#he would be fragging terrified to not be able to find the thing later

[lets-try-some-writing]

Okay, in regards to your Unicron is a parent to humans post, when you mention Unicron possessing an animal, I imagined a squirrel. Not some epic beast... I imagined the alien god of destruction sleeping at the center of the Earth as a squirrel.

But it fits. Squirrels are agents of chaos.

Squirrel runs into road, no one, not even the squirrel knows what's gonna happen. Squirrel gets under your vehicle's hood, chews the wires and makes a nest. Squirrel gets into the walls of your house, chews the wires and stores and insane amount of nuts. Squirrel gets cornered, jumps at you like a mad lad.

Could you imagine if Unicron just decided, "I'm a squirrel today and I'm going terrorize the Cybertronians and my brother can't even get mad cause chewing wires is what they do." Or "Hey, I'm a squirrel and travel-sized. I now shall nest in Raf's hair and protect the children this way."

Sorry this a wacked out thought that made me laugh, and felt compelled to share.

Dude I laughed for a solid minute reading this-

Agents of Chaos

After finding out about his surprise offspring, Unicron became protective immediately. But he quickly discovered several things, those being: He couldn't move or act all that much if he wanted to keep his spawn alive. His children quickly became fearful of anything that was abnormal to them. And lastly, fragging with the Cybertronians on his surface was far more enjoyable when there was nothing they could do to stop him.

With these thoughts in mind, Unicron devised the perfect avatar with which to protect, interact with, and care for his young while also making life difficult for everyone else and not drawing too much attention to himself. He searched the other organisms on his surface for days until he found it, the perfect avatar.

The squirrel.

It was chaos incarnate but so common in most places that it would fit right in even if Unicron used it for nefarious purposes. His chackling caused the earth to shake in places as he chose his first subject and took control of it. And while he did have some initial issues piloting the body of the small monster, he quickly got the hang of it and moved to meet the three among his many children who required his attention more so than any others.

Opting to go to Rafael, Unicron in the body of the squirrel quickly took up a place in the boy's arms, earning him a startled squeak and awed touches in response. Unicron chittered, oh so pleased with himself as he spent days refusing to leave Rafael alone, eventually gaining his avatar a place as the boy's pet, just like he planned. Then once he gained a solid foundation from which to work with, his avatar, now named Chitters, snuck into Rafael's school bag and snuck into the base that way.

Rafael was too busy working on his homework and chatting with his Cybertronian guardian to notice as Chitters wormed his way out of the bag and Unicron directed it to begin causing chaos. Unicron didn't want to totally sabotage the Cybertronians who called themselves Autobots, not while they were keeping his children safe. So he didn't direct Chitters to harm anything of importance, but he most certainly did go out of his way to make life hard for everyone. The squirrel quickly gained the ire of the entire team as Chitters tore into wires connecting to certain consoles in the base (never the groundbridge of course. Unicron couldn't risk harming his children after all). Chitters also stole small components from Ratchet's workspace and a few of Bumblebee's video games.

By the end of the day Chitters was banned from base and Rafael took him home with no small amount of guilt. Of course no matter what Rafael did to try and keep Chitters from getting into base, it was useless since Chitters snuck in by hiding on Jack and Miko of by straight up waltzing into the base via Unicron's aid. The abominable squirrel swiftly became an unstoppable pain in the aft that none of the team could do anything about and accepted since the squirrel kept coming back.

Optimus eventually accepted that he was being cursed and merely sighed when his datapads disappeared randomly only to be found later bitten to shreds by a determined squirrel. Ratchet however never gave up trying to hide his small items and tools, even when they were repeatedly found and stolen by Chitters at Unicron's behest. Arcee stopped fighting back when Chitters clambered all over her and gnawed on her outer plating like an irritating but ultimately harmless scraplet. Bulkhead and Wheeljack took to booking it in the opposite direction whenever the "demon squirrel" came near. Unicron abused their reactions until he laughed himself into a stupor, even more so when the two wreckers began carrying tower shields to try and fend the Chitters off. Bumblebee valiantly tried and failed to keep Chitters from destroying his video game controllers and very nearly crushed the squirrel in outrage after the fifth time he had to replace his controller.

