#and you need to read that especially if you're interested in reading exrid/OP

[lord-squiggletits]

Very important advice for anyone who’s trying to get into Transformers IDW: the fandom makes the story sound much more coherent than it actually is.

This isn’t me saying “fandom is wrong and makes up headcanons,” this is me saying that IDW1 spans like 13 years with a shitton of different writers, and a lot of lore that it’s most well known for (e.g. Functionism) didn’t exist until the latter half of the continuity’s run time. Most, hell almost all of the pre-war lore wasn’t covered until phase 2, with rare exceptions like Megatron Origin and maybe a couple of the spotlight issues?

But what you need to know is that when you see fanon posts about IDW1, these are made by dedicated fans who are looking at the entire series in retrospect and applying the lore from the later phases to the entire timeline. These meta posts make the story really fun, but if you read the actual comics themselves (for example, most phase 1 stuff), the material won’t actually reference any of this neat lore because it literally didn’t exist. So I think a lot of TF fans are misled when they get into IDW1, thinking the entire continuity will be lore-rich and one coherent story, when in reality a lot of the famous lore wasn’t introduced until later so earlier phases of the story did not take this lore into account (because it literally didn’t exist when the earlier series were written).

This is also why I’m begging people who are just getting into IDW1 to try reading at least some of the phase 1 (aka during the war) comics. A lot of people say these series are “boring” but I have to disagree. I don’t think people should fault phase 1 for not including lore that literally wasn’t even invented yet, and imo there’s a lot of interesting material that you can pull from phase 1. At the very least, you need to read a few series of phase 1 to have context for why certain things are happening in phase 2.

[djinn-ale]

Heavy breathing I SEE STARBEE AND I NEED HEADCANONS THEY FRENS SHJHHHF

LMAO HIII um im not actually a starbee shipper nor am i really a headcanons haver 😅 HOWEVER i am a huge fan of whatever the fuck was going on with their exrid almost-friendship-mutual-i-need-to-fix-him ghost bee arc dynamic so i do have some thoughts on them under the cut if u are interested. as for headcanons i have exactly one (1) and its this:

t4t? nah. tvt (they fight behind maccadams at 4 pm every week)

i need to preface this by saying i absolutely hate what the autobots stand for in idw1 and i despise rid2012 with a passion, especially for how they wrote bee (autobot regime police brutality sweep??????????????). despite this, i am incredibly delusional and so i pretend that what happened isnt real. also it's been awhile since i read/skimmed through any tf comics, so i could be misremembering things or forgetting events, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

first of all i think they probably had a lot of issues with each other over the whole leadership thing. like, imagine being the guy whose own worst enemy is his leader, and has fought his entire life throughout the war to usurp him and take over his faction. like youve got so much goddamn beef with this guy and you hate everything he stands for and he hates you and you've suffered so much at this guy's hands, and after so many years, through your own scheming and plotting and killing you're able to stand at the top of cybertron as its leader!! and then in strolls the guy from the opposite faction who is The Optimus Prime Numero Uno guy, and in case that wasnt enough, he was literally handed the leadership role on a silver platter. somehow he doesnt even want the role - thinks he's too unprepared for it or some shit. idk, i just think that theres a lot of foil potential here that was missed, and instead bee was just reduced to the guy cracking various "im dead" jokes while nitpicking every single action starscream took. sure there was some back and forth between the two with morality and Why Didn't You Just Do The Right Thing and whatnot, and their bantering was fun (especially the part where bee actually disappears for a bit after screamer tells him to fuck off) but i think it couldve gone a lot deeper, and a lot more personal. what im trying to say here is that it's Very Bumblebee to try and fix literally the worst guy he knows (barring prowl), but realistically i dont think he wouldve done much to change 4 million years of habits and flaws and the 50 mental illnesses starscream had built up (if anything, starscream mightve taken the actions bee "convinced him to" regardless of what was said - remember how he kept convincing himself that bee was just "his own guilty conscience" - meaning that everything bee says is something he already thinks about, whether subconsciously or not). instead, starscream shouldve been able to convince bee to stop parasocialing op. like, i know bee being op's Most Son Ever and his belief in op being infallible is one of his biggest character flaws, but it wouldve been really cool and awesome character growth for bee to be like Wow, i actually dont think op shouldve annexed the earth that one time in the name of the matrix or whatever.

tldr if starbee was more mentally ill they wouldve been closer to each other. and also hated each other more. and then canon wouldve been so much more enjoyable to me.