#and some other stuff but like. mostly the robots

[earlgraytay]

I'm not a scientist, but the frustrating thing about so much modern science is that it's fundamentally

a) nerds who want to solve cool, mostly-theoretical engineering problems, for the sake of solving the problems and making people's lives a little bit better

funded by

b) The Murder Industrial Complex, whose primary goal is figuring out how to murder people in ways that get particular politicians elected as efficiently as possible

So every time you've got an engineering problem that's just nifty and cool to solve for its own sake you've got some PR guy from the nerd company going "uhhh, we could use this for search and rescue? we could use this to help desert warfare logistics?"

and the sad thing is, I'm pretty sure the only people buying any of it are people who are not involved in the Grant Money Dance, who don't understand that most of this science is not actually going to be used for the Military Applications (TM) (R) that the people making them claim they're using it for

they're saying that shit to get grant money because it's the easiest way to get their cool theoretical engineering shit funded

[anglerflsh]

updating the Transparency mindmap for how to shorthand what's going on in there

[arolesbianism]

I'm fucking free babey

[ablobwhowrites]

I saw your post about the Poppy playtime: New Home Sweet Home Au and I really like the concept!

Since the release of Ch4 I wanted to request… how would the 17 toys react to seeing the doctor, Harvey Sawyer now in a robot (like in the fan arts) just showing up at the door when Reader goes to open the door.

I can imagine the chaos that would happen.

Especially when the doctor simply requests to live at the house with them.

(thanks for liking the au. Hopefully I can keep cooking with this one. Might make more I don't know)

The doctor forced to live in the garage or something like that.

When y/n opened the door they just kinda froze up looking up at the doctor a doey who was coming out of the living room just quietly ran back in the living where most of the smiling critters where and he just whisper yells that the actual doctor is here and everyone freaks out quietly. Cause like they would be all scared out of their minds because what do you mean the doctor of out side and at the literal door.

Doey immediately plans to protect everyone. He did it at the safe haven, he can do it again. The smiling critters well panic but dog day is the same as doey wanting to try and protect the house and the other toys inside. As most of the toys are afraid of the doctor cause like how the fuck is that guy alive and if he's out than what about the prototype? But it's almost impossible for the prototype to escape cause limitations.

And doey quietly trying to reach out to grab y/n and close the door but it's to risky as they don't want to make their presence known. As they are scared that the doctor will kill them after everything especially trying to kill him as I like he's was the main reason that most of them exist especially that he contributed to making the toys alive and was the head scientist and worked with the prototype. But y/n reluctantly let's him in but just because it's the morning and they don't want the neighbors to see him. Y/n makes a deal that the doctor can live here but the toys can decide where he sleeps and thats ends up to be the garage or attic or any of the rooms that is away from the other toys and y/n and the doctor if fine with that but y/n wants to give him a second chance but doey doesn't. He just wants the doctor away from everyone else and no where near them or y/n.

Harley kinda just had a bed, blanket and a bookshelf as the room he stays in is mainly a spare room and less used guest room. But y/n tries to be nice and put up some posters and some plushies and books in his room but Harvey kinda keeps it bare and does read the books while in his room. Even though the toys don't trust y/n being around the doctor and at least mommy long legs or one of the toys go up with y/n to make sure Harley doesn't try anything funny but mostly Harley doesn't come out of the room. Only at night to take some things to tinker with them (mostly y/n's stuff) but returns it after tinkering with it (he is a control freak. As he realizes he has no power now and isn't able to see everything around him) he does try to be "nice" as he does want a place to live but he's weak and feels vulnerable, having to take refuge in y/n's house and he wonders if he could take you back with him to the factory or to find a something more have you in his grasp (he very much Is delighted by you and your abilities back at the factory and wonders if he could perhaps make you into something greater but doey and the rest of the toys ain't letting that happen if he even tries it) plus picky piggy isn't allowed in the kitchen at night anymore cause she literally had eaten almost all the groceries so now theres a lock on it that stays on until morning.

(that's it for my yap session, I glad you guys like my little silly au. But if you want more please don't feel shy to request any ideas for this or any other fics or stories. Please stay safe and drink water!)

[dailymothanon]

My TFP Soundwave ramblings (be warned cuz there are many words)

I was gonna draw today but the prospect of it felt overwhelming for some reason so instead I’m just gonna talk about TFP Soundwave’s alt mode (a UAV/ reaper drone) just cuz I was reading about it and I like how I could link stuff between how he is and how reaper drones are.

So basically, one of the first things I wanna mention is that reaper drones/UAVs are unmanned aerial vehicles (given the whole “drone” thing and what UAV even means) but to me that just sorta makes sense for Soundwave in regard to his more.. Unsettling, robotic/alien-like behavior and movements? As well as his silence and usual distance from the front lines and his lack of showing face/(social?) detachment from like everyone else other than Laserbeak (don’t ask, it just makes sense to me). Reaper drones were also made to work at first only in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles; but eventually additionally a hunter-killer role which you can kinda see in Soundwave’s character in the show (my best example is the scene where he retrieves Laserbeak from Ratchet, super cool creepy behavior from him, just waiting for something or someone to make any noise or any movement). When he has a mission, he’s most definitely getting it done, he stalks and lurks and takes action when the time is just Right; he’s very pinpoint accurate in Prime. 

Reaper drones were also made to provide “deadly persistence” capability, being able to fly over areas night and day waiting for a target to present itself, or to survey for LONG long amounts of time. Which to me correlates to how he’s able to stand still and do work and wait and listen and watch and do everything for So Long as he does in the show (and tolerate Starscream— or like everyone actually for so long 🙄). 

Reapers also utilize satellite communications for command and control (as in, they kinda literally have satellite dishes in them I think that’s what that is?), so that to me also easily parallels Soundwave's abilities with the space bridges and kind of his visor being computer-like as well (and that time he used an. Antenna satellite thing? To look for signals or whatever). They also use other multiple sensors to target and observe, which include optical (high resolution imagery for identification and target acquisition), infrared, and radar systems (enables the drone to locate and track targets regardless of weather conditions or visibility). Which imo links to how Soundwave is described as the “eyes and ears of the decepticons”.

They carry many weapons but I’m not really gonna get into that tbh cuz. Idk. Don’t wanna. Also TFP Soundwave doesn’t fight often anyways and when he does it’s mostly just straight hands (and data cables). And this is as far as my not the most accurate of ramblings most likely but just one I wanted to make because there’s just a Lot from so Little of TFP Soundwave I just love to think about it. Was I geeked out writing this? Maybe, so what 😒

[mechncheese]

Science Cont Yapping

Character Concepts, Ideas, Possible things, oh my ! Mostly putting this out here to discuss my thought process, you can have a look into my mind if you'd like and lmk what you think !

OK ! So I think I've sorted how I'm going to go about the science continuity ! I'm thinking that I'll split it into two (like how IDW Robots in Disguise and MTMTE take place during the same time but follow two different storylines and eventually fit back together). So we have Science AU Ambition - following Jetfire, Wheeljack, Ratchet, and Perceptor stuck on the moon of Ambition trying to accomplish their mission (finding a way to restore Cybertron + returning home)

Science AU Cybertron - an anthology following various different characters as they struggle to fight a war on a dying Cybertron

Brainstorm and Prowl start out on Cybertron but eventually make their way to where Jetfire and the others are.

I'm still trying to keep this on a small scale but omg it's so hard when I want to do so much and there's so many characters and moving parts.

But here are some fun stuffs; character concepts !

Women have arrived ! I heavily changed Lifeline from her G1 version.

