#(this is verdigrisprowl mun but I wanted this post on my personal)

[ckret2]

We DON'T have evidence that he's "too heavy for his mold" and his weight has never been compared to Bluestreak's or Smokescreen's.

What we DO have evidence of is two comments on Prowl's weight. One, Jazz calls him heavy while Prowl's unconscious and Jazz has to carry him. (He says he needs to "lay off the energon," which is the stupidest line ever, because 1. it implies that Cybertronians retain weight from their food the way humans do, which, ??? where? why? wtf?????, and 2. since energon is the ONLY thing Cybertronians consume, it means Jazz is basically saying "lay off eating all together" which would uhh, make Prowl starve to death? I'm sorry, I can't stand this line.) Two, when Spike sees Prowl when he comes back to Earth, the first thing he says is "You put on weight."

So no, we DON'T know whether Prowl is "heavy for his mold" or "more heavy than Bluestreak or Smokescreen." We DON'T know that people make fun of him for it—Jazz did, while Prowl was unconscious and Jazz was stressed, but Spike made a mere observation and we have no reason to believe Cybertronians perceive mere observations about their weight to be mockery the way fatphobic humans do. What we DO know is that he's heavy enough that Jazz felt the need to comment on it (in the dumbest way possible) and we DO know that he wasn't always that heavy—he put on more visible mass between his first and second trip to Earth. However, for all we know, he was originally under-weight for his mold, and his new weight is merely "normal," and Jazz is just, like, inclined to complain about minor difficulties that aren't really that big an inconvenience when he's stuck in an enemy base with aliens and Decepticons surrounding him and he's got to rescue himself and a friend/officer while he escapes. We can't assume that this makes Prowl more heavy than he should be/more heavy than other people.

Back to the image above: we don't actually know whether the focus of this fantasy is indeed supposed to be a "pretty, curvy" Prowl. (Nor that Prowl/Cybertronian aesthetics would think that being heavy ≠ being pretty. That's a very humancentric assumption based on our own screwed up culture.) We don't even know if the above fantasy Prowl is supposed to look less heavy than normal Prowl. This is what Prowl looks like in ex-RID:

He looks pretty solid and beefy, right? But compare that to his appearance in Sins of the Wreckers, the same comic where the above fantasy Prowl comes from:

Even though it's the same body, he's drawn in a way that makes him look thinner. Moreover, he's got roughly the same body proportions as fantasy Prowl—same waist, same thighs, same shoulder span—but fantasy Prowl looks like his armor is made up of 90s video game polygons rather than of bricks, which consequently results in it looking smaller. He didn't lose overall mass, he shaved some armor.

And we know that gaining mass (likely at least part in the form of armor) is a thing that's been going on with Cybertronians—ALL Cybertronians, not just the mysterious weight-gaining Prowl. From "Signal to Noise" in MTMTE:

While [Rung] had stayed the same, his friends had grown in size. In a post-Functionist society where your body was your primary weapon, size was everthing—at least until you become so energon- hungry that you could barely make it from one mode to the next without seizing up. But until that critical threshold was crossed—and some people reached it sooner than others—every upgrade was an exercise in accretion and accession and the annexing of surrounding space.

So, from here on out is speculation, but based on all of the above here are my two theories on Prowl's body weight and that fantasy sequence:

1) He hasn't always been "heavy." Because he gained a notable amount of mass between his two visits on Earth, his weight gain is from one distinct source in between those two visits: Devastator. Since the Enigma hadn't been rediscovered yet, Shockwave had to rebuild Prowl to be compatible with Devastator, so it's highly probable Prowl had to be beefed up in order to not be ripped apart by the combination process. And between Prowl's combination with the Constructicons and his next trip to Earth, two things happened: Prowl became more violent/erratic (probably due to the Constructicns—as seen in his actions on Earth and in Combiner Wars, where his solution to every problem is "stick me in a combiner so I can punch it"), and Prowl had to reformat to an Earth vehicle for his next trip to Earth. His newly violent attitude might have subconsciously (or consciously) driven him to beef up even more. That's why Spike was able to notice a size difference and Jazz may have noticed a weight difference: Prowl got swole for Devastator.

2) In his fantasy world, Prowl isn't imagining himself as a svelt little thing because he wants to be pretty and admirable or because he wants to avoid teasing. He's imagining himself as the same basic mass, but with lighter/thinner armor. The point of his fantasy is that the war is over and they no longer need their heavy armor upgrades, so they can downgrade to aesthetic/ineffective armors. This would fit with the content of the conversation, and with the fact that Optimus has similar-looking armor in the fantasy:

His body is not a fashion fantasy, it's another facet of his utopia fantasy.

I find it interesting that, in the Perfect World that Prowl dreamt of, he was incredibly curve and beauty. I mean look at that. He fine