#and as you all know i have a lot of complaints about every single thing

[hazelcallahan]

ok “all vi needed to do was call caitlyn cupcake to make her turn on ambessa” is a fun little bit that i will participate in but i really feel like it’s contributing to two major misconceptions/complaints:

1. that caitlyn’s heel turn was sudden, and

2. that vi and caitlyn have reconciled

so let’s break that down, shall we

1. every single hint was there that caitlyn was chafing against ambessa’s regime and doing every little thing in her power to resist without putting herself and her loved ones at great risk. from the first scene with maddie - hell, the opening montage - you can tell cait is fucking EXHAUSTED. weary. that’s a woman who has spent months suffocating, doing desperate damage mitigation when put into an impossible situation. she didn’t want the mantle of leadership, and what was she going to do, say no and let someone worse take it? so she’ll take it. she’ll ban the use of solitary confinement cells. she’ll argue against ambessa’s soldiers attacking civilians. she’s in too deep to really do much else.

additionally, there are hints that she’s been planning on ways to take down ambessa for months. that one scene with dialogue over them sparring is literally there to symbolize how every single conversation between them is a battle, both of them looking for openings, and no matter how hard caitlyn tries ambessa always seems to come out on top. you also don’t just come up with the plan she did entirely on the fly - tracking things like guard rotations is something only a schemer does.

2. sure, “cupcake” is a fun little pet name, but it’s so much more than that. the most obvious is an olive branch. vi doesn’t want to hurt caitlyn. there’s so much affection still there.

the bigger thing, though, and the thing i believe caitlyn is reacting to there, is it’s a sign of distance. vi used “cupcake” as a way to needle at caitlyn when they first met, when she didn’t quite trust her even though she’d broken her out of prison. after that, we hear her use it twice more in s1: on the bridge during their parting hug, and after the council meeting as she’s trying to leave. both instances where she, in that moment, believes they’re never going to see each other again, and so she has a vested interest in creating that distance. on the other hand, we hear her use caitlyn’s name after she hears the gunshot on the bridge, in a moment of genuine fear and affection.

come s2, vi doesn’t use “cupcake” at all in act 1. she used “cait” a lot. still a nickname, but also caitlyn’s actual name - i know you, i see you, i care about you. caitlyn’s observant enough to notice this, even passively, even if she didn’t realize it until she heard “cupcake” months later, but i can’t help but feel like she takes that nickname as a sign of how they’ve drifted. she feels like she has to start over again with this woman she clearly loves. the meaning is clear to her: i won’t hurt you unless you give me a reason to, i’ll work with you if that’s what you need, but i’m not going to let myself get close to you just yet.

[quarterlifekitty]

okay, I had been thinking about but after you commented on my post it’s just— [explodes]

maybe a weaknesses post with the CoD men on your monthly? I’m begging on my knees, I’m sure they (König) could fix me❤️‍🩹✨also thinking about how König probably refers to it as “strawberry week” (German euphemism for it) [explodes pt 2]

Maybe? Machveil. For you? Anything. Also, please look at my favorite period euphemisms, found while researching for this post:

ペリー来航 - Arrival of Matthew Perry

Le petit clown qui saigne du nez - The little clown with a nose bleeding

Weaknesses part 9: the red death

cw: period play, breeding mention, exhibitionism mention

Gaz grew up with a sister— he is no stranger to the ill tidings that come with owning a uterus. He’s a man that probably already has pads and tampons at his place for guests. And Gaz is the kind of son of a bitch who kinda likes it when you’re sick, cause it means he gets to spend time nursing you— so he loves your period. Picking up comfort foods, doing a bit of extra laundry, making sure your vibrator is charged. He calls it “Lady time”.

Soap is not very sympathetic in this matter. He finds it kinda funny, to be honest. He’ll still do anything you ask, but he has a condescending little smile on his face. Calls you his little ketchup packet. Tickles you, knowing it makes you gush a little. That said, he will eat you out during it. His doglike nature knows no bounds. Refers to it as being “on the rag”.

Ghost is like a knight in your royal service when you’ve got a rough menstrual. At your command in any matter, no matter the inconvenience, with no complaint. While he will fuck you and make you cum, it’s purely for your benefit. Blood usually reminds him a bit too much of work for it to be a huge turn on. But he does melt under the praise of “none of my boyfriends before would do this for me— they all said it was gross :(“. Makes him feel like a real man. He calls it Shark Week.

Price feels, in just the tiniest way, like resources have been wasted when you get your period. Like… you’re paying rent on an empty apartment (your baby chamber) when it could be full (with a baby). He’ll never say that, but it’s in the back of his mind. And if you loudly complain about being on you’re period a lot he’ll be like “I know a way to make it stop for a while :{)” (the curly bracket is his mustache). Like man, shut up. Also, blame it on being English, but he’s constantly offering tea for every single symptom. He calls it “code red”.

König. This is a sick man. He feels a bit bad about it, but he does like that your period makes you so slick, and so sensitive— he doesn’t even have to do anything to get you going before he fucks you. Despite his career, he rather likes the look of your blood all over his cock and splashing up his pelvis. And he gets super proud if he’s the first man to ever fuck you on your period. He buys you a big, expensive box of imported chocolate truffles when you’re having a terrible period. Calls it “Erdbeerwoche” (strawberry week).

Nikolai… patron saint of your helplessness. Thinks of your period as a part of his responsibility as your man. Happy wife happy life type of thing. He does a lot of cooking. And he keeps you perched on his thigh at every opportunity for as long as you can stand it. He’s got a hand dipping into your panties and playing with you throughout the day (his non dominant, but that’s never stopped him) while he works, relaxes, entertains guests (Price). Makes you cum until you’re a boneless mess, your blood soaked clean through his jeans. Calls it “Красная шапочка (krasnaya shapochka)” (little red riding hood)

[reignpage]

another bomb question dropping.. RANK WHO HAS THE HIGHEST STAMINA and the biggest bullies about it!!

Toji:

Stamina = 15/10 Meanness = 10/10

He could go all night, all day and never take a break. In fact, he will fuck you as he bites into a sandwich and he'll sip some water only to make you drink it up from his mouth.

Beds are being broken, there are holes in the wall, and every surface is wet and sticky after he’s done with you. You might even need to go to the ER.

‘Tapping out? So soon, ma? Y’r breaking my heart here. Oh, come on, doll. One more, yeah? Be a big girl and keep those legs open'

He's not the meanest with words but he is the meanest in action.

He'll force you to hold your legs open, he'll push your head into your own puddle of squirt, he smacks your face with his cock, and he loves fucking you in front of a mirror and every time you shut your eyes he stops and waits for you to open them before he starts thrusting again.

Would even fuck you through if you black out. Might take a picture and pull it out whenever he needs a laugh and an orgasm

Sukuna:

Stamina = 100/10 Meanness = 9/10

Most stamina

I think he’d push you with his sadism but honestly he’d actually be quite considerate about the fact that you’re human and not a curse and that he actually doesn’t want you to die lol.

So that considerate aspect of him would force him to hold back, maybe even a little too much, not that you could ever tell since he's forcing you into a state of painful pleasure and you can't think for a single second.

He makes you forget your name and he makes fun of you for it.

'Silly woman, I asked for your name and you replied with mine? You're lucky you have a tight pussy otherwise there'd be no use for you. Oh, does that offend your delicate sensibilities? Does it make you want to shed tears? Poor little girl.'

He gets off on your tears and any kind of violence you inflict on him for revenge, whether that’s slapping or biting. Try to draw blood and he’ll never take his dick out of you.

‘What utterance is leaving those whorish lips of yours? Ah, i see. You’re tired? You must have mistaken me for someone who cared. As your king, you serve me. If I say you will serve up five more orgasms, then you will. Now stop your whimpering. It is falling on deaf ears, you pathetic little thing.’

Gojo:

Stamina = 10/10 Meanness = 10/10

Man’s stamina is probably on par with Sukuna and he’s not nice. prepare to be mocked for every noise you make and every face you don’t even know you’re making.

He totally uses his powers irresponsibly

He fucks you in the air

He flies over towns and mountains, ignoring your complaints about not wanting to be see or heard

'Baby doesn't want to be heard? Then keep quiet, silly. How hard can it be? Or maybe you want to be heard? Oooh, dirty girl.'

'Uh, ngh, Toru! Yes! Yes! Right there! That's totally what you sound like, baby. Nah, not complaining, just find it adorable. You're too darn cute I could keep you up. Oh, great idea. Here, hold onto me, gonna try to eat you out whilst we're up here.'

He 100% answers phone calls and bends over so it's right by your mouth and there's no way the person can't hear. Who cares? He's a Gojo and the strongest, no one would dare complain. Especially not when you sound so pretty.

Geto:

Stamina = 8/10 Meanness = 9/10

Great stamina but he's more of an endurance player

He goes slow, really taking his time, savouring every second

Type to grind every time he bottoms out

Presses down on the bulge and plays with your tits

Pulls hair

Just plays around a lot

Your body is an artwork and it deserves to be appreciated

He's quite mean

Loves to namecall - whore, slut, cumdump etc etc

Would creampie you and then dips his fingers in, makes you lick it up and then again and again until you're 'clean enough' for his cock again

Totally into exhibitionism

Would do it in front of his cult or would leave his office door open so anyone passing by can see and hear and might even stop by

Pretty amenable to sharing

'Oh, look, pretty girl. Someone else came by. He likes you, see how hard he's staring at your pretty pussy. Hmm, why don't we let him have a closer look? Would only be fair, right?'

Nanami:

Stamina = 9/10 Meanness 5/10

His stamina depends on how busy he's been. Expect lots of slow, lovemaking after work because what he needs more than anything is comfort and intimacy

But he could go deep into the night at that pace

Grinding and grinding, kissing your cervix and muttering about how that's where your baby's sleeping so you need to be quiet

BUT

When he isn't busy, weekends or holidays for example, oh good golly god

Man is so mean

Dom!Nanami is a force to be reckoned with

If you're acting like a brat, he will pull your hair and fuck you where you stand

He likes fucking you against the wall, he can keep you still that way; you have a tendency to try and crawl away on the bed.

Also loves carrying you during sex

Thinks it's his duty to make sure his wife never has to lift a finger

Very sweet in general

And when he's mean, it's because he's being too nice

'No, sweetheart. Five orgasms are barely anything - we usually get to ten, don't we? No, don't -ha- look at me like that, please. It doesn't matter that I haven't cum yet, darling. Don't worry about me, I'm spending my holiday just thrust how thrust I'd like thruuuuust.'

Choso:

Stamina = 6/10 Meanness = 4/10

Might seem like I'm shitting on him and I will neither confirm nor deny that

But just think about how easily you can bring him to tears, how easily he gets overstimulated, wouldn't take much to get him to call you whatever you want (mommy?)

He'd beg and beg for you to stop and if you do, he'll cry even harder and buck up

If you push him far enough, he'll be the mean one but only because he doesn't listen and he'll use you as his own fleshlight

He's just trying to get his orgasm and doesn't care that you're reaching your nth that night

He's not even listening anymore, everything about you is making him delirious

'Oh, no, I'm -ngh- so sorry! I don't know -ha- what I'm doing. No! No! Don't do that! Wait! Please! I'm so sorry! Please!'

[pukefactory]

Hey there! If you're comfortable with it, could you please make Coral Glasses x reader (preferably fem, but gn is alright too), who's pretty loud and active, and swoons over her very openly? Like, showering her with compliments, offering their help immediately whenever she needs something, stuff like that. I'd be grateful! Love your works a lot <3

.・゜✧ CRYSTALLINE SURF ✧゜・．

╰► Summary: A Compilation of Headcanons Featuring Coral Glasses X Reader Who Swoons Over Her

╰► Character(s): Coral Glasses (Ena: Dream BBQ)

╰► Genre: Headcanons, SFW

╰► Warning(s): None - Completely Safe!

╰► Image Credits: @JoelG

›› She tries to avoid you—but you’re literally everywhere. Coral Glasses has a sixth sense for chaos, and unfortunately (for her), you are its epicenter. Every time she tries to quietly slip into work, you’re already there—waving like a maniac and complimenting her hair or the way she blinks. “Y-you’re loud,” she stammers as her coral eye pulses like a warning beacon. “Why are you always around when I’m… trying to do literally anything?” She says it like she’s exasperated, but she still never walks away.