Design wise; I drastically changed her, I wanted to give her a bigger build, I think I could've definitely pushed it a bit more but I want Quickslinger to have a vastly different and heavier build compared to her.

here's what I have in mind for Lifeline;

She works with her bodyguard and assistant Quickslinger and their job is to stabilize critically injured bots on the battlefield so they can be brought back to the base's Medbay, First Aid and Red Alert can handle the rest.

Lifeline is their superior while Ratchet is away and she's more experienced than First and Red. First Aid wants to be a field medic as well but Lifeline keeps telling him no, mostly because he's too inexperienced and she's low-key scared something is going to happen to him because well. They lost Pharma and Ambulon.

In terms of personality, Lifeline is more serious and exhaustion from working has drained her. Fighting is not her forte nor is it something she wishes to participate in, but if push comes to shove she'll immobilize her opponents with the electromagnetic pulse in her palms or she'll just sick Quickslinger on them. She's desensitized to a lot of the horrors on the battlefield and someone needs to give her a paid vacation asap.

Oh also Minerva will be here eventually she's another medic, she mostly works with making the medicine.

Of course, Miss Arcee is here too, she goes on scouting patrols with Bumblebee and Hotrod and they're besties. I imagine they all have a more sibling dynamic with one another.

Arcee I imagine is a mix of Cyberverse and Earthspark in terms of personality, she's chipper, fun to be around, and shows her affection through punching. Arcee has a big heart and that is both a strength and weakness, she would not hesitate to throw herself in recklessly into combat if it meant protecting her allies. She's more a melee type of fighter and uses her speed to her advantage. I kept her design relatively simple and kept her pinks light since I wanted Elita-1 to have darker pinks.

Hear me out guys,, what if Thundercracker was an Autobot ? I'm biased but PLEASE !! THUNDERCRACKER !!

I changed his outlier ability to be more electrical based. As for his defection from the Decepticons.. I imagine he was nonaligned for a while but realized he can't survive alone, then Bumblebee's scouting team found him on a patrol and brought him in. His place on the Elite Trine has been replaced by Slipstream, so it's now Starscream, Skywarp and Slipstream. Haven't worked out the details but I'll cross that bridge when I get there, but they're pissed about Thundercracker, trust.

Thundercracker works with Windblade and Cosmos as Autobot Air Support.

moving forward I do want to try and push bot body types more I FEEL LIKE I SUFFER A LOT FROM SAME BOT SYNDROME I have to change that-- I'm better about it when I'm working with organic characters but something about mechas is just such a different learning curve

[stump-not-found]

hellooo haiii :]

i saw a while ago that you said that you were fiddleford hater among lovers… do you mind speaking more on that? (sorry i really liek hearing ur views on stuff)

uhh yeah you know what i'll talk a lil about it . why not . i can share some analysis as a treat . will tuck my thoughts gently behind a readmore, so sweet and softlys

i think fiddleford is a fine character its just irritating when narratively he's treated as this very tragic figure when he's an adult man capable of making his own choices . this is a flaw with the books, to be clear - i do not think the actions of fiddleford align with the explicit narrative he has as a nice guy who had a terrible thing happen to him, which stanford must feel soul-crushing guilt over .

this is what bothers me about him: that he is intended to be read as just an all around good dude with tragic circumstances, rather than a messy guy who made shit-ass terrible decisions every step of the way

not even talking about fandom mischaracterization. that's a given in any collaborative fan space and i don't really hold it against people for doing that . fandom is fun, play with your dolls, do whatever - all that mostly means is im not gonna vibe w/ a lot of fanart, it's not going to impact my opinion of the character . i do think it's funny how the collective fanonization of him is simultaneously the wettest meow-meow, but also a total badass when . he's so fundamentally conflict adverse he destroys his own life and body over it .

my man fucks raccoons . i guess that's badass in it's own way . i guess

the thing that is compelling about fidds to me is he is a bit of a worm, and that worminess winds up destroying him from the inside out . he really embodies the entire concept of 'inaction is action', in a way that's deeply frustrating in both fun and not so fun ways

some of the fun things we know about fiddleford:

leveled the downtown area of palo alto

built a robot to try and kill his wife when she tried to divorce him

built robots to kill kids because his son wasnt paying attention to them

brain blasts people to get free labor out of them

started a cult to brain blast people

so horny for Cthulhu Columbo that he did not get his son a christmas present . not a single Tonking Truck . i know your brain is half melted at this point but cmon man

i don't really think the whole leaving his wife in the 70's is all that cute either . it's a one off joke, and there's something interesting about the fact that it's a one off joke . like what kind of financial freedom do people think a single mother is gonna have in this time period? why is that something that goes unchallenged?

and the fact he leaves them for a year is just like . that's also fucked man . i can personally attest to how fucked it is to have your dad just piss off for a year to do contractor work . what a wild subplot to be treated with such little narrative importance to his character . like . the fact that it holds so little importance to fidds is a narrative all on its own

it's just weird how the story treats him, man . he's not that endearing of a dude, which is what i like about him . i like that he makes bad decisions . i like that he doesn't respect when people say "no" . characters should make bad decisions and be bad people . i just really hate this presentation of his own actions being the fault of anyone other than fiddleford

oh also the research paper stint was insane . wild to me that that was presented in the story as like a cool or kind thing to do to someone . like that's a very reasonable boundary for stanford to be upset about being crossed, and its wild how that's presented as him being a jackass . there are MANY things that make ford a piece of shit . being upset about a guy doing something like that behind your back is not one of them

tho that's a whole other conversation about how ford as a character is defined by never having his boundaries respected, and this never being challenged, and in fact he should just be okay with it when it happens by the "right" sorts of people . once an object, always an object . love him

[b1asho]

Some noises/stuff on their voice:

As said in the image, Prectikar all sound like theyre masculine to humans when speaking through their nose. Only male prectikar have a larger throat sac and special flaps in it to make their shrieks/barks/etc, females can only really do like a dog bark noise or the grumbles and soft-speak. As for the animals I included, Prectikar can't roar (yes that means they can purr) but they make a lot of other bear-like chuffs and snuffles. They can shriek and snort (which kind of sounds like a horse) bellow (similar to an alligator in noise, occasionally more like a cassowary or other rattite) and bark (similar to a seal), and if pushed the right way they can make a sort of elephant trumpet noise through their nose (also similar to an elephant are their deep-throated noises) They can also make some hoots and grunts that sound like a howler monkey or gorilla.

Rossetians sound like they have a stuffy nose to us (which doesn't help disperse their nerdy erm actually reputation). They make a lot of teeth clicks and tongue noises when speaking, and I included a marmot because they can make a noise around the pitch of a rossetian whistle. I also included a tapir for reference of some of their other squeal noises. They can also kind of moo like a cow but I forgot that.

Kixeli are very good at mimicry but occasionally will slide into more creaky and whistly speech instead of mostly human tones. They croak like toucans do, and also make a lot of other bird-ish chirps and beak claps. They make a lot of loud repeating noises like a kookaburra, and that jabbery/laughy noise is the vibe for how a lot of their vocalizations sound to the untrained ear. The African Gray's voice is close to what they sound like when not trying super hard at human speech, and can get more precise and even make inanimate object noises like a starling. Look up any monkey (macaque, gibbon, etc) screaming/hooting video if you want to k ow what they sound like when scared or very excited.

Cerest speak in short, controlled bursts, usually in a monotone. An almost electronic hum and buzziness is always a part of their natural voice, usually to the point where they're unintelligible. They can make some small trills and mews like a cat, or yowl if they align their throat right. Screaming like a mountain lion is a sundyne thing, drecu screams are like that but more like a cicada if that makes sense. Some of their other misc noises that come from airflow or just them moving their mouthparts and beak are like locusts, mole crickets, click beetles, and the capuchinbird. Depending on the quality of their artificial voice, they can sound either on a Miku level or shitty off-brand robot.

