2023-01-08 18:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
redthedragon
redthedragoni just wanted more interesting autobots because all the ones i like are coded as blue collar in some way for the most part or a blood knight and i have plenty of blood knight representation but not so many blue collar goodguys. tragic.
Notes: Raytheon is a USAmerican government contracted weapons manufacturer. DGP is my abbreviation for "devastating glorious purpose" which i use as shorthand for "maybe the scope of this thing that you are built to do and want to do is vainglorious, enormous, stupid and dangerous to those around you" and associated concepts. This all hails from this random thought collection re: class in Transformers and how I'd like to see it done.
Soundwave's job is to be Control Of The Troops and Surveillance. Soundwave is excellent at his job. Soundwave decides to extra-do his job. Soundwave decides to be Control Of The Everyone.
...the, ah, people who built him are included in that Everyone. They're not fond of being subjected to Control via the vector of the glorified supercomputer with guns they built to automate their jobs controlling the troops and doing surveilance. No one ever warned them that if they created a spy-machine taht loves being a spy-machine and wholeheartedly embraces this purpose they've given him that that guy might, like, keep doing it outside their expected parameters.
I think Soundwave is where the Decepticon cause starts here. In Soundwave deciding to become the ultimate arbiter of What Everyone Is Doing, but he basically just watches and observes. He's not the one doing the controlling; he's a background guy. (See: TFP.)
Megatron is idk maybe like whatever this Cybertron's equivalent of a west-point-educated officer is. Built to make on-the-fly decisions and to lead, but certainly not for politics. Shame, he's also good at politics. Or at least better than passable at them. Regardless, he comes up into status.
I don't actually like Ex-royalty!Starscream for backgrounds but I think it fits the themes I have here for someone to be ex-nobility. Not Starscream though, I need him to have a more insecure background. I actually like the visual of him being a very highly educated scientist type who is on the Decepticon side by choice rather than by class stratification but I don't know that I like that. Wait. Wait he could be a deliberate sellout. He could be working for cybertronian!Raytheon. I like THAT. Out of place by class so he has to walk a fine line and play a particular image but by this point he does have access to the status and wealth and he's a deliberate class traitor among everything else in the search of power. I think it works for him and his whole thing.
That said, I don't think families are going to be a thing for this, so no "royal family" nonsense is going to crop up... not sure how to embed aristocracy in that, then.
Shockwave also obviously makes military weapons; I want him to have been an early member of the Soundwave project. I like the (vague, truncated) idea of him that comes from IDW05, that he picked whatever side afforded him the most freedom and power to do mad science. He's not even a class traitor because he was built to do science and he goes where the science leads him. He is very literally upper-class enough that he can consider himself "outside of class". His inventions made him independently wealthy and he does whatever the fuck he wants- and working with the government is the fastest and easiest way to get access to cutting edge technology, so he chooses to do that. When the Decepticons start to coalesce around Soundwave (most experimental processor bank of all time capable of breaking apparently every encryption ever) he goes with Soundwave, too. I want him distinguished from Starscream; can you tell?
who else is involved in DC high command.. I'll borrow (in name mostly) Megazarak from TFA's lorebook; I want the Decepticons to have a legacy of control over Cybertron going back a good long time. He can be the head general of Cybertron, and Megatron can be one of several mecha competing to be his runner-up. Megatron and Starscream assassinate him to take power after Megatron is handpicked (helped along by Soundwave). Nonetheless Megazarak is actually a character for a while, he'd have to be. If only so I can show Megatron coalescing power under his hand, using his name.
In that same sense all the Primes need to have been Decepticons.... I have a friend I'll need to talk to re: which primes came where and when but I also want to make sure that Prime is basically the only position that isn't built-to-spec. It's an optional position that rotates through positions in an order, I think. 13 kinds of Prime to a cycle. I promise I am not going to get religious about this.
