#addendum (an IDW1 arcee novel fanfic)

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And here we have the cover for Chapter 13 of Addendum (an IDW1 Arcee novel fanfic): Gender Diaspora. This cover was super fun to work on with @VansZero (discord) love how it turned out and how they depicted the Everbright (that would be that blocky gray and blue ship in the upper right corner), and he made Road Rage's expression so memeable lmao we adore this piece. Here's the same cover in colors without the title, and in black and white:

Also yes, the symbols on the Delta Leaguer's torsos? That's the Delta Forge (not actually named in the fic) symbol, ie the symbol of the Delta League (also known as the Anti-Vocation League), a reclamation of Solus Prime's forge hammer. cyan=tears pink=blood. Here's a zoom in on Arcee's and our rough draft for it that we gave VansZero:

This symbol was first described in Chapter 2:

"Among the wreckage in the maintenance shed, I saw the agreed-on mark for the rendezvous: a cyan-pink infinity loop with two golden cylindrical hammer ends stylized after Solus Prime’s Forge hammer on each side of the loop.

The chosen transformations of spark and blood… Trans-Mutate sure is good with symbology. I rolled up around the tracks on my treads, stopped at the door, and laid out a tide of slow notes from my car horn."

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Upcoming Chapter 18 of Addendum

For everyone waiting on Chapter 18, we made a lot of headway on it recently, it is 2/3rds done currently :3 Hope and plan to release soon. Most of this chapter is a Rampage point of view (who we write as transmasc and his sister Trans-Mutate as transfemme, both part of the Anti-Functionist resistance known as the Delta League or the Anti-Vocationist League, back during the era of the autocracy of Nova Prime. the art we posted here is an edit of a larger piece from chapter 13), it's really amusing to us to write from his perspective how idw1 optimus early in the Great War has no way to conceive of a transmasculine cybertronian because that's the level of conceptual damage and societal harm the legacy of functionism has caused with it's pushing for an androcentric world of only cybertronian maleness as genderlessness assigned guys.

If you haven't heard of Addendum (an IDW1 Arcee novel fanfic) and are wondering what we're on about, you can check it out here and read the released chapters here, and here's a blurb over generalities of what the fic is:

It is a fanfic revolving around IDW1 Arcee, that seeks to add to her already detailed and beautiful arc of a trans woman errant warrior sage coming to terms with xemself (we're affirming her/xem in the text here since in this fic unlike canon xey eventually want to use xey pronouns too but face immense challenges to that as the story will show) and deciding to trust people and herself. We love her transformations very dearly, and wanted to further reconcile xeir appearance in Spotlight: Arcee with her later writing (canon did a rather fabulous job in this respect in Phase 2 and 3 that makes rereading her story from first issue in 2008 to last a real joy for us), drawing on wisdom gathered through study and experience, and imagination to connect the dots. As you can tell just from the appearance of Codexa and others in the story, this revisiting of IDW1 Arcee’s tale is in part made possible by later writing of gal transformers who we adore, and we will note we draw from ones from all across the decades of fiction of Transformers. What can we say, we love them, and know so much more about ourselves than we ever would have because of them. There are also a lot of trans / gender expansive headcanons tossed in here for bots across the gender spectrum. They're transformers. Emphasis on trans.

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100k words of Addendum! A Poll on a Teaser in Thanks

Y'all, we just realized today that with the release of Chapter 17 of Addendum (an IDW1 Arcee Novel Fanfic) yesterday, where among other things that happen the long awaited Anode/Arcee/Lug ship finally kicks off, that in terms of released chapters, Addendum has finally passed the 100k word mark!!!! We are deeply thankful for all the love and support and ideas and commissions we've gotten from people we've interacted with here and on discord servers we frequent, and also to our partners and friends, and frankly for seeing the shared love other people have for the characters we make fanfic for through their stories, ideas, and art. Connecting on that and telling this story means so deeply to us, as we adore the beautifully grown EXRID canon, especially in Arcee's regard, with her stories at large (beyond just IDW1), are ones that resonate deeply and were along with many other stories about (trans) robots with (aesthetic) journeys (like Anode and Lug), lifechanging in a way that was a catalyst for us to be more ourselves and share more happiness with loved ones.