Using their non-host voice, Muttreazik range from microwave humming noises to ear bleeding high pitched shrieks or organ shuffling low pitches. I didn't really know how to draw that so no worms in this post yet again

[icewindandboringhorror]

"We can get through this by working together, reach out to your friends, community is all we have, a social network will be your security in the world, now is the time to lean on others!"

I do agree, and it's scientifically sound (pretty sure there is data about how people with better social networks live longer and etc) but also....augh..... what about the severe social issues, difficulty to leave the house, physical issues which lead to like zero socialization energy a majority of the time, etc. etc. Social support can be a replacement for structural support, but.. I guess I just wish it didn't have to be. Community is extremely difficult to build, even moreso if you're someone who has issues with social cues or group conversations or even just being around others in the first place. And blah, nuance, of course I'm just complaining or maybe being too negative or maybe misunderstanding, but, I hardly have the energy to brush my hair once every 2 months.. how am I supposed to maintain a wide social network and be active in a Community and Join Groups lol... sometimes it kind of feels like "er.. well if thats my only option then...... ruh roh". It's overwhelming

[phoenixyfriend]

I have another AU. Whoo!

Saw a youtube thumbnail that caused some free association...

And imagined an odd little Setting where a bored Padme orders a like… LMD-style droid that looks and acts mostly human, because she's lonely and wants to pretend she has a boyfriend, and then the box arrives and she puts the 'droid' together like it's an IKEA bookshelf, and it wakes up and introduces itself as "Anakin Skywalker."

And so Padme starts living out this idyllic fantasy with a live-in househusband that's mostly like a butler that she can cuddle at night. Maybe sex happens maybe not. Doesn't matter. Mostly just Padme indulging in some relaxing fantasy time.

And then he gets a virus and goes Vader mode, and she has to fight for her life against her robot boyfriend.

(Padme has a date with this dashing young captain in the army who made a comment about how he's a bit uncomfortable with the droid boyfriend he saw in a linen closet.)

Little bit of "Megan," little bit of like… idk Disney's "Smart House" or any other movie where the robot starts thinking it's human, gets yandere about the love interest, and decides to do murder about it.

@atagotiak said: Maybe the virus or glitch or whatever isn't obvious immediately, just when she starts to maybe be interested in a human…

So yeah, the virus isn't super noticeable at first, buuuut then Rex shows up and. Well.

As @jebiknights put it:

Captain Rex being weird about the robot boyfriend is great Yes he's pretty but why is he here why is he in your closet just why

She was LONELY and she DOESN'T TRUST MEN because they keep trying to STEAL STATE SECRETS FROM HER DATAPADS, okay?

Her last real relationship was with Clovis, who was getting bribed to steal information on legislation she was drafting for tech safety stuff.

"My last boyfriend was slicing into my private servers to violate republic security and I was paranoid about that so I got a robot boyfriend." "Couldn't he slice in even more easily?" "I mean probably, but he can't really be bribed and I had a friend go through his code to make sure he didn't have any external loyalties, so he wouldn't."

The friend was R2-D2, which is great, buuuuuut Anakin not having any outside loyalties doesn't prevent his firewalls from getting fucked up.

jebiknights:

Omg r2d2 and Anakin mega best friends in this Artoo LOVES harassing high strung droids

I think somehow she and Rex manage to neutralize Anakin without 'killing' him and he? ends up in the care of Obi-Wan? I don't know why or how or what's going on but Anakin ends up latching on to Obi-Wan like a dog to the owner that's the most generous with the treats.

It could end with murdering the evil bot, but I think it's funny for him to just end up Obi-Wan's problem. Like always.

Padme: This droid is uh. Well he's designed to be a boyfriend? To deal with being lonely? Please don't judge me. Obi-Wan: I don't, uh. I don't need a boyfriend. I just need to figure out what happened in the code to cause this so we can let the manufacturer know. Padme, embarrassed: Listen, you can probably just leave him shut down in a corner or something, I'm just worried that trying to deactivate him entirely could reactivate the murder mode? Anyway, mostly he just wants… you know… to sleep in my bed and make dinner and stuff. So you can probably keep him happy while you investigate the issue by just letting him cook for you or something. Obi-Wan: I don't know that I'm comfortable with letting a designed-for-romance droid sleep in my bed with me. Anakin, gauging Obi-Wan's face for his age: I do not need to be a boyfriend. Obi-Wan, unnerved and relieved: Oh, good. Anakin: I will be your son. Obi-Wan: What.

Anakin is making himself Obi-Wan's problem. Padme is mortified. Rex is just icing his shoulder.

@firebirdeternal offered:

I like the idea that Anakin isn't any less evil he's just in charge of like. A single holo-display with no internet access. The worst he can do is be emo in Obi-wan's living room when he's trying to read. "First step in solving the problem of evil sapient technology: Don't hook them up to anything with a connection or a motor. Second step: Don't let them on your Spotify account or they will ruin your recommendations for months."

[reyrapidsbutgayer]

Ranking All Elden Ring Bosses by Fuckability

It was only a matter of time until I made a post like this. (And an equally horrible post featuring the DLC bosses.)

In this hypothetical all of the bosses can be reasonably communicated with and are not actively trying to kill you.

Repeat bosses not included, duo bosses counted seperate.

It should also be assumed that all of these bosses have access to their magic/items/resources to benefit them in bed.

Explanation of Grading system:

Ineligible: (Cannot give consent)

These characters are not sentient enough to communicate consent, or are physically incapable of sex.

Unfuckable: (Can give consent, but does not DESERVE sex)

Character sucks so badly that they do not deserve to experience pleasure in any shape or form.

Uninterested: (Can give consent, does not WANT sex)

These character are fully capable of sex but would never participate in sex due to lack of interest or overabundance of moral convictions.

Not worth it: (Can give consent, is terrible in bed)

I mean, you COULD have sex with these characters but why would you?

Acceptable: (Can give consent, would be fine in bed)

These characters are average in bed, nothing crazy or noticeable. Some might end up in this category because they ARE good at sex, but the entire process would be inconvenient or uncomfortable to initiate.

Good Time: (Can give consent, would be great in bed)

These characters are good at sex, give or take a few points depending on their mood or situation.

Knock your socks off: (Can give consent, would be amazing in bed)

These characters excel in giving pleasure and would be well worth the time and effort involved.

Sex God: (Can give consent, would be the best in bed)

These characters would be so good at sex that all other factors are irrelevant. They are serving and we are here for it.

Evil Sex God: (Can give consent, is a terrible person but you’d make an exception.)

These are characters that should fall lower in the rankings, but their sexual prowess supersedes their inherent awfulness to a noteworthy degree.

Full list below the read more. Obviously it's not going to be sfw.

Ineligible: (Cannot give consent)

Dragonkin Soldier:

Mindless beast

Astel, Naturalborn of the Void

Weird rock alien, doesn't/can't understand.

Fia's Champions:

Ghosts, simps.

Regal Ancestor Spirit

Animal

Erdtree Avatar

A plant

Great Wyrm Theodorix

Mindless beast.

Ulcerated Tree Spirit

A plant, no junk

Tibia Mariner:

Skeleton

Red Wolf of the Champion:

Animal.

Full-Grown Fallingstar Beast

Weird rock alien, doesn't/can't understand.

Abductor Virgin

First off, just some snakes in a robot. Second, virgin.

Erdtree Burial Watchdog

Stone gargoyle

Crystalians

Non-organic

Mad Pumpkin Heads

Unable to consent due to madness.

Cemetery Shade

Unable to consent due to mind controlling parasite.

Spirit-Caller Snail

Animal

Runebear

Animal

Miranda the Blighted Bloom

A plant

Guardian Golem

Stone gargoyle

Starscourge Radahn:

Unable to consent due to madness

Unfuckable: (Can give consent, but does not DESERVE sex)

Elden Beast:

Too catholic.

