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noperopesaredope · 8 months

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My Slightly Cringey Transformers OC

Well, well, well. Look who decided to finally give in to their inner "cringe" and make a canon-non-compliant Transformers Prime OC.

Me.

It's me.

I'm the one who decided to make a dumb OC.

Now, let me start off by saying that I have only watched Rescue Bots and about half of Transformers Prime (I'm partway through Season 2). I don't remember much about the lore, and in this instance, I don't exactly care. This OC likely breaks some lore in relation to Cybertronian history and society, and I'm not really gonna do anything about it. It's also one of those OCs that I just kinda inserted into the team and pretend that she's always been there this whole time.

I did this purely for self-indulgent reasons, because I wanted to make a big cool robot who is morally grey and will help people with their redemption arcs. Please be understanding of that fact. I'm working on just allowing myself to create "dumb" and "cringy" OCs and stories, because this is all just for fun, and why should I limit myself?

So, with that out of the way, please enjoy.

Tireslash is a relatively liked member of the Autobots, but she has a few dark secrets that she constantly worries will get her kicked out of the group. Long before the war, Tireslash was a member of the infamous criminal group known as the Ground Shakers. They were essentially like a bank robbing gang, but instead of stealing money, they stole energon and resold it on the streets. It was a very organized criminal enterprise, with carefully planned operations, separated teams of thieves, and a network of distributors. And Tireslash wasn’t just a random grunt, oh no. She was someone working on the field, actively participating in robberies and some of the more violent stuff. She led her own team and personally knew the head of the Ground Shakers (though they weren’t super close or anything).

However, eventually the organization fell apart, and most of its members were arrested, including Tireslash, whose teammates were killed during a raid, the same one in which she was eventually caught (though it is later revealed that her second in command, Firewall, actually survived and went into hiding). Tireslash was sent to prison, where she reflected on her life and began to regret her crimes.

She remained there for a long while, until one day, the war broke out. At a later point in the war, the war came to the area which her prison was in, and the prison wasn’t safe from the blasts as the battle raged on around it. The wall next to Tireslash’s cell ended up being destroyed by a stray blaster shot, and she and many other prisoners ended up escaping in the ensuing chaos. Somehow, Tireslash managed to find a small ship, and she stole it, escaping to another area across the planet. Due to this being later in the war, a lot of stuff had been destroyed, and many computers and systems with Tireslash’s criminal records in it were deleted.

Due to this (and being a more obscure criminal whose crimes occurred long ago), Tireslash was able to join the Autobots with few suspicions against her. She liked Optimus’ vibes and beliefs, and had heard about some of the more atrocious behavior of the Decepticons, something she no longer wished to be associated with.

I might make it so that Optimus has his suspicions about her past, and may have even found out about Tireslash’s crimes long ago, but after getting to know her, he was able to tell that she likely regretted her past, and had developed a good heart. He believes in second chances for many bots, and seeing how willingly Tireslash took that chance to do genuine good, Optimus decided to never mention his insight into her past. None of the other Autobots know Tireslash’s secret, and it is only at a slightly later point in the series that her past is revealed, about partway through.

This happens in an episode in which Bumblebee and Tireslash are patrolling an old ship that was a prisoner-transport-ship-turned-energon-transport-ship. Some of the old files were saved in the ship’s computer, and Bumblebee choses to go through a few of them while Tireslash continues to patrol the ship. Bumblebee accidentally ends up stumbling across Tireslash’s old prisoner files, which outline some of her past crimes and history. He is both shocked and unsure what to do with this information, and when Tireslash comes back into the room, he quickly clicks out of it and pretends he didn’t see it. This will lead to some drama later on, and at some point, while Tireslash is out, the truth will come out to the whole team, with the records appearing on the screen of the main computer and everyone staring at them. Tireslash then walks in, and freezes at the sight of her mugshot-type-picture.

She then proceeds to immediately flee the base, panicking. More drama ensues, and it is very fun (for me. Not for the characters).

