you mean, twice?"

"Yeah. That one time when you used it on me, and then back in the '90s when Fidds . . ."

Stanley trails off. He blinks and then frowns, gaze falling to the floor as he mutters, "Back when Fidds . . . when he used it on me the first time, and. . ."

Realization dawns on them both at once, and Stanley looks at Stanford with an odd mix of emotions.

"Stanley," Stanford says in an effort to calm him. "What exactly do you remember of-"

"Who cares!" Stanley jumps to his feet, hands clenched into fists at his sides. "He used that thing on me! When I told him not to - when I asked - begged -" Stanley punches the wall and glares at the splinters littering his knuckles. His voice is shaking. "After everything we went through - he just took off 'cause he was, what, scared? Do you have any idea how much I've forgotten? Who knows if I'm gonna remember any of it? I didn't want him to leave! And after he did and used the gun, I - I was so broken and angry I didn't know why, couldn't remember why--"

With a growl, Stanley grabs the car keys from the little bowl by the TV and stomps towards the front door. "Get in the car. I've got a bone to pick with your old college buddy."

Stanford grabs his journal and hurries after his brother, calling for the kids as they head to the car. They're all likely going to be at Fiddleford's new mansion for some time.

He certainly has a bit of explaining to do.

[in1-nutshell]

Hi, again! I want to try mixing Generations this time. This one have a human Buddy that is very tired and VERY done, but selfless human that keeps reincarnated to different Transformers universes everytime they passed away. They have no idea why this is happening - no idea what's causing this. Human Buddy is knowledgeable and very experienced of the Cybertronian wars. They are skilled at healing humans and Cybertronians. I have no doubt that there will be alot of confusion on how Buddy knew how Cybertronians work and why Buddy is never suprised about the Cybertronians existence. Everytime Buddy sees their Cybertronian friends counterparts for the first time, they looked at them blankly and say, "I'm getting too old for this.", despite they don't look old, Buddy can feel aging mentally. Characters - Bumblebee Movie: Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts: Optimus Prime, Shattered Glass: Soundwave, Earthspark: Megatron, and IDW: Prowl. Please and thank you. Have a nice Day/Night.

Buddy is so tired of getting flung all over the place and occasionally gets scared by their friends new frames or universes rules.

Hope you enjoy!

Human Buddy gets reincarnated in different universe with Bumblebee from The Bumblebee Movie, RotB Optimus Prime, SG! Soundwave, TFE Megatron and IDW Prowl

SFW, Platonic, tiny bit of angst, Human reader

BB Movie/ RotB/ SG!/ TFE/ IDW

The Bumblebee Movie: Bumblebee

Bumblebee and Charlie were startled at the sudden 15-year-old at the opening of the garage door.

The kid looked at Bee then at Charlie before entering and closing the door.

Before Charlie could say anything, they introduced themselves as Buddy.

This introduction was one of the rockier ones that Buddy had to endure.

“Listen! I know this is going to sound weird, but Bee here—”--Buddy

“Bee?”--Charlie

“Well, his full name is Bumblebee—”--Buddy

“I named him that!”--Charlie

“Shush!”--Buddy

“Don’t shush me, you’re like 15!”--Charlie

Buddy slapping their hand on their face.

“This is going to take a while…”--Buddy

It took a bit to explain about their reincarnation to the two of them.

Charlie was a bit skeptical, but the number of details they were putting and the genuine concern they had for her and Bee seemed to put out the fears.

Bumblebee on the other hand, completely trusted this new human and what they said.

Sure, he was still trying to piece things from his past, but everything else seemed to check out.

He does try and ask Buddy the best he can about the other universe they had been a part of.

Buddy is sitting in Bee while Charlie takes a nap in her room.

Buddy gently pats Bee’s wheel hearing some sad whirls.

“You know… I knew a version of you who also didn’t have his voice box.”--Buddy

The whirls stop.

