#wtf goes on in that bot's processors

[morporkian-cryptid]

I'm reading The Murderbot Diaries (Network Effect, so, spoiler alert), and man, Murderbot's relationship with ART makes me insane. It's like, you're an insufferable asshole. You're my best friend. Saying that word makes me retch. You're the only person in the universe who could possibly understand what it's like to be me. I can't possibly understand what it's like to be you. I must look like an ant to you. I've put my unconscious body in your hands and let you alter it. We both love our humans to the point of destruction. You've killed people to protect me and my friends. You only did it because you were between two jobs and bored. We watch TV shows together. I saw you have an emotional breakdown about a historical drama. You could kill me in a hundred different ways. I've brutally murdered several people to avenge you. You were ready to kill all my friends to save yours. I've brought you back from the dead. You're keeping us prisoner. I'm your only chance of saving your friends. I've lived and traveled inside your body, and you've been a passenger in my brain. We don't even know each other's real names.

[theflameisgonee]

if ur still up for headcanons, riptide for your brainworms and magnus for mine?

DREAMBOAT. riptiiiiiiiide. i spend a lot of time building this boy up from nothing, as i haven’t even reached the part of the comic that he’s in yet. lol

he doesn’t drink! i put this in a fic for a consent explanation but decided i actually really liked it. my explanation is that boats have a lot of liquid balance to deal with just...being boats, so they have to be really careful about their intake! not that they all just can’t drink at all, but riptide finds calculating what and how much he can drink to be too much trouble, so he just figured out how much sparkly stuff he can put in regular energon and goes with that so he can hangout with his friends in social drinking situations.

i think boat culture in general is less...weird about the gender thing than a lot of cybertronians are. i like the idea that boats have been on the side developing their own thing while everything else on cybertron became formal and weird and eventually collapsible. this leads to a lot of fun nested headcanons!! the gender thing primarily. riptide meets nautica and is like oh! Submarine, nice and just doesn’t even care about the she??? She?????? of it all

this is also my approach to his mto status, in that boat culture in general doesn’t give a fuck about that kind of thing. they saw a boat and went ayy!! boat!! and he’s been about that lackadaisical about it ever since.

speaking of boat culture lets talk about BABIES. i did this in a twitter thread once so it’s cheating but i CARE THEM. boat babies are raised communally with the carrier as the only designated parent. they have really soft plating that makes them very flexible, like its disquieting to other alt modes. they also have MANY TEETH, an unsettling amount of teeth, and are fond of grinning. they’ve got connectors like little parasite fish suckers that let them latch on to bigger mechs and ride around. please just imagine with me riptide carrying around this genderless little monster baby, not telling anyone who the father is, while half the lost light freaks out. it’s a thread that soothes me regularly. the other soothing thing is that the scavengers fucking love this weird baby a lot, SO IMAGINE KROK HOLDING THIS LITTLE TERROR!!!!!

my completely unfounded friendship group headcanon that i hold near and dear to my heart is riptide, nautica, and rung. i think they all bond about cybertronians being weird as fuck all the time, riptide as a boat, nautica as a camien, and rung in a removed “i looked away from my science project for four million years and they developed a society wtf.” i just like to think about them meeting up to be like WHAT/WHY IS THE WEIRD SOCIETAL EXPECTATION OF THE WEEK. did i just order a “riptide-nautica-rung” linking charm set from etsy?? yes. that is how hard i believe in this dumb friendship headcanon.

oh mr. magnus. i’m GOING to make some of these fun!!

magnus’s processor has a lot of autonomic functions he doesn’t even realize are there, and most of them are just self-preservation to combat the hypervigilance. i think he compulsively gathers data around him, and needs a way to catalogue it so it doesn’t overwhelm him!! (i’m thinking about the drift criminal status hud panel here) the hypervigilance is a combination of “he always liked being aware of his surroundings” and well, the War. but his autonomic processes have settled into taking this massive amount of data input and settling it into neat lists and spreadsheets and even when he’s accessing these lists and spreadsheets he has no idea they’re there or where they came from.

hmmmm, how about a distinct headcanon i have for g1 magnus?? i think he genuinely cares so much for everyone around him, not just under his command. his empathy drive is just in overdrive all the time, and he finds himself caring not just about his mechs, but his enemies, random bystanders of the war etc.

okay back to idw: i think some small part of magnus really likes having drift around as a nemesis. important things: drift does not consider them nemeses. magnus would also NEVER voice this out loud. but secretly, drift is his nemesis and he maybe hangs around drift sometimes under the guise of “keeping watch for criminal activity” but really he just enjoys arguing with him about mysticism. because they’re nemeses.

magnus actually really likes how useful his alt mode is!! every time he gets to tow or carry something he gets a little zing of happiness because it’s such a little difference but it’s a physical difference he can make. it’s like...clearing clutter from a room, you can SEE what it is you’ve done and he loves that!!

tfp ultra magnus took one look at the rescue bot logs and immediately turned them off. he doesn’t know what’s wrong with griffin rock, but he knows he absolutely cannot handle it. he also knows wheeljack must never learn of it.