›› She has no idea how to handle compliments. You tell her she looks “ethereal today” and she just stands there, blinking. Sweating. Her coral twitches. “Are you… mocking me?” she whispers, absolutely scandalized. The worst part is, you’re not. You think she’s genuinely beautiful and weird and cool. Coral Glasses doesn’t know whether to file a complaint or cry into her tie.

›› You offer to help her with every single task—and she hates it. Kind of. “I have to file these blood samples into the anomaly drawer.” You, already holding a labeled container, “I’ll do it for you, gorgeous!” “I—no—this is government-grade biological chaos. This is not ‘cute.’” Still, she never actually stops you. She just hovers nervously and mumbles things like “Don’t die, please. It’d really complicate my week.”

›› She acts annoyed when you flirt, but secretly braces for it. You wink at her over the copier machine, and she makes this little strangled noise and trips over her own foot. “Why are you like this?” she mutters while simultaneously checking her reflection in the copier glass. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Is that the goal here?”

›› The only time she compliments you is under extreme stress. Coral doesn’t mean to blurt things out—but during high-pressure jobs, she panics. Once, she turned to you mid-crisis and screamed, “If we don’t make it out alive, I just want you to know your hair smells amazing and your face makes my job worse in a good way!” Then she immediately choked on her own words and pretended she blacked out.

›› You bring her little gifts and she keeps all of them. You once gave her a coffee mug that says ‘Don’t talk to me unless you’re a coral reef’ and she uses it every day. Another time, you drew a cartoon of her on a sticky note with the caption “My little suit-wearing heartthrob” and she pretends she threw it out—but you caught her staring at it in her desk drawer, blushing furiously.

›› She complains about your enthusiasm like it’s a virus. “I think you might be an emotional contagion,” she says once while you’re spinning in a chair near her. “Your energy levels are… violently disruptive.” You call her your “pretty little hater” and she goes rigid like a startled cat. “D-don’t say things like that out loud! People might think I’m involved with you!”

›› She talks to herself about you constantly. “I swear, if they wink at me one more time I’m going to combust. That’s a medical thing, right? People combust? Internally?” Coral mutters to herself in the hallway. “Did you say something, cutie?” “NO I DID NOT I WAS RECITING… UM… A WORK PRAYER!”

›› She develops an elaborate system of ‘casual avoidance’. She changes her walking routes. She pretends to take calls when she sees you. She even hides behind office plants. But the second you smile at her and say, “There you are, my favorite coral-colored cryptid!” she forgets all her escape tactics and just freezes like a Windows 95 error message. Her coral lens rotates nervously.

›› One day, after you’ve overwhelmed her with compliments and offers to hold her clipboard and brush her bangs out of her face, she just sighs. “…I don’t get paid enough to emotionally process you,” she says, completely defeated. “But if I… hypothetically… wanted to ask you on a date that would include minimal noise and zero touching, would you scream? Or faint?” You do both. She needs a cold drink and five minutes in a server room to recover.

[lych33dragoncookie]

Only the masterpieces that survive the fiercest flames earn their place in history.

(Analysis post)

Alright, they absolutely cooked this update. Like, undeniably so. I was admittedly not that huge of a fan of the last 2 beast yeast chapters we got; they had really good ideas, and Mystic Flour is a wonderful character, but... Dark Cacao hasn't really been done enough with for it to feel like it had the amount of weight it could have, and it really doesn't feel like much about him actually changed at all. Combine that with a complete lack of interesting dynamics and you have a lot of very good and genuinely pretty well thought out story concepts with extensive cultural research, executed in a way that feels more like a traditional old-school story that weakens the attachment the audience feels to the components of said story.

Here, though? I have no complaints so far. It was absolutely wild in fact, to the point where I don't think it's gonna happen again (nor am I entirely sure it should ever happen again). This was back to back, non-stop, smack to the face one after the other. The moment the first point of conflict came up, it was just shit happening left and right; even in the mandatory moment of rest where we chill out for a bit, it's revealed that hey, these sandstorms? Yeah the sand is actually ashes. It's the remains of all the people that live here. Whether they died off on their own or were killed by someone else.

And if that wasn't enough, very shortly after;

... It's fucking crack.

So, people die and kill each other here very frequently, and not only are their remains visibly on display, their ashes also become sandstorms that make it near impossible to navigate the land; on top of being something that people snort like cocaine to become more energetic and aggressive.

We started fucking wild, dude. This whole thing is pulling no punches.

Though, I do wanna note; I really, really enjoyed the interactions between Smoked Cheese and Golden Cheese. It shows not only how forgiving she is, but how these two have known each other for an incredibly long time, and know each other well. They're incredibly comfortable around each other, despite it all, and despite how brazen and Very Much Not Strategic the queen here can be. I really, really enjoyed them.

Always fun to see a recovering villain do things for good, but in their own unique way that's still not exactly heroic but definitely effective and, at times, very gratifying.

Though I enjoyed all this, there's one thing I wanna talk about above all else.

The star of the show. Note that every single part was enjoyable, of course, and he wouldn't be half as interesting without Golden Cheese Cookie to serve as a parallel, but they've cooked up something special here.

So far, Burning Spice's extent of onscreen appearance is very, very short, but... I don't think I need to tell you that he's already made an impact and a half.

Christ, that's violent. With the sound effects and everything too, god damn. But, I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a pretty superficial source of judgement for this character. It's very very telling of what kind of person he is now, what he's all about, what he's willing to do, what he likes doing, but...

More than anyone else in recent memory, the devil is in the details. So let's look at those details.

Nothing too much so far, other than how much he absolutely loves destruction, but there's already a trend; namely on "Nothing lasts forever. It's as simple as that", "In the end, everything becomes dust.", and "You, too, shall see that destruction is the only way.". There seems to be an infatuation with the natural process of everything fading away, turning to dust and dying out. An entirely honest one, believing that there is just about nothing else to life. These will be important to keep in mind.

Here, we see a bit of his current relationship with his own immortality. He doesn't seem to mind the idea of losing it, finding something that may eventually take him down, but he still takes great pride in it. These lines, in text, seem somewhat miserable (and trust me, they definitely are), but the voicework in just about every language conveys that they are said in a more neutral, even potentially proudly manner. Again, not much on their own, but...

Here's where we get into the fun part.

This. This is the crux of their character. At the start, him and Golden Cheese cookie were more or less the same. Benevolent royalty, close and personal with their subjects. Beloved, and loving.

And then, they lost it all.

One way or another, their kingdoms were lost, reduced to almost nothing. They were overcome by grief, desperate, unable to cope with their loss. One tried to latch on as hard as possible. Preserve what she could, blindly, replacing the harsh truth of reality with an idealized, constructed world, where no one would ever have to know pain ever again. She shut herself off, and retreated in the safety and peace of a false reality. She would rather have lied to both herself and all her subjects than face reality. And eventually, she had to learn to move on. Let herself and her kingdom heal more naturally, facing reality. The other, meanwhile, was desperate to let go. He detached himself, trying to move past the pain of loss. But, of course, he couldn't force it to happen. No one can. And so with the grief of losing that which he held dear, continuing to be faced with the reality that nothing is forever, over and over, while he endured, the world slowly turning to ash around them again and again... It's no wonder something in there eventually cracked.

What will it take to destroy me. Nothing is forever, and yet, I am.

Nothing is forever. And yet, I am.

With time, misery turned to mania, and in an attempt to overcome their grief, they embraced it, in the worst way possible. A coping mechanism gone horrendously wrong. That destruction, that loss, the inevitability of death... It's not painful, no. It doesn't have to be. It can be thrilling. Exhilarating. A new reason to live. If all you care about turns to dust anyways, if that's really the only logical destination... Why not have some fun with it? Why not embody that inevitable, unstoppable force? Why not become what you fear, so you no longer have to be afraid anymore?

... You know, at least that's what I think is going on here. The next chapter could contradict this reading, but... From what all we have right now, it seems like Golden Cheese and Burning Spice are two completely different paths for the exact same type of pain. They are, in a way, the same, but diverge in almost complete opposite ways where it counts.

Spice is genuinely equal parts absolutely terrifying and absolutely miserable; a balance that is incredibly hard to strike in writing, but always absolutely fascinating and wonderful to observe when it happens. I have to say, the more I found out about them, the more I couldn't keep my eyes off everything they have going on.

I'm loving every little bit of this update. Mad props to the devs for cooking something up here that I am genuinely incredibly invested in, almost to the same degree as White Lily and Dark Enchantress. Banger update. Absolute S tier material.

TL;DR: Burning Spice is terrifying, miserable, and ridiculously cool. Everything about this update was an absolute merciless flurry of consecutive gut-punches. And I loved every second of it.

... Now we sit and wait for Shadow Milk's release next year.

[rudimentaryflair]

Something about Ren I think is often overlooked is that his character motivation stems from wanting to be invisible, not from disliking others or laziness.

Though those things can be related, there is a distinction. Characters like Yuri and Romeo are belligerent on their own with no provocation. They believe most of the people they interact with are incapable idiots or TGAs (Tiresome, Good-for-nothing Assholes for those of you without a Romeo dictionary). In contrast, Ren isn't really rude unless somebody pokes at him or he's forced to do something he doesn't want to (see: how he treats/speaks about Haru versus Towa). He reacts negatively if the MC acknowledges him (re: bus stop side story) and can be blunt in his requests to be left alone, but he rarely ever calls her names or treats her meanly. Ren would never go out of his way to be an asshole because that would draw attention. He's only rude as a reaction to attention already being on him.

Another hint is his stigma. Though we still don't know much about the demon-pacts, people have noticed/theorized that the ghouls’ stigmas are related to their wants and goals. Leo likes learning secrets; he can eavesdrop on conversations from far away. Haru is overburdened by chores; he can make himself lighter to move faster. Subaru is very private and seems to distrust others; he can sense people's intentions and emotions with a single touch. Rui is afflicted by an incurable curse; he can heal others. So on and so forth.

I also want to draw attention to this particular scene from Episode 12, when Ren was running the duck show at the farm:

Ren's activation word, Raothtas, is an anagram of Astaroth, an archdemon who “can make men invisible” (from the Ars Goetia Wikipedia). In Episode 3, he was able to use it to remove ink stains from the dorm carpet. He seemed unsure that it would work at first, showing that its main intended purpose is not cleaning-related; he likely just turned the stains invisible instead of cleaning them (which is quite in-character tbh). With this in mind, I believe the reason for his pact is related to being able to navigate through life unseen or unacknowledged. It's also why his other main complaint about Jabberwock is that it has no general students: he can't blend into the regular student body because the only members of his House are ghouls. Not to mention, every time the topic of demon-pacts has been brought up, his mood has visibly worsened.

Ren did not have any positive feelings towards the ducks. He didn't even need to be talking, since the dog patch was doing it for him. However, he felt so strongly about making sure the ducks were left alone that he spoke up and scolded the boy anyway. Probably because he related to the situation on a personal level.

Astaroth is also described to “seduce by means of laziness”, but the thing is Ren… isn’t that lazy? He does his best to go to all his classes (despite being woken up at atrocious hours), is invested in doing well in them, and is the only ghoul who has a part-time job. In fact, he works hard enough to resent when things appear easy for others, such as when he suspected Sho of cheating on exams because he scored so high without having to study as much. He doesn't understand how people can succeed without hard work. He only seems lazy because he's in an understaffed, underfunded House that expects a lot of extra work out of him that he isn't willing to give, especially since none of the other Houses’ students have similar responsibilities. Ren being labeled a slacker when characters like Jin and Ed, who actually shirk their required duties, exist, makes me think this whole lazy campaign is a red herring for something else.

Ren, at his core, just wants to feel safe and normal. He doesn't want to go on missions and be put in danger, and he doesn't want to be reminded that he's a ghoul.

Unfortunately, he also goes to Darkwick Academy.

