#ravwave

(Ravage POV. If you are up to date on this fic, you know that Bill Fowler has rescued Soundblaster, who is, of course, Viridian aka Blackcat's brother.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “Things are different now,” said Soundwave, before it could get more awkward.

“Indeed they are,” said Fowler. “So when are you coming to get your boy? We’ll want to wake him up before you get here.”

Viridian tensed, looking up at me sharply. She wanted him back at once, and she wanted to go with whoever went to Nevada to get him; so did I, but I knew the risk.

“We’ll get him back today,” I said. “We’ll send the W.A.P.—”

“The what?” Fowler looked at us as though he were shocked. “Did I mishear you?” I had no idea what he’d thought I’d said.

“The Weak Anthropic Principle,” Jazz explained, laughing; he understood what else the letters had meant that I didn’t. Soundwave must have understood it as well, because he covered his face. I wondered what they thought I would say if they shared it with me, but I gave them the side-eye and shrugged it off.

“It’s the ship that I came home from the Lost Light on,” I told Fowler. “Do you want them to come direct to the base in Nevada? The quicker we get off the line, and the quicker our ship gets in and out…the less likely it is that Thunderblast will notice we’ve got an encrypted connection going and tell Galvatron that she thinks we’re up to shenanigans.”

“I’ll send coordinates,” said Fowler.

“Thank you again; we are unbelievably grateful.” I sighed. There was a lot to do to prepare—like fixing his room up, for one thing.

“I’ve got kids. They’re all grown now, but I absolutely believe you. EDC out.”

Viridian jumped off my lap and headed off to her own room.

I started thinking about the logistics of adding Wingthing to the household; once she was fully manumitted, she would probably want to move out, but that would be a transition we couldn’t make until she and our son were ready for it. They’d both had a lot of shocks recently.

Soundwave and I had deliberated the optics and ethics of the issue, but the three of us had taken the larger habsuite the Housing Committee had offered us after Jazz had been with us for several months without incident. That meant that Viridian had a room of her own at the opposite end of the hab from the room that Soundwave and I shared (and also shared with Jazz most nights) and there was a room next to ours that Jazz recharged in when he chose to, instead of Viridian being in the tiny room that my birdsibs had shared before they moved out and Jazz having slept every night in our berth until Frenzy moved in with some new friends she’d made after deciding that she was a femme. There was another room across from Viridian’s, but only the one, and Wingthing would need to stay there as well…

I started writing up requisition forms for a recharge perch, and a few other things I thought Wingthing might need. Jazz was in the kitchen with Soundwave, who had been working a recipe out in his mind when they had gone in; he wanted to make something special for Soundblaster.

“C’mon, Princess, you know there’s some whores in this house,” Jazz said, giggling. “I can think of at least three.”

“Shut up,” Soundwave grumbled, but he was still laughing inside. And still keeping it under surface thought level. Was it really going to offend me? After living with Drift in Rodion, and the entirety of the Conclave in Kaon?

I looked up from the desk and into the kitchen. “So what was so funny? Come on, you two.”

“It wasn’t that funny,” said Soundwave, but he still made a snorting noise.

“It was funny!” Jazz protested. “When I told him that the phrase those letters refer to is one that I think of sometimes in connection with you…”

And there it was, because Soundwave couldn’t keep it off surface anymore. He had once heard Jazz sing the whole song at a karaoke bar, to the enthralled amusement and horrification of numerous humans who had been present at the time (and possibly hadn't known that Jazz has a valve just like everyone else).

I was almost offended, because some of the Autobots who had served on Earth had used that word (which also meant ‘cat’) to refer to me in a way I had really disliked…but I caught myself laughing, so I just threw a wadded up sheet of flimsy Viridian had left on my desk at them both.

{Gross.}

That was Viridian, reappearing from out of her room with a bag in her mouth. {Put these in Blast’s room.}  She dropped it at Soundwave’s feet.  {This is stuff that I knew he would like that I’ve saved for him.}

“You can do that,” I told her, but Soundwave did pick it up and go into the room with her.

This show is where a lot of people get the idea that Soundwave's cassettes are his children (or pets). Again, you can write whatever you want, but if you're writing Soundwave's cassettes as his children, you are not writing Single Father of the Year Soundwave like you think you are, because now you have made him a parent who sends his children off to fight battles for him. Child soldiers aren't uwu cute.

