#I really like both romantic. best friends/amica and familial relationships between these two.

[decoy-sammy]

Dadwave

[cleverthylacine]

Ship and HC what you want--but I hate Ravage & Soundwave parent-child headcanons so much. I'm finally gonna say it. They can be adult best friends rather than lovers, but the family thing makes my skin crawl. Here's why.

The following is just my personal opinion. Everyone who reads this is free to engage with it, but I don't want to fight about it, and I am not trying to make anyone give up their headcanons, whether those are romantic, sexy, familial, or just friendly.

(The Ravage I write in my fics and RP, like ES Ravage, prefers she/her pronouns. I am aware that Ravage uses he/him in other continuities.)

I am really freaking uncomfortable with most of the common familial headcanons about Soundwave and Ravage, Soundwave and his cassettes in general, and the whole cassette thing. And I will also die screaming before I tag erotic content between two fully sapient beings as "bestiality".

I would rather think of Ravage and Soundwave as bonded lovers (and the birds as her siblings) then think of Soundwave as either of the following:

An Abusive Father who sends his own children directly into the heat of battle out to fight as child soldiers; or

A Large Adult Son who allows his parent and her siblings to be mutilated so he can drag her off into places like mining colonies and war zones, where she ministers to his emotional needs while also fighting for him in the heat of battle, and has no life or relationships of her own.

Because no matter how many cat memes you draw, neither of those things is cute. You have the right to ship whatever you want to ship same as me, but I don't want to read either dynamic.

He is NOT the single father of the year if he's yeeting his children onto battlefields.

He is NOT a good son if his mother is telepathically linked to him, programmed so that he can yeet her out into battlefields in less than a second, and unable to have any romantic or QP partnerships of her own.

If he is her lover (conjunx) or her QPP (amica), and the meeting they had in Rodion was a meeting of two neurodivergent adults who learned how to help and support each other in dealing with their disabilities, and they both want to be together even in the depths of hell, then they have a much less horrific and unhealthy relationship.

I was once made to play IDW Ravage as not Soundwave's partner in a dreamwidth game because they didn't like the ship, and she was a miserable, unhappy person who had given up her entire life to serve Soundwave and Megatron.

This really solidified my feelings about not just why I think their relationship is romantic and adorable, but also why I think a parental relationship between them, going in either direction, is incredibly fucking gross.

Making them mutually interdependent neurodiverse adults with complementary support needs, who love each other in a mature way or even an 'adult' way changes the narrative.

If Ravage is Soundwave's life partner, then the forced cassettification has imposed a power differential on them, but it is significantly lessened by the fact that they were already together and interacting as grown-ass adults who loved each other before that took place.

In other scenarios, she's being thrown by her father up against mechs 4 times her size, OR she's a devoted parent who has been emotionally enslaved by cassettification and can't even have an adult relationship of her own because who the hell is going to want to be her partner knowing that she has an unbreakable telepathic link with her son? And you can't really say she's trading this emotional labour for protection when he's yeeting her out into the front lines every third episode.

IDK, I think glorifiying parents who send their children to war and enmeshed parenting that renders someone an appendage to their child is a lot less problematic than letting them meet as adults and learn how to help one another.

Every time I see someone draw humanformer Soundwave and Ravage as a collared pet, I want to scream, but I don't, because everyone has the right to write and draw what makes them happy.

My friends know NOT to send me links to art that diminishes Ravage.

Ravage may look like a cat, but she passes the Harkness test, and her entire arc in IDW was about getting people to respect her as an equal despite the thing where she looks like a cat.

Her brain and spark are equal to that of any other Cybertronian. It's not bestiality. There's no reason a telepath would care more about the shape of her body than the feel of her mind.

I would rather think that she's getting love and respect and hot overloads from Soundwave than think that she's selflessly devoted to him and to Megatron for all of her days until Tarn locks her into that fucking refrigerator. Or think that she's a child soldier.