Bumblebee: YOU DETESTIBlE VERMIN!

Chitters/Unicron: *destroying yet another controller* This is what you deserve you abominable creation of Primus!

Bumblebee: *chasing after the squirrel* PERISH!

Chitters/Unicron: MWAhAHA!

Every single member of the team hated the squirrel with a seething passion. At times Optimus, usually ever merciful, contemplated taking the squirrel out back and putting it down in the most gruesome way possible. His contemplative thoughts nearly became reality once when Chitters got into his personal datapads that he usually kept hidden away. Those were his only remaining items from his time as Orion and he may or may not have blasted much of the wall into scrap as he widely shot at the squirrel. That day Unicron learned Optimus's limits and he did not touch the Prime's personal items again. He wanted to cause chaos, but he didn't want to earn the true ire of Primus's chosen vessel.

The team hated Chitters and the children knew it. So eventually Rafael tried in vain to let the squirrel go for the sanity of everyone. Long story short, he failed. No matter what he did, Chitters always came back and nestled in his hair like an unwelcome louse. Unicron wasn't upset in the slightest at the children gathering together to try and attempt to get rid of his avatar. In fact he found it to be a fun game to find a way to sneak his avatar back into the Autobot base.

Of course not everything was fun and games for the chaos god, though he greatly enjoyed messing with the Autobots. The Decepticons were a real threat, one that loomed over the children every time they left base. As such Chitters followed the children whenever they left and proved to be far more dangerous than anything else out there once the squirrel got on a Decepticon. Unicron would not tolerate anyone touching HIS children, especially not a disgusting spawn of Primus.

Vehicons that got too close found a rapid squirrel in their joints, tearing away at cables and wiring while somehow managing to not be squished as the Cybertronian flailed. Starscream was met with a rapid squirrel to the windshield once when he attempted to bomb Bulkhead, and simultaneously the children. The seeker ended up crashing into a wall and very nearly being blown to bits. Knockout got scratched one time by Chitters and swore off touching the children ever again. Soundwave straight up avoided the squirrel and didn't bother with the human children upon seeing what Chitters could do. Breakdown once tried to squish the squirrel, but no matter how many times he attempted to, Chitters got back up and tried to maul him. Megatron very nearly got his optics destroyed once when he got too close to the children and has since put out a kill on sight order for the rapid avatar of Unicron (not that any heed it).

Seeing all this the team were suspicious as pit in regards to the squirrel. Ratchet tried to drop a weight on the squirrel only for it to bounce off harmlessly, earning awed and shocked expressions from the medic. Bulkhead and Wheeljack attempted to blast Chitters with a flamethrower only for the squirrel to brush it off and continue onward and chase the wrecker duo who screamed like human girls. Bumblebee made his own attempts to murder the avatar through various means ranging from but not limited to sniping, acid, drowning, crushing, and even suffocation. But nothing ever worked and in the end after months of enduring Chitters, Optimus knelt before the squirrel, glared at it, and ordered Unicron to get the hell out of his base until he behaved.

The chaos god obliged, not even hesitating after he very nearly sent the Prime into a rage when he touched his datapads. A few days later he returned and nestled in Rafael's hair again.

Optimus knew that Chitters was an avatar and the rest of the team sensed something else was off, but they never commented and focused their efforts on what needed to be done. They only really attempted to kill Chitters when they devised a new potential method of extermination. At which point they would try it out on Chitters just to see if it would work or not (which it never did).

[cozzzynook]

Can I pretty, pretty please, with a cherry on top, see more Tarnbee? I read the previous posts and I’ve had brain rot ever since. There’s just something so funny to think about Bee making the mistake of seducing Tarn (maybe flirting with him to lure him into a trap or even fragging him so he can sneak off while he recharges) and Tarn - being the obsessive loser he is - takes it as Bee being totally into him and all of Bee’s rejections or running away from him is just him “playing hard to get”. And meanwhile the rest of the DJD are just apologizing to Bee cuz they won’t risk offlining trying to convince Tarn to take a hint. Except for Nickel, she just drags Bee into the medbay and tells Tarn to bugger off so she can focus on healing bee, that at least gives him one or two hours to relax before he has to escape again.

