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[road-hauler]

Tell us about Breakdown jehehehehhee

ok if you say soooo (Oh goodness this took me forever to make oops lololol) Yapping below the cut, this is going to be a long one:

Alright I'm just going to use this as an opportunity to dump all my thoughts in one place.

I’ll talk about his design character design first:

For references, I used his g1 cartoon design, original toy, Earthspark, and legacy figure. Then I stuck them all into my character design food processor and tada! I must say I'm quite pleased.

Starting with the colours, I decided to make his red more orange-y & lighter to really squeeze as much contrast juice out of the blue as possible. Then I added in some yellow, made his ‘white’ a very light desaturated blue, plus the purple for his insignia, and voila! I really like this colour scheme, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to use coral in a design for awhile now lololol.

I absolutely adored ES Breakdown’s coloured tires from the moment I first laid eyes on them, so I decided to include that design element here as well. The white decals are just a pattern of squiggly lines alternated with straight lines and dots just to keep things simple.

For Breakdown’s altmode, I went with the Lamborghini Countach LP500 S, which is the same (or close to) as his g1 if I’m not mistaken. I did consider picking a more modern Lamborghini, but I really did fall in love with this car’s vibe. When I close my eyes and envision Breakdown’s alt, this is the car I see, so I decided to just stick with it.

Moving on to his face, I wanted to give Breakdown a really wide eyed expression to get across how on edge he is. His eyes also have little orange rings in them to accentuate this look, but sometimes I’ll just draw it in with the blue instead if he’s far away. Googly eyes hehehe.

I base the majority of my designs off of some kind of animal/creature. For Breakdown that was initially a gummy bear, but I changed my mind! His wide eyes that look like they've seen untold horrors combined with his helm shape really does remind me of a hare. I mean, he also occasionally has prophetic dreams, so I think it really fits him! Also he'll book it rabbit style if someone he doesn't like enters the hes in room lololol.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the little yellow reflective rectangle on Breakdown’s head acts as a headlight that he can turn on whenever. It’s pretty handy for when he needs to navigate dark spaces since his altmode headlights are in his pedes. He’ll also use it if he’s working on something up close that way he can see what he’s doing better.

Moving on, let’s talk one of my favourite aspects of this design: his spoiler! I got the idea of him having a detachable spoiler from his legacy figure , and I love the idea of it just being able to pop it off. The lore here is that one day it just sort of slid out from the connectors because they forgot to weld it in place when they were building him lololol.

He doesn’t get it fixed though, because it’s actually pretty handy to be able to just take it off whenever. For example if he wants to lay down comfortably on his back, or throw it at his brothers, or use it as a makeshift blunt weapon in battle, it has a variety of uses. I just hope he doesn’t lose track of it or it something, that would be very inconvenient.

I’ll also mention that Breakdown’s major subspace compartment is behind his back underneath the spoiler, just like the actual trunk on the Countach. I think it’s pretty funny for him to be able to reach behind his head and pull out whatever random objects hes got in there. This is also the main compartment he keeps his gun in!

Now for some ideas that didn’t make it into his final design:

I really wanted to try giving him purple eyes like his g1 design, but it just doesn’t work with the other colours I chose. Breakdown's eyes need to contrast against the rest of his face for that wide eyed look, and the lavender just doesn’t do that. It’s unfortunate because I really him with purple eyes, but it just doesn’t work here. So sad.

Another idea I had was to give him door wings (I live for kibble, it’s my favorite part). Again, it just didn’t really end up working with the design I had in mind with him, and I think a spoiler does a much better job at enhancing his silhouette anyway (That and I might be giving them to Dead End instead (what who said that). Plus Breakdown already suffers enough with the sensory organs he has, I don’t think we need to give him more lololol.

I also had the idea to give him decals of the number 3 on his doors and tires (this will make sense later when the other Stunticons are done. Or it will be a vestigial concept that doesn't make it into any of their final designs. Who knows!).

In the end I felt this was over complicating things, and that I wouldn’t be able to draw it consistently. I also thought about having his tires have his name as the white decals, but this has the same problem. That and I couldn’t think of a good reason for him to have English writing on his tires, which is too bad since I think they look absolutely adorable!

I'll mention that if you feel inspired by any of the concepts I've show here, feel free to use them! Hell tag me if your feeling up to it, I'd love to see.

Alright now its background info time:

First lets start with how the Stunticons came into existence in this continuity.

The Decepticons are stranded on Earth. Like super stranded. The Nemesis has been critically damaged, and it's currently sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Energon supplies are low, and while there is plenty of it to be refined on the planet, the location they crashed in has really poor quality ore. That and the fact that they have to compete with the Autobots for it has made the situation quite rough.

Anyways, these are obviously the best circumstances to make a brand new gestalt combiner team in yes?

The last time around, the Decepticons made a combiner from a preexisting team (who will go unnamed lest I active The Curse). This time around they want to take a crack at making constructed mechs who are a gestalt from the get go. They take some random sparks they brought with them, some earth vehicles and mechanical parts they stole, the horrifying spark tethering machine, and then they let Starscream go at it for a while.

Next thing you know, tada! Stunticons. You know the rest from here.

Breakdown feels like he is constantly being watched. By what? Depends. Sometimes it's everyone in the room is staring at him, other times it's inanimate objects are able to perceive him, and occasionally its just a feeling. The one thing that's consistent is that it never ever goes away, which is as exhausting as it sounds. His paranoia isn’t completely unfounded at times though… sometimes he really is being watched! By what? That’s for me to know and for you to find out...

Another thing that causes Breakdown a lot of stress is when he has to leave the Nemesis on a mission. I mean, you take a very anxious mech who has only known the confines of an underwater spaceship for his entire short existence... and then show him the widest most open space imaginable. Let’s just say Breakdown is not a fan of the sky!

He finds the sheer vastness of it to be absolutely terrifying, and it doesn’t help that that’s where the Aerialbots attack them from. He’s constantly hyper vigilant of his surroundings when the Stunticons go surface side, and by the time they get back to the ship, he’s completely drained. He can usually handle the stress of it all if he’s with his brothers, but if he’s left alone on the surface he’ll totally freak out. He's gotten himself into a few predicaments trying to find any form of cover, even if it doesn't exactly match his size class.

The inverse is also true: Breakdown generally likes confined spaces because there are less places where something could be watching him from. Put him in a crevice and he actually slightly calms down. Miraculous!

The Stunticons have other duties assigned on the Nemesis, and Breakdown ends up in the communications department. This means he has to deal with Soundwave (scary!) and his cassettes (AAAAA) on a regular basis (and Bitstream, but that's for a different post).

He does actually end up enjoying his job in comms though. Monitor duties can be a good outlet if he doesn't over do it, and he really enjoys learning about how the all the comm machinery functions. He gets kinda freaked out about the fact someone can observe him through comm channels or cameras, so gaining insight into how the stuff works does lessen his anxiety around using them a bit.

Lets see what else... uh his engine still does The Thing and is generally kinda messed up. The medics can't figure out why it's able do that or how to solve the issue with their current resources (which is not a lot considering what happened to the medbay in the crash), so he just sort of has to live with it. Stress of course only serves to worsen the problem, and Breakdown's default state is being stressed out. Unfortunately for him, it's only going to get worse over time.

There's probably more that I forgot to mention, but this post is already massive so I'll leave it here for now.

I have a lot in store for this poor little car… heheheheheHAHAHAHA-Oh shit, the capybara! No wait give him back noooooooooo

Woah you made it all the way to the bottom, thank you for reading!