Sir Gideon Ofnir, the All-Knowing:

Dick game weak - unironically posts joker memes.

Omenkiller:

Basically a cop.

Necromancer Garris:

Killed his family, not a good husband.

Royal Revenant:

Won't stop screaming (in an unsexy way)

Godrick the Grafted:

Incel - Also all that murder and torture business but mostly the Incel stuff.

Uninterested: (Can give consent, does not WANT sex)

Valiant Gargoyle:

Could probably have sex if it wanted to, but is kinda going through a lot right now. Ya know, that whole "Is made of several corpses mashed together" thing.

Malenia, Blade of Miquella:

Look, I ALSO wanted her to higher up on this list, but let's be honest here. Her body is rotting and falling apart, she just isn't up for sex in her current form. In her prime? She'd be top of the list. She's the daughter of Marika and Radagon, she'd be playing fuck/marry/kill with every warrior who crossed her path. (in that order)

Death Rite Bird:

I think it might be physically capable of sex, but is too busy burning corpses to bother with stuff like that.

Black Blade Kindred:

Same reason as the Valiant Gargoyle but you might have like 2% more of a chance because they are goth.

Maliketh, the Black Blade:

Would normally be a sex god, but is too religious. Probably took a vow about this sort of thing.

Morgott, the Omen King:

You kidding me? This guy has the same energy as a repressed youth pastor. He's gonna be a virgin till the day he dies. The dude sided with the same religious order that locked him a sewer and tried to kill him. He's not out there getting phone numbers he's too busy praying and judging others for their 'impure thoughts'.

Draconic Tree Sentinel:

Married to his job, also physically chained to his horse. He ain't taking off that armor anytime soon.

Wormface:

Too sad, leave him alone his face is full of worms.

Tree Sentinel:

Same as the Draconic Tree Sentinel but he's a tiny bit more naive so you might have a better chance.

Elder Dragon Greyoll:

Too sleepy, but still kinda a milf.

Grafted Scion:

There might be some genitals in there somewhere but I don't think they know how or even want to use them.

Not worth it: (Can give consent, is terrible in bed)

Esgar, Priest of Blood:

No sense of hygiene, is always covered in blood (in an unsexy way)

Mohg, Lord of Blood:

This loser is dripping with all the least sexy bodily fluids and he has sharp horns sticking out of him. Even if you got him in bed you'd only enjoy like 5% of it. Plus you just know he'd be all needy afterwards and try to get you to join his MLM.

Borealis the Freezing Fog:

Too cold, not a snuggler.

Elemer of the Briar:

The armor stays ON during sex.

Kindred of Rot:

It's like all the worst possible aspects of alien biology, it won't be nearly as fun as you hoped.

Sanguine Noble:

Same as all the other Mohg followers, too sticky and too smelly.

Decaying Ekzykes:

He's sick right now, leave him alone.

Acceptable: (Can give consent, would be fine in bed)

Loretta, Knight of the Haligtree:

I'm sure she'd be a decent lover. Maybe a little overzealous but she'd has good intentions.

Grave Warden Duelist:

I mean these guys are hot and probably fuck like a truck but they are not the most caring lovers, also they are covered in live snakes so there is that.

Night's Cavalry:

If you like goth knights I'm sure they'd be fine.

Alabaster Lord:

Their skin probably feels like stone, but I bet they can pull off all sorts of freaky zero-g sex stuff if you ask them.

Onyx Lord:

Same as the Alabaster Lord but slightly more goth.

Fell Twins:

Once you get past the horns and stuff I bet the Omens are actually pretty good in bed, just watch out.

Demi-Human Queens:

I feel like all Demi-humans are pretty good lovers but their biology probably has some unexpected drawbacks.

Stonedigger Troll:

If you can get past the texture and the size I bet they could be decent in bed.

Flying Dragon Greyll:

A surprisingly unsexy dragon, but a dragon is a dragon and still worth at least a one night stand.

Glintstone Dragon Smarag:

A dragon willing to kill racist magic users, earns them a few extra points.

Beastman of Farum Azula:

On one hand the Beastmen probably have crazy mating skills, but they are also zombies, which detracts some points for all the decay.

Battlemage Hugues:

Contrary to popular belief, Wizards are not very good at sex. They spend all their time studying instead of partying, at least Hugues is willing to get his hands dirty.

Commander O'Neil:

Seems like a decent guy, but probably won't shut up about his time in the military. Also he is infected with scarlet rot so that might be a mood killer.

Bloodhound Knight Darriwil:

The bloodhound knights are probably pretty wild in bed if you can earn their loyalty, but good luck with that.

Adan, Thief of Fire:

The dude committed heresy, that has to earn him some sexy points.

Soldier of Godrick:

He's a good boy, he's doing his job so throw him a bone.

Flying Dragon Agheel:

One of the first dragons you encounter, so he earns some points for style.

Demi-Human Chief:

Same as the queens, but probably a bit rougher in bed.

Good Time: (Can give consent, would be great in bed)

Lichdragon Fortissax:

A much sexier dragon, you know they were hooking up with Godwin. Only loses some points for all the death rot.

Crucible Knight Siluria:

A bit gloomy, but I bet the crucible knights can do all sorts of freaky stuff with their animal body parts.

Mimic Tear:

A slippery liquid shapeshifter, need I say more?

Commander Niall:

A way better guy than O'Niel, plus he just a bit more daddy energy.

Fire Giant:

Once you get past his size, his sadness and the giant fell god of destruction in his chest, I bet he's got something going on.

Ancient Hero of Zamor:

Gives me Hercules/Amazonian vibes, I could be into it.

Cleanrot Knight:

Lesbian activities detected.

Crucible Knight:

These guys have tails, horns, wings and big old throat sacks. Imagine the possibilities.

Glintstone Dragon Adula:

Has a sword. If you hear "Dragon holding a sword" and your pants aren't already off, we can't be friends.

Bols, Carian Knight:

He seems like a good boy.

Scaly Misbegotten:

I feel like the Misbegotten have some really interesting possibilities with their animal biology. I bet they have bonobo type societies and that could be fun.

Leonine Misbegotten:

Same as the other Misbegotten.

Misbegotten Warrior:

Same as the other Misbegotten.

Knock your socks off: (Can give consent, would be amazing in bed)

Crucible Knight Ordovis:

Has all the desirable traits of a Crucible Knight but I also imagine they are super into threesomes.

Perfumer Tricia:

She seems really nice, and would be a super attentive lover. Plus she probably has access to crazy drugs and could hook you up.

Nox Swordstress & Nox Priest:

You just know that the Nox were getting up to crazy hot and crazy unethical experiments in their underground cities. These two probably get up to some wild shit and they are inviting you to join them.

Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon:

As she is now, I bet she'd be too sad to really be in a relationship again. But she kept up with Radagon and you just know she has some tricks up her sleeves that could make you abandon the golden order.

Sex God: (Can give consent, would be the best in bed)

Dragonlord Placidusax:

Has two male heads and three female heads, imagine...

Ancient Dragon Lansseax:

Formed a whole freaky dragon/human cult and you just know they got into some eyes-wide-shut orgies behind those doors.

Godfrey, First Elden Lord (Hoarah Loux):

We all knew he'd be this high on the list. He was just a normal dude but he managed to keep pace with Queen Marika (Who is basically a goddess of fertility) for a good long while. He will fold you in half (on the battlefield and in the bedroom.)

Evil Sex God: (Can give consent, is a terrible person but you’d make an exception.)

Radagon of the Golden Order:

He sucks in all the worst ways, but I mean... You can't NOT. Both Radagon and Marika are the embodiment of evil but they managed to suck and fuck their way across an entire continent for generations. You HAVE to give a try at least once.