3. In Beast Wars, Ravage appears briefly, but unlike the other characters who are reusing names from G1 as homages to their predecessors, Ravage is actually the same character. For some reason, after the Decepticons lost the war, Ravage performed some service that was crucial to Cybertron and was reformatted in a bigger butcher body to act as an agent for the Tripredacus Council.

4. The idea that Ravage is incredibly old, older than both Soundwave and Megatron, comes from the Transformers Marvel comics. Contrary to popular opinion, it never says this in the IDW comics, though many of the IDW writers were fans of those comics. In that universe Ravage and Nightstalker were siblings and members of the Autobot guard but Ravage slew the Autobot leader and joined the Decepticons.

5. Japanese G1 has had a lot of fun with Ravage, particularly in various manga. In one manga Jaguar (Ravage) has a son also named Jaguar whom s/he has to make an end of because he's dishonourable, but the main thing to remember about Ravage in JG1 is that they took the idea that Ravage is an actual time traveller from Beast Wars and RAN WITH IT. Ravage appears in the second (and much cleaner) half of the Kiss Players manga that few people have read because they hated the first half so much. The KP girls call her "Black Panther Man" and complain because s/he's always interfering with the quests the Sparkbots have sent them on.

They eventually learn that the Sparkbots are servants of Unicron and they've been duped into bringing back things that can be used to make Unicron come back. Oops. Ravage was just trying to be helpful, but they didn't want to listen to anything that was said.

Ravage being a time traveller is kind of important with respect to my own writing, though as of current point in the Voice of Stanix series (chapter 4 of Recovered Light) Ravage is mostly unaware that she had a different life and outcome in another timeline. Fortunately AU import Rewind can't tell her about it because it hadn't happened yet.

6. We don't know much about Bayverse Ravage (the very spiky one) because she ends up real dead real fast, but she can apparently cough up nanites that turn into smaller robots. Whether that's a native ability or she just swallowed them, IDK.

7. IDW 2005 is one of the most seminal portrayals of Ravage. I would like to note that the idea that Ravage is Soundwave's parent, father or mother apparently comes from an offhand comment John Barber made at a convention after someone asked if the cassettes were Soundwave's kids. It's not actually canonical in the comics themselves, it was something along the lines of "if anyone is the parent here, it's Ravage".

Strictly speaking, nobody in IDW 2005 has parents. The upper classes who are forged and live in families are all adopted from hot spots. Also, there's no evidence that Ravage is appreciably older than Soundwave. He was out walking around on his own, even though he was definitely in a bad situation, therefore, in that society, he was an adult--and so was Ravage.

Pre-cassettification, some artists do show Ravage walking around in a bipedal "root" mode. This was taken from Ravage by Ratbat, although Mastermind Creations made a Reformatted IDW Ravage figure that looks exactly like Ravage does in IDW and this figure can stand either in biped or quad positions.

I thought their first meeting was really rather romantic because Soundwave was raving but he knew Ravage's name and had clearly been spending a bit of time in Ravage's mind, enough that he liked it and wanted to make friends at the very least.

(Soundwave in IDW is pretty damn autistic and he has a lot of trouble controlling his telepathic powers, which is why he is in the Dead End with the junkies and castoff bots; he's not able to function very well because he's never sure which thoughts are his own.)

But they are both neurodivergent and while he was in a worse place than Ravage was when they met, it is my opinion that Ravage sharing autistic self-support hacks with Soundwave doesn't make her his parent. She wasn't his therapist, she had no such training. And it's a little insulting to state that disabled people helping each other with self-care in a friendship or romantic relationship parentifies or infantilises them.

When I talk about Soundwave/Ravage in IDW, I'm talking about a relationship that is never confirmed in canon, and may very well be unintended by some of the authors (IDW had a problem in that there were numerous authors and they all had different and conflicting views of the characters and universe), but is clearly visible to me. Although everything in my writing is my own creation based on various TF canons I did not create, the relationship I write between them is the one I actually saw when reading.