“He lost it to Megatron back on Tiger Pax. But he was one of the best scouts I ever met, and I’ve been around.”--Buddy

Buddy gently puts their head on Bees wheel.

“You’re doing a great job Bee.”--Buddy

Bee whirls happily making Buddy chuckle a bit.

Rise of the Beast: Optimus Prime

Buddy, now an 80-year-old, stood in front of the small group of Autobots, humans, and Maximal with their hands on their hips.

They honestly got worried for a second that they weren’t going to see any of their friends at this age they spawned in.

But just as they were taking a stroll by the docks and nearly got smashed by a flying tire, they found their family again.

“Hi!”--Buddy

Everyone freezes.

“I would have thought you took your whole ‘robots in disguise’ thing a bit more seriously Prime.”--Buddy

“… Who’s that?”--Mirage

Buddy adjusts their glasses a bit.

“…Mirage? Oh, it is you and—SWEET PRIMUS WHAT HAPPENED!?”--Buddy

Buddy hurriedly moves to Bumblebee’s fallen body.

Optimus tries to move in between them and Bee.

“Move it Prime! Let me look!”--Buddy

“How do you know my name?”--Optimus

“I’ll tell you if you let me look at your scout!”--Buddy

Optimus moves a side and lets Buddy take a closer inspection.

Mirage bends over to Noah and Elena.

“Are you guy’s psychic too?”--Mirage

“No!”--Noah

“No, I’ve just been tossed from dimension to dimension all the time and have picked up on a few things.”--Buddy

Mirage is about to say something else when Buddy throws a wrench at his helm without even looking.

“Learned that from Ratchet.”--Buddy

It was a bit harder to talk with this Prime than others they had the pleasure of meeting.

Mainly it was because of his wariness against humans, which Buddy completely understood and didn’t push Prime on the subject too much.

Optimus did ask from time to time about his other alternatives and how they fared in the war.

Buddy tried their best to tell him about the other Prime’s, but they did get upset when they saw him try and mimic some of their styles.

“Prime, we need to have a talk.”--Buddy

“About what exactly.”--Optimus

Buddy gesturing at him.

“You. This. All of this. You’re not acting like yourself.”--Buddy

“I am—”--Optimus

“I mean your authentic self. Listen, I know this is absolutely terrifying. I’ve been through this war almost, if not longer than you have. I lost count a long time ago.”--Buddy

“What—”--Optimus

“Shush!... Optimus, you shouldn’t have to change yourself to fit into a mold of another. You’re the best you in this universe and nothing is going to change that. You have a team, a growing family, that loves you for who you are. Don’t change that. Now, yes improvements are necessary here and there but that’s a part of growing up. So, stop trying to act like some one else and lets find out how to stop Unicron.”--Buddy

Optimus smiles at them tiredly.

“Thank you, Buddy,…”--Optimus

“Anyways you have a mellowed version of Primal on your side, if that’s not an added bonus I don’t know what is.”--Buddy

“A mellowed version?”--Optimus

Shattered Glass: Soundwave

Soundwave was moving some crates to the main room when something warm attached itself onto his pede.

He looked down to see a human hugging his pede.

“Umm… hi? How did you get in here?”--Soundwave

“It’s been a while since I’ve heard your voice Soundwave.”--Buddy

Soundwave looked at his cassettes who were just watching the interaction.

“…Who brought the elderly human to the base?”--Soundwave

“Hey, I’m just 60! I’ve been 104 one time.”--Buddy

“Excuse me you’ve been what.”--Soundwave

Once Buddy was through with the explanation again Soundwave was ecstatic.

He had heard of reincarnation before, but to see someone actually remember their previous lives was exciting!

He wants to know everything about his other alternatives and the outcomes of the wars. Maybe they could help them beat the Autobots once and for all and peace can finally be restored.