But anyways, I should talk a bit about her personality.

When we first meet her, Tireslash has already had her reformation and redemption arc, so she is somewhat likable at this point (though she was already somewhat likable even back when she was a baddie). Very friendly and encouraging, Tireslash tries to see the best in almost everyone, and if any Decepticons happen throughout the series, she is likely to quickly welcome them in with open arms. She is very open minded and, despite having been a violent robber, very sympathetic when others talk about their feelings.

She also cares a lot about her friends and teammates, valuing them over everything else and protecting them with her life. This is why she was so well respected by her old team, and why she is well liked by her fellow Autobots. She puts a lot of effort into maintaining positive relationships with the people in her life, hanging out with them and lifting them up when they’re feeling down. She can also be a very good person to work with when trying to work with people who don’t work well with others and are often unfriendly. Tireslash is almost immune to feeling insulted, and even the most mean and sour of people will barely phase her.

I actually initially thought her up because I was thinking about potential Starscream Redemption AUs, and I wanted to, for funsies, make a character on the team who quickly empathizes with him for personal reasons. So if I do have any kind of Starscream Redemption in an AU where she exists, she will immediately be like “well, I guess you’re part of the family now.” He could constantly be trying to insult her and act contrary, and she’ll basically laugh it off.

Tireslash is just very easy to get along with for many people, and it can be very fun in regards to character dynamics. However, she is not without her flaws.

While she tries her best, Tireslash can admittedly have some issues regarding understanding others, and will occasionally say some pretty hurtful or insensitive things by mistake. She means well and wants to do good, but she can occasionally forget how things like death have an emotional effect on people.

In a Starscream Redemption AU, Tireslash and Arcee may have an argument over whether or not to forgive Starscream, and Tireslash unintentionally says something really insensitive things to Arcee in regards to Cliffjumper, resulting in a temporary rift in their relationship. Whilst she might be shown to have many very good points about redemption and forgiveness, Tireslash is explicitly presented as being in the wrong here. She later ends up apologizing to Arcee, and they make up, explaining their points more calmly.

Generally, Tireslash is good at working her way into people’s hearts through her friendliness and ability to shrug things off, forgiving and forgetting quite quickly. However, she is also somewhat socially awkward, and this can cause problems in a few of her relationships. She forgets about personal space a lot, which can get very uncomfortable very quickly. She is a bit too blunt, stating things that she really didn’t need to say aloud, and putting other people off.

When she was robbing and hurting people, she really didn’t seem to process the fact that her actions affect others, not thinking much about it or the morality of her actions. While she’s gotten better at that, she wasn’t always good at it. She just sometimes forgets that her actions have consequences, and that is a major flaw of her’s. Tireslash also has some impulse issues, and can be a bit triggerhappy. Again, she may be reformed and somewhat redeemed, but old habits die hard, and her slight violent tendencies is one of those habits. She can forget where to draw the line, and occasionally needs to be reminded to chill out a bit.

Tireslash is an experienced fighter, having been part of a crime syndicate after all, and while she’s developed a tamer fighting style that’s more fine tuned, her past still shows. Tireslash heavily relies on her weapons, but she actually doesn’t use her blasters all that often. That is because blasting at energon could be dangerous, and so she and her team were ordered to use their blasters as little as possible. This is why she’s best at using her blades and objects around her, tending to improvise in the middle of a fight.

She also does a lot of ambushing, trying to knock her opponents out before she even needs to fight them. But if she needs to fight, she will continue to focus on mainly knocking people out as quickly and efficiently as possible, aiming her punches more towards the head. Due to being quite clunky and large for a Femme, Tireslash often ends up being forced into the role of Tank, blocking attacks and even just hurling herself at the enemy. Her main form of attack is literally just body slamming people.

The main things that she brings to the team are fighting skills, but also her intense amounts of knowledge on Energon and gathering it, as well as conducting raids. Tireslash may be no scientist, but she was required to have a generally good understanding of it in order to do her job, so she knows a lot about how it’s stored, harvested, and how to transport it properly. She will also reveal random skills and knowledge (that make sense in the context of her backstory) which will serve as foreshadowing to her past.

