#individual autobots still have personalities they just have little pieces of Primus in their brains watching at all times

[lord-squiggletits]

OH, I am so interested in your idea for SG Tarnma.

Okay so my exact ideas for SG Tarnma vary a lot, because I think there's two different canon varieties of Shattered Glass: the original Fun Publications SG where everything was completely flipped and turned into crack-canon, and then what IDW later did with Shattered Glass IDW1 where it was more or less just role reversal IDW1 with only some "complete flipping" of lore and personality. There's also my own personal Shattered Glass universe that I built for Pay Unto Evil, so I could also answer this question as "what would Tarnma be in the SG PUE universe."

That being said I'll do my best to explain all of the different ideas I've had for SG Tarnma. All of them are pretty different so I'm not really particularly attached to any one, but here goes

Version 1: FunPub complete role reversal style. Pharma was originally a mere energon farmer get it lol and has a very meek, shy, unconfident personality. He got enlisted by the Autobots, but he spoke too quietly when they asked for his name (Farmer), so they started calling him Pharma. Then at some point Ratchet is like "yo I'm gonna make this completely untrained guy do medical operations. No I'm not gonna send him to medical school he can learn on the job!" And so Pharma becomes Ratchet's apprentice and develops even more anxiety from the hundreds of times he murders patients either on accident bc he literally has no medical training, or on purpose bc Ratchet made him. He's literally just trying his best and doesn't even want to be here. Meanwhile, the SG DJD is known as the Decepticon Jokester Division, formed as a sort of circus troupe meant to bring good cheer to the Decepticons in a time of depressing war. The members of the DJD are codenamed after the first cities they toured right before/when the war started. How reluctant medic Pharma and literal clown Tarn meet in this universe is anyone's guess.

Version 2: IDW style. Tarn and Pharma still have basically the same backstories as canon IDW1 except that Pharma is a professional assassin instead of a doctor (yknow, role reversal where Pharma is an expert at killing people instead of healing them). Also this universe's Pharma has the posh and aristocratic personality fandom thinks he has in canon lol. Maybe Pharma finds out about Tarn having a secret t-cog addiction, and he starts bringing t-cogs to Tarn in exchange for Tarn providing him intel (or some other service, idk). Maybe in this universe instead of Tarn torturing Pharma into insanity, Pharma somehow develops guilt for killing people because of Tarn, then defects from the Autobots willingly? Or they kick him out like in canon

Version 3: Pay Unto Evil SG. Tarn and Pharma would have their FunPub style backgrounds (though maybe Tarn's would be slightly more serious) with the added caveat of Pharma having the evil Matrix's mind control embedded in his brain. He still didn't join the Autobots willingly and wasn't even trained to be a doctor. Somehow he and Tarn meet and fall in love across faction lines because Tarn sees how much Pharma is suffering under mind slavery and feeling like he doesn't belong among his cruel comrades. It's a bit of a tragic one though, as Pharma warns Tarn that the Prime can look through his mind at any time thanks to the Matrix. If he finds out that Pharma is Tarn's vulnerability, he could use that against him somehow, or worse, mind control Pharma into trying to kill Tarn himself. They were both devastated when the universe swap happened and they thought they would never see each other again. Though Pharma secretly felt some relief that Tarn was now a universe away and can find someone else to love who isn't a mind-controlled walking time bomb that could try to murder him at any moment.

[thanksjro]

Last Stand of the Wreckers PsyOps records- Can we PLEASE Hire Some More Mental Health Specialists?

Rung gets a lot of play in the Last Stand of the Wreckers bonus materials. He was still more of a play-on-words as opposed to an actual character at the time, so I suppose it makes sense.

Rotorstorm walked into his appointment with Rung and immediately started hyping himself up. That’s very telling. When Rung asked about his time at Simanzi, he sort of shut down and wasn’t able to hide behind his defense mechanism of being the funniest, coolest, bravest, all-around-bestest guy in the room.

Rotorstorm was basically born, then thrown into the Aerial Program, where all that awful stuff with Jetstream happened. Dude was beating up an infant.

Motherfucker’s got some trauma, obviously, but apparently that’s not enough to disqualify him from Wrecker duty. Wrecker duty that he didn’t even want, I should add.