Tarnbee was meant to be a filler/funny thing but now I’m genuinely liking it & you are not helping 😂

Bumblebee made a mistake in using sexual charm to best Tarn.

The mech is obsessive to a terrifying fault and he truly does set his sights on Bumblebee and Bumblebee alone.

Bee did use flirting and charm to seduce Tarn so he could take out another mech but then Tarn cornered him and Bee had no choice but to continue their little game all the way up to Tarns habsuite where they interfaced roughly leaving Tarn knocked offline and Bee waking just before Tarn so he could slip free of Decepticon territory and break free of any following interest.

Bee comes home one lunar cycle extremely tired and covered in another mechs energon only find candles lit, a tub of hot oil waiting for his frame and a glass of smooth high grade.

Bee is on edge after that.

Energon supplements are always on his doorstep, he feels like someone’s always watching him when he’s coming back from a mission or a trip to the market.

He doesn’t feel safe meeting with certain clients after one of his late night mechafriends is found offline with his spike cut off and his dermas ripped to shreds.

Later that evening he finds a note in his berth room on his sheets, “I can do so much better than him.”

He leaves him home that lunar cycle and stays abroad a small ship after that. He never stays in one place for long and even ventures close to autobot borders to feel a semblance of peace from Tarns optics.

Tarn leaves gifts attached to his ship and love notes stating he could wait until Bee was ready and that he couldn’t wait to spar with him again.

Tarn manages to corner Bee when the mini let his guard down during a lunar cycle out in autobot territory. He was hoping Tarn wouldn’t be stupid enough to follow him there but he was.

Tarn had Bee cornered against the alley wall about to take him back to the decepticon base when Bee was able to wiggle free from a distracted Tarn.

Bee owed Optimus Prime his spark for saving him and Optimus later used that to get Bee to stick with him on his team after Bee was forced to join the autobots.

Bee figured he would be safe from Tarn since he wore the autobot brand even though he didn’t believe in it entirely.

That was not the case.

He received a note after getting his original frame back.

“I’ve missed you my sweet elusive spark.”

Bee was terrified all over again

[adenthemage]

shoutout to @madness-to-my-method​ for enabling me!

Here’s a long post where I dumped all my thoughts about tfp Starscream into a Google doc, please do enjoy and sorry for the length in advance! 

Categories include (but not necessarily limited to, as I’m an unorganized mess,) Wants vs Needs, How the Pit Does His Head Work, Megatron, Heroic Traits, and additional headcanons.

Wants vs Needs: The core to both Starscream’s want and need is the desire to be respected by others. Starscream is, of course, a very ambitious person. He knows exactly what he wants, and what he wants most of all is control of his own life. His own ambition and mad brand of genius amplify this to world-domination-levels of control. The want of power and being feared by others is a by-product of the core desire to be respected.

What he needs is someone to trust. He needs someone to ground him back in reality and help him recover from the serious damage those billions of years of abuse has done to his psyche. This will probably never happen, because Starscream will never let anyone get that close. When he lives in a world where Megatron constantly hurts him and no one has ever stepped in to help, of course he would learn that he should never rely on anyone else. That he has to help himself first and foremost because no one else will.

The closest person to ever almost gain his trust was Knock Out, and Knock Out never even realized it. It’s shown blatantly more than once that Starscream doesn’t forget when people do him a great service or disservice. He tends to operate on a weird ‘eye for an eye’ sort of honor code. If you save his life, he will remember that. KO saved Starscream’s life at least once, and it’s easy to see especially in the episode Thirst that Starscream starts to sort of respect the guy (and the genuine flattery didn’t hurt either.) Meanwhile, in the same episode, we can see KO becoming perhaps a little disenchanted with always being left behind or thrown under the bus after all he’s done to look out for Starscream.