[maxarchive]

"A season that brought the best out of the best" Motorsport Magazine, February 2025 Issue, by Mark Hughes

We've seen plenty of demonstrations of Max Verstappen brilliance on his way to a fourth straight title this season. But has he become a yet-greater driver in '24? Yes. But not because of what he's done in the car; that's always been remarkable. Rather, in a challenging combination of circumstances where it would have been very easy for the whole team to have come undone, he has been the glue. He couldn't have been that if his power was not underwritten by the enormity of his talent. It was on display this season just as always – the virtuosity of dancing through the Interlagos rain, the steely focus of keeping a closely chasing McLaren from getting within DRS reach for 30 laps in Qatar, the technical perfection of Suzuka, the defensive masterclass of Imola, etc. But the circumstances he found himself in this season brought out a leader. At 27 years old he's no longer only the dazzling hurricane of speed and ambition. No longer only someone so driven, drilled and practiced that he’s virtually unbeatable in an equal car. No longer only someone of which his friend and Formula 1 driver coach Atze Kerkhof says is as good as he is, "because of a brilliant natural talent and millions of hours of training. He’s only got better. The rough edges have gone and now he’s like a machine. You cannot beat him." No, Max Verstappen is more even than all that now. A driver in their tenth F1 season doesn't get faster. They can possibly access their best stuff more consistently. But he's been doing that almost perfectly for seven seasons now, a remarkable achievement in itself. So where has he got better? Circumstances have demanded an extra dimension from him – and he's delivered it. But in a way which has not buried him, which still allows him his easy delineation between racing and home, keeping his mind perfectly uncluttered to focus on performance.

He prepared like never before for the new season, as team boss Christian Horner revealed at Suzuka in April. "He changed trainer over the winter. He's fit and lean. You can hear how much spare capacity he has in the car. He wants to know not just who's behind him, but who is behind them as well and what times are they doing. He's become very astute at managing the tyre. The way he managed to extend the tyre life here [at the Japanese Grand Prix] was so impressive."

But that's just a detail, a polishing-up. The leadership dimension came from the circumstances of Red Bull's season. Specifically the strains arising from the controversy surrounding the Horner internal investigation in the early season. Then the car's mid-season competitive decline.

The serenity in the cockpit at the start of 2024, as Verstappen continued from where he'd left off in his dominant '23 campaign, was very much in contrast to how things were in the team as the Horner controversy about the employee complaint against him played out and Max's father Jos got involved, opposing the team boss, campaigning for him to be ousted. 

The way Max dealt with the powerplay, which also involved Helmut Marko, the man who had almost single-handedly brought him to F1, was illuminating. He did not align himself with Jos, stayed on good terms with him but went his own way. He did state his unambiguously firm support of Marko – "If he goes, then so do I" – so sending an implicit message to Horner not to overplay his hand.

But then he helped bring calm equilibrium back, just continued with the competitive imperative and remained civilised with everyone, Horner included.

"What I know is that this team doesn’t give up," said Verstappen after clinching the title in Las Vegas. "There are a lot of very confident people and I really enjoy working with them. I know there was a lot of pressure on them. When you come out of a season like last year where we broke every record and then start to struggle to understand what is going wrong, it's important to remain calm as you try to fix it. Every person in the team has their own emotions which you have to deal with. It's also people-management – because everyone acts in different ways to good results or bad results. But that's something I enjoy as well. Because we all have our own character but we all have to work together to the same end goal and I'm proud of how we stuck together through those races where we were a bit lost."

As Jos was saying that Horner remaining would tear the team apart, Max was ensuring that it wouldn't. Probably this didn't come as much of a surprise to his mother, Sophie Kumpen, the former top-class karter who provided much of his genetic make-up. "Max will always want to solve things first by talking," she explained in a Dutch TV interview. "He is a sensitive person. He gets the fierce racing side from Jos. The gentle side from me. But make no mistake, eh. Under the helmet he is a tiger."

Given Max's childhood and the tempestuous marriage surrounding his early home life before his parents split, it's not much of a stretch to imagine where that diplomatic impulse might come from. It's something so at odds with his racing image, someone who is so uncompromising in his desire to win, he's even prepared to cross the line. As he phrased it in one of his own documentaries, "Sometimes you even have to be a dick to win."

The combination of that sociable, easy-going, even tempered guy outside the car (the Sophie side) and the uncompromising competitive monster in it (the Jos side) is a big part of his strength. But specifically, it has been front and centre in how brilliantly well he kept everything so cohesive in the '24 campaign when it had many ingredients which could have decimated it.

Further fallout from the early season controversy came as Adrian Newey announced his departure from the team, just prior to Miami in May. Max admitted it was a blow, but still he stayed focused. Because there was much to focus on – this was not going to be the breeze the early races had suggested it was going to be. There was a nagging trait in the car, one which had started to become apparent in last year's towards the end of the season: as they applied more aero load to it, so it was becoming more imbalanced. The front end wasn’t keeping up and it was becoming ever trickier to get the car into its sweet-spot window with set-up.

When McLaren made its breakthrough update in Miami, Red Bull's limitation was exposed. It was no longer superior, merely competitive. Then, as McLaren further developed its aero elasticity to give it a great front end at low speeds without compromising its balance at higher speeds, it began pulling clear of Red Bull. The middle part of Verstappen’s season – Silverstone to Monza – was all about wrestling with the competitive consequences of that as Mercedes surged into form too.

It was at this point that Verstappen began visiting the factory at every possible opportunity, maximising his simulator time, working with the engineers in trying to find a solution to the car's limitations. "His workload has been phenomenal this year," says an admiring Horner. But without surprise, for as he’s also said in the past, "The more pressure you put on, the better he delivers… his mental resilience is the strongest I've ever seen."

Only at Hungary did the strain that the competitive struggle was putting on the relationship become apparent. There, he was having an untypically scrappy race trying to overcome the car’s limitations on a day when both McLaren and Mercedes were faster. His race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase (aka ‘GP’) is a tough but calm character, gives as good as he gets and in that sense is perfect for Max. There’d already been a terse exchange between them about Max giving a place back to Lando Norris after having passed off-track. When GP admonished him for not bringing in his new tyres sympathetically, it triggered the sullen kid who hates to be beaten and he responded with (the more-severe expletives removed), “No mate, don’t give me that bullshit now. You guys gave me this strategy, OK? I’m trying to rescue what’s left.” The strategy was perfectly good for the limitations of the car and was predicated on having newer tyres in the last stint, even though that involved getting undercut initially.

It was the low-point of his season – the breaking point after he’d carried the load for so long. It’s where the competitive fierceness conflicted with the leadership role, and it took a sit-down with Horner and Lambiase before the following race to realign that. They were in the car with him, they emphasised. He wasn’t alone, even if it feels like that in the cockpit sometimes. They felt his pain. He took it on board, as always completely straightforward in his communication. He likes to feel he can call the team out when it’s not delivering just as they can call him out when he’s wrong. This was one of the latter times. But there’s never any lingering resentment. “He’s emotional,” says Horner. “Partly that’s where the performance comes from. He’s incredibly strong-willed. He’s a thoroughbred and can be very sharp when emotions are running high. He doesn’t hold back.”

As that sit-down coincided with Monza, with the car at its absolute nadir, we were witnessing how close the whole thing was to falling down. Had the relationship not been repaired and the car’s shortfalls continued not to be understood, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where the partnership broke down irretrievably. But actually not only did they rally around Max and give him the reassurance he needed to get out of that negative place the Budapest weekend took him to, but Monza then shone a big light on the cause of the car’s woes. Which they could set about addressing. Together, they emerged from the crisis.

As they did that, we saw a classic bit of Verstappen hard-headedness in Austin and particularly Mexico against his title challenger Norris. The niggle between them had started in Austria back in June, when they’d punctured each other’s tyres as Verstappen fended off Norris’s attacks in a way which stretched the sporting regulations. It was like that again in Austin and Mexico and in the latter event his move at Turn 7, with no attempt to make the corner so as to ensure Norris went behind once more, was outrageous. It brought to mind his quote about what you had to be sometimes. That’s where he draws his lines; it’s about prevailing and about how extreme he’s willing to be. No one is ever going to pass him around the outside, he says. Something that was drilled into him as a kid in karting by Jos.

If there is turbulence in the aftermath he’ll not acknowledge it. In fact he seemed mystified about why Norris was so upset afterwards in Austria, that delineation for him between on-track and off rarely so well illustrated. Criticism for the incidents by the media did seem to sting him, though. “He’s more sensitive than you think,” Horner says. “Inevitably he’s aware of the criticism and some of it, I think, is very unfounded. He’s a driver that drives aggressively; he’s an attacking driver. But so was Senna, so was Schumacher, so was Hamilton, and they all came under the same kind of spotlight at various times in their careers.”

It was the criticism he received after his incidents with Norris in Austin and Mexico which particularly bugged him. He perceived them as attacks from countrymen of Norris rather than as attacks against professional fouls. He knows he’s the best out there and if there’s some nudging over the specified lines of regulation on track involved in overcoming the competitive limitations of the car, then he probably feels justified. That, for some, puts him in the same bracket as Michael Schumacher as someone whose achievements have an asterisk against them. But he’s not racing for their approval.

He’s not even racing for achievements. As he says about more titles, “I’m already very proud to win four. Winning one or seven is the same thing. You’re just repeating. It’s nice to repeat but it means the same thing. The first one is what you are chasing, is the whole reason you are there. You’ve done it. After that, it’s just nice and doesn’t really mean as much. What’s been beautiful is that each of the four titles have had different emotions. This one has been the best as we’ve not had the fastest car. But the first one will always mean the most.”

That indifference to the statistics of achievement means he won’t be trapped into chasing numbers that only mean anything to outsiders. But there’ll be a conflict between his love of racing and his stated yearning not to be racing long before he reaches 40 (which is what Lewis Hamilton used to say too!). That conflict will surely play a crucial part in what he decides to do with the rest of his life. He’s never known any other life, of course, as the boy brought up in the circus. 

As a driver he’s one of the all-time greats, a more formidable all-rounder even than Fernando Alonso, faster, more extreme. But similar. Alonso is the nearest driver in overall traits. But even the great Alonso bows down to the level Max has attained. The number of times Max has not maximised his car since joining Red Bull in 2016 can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Is he the outright fastest over a lap? Often he is, yes. But this is a misunderstood concept. A driver can only get to the ceiling of his ability if the car’s traits, the way it is balanced, allow him to. There are many reasons why it won’t be, especially in this era of thermally sensitive tyres. 

But let’s assume every driver on the grid was magically given a fully competitive car, each perfectly balanced to match the outer edge of their specific style, in how each driver was wired up physiologically. Would Max be the fastest in qualifying? Possibly not. If it wasn’t him, you’d be looking for Charles Leclerc, possibly Lewis Hamilton at the height of his powers. But in the grind of a race and the even grittier grind of a season, would Verstappen in those circumstances prevail? Almost certainly he would, yes.

There’s no weakness. Schumacher had weaknesses, Senna too. Alain Prost was as rounded as Max but not as quick. Before then, we are heavily into the dangerous era – the years which killed Gilles Villeneuve or Jochen Rindt or Jim Clark and mortally wounded Stirling Moss, drivers who, like Senna, could conjure things that left their contemporaries shaking their heads in wonder. None of the current stars, Max included, quite have that. But Max can maximise every situation with unerring consistency like Fangio, like Clark, like Stewart. And if the peaks of his raw speed are not quite as miraculous as some of the past, he runs close to that almost all of the time, probably more than anyone before.

He’ll be missed when he’s gone, when the rewards no longer offset the energy draining irritations.

[sundaycentric]

I need fluff can you write yandere dan heng and if you do 2 Neuvillete (idk how to spell his name 😭)

Sorry if this goes over the rules you could ignore I loveee yandere dan heng hehe

(separate yandere) dan heng & neuvillette x gn reader

content ★ headcanons, minific, yandere, not proof read, gn reader, reader has hair in dan heng's part, sfw, fluff?

note ★ i love yandere hcs.. idk what it is i just eat them up every single time. but sorry for my recent inactivity ?!?! i rushed these a bit tho.. hope theyre still good </3 mainly just put my thoughts down :(

DAN HENG ★

Dan Heng knows what it's like. He knows what it's like to be locked up, forced away from the outside world. He knows what it's like to be alone and scared. He knows what it's like to have someone watch your every move. Dan Heng knows what it would be like for you. Yet, he can't shake the thoughts and desires to take you.

Dan Heng knows it's wrong. He can sympathize, which is probably why he tried to deny it all in the first place. However, he's been so selfless. He accepted punishment without complaint. He helps around the Astral Express so much. It's hard for Dan Heng to not be selfish this once and indulge in his love.

That is if he can even call it love. Dan Heng tried to deny his feelings for you first. He knew how hard it would be, even without expecting the obsession to come along with it. His draconic heritage makes him more possessive than the average lover. They hoard what they love, and it includes their mates as well.

Dan Heng can't avoid it entirely, though. Being without you feels like an even worse punishment than his banishment. With you, he feels something he has never felt before. Dan Heng can no longer deny his love for you, even if it may be more than that.

