rvelchc

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I wanted to be your woman;

I wanted to be your man

I wanted to be the one that you could understand

#transformers

[rvelchc]

little bird appreciation

#transformers

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#star wars

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two birds sunbathing

#transformers

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#overwatch

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#transformers

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Megatron sensory board🎭

The co-leader of the lost light crew and Ex Decepticon leader🎭

Part four of the MTMTE sensory board "mini" series! Next sensory board/character: Ratchet!

#transformers

[rvelchc]

talking about hearing disabled!Megatron again

listen I’ve had to wear my hearing aids for 12 hours straight today and my ears physically hurt because the plastic bendy part of the tubes is scratching up my ears pretty badly, so here we go: 

(this is mostly about IDW 1 Megatron, but feel free to apply it to any Megatron because all Megatrons are excellent) 

-the helmet dampens his hearing fairly significantly, as it doesn’t have any micro-openings over his audials for sound to permeate. this is intentional as part of the design, and is a safety feature for both him and any other similar mining/heavy manual labour bots who might have similar helm designs.

-that having been said, he does still have actual hearing loss from his younger days in the mine (loud machinery in sound reflective mines/caves + lack of maintenance owing to being lower class/caste and not having the resources = not great for hearing health), so while the helm design prevented it from being more severe (at first), it still didn’t provide enough protection to actually prevent a still-significant amount of hearing damage to occur 

-on top of this, during the war he was constantly getting direct impacts to his helm, standing near heavy explosions, and otherwise very often in situations where his hearing damage had plenty of opportunity to gradually worsen for one reason or another (endless environmental noise + blunt force impacts to the audials even through his helmet is no bueno) 

-at some point during the war he developed a low grade tinnitus in both audials, which he believes may have been caused by Starscream shooting him directly in the face with either his null ray or something else, which is a thing that happened too many times and with too many different weapons for him to be able to guess which specific occasion may have ultimately caused the tinnitus. it could also have just occurred naturally, he has no idea. but he thinks it’s probably Starscream’s fault, somehow, maybe. it’s not impossible, that’s for sure. 

-the tinnitus isn’t bad enough to bother him too much most of the time, but it does irritate him when he’s in quieter moments in his hab suite and trying to settle down to write or consider strategy etc. since that’s when it’s most noticeable to him and it’s distracting whenever he actually focuses on it. it does disrupt his recharge patterns on occasion, which agitates him. 

-he never really considered his gradual loss of hearing in his youth to be that negative or scary, because of course, in the mines it’s already hard to hear anyone or anything, and open internal comms were often impractical due to their mining equipment typically interfering with their comms signals. so the mining bots generally adapted fairly well to both the noise pollution in their work areas as well as their collective general hearing problems, because they already created work arounds between themselves. 

-Terminus was also hearing disabled; Megatron refuses to ever have his hearing fully repaired even if he could, for three primary reasons: 1) it reminds him of where he came from and the struggle which originally inspired him to start writing, 2) it reminds him of Terminus, and 3) he’s personally so used to it that he considers his hearing disability to be a part of himself and his life experiences to such a degree that to attempt repairs would be to remove an important aspect of who he is– he associates it closely with his sense of identity. 

-they did use sign language in the mines whenever possible, but it was a form of Cybertronian Sign Language unique to low class/manual labour bots. most signs could be made with one servo, to allow them to continue operating certain machinery with their other servo while still talking to each other during work hours– whenever they could sign to each other without their pit bosses noticing, anyway. 

(BSL, British Sign Language, is usually two-handed. I’m aware that ASL, American Sign Language, has a lot of one-handed signs. Just mentioning this for a real world comparison for how this kind of stuff varies massively on a regional level, for those who aren’t aware!) 

-their sign language was more of a sign supported form of Cybertronian, similar to SSE (Sign Supported English) in real life, as most of them started out with reasonably functional hearing but lost hearing ability gradually. so the grammar structure etc. is more similar to spoken Cybertronian than to most other forms of signed Cybertronian.

