#seriously have you ever thought about how miserable it had to be to be Soundwave on the Nemesis?

[kytherion]

I just found out that the Autobot edition of Cards against Cybertron has a white card that says:

"Soundwave fendered on circuit boosters."

I can't stop laughing.

Before I got The Trinket, I used circuit boosters on prescription. (Or not.) To stabilise.

(You try being a passive telepath with terrible shields and a stupidly enormous range on the bridge of the Nemesis. Just being in the same room with both Starscream and Megatron was enough to give me a migraine sometimes.)

[dontpetmeibite]

Ravage, how did it feel seeing Tarn perish at Megatron's hands for...literally ripping you in half? Or at least a version of you, I should say.

I know that wasn't the main reason, but I feel like it was what drove o'l Megs to go "fuckit mode" and kill Tarn like the mistake he was.

I have actually not seen that, and I don't want to. Is this the manner in which you normally ask people you've just met about their traumatic experiences?

If I put myself in the position of that Ravage, seeing that incident, I think it would piss me off, because it would have been better for me if he'd chosen to do that before I died, not after.

But I don't know. And I don't know what any of those people went through, whether it was the same as me or not. I mean that Ravage was still using he/him pronouns and maybe he liked them, maybe he was a masculine person instead of a person who didn't want all her enemies to know she was a girl until the war was over.

Here is what I do know based on what happened in my own timeline.

Megatron was subjected to a partial "personality adjustment" on Messatine. At first I didn't know that and I was pleased to see my amica finally accepting that we were not going to be able to go to Iacon and politely ask the Senate to vacate the premises and allow us to craft a functional and just government without giving a few people Rossum's three shots.

But it just kept getting worse and worse. Soundwave and I were never accused of treason or taken out and shot because Megatron loved us as people, but he also stopped listening to us when we said we thought things were going too far.

Then we had

(yes glit I borrowed your gif)

and at the end of it he went Autobot and abdicated and abandoned us and that totally aided the cause of peace because Galvatron and Soundwave coming to blows was not anything that anyone could have ever seen coming given their respective personalities, and I ended up on the Lost Light for reasons and you know.

After I left the LL, Megatron got attacked by a rogue mnemosurgeon who could fuck with people's brains without touching them and mysteriously recovered the pacifism of his early youth. Which would have been very convenient for that guy (seriously, fuck that guy) if Tailgate hadn't ruined his day by dropping a shuttle on him.

Shortly after this completely normal and unforced moral 180 Megatron tried to bash his brain into a wall and told his doctor that he'd never been happier with a huge grin on his face. Because that's not suspicious or anything.

So far as I can tell the only purpose my death served in that timeline was to make Soundwave utterly miserable (and result in him ending up with that idiot Cosmos) and make Megatron get up off his aft and blow up the guy he turned into a raving mad serial killer at least partly on purpose with antimatter. But I don't know. I didn't live that life.

Charlie, Marissa and Miko told me that this is called "refrigeration" when it happens to female human characters in stories and that if I were a fictional character they would be pretty mad about that.

My point is I'm not judging anyone here in this scenario because Trepan and Sunder both fucked with Megatron's head and in the intervening time period Megatron fucked with Glitch's head and made him into Tarn, although I do not think we can blame all of that on Megatron because the guy was the commandant of Grindcore at one time, while my brother was there, so.

Our history is enough of a sideshow in the timeline I'm actually in. Would I be glad to know I was avenged? I guess so. But on the other hand if I died because of his fucking vow of pacifism and he didn't keep it that's not exactly wonderful either. And on the third one (good thing I have four paws) maybe it's really the fault of all those needlefuckers who thought they had the right to open up his cranial vault and redecorate!

I'm not blaming a Megatron I never met for the exigencies of a situation I was never in. Megatron is my amica, Soundwave is my conjunx, Tarn did horrible things to people in my universe too, I just wasn't one of them. and it didn't happen.

My point is, you're asking me how I feel about people I don't even know that are actually NOT the people I love the most in this universe. They look and act a whole lot like those people but I have no idea if they're the kind of people they were in my own universe.

I mean I could also say "Minimus Ambus needs two whole sets of armour so that nobody catches him impersonating a vertebrate" which is a thing that I actually said in my own universe once.

But if I did say that, I would be talking about the one in my universal stream. And that would cause no end of needless offence, because there could be five different people reading this post who are also named Minimus Ambus, but none of them did any of the shady shit the Ambus brothers I knew in my own universe did.

Or maybe they did but since I don't know them I'd possibly rather not know.