Writing this fanfic is not just a way for us to connect things in a way that fills in the many millions of years of Arcee's life where we don't really know much about what she was doing and from that have an arc to more closure after 2018, but also to remind ourselves of how beautiful the world is, even when things are hard and everything hurts, because of the sapient condition always having the capacity collectively for people to put words to and act on expansiveness and autonomy. It probably does not surprise the readers of this story to know that we have sometimes had it very hard and not known if we were going to make it- but we are still here, and made our peace with the fact we have done some things we never imagined doing and there are things we still want to do, for which we are very lucky.

As a thank you, we want to share some major spoilers text in a teaser format, so please vote on

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(one must be gentle) they can hold hands. Love Flamewar and Shadow Striker together so much. The smaller side of Flamewar's hand, where the thumb is, is what we squeezed through Shadow Striker's hand slowly, be careful

Also spinning wheels image that is either just non-sexual sensuality pg13 or somewhat lewd (imo also in pg13 territory) depending on context. Going by Lost Light where Roller is spinning Nickel's wheel feet in public and commenting that she has very nice wheels while Nickel smiles about it and enjoys it, it isn't necessarily horny enough or intimate enough to avoid doing in public. But on a basis of Devils Due (humor, decidedly, but still) it might be given that in G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers III Arcee flirts with Bumblebee by saying 'forget kissing you if you win our race to the spacebridge, I'll rotate your tires instead,' which while decidedly different than spinning someone's wheels since rotating tires means switching tire positions on a vehicle/bot (which is actually important for maintenance and upkeep which raises more questions), Bumblebee then yelling 'Wahoo!' and racing ahead makes us wonder how he'd feel about wheels getting touched in general.

For the sake of our own writing we share on this account and this image, we write sensory touch of different parts of the body of a transformer in this manner whether wings or wheels or back stacks or doors or tails or what have you as something partnering bots do for aesthetic/gender affirmation and euphoria which does confer a sort of pleasure of 'making real' (if you want to be academic, reification) in particular in part because it helps them connect with their alt mode and the shape they enjoy, rather than er, a sexual drive, though it certainly can be sensual. We suppose that touching one's corresponding arm or thigh parts while they are in alt mode would be similar, though we haven't written that yet. It's not just a multimodal thing though, its also just, sharing one's shapes with each other and making love in that regard. Which is a very trusting intimate thing to do with someone whether or not sex is involved, as many asexual people could tell you. If you want examples of our writing in this sense, you can check out:

-some chromeblade smooching and wing and wheel touching in Chapter 7 of Rekindling Flight, before we figured out how to write the euphoria aspect of this in a lovemaking manner. We might go back and add to this.

-Chapter 3 and Chapter 15 of Addendum (an IDW1 Arcee novel fanfic) with Arcee/Codexa and Anode/Lug respectively, amusingly Chapter 3 is before Arcee's surgery and Chapter 15 is before Anode's while she and Lug are still trying to figure out their genders, so they both have a sense of trying to give and/or receiving euphoria to help with dysphoria by reifying parts of the body the two wanted to change

-Trusting Transformations is an Arcee x reader fic that also touches on this (the reader's character is a gender/aesthetically expansive transformer)

We want to talk about casual or reassuring contextually non-sensual public touch of alt mode kibble is commonplace among friends or from aesthetic/gender kinship but don't have the spoons to get into that and real world human bodied parallels rn. And yes that, and intimate affirmation touch are all things we have experienced and that we are deeply glad for

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Release of Addendum Chapter 16

Chapter 16 of Addendum (an IDW1 Arcee novel fanfic) is out! Arcee, Anode, and Lug, have finally met, setting the stage for all the good and terrible there is to come for the three of them and their loved ones…