You might notice him giving extra attention to you. It is never anything big, but rather small things. Dan Heng looks at you a bit longer. He smiles slightly when you talk. He stands closer to you. He won't flinch away when you grab his hand. He'll let you into the Archives. Dan Heng will treat you differently.

He is still silent as ever, but he is more relaxed around you. At the same time, he feels more tense, though. Dan Heng doesn't want to push you away. He'll take his time with you.

In his dragon form, his thoughts are even worse. It is harder to suppress his desire for you. Especially when he already begins to subconsciously think of you as his mate. This is when things get a bit more severe. He's less controlled.

Dan Heng's tail might loosely wrap around your ankle as if you'd run. He'll glare at people he thinks are too close. He'll only go where you go. He'll favor you and always find a way to defend you. Things like this are much more noticeable as his love grows.

The Archives have a lot more entries about you. Your physical description, personality, hobbies, interests, and moods all have their own extensive pages. When he can't be with you, he'll simply write or read about you. Dan Heng will find himself reading over your information if he can't go to sleep.

At this point, Dan Heng knows it is more than love. He knows he is obsessed with you. But he doesn't care all that much. He feels something, something that isn't cold. Something that feels good and warm in his heart, even if it is terribly wrong in his brain. He's given up on trying to suppress it. He simply can't, so Dan Heng embraces it. He embraces you. He loves you.

If you do end up loving Dan Heng as well, he will be overjoyed. You can't see it on his face, but the way his tail tightly coils around your waist tells you otherwise. He isn't too big on physical touch normally, but he will always have some kind of touch on you.

He'll get a bit overbearing. He doesn't want to see you hurt. It's dangerous trailblazing. Dan Heng needs you.

If you find out the extent of his love, he might finally lose the rest of his self-restraint. You'd probably run. He doesn't want that. He won't let that happen. You're his now.

Dan Heng gently ran his fingers through your hair, playing with it. You sat down in front of him with his tail securely wrapped around your waist. Your back snugly pressed against his chest. Both of you breathed slowly, enjoying the moment.

"Dan Heng?" You asked. He did not respond. He only continued to mess with your hair. You couldn't see his expression, how he looked at you with utter love in his eyes. He was thinking.

"Dan Heng..?" You question softly. This time, Dan Heng seems to have heard your words. His fingers stop for a moment as he blinks.

"Yes, what is it?" His fingers resume once he speaks. They softly pull through any tangles, Dan Heng paying extra attention to make sure he doesn't hurt you. His tail lightly twitched around your waist.

"I was thinking about going on the Luofu with March and..." You didn't get to finish your sentence as Dan Heng's grip on your hair tightened. It hurt a bit, as his fist pulled on your hair unknowingly. Dan Heng's voice came next.

"No," he said. Dan Heng's voice was far colder than it usually was. He sounded angry and disappointed and upset. It was impossible for you to turn to see his expression with his hand holding your head straight. Dan Heng repeated, "No. It's too dangerous. The.. Stellaron Hunters are there. He is there. If something happens to you, you will never be able to best him in a fight. You need to stay here, where it's safe. Besides, March and the others don't need you. They can do this alone."

Dan Heng's words came out harsher than he was meaning to, but he was too busy worrying about you to realize. He shuddered slightly, imagining what it would be like if you were Blade's next victim. It wasn't hard to figure out Dan Heng is attached to you, so perhaps he would go for you to get to Dan Heng. The thought sickened him. He never wanted to see you in pain like he had to be. Slowly, his grip loosened as he went back to playing with your hair.

However, you were also a bit uneasy. Dan Heng's tone was off, and he had been acting weird recently. You spoke after a few minutes of silence, "I'm feeling tired... I'm going to go to sleep in my room now, Heng."

"Hm," Dan Heng hums, "No. I think you will sleep in here from now on."

NEUVILLETTE ★

Neuvillette also knows it's wrong. What he stays up at night thinking of is illegal. It goes against everything he does in life. Yet, he would never think it would feel so good.

Neuvillette has never been a selfish man. For hundreds of years, he upheld justice for others. He was always fair and righteous, even when it hurt. However, Neuvillette has never really wanted anything specific in the first place. Yes, he yearns to understand himself and others, but he has never felt that carnal desire to own something.

That is, until he met you of course. Suddenly, he felt something he'd never felt before. It was weird, bubbling in his chest sweetly. It made his heart ache with yearning. It almost felt a bit painful, but it was also so enjoyable. He wanted more of it.

You made him feel something he has yet to grasp. He may not understand emotions well, but he knows what certain ones are. But this, he does not know. You made Neuvillette feel something new. Something that made him feel a bit more alive. As if you were the purpose, the reason he was born.

Neuvillette tries to dismiss these thoughts, but it's hard. He must focus on his duties, but he often thinks of you in the moments between work. He knows it's wrong. But it doesn't feel bad. It feels good. So, is it really that wrong?

Neuvillette is still very busy, though. He will get the melusines to spy on you, which they happily accept. Neuvillette often tells them about you since he doesn't have anyone else he can tell. It's gotten to the point where alongside seeing Neuvillette as their father of sorts, they see you as a parent as well. Of course, they think, you must be the monsieur's spouse. They certainly have no issue with simply ensuring their 'parent's' safety, after all.

Neuvillette never corrects them. After all, it makes him feel warm inside. Marriage sounds nice. A legal contract, bounding you to each other forever. Suddenly, Neuvillette seems to pay more attention to marriage documents and trials related to it.

He will never say anything first. Ever. Even though Neuvillette wants you badly, he will not break his moral code and risk doing something irrational. He likely wouldn't either way, but he worries. Especially when it comes to you.

Neuvillette is very protective of you. He wasn't very big on touch, but now he likes to have some sort of contact with you. Holding your hand, arm, waist, finger, whatever it may be. It helps him make sure you're okay. It's been so long since he's felt affection like that, and he tries to get you to spoil him with it sometimes.

He loves it so much when you treat the melusines like they are your children. Maybe one day you can have children together. Whether it's biological or adoption, he doesn't care. Neuvillette wants to be with you however he can.

And once the prophecy kicks off entirely, you're never leaving his sight again. Even if you're not from Fontaine, there's still a risk and uncertainty. Neuvillette won't let you slip away. He can't. He'll pamper you, do whatever you ask of him (besides letting you go), but he just needs you to stay where he knows you're safe.

If you try to leave, then good luck. It'll be raining. Hard. You can barely even walk without getting soaked. It's never been this bad in Fontaine before.. but as soon as Neuvillette sees you again, it's unbearably sunny. The weather is quite extreme.

You're his mate after all. Why are you even trying to leave him, if you are? This is your home now. Neuvillette sighs, perhaps you're just nervous. It's okay, though. He figures you need to adjust.

He won't care if you find out how much he loves you. Why does it matter? Of course, he loves his mate.

"I forbid you," Neuvillette stares you down, "My dear, please, come back over here. I'd hate to request a guard to block the door."

You stop in your tracks, not doubting Neuvillette's words. You could feel his gaze burning into your skull. It scared you. He was incredibly powerful, and it would be best to comply with him, no?

You turned around. He smiled gently, "Good. Now come, sit back down, mon ange (my angel)."

You listen to him, slowly walking back towards him. You sit on the couch next to his desk before he sighs. The rain gets a bit harder.

"You know that's not your seat," he murmurs. And you know exactly what he means. Neuvillette waits for you to return to him, and sit on his lap—your seat. You do.

"There," Neuvillette breathes out on your neck. He wraps his arms around your waist and buries his face into your neck. The rain alleviates, slowing. You shake a bit in his grasp, either from his breathing or your possible fear.

"Shh.. it's okay, mon cœur (my heart), is it that you're cold..?" Neuvillette asks sweetly, before holding you tighter. "I'll warm you up, my love. Just stay with me.."

His hands begin to rub circles into your back as he flips you over. Neuvillette isn't manhandling you roughly, but he does it with such ease. It may not be purposeful, but it's a reminder of just how much stronger he is than you. After all, he is a dragon. He uses his glove hand to gently push you against his chest. Neuvillette effectively trapped you in his warm grasp.

"Neuvillette.." You say softly, "There is no need to hold me like a lifeline."

He smiles but doesn't loosen his grip. "I beg to differ. After all, I don't think I could live without you, so you are my lifeline, no? My lifeline and my mate.."

Neuvillette's voice is longing. You won't be able to get out of this any time soon. The rain disappears alongside your smile (or frown).

[izsheum]

Hello!!!

Can i listen to you yap about rodimus and swerve for hours please 🥺🥺🥺🥺

WHEN I TOLD YOU I JUMPED FOR JOY!!!

ugh these guys have been in my brain for a bit now…i swear

“it’d be cool if i took my favs and made them kiss haha that’d be so silly” and then Boom. I kept thinking.

have some art of them i am in the trenches methinks

when i tell you they are PEAK yapper + louder yapper…

like i genuinely believe that’s how it can start. two losers who love to hear themselves talk? it should be a recipe for disaster.

However.

it’s not like swerve doesn’t know when it’s not his turn to talk. he’s got a big mouth, and criminal levels of audacity, but he has manners. and that means that whenever rodimus goes on and on about whatever bullshit he had to deal with during the day, he listens.

and, good lord, rodimus can definitely talk.

he does so with swerve probably after having a few because i mean…that’s how this starts, surely. a bottle of top-shelf and a purely functional arrangement.

(hundreds of words of sleep-deprivation-induced writing under the cut. i am so sorry. completely sfw btw just barely on the edge of suggestive.)

predictably, swerve’s constant chatter is bearable after rodimus gets in a few drinks. and in the beginning of Whatever The Hell They Got Going On starts with the two of them building a routine.

swerve supplies the shots of liquid stress relief and a listening ear (audio processor? cybertronian anatomy is lost on me), and rodimus provides what can only be described as a semi-coherent stream of complaints and whines about his day. and he has a lot to gripe about—he’s suffering from an acute case of ‘doomed by the narrative’, primus help him.

and swerve, for the most part, is quite a good active listener. not that rodimus would ever admit that out loud (for now) because swerve wouldn’t be able to keep that kinda praise to himself. i mean, the guy raved for months after getting his own rodimus star…yeah, no, not happening. rodimus’ appreciation will remain unspoken, thank you very much.

he gets his sentiment of ‘thank you for listening to my bullshit, you’re such a good friend’ out there by continuing to show up. same time, every day, like clockwork. he’s there in the bar, long laundry list of things he’s going to cry like a baby about, and swerve is at the ready with the fainting couch. their little ‘whine and cheese hour’ (as swerve calls it. rodimus will adamantly deny that he likes the name. it’s not clever. it’s not! it’s apparently a human thing, anyways. little thief.) is probably the only thing he’s ever on-time for at this rate.

having someone listen politely to your woes is. nice! having someone gently try and guide you into solutions to said problems is…manageable, i suppose.

having someone who gasps dramatically and exclaims “i can’t believe you had to deal with that—you’re so much stronger than me for putting up with such scrap” is euphoric.

because since getting the weight of the universe thrust on his shoulders again and again. since he had it ground into him every single day that he needs to be this mature, wise, thoughtful leader who doesn’t react to problems with complaints, but rather calm understanding followed by benevolent resolution…rodimus has completely, truly missed just being able to talk shit.

and, oh, does swerve just love that song and dance.

this isn’t therapy, and neither of them are going to pretend it is, though the constant flow of drinks does manage to feel like something akin to self-medication after a while. their lives are messy, god damn it, and they’re going to cope with it messily!

and cope they do. and they talk. a lot. and—for some reason—it helps. turns out, when you get to vent all your frustrations towards someone who knows how to match your energy exactly, you feel seen. not as this esteemed figure who needs to watch what he says and make sure he keeps up the display of picture-perfect-motivational-cat-poster-leader twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five…but as just. a guy. a guy with a lot on his shoulders and a lot more on his mind. turns out, talking with swerve ends up helping rodimus feel normal.

go figure.

and somewhere between the start of their little unofficial gossip sessions and the end of another bottle of the good engex, something bubbles up that wasn’t there before. and it isn’t the carbonation in the cocktail.

feelings. affectionate ones. rodimus goes to recharge afterwards all giddy, like some newly forged spark still buzzing with boundless energy, and honestly? he feels like he might be going crazy. might need some actual fucking therapy, because ho-ly shit he is not about to entertain this. not at all.

