#psychology and mental health stuff imo has made leaps and bounds in a mere decade from my pov

[transingthoseformers]

Black Arachnia is also fascinating to me. So much of her personality in the show is based on her knowledge of how people perceive her, and what she does in response to that. She's got body issues which i mean hey samesies. She tries harder as a Decepticon scientist, which I don't think she had any interest in science before Arachna 9? The way her frame reformat changes her psychology is interesting as hell. Especially since, in TFA, the frame based functionalism is strong as hell. You can see it in how they associate flight frames with Decepticons, how they treat Bulkhead's size, a lot of Bumblebee's interactions and his need to prove himself, and Black Arachnia is the strongest example of this tbh tbh. She was willing to work with Meltdown, fucking Meltdown who has a great history of being very technophobic, despite all the red flags. She was willing to do anything to go back to her original form... and I often find myself wondering what would've happened if she was able to achieve that.

The autobots wouldn't have taken her back. Most of the autobots full well think she's dead, and there's a chance they might up think she's a terrorcon if she got back on Cybertron. If that doesn't happen, they'd toss her in the stockades for being a former Decepticon. Hell... as much as she says the Decepticons were willing to take Black Arachnia in, we see that they still didn't treat her with full dignity. It's why I think she never went back even after arriving on Earth. She was technoorganic first, a former autobot second, a scientist third, and a person last. Not gonna get into the sociology of the tfa Decepticon hierarchy and social norms right now. For all intents and purposes, she's a rogue. She probably got somewhat attached to the dinobots because they accepted her immediately (... and ykw I can see many of the— terrans yes I'm going to call the mecha created on earth terrans sue me— could've been treated as technoorganic-adjacent.) But even then, she still looks at them through the lens of how useful they are. Which again again is thanks to the rampant functionalism in tfa. Both the autobots and Decepticons look at things in terms of "now how useful are you to us, and your usefulness will determine your worth) which pits is how IRL Functionalism in humans work as frag that's exactly where Transformers as a franchise got it from. IDWG1 has a lot of sociology and psychology inspiration from Jro's own fascination with it.

Anyways Black Arachnia, like many mecha in this series, is ultimately a cool example of people being a result of their environment. And she's a major mood thanks to this