how weird do gestalt groups look to regular tfs?

[redthedragon]

still in my Stunticons feels. Anyway this is more of a general Gestalt Thing, and stuff, but like.

okay so most TFs don't really have that many interpersonal things, as far as we see. Like, in canon, transformers don't really have families so much as like, friends, possibly romantic interests, and That's It. All of those are things you have to go out and actively get. You're not onlined with friends or anything already built in, and i imagine it's rude to be mean to a newbuild but that doesn't mean that they have like. friends and people to rely on. (Some medias does mentors but i don't like that personally :P)

And then you get gestalts like the Stunticons, or to a lesser degree split spark twins or whatever, who pop out of the ground with a person or multiple people attached already. What is that, like, like in the fabric of Cybertronian society? Must be fucking weird.

Comments

[caiusmajor]

Tbh I headcanon that Decepticons tend to come in sets, normally of 3 or 5, to counteract their otherwise generally antisocial coding. It's not usually as strong a bond as the combiners, but for example, Seekers and Insecticons come in threes, Soundwave and his cassettes, Reflector's clones or whatever.

So it's kind of less weird in 'Con culture. With Autobots otoh...yeah, they think combiners are fucking WEIRD. Doesn't help that the first one they got was five JETS, either.

[redthedragon]

Oh yeah, the Decepticons especially in G1 are a lot more... pod-y. Cliquey. They have their friends they stick with. Whereas the Autobots are all like "friends with everyone" in a way that reads to me like they're just, like, interacting with everyone lol.

I do like the idea of them coming in sets, but I also kind of like the idea that maybe like- maybe it's a class thing or something? Different builds come in different amounts, maybe. I've always had a headcanon that "lower-caste"/manual-alt TFs are more social than their higher-caste/more delicate framed counterparts.

[yvannairie]

Yeah, also their whole society is structured on a million atomized interactions every day, and the roles where you interact let alone influence lots of people at once are explicitly prestige jobs. Someone else always having a say when it comes to an individual in a gestalt fucks with that so bad, like, how do they societally deal with it if half a gestalt is loyal to you and the other isn't?

[redthedragon]

OWO. you are absolutely onto something- i didn't even think about that LOL. Like the worst parts of human capitalist social norms turned up to eleven there.
Now I want to write about it lol