You gotta sign up for the Wrecker roster; he’d been on it before, but had dropped out to teach instead. Either someone set this poor guy up to die, or Jetstream was wrong this whole time and he really just is that good. Not that it mattered much- the damage is done. Rotorstorm has crippling self-doubt, and is also dead.

Pyro suffers from a programming disorder known as primus apotheosis, identified by the sufferer’s need to emulate the great Optimus Prime. Many Autobots are afflicted with this disorder, and even a few Decepticons have been known to have it. The fact that Pyro had primus apotheosis makes panels like this:

-all the more sad. This is a guy who’s had his own personality overwritten- by his own hero worship- in an attempt to be greater than himself. Pyro is by no means a slouch when it comes to saving the day- he saved an entire platoon of Autobots as a member of the Resistance.

Then Simanzi happened.

There isn’t a ton known about the Simanzi Massacre, only that it was so bad, the Cybertronian population was halved by the time it was over. Pyro would have been just another statistic, had it not been for Optimus Prime’s intervention. Does survivor’s guilt have some part in his disorder? It’s certainly possible. All that can be said for sure is that nobody got out of Simanzi unscathed.

Pyro was approved for the Wreckers with reservations, seeing as primus apotheosis sufferers can and will sacrifice themselves for others if given any wiggle room in which to do so. The Wreckers were just lucky that Pyro wanted to go out in style. It didn’t really work for him, but points for trying.

Guzzle isn’t his legal name. Much like Chromedome, he’s called what he’s called due to meddling with the war. Originally Pneumatix, and a forklift of all things- the name being a play on the word “Pneumatic”, because forklifts work by using compressed air to lift things- he entered the Body Augmentation Program. This turned him into something called a ruination tank. That’s why his turret accounts for nearly half of his height- they basically turned a Mini Cooper into a weapon of mass destruction. Because he’s meant to be actually very tiny, his body compensates for the added stress by being so insanely fuel-inefficient, he has to constantly eat. Thus the nickname.

Guzzle didn’t exactly impress Rung at his appointment, coming across as a rather cold, distant individual when it came to his own emotions, describing his own near-death experience at the hands of the Decepticons in terms of what weaponry was used to try to kill him. Still, he was approved for the Garrus-9 mission.

It’s at this point that you have to wonder just how many people are actually on the waiting list for this group.

First Aid about had a panic attack when he thought Springer was inviting him to join the Wreckers, so it’s obviously a known thing that members don’t last terribly long, or at least, it’s something that can be inferred through reading about them.

Looking at past members, it’s rather telling what sort of person is attracted to the Wrecker lifestyle; Whirl is an emotional powder keg that’s constantly trying to light his own fuse, Impactor defied wartime sanctions to murder the his rivals, Roadbuster is a hardcore drug abuser who ripped someone’s spine out, and Kup can only function in polite society if he’s smoking medicinal marijuana at all times. These are not stable individuals. Springer is the odd exception, and I’m counting Perceptor as a borderline case, because he went through a massive personality shift that led him to where he was within the group. He may appear “normal” when compared to the others, but that guy’s for sure got some issues that he keeps close to his chest.

Given all of this, it’s not really much of a leap to say that Rotorstorm got thrown back on the list because they didn’t have anyone else who wanted in on this madness. It’s also not much of a leap to say that the only reason any of these guys got approved to join was because there weren’t any other options. The psych-screenings were probably just done as a professional obligation at that point. Rung, for all his faults, was likely working with what he’d been given.

I’m not exactly sure where these profiles were meant to reside within Last Stand’s timeline, given that Rotorstorm and Pyro are classified as being probably alive, whereas Ironfist is not.

Ironfist spends a good portion of his appointment with Rung fanboying over the Wreckers, as he is wont to do. When he actually gets around to talking about himself, he’s not nearly as eloquent or organized. Rung did not approve Ironfist for the mission, based solely on his lack of experience in the field of busting heads. He only got on the team due to Prowl’s interference, as has been established before.

Fisitron is revealed to have been a writer of many talents, publishing articles for all ages and reading levels. He was an author you could grow up on.