because, let’s be real here, it’s swerve we’re talking about. swerve. s-w-e-r-v-e. the ‘shut your damn mouth’ guy? he used to annoy the living hell out of rodimus when he first came aboard, and nowadays rodimus finds himself excited at the thought of going to talk to him again.

war changes people…and, okay, the war is. over, technically. but still. maybe he hit his head a little too hard during a mission. yeah! yeah, that’s it. little concussion knocked a couple things loose in his processor. that’s why he’s suddenly wanting to share more than just his woes with the little ‘bot. that’s why he starts asking swerve about himself, why he starts listening back. chimes in every so often with “huh, i never knew that” or “you should show that to me some time” when swerve goes on his little tirades about foreign media.

why rodimus can’t help but wonder how that big mouth would feel against—

phew! yeah, definitely brain damage. because the alternative is that rodimus has started feeling terrible, awful, affectionate things for swerve. and that just won’t do. nope!

but ohhhhhh god, does that do nothing to stop his imagination. because really. how would swerve fare if he used that mouth for something else—

thankfully for rodimus, swerve is an avid fan of imagining things that he can never have. dreaming like the hopeless mech he is about a future that only someone as deeply delusional and para-social as himself could think up.

in his swerve-y fantasy, the talks start to mean something. rodimus goes from coworker to situational friend to…something. something that he can’t place his finger on. but it’s something that he doesn’t believe he can have. because while rodimus laughs at his jokes…he’s also laughing drunk. and swerve is desperate to let people close, sure. he likes people, he wants friends, he loves connection. but he’s not stupid. a bit air-headed? sure. but not dumb. not by a long shot. he has a mental list of things that he can try to have (friendship, a successful business, endless adventures with said friends that he plans to get more of, he swears), and things that are off-limits.

you can guess which box rodimus starts to fall into.

doesn’t mean he can’t…y’know. think about him. a lot. find excuses to comm him about this or that, subtly hint that he misses him…uh, he meant their talks! offer him free drinks just to see the way his face lights up. deny the suspicion of special treatment by reminding rodimus that he’s the captain! c’mon! of course he deserves a little leeway!

and ignore the fact that the reassurance is more for himself.

swerve is so good at believing that this something he imagines with rodimus is so, so far out of reach that he thinks it’s a joke when rodimus propositions him for the first time.

and, c’mon, he’s gotta be having auditory hallucinations. because there’s no fucking way in the world—in the galaxy, or in the whole universes that he’s visited, for that matter—that (co-) captain fucking rodimus prime-not-prime-status-still-pending-thanks-a-lot-matrix-of-lameship asked to borrow him for the evening. he nearly drops the glass in his hand.

because that’s the only way rodimus can bring himself to phrase it when he finally fucking gets through all five-billion stages of grief over this stupid crush. god. he was so pathetic. the worst part was that he didn’t even care anymore.

“yo! are you working tonight? can i borrow you for the rest of it? we can watch that movie you were talking about earlier this week, or whatever.”

or whatever. rodimus would’ve just tossed himself out the nearest airlock if he wasn’t glued to his recharged slab (not literally, this time) rocking back and forth like an asylum patient. he could hear the cries now—nurse! nurse! he’s out again!

successful attempts at being casual: zero. days since last urge to ram his head into the wall: also zero.

swerve’s response comes in quickly just before rodimus contemplates jumping ship and taking a page outta megatron’s book and starting a new life in another universe. and if rodimus wasn’t busy having a fucking panic attack, he’d’ve noticed the undercurrent of excitement in swerve’s voice when he strains out those six little words.

“sure thing! your place or mine?”

it ends up being at rodimus’. more space meant more wall for the projection of ‘Alien’.

not that they ended up paying much attention to the movie by the time the fledgling xenomorph got loose.

and liiiisten. listen. they didn’t plan on it going that way, alright? major props to ridley scott—the two of them were intensely invested in the film for a good long while. but, as per usual, swerve brought drinks to help ease the tension that threatened to smother them as soon as he entered rodimus’ quarters.

he would’ve pat himself on the back, too, if he wasn’t so consumed by the way the light of the projection reflected off of rodimus’ frame. and rodimus would’ve thanked him (and i mean, like, actually thank him, no reluctance left in him whatsoever) if he wasn’t so focused on the warmth of swerve next to him.

the elephant in the room was slaughtered and left for dead in the same way as the crew of the nostromo as soon as they locked eyes.

and rodimus ended up being right.

swerve’s mouth could do a lot more than just talk.

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[lesbikaiser]

omg I js saw your post about how you'll celebrate 200 follows (congratulations you deserve it!) and since you wanna write for other characters also I was thinking of kiyora Jin 🤭 likeee how do you think he'd be in a relationship? or in bed, would he be sweet and loving or kinky.. 🫦

hii love! i took so long to write this oh myyy, i even reached 400 followers and this was supposed to celebrate me hitting 200... but anyways!

also thanks for the request >< i tried another writing style for this one, kind of a headcanons format!

nsfw under the cut! beware ;)

kiyora jin is a perfect mix of sweet & kinky! not too vanilla to get you bored and not too freaky to get you weirded out, just an amazing balance between both of it.

he's the quiet type, you won't listen to his voice too many times a day and when you do it's a calm, collected tone. but he loves to hear you talking.

asks about your day recurrently and wants you to tell him every single detail about it, it doesn't matter how futile it is, he wants to know everything! you may think he's not listening at all when he starts to do something else while you talk but if you stop, he's quick to look at you with the best inquiring face he can make and asks you to keep going.

loves to lay his head on your lap as he listens to your stories, have your fingers combing through his hair as he feels the plushness of your thighs and hears your melodic, excited voice speaking about anything.

kisses your hands a lot, be it their back or your palms, or the tips of your fingers, he loves to feel their warmth against his lips. also likes to kiss your neck, and does it without ceremonies, one moment you'll be babbling about something and suddenly you're stuttering in your words because your boyfriend decided to plant wet kisses on the column of your throat.

speaking of that, he absolutely adores eating you out, especially when you're both on the couch and you're far too deep in your rambles to notice his hand sneaking up your thighs, breath fanning your cheek as he gets closer to your face.

likes to make you cum while still listening to your voice and will ask you to keep talking if you get too overwhelmed by the pleasure, even stopping what he's doing if you can't continue what you were saying, waiting for you to restart so he can go back to savoring you, and oh, he's so good at doing it...

cares for your pleasure above anything because after all, he knows he'll get off on your sounds, so all you have to do is be loud for him and not worry about the rest, he's doing all the work without complaints. that also means you'll surely come at least twice whenever you get intimate with him...

in short, kiyora loves to hear your voice, be it you talking, moaning or babbling incoherent things, he's a sucker for you and although he ironically isn't the best at vocalizing how much he loves you, his actions make it very clear.

[womanofwords]

Silver Swan (Part 9)

Neglected!fem!reader x yandere!batfam

You heard it before you saw it. The complaints and yells of horror. Not wanting them to see you too early (as Damian put it, you make good moments bad and bad moments worse), so you searched it up on your phone and wore headphones so you wouldn't disturb anybody.

That was a lot of fun.

"How are you all not obsessing over Silver Swan?" a wide-eyed influencer asked, screaming into the mic. "She hears about a catwalk with fur, pulls up, somehow gets into the event and fucks shit up from the inside, and then shows up to confess and tell the producer to do better. She's an icon."

An icon? You? It felt impossible, but it was true. You (or rather, Silver Swan) were an icon, and a legend, and loved. A new hashtag was there to grace the presence of social media.

#itsonlyawayne

"That Silver Swan is a menace," Damian said. "She's a bigger humiliation to the family name than Y/N is. Our family name is part of a hashtag because of her!" He said the word hashtag like it was a death sentence. His pain was sweet music to your ears.

"What are you planning on doing about it, shrimp?" Jason taunted. "She's already gotten your stupid hair spikes shaved off, Damian. What else could you do?"

"I'll break her precious board over her head!" Damian roared. "She's going to pay for embarrassing me, Jason. She handed me a glue bomb with a smile! She knew exactly what would happen to me!"

"Why don't you take some father-son time and find her while you're on patrol?"

Patrol? What patrol was Damian doing?

"Father doesn't let me do anything! I'm not allowed to press a single button or even sit in the front seat! Why would he let Robin decide what happens when we're on patrol?" Damian asked.

What did Robin have to do with Damian? This was making no sense.

"Yeesh, he's really tightened up. When I was Robin, Bruce trusted my judgement about some things," Jason said.

That threw you for a loop. Damian was Robin? Jason was Robin too, but then . . . stopped? And if Damian was Robin, Bruce was . . .

Batman.

Bruce Wayne was Batman.

All of these bitches were doing vigilante stuff except you.

You went to your room as quietly as you could, having a mini heart attack with every step. You'd been beefing with billionaire vigilante geniuses? And now you were Silver Swan, Batman was probably going to be on your tail. Batman, who was Bruce Wayne, who was your dad.

"Well, if they really want to mess with Silver Swan," you muttered to yourself, "it's about time they learned how aggressive water fowl can be."

*_*_*_*_*_

The next time you went out, you did so on a mission. A mission to mess with the twerp that you knew as Damian Wayne and now Robin.

"Hello, Boy Blunder," you said, flying tauntingly close to him.

"You!" Damian - Robin - looked at you as if you had spat onto him. "I'm going to get you and throw you into Arkham myself!"

"Whoa, little boy, what's with the anger? I only went after those rich snobs!" You dodged effortlessly. "And it was for the greater good."

"Greater good? Don't lie to me! You did it because you enjoyed seeing me stuck with glue!" Robin said.

"Look, Boy Blunder, I've never met you before - ooooooooooh." You pretended to join up the dots in front of him. "You must be Bruce Wayne's son . . . Dave."

"Damian."

"Daniel."

"Damian."

"Dynasty."

"Damian."

"Oh, right. Dominion."

"Damian! My name is Damian!" Damian hissed, shoving a hand over his mouth exactly too late.

"Oh, right, Damian Wayne. Good to know. Now, what do I do with an annoying brat that won't leave me alone?" You pretended to think while activating another glue grenade. "Ooh, I know!"

You threw the grenade at Damian's feet just in time, coating him in glue just in time. "I'll get you one day, Silver Swan!" Damian groaned, getting out his comms link to text Batman.

"Yeah, yeah, cry to Daddy Batman about it," you said, booping him on the nose just before you flew off home.

That ought to send him crazy until Bruce or one of your numerous siblings could pick him up.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9 <- You are here

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 13

Part 14

Taglist: @tinybrie, @hopingtoclearmedschool, @simpingfor-wakasa, @kittzu, @simpingpandas, @devotedlyshamelessdetective, @galaxypurplerose, @wisefuncherryblossom, @vanessa-boo, @deathbynarcisstick, @sirenetheblogger, @asillysimp, @toxicvoidsstuff, @kneelforloki, @trashlanternfish360.

[kyoshithewriter]

Tenth Floor.

warnings: smut (18+)

wc: 2970

A/n: And as per request. This is just unhinged atp loool. I notice that I always basically write smut when people send in requests so next time you do please be specific with what you want😅. I hope you enjoy though.

The humid heat outside feels borderline offensive after being blasted by the cool air conditioner in her vehicle. Sweat immediately begins pooling at her neck and underarms beneath the long sleeved dress that hugs her body all the way down to her calves. Gathering her bags from the front seat, Christine presses a button on the fob and hurries toward the apartment complex as soon as she hears the locks click in place. The black heels on her feet accidentally splashes in a small puddle, the water already feeling warm despite the sun coming out no more than five minutes ago.

“Fucking France and its bipolar ass weather I swear…” she mutters in an annoyed huff under her breath. She was eager for the transfer while living in the States. France has always sounded like a dream to her since she was a teenager. When her office presented the opportunity for her to work in the newest franchise in the country, she dived headfirst in. No questions, no second guessing. Christine is not sure if she regrets the decision yet, but she will admit there are a lot of things she was not prepared for. The culture was something that took her months to navigate; from the language, to the cuisine, down to the very mannerisms and the people. The people. Maybe she has just been unlucky, but the ones she has met are either the nicest ever, or downright rude. Unfortunately, the latter has been the majority. And that includes her neighbour.

The lobby door beeps, light on the pad flashing green after she punches in the four digit code that all tenants need to enter the building. Christine checks her work emails as she waits for the elevator. She steps in as soon as the doors open, eyes glued to her phone as she types away. The metal doors are just about to slide shut when a hand blocks them. Looking up, Christine doesn’t have enough time to swallow the groan that bubbles up in her throat as she makes eye contact with him. The neighbour.