In MTMTE, it looks an awful lot like Megatron, Soundwave and Ravage may have been a triad that has been broken up by Megatron's defection--and Riptide even grills Ravage about it, though all he's offered is a face full of claws if he doesn't shut up. In fact, Soundwave sent Ravage aboard the Lost Light with instructions to help Megatron if he was pulling a scam on the Autobots, bring him home if he was a prisoner...or kill him if he was serious about this Autobot bullshit. (There's no evidence in IDW that anyone has a natural cassette alt mode. Everyone who was a cassette in G1 is either something else--for instance, Rewind is a "data slug" -- OR it's explicitly brought up in text that reformatting as a cassette was a punishment that was forced upon them. In Ravage's case, Senator Ratbat forced her to undergo it in order to not be separated from Soundwave because he wanted to own him (her) himself. Soundwave later puts Ratbat into a cassette so he can see how he likes it.)

The other thing in IDW that points heavily to Soundwave/Ravage, aside from their first canonical meeting, which is a classic meet cute if you ignore the differences in body shape, is his reaction to her death.

Yes, Soundwave is a telepath, and a very powerful one, but there is no evidence in IDW that he can read someone's mind from another planet in another solar system in a different quadrant of the galaxy. If he could do that, the Decepticons would be ruling the entire galaxy.

There are only two situations in the IDW comics in which the death of a mech that someone cares for affects them so profoundly, causing physical collapse and in some cases illness or death. The first such situation is spark twinning. This is caused by the split of a spark before the spark is embodied (whether by the hot spot, a blacksmith, or a factory). Spark twins may be different colours but usually look a bit alike. (I've had Ravage and Glit as spark twins in several RPs, for example. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe are the classical pair, and most everyone from Devisiun is a spark twin in the IDW-verse.)

Soundwave was forged and Ravage is a cold construct, and they don't look a thing like each other. They can't be spark twins.

That leaves the other option which is conjunx endura (spouses) who have a spark bond.

Anyhow, one of the major things to remember about IDW Ravage is that Megatron actually respects Ravage, so much so that Ravage is utterly exempt from the obligation to be subservient and selfless in his presence. Ravage and Megatron have an argument in MTMTE and at one point, a completely vexed Ravage rakes claws across Megatron's face. IDW Megatron is known to have been a violent leader among the Decepticons, but Ravage has no fear of him, and all Megatron does is hold Ravage's paw still so it won't happen again, and they continue their discussion.

Ravage is also important enough to Megatron that Ravage gets fridged by Tarn in order to motivate Megatron to break his vow of pacifism to kill Tarn. This made me madder than anything else I have ever read in a book/comic book. So mad that I wrote 500,000 words and counting of what began as an MTMTE fix-it fic but ended up becoming its own AU.

I also wondered what they thought they were doing given that they also did a Beast Wars comic and they were going to have trouble with that if Ravage was actually dead.

8. In TFP, my understanding is that Ravage died on Cybertron and that we don't actually know whether Ravage was a whole person like usual or another "symbiote" drone like TFP Laserbeak.

9. I haven't read much of IDW 2019 or Skybound. Skybound appears to have been a relationship where Ravage and Soundwave are not equals and Ravage's personhood is not fully confirmed. I ... don't have any interest in reading it if Ravage isn't a person.

10. I actually thought we might get RavWave in Earthspark after I saw the animatic of the deleted scenes, because remember, that looks like a cat, but the way they talk to her and about her (Ravage is for sure a she in ES) it's clear that she IS a grown-ass Decepticon officer, and when they're indulging in PDA, Starscream looks more than vaguely embarrassed.) But we'll never know because they fired all the writers and went back to "Decepticons are all evil" for Season 2 because a bunch of geewunnners on TFW2005 started a campaign of bad reviews about Earthspark being too "woke" for making sevreal characters female and one character non-binary.

11. The Unicron Trilogy in Japanese G1 is actually set up by Kiss Players, so the Ravage drones that appear in it are probably clones of the original Ravage. (I'm sorry. But I actually kind of like Kiss Players. There are things about it that I don't care for, it's overly bimbofied, but in the last few episodes of the first season there was an actual plot that was actually interesting. I'd rather KP than RID 2015, which is gross copaganda. All of the upsetting things in KP's first season are supposed to be upsetting and a sign that things aren't right. The behaviour of Optimus? Supposed to be upsetting and a sign that things aren't right with HIM.)

12. Ravage doesn't appear in Cyberverse. I ship Hot Rod/Soundwave in Cyberverse.

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My fics began as an MTMTE fix-it fic. The plan was for Ravage to realise that Megatron was, in fact, serious as a heart attack about this Autobot business, and likely to allow himself to be executed, leaving Ravage dead in the water after and possibly incarcerated by Autobots, with a lot of space to traverse before she could get home to Sanctuary Station and Soundwave. So she contacts Misfire, who's secretly a member of Soundwave's intelligence corps (he was in fact canonically Brainstorm's handler), and asks him to bring her home, and hilarity ensues.