Impactor’s profile was written at the time of his probationary hearing, and it seems to imply that Rung may be a bit of an idiot. He had dismissed the guard who was present, in an attempt to get Impactor to be more open with him. This went about as well as that sort of thing usually goes for the only mental health specialist on all of Cybertron.

Looks like someone’s got a fear of mnemosurgery. With this little event in his past, it’s very surprising that Rung tried to offer it to Fortress Maximus in MTMTE #6.

Maybe Rung accidentally stuck a really big magnet to the side of his head at some point, thus erasing his memory files, because I know that I sure wouldn’t be offering that sort of thing if this was the average reaction to it.

After Impactor had had his moment, he shared some of his war stories with Rung- apparently his lack of a right hand was inspired by meeting Death’s Head.

Though Death’s Head isn’t directly named, it’s pretty obvious that’s who it’s intended to be, given that he’s mentioned as “ricocheting from universe to universe after leaping through an exploding time portal.” This is in reference to the events that took place in the Marvel UK storyline “The Legacy of Unicron!” This is also what happened to him prior to the events of Eugenesis.

Rung is aware of these events due to having read Wreckers: Declassified. I’m not sure how I feel about Wreckers: Declassified being a valid resource for Rung to pull from, considering Fisitron self-described with the word “dramatist” in “Bullets”.

The session had to be ended when Rung tried to psychoanalyze Impactor in a way he wasn’t ready for, as the man threatened to crush his brain like a grape between his fingers.

Lot of Eugenesis vibes in this entry.

We don’t get any history on Impactor, as it’s been scrubbed from the record at someone’s request. Is it related to his relationship with Megatron? The events that would eventually be revealed in Sins of the Wreckers? Maybe it’s just left like that to create intrigue for the eventual sequel series, Sins of the Wreckers. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

That’s the end of Rung’s reports, but we still have a couple more characters to get through.

Rotorstorm, Snare, and Swindle must go to the same body shop, because they’re the only guys who have eyes/visors that aren’t a primary color. It’s an interesting little character design choice, and I can’t help but wonder if there was some sort of reason for it.

…I genuinely wasn’t expecting an answer for that. Neat!

Snare’s kind of a loner, which works out pretty well for him, since he’s usually on surveillance duty. He’s also a sadist, having developed some nasty ways to keep prisoners in line. “Morphcore stimulation” is mentioned, and it’s less fun than it sounds, not that it sounds terribly fun in the first place. The fact that even Snare thought Overlord was a bit much is very telling.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “morphcore”, don’t feel bad about it, because it’s only ever been used in one piece of media up until this point. Morphcores were a small bundle of nerves at the base of the Cybertronian brain that controlled transformation, as explained in Eugenesis. This term would quickly be switched out for the more well-known “transformation cog” for brand cohesion. The really funny thing is that that this section is attributed to Nick Roche. It would seem that TMUK is a hard state of mind to shake off.

This won’t be the only time Roche and Roberts team-up to completely miss the mark on how the IDW continuity functions- the Dire Wraith in The Revolution oneshot they wrote together was running off of the Marvel UK iteration of the species.

Overlord doesn’t have a profile, per se, but rather a transcript of a correspondence between Megatron and a guy named Gorelock.

Gorelock apologizes for not getting in contact sooner, explaining that the reason he’s been radio silent is because Overlord fucking showed up out of nowhere, after cutting and running from the Decepticause years prior. Whether Megatron had actually heard Overlord’s message or just figured it out from context clues isn’t clarified.

Gorelock super-duper promises that he and his guys didn’t just stand there pissing themselves in fear as Overlord strolled through their ranks, and they super-duper totally fought him until Gorelock decided to hear the guy out. For sure. Absolutely.

It turns out, Overlord was never actually dismissed from the rank of the Decepticons, which means that he outranks Gorelock, and Gorelock was therefore compelled to grant him a favor.

The favor is wrecking an entire empire’s shop. Gorelock complies with this request, purely due to being outranked. Absolutely. For sure.

Once the contract was completed in full, Overlord fucked off into space.

You know, not enjoying your hobbies anymore can be a sign of depression.

And that’s why Gorelock hasn’t kept in touch! I’m sure Megtron will be very understanding about this whole thing.

Or not!