KO put himself out there to help Starscream, (barring the ending of ep Thirst, but unfortunately that’s just the behavior expected of him,) and Starscream realized that in some capacity. On the other hand, Starscream was willing to let KO get hurt to save his own hide at every turn, and KO didn’t miss that. So it’s no surprise in the end, when Starscream rescues KO and hands him a powerful weapon and turns his back to him, nor when KO takes that opportunity to throw Starscream under the bus to save his own hide.

This is why I believe it is nearly impossible for Starscream to form any positive relationships after the ending of tfp. He was already basically there during the series, he likely already had the mentality that ‘trusting anyone=death’, but KO was supposed to prove him wrong, in a way. It was essentially his last chance to change, but instead he was proved right as a result of his own actions. He is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Starscream desperately needs to be saved from himself. He will never get this. Starscream wants power and control. In his relentless pursuit of this, he has ruined his chances at getting any of the above.

How the Pit does his head work: Starscream, as I mentioned briefly before, is kind of a genius. It’s not really the conventional type, though. He is observed for most of the series coming up with outlandish ideas on the fly (heh,) and they’re usually pretty hit or miss, but when they work they really work. It definitely helps that Starscream is quite honestly willing to sacrifice anything and everything short of his own life if he thinks there’s a chance it’ll work out in his favor. He takes risks-- granted a lot of the time it’s out of necessity, in his mind. ‘If I pass up on this chance, it might cause my death later on.’ He has a combination of a mind that comes up with plans most sane bots would rule out as impossible, and a constitution strong enough to act on those plans.

He functions on the (rather correct) assumption that everyone wants him dead, and so every alliance is never anything more than another means to manipulate and probably kill. He is a startlingly good actor when he is either in control of the situation or under threat of death by anyone besides Megatron.

Speaking of! There are two situations in which Starscream will act strikingly differently. When he is in control of the situation, versus when he’s under threat of even just physical harm. When he’s in control, he is grandiose and dramatic, sadistic and gleeful and terrifying. When he gets what he wants, he revels in it. He loves when he has someone else cornered, when he can feel the fear in them, it’s a sense of power that he isn’t allowed to have ‘back home,’ so it’s intoxicating (also, he’s just kinda a piece of shit.) As he is already prone to puffing himself up, his pride may become his downfall in these times (he gloats every once in a while. Depends on his mood. Sometimes he’ll just murder the victim right off the bat.)

When he feels significantly threatened, or otherwise thrown off guard, he may shut down, so to speak. He will give up on fight or flight and turn to trying to trick his way out. This is what the show seems to consider his cowardly side. He will do anything to protect his own life, including begging. His silver tongue is very much his strong suit, so there are several instances of him talking his way out of death. Thing is, he’s kinda smart about watching his own back. He survived the war, after all, and in a situation where he was essentially taken captive he followed all the recommended rules to surviving that situation. Even when he’s panicking, he’s able to plan an escape route.

Megatron: Megatron deserves to fucking die and I’m going to tell you why. Buckle in.

The concluding paragraph to the Want vs Need section was pretty bleak, and it’s Megatron’s fragging fault. What he put Starscream through is some severe abuse. There’s no way to deny that. He put Starscream in a position of power and then proceeded to take away any sense of power, security, control, safety, you name it. He created an environment where Starscream was constantly afraid and paranoid, punished him for every little error, literally beat him to near-death on an occasion that the show spells out for us. He gave Starscream the idea of what he wanted to badly and then tore it away from him.  If I made a Fears section, (which, I might,) Megatron would be near the top of the list.

And it’s infuriating because Starscream thinks that the way to get out of this cycle of pain and fear is to become just like Megatron. And what’s worse, he adapts to the situation, unaware. He learns that failure of any kind means pain, he learns that security will be found in controlling and harming others, he learns that he is worthless and desperately tries to force everyone around him to believe he is worth something, and he learns that believing in Megatron and the Decepticon cause was naive.

He was right about Megatron, by the way. Unstable as his grasp on reality may be at this point, he correctly saw the major flaws in his leader and correctly sought to dethrone him. Look what happened because Megs stayed in power! Megs became a corrupt leader and created a hierarchy where he was at the top and everyone did whatever he said because they were all too scared of him. If he made errors, it wasn’t because he was making decisions without taking into account the opinions of the qualified around him, it was because someone under him messed up somehow and he would punish them accordingly. Also, he uh, fucking lost the war. So yanno, eat shit, Megahoe.

