#bc like all of the signs of pharma regretting what he's done are INCREDIBLY small so him having a white badge makes sense

[lord-squiggletits]

I'm not inclined to believe in the gray morality idea honestly bc if JRO really meant to imply that Pharma was always suspicious/a bad person so him breaking at Delphi is just an extension of his bad moral character (ew), he really didn't go out of his way to actually write Pharma as being a bad or even mean person at all in all the opportunities he had?

In all the flashbacks of Pharma we have (including one written in a Roche issue), all we see him doing are:

Delivering emergency care to Chromedome and telling him to "hang in there" while looking him in the eye and looking emotionally invested (not like afraid but Pharma certainly doesn't look detached or cold)

Asking Ratchet whether he should go to Delphi or not. Purely conversational + Pharma doesn't display any signs of arrogance or meanness and is just going "so Prowl wants to deploy me to Messatine but idk, what do you think." So mundane of a scene that you can't even read into his sense of morality at all

A panel or two in the Functionist Universe where Pharma and Ratchet are side by side

(Roche LSOTW) Pharma running in alongide Ratchet to help the cadets who got transform-drilled to death. During which Pharma is again behaving in a very mundane way and even commenting "poor chap" at one of the corpses they find. So again, morally neutral or at least sympathetic/concerned if you read into it.

The issue to me (and not dismissing you, this is something I've thought about a lot re: "was Pharma intentionally written to have such depth") is that if JRO really wanted to make Pharma an evil/suspicious guy, he had multiple flashback opportunities to do so and yet chose to present Pharma more or less as a guy just doing his job every single time. This is especially noteworthy since Pharma is a minor character with few appearances, so any establishing character moments need to be explicitly clear in defining Pharma's past/personality in a limited amount of time. Except we don't see a guy being evil, we just see Pharma was for all intents and purposes just a normal doctor.

Even in the present day when people talk about him in a derogatory way, it's almost always with some mention of "for most of his life he was a good doctor" "he was doing [x medical research] before he started killing patients" so even the people who hate Pharma most overtly are confirming that Pharma was morally innocuous and even a really good/smart/talented doctor. You'd think if Pharma was actually a bad person the whole time people would be saying "I always knew there was something off about him" and not "He was a good doctor for most of his life."

yk I was wondering why Pharma's Autobot insignia is grey. it expecially picked my attention since grey insignia means mourning as we know from Lost Light comics. So I searched for flashbacks with Pharma to check if it was always grey and LOOK

here, in the retrospection (issue #40) his insignia is red. So I started thinking hm. maybe it's bc of Delphi. not bc of the plague he started (as his insignia is grey in First Aid story before the plague too) but bc of the patients he killed for the T-cogs. that would be a suspicious thing to do probably for him but also explainable, he was an ambicious and talented doctor who was losing way more patients than before, others could understand it like that, while for him it was a way to channel his guilt. BUT. then i checked Chromedome flashbacks in issue #17 and...

yup. chronogically this flashback must be from earlier than the retrospection from issue #40. so it kinda ruined my theory. now I just think it's a part of the design, ment probably to forshadow his, em... dubious morality (expecially if we treat autobot insignia as symbol of morality. symbol of morality greying is... well, pretty easy to read), has nothing to do with mourning and in issue #40 somebody just maybe made a mistake with coloring, bc person responsible for colors changed. but its a fun thing to make headcanons about. if someone had a theory/headcanon or actually know what is that grey insignia about i'd be glad to know!