There’s a subtle smirk on his face as he presses the button for the tenth floor where they both stay. Side by side. The doors slide closed and there’s a subtle rocking motion before it starts ascending.

“You can’t say bonjour? How rude.” His deep voice fills the space, accent thick.

“You came in and saw me. I know you’re somewhat of a superstar but we don’t all have to kiss your ass.”

He laughs softly, running a hand down the length of his dark blue sweatsuit. She doesn’t see him often because the club he plays for is in Spain; but on the occasions she does, their meetings always go a little like this. Kylian Mbappé; football star and her neighbour from hell.

“Did you like the present I left you?”

Christine grinds her teeth in annoyance. She knows that she technically started this. He had said something sly that really got under her skin, she doesn’t even remember what exactly. But at the time, she was so annoyed to not have gotten the last word in, so in true petty nature, she printed out the results of the last game his team lost badly and stuck it on his door. If she had any idea that it would’ve started this little silent war she wouldn’t have. But alas.

“Yes. I couldn't get the stain out after you accidentally.” She puts air quotes around the last word; “left the bottle of red wine open.”

“Oh… Je suis désolé. I can be so… careless sometimes.” He says with faux sincerity.

“You owe me a new doormat. I really liked that one.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll have something else at your front door real soon.”

“I have already sent a complaint to the landlord by the way.” She says while glaring at his side profile.

“Have you? Do you even know who the landlord is?”

“Yes I do.” She lies smoothly. Truth is, her company arranged every single thing; even her living arrangements.

“Well I look forward to reading your complaint letter, Christine.” He crosses his arms over his chest, his stance widening. Christine hates that he looks good like this.

“Oh for fuck’s sa- you own the place? It’s no wonder you know my damn name.” She hisses.

Kylian opens his mouth to reply but the loud rattle of the elevator makes him pause. The metal box screeches and halts. Darkness descends on them as the lights are suddenly cut.

“What the… no… no no no no!”

Christine moves forward, index finger hitting the buttons over and over and over- ‘please please please just fuckin-’

“Pressing the buttons a lot won’t bring the power back on. There’s a blackout.” He mutters calmly.

Christine holds her breath as he reaches by her waist to hit the emergency button.

Sighing, the woman kicks the heels off her feet that were beginning to feel a bit sore. She tries to quell the anxiety that’s starting to hum in her chest with her heartbeat picking up ever so slightly. Christine isn’t the biggest fan of small spaces.

“Don’t look so disappointed. I’m great company.”

Christine chuckles incredulously. She spins on her heels to pin him under her glare but he remains the picture of suave and collected.

“What gives you the right to be this cocky?”

Kylian drops his head back against the wall of the elevator behind him. Looking down at her with heavy lidded eyes, he responds;

“Je peux te montrer.”

His voice lowers in pitch. Christine is nowhere near fluent in the language, but she understands his words perfectly. ‘I can show you.’

Christine flushes from head to foot. Her cheeks feel so hot that she’s worried he can see her blushing even through all the melanin in her skin.

“I thought you hated me?” She asks instead.

“Nonsense. That’s how I flirt, chére.” The words flow from his mouth smoothly.

“You flirt by ruining doormats?”

Christine gathers the jet black bundles flowing down her back in one hand to lift them off her neck as sweat begins to gather there, causing it to stick to her skin.

“I flirt by riling you up. I love the way your pretty, cat-like eyes narrow, I like the way your plump mouth pouts, I like the way your little nose twitches. I like getting your attention.”

Christine’s breaths become heavier. White lights suddenly fill the space; the elevator sways and moves again. The pair don’t react; they just keep staring at each other. His eyes hang heavy with something dark. There’s a loud ding before the doors come sliding open behind her back. Kylian stoops to retrieve her shoes from the floor and moves in her direction. Christine steps back until she’s standing in the hallway and then pivots on her feet and walks toward her apartment door. He stays just behind, hovering quietly as she makes quick work of unlocking her door.

“Thank you.” She sounds breathless as she accepts the shoes he holds in her direction.

“See you around, Christine.”

**************

Two hours later, after dinner and a shower, Christine is restless. She tries watching a movie, but her attention drifts five minutes in. She tries listening to music, but every song provides the perfect opportunity for her thoughts to drift… to imagine. He’s just next door. Adding wine to her evening definitely didn’t help. She feels warm, needy.

“Je peux te montrer.”

The words ring over and over in her head. The inky black nightgown made of silk drags along her heated, moisturized skin as she twitches on her couch.

“Fuck this.”

Christine downs the glass of red wine in one swallow and marches to her front door.

He opens on her fourth knock. Only a pair of grey sweatpants riding low on his hips. His shoulders and chest are broad, toasted caramel skin smooth and even. Her mouth runs dry at his visible six pack that leads to his deep v- line.

“Show me.”

He inhales sharply at her breathy whisper.

“Quoi?”

“Earlier… you said you could show me. So here I am. Show me.” She challenges him with wide eyes.

**********

“You think you’re so funny, don’t you?”

Christine doesn’t attempt to hide her annoyance. Still, she surveys the brightly lit room all the same. Her eyes look at every single award, some in various shades of gold and others silver.

“I said I’d show you what makes me so cocky. Here it is.” He gestures around the room he has dedicated to keeping his achievements; every single award or trophy.

“I got a different idea.” She says through gritted teeth. No matter how impressive the room is, Christine is not here for that.

“What else could you have possibly thought I meant?” He cocks his head innocently. But Christine sees the glint of mischief in his eyes.

“Fine. Since you want to be funny, I’m leaving.”

She attempts to round his body in the doorway but he puts both hands out, blocking her path.

“You don’t like to play, no?” The timber of his voice is lower.

Christine blinks up at him. Without her heels, he stands a lot taller than her 5’5 frame.

“I have to be in the mood for it.”

“And what are you in the mood for, Christine?”

“You know what.” Her eyes drop to his chest, suddenly feeling shy under his heated gaze.

“Do I?”

“Don’t make me say it.” She almost whines with a petulant pout.

With a chuckle, he reaches to grasp her waist and lifts her off the ground. Christine instinctively wraps her legs around his hips, hands looping behind his neck.

“Have you ever seen the night sky from the tenth floor, Christine?”

He practically breathes the words into her panting mouth. She isn’t sure if this is another one of his tricks but she shakes her head signally no as that’s the only thing her flustered brain allows.

“I have a balcony; owner's privilege.” He says with a sly smile. And now that he says it, she realizes that the layout of his apartment is very different from hers despite being on the same floor. He has four rooms compared to her two and the space is bigger.

“I think we should go look at the stars. I think you’ll like the view from this far up.”

*******

Christine’s belly clenches in nervous excitement as her body is pumped full of flight or fight hormones. A chill breeze tickles her skin, cooling the saliva on her nipples and causing them to tighten even more. Goosebumps rise along every inch of her skin. The wind picks up again, flicking her hair over her face and making her shiver almost violently. She clutches onto his shoulders tightly. Her eyes stay locked between his legs. She sees now; Christine understands perfectly well why he’s so cocky. The sheer size of him should make her panic, but she’s so aroused that it makes her brave. He keeps his heavy lidded eyes on her as he rips the little packet with his teeth. The bold, black ‘XL’ written on it makes her want to tear her hair out.

“Hold onto me.” He commands gruffly.

Christine, with stuttered breath, locks both her hands around his neck.

Kylian expertly rolls the lubricated latex on, then he pulls back to capture her kiss swollen lips again. He pulls away from her desperate mouth with a soft click. He grasps her left leg in his hand and hoists it higher. Christine flails a bit, gripping him tighter.

“Kylian… I’m scared.” She chokes. But even as she says the words, the place between her thighs pulses harder. The fear fueling her arousal for reasons beyond her comprehension. The man has her propped precariously on the rail of his balcony that faces the giant pool outback. They’re stories high, if she falls…

“I’d throw myself over too if I let you fall, Christine. It’s going to feel so good, hm? See the way you came till you cried when I had you bent over the railing as I licked you up? That’s the added rush from the adrenaline.”

Christine shivers, it’s almost as if she can still feel his tongue on her clit. Her head was hung so far over, that she felt lightheaded at times with the blood rushing down. He had pulled her up to catch her breath then bent her over again. Christine had to bite the palm of her hand to muffle her scream as she came. She had never experienced anything like it.

“Do you trust me?”

She shouldn’t. Today is the first day they’ve had a proper conversation. But for some strange reason, she nods.

“Good girl.”

Reaching between their bodies, he grips his dick in hand and teases it along where she’s warm and slick. Christine jolts, gripping him tighter when she slips further backwards.

Her mouth pops open as he begins to ease his way inside. He responds to her gasp with a deep groan. Christine squeezes her eyes shut as he keeps going. He stretches her just beyond what’s comfortable even as wet as she is. It feels never ending.

“Ky- fuck.” She whimpers.

“It’s okay. Almost there. Shh.” He tutts to soothe her.

She keens long and low in her throat as he touches something so deep in her hurts.

“There you go. Putain, baby.” He moans softly.

He brings her leg further up, hoisting it over his shoulder. It allows him to shift his hips closer, slipping a little deeper.

“See why I’m cocky, baby?”

Christine can’t even berate him for his ego. She can only nod. He has every right to behave the way he does. He allows her body time to adjust with small little kicks of his hips while he kisses her lips, bites at her ear and licks her neck.

“Feels so full.” Her moan is closer to a sob.

“You’re so tight, Christine. Gripping me like you want me to stay there.” He groans as she clenches around him.

The first proper slow, deep stroke steals the breath from her body. He digs the hand gripping onto the swell of her ass deeper in her skin and gains a proper rhythm.

Christine can’t even think to conceal her moans. If someone decided to come out for a night swim they’d be given a show.

“There you go. Feels good, hm?”

She can only nod her head rapidly. He plants his feet and pistons his hips faster. The glide becomes easier as she grows wetter. The wind whips her hair about as it whispers into the night. Her lips, swollen and slick, her eyes teary and almost confused as if she can’t believe it feels this good, it’s all too much. Kylian can’t help the way he moans almost desperately.

“So fucking pretty. Fucking-”

Christine whines loudly in reply. Her palms are growing slick but she doesn’t care. She can’t care with the familiar pressure she feels building in the pit of her stomach.

“Kyky, ‘m gonna- you’re gonna make me-”

Christine grunts as he angles his hips upward. It kisses something deep inside her over and over again that forces her to clench her teeth.

“Come on baby. Let me see it, want to feel it. Come for me, Christine. Need you to.”

Christine’s mouth pops open on a silent scream as she’s sent hurtling over the edge. Her hands slip from his skin and she’s momentarily winded as she slips backwards. She tries to gasp but comes out as an awkward sound between a scream and a wheeze. Kylian hauls her into his body. Christine clings to him like a koala as she shakes, the orgasm still wreaking havoc on her body. She’s almost thrown into panic as the sensation seems to heighten when he starts thrusting up into her in midair.

“Kyk- fuck!”

“Shit shit shit shi-”

Kylian grunts as she keeps tightening around him. His hips grow sloppy, his entire body shakes. The pleasure almost feels like it could kill him. He’d die fucking happy.

“So good, Christine. Milk my-” he cuts himself off with a sharp, deep moan. The exhaustion from the long day, the tension in his body, it all bleeds out as he empties himself inside her. She keeps clenching and moaning, drawing it out.

“Oh fuck.” He hurries to support both their weight against the wall just before his legs buckle under him from the pleasure. He slides down the wall helplessly and sits on the ground, uncaring of his nakedness.

Christine shivers and hiccups in his lap, still hugging him tightly around his neck.

“Christine? Baby?”

“Hm?” She whispers brokenly, voice wrecked.

“Are you okay?”

“Uh-huh. We should stargaze more often.”

His chest vibrates beneath her with his laugh.

“Told you you’d like the view.”

[bump1nthen1ght]

It's Just In My Nature (F!Reader x F!Werewolf)

Pairing: F!Reader x F!Werewolf

Genre: Human/Monster Society, Gratuitous Smut, Inspired by Chappell Roan's "The Giver" (if that wasn't obvious)

Warnings: Explicit Content Under the Cut, 18+ ONLY

Summary: Ain't got antlers on my walls But I sure know mating calls From the stalls in the bars on a Friday night And other boys may need a map But I can close my eyes And have you wrapped around my fingers like that

(AKA you get your world rocked by a hot werewolf handywoman)

Word Count: 3281 words

She’s trouble, that's the first thought you have when you see her.

