#or perhaps anger is seen as an 'evil' character trait as opposed to being unsociable or anxious or depressed

[lord-squiggletits]

I know I haven’t posted detailed meta or thoughts of any kind about Impactor, but I really do rotate him in my mind a lot because mmmmm, he’s actually kind of relatable to me. Not in a “he’s just like me fr fr” way, but in a way where he has a lot of my strongest/most negative personality traits turned up to 11, so in him I see a sort of “worst version” of who I could be. But saying “worst version” as if he’s evil is misleading. Mostly when I look at Impactor I see someone tragic, someone who does have a noble heart but is drowning in too much violence and recklessness and anger to be the best version of who he could be.

Like (pardon me b/c it’s been a while since I read LSOTW), when Impactor shot those Decepticon POWs, it wasn’t “haha I’m gonna commit war crimes for the lols,” it was “these guys have killed thousands including my comrades and now I have to let them go just because of some fucking galactic politics? It’s not fucking fair that they get to get away with what they did, I didn’t come all this way to deliver justice to them just for them to be let go on a technicality” so he killed them.

In a way it’s admirable to be so hellbent on justice that you would go against everyone in order to kill people who did evil, but on the other hand, it was also incredibly short-sighted for Impactor to put killing a couple guys over an entire major political relationship in a war. But I think that goes to show that he thinks in terms of the here-and-now, in terms of what’s directly in front of his face and what he thinks is right or wrong. And I suppose that’s what I find so intensely relatable about him, because I can also be prone to blinding anger and passion, and just because you feel intensely that something is wrong doesn’t excuse you from doing it, and yet it just seems so unfair in the moment. Anger and passion can make you forget the principles you stand for when the heat of the moment comes. And it’s not because you’re an evil bastard who wants to hurt people, no; it’s because you DO believe in justice and you DO want to do the right thing, but your anger at injustice overcomes your sense of reason and you end up doing something evil against your moral code because you got caught up too much in your emotions...