Anyway I remember a few Primes - Nominus, Nova, Nemesis, why are these all N names, Sentinel, and that's like it. I need a lot more Primes than that to make my preferred kind of weight of history feel earned. I suppose I'll be making up characters. I am doing away with the senate entirely--
okay gov structure. Aggressive autocratic theocracy. God-Emperor Lord Prime and his military do basically everything; there is no senate and there is no voting. They have specially-built lawguys to make up the laws. The Prime signs off on them. Whoever controls the troops can pressure the Prime, but most Primes are pretty much in control. And Primes get to choose a successor in this but in times of serious issue Primus can override the successor and lock them out; the Matrix will go to any of several compatible mecha. Also you can refuse the Primacy.
actually that VERY neatly stitches a different issue- if the DECEPTICONS are the ones who care about the Sanctity Of The Matrix then they have good reason to care about getting it back; if the AUTOBOTS are the ones who kind of dont care about who is elected but are in the position of relative lack of power trying to negotiate with the Decepticons, of course the Matrix is their single ticket toward legitimacy! That's perfect.
I think that's good for now.
Ultra Magnus can be our token class traitor, because if that guy comes from anywhere that isn't the military i will eat my own computer. He's on the same track as Megatron but increasingly disgusted by the political games that he has to play to maintain position. A real no-nonsense person. He takes what people say to heart and then gets mad when they don't mean it. Megatron never, ever considers him to be "real competition" and is pissed the fuck off when he discovers UM can wipe the floor with him. A disdainer of DGP (swear to god i love that abbreviation) and who kind of has the opposite kind of dealie as Starscream.
(ie: where Skeem disdains integrity for power, Magnus disdains power for integrity. You can't be an integrity'd up Decepticon, it doesn't work well, so Mags finds himself drawn to the side that DOES exhibit more integrity on the whole- the Bots.)
MinimusAmbus Magnus gets to be a completely different kind of transformer here but he maintains personality, I think. He turns into the Magnus Hammer. I think I want to call them Minimus Magnus and Ultra Magnus for this, actually. Teammates. They come in a pair I think. Two Magnuses making decisions together, both beholden to their belief in the idea that the rules are good but also very strongly beholden to the idea that also morals are important and the structure is already being twisted by these motherfuckers playing stupid social games for power they don't deserve. Minimus does most of Ultra's paperwork more for fun than anything else, since I imagine their paperwork is assigned on a team-based basis before the war; afterward he finds himself working almost secretarially for the Autobots for a little while because he can and it's not hard and he likes it.
Optimus is simple, I want him to have his g1 backstory that everyone talks about. He works in shipping as a dockworker and he's sort of just a guy. He and his buddies have an agreement to look out for each other but that's it, that's really all the leadership experience he has. He needs so much help. But he has a very strong sense of what is and isn't fair, and other people to lean on and a willingness to ask questions.
Thus: Ironhide. Not really a bodyguard here so much as a guy Optimus knows who's been around the block a few times and done more leaderly stuff and who he leans on for advice. Sort of like Kup Two: This Time More Of A Peer. Ironhide worked in mining, and he's kind of instrumental in keeping everyone alive for a while because of it; when the Autobots are underground they are UNDER GROUND. He and Dion went to Baby Miner Job School together for a little while because Dion needed a job cert for energon handling or something but he wasn't a personal friend of Optimus's until everything got going.
Ratchet is probably a closer parallel to Shockwave i swear I didn't do this on purpose. Ratchet probably parallels Shockwave in that he CAN do whatever he wants with his skills, but instead of "the most science" he wants to do "the most good" so while he's not really independently wealthy he has done a good solid amount of- actually fuck it. Nope, changing my mind. Ratchet is an ex-Decepticon who cares more about doing good than doing money and so when the Autobots start making actual waves Ratchet jumps ship in about 0.1 seconds flat. I'm riffing off TFA and the Infiltration IDW2005 comics for this. Ratchet probably disseminates anarchist literature in his free time under a pseudonym. holy shit what if Ratchet is this 'verse's "IDW-Inspired Megatron" type. Could you fucking imagine.
I don't think I'm doing that because Ratchet is kind of ruled by consequences so it'd have to look plausible before he jumped ships, but I like the idea regardless. Maybe he writes tracts up and someone else distributes them after he joins. Idk. I want him to think the Matrix and the Primacy is a load of shit though.