-he uses multiple methods to interpret spoken speech and other sounds which he either struggles to hear or can’t really hear at all. only the most observant bots will notice him doing any of this. Soundwave and Ravage are the only two non-medical bots who have ever realised that he does use lip reading in a limited capacity to help “fill in” words that he can’t make out. 

-he suspects that some of the Autobot spec ops bots may have figured out some of this during the war too, but he’s not 100% sure. Jazz probably noticed on at least a few occasions, but may not have realised the extent to which Megatron relies on these “work-arounds”, or necessarily why he was using them. 

-he is aware of the fact that one of the only reasons he could actually tolerate Starscream’s constant yelling at him is because it doesn’t sound as shrill to him as it does to everyone else. Starscream’s voice would just sort of clip in and out, as far as Megatron’s concerned.

-ultimately his hearing by Cybertronian measure is far below what is considered a more “standard” operational hearing range, even without his helmet, but he’s been so used to this for the vast majority of his life that he’s totally fine with it and doesn’t want to attempt any repairs. like I said above, he considers it part of his identity, and he wants to protect/preserve that. 

-at some point on the Lost Light, Ratchet/First Aid/Velocity probably figure out the extent of Megatron’s hearing disability, and initially offer repairs or audial devices to assist in hearing, but Megatron declines and they don’t push him on it out of respect for his wishes 

-as he gets more comfortable on the Lost Light over time, he relaxes a bit and doesn’t bother stressing himself out 100% of the time trying to strain to figure out audial input as much (unless it’s critical to do so, such as when he’s on the bridge in command capacity etc.) 

-this leads to more bots figuring out that his hearing isn’t all that great, but most of them assume it’s because Megs is getting older and they likely don’t realise his hearing has been fucked for essentially forever 

-this in turn leads to a lot of old mech jokes but Megs doesn’t care and Ratchet very much does because uh oh he actually is maybe a little bit losing some audial sensitivity himself due to age and his general condition declining a bit and yes Drift he will see First Aid about it in the morning, no shouting in my audials does not help it just makes you harder to understand, please don’t do this around Rodimus or he’ll start doing it and will never stop etc. 

IDK I just really love the idea of hearing disabled!Megatron because it makes so much sense 

even if you think about it in terms of like, G1 Megatron, I can easily see one of the reasons for him yelling in that super gravelly tone literally all the time is because he can’t 100% gauge the volume/pitch of his own voice and he’s just like, fuck it 

TFP Megatron absolutely took some brutal blows to the head in the gladiatorial ring at the very least and we know he also started out doing manual labour in the mines, so there’s a very similar background to IDW 1 Megatron and a lot of this could apply to this version too 

even with Cyberverse Megatron, the reason his voice is slightly lower in pitch may very well be because he can’t hear higher frequencies so he adjusts his own voice box settings accordingly 

I’m just thinking out loud with all this (and of course I am biased in favour of any hearing disabled characters because I myself have some hearing issues lmao) but I think hearing disabled Megatron in particular just works extremely well 

it’s a concept that could work for Ratchet too though, especially in TFP/IDW 1 where he could gradually be dealing with age related audial damage etc. 

but there’s no way Megs is hearing shit through that helmet either way lmao 

#transformers

[rvelchc]

Southern Comfort (2001)

A beautiful scene featuring transgender man Robert Eades and his transgender girlfriend Lola.

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#transformers

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Necromancer 🩸💀

#dragon age

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#dragon age

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Falmer mother and child

#THIS IS EVERYTHING TO MEEE #elder scrolls #skyrim

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Wanted to try a faster render style, discord voted on fairy au from my drunk doodles a while ago.

So have an archfey Obi-Wan.

#star wars

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rapunzel's struggles

#star wars

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glóin and baby gimli

#hobbit