Godskin Duo:

Oh my god will it be awful with all those flayed human skins, but you know you are still gonna have to. They can stretch and do all sorts of freaky stuff with their bodies, plus they kill gods and nothing is sexier than heresy.

Vyke, Knight of the Roundtable:

The dude is a mad killer but... he can still probably get it, might as well give it a try.

God-Devouring Serpent / Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy:

Personally I wouldn't, he's a loser and will probably kill you. But he is also a giant snake made up of squirming hands doing all sorts of sexual experiments, I can't blame you if you want to give it a taste.

Black Knife Assassin:

They committed a whole lot of treason but the power of armored lesbians is too hard to resist.

Patches:

If you are already having sex with from software characters, you gotta give Patches at least one attempt. When you wake up he'll have robbed you, but you knew what you were getting into.

[cheschesterpossum]

First I want to say that I hope you’re feeling better, I can definitely relate to school taking a toll on my mental health (exams are a bitch). This AU gets my gears turning and I wanted to give some ideas for CITF for you to maybe look at when you are felling better. These are completely random and mostly unrelated to each other and in no particular order. I hope you enjoy!

Humans are only slightly shorter than cybertronians, when humans put the Cybertronians in their little pocket universe they made it so that the Cybertronians were bigger then everybody else, why? Because it’s funny. So when a human visits Cybertron they are the size of an average Cybertronians.

Humans or Y/N view Cybertronians as their children, as well as Primus AND Unicron. So if a scenario where the Lost Light has a human on board and they come across Unicron it’s going to be really weird for the crew because the human liaison is threatening Unicron with time out if he keeps doing what he’s doing (idk eating planets or smth) while Unicron is pouting and whining that he isn’t a kid anymore. While this exchange is happening the crew of the LL is both confused and horrified that this human is telling their version of Satan that they’re going to put them in time out.

The 13 original Primes where the only Cybertronians that knew Humans created them and since the Matrix of Leadership contains the knowledge of the past Primes this mean that Optimus knows that humans created his species.

Cybertronians were created as the next evolution of human robotics. The original 13 Primes were created to see just what they could do with the newly developed technology that was used to make Rung.

Scraplets act like dogs and/or cats around humans.

Every Cybertronian when they see a human and/or Y/N(The creator of their species) they subconsciously recognize them.

the reason why many Cybertronian alt modes have seats, steering wheels, cockpits, etc. is because they were originally made for human use.

I’m in the process of thinking about more stuff especially lore so I wanted to share some of my ideas.

OMG YES YES, THESE ARE AMAZING I LOVE IT WHEN PEOPLE SHARE THEIR IDEAS WITH MEWIHDSUSENHEJ-

Im doing better now dw:) and also thank you so much for these lovely brilliant ideas, im stuffing these into the AU no exception!!

I really like the idea of human being the same size as cybertronians in this AU, I've been thinking about for a long time actually. Also if we're the same size, that mean we're practically giants compared to everyone else in the pocket universe (aside cybertronians). Their alt-mode having seats, steering wheels, cockpit, ect also make so much sense as they're originally made for human's use. IT'S ALL COMING TOGETHER.

When imagining y/n and Unicron, i thought of that one scene in Adventure Time where Finn ground Ice King, i could see this totally happening lolol. The Lost Light, beside Rung prolly, are flabbergasted.

Scary robot Satan getting put in time out- actually, y/n putting both Primus and Unicron time out whenever they argue. Great, just great.

The 13 Primes being created using the same tech that was used to make Rung/Primus, the only few cybertronians knew of their species roots, those who obtained the Matrix of Leadership will be passed on the knowledge.... humans..humans originally created the Matrix? The Allspark?

Hnggggggggg-Domesticated Scraplets go brrrrrr, they're like tiny dogs/cats. Cybs be looking horrified as we pet those metal-eating pest that destroyed cities. Building an army of Scraplets and commanding them, i have no doubt some of you out there would try it. Shi, it'll be like minions and gru/j.

The bots getting that faint feeling of connection, they can't exactly put their digits onto it but it's there. It scares some and intrigue some, but they're all drawn to it in some way. What is it about these fleshies that feels... different? Yet familiar at the same time? Who are we to them?

Slowly, subconsciously, as if a long buried forgotten instinct surfaces. They started to listen more intently when we talk, when we indirectly or directly ask for something they fetch it for us, ect. It feels... right, like something clicked. It feels so right when we touch them, a small accidental brush, a handshake, or a friendly pat.

Before they knew it they started craving it, they feel like they lost their purpose when we're gone (like a vehicle being abandonded, left to rust and fall apart through time). It's scary and it's as uncanny as how much they yearn for a human's touch-

Im going insane.

[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.

[seleneprince]

Part 2 of my the Neglected! Daughter's file from the yandere!batfam au

HER ARSENAL:

-Lucia's skills as a hacker are inspired by the Watch Dogs universe.

-She can remotely hack phones to access data, disable alarms, or track locations. Tamper with security cameras for intel or to map out routes. Overloard junction boxes to create distractions or disable power.

-Even manipulate traffic lights to cause accidents or create a escape route.

-She can also override vehicle systems, remotely controlling cars or locking people inside.

-She's also an inventor. Her fascination with tech doesn't end only in programming. She loves creating and developing tech stuff. Robots and drones are her favourites, designed for surveillance, as weapons, or other related tasks, such as planting bugs and retreiving items.

-With time, she learns to build specialized tools like signal jammers, EMPs, or hacking tools disguised as everyday items. Nothing escapes her.

-She has many hiding spots in Gotham, after years of finding routes by jumping through rooftops and sneaking around, but she mostly frecuents her main safehouse, that's located within an abandoned warehouse in The Narrows, and extends below utilizing portions of the closed underground station.

-She knows no one would think of looking down there, unless they know what they're looking for.

-It serves her as a workshop, but also as an operations center and her own personal heaven, where she can rest and enjoy herself in peace. She feels more at home there than in the Wayne manor.

-She puts her gymnastic skills to good use, sneaking through rooftops, alleyways, and urban infrastructure to her advantage. Sometimes she'll rely on drones for mobility instead, controlling them to scale virtually any wall and obstacle that she can't by bypass with parkour.

-She's not a fighter, but years of judo classes have allowed to defend herself when the situation calls for it. She's usually armed with compact, high-voltage stun weapons that incapacitate people without killing them. All of which designed and developed by her.

-She operates with an alter ego, Ghost, and later Zero, with which she manages her "errands" and communicates with people who hire her services. At first, the alter ego only exists online, but with time, she begins to intervene more in her missions, and it's not unusual for her to sneak into places to do her work, so she uses a disguise.

-When she's acting as her alter ego, she wears form-fitting athletic wear for unrestricted movement, with a jacket over it with deep pockets and hidden compartments, that helps conceal her shape. A sleek, high-design mask that covers from her nose to her forehead, equipped with augmented reality features for hacking on the go and a voice modifier, which creates a robotic tone that makes impossible to discern her age or gender. She also uses gloves, to keep her fingerprints away from any surface.

-She started doing some hacking here and there for hiring, but eventually, she associates with villains and works with them. She does some morally and legally questionable stuff (downright crimes) for money and also for the thrill of power, for the self-validation.

-Regardless, she doesn't really follow anyone. She works on her own terms and mostly does her own things. She's friends with some other hackers too and they work together from time to time, but otherwise, she acts alone.

-The classes and extracurricular activities she took in an effort to impress her family (judo, gimnastics, programming, drawing) have proven to be very useful with her new job, giving her a set of skills that she's honed for her not-so-legal endevours.

