#Howlback

[the-ratt-king]

I've been working on this for a while!

Was once again supposed to be an up to date pic of the whole logical proposals gang but yanno in an alternate dimension where no children die & everything is cool and good.

@vivificanousprime I really love the story as is but it would have been wonderful if some of the kids had been able to meet.

[starscream-is-my-wife]

Happy pride month to the first self identified trans transformer

[raringooo]

Workin on Soundblaster for a server I’m in! He is heavily HEAVILY inspired by blueey-jayzilla’s design and is purely just for like fun roleplay with friends

[runawaymac]

blinking my big eyes at u. might i request a howlback

blinking my beady eyes at you

[blighted-lights]

u can trust that i am always thinking of these three all of the time every day btw. more cassette designs to come!

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime

How did Tyran cluster's Howlback fight Bumblebee? What kind of mission was she on?

Dear Retro Reconnaissance,

Following the battle at Half Dome, Soundwave and Bumblebee clashed several more times throughout the early ‘90s. During that time, Soundwave disguised himself as a van, and was experimenting with subtler means of manipulating human minds than direct blackmail. In Detroit, together with his Pretender partner, Doombox, he infiltrated the techno scene, promoting his shows on the nascent worldwide web, and using a combination of music, psychedelics, and hypnosis to influence the behaviour of club goers. From there, he began distributing mini-cassettes to susceptible individuals with government connections, hoping to gain access to isolated federal networks. Bumblebee was able to uncover and dismantle the scheme, thanks to the help of Dairu and Zauru—but with exception of Garboil, all of Soundwave’s minions were able to escape, amongst the dozens of tapes being copied and circulated within the subculture.

Bumblebee finally settled the score with Soundwave during the Battle of Chicago, turning the tables right as the Decepticon was about to execute him. In the aftermath, the Autobots were forced back into hiding, but Bumblebee nevertheless continued to protect humanity from the shadows. While on the road, the Autobots tracked a Decepticon energy signature to Silicon Valley. There, Doombox had leveraged his Princeton connections to get in on the ground floor of a music streaming startup, and had secured a small data centre. It turned out that, before his death, Soundwave had spent years seeding the internet with viruses, tiny shell scripts that each contained some fraction of his own programming. And in a data center at the heart of the Bay Area, industrial servers were collecting and processing petabytes of concert recordings, music reviews, playlists, listening data, mashups, and the lingering consciousness of a digital ghost. Disguised as smartphones, Howlback, Buzzsaw, and Frenzy (who had escaped Seymour Simmons’ basement after the ex-agent’s rather hasty emigration to Cuba) were able to totally control the actions of the company’s founders, and Bumblebee had no way of reaching them without breaking cover. But when it became clear that they intended to turn the entire city into a new body for their master, he convinced Ratchet to help him destroy the data using an EMP blast. It was during this altercation that Howlback fought Bumblebee one-on-one, seeking revenge for Garboil, Ravage, Laserbeak, and of course Soundwave—in her UAV mode, she had him effectively pinned down, until a reckless dive-bomb brought her within reach of his new energon axe. After that, he was able to keep Frenzy and Buzzsaw busy just long enough for Ratchet to wipe the last traces of Soundwave from existence.

Alas, this brief exposure was what ultimately allowed Cemetery Wind to track down and murder Ratchet, with Lockdown’s help. As for Doombox… well, startups come and go. With access to such a heady mix of personal data, cryptocurrency, nootropics, and warm bodies, I cannot imagine he found it difficult to steal a new identity, slip into a life that was waiting for him and his cronies. Rumor has it that they are creating new life, in Silicon Valley… a form of life designed not to live on that planet, but on the next.

[cleverthylacine]

Japanese G1 continuity is absolutely not normal about girls but damned if they don't give us some of the best ones

There was a significant amount of Transformers continuity released between 1987 and around 2007 that was produced in Japanese and is really only known to most English-speaking fans through fansubs, dubs that were only released in Australia, and the like. Shows like Headmasters, Victory, and Zone. Manga like Victory and 15 Go Go Go Teletraan (which was really mostly Kiss Players). Radio shows like Kiss Players.

I'm gonna be super up front. Japanese G1 is not normal about femmes in any way, shape or form. At the same time, it gave us some of the BEST and most underused female characters in the Transformers universe.

Headmasters, which came out right after the US G1 show ended, is particularly egregious. In Headmasters, Arcee has been reduced to Fort Max's administrative assistant, uses ridiculously polite and subservient language, and is also the only medic. And being a medic would be kind of badass if they let her be as badass as Ratchet, you know? But they absolutely do not.

