#someone pls talk to me about beastformer deadlock/drift I am SO NORMAL about him!!!

[blighted-lights]

i wanna ask abt beastformers deadlock. i wanna ask aby beastformers deadlock so bad

YOU!!

(thank you sm for asking, deadlock has been rotting in my brain for weeks you have no idea. as a treat, have some sketches of him as i try to figure out his design!)

putting this under a read more because it's kind of a lot but; lore time!

(sudden change to proper grammar!)

Drift was forged as a feline beastformer with an entierly different name. He was forged at a time when the Functionalist Council's political power was at its highest, and as such, was subjected to the same extreme prejudices as others with animalistic forms were. He spent the early years of his life struggling; resorting to all manner of dangerous jobs in order to make ends meet. With no education or stable place to live, Drift was desperate for a way to escape the situation that was unfairly put upon him due to his altmode.

Drift was eventually approached by someone (an OC made out of convince who has since become the boogie man of several different stories by this point) who was willing to give Drift a new chance at life... so long as he was willing to give up his beastformer altmode, be put into a new frame, and change his name. Drift agreed out of pure desperation. He renamed himself Drift and underwent the frame change; going in as a beastformer and coming out as a speedster. The mech who "compassionately" took Drift in became his patron and funded his life as a racer, and for a while, Drift lived comfortably. (If you can call being exploited for labor, being turned into a product, barely seeing any of the profits he makes, and feeling disconnected from himself and everyone else around him as "comfortable".)

However, this arrangement only lasted a few short decades. The life of a racer was a difficult one, and Drift coped poorly with the change. While he initally had a very successful run, his performance slowly began to worsen over time. He was costing his patron more money than he was producing, and after a devastating "accident" on the raceway resulted in Drift completely wiping out with extensive damage, his patron decided to cut his loses and try again with someone else. Drift was casted back out onto the streets with zero support and lingering damage from his accident, and the next bit is pretty much as we know it in canon.

Drift ends up in the Dead End, meets Gasket and the rest of his group, and struggles on the streets for many years until he is eventually picked up by Megatron and renamed Deadlock. He fought alongside the rest of the Decepticons against the corrupt, oppressive society that the Senate and functionalists promoted, and finally thought he found a place to belong.

After the deaths of the Senate, followed closely after by the hunting down of the Functionalist Council, Deadlock received the chance to return to his original altmode. He was initially hesitant to do so; he felt so disconnected from his original identity that the idea of returning to having a beastformer altmode was intimidating. He'd grown comfortable with being a speedster, as he associated it with the saftey and comforts with his brief life as a racer. Eventually- with some subtle coaxing from others, namely Ravage- Deadlock agreed to undergo another frame change to regain his original altmode. He got lucky; he was able to keep both his speedster alt and the addition of his feline one. Deadlock woke up as a triple-changer, and from that point on, his beastmode was deeply tied into his identity as a Decepticon. He believed it was the Decepticons who gave him the ability to be who he truly was (as well as the ones who enabled him to get sober), which was something Deadlock felt so, so rarely in his life. Deadlock was a speedster, yes, but he was a beastformer first. It became impossible for him to seperate being a beastformer, a Decepticon, and Deadlock.

So when he left the Decepticons and eventually joined the Autobots as Drift, he pushed his identity as a beastformer away once again. Not only because revealing that he is a triple-changer risked others being able to link him back to being Deadlock, which only Autobot High Command knows about, but because his identity as a beastformer is so deeply tied in with being a Decepticon that he didn't know how to fit it into being an Autobot, if that makes sense. Drift still has the ability to transform into his beastmode and there are other Autobots who know about it, but he only does so if a situation absolutely requires it of him. He associates his identity of being a beastformer with being a Decepticon, and some of the guilt and shame he feels for his actions as Deadlock bleed over into how he feels about his altmode as well. Its a mess of complicated emotions and identity issues. As if Drift didn't have enough of those already 💀.

(and hey, if you made it this far, this is for you 🌸)

But yeah! Those are the super basics of my Drift/Deadlock being a beastformer lore. I love talking ab the Drift that lives in my brain sm tho, so if anyone had any more questions, feel free to ask!! I've considering writing fanfic for this version of Drift/Deadlock but 🤔 I'm not sure if I will, yet. He's mostly living life as a roleplay muse for now lmao