#my phase before tf was Moon Knight

[giantenemyrobot]

They would kill so many people for the greater good if they were friends your honor

[butterflyinthewell]

Because I had some anons ask “What’s Danceverse?”

http://archiveofourown.org/series/282375

I ship the effin’ hell out of Optimus and Mikaela. 

Careful, the fics are a rabbit hole.

The idea of what’s happening to Optimus in TLK can play into Danceverse if the movie lets him be okay by the end of it. 

I have a headcanon that he had developed a mental illness similar to PTSD in humans between DOTM and AOE. The condition can only occur under specific circumstances since it affects his software. 

It’s called stasis trauma; a bot who falls into stasis (like a coma) during a traumatic event will experience that event on an endless memory loop until they’re repaired enough to wake up. To some, that last moment before stasis may not seem all that traumatic, but relive it over and over for months, years, decades, centuries, millennia or even eons and it’s not so small anymore is it?

It’s basically a really advanced equivalent to a bunch of data on your computer getting corrupted and desktop shortcuts or apps not going to the correct program or app. Like, you click on a a folder that has artwork in it and your internet browser opens instead, or there’s an error message telling you to check if the folder was moved somewhere else. 

Flashbacks happen because Optimus experiences a trigger and the datatrack of his trauma gets set off, putting him back in the moment. His equivalent to sleep is recharging and it has stages similar to human sleep. The difference is he doesn’t dream the same way we do. His dreams are always actual memories opening in a random order. They’re never random things like flying toasters and other human dream weirdness. 

What’s different is due to the stasis trauma he acts out the dreams, like sleepwalking, and he has zero memory of it when he wakes up. You can’t shake him awake, the nightmare stops when the datatrack closes. He can’t hear you trying to comfort him and he wouldn’t know the nightmares were happening at all if someone else didn’t tell him. His only clue would be waking up in different locations from where he went into recharge. 

I think you can imagine why this is dangerous. Fortunately, none of his projectile weapons actually go off when he’s recharging, but he may still punch or kick people.

He also contends with intrusive thoughts, random bouts of depression, hypervigilance, and random “fear attacks” where his body’s fight-or-flight systems kick off and he has to do a sort of control+alt+delete to shut the program down. It makes him get the shakes like he’s got chills.

To make matters worse, (headcanon here) Cybertronians stigmatize the hell out of mental illnesses. Nobody talks about it if they have one and they may not even tell their medic and it’ll come up on scans instead. Mentally ill bots get slowly phased out of social circles if it becomes public knowledge. They’ll usually get treatment privately-- the worst symptoms of stasis trauma can be recovered from, but traces will always remain. 

Optimus knows his leadership would be called into question if people knew about his stasis trauma, so he tries to keep it secret. Just admitting it privately to Mikaela was hell for him. He was crying and terrified that he had betrayed her.

Optimus being susceptible to manipulation can work with my headcanon, but I won’t stay with canon if he stays on the “bad” side and gets killed off. I’ll come up with a way for Mikaela and the other Autobots to help him.

I have my own headcanon for where and how his life ends and it’s at a ripe old age where we get to see him be a cranky old fart bot who walks with a cane. Kinda like Jetfire in TF2 ROTF...but THAT fic takes place a trillion years in the future! (It’s “Tin Man’s Treasure” so don’t read that one if you want to avoid sobbing for hours. It was hell to write, yet it was one of those fics that wouldn’t get out of my head until I wrote it.)

So yeah. Danceverse, everyone.

Abbreviations for the movies:

TF = Transformers TF2 or ROTF = Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen TF3 or DOTM = Transformers: Dark of the Moon TF4 or AOE = Transformers: Age of Extinction TF5 or TLK = Transformers: The Last Knight (Upcoming movie)