Prowl's not a cop. Prowl is an ex-manager type from the ground floor of a factory. He was made with the extremely not devastating nor glorious purpose to micromanage mecha, and he's good at it, but he cares a lot about the work getting done well and turns out micromanaging anyone is a bad way to get that done- you have to trust in expertise a lot of the time. Maybe he worked in a place where everyone else was machining parts to very narrow tolerances or something else super-precise like that, or I could see him working in some kind of back-end medical thing. He cares a lot about proper process. He and the Magnuses are friends.
Wheeljack is the non-Raytheon version of Shockwave. He does science but he has standards. So before the war he's on a shoestring budget expected to mostly use his talents to make things to other people's specs and finances his own experiements with a combination of his own pay and being part of a research lab that has a pool for experiments they'll pay money toward.
who else is in charge of things... i got military advice, OP, leader advice, medical, ops management, and engineering- OH. spec ops and interpersonal management (shamelessly stealing off a friend's notes for this last one.)
JAZZ! JAZZYBOT! Soundwave 1.0! Originally built and specced as a targeting/navigation calculator onboard a very turbulent ship and then swept up into experimentation after just long enough to get comfortable in the stars and observing mecha, one of very few mecha with the software and hardware suite combo that allows him to run an early version of the calculations they wanted Soundwave running to do rudimentary brain-to-brain encryption hacking and essentially mindreading (they're both not telepaths though). Jazz takes to this like a fish to mountainclimbing and fucks the hell off. Now he's possibly THE most high-powered antigovernment radical there is, except he plays that very close to his chest and doesn't talk about it much and just gets real damn good at reading people's meanings and playing doublespeak and performing trustworthiness as a gorgeous little underground schemer scamming-for-food-and-profit. I think he should be in the government actually, not really as a traitor so much as someone thrust up in there against his will who walked out and then back for the sake of disruption and revenge. Sharper (texture) than he looks; you can cut yourself on his edges if you're not careful. Fortunately he's also kind of a nice guy if you don't put him in a corner. World's greatest DGP enemy; bonds with Optimus specifically over Optimus explicitly and publicly rejecting his new DGP. Extremely "just some guy (don't look any closer or you might not want to know what you find out ;> haha)" energy.
and Smokescreen- I got no idea where he's from but I dont' want him to just be another scammer, really, I want him and Jazz to be enemies-turned-friends who met in the Autobots themselves. He could be from anywhere, though- the skill he's most useful for is keeping an eye on everyone on this inside of the Autobots and being able to handle interpersonal strife. He's like an unoffical mediator turned official mediator. Maybe he's also a miner, or he worked in an energon refinery - somewhere where you have to work in concert with people or else you cant do the job and everything gets dangerous. Or construction.
(Bonus Hot Rod- he is absolutely no part of High Command for a long time, but I kind of want him to be a delivery guy turned smuggler after he joins the 'bots. Mr nyoom zoom mailman.)
I got more the makings of a story than a real story here, and what I got needs time to settle, but there's something like-
the Matrix ends up in Optimus's hands as a result of Jazz doing actual serious sabotage. He fucks it up, it was meant to be a straight-ahead assassination. Soundwave and Megatron capitalize, either killing or having killed Megazarak, and stepping into the gap to take power entirely. In the chaos, Optimus, who is targeted mostly via Primus-Related Shenanigans, gets the matrix sort of teleported over to him. Oops, Now We Have a God-King...2! Jazz vanishes into the ether and isn't seen again for a long time.
Nominus or whoever had picked as a Primacy-successor Megazarak, and Megatron is Megazarak's successor, so Megatron is the "chosen heir" and goes to try and take the Matrix by force. Optimus meanwhile is like "no its okay i think i can use this to negotiate for a better set of wages" and instead is suddenly and even more thoroughly radicalized (more) by getting nearly assassinated (maybe Magnus comes to the rescue because killing civvie primes is against all the rules?) A series of very convenient lucky breaks (read: Jazz doing pre-Autobot specops shit) means that OP and his retinue can get tf out of dodge but oops,shit, we're in hiding now.
op has SCANDALOUS ideas about class-mobility and personal freedoms. He has shared some of these with his close friends and cohort. They kept telling him to keep his voice down; now he stops doing that. oh no, now we're a social movement? Might as well work with it. Hm. Plus this whole "true Prime" thing means that they do have to pay lip service to listening to us. Okay. We can work with this.
then blah blah blah energy crisis etc etc the autobots flee cybertron etc etc the decepticons follow idk from here every transformers continuity is about the same. i wouldnt want to do away with the robots in disguise thing.
idk the narrative will build itself. it's one of those ideas, I can feel it, I just need to let it be soup for a minute.
