#i'm a verbose mofo fair warning

[entropic-introspection]

Ok so TFA Optimus, Elita, and Sentinel all suffer from “gifted child syndrome” no I will not be taking questions because the essay is below the cut

Ok, so Optimus is our go-to protagonist boy, he’s pretty easy. He’s smart, very clever, maybe feels like he has to work harder to keep up with Elita and Sentinel who have the flashier in-built/Outlier powers. He screws up once, and his life sort of implodes. It’s not even necessarily his fault! He’s spent his whole life trying to be a good kid and being praised for it/following rules, and then got chucked out the minute something went wrong. Sentinel and Elita both should have listened to him or been smarter about exploring on a forbidden planet, but because Optimus was technically in charge of them he took the fall.

Except now he feels like it is his fault, and he internalizes the blame pretty badly. He’s now a washout, his plans for the future are gone, and he has no idea of what he’s supposed to do now. He doesn’t want to step out of line because he thinks he can’t without fucking up again. Which is also a problem, because if you watch, Optimus’ greatest strength tends to be that he thinks unconventionally and is willing to act outside of accepted doctrine to complete the overall mission. Dude’s actually very good at taking limited resources and using them to find viable solutions when he’s not tripping over himself or the idea of what a proper Autobot should be.

Him being in charge of team is both really good and really bad for him alternately, because being responsible for people again keeps him from focusing too far inward, but it also puts pressure on him again in very sensitive spots. Especially because his team is in no way shape or form “proper” Autobots, and sometimes that leads to them getting in trouble with Authority, which Optimus is terrified of doing again. Ratchet is honestly the best bot he could have been paired with, because Ratchet is old enough to have been through some shit and has learned enough emotional distance to teach Optimus how to say “fuck you and your emotionally manipulative bullshit”. Optimus goes from seeing his team of washouts as being a pity “thanks for trying” gift to his responsibility (in a good way!) and his friends.

I wanted a TFA season 4 for a lot of reasons, but one of those is that it would mean Optimus is no longer just on Earth where he’s got a fairly nice, stable routine and his supportive team around him. It’s the first time he’s back into a position of possible authority while being under constant scrutiny, and everyone’s watching him and his ““potential”“. That’s often a bad word to previously gifted children, aight. It is a bad bad trigger word that inspires some deep set panic of failing to live up to expectations. He’s expected to have plans and future desires. As someone who went through something vaguely similar and some ensuing depression, that’s uh. The future turns into a big worrisome question mark. I can plan for next week! Next year? Uh. Never. Never really thought I’d get that far...

Elita/Black Arachnea is very much “driven gifted child”. Her power is insane, she’s very smart, and physically talented enough that the Elite Guard is within her realm of possibility. Then something goes wrong and she’s all fucked up. No one wants her anymore, and she’s stuck between blaming herself and blaming others. Usually, she blames others (namely Optimus and Sentinel) because anger is a lot easier to deal with than guilt and self-recrimination.

So she gets stuck on the idea of “fixing” herself to be good, rather than really learning how to work with her new reality. And that’s frustrating to her, because here’s something without an easy fix. It’s not something she can work to overcome. It is very much a dead-end to her, and she’s not used to that.

Although she does make her entrance having thrown in with the Decepticons, I don’t count her as one. She’s strikes me as more of a neutral party willing to use either side in her current state. The Autobots do not like organics, and there’s too many people who would know her back on Cybertron, so it’s safer for her to throw in with the Decepticons until she gets herself sorted out, even if they don’t like organics either. That’s fine, because she can work hard and show off her potential and finagle her way up to a spot where she can travel with Megatron himself. Which like, damn?? Even if no one likes or trusts her she is good enough at what she does that they will bring her along on the crazy top-secret mission. So she’s gotten some internal validation that she’s still a good gifted child, she’s worth something, and she’ll be worth more once she fixes herself. (Honey it ain’t just your physical being that will need fixing after all this.)

Then she gets to Earth and meets Optimus again. And oops that opens up a kettle of worms she’s been steadfastly ignoring for a long time except to blame him whenever she starts feeling too upset about her condition. And he doesn’t want to treat her any differently. He still wants to call her Elita. He’s still fond of her. He has some very obvious spider-related PTSD. And on the one hand, she wants that. Wants to be loved by someone who knows her, wants that friendship back. On the other hand, it’s like. He’s refusing to acknowledge her, as she is now. He’s not looking at the whole of her, and that’s infuriating. AND THEN she has to deal with Black and Sentinel and it is driven home very hard that she won’t ever be “normal”. She’s going to be “broken” forever. It doesn’t matter what else she does, she’s always going to be a techno-organic freak. And that sends her off the deep-end a bit and leads to her shenanigans with Wasp and. Hm. Therapy is needed, really. For everyone in this verse but I’ll settle for her first.

Sentinel is our favorite asshole. Personally, I read him as “imposter syndrome gifted child”. He feels like he can’t keep up with Elita and Optimus because they’re both so much smarter than him. He’s just not as special as them. So he blusters a lot to cover that up, tries to force the world to make space for him and acknowledge him. If he’d slow down and find some inner-peace, he’d probably find that actually he is very talented and clever, and that by partnering with others he can cover for the areas he’s deficient in, but eh. That takes self-reflection, and folks with imposter syndrome have some trouble with doing that truthfully.

So when Aranea-7 goes down, he’s left with the feeling that he fucked up big time. Optimus though, he’s not saying anything. Optimus is willing to take the fall. Optimus is special and Sentinel doesn’t even have to say anything really and oh look, Optimus is still a Prime, and he gets his own ship and crew. Sentinel knows if he had spoken up, he wouldn’t have gotten that. Then the lucky idiot goes and finds the fucking All-Spark, like what the fuck that thing has been missing for goddamn centuries.

And then Sentinel gets to spend 50 years thinking that his two former best-friends and teammates are dead.

Now, honestly, 50 years is not that long to a Cybertronian, true. But! Even if we compress it down to a more human compatible time of say, 5 years, that is a long time to think someone is dead, and to maybe sort of blame yourself for it. And Sentinel got to see that these lucky, gifted kids who were so special weren’t safe. And he knows that he isn’t safe either, because it’s not like he’s that special. So he knows he needs to be a good Autobot and a good yes-man and stick by the rules and keep fighting for his spot at the top because otherwise, what will happen to him? And so he’s kind of a prickly asshole, but he’s good. He has to be good.

And then he gets to find out in short order that oops! Both his friends are alive, doing significantly better than expected, Optimus can still kick him to the floor after being out of the service for so long, and no one on the disgusting organic planet respects him. And now Ultra Magnus is out of commission, somehow he’s supposed to be in charge even though it feels like all he’s done is just stand there behind Magnus and be his secretary (pro-tip kids: paperwork and secretarial know-how is actually what makes roughly half the world run. If you hold the files, you hold the keys to the kingdom). But he’s in charge, he’s in the spotlight, and all he can think is “I can’t screw this up I can’t let them find out I’m a horrible little nobody what would somebody actually important do in these circumstances”.

Could Sentinel have a redemption arc? Probably! I’m not the one to write it though, and it would most likely involve a lot of him being stuck in places where his identity both does not matter and conversely does: his rank and abilities don’t matter. His willingness to help and interactions with others? Do. He needs a chance to interact honestly with people again to fix some of his underlying problems with trust before he can start on other shit..