Tireslash’s alt mode is probably gonna be one of those armored trucks that banks use for transporting money. This is quite useful at times, as Tireslash is able to carry various things with her, and this function is used quite frequently throughout the series when it comes to certain smaller items. She also has slightly thicker armor than most, which is very handy in battle and allows her to act as a bit of a shield for others.

Due to having been in many battles over the years, Tireslash does have a few scars, some of which cause her a bit of chronic pain. A particular example of this is one in which she got stabbed in the elbow, and really deep as well. At the time, she didn’t have much access to good medical services, so her old teammates tried to fix it themselves.

Eventually, by the time she could have been able to have it fixed, it had already mostly healed/become old. So she now has a slightly wonky left elbow that she dislikes moving. Tireslash will still insist on “powering through” the pain, but there have been times where she’s been fighting for multiple hours, and her arm gave out on her. This is why her fellow Autobots occasionally remind her to not fight with that arm for too long, and Ratchet will scold her if she does.

Tireslash’s past does come back to bite her multiple times after the others have found out the truth, like when she discovers that her old second in command and longtime friend, Firewall, has joined the Decepticons. There is a lot of angst there, especially in regards to Tireslash trying to convince her friend to come to the side of good. They actually have an argument in which we learn some of the more unsavory parts of Tireslash’s past, specifically the murder of innocent people. Tireslash was a legitimately bad person, and though she has grown a lot over the thousands of years of war, it doesn’t take away what she’s done.

It even leaves some of the other Autobots feeling conflicted, because sure, they knew that she likely did some pretty bad stuff, but hearing the specifics makes it feel a lot more real.

There’s also some stuff tied to what caused these bots to join this group and become violent criminals. We look a bit into what things like poverty and desperation did to certain bots, and how some got wrapped up in a life like that. While we don’t get to know too much about them, there is a flashback episode in which we get to see the day most of Tireslash’s team dies and she is arrested. In that episode, we get to know a bit about her old team and their legitimately sweet friendships, their hopes and dreams. We see both the kindness and ruthlessness within Tireslash, and how she views things like death and revenge.

Tireslash’s past isn’t her whole character, but it does greatly shape it. I’m hoping to show an extremely nuanced and ~messy~ character who is nonetheless somewhat likable. A character who has a very specific kinda past. A character who has a somewhat sympathetic backstory, but not completely, and has a more unsympathetic backstory than a sympathetic one. A character who has a unique perspective in regards to the Decepticons without ever having been one.

Also, I just generally wanted to create a herbo with a dark past because I’m like that.

Hope you like her decently enough, or find her vaguely interesting. Please tell me what you think. I’m trying to just let myself make fun and silly OCs without caring what others think, but I do hope that people find this character to be potentially compelling. I might make a few more, each more cringy than the last, since I just do that with Transformers. I like big cool robots and I will make big cool robots if it’s the last thing I do.

So, TFP fandom, your thoughts?

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elendiliel · 7 months

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Birds of a Feather

Another sliver-of-life bit of nonsense, this time inspired - at least in part - by an article in @novafire-is-thinking's highly recommended analysis series "Who is TFP Optimus?" ("Desire vs Destiny", if memory serves. I'd have written this down earlier, but I was trying - and ultimately failing - to chase up a reference.)

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Being a medic – even the junior medic – in an active, injury-prone team of Autobots isn’t exactly a situation that lends itself to large amounts of free time, but Field-tech Glitch had long since learned (the hard way) to carve out at least a few minutes for herself where she could. She considered total sanity greatly overrated, but staying functional very much is not. So, while the rest of Team Prime caught up on reports, homework or stasis, she was standing in the doorway of the hangar that served as their base, just watching a flock of birds in the distant sky. They were out of range of her non-optical sensors, but without her realising it, her winglets had still fanned out to their full extent, trying to track the fliers’ movements. (Had she noticed, she would have observed that that was the first time she had relaxed her normal vanadium-steel grip on her coding that much since… since leaving Detroit.)