Notes: Raytheon is a USAmerican government contracted weapons manufacturer. DGP is my abbreviation for "devastating glorious purpose" which i use as shorthand for "maybe the scope of this thing that you are built to do and want to do is vainglorious, enormous, stupid and dangerous to those around you" and associated concepts. This all hails from this random thought collection re: class in Transformers and how I'd like to see it done.
Soundwave's job is to be Control Of The Troops and Surveillance. Soundwave is excellent at his job. Soundwave decides to extra-do his job. Soundwave decides to be Control Of The Everyone.
...the, ah, people who built him are included in that Everyone. They're not fond of being subjected to Control via the vector of the glorified supercomputer with guns they built to automate their jobs controlling the troops and doing surveilance. No one ever warned them that if they created a spy-machine taht loves being a spy-machine and wholeheartedly embraces this purpose they've given him that that guy might, like, keep doing it outside their expected parameters.
I think Soundwave is where the Decepticon cause starts here. In Soundwave deciding to become the ultimate arbiter of What Everyone Is Doing, but he basically just watches and observes. He's not the one doing the controlling; he's a background guy. (See: TFP.)
Megatron is idk maybe like whatever this Cybertron's equivalent of a west-point-educated officer is. Built to make on-the-fly decisions and to lead, but certainly not for politics. Shame, he's also good at politics. Or at least better than passable at them. Regardless, he comes up into status.
I don't actually like Ex-royalty!Starscream for backgrounds but I think it fits the themes I have here for someone to be ex-nobility. Not Starscream though, I need him to have a more insecure background. I actually like the visual of him being a very highly educated scientist type who is on the Decepticon side by choice rather than by class stratification but I don't know that I like that. Wait. Wait he could be a deliberate sellout. He could be working for cybertronian!Raytheon. I like THAT. Out of place by class so he has to walk a fine line and play a particular image but by this point he does have access to the status and wealth and he's a deliberate class traitor among everything else in the search of power. I think it works for him and his whole thing.
That said, I don't think families are going to be a thing for this, so no "royal family" nonsense is going to crop up... not sure how to embed aristocracy in that, then.
Shockwave also obviously makes military weapons; I want him to have been an early member of the Soundwave project. I like the (vague, truncated) idea of him that comes from IDW05, that he picked whatever side afforded him the most freedom and power to do mad science. He's not even a class traitor because he was built to do science and he goes where the science leads him. He is very literally upper-class enough that he can consider himself "outside of class". His inventions made him independently wealthy and he does whatever the fuck he wants- and working with the government is the fastest and easiest way to get access to cutting edge technology, so he chooses to do that. When the Decepticons start to coalesce around Soundwave (most experimental processor bank of all time capable of breaking apparently every encryption ever) he goes with Soundwave, too. I want him distinguished from Starscream; can you tell?
who else is involved in DC high command.. I'll borrow (in name mostly) Megazarak from TFA's lorebook; I want the Decepticons to have a legacy of control over Cybertron going back a good long time. He can be the head general of Cybertron, and Megatron can be one of several mecha competing to be his runner-up. Megatron and Starscream assassinate him to take power after Megatron is handpicked (helped along by Soundwave). Nonetheless Megazarak is actually a character for a while, he'd have to be. If only so I can show Megatron coalescing power under his hand, using his name.
In that same sense all the Primes need to have been Decepticons.... I have a friend I'll need to talk to re: which primes came where and when but I also want to make sure that Prime is basically the only position that isn't built-to-spec. It's an optional position that rotates through positions in an order, I think. 13 kinds of Prime to a cycle. I promise I am not going to get religious about this.