It’s nothing about her personally. Your first impression isn’t nasty, not even a real impression; Just catching a glimpse of her in your neighbor's driveway, coveralls stained with grease as she looks under his mustang’s hood. A local handywoman. From pipes to engines, she’s the one to call. You’ve heard good things, commendations on her reasonable prices and her good sense. Sort of crass, but it's to be expected, a stereotype about the folks in her line of work.

No, it’s the way her shoulders bulge in the stained wife beater, glistening with sweat and muscles as she leans down to grab her tools. It's the way you see a peak of her stomach, when she raises her arms to wipe the drops off her forehead, a glimpse of a treasure trail leading straight down into her half-zipped coveralls. It’s a sweltering day, humid and miserable, it makes sense she’d strip it down halfway. But it's dangerous the way her lips wrap around her water bottle, the way her throat bobs as she sucks it down. It's dangerous the way she catches you, starting from over your coffee cup. Dangerous the way she holds up her hand, a wordless greeting, and winks.

Your heart pounds in your chest and you can hear the blood pulsing in your ears. Eyes wander down her form, down her spine and all the way to her paint-splattered steel-toe boots. They linger on her backside, too thick to be covered up by fabric. It twists your stomach, has your mouth going dry.

Yep, big trouble indeed.

You know she’s strong, it comes from her family. A big pack of werewolves, settled all over your small little town. Hardworking and dependable just like her, bastions of the community. Good stock, friendly, the kind of friends you need in a tight-knit community. You can spot them at most of the usual haunts, at almost every corner there’s an O’Connell. It’s no surprise when you bump into her at the one bar in town, still in work wear. Not her coveralls (unfortunately) but something equally as tasty; A stained flannel and solid work pants, the same set of steel-toed boots on her feet.

“Can I buy ya something?” She offers, and you're not strong enough to say no. You’re sure she gets around, sweeps sweet little things like you off their feet with a single slip of her southern drawl. It doesn’t matter to you, though, not when her hands find their way around your waist, sliding into the seat next to you at the bar. “What’s your poison?” You babble out your order and your heart flutters when she smirks. “Something sweet for something sweet.”

She asks your name, says she’s seen you around. The cute little house with the blue door, right? Always fluttering too and fro during the week, working on your humble garden out front during the weekends. Sje’d never plucked up the courage to say hi until now, which has you blushing, even though you're sure it's not true. She probably says that to all the girls, yet you’re swooning self can’t find it in yourself to care.

She asks about your job, curious where you run off to in the early mornings during the week. When you tell her you’re a lawyer, she whistles.

“Damn, smart and sexy? Darling, what don’t you got?” Your hearts sings under the praises, bashfully takes it without complaint. Not as exciting as big city lawyers, you admit, mostly dealing with property disputes and other legalese like that. “Still, gotta take up a lot of your time, negotiating and reading all them contracts. You ever need help with that old house of yours, just lemme know.” You can feel her calloused hands through your pants, her grip warm as she pats you right on the knee. It hits a certain nerve that shoots right up into your belly, scrambles your brain and shoots out any good sense.

You’re not the type to go home with strangers. But is she really a stranger, when she grabs your hips and pulls you in close on the dance floor, whispering filthy things in your ears? When those lips, the ones you saw sucking on that water bottle, just graze yours? When you practically taste the salt on her skin, still sweaty from a day's worth of work?

No, she isn’t strange to you at all. So you have no problem hopping into her pick-up truck, or spreading your legs when she places a warm hand on your inner thigh, the other still on the wheel.

Her place is small, a rough and tumble trailer in a park not too far from your neighborhood. She’s got a few garden beds of her own, small and humble, and you wonder if that's what first drew her to you. This miniscule thing in common, working with your hands when you can. You’ll ask her about it later, after.

Her skin is burning, trembling as you push up her shirt, feeling the soft plains of her stomach. She growls into your hasty kiss, grips harder onto your waist.

“Shit, d-don’t think I can hold it back.” Her laugh is cracked by a chest-deep groan, her bottom lip worried between her teeth. “Do you mind?”

You shake your head in a haste, stomach twisting at the very idea of seeing her shifted form. She smiles, gives you another wet kiss before pulling away, shaking off her shirt and pants in a haste. Her bones begin to crack, a startling sound, but it doesn’t seem to hurt. No, it seems like a release, the fur cascading down her skin as her body changes, grows bigger, grows stronger.

The minute she’s comfortable, you leap on her. It makes her chuckle again, big paws now landing on your ass, squeezing.

“Like what ya see?” She says, scooping you up right onto her forearm, your weight nothing to her superior strength. Your legs instinctually wrap around her hips, grind like the animal you are. But it's stopped when she throws you on her bed, springs squeaking as she pounces on you.

Her fur is soft, knots easily in between your fingers as she kisses down your face, your neck, your chest. Canines nip at your tits from behind your shirt, quickly pushes up so she can lick down your stomach. You wiggle compliantly once she undoes your zipper, hips thrown up to get these damn pants off as quickly as possible. You’d be embarrassed by your lack of sexy underwear, not planning on something so sexy when you stopped by the bar after work, if not for the fact she literally tears them off.

“Well well, look at you.” She purrs, thumb and forefinger spreading apart your pussy lips. You gasp, hands curling into knuckles when her hot breath blows across your sensitive entrance. “That's a mighty fine cunt, missy.”

She doesn’t give you a moment to be embarrassed by the crass observation before her tongue is on you. It licks a long stripe up your hole, the rough texture shooting sparks across your nervous system, her nose snuggling into your clit. Your head throws back, nearly hitting the cheap metal bed frame, a moan ripping out from your throat. Her ears flick when your thighs clamp around your head, and you can feel her smirking. She doesn’t stop to comment, solely focused on that mighty fine cunt and making it weep.

Her tongue is long, just as deft as her hard-working fingers, writhing against your gummy walls. She easily finds that spongy spot inside with the tip, the muscle of her jaw feathering across as she presses against your insides. Her nostrils flare, soaking in the scent of your juices, lapping at you like a dog. She’s making your whole lower half tingle, but the rubbing against your clit isn’t quite enough, now flush with blood and throbbing for more. Not until a paw pad replaces it, her rough thumb making slow circles around the sensitive button.

“Oh god!” Your fingers tangle in the fur on her head, knuckles taut against the skin, rolling your hips onto her face. She shudders as you yank, too lost to be ashamed of your desperation. It's just how she wants you, writhing and fervent. The sounds coming from her lips on your pussy squelch inside her cheap trailer, practically bouncing across the walls. It matches the squeaking of the bed springs as she ruts her hips, soaking the crotch of her boyshorts. Gosh, if she had known you’d make such pretty noises, she would have approached you sooner. Would have bent you over in that garden and made you sing.

Her coordination is expert, thumb never faltering on your clit as her tongue fucks you open. It keeps a steady pace; Never too hard, never too fast, simply riding the wave of your reactions. At one point the two appendages switch, her tongue moving upward and her fingers sliding in to fill its place. Her tongue flicks like a professional, making your mouth form a breathless ‘o’ as even moaning becomes out of your reach. Lips wrapped around your clit, the tip of her tongue just teases your entrance as her fingers scissor outward. Your juices drip down her palm, already matting down the fur on her face and staining the bed sheets. She barely has to move her fingers, thrusting them only an inch before your spasming.

It's impressive how expertly she navigates your own pussy. You don’t think you’ve ever brought yourself so close to cumming this fast, even with your favorite vibrator. It's like she knows it better than you do, knowing each nerve to press, when to go fast, when to go slow, when to go hard and when to be soft. Your orgasm hits like a thundercrack, not even giving you a moment to say “I’m-” before it shocks through you. But she knows, she knows immediately, when your whole body convulses, pelvis thrown up in the air and squealing like a stuck pig.

“That’s it.” She nips at your thigh, a smarmy smirk in her voice. “There’s my pretty girl.” She admires her handiwork, spreading open your gushing lips with two fingers. God, you might be dehydrated from how much you just came, the dim lighting of her trailer making everything seem blurry. You can barely make out her face when she climbs up on top of you, leaning in her so her snout is right next to your ear. “Think you can give me one more, princess?” She whispers, and your head is nodding before your better sense can say no. You would do dangerous things to experience that again.

She jumps off you with a grin, shimmying off her underwear as she rummages around her room for something. You’re too tired from the mind-blowing orgasm to sit up, so your head just swivels, barely making out what she’s fiddling with. It isn’t till she’s back on you when you can feel strap-on tapping against your stomach that you realize. Your pussy clenches around nothing, already aching for it.

You let your legs fall open, no words needed as she lines her strap up with your hole. Her warm paws grab onto onto your thick thighs as she slides in, meeting no resistance from your wet and eager cunt. 

“Say my name.” She growls, lips curling back to reveal her canines. How badly you wish she’d dig them into you. When you don’t immediately respond, still catching a breath as the toy sinks inside, she slaps the side of your ass.

“Jo-anna!” You yelp, head turn back as the final inch fits, the tip now pressing right at your cervix. You didn’t think you could take something this big.

That snarl twists into a smug smile, only widening when a jerk of her hips makes you squeak. She chuckles, and it sounds exactly like trouble.

“Thatta girl.”

Joanna pulls her strap out to the end, not giving you a moment to complain before forcing it back, the tip bullying at your deepest part. From there she sets a punishing pace, puts those working woman muscles to work and fucking you like its her job. If only there were a mirror in here, so you can see her fine ass clench with each thrust.

“Yeah, take it.” Her voice rumbles, claws digging into the fat of your thighs for more leverage, though not enough to sting. Even now she’s in perfect control, working your body like a fiddle being tuned. She has you clawing at the bedsheets, no shame in your dirty moans. You don;t care that her trailer walls do nothing to suppress the noise, that everyone within a three mile radius can hear your caterwauling. Not when it feels this good.

“Fu-uck!” You pant, heart damn-near pounding out of your chest. Each thundering pound against your g-spot has your vision going spotty, has your brain turning to mush. Tingles buzz across your skin with each drag of the strap, like every cell has been set aflame. Your legs try to clench shut, to wrap around her hips and writhe against the toy, but she keeps them wide with pinches of her claws, her own muscled thighs filling up the space, working hard to batter at your spongy insides. “Right there! Right there!”

“I hear ya, baby.” Joanna leans a hand forward to grip onto the cheap bed frame, extra leverage allowing her to go even harder on the spot making you see stars, pinpointed on that nebulous “there” you described. “I’ve gotcha, gonna make you feel real good.”

She loves watching your tits bounce, the hard peaks pushing through your cute little blouse. So formal, what she expected from her little lawyer. All of this and she still hasn’t gotten a proper view of them tits, she should fix that.

With one hand she’s able to deftly undo all the needed buttons, never faltering in her rhythm. Your bra is cute, like you, but the real prize is underneath, so it's shoved down below your full breasts so she can get a proper look.

“Love these fucking tits.” Joanna pants, leaning down and swirling her tongue around one. You wail, chest pressing up and into her mouth. She pops off your nipple and smiles. “Been waiting to see these pretty things. Knew they’d be just so tasty.” She latches onto the other, letting the teeth just graze the sensitive skin. Your fingers quickly knot into the back of her skull, forcing her face to nuzzle in your cleavage. A purr rumbles through her.

Ahh, this is where she’s meant to be. Buried between your thighs, lips on your nipples, hearing your heartbeat out of your ribcage. She’s been needin’ this.

“Shit, Jo!” Your fingers yank on her skull, but she doesn’t give you any reprieve, still swirling her tongue around your areola. “Gonna cum again!” You pant in her ear, as if she doesn;t’ already know. As if she doesn’t feel your legs starting to shake, smells your pussy juices just gushing around her strap.

Joanna finally detaches from your chest, a long string of saliva still connecting her tongue to your boob. She leans in close, so her nose is touching yours.

“Then cum for me, baby. Give mama one more.”

“Oh, Fuck!”

Your nails dig down her back, giving Joanna’s claws a run for their money, no doubt leaving long tracks that’ll linger in her human form. Not that she minds, they’re just badges of honor, signs of a job well done.

