#is it weird that i remember not only that brainstorm specifically vomited in an alien force finally (had to look up the specific episode)

[whatudottu]

Regarding cerebrocrustacean’s teeth: DJW stated that they’re actually filter feeders, so I think it might actually be stylized baleen?

Hehe, cerebrocrustaceans don't need a toothbrush since their teeth are already brushes :P

Hmm filter feeding means that you gotta intake a lot of water with your food, and no matter what the water is filled with (different planets, different rocks, different elements eroding into the water of rivers and oceans), swallowing that water is not going to treat the body well. Baleen whales open mouth a lot of food and water and their 'teeth' are used to keep food in while they spit out the salt, using their tongue to do so, so if cerebrocrustaceans have a baleen then they might have a similar process.

Thinking thinking (mentions of vomiting below)

In comparison to a whale cerebrocrustaceans are incredibly small, the fact that their filter feeding is centred around keeping food in rather than letting it pass over internal gills (the method I like making orishan fed) makes it seem like their food is a little too big for gill based eating, but with the size of their brain aka one of the most nutrition and energy taxing organ in the entire body (so much so our extinct cousins the neanderthals had BIGGER brains they couldn't maintain) they probably need to have bigger if not many MANY small prey to eat in relatively large quantities. Well if cerebrocrustaceans have to filter feed like a whale, do they also have a tongue or tongue-like replacement? Well considering that Brainstorm was capable of vomitting in War of the World part 2, with the addition of a retractable baleen, cerebrocrustaceans have the physiological capacity to adjust pressure levels (increase pressure in the stomach, lower pressure in the thorax which I'm just using terms in reference to humans) as well as have the abdominal muscles to move stomach contents out.

Technically emptying the contents of your stomach is not indicative of anything but I imagine since they're kinda all torso (all thorax) that they might have a water stomach, perhaps even combining it with some form of gizzard since cerebrocrustaceans don't have teeth to chew with. They open-mouth a whole bunch of zooplanktain and maybe larger prey (closing their mouth if something bigger comes obviously), water enters the gizzard where a vomit-like function occurs, expelling all the water while the baleen catches the mouthful of food. Also! This is when underwater, especially in zooplankton swarms, does this process occur. Cerebrocrustaceans have evolved to filter feed and have a gizzard that facilitates the act to chewing thus doesn't necessitate the evolution of teeth should they (and have) live on dry land.

Of course Encephalonus IV would have a different culture to Earth, so making the transition from a reliance on the water to being able to live between environs of land and sea, they retained the habits of filter feeding habits (swallowing food and water and spitting out the water) until fully acclimating to a dry(er) setting. Technically one could say they were the type to 'drool' or 'spit' randomly all over the floor until collectively agreeing it's more of a hassle on land than in water to filter feed. Instead with the move to land cerebrocrustaceans have developed a separate cuisine culture between dry and wet settings, eating larger (though still swallowable/gizzard-chewable) foods, perhaps beginning to create and invent foods rather than rely solely on live prey. Kind of like how you can't have metal without fire, you tend not to be about to have a cuisine culture without fire too, but unlike human evolution where obviously food came before smelting, cerebrocrustaceans developed both cuisine and technology at around the same starting point; though technically it's technology they're mainly interested in as there are more niches technology can fill in invention over cuisine, those roots still exist in a passion for well crafted delicacies packed with more nutrients per square inch to make smaller meals worth the same as a feeding frenzy.

[rossumtrinity]

like all of my posts this is incoherent so dont rebagel but i think whats sticking in my brain is, i guess, that idw1′s Cybertronian Oppression is like... i mean they’re robot aliens. and i think the base idea behind them is What If Robot Car Aliens Lived In A Society, so they obviously don’t function as 1:1 allegories of real life oppression. 

but at the same time there is obviously a very clear, intentional connection being made between, like, the *form* of being constructed-cold and racism--what with brainstorm referring specifically, at one point, to “knock-off” apartheid (yay immersive fictional slurs). the *content*, however, doesn’t match up in quite the same way, and the disconnect between form and content is what leads to. uncomfortable implications. is brainstorm... white-passing, by this logic, since he pretends to be forged? what the fuck are we meant to make of megatron “one-percent spark in a cc frame”? (i already rambled about the implications of that in a post like, several months ago so i won’t rehash that here but i Really Do Hate That lol)

(in a similar vein id argue there’s a conscious connection between the *form* of decepticon ideology/communism but the *content* is. i mean once again we know fuck all about cybertron’s actual like... political or economic processes. anyway remember when simon furman thought the ussr still existed in 2005)

i think there are implied to be specific *frames* that are known to be constructed-cold but transformers are swapping out their bodies (and alt-modes, too!) every ten minutes. there’s that whole thing early in LL where everyone lists out whether they’re cold-con bc you can’t Tell Otherwise when they’re figuring out why ppl are disappearing. amputees are immediately recognizable, and it’s a punishment Meant for only cold-cons (except whirl and shockwave), but tarn got his face and hands back! so oppression on cybertron ends up primarily systemic and significantly less interpersonal, because... only the government knows that you’re oppressed?

there’s not really a point to this i am thought vomiting. it wouldn’t bother me if it was just presented as ‘robots living in a society’ but the intentional resemblance in form and then the disconnect in content makes it weird. maybe i just don’t want to read about robot racism