Which meant that the sensor array on the inner surfaces of her short-range scanners could also track any movement behind her – such as the approach of one of her teammates, which caused her winglets to spring back into their default position, a little more slowly than usual. She recognised the other ‘bot – one of only two mecha whose spark signatures she could identify without pushing her sensors and processor to the point of shutdown or meltdown – and, bar any weird Star Trek-style mirror universes that might exist, any Optimus Prime in any reality was surely the definition of safe.

“What are you doing?” he asked, coming to a halt beside her. As he was about three times her height, she couldn’t usually see his expression very well, but she could easily imagine his intricate optics – much more powerful than hers – spiralling open as he followed the direction of her gaze.

“Just birdwatching.” Wasn’t that obvious?

“For what purpose?” Oh, stars. She kept forgetting that, like every other ‘bot on the team, he had known nothing but war for far longer than she had been online. Everything, for him, had to have a practical reason. Even close contact with a quintet of humans, three of them children, hadn’t completely commented out that code.

“Relaxation, I suppose. I get stressed pretty easily, and something like this, which doesn’t really need me to do anything or think too hard, often helps.” She wasn’t generally so open about her… differences… from most mecha with anyone outside her original team, but Prime wouldn’t judge her, she was sure. A thought struck her, not for the first time, and she smiled up at her leader, a little slyly. “I recommend.”

“Is that a general, or a specific recommendation?” Skies above, was that the closest she’d heard Prime come to making a joke?

“Both. And yes, I do think you’re stressed, though you hide it insanely well. You’re carrying the weight of two worlds on your shoulders and leading an outnumbered, out-gunned team permanently low on just about everything. I don’t need more than a back-of-the-envelope calculation to tell me what effect that would have on anyone, let alone someone who cares as much as you do.” Prime seemed at a loss for words, for once, so, rather than force him to find some, she changed the subject back to the previous one. “There’s another reason I like birdwatching. It reminds me of home, in a good way. Our base has a tree growing in it, and it’s my job to feed the birds that visit or nest in it.” Or rather, it had been, before a space-bridge accident had transported her to that reality.

“Why do you not do so here?” Prime seized the new topic with both servos, though only someone watching him as closely as Glitch was would have known that.

It was her turn to be momentarily lost for words. More accurately, the words were all there, but they had jumbled themselves up in her processor again. (Why couldn’t they just behave themselves, the way musical notes did?) Prime waited patiently while she sorted them out as best she could. “This place doesn’t feel – permanent enough. It’s home, but it won’t always be.” Having been a student until less than a stellar-cycle previously, Glitch knew what she was talking about in that respect. “And once you start feeding birds, it’s not a good idea to stop. They don’t usually carry significant fuel reserves, and sometimes use up the last of their energy to get to where they think they can find food. If it isn’t there… not good.” Her optics dimmed slightly at the thought.

“I did not know that,” Prime said thoughtfully. “Relatively little was known of organic worlds on our Cybertron, and even on this planet I have not had as much time to learn such things as I would like.”

“Same goes for my Cybertron,” Glitch sighed. “A lot of mecha are actually scared of organics, thanks to Sentinel blasted Prime. In fact, we’ve lost a lot of knowledge over the aeons, especially our history, and there isn’t much of a general desire to learn more.” That hadn’t always been the case, she knew from her dubiously-legal forays into Science Guild databases. “Particularly if it comes from outside the Commonwealth.” Her handlebars twitched in a kind of shrug. “But then, we’ve been at war on and off since Alpha Trion was young, if not longer. Sometimes with other species, but more often with our own kind. It’s not unexpected.”

She realised Prime was giving her a look she couldn’t decipher – not just because of the height difference. “Your Alpha Trion is alive?”