-She has her own motorbike, her favourite gift from Alfred that she treasures. She calls it "my baby", and has given it a few not very legal modifications to improve the design to her taste.

Personal info:

-She doesn't call Bruce "dad" or "father". It's always Bruce, or Mr Wayne if she feels particulally petty.

-She was banned from judo competitions after accidentally breaking her oponent's leg. In her defense, she had an awful day and the poor bastard decided it was a good idea to taunt her into hitting him. She claims she's gotten over it already (lies, she still gets pissy over it).

-She's been practically raised by Alfred, and they have the sweetest bond. He's the only person in the manor she respects, and wants to make him proud. That's why she does her best to hide her double life from him, knowing he would dissaprove.

-Funny enough, because Alfred is the same one who taught her how to shoot a gun and where to stab someone to render them helpless. The man is no fool, he knows he can't stop a teenager from doing dumb shit, but he can at least make sure she's prepared for the worst outcomes.

-She has the habit of moving around the manor like a monkey, climbing and jumping around like the proud gymnast she is. The manor is like a obstacle park for her. Why take the stairs when she can just jump off the rail and land gracefully on the ground? It's much faster.

-Alfred had to patch her up more than once from stunts gone wrong, but always encouraged her that "there's no victory without failure".

-She's grown up helping Alfred around the manor, slowly but surely taking his tasks from him and doing them herself so he can rest. She's worried about his high activity at his old age, fearing he might drop dead one day out of exhaustion.

-They share the house chores, and he calls her "his little helper", even though she's taller than him now. Lucia's heart melts when he calls her that, but pretends to complain with "she's not a kid anymore"

-She's fixated with the color red ever since her mom's death, specially with the kind of red that resembles blood stains. At the same time, she has severe claustrophobia.

-She hates the color green ever since Damian tried to kill her. It reminds her of his eyes.

-Speaking of it, she's either indifferent or polite with the others, but she hates Damian with passion. He gave her trauma, nightmares and a permanent scar on her neck that would never dissapear, among being an absolute bully whenever their paths cross. She avoids him entirely.

-Even thought she's stranged, she's still known as Bruce Wayne's daughter. She got kidnapped not much later after moving in to Wayne Manor by Penguin, whom she won over by being overly nice and polite with despite her circumnstances. Her mother taught her that bowing her head and be pleasant could save her life in the worst situations (pity it didn't save her)

-She was rescued quickly enough by Bruce, but he handled the ordeal as if it was an inconvenience rather than his daughter having been in a life-threatening situation.

-She's been kidnapped and attempted to more times over the years, each one cementing her belief that she had to save herself because no one else would.

-Her little brother, Marco, is a year younger than Damian, and has dyslexia, which is one of the reasons Lucia works so hard to provide him the best from a distance. She knows the educational system doesn't fit kids with special needs like him, specially if they're orphans.

-She's taken upon herself to be a mother for Marco, unconsciously seeking to cope with their mom's death by taking her place in his life. She visits him frecuently at the orphanage and pulls strings so he doesn't get adopted. It's selfish, she knows, but she can't stand the idea of another family getting him and losing contact with him.

-Being possessive with family runs in her blood.

-She adores him, but her relationship with the boy is also built on her feelings of neglect and the trauma of losing their mother. She holds unto him not only out of love, but because she feels he's the only true family she has. The only brother who loves her unconditionally and doesn't make her feel like shit.

-She's a parentified oldest daughter at its finest, used to act like an adult even at a young age. The only times she allows herself to be a girl her age is when she's alone with Alfred or with her best friends.

-She smokes and has some self-destructive tendencies, but crosses the line at getting drunk.

-She has discounts at the Iceberg Lounge whenever she goes. Gets along surprisingly well with Oswald Cobblepot, with him being somewhat fond of her since the kidnapping.

-Because of this, she has met a couple of villains already and even talked to them. Ivy and Harley are secretly scouting her for Siren potential, trying to see if she's worth it.

-All of them at some point have met her alter ego online. She has contacts everywhere.

-Marco's biological father is a pillar in both their lives since they were kids, and Lucia has a complex dynamic with the man. His identity is relevant to the plot.

-Out of all her "siblings", she likes Duke the most. He's the only one who's been friendly with her since the beginning and hasn't gotten bored of her, unlike Stephanie. They were close before, but after Lucia found out their secret identities, she kept her distance from him, much to his sadness.

-She doesn't mind Barbara and Cassandra. She's polite when she sees them and has no particular problem with their presence.

-She strongly dislikes Dick, Jason and Stephanie, and she doesn't have an opinion on Tim, beyond that he has assholes vibes.

-My Dick Grayson, Jason Todd and Damian Wayne from this au are inspired by the ones from @solelifauna. If you want to get an idea, go check her works and you'll understand.

-Lucia knows all of their vigilante lives, but pretends she doesn't so to not give them a reason to bother her. Alfred is aware that she knows, since he was there when she found out, in an accidental way.

-Long story short, she snuck in the Batcave and saw all the stuff, including the uniforms. She had a mental breakdown right there and rushed to pack her stuff, determined to run away. She's a criminal, she doesn't want to share space with the people who hunt down those who break the law. Alfred caught her and managed to convince her to stay, agreeing that she would keep the secret and the family wouldn't have to know about this incident.

-Alfred thinks he reacted like that because she's afraid of being targeted by the Batfamily's enemies.

-In reality, she's afraid of being targeted by the Batfamily themselves.

@bunbunboysworld

[starlitiris]

MORE POLYAMAROUS HEADCANONS NEOW!!!! /lh /nf

GULP. SIR YES SIR!!!!! o7

More Sebastian x Reader x Painter Headcanons

To feed the hungry fish & puter smoochers

And its actually headcanons this time instead of a fanfic of how you started dating! Forgive me if this is little rushed :,)

I was gonna add my shitty divider again but i’ll spare you this time

Living Arrangements:

So. It’s probably worth mentioning that in this silly little au, you and your significant others share a nice house near the ocean. It’s a safe house, hours and HOURS away from the nearest town. You get food sent to you every couple weeks courtesy of Innovation Inc, and they keep your utilities and such running as well. All of those assets you three provided to them were very appreciated and was enough in their eyes to warrant such a freedom (even though you guys deserved it anyway), but they still asked that you do some work for them. It’s mostly all remote work that you three do from home, but it keeps you all busy.

With that boring stuff out of the way, though- you guys love visiting the beach! It smells amazing, it looks beautiful, and with all of you being there together… it’s just perfect. You try to mostly go after the sun starts to set for the sake of Sebastian’s eyes. Especially with all the bright ass sand all over the beach, the daylight is BLINDING. But the sunsets on the beach are beautiful, and it never gets too cold out there.

Sebastian likes to just soak in the water. It’s cozy. Sometimes you’ll go out and swim with him, but for the most part, you and him try to stay on the shore or in the shallow end of the water. Painter isn’t waterproof. He cannot swim 😔. You guys are thinking about asking Innovation Inc if they could maybe fix that.

Your house has two bedrooms, one bathroom, a big living room, and nice kitchen, another room you guys turned into an office, and a big and beautiful back porch with an amazing view and a nice awning that covers it. Sebastian loves the porch because he can fit on it, and he loves the awning because owie ouch the sun it burns his eyes. The bedrooms aren’t really used since, well… you only would’ve needed one anyway, but Sebastian doesn’t exactly fit in either of them – comfortably, that is. So one of the bedrooms became Painter’s are studio, and you all turn the living room into your bedroom at night. Which leads me into other more specific (and hopefully shorter) headcanons.