Also, in Headmasters, Carly (now married to Spike) allows her son--a freaking child, not even a teenager--to go on missions when Spike can't and a human is needed, because uh, for some reason it's better for a 12 year old boy to go, not an adult woman?

But most of the good femmes don't come from Headmasters. And some of the best femmes we have are from Japanese G1.

Super-God Masterforce made it up to us by giving gave us Minerva, a human girl who is a Headmaster with a robot body (transtector) making her basically a bad ass mecha pilot, and who actively does fight.

The Victory manga gives us Esmeral, Deathsaurus' incredibly classy wife, and Lyzack, Leozack's twin sister, who is in charge of defending the homefront but really does want to go out and fight. Illumina appears in both the Victory manga and the anime. She's a little human girl who has a crush on Jan Minakaze and is always trying to get people to choose nonviolence.

(Lyzack later appears in an English-language comic - the Wings Universe--wherein she's basically Deathsaurus' servant and Starscream hits on her. I don't like that.)

There are a number of great femmes who were only ever toys. The Cobalt Sentries set gave us Howlback, leader of the Decepticon military police (called the Cobalt Sentries). She is basically Ravage's twin sister but instead of being super stealthy she can turn your attacks right back on you.

(Later she appears in several English language comics and in at least one she is canonically trans. I'm not a fan of her depiction in the SG Recordicons Batman tribute arc, though.)

The Unite Warriors toyline - Takara's response to Combiner Wars, basically - gave us the combiner Megatronia, made up of Megaempress, and her four guards, Lunaclub (sometimes called Luna Clover or Luna Trefle), Flowspade, Moonheart, and Trickdiamond. They are incredibly awesome.

(IDW 2019 used Trickdiamond, but none of the others. Tricky was one of Swindle's contacts.)

Then there's the elephant in the room that everyone pretends isn't there...Kiss Players.

So, okay. There is nothing normal about Kiss Players whatsoever. On the other hand, I'd rather listen to KP than watch RID2015 which is just blatant copaganda from hell.

Kiss Players had an interesting plot involving little bits of Galvatron and Unicron getting into humans and creating the Kiss Players--humans who could give TFs a powerup by kissing them and then merging with their internals somehow. Then there are the Legions, the dick-tongued monsters that everyone who hasn't actually listend to the show or read the manga thinks are Megatron.

The dick-tongued monsters are gross. It is also gross that some of the Kiss Players are barely teenagers and definitely not adults and are constantly ending up in Situations.

But the plot centres around the apparent rise of Convoy, or Optimus, from the dead, and his transformation into a weird groomery dude, which many people don't understand there was an actual reason for, because it's not Optimus, it's someone else riding around in his body.

Melissa Faireborn is like if you chopped Marissa Faireborn's IQ in half, dyed her hair blond and threw out any pants or skirts that covered her knees. She is nothing like Marissa and I treat them as cousins, but Xiaoxiao Li is amazing and her real lover.

Anyhow, this female scientist (Dr Amaou) lost her mind over the loss of her daughter during the events of the 1986 movie et sequelae, and she's got to be stopped from turning Atari and her Autorooper robot pal into a permanent fusion to reincarnate her daughter Shizuku (whom for some reason I always want to call Setsuna instead).

It's a little confusing because most of the really good parts of the plot got jammed into a few episodes near the end of the season, although once you know what it is, it's clear that it's being set up. That artist just likes borderline lolicon way too much.

The second season of KP is very squeaky clean and sends the girls out to collect what they think are Allspark fragments, and they are very annoyed because Ravage, whom they call "black panther man" keeps getting in their way and fucking with them, only to later find out that the bots who gave them this task are Unicronian heralds and Ravage is trying to stop them from helping Unicron do what Unicron does.

Rosanna, everyone's favourite robot pop idol, comes from the second season of KP, although you don't see very much of her or her companions Glit and Sundor.

Incidentally KP sets up the Unicron Trilogy and some of its characters end up in the UT--which did come to the US, and gave us Alexis Thi Dang.

(This post is brought to you because I just wrote an Esmeral thing and someone was musing separately about Megaempress as a parent and I almost ended up writing this post while reblogging them, because I'm a nerd with a hyperfixation).

[sticostudios]

Transformers Young Botz AU

HowlBack, enforcer of the decepticons, sister to Ravage

[elfdragon12]

Daily female Transformers

Howlback! She's a member of the Decepticon Secret Police who disguises her icy killer nature with a sophisticated persona. Also, a confirmed transwoman in an Ask Vector Prime segment.