Anode excitedly undergoes her reforging surgery led by Minerva to follow Anode's every want as best she can. Anode with euphoria realized joins Lug, Stratosphere, Minerva, Lifeline, and Road Rage in going to Lithone to meet Arcee, who has tentatively agreed to get to know Anode's family and to live alongside them before deciding whether to allow Anode to use blacksmithing to heal her sensory mayhem from the transmedicalist surgery Arcee went through long ago. In the process of meeting Arcee and talking with her for the first time, Anode and Lug have a new realization about how they feel… much of which we read through Anode's particularly fervent and wanting perspective. You can read it here on Ao3! sleezy Anode hasn't hit public release yet but soonish…

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Chapter 15 of Addendum is now out, introducing Anode, Lug, and Stratosphere! You can find the summary here:

4 million years ago, Lug and her Conjunx Anode, and Anode's grandfather make their way through space fleeing the Great War of the Autobots and the Decepticons, with the couple navigating their own encounters with gender of others bringing out questions about if they had any of their own- fears on Anode's part facing a reckoning, before their old ship faces challenges that leave them wondering if they'll survive… and if they do, if they'll ever meet the fabled knights known as the Delta League… The beginning of Anode and Lug's arc in Addendum enters full swing.

Our word count has hit 96,305 in terms of stuff released for this fic...

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Addendum Revisions: For the Sake of Love

In light of the copious research we have done regarding IDW1 Arcee (for our own sake and interest, for a love of her story, and because of a thing we're working on that we haven't revealed on social media yet), we realized that there isn't anything in her story that suggests that the side effects of her surgery directly caused homicidal outbursts, and that that is just a fandom perception that we ran into in 2020 and took as fact. So we removed that from her story in Addendum chapter 6 in favor of her instead breaking from mission parameters recklessly or vengefully to take on functionists who weren't the ones targeted and/or going after people who helped jhiaxus. As important as we think it is to navigate the story of someone who has had outbreaks of violence from all the pressure and pain compounded with agency being meddled with to an extreme degree still being worthwhile to love and have alive and to try to help, we realized that is not quite Arcee's story, and it just took us several months to be at a point where we could change that, especially for her, so with her consent we've changed this. We want to say thank you to @quetzalpapalotl for doing a post specifically about Arcee's relationship with violence (which we can't find rn) that both deeply resonated with us from overlapping observations and part of what made us realize that we had missed something, and we knew what she was saying was true because we had recently read EXRID at the time, and so we went and read Spotlight Arcee again and lo and behold the actual words show a very calculated and passionate series of decisions that are not just for vengeance but also to save other people (she warns Ultra Magnus that a change is coming that will effect everything) and her rampage against the bots allied with Jhiaxus (which the Autobots didn't know) makes sense. As usual, Arcee was ahead of the game compared to the Autobots lmao and they because of their biases and lack of information were scared of her. (note we aren't excusing when she tortures people but like. Autobot guys get free passes on this apparently and she doesn't because of how they see her).

We are going to keep the idea of the original writing we did for the fanfic though for a future work though because we think the concept is very useful for subverting a stereotype around transfemmes

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Anode: Gallant Sleazy Scoundrel Do-Gooder

things we realized writing chapter 17 of addendum (still need to finish uploading chapter 16 and doing the last paragraphs it's just the way time for the fic works out we've been writing by hand and uploading later):

it is so fun to write Anode as a gallant sleazy scoundrel do-gooder and have that be the basis for how she flirts with Arcee whose permission to heal her surgery side effects she is waiting on (still havent uploaded chapter 16 but it explores Anode and Lug's budding feelings for her in part and chapter 17 steps further towards doing something about them) realized part of the appeal apart from the many original aspects of the canon characters and just the sheer trans wlw of it all is:

inspired from leia - han -> arcee - springer

inversion of leia - ?indiana jones!? -> arcee - anode - lug (lug as far as we know does not have any connections to a star war indy character)

lmao now we want to write Springer, Anode, and Lug interacting in something its also fun for the reader to be uncertain of Arcee's feelings and intent through Anode and Lug's point of view oogh. Cannot wait to share. We could spoil what is actually going on in Arcee's head but we don't want to