“So, you’ve met different versions of us?”--Soundwave

“Like I’ve said before, yes.”--Buddy

“So do you have a favorite?”--Soundwave

“Not really.”--Buddy

“Why?”--Soundwave

“… You have to let go of that thought if you want to stay sane for the next universe that needs you. It’s nice to remember but you can’t keep your head in the past.”--Buddy

“I’m… I’m sorry to hear that…”--Soundwave

“Its not all bad… it’s a pain to reintroduce yourself for the millionth time and earn trust and all. But if it means getting to have moments with my friends, from the ones who keep on dying to the ones who seem immortal, I’ll take it.”--Buddy

“I hope I’m your friend in the next universe you go to.”--Soundwave

Buddy looks at him sadly.

“I hope so too.”--Buddy

Earthspark: Megatron

None of the Autobots or Maltos were prepared to see the random 10-year-old stare at them wide eyed and drop their juice box as they ran over to Optimus and Megatron hugging their pedes.

“Finally! It’s been a while since I’ve seen a good Megatron!”--Buddy

“What?”--Megatron

“Who let a 10 year old in the base!”--Dot

Buddy taking notice of the new badge on Prime and Megatron before face palming.

“Primus… This is another shadow government things again…”--Buddy

This universe by far took the record for bots believing their story of reincarnation.

Buddy looks like they are going to pass out when they hear more about the Terrans as they are furiously scribbling things in their book.

Megatron does feel a bit weird that Buddy hangs out with him so much than the children or other Autobots.

He tries his best to refrain from asking about his alternatives…

But he does let one question slip out…

“You have met other versions of me who stayed with the Decepticons? How did—”--Megatron

“Terrible. Most Megatron’s I knew that went against Prime didn’t exactly end up with a happy ending. Not even in the universe were things were the opposite.”--Buddy

The what universe?”--Megatron

“Doesn’t matter now. I say you should focus more on what here with you now than the ‘what if’s’ and questions your alternatives did.”--Buddy

“Ohh…”--Megatron

“You have a lovely family and great friendship with Dot, Megs. The last god Megatron I knew didn’t have what you had, but the family he formed helped him have some sort of closure and redemption others tried to deny him.”--Buddy

Megatron gently pats Buddy’s head.

“You are wiser beyond your years Buddy.”--Megatron

“You get wiser when you’ve been doing this for years.”--Buddy

“…How long—”--Megatron

“Hey, look at that cow! Imma go touch it.”--Buddy

IDW: Prowl

Prowl had just got back to his habsuite with his new data pads when he saw a human child on his berth.

The child looked at him wide eyed with some tears prickly around.

Prowl scooping up the child.

“Who are you and what are you—”--Prowl

The child grabs his digits and hugs them as tightly as they could.

“You’re here… you’re here…”--Buddy

Prowl looked at them gently patting their back as they started crying.

“It’s been so long since I last saw you I was beginning to think that… Oh Prowl…”--Buddy

After Buddy was finally able to calm down, they explained their situation to Prowl.

Something that he refused to believe.

It wasn’t until Buddy pulled out the book with their notes that he realized they might be right.

Prowl is wary around Buddy, still plagued with the reminder of Spike Witkicky in his processor and keeps Buddy at arm’s length.

He is set on not getting attached to Buddy.

Too bad for him, Buddy has spent years knowing how to befriend Prowl’s for years and while they are a bit rusty, they know that it’s only a matter of time before they worm their way into his spark.

“Spike sucks.”--Buddy

Prowl freezes for a second.

“What are you talking about?”--Prowl

“Most Spike Witwicky’s, and most Witikcky’s, I’ve met in general are just the worse. There was this one universe where he brought SOUNDWAVE into the Ark after just getting attacked by him earlier that day!”--Buddy

Prowl snorts a bit while looking in disbelief.

“Are you serious?”--Prowl

Buddy looks at him in the optic.

“Like a heart attack.”--Buddy

“…are there more stories like that? Or about my alternatives reaction to that?”--Prowl

Buddy gives him a toothy smile.

“I swear when that Prowl found out he looked like he wanted to bang his helm on the table then flip it into oblivion.”--Buddy