Anyway I remember a few Primes - Nominus, Nova, Nemesis, why are these all N names, Sentinel, and that's like it. I need a lot more Primes than that to make my preferred kind of weight of history feel earned. I suppose I'll be making up characters. I am doing away with the senate entirely--
okay gov structure. Aggressive autocratic theocracy. God-Emperor Lord Prime and his military do basically everything; there is no senate and there is no voting. They have specially-built lawguys to make up the laws. The Prime signs off on them. Whoever controls the troops can pressure the Prime, but most Primes are pretty much in control. And Primes get to choose a successor in this but in times of serious issue Primus can override the successor and lock them out; the Matrix will go to any of several compatible mecha. Also you can refuse the Primacy.
actually that VERY neatly stitches a different issue- if the DECEPTICONS are the ones who care about the Sanctity Of The Matrix then they have good reason to care about getting it back; if the AUTOBOTS are the ones who kind of dont care about who is elected but are in the position of relative lack of power trying to negotiate with the Decepticons, of course the Matrix is their single ticket toward legitimacy! That's perfect.
I think that's good for now.
Ultra Magnus can be our token class traitor, because if that guy comes from anywhere that isn't the military i will eat my own computer. He's on the same track as Megatron but increasingly disgusted by the political games that he has to play to maintain position. A real no-nonsense person. He takes what people say to heart and then gets mad when they don't mean it. Megatron never, ever considers him to be "real competition" and is pissed the fuck off when he discovers UM can wipe the floor with him. A disdainer of DGP (swear to god i love that abbreviation) and who kind of has the opposite kind of dealie as Starscream.
(ie: where Skeem disdains integrity for power, Magnus disdains power for integrity. You can't be an integrity'd up Decepticon, it doesn't work well, so Mags finds himself drawn to the side that DOES exhibit more integrity on the whole- the Bots.)
Minimus
Optimus is simple, I want him to have his g1 backstory that everyone talks about. He works in shipping as a dockworker and he's sort of just a guy. He and his buddies have an agreement to look out for each other but that's it, that's really all the leadership experience he has. He needs so much help. But he has a very strong sense of what is and isn't fair, and other people to lean on and a willingness to ask questions.
Thus: Ironhide. Not really a bodyguard here so much as a guy Optimus knows who's been around the block a few times and done more leaderly stuff and who he leans on for advice. Sort of like Kup Two: This Time More Of A Peer. Ironhide worked in mining, and he's kind of instrumental in keeping everyone alive for a while because of it; when the Autobots are underground they are UNDER GROUND. He and Dion went to Baby Miner Job School together for a little while because Dion needed a job cert for energon handling or something but he wasn't a personal friend of Optimus's until everything got going.
Ratchet is probably a closer parallel to Shockwave i swear I didn't do this on purpose. Ratchet probably parallels Shockwave in that he CAN do whatever he wants with his skills, but instead of "the most science" he wants to do "the most good" so while he's not really independently wealthy he has done a good solid amount of- actually fuck it. Nope, changing my mind. Ratchet is an ex-Decepticon who cares more about doing good than doing money and so when the Autobots start making actual waves Ratchet jumps ship in about 0.1 seconds flat. I'm riffing off TFA and the Infiltration IDW2005 comics for this. Ratchet probably disseminates anarchist literature in his free time under a pseudonym. holy shit what if Ratchet is this 'verse's "IDW-Inspired Megatron" type. Could you fucking imagine.
I don't think I'm doing that because Ratchet is kind of ruled by consequences so it'd have to look plausible before he jumped ships, but I like the idea regardless. Maybe he writes tracts up and someone else distributes them after he joins. Idk. I want him to think the Matrix and the Primacy is a load of shit though.
Prowl's not a cop. Prowl is an ex-manager type from the ground floor of a factory. He was made with the extremely not devastating nor glorious purpose to micromanage mecha, and he's good at it, but he cares a lot about the work getting done well and turns out micromanaging anyone is a bad way to get that done- you have to trust in expertise a lot of the time. Maybe he worked in a place where everyone else was machining parts to very narrow tolerances or something else super-precise like that, or I could see him working in some kind of back-end medical thing. He cares a lot about proper process. He and the Magnuses are friends.