Sleeping Arrangements:

You all sleep within the coils of Sebastian’s tail. You and Painter are always cuddling, and Sebastian will be either snuggling into one of your guys’ sides, or he’ll just lay down with his large upper body laid out on top of the both of you. Sebastian doesn’t often find himself in need of blankets or pillows, but if you and Painter are using them, then so is he. He likes to be under the blankies on top of u two to leech off of urs and Painter’s body heat :)

As for pillows… well obviously you guys are his pillows duhh

And you would think with Painter being a clunky robot that he wouldn’t be that comfy to snuggle with, but his snuggles are actually pretty cozy. He’s warm because of his running machinery, but he usually doesn’t get too hot. As long as he isn’t covered in a heavy blanket while the house is warm or whatever.

If you’re the type that loves weighted blankets then I’m sure you LOVE this sleeping arrangement. Sebastian’s size and weight is the perfect amount of crushing and Painter is always latched onto you like you’re his lifeline. If you’re opposed to this, then… well. You can try to shimmy out of the suffocation and maybe make some compromises with your significant others, but those two are too clingy to let you escape. I’m sorry. This is your life now.

Love Languages:

I can’t speak for you on what your love language is obviously, but I will happily explain the other two!

When it comes to expressing love, I imagine that Painter’s love languages are mainly acts of service and gift giving. He loves to do things for you and Sebastian and see you guys smile and be happy about it!! It fills him with so so much joy. He even took up cooking because he wanted to find other ways he could do nice things for you two. Thankfully him being a silly puter makes him decent at cooking. He did a ridiculous amount of research to make sure he would do it right. And of course he paints for you guys!

As for receiving, words of affirmation and quality time really show him that you guys love him dearly. ESPECIALLY words of affirmation. Please tell him you love him and cherish him and appreciate everything he is everyday it makes him feel so very loved.

Sebastian’s love language when it comes to expressing is mainly quality time. Just being in yours and Painter’s presence is enough for him most days. Whether you’re sitting in silence doing your own things, chatting his ear off, chatting with him, or doing anything together, it’s how he shows that he loves you. Sometimes he’ll follow you and Painter around the house like a lost puppy. To be fair, Painter does that with both of you too on occasion, but I think it’s safe to say that Sebastian does it the most.

Sebastian is a little distant. He isn’t one to ask for affection, he rarely opens up about things when he should, and overall he’s still trying to get used to… everything. Freedom, safety, some semblance of a domestic life, and having people around that love him and that he can be himself around. He’s still trying to learn that he doesn’t have to fight to stay alive anymore. So he’s distant. He knows he is. He tries to make up for it by doing things with you and Painter that he knows you both enjoy, and being around you as much as he can. Though, the following you around like a lost puppy thing is moreso him being clingy and traumatized and not wanting you out of his sight for too long. He loves you both and loves seeing you and watching you do things.

Anyway, when it comes to receiving, Sebastian’s love language is probably also quality time. And, on occasion, physical affection. He can be iffy about touch sometimes, understandably so – but there are moments where he’ll let you and Painter touch him, and it feels

Safe.

It feels safe, and right, and okay, and he won’t want it to end. He is severely touch starved and knows you and Painter would never hurt him.

I’m sorry I didn’t mean for this to get a little sad but I’m The Angst Author™️ and I can’t help myself LMFAO

Jealousy:

It’s okay to have jealousy arise in poly relationships. We are human (Painter is human enough in my book and Sebastian still counts) and jealousy is normal. What’s important is how you go about it. I just felt the need to say that before continuing with my fictional poly headcanons. Anyway!

Just like with the love languages section, I cannot speak for you and how jealous you get or how you deal with it. But the other two teehee

Painter gets jealous the most. It’s mostly when he sees you and Sebastian being affectionate with each other or having a good time without him. When he does get jealous, he doesn’t really… communicate about it so much as he comically inserts himself into whatever you and Sebastian have going on.

“Dooon’t mind me, just gonna squeeze in here!” He’ll say as he wedges himself between you and Sebastian wherever you’re cuddling or whatever

It’s cute. You don’t need Painter to say that he’s jealous for you two to know when he’s feeling that way. He’s a little obvious. So, whenever you guys see that he’s feeling jealous, you make sure to shower him in love to make him feel better and let him know that he’s always welcome to be included. :)!!

Sebastian is the exact opposite of Painter. He’s quiet about it. He tries not to let on that he’s jealous. But he also becomes a little more reserved when he gets jealous, so you and Painter can usually tell something is up. It took a little while for you and Painter to get him to start admitting to getting a little jealous sometimes, and during that conversation Sebastian said he knew how stupid it was that he ever gets jealous at all – but of course, because you and Painter are amazing partners, you were quick to reassure him that it was okay and showered him in love <33. The both of you eventually learned how to catch on to when Sebastian gets jealous, even if it’s a little hard to notice sometimes. But the more time goes on and you and Painter reassure him that you’ll never leave him behind, the easier it gets for him to open up about it, or not feel jealous at all.

And then there’s you. As I said, I can’t speak for you and how you get jealous, BUT. If you ever do get jealous and Sebastian and Painter catch on, they’ll be sure to drag you into whatever they’re doing and remind you how much they love and adore you. And they’ll be annoying about it, too. They’ll get excessively corny and affectionate on purpose and tell you how you’re the most beautiful person in the world and don’t know WHAT they would do without u ☹️!!!! Ur just so perfect and they’re soo lucky that an angel like U!!!! Loves THEM!!!!! And ur just so great and amazing and adorable and attractive!!!!!

“Sebastian, I can’t breATHE-” You would shout while your fish boyfriend is crushing you to death with his body weight.

“Neither can I when I’m around u” He’ll say dramatically, with a very dramatic and very fake sad look on his face.

Painter is also contributing to flattening you like a cute little pancake.

“Get OFF” you demand.

“We can’t!!! We just love you SOOO much, separating from you would be too unbearable!!” Painter says. Dramatically. While nuzzling you with his screen.

“Urgh- at least turn down your brightness, your screen is burning my eyes!” You complain.

Painter complies. “Oh, I’m so sorry honeybunches, I didn’t mean to!! How could I do such a thing to your beautiful gorgeous eyes :(!!!!” DRAMA QUEEN!!!

“You did not just call me ‘honeybunches’,” you say.

“He did,” Sebastian confirms.

“I did,” Painter also confirms.

“I hate you both,” you sigh.

“Nuh uh,” Painter retorts.

“You love usss,” Sebastian teases.

They’re a pain in the ass.

But they’re your pains in the ass, and you’re not actually as bothered by these situations as you let on.

They know that. That’s why they keep doing it.

[bunni-v1]

hii, can I request "First Years Finding Out Your A Girl" with sebek and ortho please?

Ortho and Sebek Find out You’re a Girl?!?!?! (NOT CLICKBAIT!!!)

TW: Swearing (as usual lol); Ortho being creepy; Misogyny mention <3; Reader goes by she/her and is biologically female; Book 6 spoilers (very light, but still there); Bunni hasn't read Book 7 and therefore doesn't know what they're talking about :)

Info: Ortho x Reader; Sebek x Reader; Fem!Reader; Platonic

🍓Hi. If you’ve read the first part of this, I copy pasted the intro. Not because I’m lazy or anything (I’m a little lazy, but I’m a full-time college student who also has a part-time job, so I think I can be excused.) It’s mostly because… It’s a good intro. If people are just discovering this stuff then they can read it, but if you’ve read the first part you can just skip to the good good yk. Anyway, long-ass babble session, but I didn’t include Ortho and Sebek initially because they’re kind of new to the First year group so idk. Felt weird including them. Also, I haven’t read book seven so Sebek I bullshit a lot lol. Anyway, they’re here now, and I absolutely ADORE Ortho, so sorry if my favoritism shows.

First Years

Second Years

Third Years

Dorm Leaders

-Okay so, I know we’re all wondering, how the hell do you get away with hiding your gender for so damn long?