(These things do happen. It's not much of a spoiler because the existence of subsequent fics set on Sanctuary with Ravage and Soundwave together kind of more or less make it clear that this happens.)

However, the backstory between Ravage and Soundwave is a bit more baroque than what you see in IDW because Ravage worked for the Senate and for Ratbat in IDW but that's exactly all they said about it, and my Soundwave is Senator Shockwave's younger brother and a disowned noble, and there is a reason he is so delighted to see Ravage in the slums of Rodion, because he actually thought she was dead. Go read it. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

However, I'm a fan of Japanese G1. It's often very silly, but it's fun as well. The IDW writers routinely butchered the Japanese G1 characters. For instance Star Saber in his original canon was not a murder-crazed fundamentalist religious fanatic. He was a goofy heroic Autobot leader who had adopted a human kid and was more than a little pretentious but actually not that much of an asshole. (He's a little like Allmight in MHA tbh.)

So I uh, started including that material and those versions of the characters.

Now, in Japanese G1, there are actually five cats and six birds that were sold in Japanese figure releases (usually in pairs). Ravage and Laserbeak, same colours, sold together. Buzzsaw is alone but Ravage is known to have had a brother; Howlback and Garboil, same colours, sold together; Pounce and Wingspan, same colours, sold together, and referred to as clones in Headmasters. There's an orange cat named Stripes who belongs to Blaster and an orange bird named Sundor who belonged to him too.

There's a white cat named Glit who is a surgeon and a white bird named Squawktalk who belonged to Soundwave.

Glit and Sundor were sold together because they were characters in Kiss Players. I presume that Glit and Squawktalk, and Sundor and Stripes, were separated somehow, but in my fic, they are "clones" of a sort. Most G1 cassette cats have this boxy setup around their heads. The cats that come with the birds in these sets do not.

So the important thing to know in terms of Voice of Stanix is:

Senator Ratbat, and Emirate Balto of Stanix, had all of these characters built for black ops. The cats are meant to be the infiltrators and saboteurs, seducers and assassins; the birds guard from on high, are snipers, and steal.

The rest of the Senate found out about it and ordered them all destroyed because Ratbat used CNA from extinct Predacons (Tripredacus feliformata, in the case of the cats) to make them.

Of course Ratbat just kept Ravage and two of the birds and they sold the others to various other entities under the table. Glit is able to become a surgeon because he and Squawk were bought by Pharma's family and Glit is trained by Ratchet. Howlback was Decepticon Military Police (Cobalt Sentries) so she was sold to Iaconian Metaforensics and trained by Prowl. And the others ended up in other places...

Anyhow, in many canons including mine Ravage was an important member of the Decepticon core command from the very beginning, and did a lot of very crucial work for the cause. Which is what puts her in the awkward position she finds herself in, in VOS, of trying to figure out what she and Soundwave are going to do about and for the rest of the Decepticons--obviously the ones who just want to do violence can go be with Galvatron, but what about the ones who really did want a society of equality?

Soundwave, for various reasons, refuses to be the official leader of anything. But Ravage isn't willing to bow to Galvatron...

This is very cursory I know, but Ravage appears in a lot more continuities than Howlback or Glit did, and I also wanted to address the common headcanons that some people think are actual canon, but don't really qualify to be canon, and some of the portrayals of Ravage that run very much counter to the person we're told she is in official materials. There's always TFWiki.

I also tried to tell you a little bit about Ravage in my world, but I do want people to read my fics, so unless you're one of the people who cannot, for whatever reason, and want to ask me privately, this is as much information as I'm willing to drop to people who might not want to be spoiled.

By the way--and this in no way refers to you, whoever you are, but rather to other people who have said some very obnoxious things to and about me--

A lot of people seem to have all sorts of ideas about what I'm writing that would be dispelled immediately if they ever read the work and judged it on its own merits. They hear "Soundwave/Ravage" and imagine their own preferred versions of the characters and their own associated headcanons, then add sex to that, and get disgusted. But those aren't the characters or headcanons I'm writing.