“Thankfully. He’s just about the only councilbot with the backstrut to stand up to Sentinel. Not that he takes anywhere near enough notice.” She tried to make it clear from her tone of voice that she did not want to drive any further down that road, and Prime not only got the message but complied with it.

They stood in companionable silence for a little while, just watching the distant birds. Glitch briefly wished she had a built-in magnifying lens, so that she could see them more clearly, but even had she been in her home universe, mods – especially medics’ mods – have to be earned, and she was a good few stellar-cycles away from earning that one. Sundry other thoughts flitted through her processor, and one of them found its way to her voicebox. “Did you know some humans used to believe that the future could be predicted by observing the flight of birds? Augury, they called it.”

“I did not.” Prime didn’t take his optics off the aerials he himself was observing, but he sounded curious.

“Oh, they had all kinds of superstitions before their religions became properly organised. Some still do. At least it’s no longer acceptable to use the internal systems of a slaughtered animal for predictive purposes. Eesh.” She made a face. “But if you read a lot of historical accounts, especially if they’re more than a millennium and a half old, practically every significant event is surrounded by omens and portents. Some Roman writers are particularly good. I remember one story about a naval commander who tried to judge how well he’d do in an upcoming battle from the eating patterns of some sacred chickens. They wouldn’t eat at all – probably seasick – so he had them thrown overboard, saying, “If they won’t eat, let them drink” – and went on to lose the battle. At the time, that would’ve been blamed on his disrespect for sacred creatures. I’d argue that anyone with that much arrogance and lack of concern is unlikely to make a good commander.” She grinned up at Prime again. “Luckily for us, you’re the polar opposite.”

Prime didn’t seem to have noticed the compliment. He was looking down at her with an expression she recognised after a sparkbeat. It was one she’d seen in the mirror often enough. The look of a seeker after knowledge who had found a new source of information. She had the distinct impression that Optimus Prime, bearer of the Matrix of Leadership, had been laid aside, and the mech next to her was Orion Pax, archivist and just as much a data addict as she was. Her need for knowledge and understanding, along with a strong desire for justice, might have got her into quite a bit of trouble over the centuries (which would have become a lot of trouble, had her initial incursions into Science Guild databases been noticed by somebot less sympathetic than Brainstorm), but his had led him to Megatronus’ nascent civil-rights movement, to the title of Prime, and to all the responsibilities and problems that that entailed. (In her root dictionary, “Prime” still meant “high-ranking military officer”. She had added “Matrix-bearer” to her custom dictionary, but that hadn’t overwritten the older definition.) She was glad that Orion still existed, under the persona (Latin for mask, she recalled) of Optimus, and – she had to be honest with herself – pleased that she and her store of information could bring that side of him back to full consciousness, even once in a while. Maybe, when the war was over, he could return to his beloved Hall of Records, or recreate it on Earth, and add everything he had learned on his travels around the galaxy. Be Orion again – an older and wiser Orion, true, but no longer the war-weary leader of a beleaguered faction, simply a lover and seeker of knowledge and wisdom. She could but hope.

“I would like to hear more of such things,” Prime – Orion – remarked. Then he seemed to shake himself mentally and slightly, and returned his gaze to the skies, to the birds still swooping, circling and occasionally diving towards the ground, probably aiming for some unsuspecting prey. (Well, everything needs fuel, and organics can’t live on Energon or hydrocarbons.) “Later.”

That suited Glitch; she was there in the first place because she wanted some peace and quiet, after all. But she had enjoyed their conversation, and continued to enjoy her companion’s presence. Her Ratchet occasionally, usually affectionately, called her a born philosopher – a lover of wisdom – and it occurred to her that the label would be at least as appropriate for Prime. (Knowledge and wisdom weren’t the same thing, though – what would “lover of knowledge” be? Philognoser? Yikes. Better stick to the more euphonious if less accurate term.) More than she had realised at first, he and she were, in that human phrase she liked, birds of a feather, who proverbially – and in reality – flock together.

#transformers prime #transformers animated #fanfic #autobot oc #tfp optimus prime #misplaced medic au

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