Wheeljack is the non-Raytheon version of Shockwave. He does science but he has standards. So before the war he's on a shoestring budget expected to mostly use his talents to make things to other people's specs and finances his own experiements with a combination of his own pay and being part of a research lab that has a pool for experiments they'll pay money toward.
who else is in charge of things... i got military advice, OP, leader advice, medical, ops management, and engineering- OH. spec ops and interpersonal management (shamelessly stealing off a friend's notes for this last one.)
JAZZ! JAZZYBOT! Soundwave 1.0! Originally built and specced as a targeting/navigation calculator onboard a very turbulent ship and then swept up into experimentation after just long enough to get comfortable in the stars and observing mecha, one of very few mecha with the software and hardware suite combo that allows him to run an early version of the calculations they wanted Soundwave running to do rudimentary brain-to-brain encryption hacking and essentially mindreading (they're both not telepaths though). Jazz takes to this like a fish to mountainclimbing and fucks the hell off. Now he's possibly THE most high-powered antigovernment radical there is, except he plays that very close to his chest and doesn't talk about it much and just gets real damn good at reading people's meanings and playing doublespeak and performing trustworthiness as a gorgeous little underground schemer scamming-for-food-and-profit. I think he should be in the government actually, not really as a traitor so much as someone thrust up in there against his will who walked out and then back for the sake of disruption and revenge. Sharper (texture) than he looks; you can cut yourself on his edges if you're not careful. Fortunately he's also kind of a nice guy if you don't put him in a corner. World's greatest DGP enemy; bonds with Optimus specifically over Optimus explicitly and publicly rejecting his new DGP. Extremely "just some guy (don't look any closer or you might not want to know what you find out ;> haha)" energy.
and Smokescreen- I got no idea where he's from but I dont' want him to just be another scammer, really, I want him and Jazz to be enemies-turned-friends who met in the Autobots themselves. He could be from anywhere, though- the skill he's most useful for is keeping an eye on everyone on this inside of the Autobots and being able to handle interpersonal strife. He's like an unoffical mediator turned official mediator. Maybe he's also a miner, or he worked in an energon refinery - somewhere where you have to work in concert with people or else you cant do the job and everything gets dangerous. Or construction.
(Bonus Hot Rod- he is absolutely no part of High Command for a long time, but I kind of want him to be a delivery guy turned smuggler after he joins the 'bots. Mr nyoom zoom mailman.)
I got more the makings of a story than a real story here, and what I got needs time to settle, but there's something like-
the Matrix ends up in Optimus's hands as a result of Jazz doing actual serious sabotage. He fucks it up, it was meant to be a straight-ahead assassination. Soundwave and Megatron capitalize, either killing or having killed Megazarak, and stepping into the gap to take power entirely. In the chaos, Optimus, who is targeted mostly via Primus-Related Shenanigans, gets the matrix sort of teleported over to him. Oops, Now We Have a God-King...2! Jazz vanishes into the ether and isn't seen again for a long time.
Nominus or whoever had picked as a Primacy-successor Megazarak, and Megatron is Megazarak's successor, so Megatron is the "chosen heir" and goes to try and take the Matrix by force. Optimus meanwhile is like "no its okay i think i can use this to negotiate for a better set of wages" and instead is suddenly and even more thoroughly radicalized (more) by getting nearly assassinated (maybe Magnus comes to the rescue because killing civvie primes is against all the rules?) A series of very convenient lucky breaks (read: Jazz doing pre-Autobot specops shit) means that OP and his retinue can get tf out of dodge but oops,shit, we're in hiding now.
op has SCANDALOUS ideas about class-mobility and personal freedoms. He has shared some of these with his close friends and cohort. They kept telling him to keep his voice down; now he stops doing that. oh no, now we're a social movement? Might as well work with it. Hm. Plus this whole "true Prime" thing means that they do have to pay lip service to listening to us. Okay. We can work with this.
then blah blah blah energy crisis etc etc the autobots flee cybertron etc etc the decepticons follow idk from here every transformers continuity is about the same. i wouldnt want to do away with the robots in disguise thing.
idk the narrative will build itself. it's one of those ideas, I can feel it, I just need to let it be soup for a minute.
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