This is annoying, especially when they send me multi-paragraph direct messages on Dreamwidth or here telling me why it upsets them so much and they're clearly talking about a story and a character dynamic that I did not write. I always want to tell them to leave that comment on the fic they actually read for the writer of that one, because it's absolutely not me or my fic they're talking about.

Laserbeak and Buzzsaw are essentially Ravage's siblings.

In my fic, the six cats found throughout multiple canons (Ravage, Pounce, Stalker, Glit, Howlback and Stripes) and the six birds that just "happen" to match them (Laserbeak, Wingspan, Buzzsaw, Squawktalk, Garboil and Sundor) were produced by the government as a black ops project underwritten by Emirate Balto of Stanix, a certain lord not yet named in the text (he's Mirage's dad! but I haven't come up with a name for him yet!) and Senator Ratbat.

Each cat has a bird partner whose colours match theirs. Ravage and Laserbeak, for example, are black and red. Pounce and Wingspan are white, teal and purple. And so on. The cats were produced to be special agents designed to infiltrate, record, seduce, sabotage and assassinate enemies. The birds were special agents designed to support them by scouting, watching from on high, sniping, and other similar activities. They have Predacon genetic material and had to be produced as sparklings and raised together. So all 12 of them regard each other as siblings, although some of those relationships are fractured--for instance, Ravage refuses to speak to Stripes under any circumstances.

The project was defunded when the Senate found out exactly how dangerous it was. The twelve agents, still minors, were sold under the table as slaves, though they were ordered to be destroyed. Ravage and Laserbeak and Buzzsaw and Stalker were bought out by Ratbat himself. and Stalker died shortly thereafter (modulo bigger spoiler).

So Laserbeak and Buzzsaw are shown in canon walking along the street with Ravage when Soundwave encounters them and calls out to Ravage by name, even though (modulo big spoilers unique to my fic) he supposedly hasn't met her before. She decides to take him in immediately, though the other two argue with her. Of course, eventually they also become fond of him. So when she is forced to become a cassette to stay with him, by Senator Ratbat, they go along with it.

The other cats and birds were sold to other people. More, largely minor spoilers: Glit and Squawktalk were sold to Pharma's family and Ratchet got them in the divorce. Eventually, because they became Decepticons, they ended up with Soundwave, although Glit operates mostly independently because he's a surgeon and not a fighter. Pharma and Ratchet (mostly Ratchet) provided the bulk of Glit's medical training.

Howlback and Garboil were sold to Iaconian Metaforensics and Howlback was personally trained in police work by Prowl. Canon never says that they ended up with Soundwave; that's just fanon based on the fact that nobody ever canonically stated who the other hosts among the Decepticons are.

Pounce and Wingspan appeared canonically in Headmasters. Pounce is eventually the mother of Leozack and Lyzack. They are part of a group of Decepticon minicons not associated with Soundwave at all.

That leaves Stripes and Sundor. They're Autobots, so naturally they never became Soundwave's cassettes either, they are Blaster's deployers. They were purchased by the office of the Primal Censor, which is responsible for all pre-Autobot official broadcast media supervision before the war, and that's where Blaster got them.

As for Rumble and Frenzy, they were originally in canon part of Megatron's old mining crew and he ordered Soundwave to take them on, presumably because Soundwave is able to handle many people that other Decepticon commanders find ungovernable, which the twins certainly are.

There are many other cassettes associated with Soundwave and/or Soundblaster in various TF canons. (Soundblaster is not, in my fic, a reformatted Soundwave; he's another person entirely and I think I've given enough spoilers away here to people who might want to read this). However, it never says where he got them in canon, and many of them are one-off characters who appear only in one episode, or were made as toys but never shown on screen because they were a cool idea.

When and if these characters appear in VOS, they will be people who were assigned to Soundwave (or perhaps not!) later on by Megatron. Slugfest, for example, worked with Soundwave in VOS. We know this because Ravage is upset about having had to kill him in "A Few Small Repairs". And Flipsides appears (or rather doesn't) in "Designs and Persuasions" when Miko and Rumble mention that Flipsides told them stuff but nobody can find her on the Station. (Flipsides is Rosanna's twin and it is never clear whether Soundwave had anything to do with her or not!)

That leaves Ratbat. Canonically, Ratbat is actually Senator Ratbat, who was reformatted during the fall of the Senate by Soundwave as vengeance for the things that he did to Ravage and her siblings. This is also the case in VOS.