-Firstly, those ceremonial robes do great at hiding the figure. The only tell would maybe be your hair, but feminine men aren’t unwelcome at Nightraven College, so you mostly get a few questioning stares and that’s it.

-Secondly, Crowley wants to save his own fucking ass. He already has to hide from the press that he has a MAGICLESS student from ANOTHER DIMENSION here, he doesn’t need the fact that you are a woman ALSO on his plate. So, obviously, he helps you hide your gender from others.

-Grim knows, of course, and he keeps his mouth shut for a few yummy cans of tuna (and threats of being expelled from Crowley <3)

-Even when you were just a janitor, he couldn’t have the rumor that he put a “helpless” young woman to work. (Like it wouldn’t be expected.)

-So how do you two do it?

-Baggy ass uniform. Crowley gave you at least three sizes too big.

-Your figure is completely hidden. Sure, you look completely homeless, but at least you’re hidden.

-For your voice, you simply deepen it. After some point, you blackmail Crowley into giving you a potion to help with it, since it's so taxing on your voice. (Or maybe your voice is naturally deep!)

-Sam provides you (for an unfairly pretty penny (not too different from your original world…)) any feminine hygiene products you might need.

-Honestly, you’re set for being cared for, but it’s the adjustment period that’s the hardest part. 

-Truly, it’s very jarring to suddenly be thrown into both a magical world and be isolated in a man's world with nowhere to hide.

-At least in your world you had other women who could understand your struggles. Here though? You’re completely alone.

-You notice how… messy some of these guys could be. How some of them smell… really rancid. -How rough they were with you and each other.

-Honestly, it’s kinda eye-opening. The way men show affection to each other is oddly refreshing to watch and experience!

-Ace and Deuce specifically are a good… trial run.

-That’s not what we’re here to talk about though…

-For the most part, it's incredibly easy to hide yourself for the first while on campus. Everyone on campus is so self-absorbed that they don’t bother questioning you.

-Your only real risk factor is Savannaclaw, but it's easy to avoid those guys (minus Jack, of course).

-However, you can only hide your gender for so long… It’s mentally draining to keep up this facade all the time around people you care about.

-So… how do they find out?

Ortho 

-Okay, so Ortho is a little creepy weirdo. He’s a highly advanced robot who likely has autism, and loves his big brother a whole fucking lot. 

-(Side note: Can a robot, child, or thing have autism? Does that mean Idia programmed Ortho to be autistic? How silly of him.)

-It’s my personal head cannon that Idia DECKED this kid out in as much high-tech gear as he could get his hands on. 

-He’s equipped with some of the most complex medical features, therefore he has access to a database of all students at NRC’s medical files. (This is not legal, but he does not care for the law.)

-“But Bunni, what does that have to do with the prefect?” Well, Ortho is ALSO equipped with the latest medical scanner on the market.

-Think like Baymax, yeah? He can scan everyone one time and know every piece of medical knowledge readily available.

-Well, Ortho, the sweet little creep he is, automatically scans the medical information of any new person he sees/meets into his database — just in case it may come in handy.

-So, before he even KNOWS you. Before he speaks a single word to you, he knows you’re biologically a female.

-He scanned you without thinking and just shrugged his shoulders at it.

-You’re not from here, and you got thrown into this, so you being a woman doesn’t really matter too much to you being at NRC. 

-It honestly could’ve been anyone getting stuck here, so why should he question it?

-However, he notices that you are referred to with exclusively “male” pronouns, so he marks in your file that you are trans and moves on. 

-Again, who cares? He’s a magical robot guy based on his brother's dead brother. Who was he to judge?

-When he finally ACTUALLY gets to interact with you after being welcomed into the first-year squad, he’s very respectful of your gender.

-You are a man to him, therefore he refers to you with exclusively masculine pronouns.

-However, everyone in your little group already knows, and they assume that Ortho knows. So when they speak about you, they use feminine pronouns.

-Ortho, sweet as he is, immediately questions everyone as to why they’re misgendering you.

-Protective of the people he cares for at heart, he doesn’t like the idea that your so-called closest friends are misgendering you behind your back.

-Doesn’t believe them completely when they explain, so he goes to you because you’re the only one who knows who you really are.

-“Prefect!”

“Hey, Ortho! What’s up? Miss me?”

“Of course I do, but I have a very important question.”

“Sure, what do ya need?”

“Are you a woman?”

-At this point 90% of your friends know, but there is a handful that doesn’t… and you can’t be having that.

-You, of course, assure Ortho that you are not only a woman, but that your friends are not misgendering you behind your back.

-Relieved, he takes several of your friends off a hit list and removes the trans man label on your medical chart.

-Asks why you hid your gender in the first place.

-Promptly adds Crowley to a hit list (again).

-Ortho, out of EVERYONE at NRC, has absolutely zero behavior changes toward you. 

-He’s equally protective as he was before, he spends the same amount of time with you as usual, he doesn’t suddenly have some weird crush on you, and he’s still trying to set you up with Idia.

-Honestly, everyone should take notes from Ortho. He’s the best at this whole thing.

Sebek

-On the other hand… do not take notes from Sebek! He sucks at this! He sucks really badly!

-Out of all the first years, Sebek is not only the least close to you, but he is also incredibly mean. So you just… feel no obligation to tell him.

-In fact, you kind of… sort of… actively leave him out of the loop for a really long time.

-I mean, it's not an unreasonable thing to do. He is constantly berating you and putting you down for being human. You have no idea how he feels about women and you don’t want to find out first hand.

-In all honesty, he is the only person (other than Azul and the twins) that you’re really scared of finding out, and take extra precautions to ensure he doesn’t find out.

-However, you attend NRC, and nothing ever goes your way at NRC.

-Despite every precaution you take to keep your gender under lock and key, you overlook one thing.

-Malleus Draconia.

-His complete and total lack of social awareness is your downfall here. He finds out, and despite everything telling him to keep his mouth shut… he doesn’t. Because of course, he doesn’t.

-At this point, you’ve gone through most of your misadventures, and most — if not all — of your friends know you’re a girl.

-Hell, even Silver knows now. Everyone BUT Sebek knows.

-And he finds out because Malleus casually mentions it over dinner. Not even directly about your gender, he just uses she/her pronouns.

-Sebek, being Sebek, respectfully asks Malleus if he meant to say he. Malleus, of course, says no without a second thought.

-The shock and horror on Silver and Lilia’s faces was enough to be further confirmation.

-And Sebek’s world shatters.

-He was completely left out of the loop and also has a moral conflict now.

-As much shit, as I gave Sebek (as everyone gives Sebek) he RESPECTS women. His queen is a woman, and his mother is a woman. 

-In his eyes, women are some of the strongest people around. Regardless of if they’re human or not.

-You, on top of being a human from another realm who had successfully quelled several of the strangest students at NRC’s OVERBLOTS and came out on top, was also a woman.

-If that wasn’t strength, he didn’t know what it was.

-However, his bias against humans strongly clashes with his respect for women in this case.

-And it just… messes with his head. 

-He doesn’t treat you worse, in fact, he’s just… really awkward around you now.

-He doesn’t know if he should apologize or berate you for being a human, so he just stays stiff and glares at you.

-It's honestly more scary than him constantly talking down to you.

-However, once the two of you actually befriend one another, he apologizes to you. For everything, and explains where he’s coming from. Why he acted the way he did, how he really feels about you, and all that sweet shit.

-Afterwards, he is genuinely the best at keeping your secret (if he even needs to at this point).

-If there is anyone you can trust to keep his stupid mouth shut at NRC, it's Sebek. 

-His honor and pride force him into silence when it comes to secrets he promises to keep.

-In fact, if anyone is on your trail about it, he’s the first one to jump in the way and scare them off/shut them down.