soundwaveās telepathy, for the ask meme?
Send me a headcanon and I'll elaborate on that headcanon
is that Soundwave isnāt actually a telepath. Heās maybe partly a telepath. He says heās a telepath, everyone else says heās a telepath, and I write ātelepathā in fics, but. I donāt think heās a telepath. If he is a telepath, itās a secondary factor compared to his synesthesia/empathic abilities. My reasoning is:
-Going by the traditional definition of a telepath (if you think a thought, a telepath can pick it up), if Soundwave is just a telepath, he should have no trouble reading Shockwaveās mind, as Shockwave quite obviously thinks. He thinks constantly. But Soundwave canāt get anything off of Shockwave, and itās specifically mentioned itās because Shockwaveās emotions were cauterized by shadowplay (iirc in the comic it was stated to be because of empurata, but that was before shadowplay/empurata were readily differentiated from each other).
-Unless Iām absolutely making this up and I donāt think I am, Soundwave also has a harder time picking up the individual thoughts of a combiner, most notably the Constructicons. Iām inferring this is because their thoughts and feelings tend to run together; like... 95% of the time the Constructicons are of a like mind and donāt disagree that often, and if they do, itās one speaking out and the other 4-5 are laughing at them. In canon itās defined as a āunity of purposeā, and was part of the reason it was hard to make combiners that worked long-term.
-In his monologues, Soundwave hardly (if ever) refers to thoughts--itās usually emotions, or emotions-then-thoughts.
-Soundwaveās ability to pick up electronic transmissions is never really explained or explored beyond him being able to hear + disrupt them when the plot calls for it, but it definitely doesnāt feel like heās particularly good at it. If he was, wouldnāt he have just spent his whole time eavesdropping on Autobot transmissions and they never wouldāve been able to keep secrets from the Decepticons?
So tl;dr I use telepath because thatās the easiest functional equivalent I can find for Soundwaveās outlier ability, because āempath with synesthesia and limited telepathic and/or electronic sensitivityā is really a mouthful.