She was introduced in the Japanese Legends comics and has periodically popped up in various places in small roles or cameos since.

Soundwave having girls in his arsenal of cassettes needs to be more prominent!

[transformers-mosaic]

Transformers: Mosaic #642 - "Let's Play Frisbee"

Originally posted on March 26th, 2012

Story - Wout Jut Art - James Cox Colours, Letters - Brandy Dixon

deviantART | Seibertron | TFW2005 | BotTalk

wada sez: In the Shattered Glass universe, the Scrounges are a bunch of disposable, interchangable drones under Blaster’s command; a riff on Scrounge being unique thanks to his “special arm”. This one was actually published as a Mosaic! It was Brandy Dixon’s first ever lettering effort, per a comment on TFW2005.

[ravage-tf]

To Glitt: what's the worst thing to hear in an operating room?

[jolyne-best-jojo]

What Stands I think the Logical Proposals wavewave family would have:

Soundwave: Hermit Purple. This one's pretty easy, it's got everything a wave of sound could want: break a camera and get photos of a picture anywhere in the world, have a screen to project onto and read minds, just use the vines on a TV screen and get a message like "x is a traitor". Or Moody Blues since being able to see and hear what happened to a singular person would make for great intell depending on who it is.

Shockwave: Gold Experience. Shockwave would love having it, funding becomes a far smaller issue if he can grow the body parts himself. Not to mention the research he'd do testing the limits, how big can the being he grows be relative to the original objects mass? Can he grow an extinct species? And he'd love finding these things out.

Ravage: Harvest. Being the only responsible child is hard, much easier when you have 500 tiny buggers to keep watch on everyone.

Buzzsaw: Kraft Work. Given his weapon building I feel like he'd find some use for being able to store however much kinetic energy in an object he desires then release it all at once.

Laserbeak: Mr. President. With the caveat that he just had the user on him at all times. Laserbeak wants a nap, just pull out Mr. President, hide it, and take a nap in the key room, he can even fill it with all his favourite blankets.

Rumble & Frenzy: Star Platinum & The World. This one's the most obvious, SP and TW stop time for 5 seconds, that's 5 seconds of free prank set up.

Enemy: Survivor. Probably a bit too surface level for his character but it makes sense. He wants enemies, Survivor makes everyone around him so mad they start beating each other to death.

Flip Sides: Sticky Fingers. It's got a pocket dimension to explore long range travel purposes with (idk if it can do that but presumably if Sticky Fingers opened a zipper in one place then went hundreds of miles away and opened another they should connect) and I think Flips would find that interesting.

Beastbox: Man in the Mirror. So long as he has a mirror shard with him he can hide away in the mirror world whenever he's feeling overwhelmed and come back when he feels better.

Slugfest: Pearl Jam. He may not be a cook, but given the positive effects Pearl Jam has on the consumers he'd absolutely learn how to cook to give healing meals to refugees.

Squawktalk: Bohemian Rhapsody. I don't know if It works if it's only audio but it turns fiction to life and what better way to tell your stories then making them real? (Just ignore the part where people are forced to play a part in the stories, usually the one who dies)

Garboil: Earth, Wind and Fire. Technically not a stand (but maybe it is who knows) the shapeshifting would be really handy for painting, don't wanna use a picture or just memory to base a drawing on? Just shapeshift into what you wanna draw.

Overkill: Scary Monsters. It can turn people into dinosaurs. He'd finally have Dino friends that the Autobots don't steal away before begging to hand them back. (Targets of it retain their sentience right? I can't remember)

Howlback: Killer Queen. This isn't because of the fact it's a cat, nor is it about it being able to turn objects into bombs or its tertiary bomb Bites the Dust being able to rewind time an hour. No, this is about Sheer Heart Attack being indestructible and as such the perfect thing to enjoy biting to no end, and honestly what more does Howlback even want in life?

Ratbat: Kiss. Sure, the duplicated objects crash back together after the sticker comes off, but so long as that happens long after he sells them it's not his problem.

Wingthing: I'mma be real, I got nothing, he got killed in the great cassette culling of chapter 36 and he was introduced in that chapter. Weather Report? Because he wanted to know how rain works?

[queen-of-heretics]

Kitty cat costumes

Blue and grey is howlback

Blue and white is glit

[astralzeraphias]

some of my favorite obscure tfs !!

[runawaymac]

loud purring

[blighted-lights]

canon howlback:

howlback, according to @mohavegecko: