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okay i am actually writing the Experimentalist First Aid metapost right now.

Beginning statement and caveats - I have no reason to believe this is canon and basically don't, except that I like it better. However, it literally would be indistinguishable from canon for the most part for various reasons outlined below, so like, you can't prove it's not. Canon compliant canon divergent headcanon territory.

Also, this is about G1.

I think First Aid is many things.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging things, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging thigns, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

I think that's all the requisite readings.

In sum, this gives us a guy who relaly likes being around people in pain, who also likes being the guy to help them out of it, and likes to learn. He's encouraged to do all of these things by the people around him, because he's not being concerning about any of it- he's just dedicated to what he does and he's good at it, and getting better every day.

And by the same tokens, you have a guy who really, really badly wants to get to take someone apart over and over, because he wants to see how they work on the insides and he likes the way they look when they're in pain, but he doesn't want to fuck over his friends, comrades, patients, or teammates, and everyone he's interacting with is at least three of those things.

Plus we get G1 First Aid's pacifism, which is a strongly-held ideological standpoint that First Aid maintains - he won't fight, he won't carry weapons, but he will work as a medic. We can interpret that this isn't a squeamishness issue for him by the asme tokens I established earlier - that he's much more okay with getting into the guts of his friends and coworkers than the average person would be - and also by the fact that he was built in a military context and everyone else is a military fighter of some sort. if he were reluctant to hurt people because of anything shy of serious personal convictions, I am convinced that the Autobots around him could have convinced him otherwise. His position is profoundly difficult to maintain in an active war zone, aftr all.

So even beyond standard Autobot ethics, First Aid does not want to hurt people. Yet I reconcile this with saying he is an innate sadist anyway, because they're not mutually exclusive. It really just means that, like, First Aid can want to take people apart all he likes; he's just not going to do it to anyone until someone asks him to.

As an aside, in my corner of fandom anyway, it seems like we talk a lot about characters who kind of throw interpersonal concerns and care for those around them to the wind in order to chase their own hedonistic desires (see: Vortex, Overlord, Motormaster, Megatron, etc) or otherwise, put bluntly, just kind of don't care that much about their partners' and playthings' consent even when they have it. And that can be a lot of fun, obviously; I like them. But as of late my friends who shoot the shit with me about consensual kink in Transformers have been busy or we haven't been talking about it for a while, and I've been missing the other side - the exact same desires and interests, just harnessed, controlled, and managed, not because First Aid has to but because he just, like... feels like it. It's what he wants to do. And, like. yeah the Autobots wouldn't be pleased if he turned out to be some sort of turborapist, lol, but he's the first person to decide he's not going to run around doing harm. I tie it into the pacifism. Part of this reading is because this is my reading; part of this reading is because I want to insert even more contrast between the characters I see First Aid Aid played alongside than I'm already seeing when I finally sit down and write about him myself.

So what this boils down to - all together - is that First Aid wants someone to ask him to take them apart.

And he likes to learn.

So the first person to catch his attention and walk him through opening their chest up is going to get to see him catch his brain on every shiny new edge he's not used to seeing outside of a medical context, and he's going to go over and catalogue every single part and take them out and put them back in and he's going to do it over and over until he can do it without looking and then he's going to do that to everything else, too. He's going to pick up every style of play fast and hard, but I read him landing hard on the "roleplay is kind of silly, I like bodies" side of domination. And I think he'd enjoy domination a lot.

He's a good student and a quick study. He likes to learn. He's enthusiastic and comfortable being taught, too. It would be very easy to turn him into a service top, too, to talk him into being an extension of your own hands and guide him through doing what you want.

But only to a point. Because he's still a pacifist, so you can't use him to hurt someone else, unless they're also asking for it. But, hell, he's part of a combiner team... I bet that would come easy to him, too, once he does have everyone's consent.

In a few thousand years, I think First Aid is going to maybe be one of the biggest kinksters in the entire Autobot faction, or he's going to have extremely narrow and extremely specific tastes. But he's going to get there through experimentation and he's going to get there through his fascination with anything new, which right now is everything.

Last bit is that - I think his instincts are not fine-tuned, self-preservation-wise. I think his social instincts are just as bad. you develop those over time, after all, and through experience, and he doesn't have that. And he's a pacifist because he doesn't want to hurt Decepticons. Very sweet, certainly, but the Decepticons are like... kind of dicks lmfao. The way of things is not very complicated because there are so few Transformers around and alive; eventually First Aid is going to run into a Decepticon. The question is if he ever ends up on good terms with someone from the other faction - or if he already has - or if he gets himself hurt early and learns to avoid them fast. But even with the latter, I don't think that's how he'll stay. I think he wants to experiment. I think he wants to learn and do more and learn more. So eventually he will run into a Decepticon who is also willing to play the way he's willing to play, and they will end up making, if not friends, then at least some sort of positive interaction and First Aid will...

...well, he's never going to stop being curious, huh. That would be boring. But his morals and standards for his behavior are either going to stay ironclad or they won't, and either way it'll be interesting to see what happens. Because there's no bottom to where First Aid might go, eventually.. as long as he's being asked for it.