Starscream kept Decepticon presence so well-hidden for the three years they were on Earth, that the Bots didn’t even realize they were there. Can I stress how impressive that is. He managed to operate on Earth enough to at least mine so much fuel as to run a massive warship and feed an army, and the Autobots assumed they were still out in another galaxy. Had Cliffjumper not stumbled upon one of the digsites before Megatron’s arrival, who knows what they could have done with such a potent element of surprise. He would have killed Optimus Prime in one instance if Megatron hadn’t intervened to beat him up. He would have been a far more effective leader than Megatron.

I would also like to note that the Decepticons do not fear him as wholly as they do Bucket Head, with notable distinctions to be made in how KO does not flinch away from Starscream despite being punished for disobeying him once or twice, whereas Starscream will flinch away if Megatron so much as walks towards him. The poor guy flinches at almost all physical contact, even if it isn’t hostile.

Whenever we’re shown Megatron attacking Starscream, Starscream does not fight back. He even refuses to put his hands around Megs’ wrist when he’s being lifted by the neck, which would generally be instinctual. That’s an intense terror to have been instilled in him, but I guess billions of years of severe mental and physical abuse will do that to you.

Heroic Traits: Starscream is a terrible guy, of course. We’ve established that much. But he’s got some traits that are often ascribed to protagonists, which I find interesting, so I’m making note of it. The big one is his perseverance. American stories love heroes that never give up, despite the odds, that try every angle and come out victorious despite hardships. Starscream embodies this trait, but I think the interesting angle here is that he’s persevering in pursuit of some evil-ish goals. Any heroic trait can be perverted into something to scorn, after all. If this trait is pointed at something that isn’t worth pursuing with such fervor, then perhaps that is what makes the difference between a hero and a villain.

The other one is his willingness to act on the problems he sees. The heroes are the ones who take up the calls to action, and far be it for him to be the type to sit back and let things happen. If he can, he will have a say in what happens. He thinks in terms of the bigger picture and goals towards solutions, and these are usually traits framed as worthy of being admired. He is often ridiculed and punished for these traits in the show.

Also, given his dismay at the destruction of the first chance to save Cybertron being done away with, I think it’s safe to assume, somewhere in his mind, he wants the best for their planet. Whether that’s to rule it is a different story--

Headcanons: He has a crooked, fake-looking smile even when he’s being genuine. Fight me. Also, dark lines under the eyes. Ups the spook-factor and the tired-old-man-factor all at once!

The reason Starscream returned to the Cons for season 3 was because he was starving. The red energon was the last of what he had, so he was forced to find a way to use it to earn his way into one of the factions. The Cons were familiar, he knew how they ticked, and trying to join the Bots twice before nearly cost him his life. It was the lesser of two evils.

He talks to himself constantly. He’s a verbal processor. (Although, this one might just be canon.) He also may not be able to differentiate between what he keeps in his head and what he says out loud, occasionally.

He’s a terrifying enemy in a fight, so long as he isn’t taken of guard. Look at him, he’s basically a bunch of knives with wings! Curse you, tfp, for not letting him win more fights, you cowards!

Dark Energon reacts more powerfully to Starscream than Megatron, though it seems to have more downsides for him, as well. It’s effect when he first stabbed himself with a shard was to cause him to burst into purple flames, while Megs just kinda spazzed out for a bit. However, Starscream could not control a Terrorcon with it, and Megatron could. (Not gonna make a call on the visions from the future thing because Starscream wasn’t affected by the Dark Energon for very long.) Megs used the Dark Star Sabre as merely a big slightly-toxic sword. When Starscream used it, it would backfire and cause him pain occasionally, but he was also able to use it to send out a paralyzing shock to everyone within like a 30ft vicinity or something idk I didn’t count but it was pretty impressive okay.

Insert mumbo-jumbo about Vosian Seekers and Skywarp and Thundercracker and Genericons here. He’s shorter than his brothers fighT ME.

Knowing myself, I’m probably gonna add to this garbage sooner or later.