Your thighs lock around her hips, hips rocking as you ride out your second orgasm of the night, somehow more mindblowing the last. You’re surprised you still have enough energy to clench your legs, all energy sapped from your body. You feel beads of sweat rolling down the side of your face, sticking your cheeks to the pillowcase. It’s cool against your heated skin, which is so burning hot the fabric might as well be a bag of ice.

“Shit.” You wheeze, vocal cords strained, mouth feeling cottony from all your yelling. “That was….” You struggle to form the words, both from the puddle your brain has become and just how indescribable the last hour has been, “....fucking incredible.”

“Well, aint you a flatterer.” Joanna kisses the side of your forehead, right before finally pulling her strap out of you. Your pussy feels thoroughly stretched, and while you know that's not at all how your anatomy works, you genuinely feel like it's been molded to the shape of the dildo.

“Seriously, that was-” Your breath catches, mind still fuzz, “-I think that was the best sex I’ve ever had.”

Joanna chuckles, but doesn’t deny the compliment. She definitely knows what she’s got going on.

“Lemme get you some water, sugar.” Joanna says, giving you another kiss before sliding out from between your legs. Her strap is quickly stripped off and put to the side, leaving her in the nude. Your lazy gaze admires her ass jiggling as she walks. It looks even better now than in her working uniform. Her tail swings lazily behind, looking temptingly soft to the touch.

It takes all you can to sit up and gulp down the water, your nervous system finally rebooting and firing the correct orders to your muscle groups. The hydration is exactly what you need, luke-warm tap never tasting more delicious.

“Slow down, don’t want you to choke.” Joanna laughs as she pulls the cup away, watches your mouth follow it,despite the drops coming down your jaw. She takes a long sip herself, finishing off the cup with a content sigh.

It didn’t seem like it in the moment, with how effortlessly she moved, but fucking you must’ve been a work out. Sweat clings to her fur, sticks it closer to her skin, and while she doesn’t seem too out of breath, her chest is inhaling a little deeper. 

The realization gives you another boost, has you sitting up more and leaning into her space. Pressing a soft kiss onto her shoulder, you look up at her with (what you hope are) proper bedroom eyes.

“I wanna make you feel good, Jo.”

She raises one brow, a hint of that smug smile back.

“Yeah?” Her heated gaze rolls down your debauched self: bra pushed down, shirt-hall unbuttoned, bottom half bare as the day you were born. You may not be much of a vixen as she, but you know a thing or two about seduction. 

Before you know it you’re on your back, Joanna’s arms wrapped around your waist. But she doesn’t have that hungry look in her eyes, her gaze softer. You both lay side by side, her big paws brushing away the wayward hairs that cling to your sweaty forehead.

“Maybe in the morning, sugar. For now, all I wanna do is hold ya.”

Your brows slightly raise, but you don’t push the subject. While you’d gladly try to bring her to the highs she just brought you too (or at least attempt to), you're more than content snuggling into her strong chest and sleeping the rest of the night away. 

No doubt you’ll wake up with dry mouths, sticking to the sheets and smelling like something left out in the sun for far too long. But neither of you will care, too wrapped up in each other to think about anything else. 

You had thought she’d be trouble. As it turns out, you don’t mind a little bit of trouble, now and then.

[gojoidyll]

it's ok, i'm ok

(implied) simon "ghost" riley x fem!reader x johnny "soap" mactavish

cw | insecurities, depictions of facial scars (reader), mentions of being interrogated/tortured, open ended, may continue (?), etc.

sum | a mask protects you, and you're determined to keep it that way.

When you look in the mirror, you immediately feel a tinge of disgust. Your eyes racked over the scars that littered your face. There was one long nasty one, on the right side. It marred the skin terribly. It reached from the top of your eyebrow and down all the way to your chin and the scar was not straight at all. It was jagged, cut with haste. You could still feel the pain lingering there before your eyes lingered on the other scars. One was a horizontal line slashed across the middle of your nose, another perfectly symmetrical with your jawline on the left side of your face, and finally the last one. The one that was smaller than the others and cut across the left side of your temple.

The scars were given to you a year or two ago. You can’t exactly remember the date as the memories start to blur, but what happened to you was as clear as day. It was an interrogation, the squad you were apart of had been captured and slowly the enemy began cycling through every single one of you until you were the last. But you gave them nothing, even as they slashed your face up.

You could still feel your nails being pulled out, your nose being broken, your-

You shook your head and reached for your mask, the black fabric covered both your mouth and nose before you reached for your favorite baseball cap and fixed it over your head. It wasn’t a perfect covering, but it did its job. The job being to hide most if not all of your face from your comrades in arms. You learned all too well, that the men would much rather have a pretty face to look at then a scarred one (as you came to realize with the women in the squadron who … were not scarred as you were).

And as you got ready for the day and to head out to base, you wondered if you would find someone who wouldn’t care about your scarred appearance, but … you found it highly unlikely.

“L/n, meet taskforce 141, you’ll be joining them from here on out.”

The moment you get on base and being handed a new team assignment wasn’t on your bucket list, but you had no complaints. Your original team was already disbanding to begin with. Most of them retiring after they were rescued from being captured, but you decided to stay. If only to keep your mind occupied.

And even as you introduced yourself and met the tf 141 guys, you still had that ache in your heart. It wouldn’t be the same, but at least you will be doing something.

“So, L/n, do they call you anything else?”

Its when you are left alone with tf 141 to “better get to know them” when you finally come back to reality.

“I don’t have a nickname if that’s what your wondering.”

“Really,” asked the man with a mohawk, you already guessed he was the one called Soap, “they just call you l/n?”

You merely nodded, the words seeming to have left you. Which was another thing you noticed. A change that just didn’t sit right. You used to talk a lot, you always filled the silence, made things louder, brighter, happier almost. But now, you just meander with the silence in hopes that someone else starts talking so you don’t have to.

Soap merely grinned at you before reaching out and clapping you on the back, “well, then No Name, guess we’ll just have ta figure somethin out.”

At the mention of the words “No Name” you had a feeling that that was what your nickname was going to be. And as it turns out, you would be right.

“No Name! Come check this out!”

Fixing your baseball cap and adjusting your mask a bit, you trotted over to Soap, eyes seeming to bore into what he was looking at on his phone.

“Really?”

“What? Oh come on, you can’t possibly say this isn’t funny.”

You rolled your eyes, the action going unnoticed due to the bill of your cap, “whatever you say, Soap.”

And that was how the weeks followed. You trained silently with them. Soap being the only one who seemed to try and tear away at your walls, but nothing seemed to work as you were as silent if not even more silent than Ghost was.

Speaking of the man, he was probably the one you liked being around most.

He didn’t look at you when he talked, nor does he try to acknowledge you. Something that you found being grateful for. And when he did have to communicate something to you, his eyes never seemed to pry nor did his actions seem like he wanted to know more either. You found that you liked the little to no attention you got, and luckily when you are near the man no one else tries to get to you as well. And Soap? He tends to pay attention to his friend more too. Another thing you were grateful for.

Though, the brief simplicity you had gained and the happiness of blissful silence all seemed to come crashing down when a small group of women that shared the barracks with you stole both your mask and hat.

“So that’s what you look like…”

You were not amused when the women who you fought alongside with more than a couple of times started to crowd around you to get a good look at your face. It had caused your usual straight look to turn more down, the obvious hint of displeasure and anger clear on your features.

“Where’s my mask,” you managed to ask as you swatted a girl’s hand away.

One of them giggled, “we sort of hid it from you.”

You glowered, “where?”

You knew the question was fruitless as the girls scattered immediately the moment you started to get out of bed. And before you could make the move to look for both of the items, you chanced a look at the clock and almost let out a groan before holding in.

You had no time to waste on looking for either of your belongings, nor did you have any extras in your locker.

Today was going to be a shit day.

“What.”

The single word that left your mouth was more of a statement than a question as you stood next to Ghost and Soap, both who seemed to openly stare at you as the three of you waited for your Captain and Gaz to show up at the meeting point.

“It’s nothing,” Soap answered a bit too quickly for your liking, and when you shifted your gaze towards Ghost you immediately hated that fact that his eyes were directed right at your face. You instantly started to miss when he didn’t look at you at all.

“Girls in the barracks hid my mask is all,” the little information you relented was hopefully enough to get them to stop staring.

However, it wasn’t enough.

“Didn’t have a spare,” you managed again. But the stares they gave you was all you could feel, “know my face isn’t great to look at, once I get a new one or find my old mask, you won’t have to stare so damn much.”

And when Ghost finally talks to you, not at you or near you, like he really talks to you and sees you for the first time, your brain just short circuits.

“Why? You’re pretty to look at as you are now. Soap and I just don’t know how to act around a pretty lady.”

[lapdoodlebop]

Stole A Breath

A small little ace x reader drabble I made! it was supposed to be part of a series but then it got out of hand and slowly stopped becoming part of what I originally intended. Not proofread!!

————————————————————————

What sorta loser gets all sweaty when they start holding hands with their crush?' Little does Ace know that he IS that sorta loser, as much as he'd loathe to admit it.

Don't get him wrong. When the two of you become friends, it's nothing to bat an eye over for him. Pats on the back for getting test scores that would send any student spiraling? You guys shared those all the time.

Playful hair ruffles for when either of you say something stupid? He's already messing up your hairdo despite your constant complaints. The sight of you taking his hand while you're pushing through the halls of a bustling crowd isn't even uncommon. You two became best friends in a flash, with physical affection as easy as breathing air.

But all the sudden, it's gotten a bit harder to not choke around you.

————————————————————————-

You and Ace just got out of class, and already swarms of students was taking up every bit of surface possible. There's not even a special occasion, maybe other than a special lunch deal that's been plastered on the walls as posters. Ace clicks his tongue; he's interested to try the new breakfast sandwich on the menu, but he's not sure he wants to weave through hangry, desperate students for it. Thats when you seem to cut off his airflow.

“Come on,” you wordlessly raise your hand and take his before he can get a chance to breathe.

Your fingers are a lot softer than he gave credit for. Did you have some sort of deal with Vil for moisturizer or something? It’d explain why he feels the need to feel your palm at least one time and at most a dozen or two dozen. And your grip is firm, but it’s so gentle too. The way it’s wrapped around his own rougher fingers suddenly has him praying he doesn’t have sweaty palms. He doesn’t, right? That would be so lame. But you haven’t complained yet. You shouldn’t, y-you’re the one that initiated all the skin contact, not him!

His cheeks pinken, eyebrows furrowed as the corners of his mouth twitch into a dismayed expression. What the hell was he thinking? This wasn’t any different from all the other times you took his hand.

So why can’t he follow a single word you’re saying? Something about the cafeteria and cats and sandwiches, he can’t even remember what he wanted right now. Sure the crowd’s a lot bigger than expected, he’s getting pushed against you and his chest bumping into your back is causing him to choke on what little breath he has, b-but that’s a given! Great Seven, he never pays attention in class but this is ridiculous. His eyes keep looking from the back of your head to the hand you interconnected with his, slotted like a puzzle piece waiting to be complete. His hand (all on its own, that’s what he’ll tell you) turns to hold yours (his ‘lead me away’ doesn’t sound so sarcastic anymore when it’s for you). The casual squeeze you give him back sends him further than he thought, goosebumps suddenly running under his sleeve and across his arm. His breath catches in his throat again and now he has to breathe manually before he forgets to.

And then, an idea hits him. A stupid, stupid idea.

You have to be thinking the same thing, right? That’s why this feels so weird. You two are on the same wavelength so often that you must be somehow projecting your thoughts into his own. That HAS to be the reason! It’s totally not him trying to save face over the fact he’s becoming the guy clamoring over one bit of contact from a person he thinks is kinda (really) nice to look at and kinda (really) nice to be around and he wouldn’t mind hanging out with them (forever, in a space together, seeing each other all the time and more).

The butterflies twirling around in his stomach must be what you’re experiencing too, certainly not caused by how you turned back and smiled at him, him of all people you share your smile with all the time as if it was reserved for him only. You must think the same about the wry smile he’s giving you back, one that holds a little too much affection than he wishes he held. He’s pretty great, right? At least, he hopes you think he’s great..

The cafeteria’s a lot closer than he thought. When you guys get there, he lets out the air you kept hostage from him. But now he’s definitely teasing you for wanting to be so close to him afterwards. Taking his hand and dragging him around, no shame in being interested y’know!

That night, unfortunately, he’s clutching his pillow against his reddening face, scowling at the idea that he wouldn’t mind you dragging him around like that on a date.