#thundercracker confession

First - I am begging some of y'all to check yourself before you wreck yourself. Please for the love of Primus look up the terms you are using. Yes, first actual confession here - the anon that said Megatron canonically groomed Orion Pax still lives rent free in my head.

And that ties into point two - "Carrier" is a common noun, not an indicator of bigotry. Confession number two, I don't like the word either! I've been pregnant twice, and besides my joking about the word invoking images of the USS Kitty Hawk more than a pregnant Ratchet, the idea of being called a "Carrier" for being the one to give birth actually does squick me out a little.

But that's the key word there - "squick." It's personal to me, not an indication of someone else's moral depravity or whatever.

We can and should discuss how misogyny and other types of bigotry show up in Transformers media and fan works, but I can guarantee that singular words (aside, of course, from slurs) generally have little to no bearing on these conversations. Heck, adding in a gender spectrum or including mechpreg also doesn't automatically result in misogyny, nor does the exclusion of those concepts. (Top/bottom discourse, character designs of male vs female Transformers, etc.)

Third, and to end on a less serious note, I am unreasonably delighted by the slight under-bite/lantern jaw Dan Mora gives to Thundercracker in the Skybound comics. I actually like how the artists on those books also managed to use design to differentiate Skywarp and Starscream too, but Thundercracker's lil bulldog jaw makes me so happy. They gave him his lil boomies and the Autobrand too, and that dang underbite is the reason I even started reading those comics.

Here's a top 5 for most attractive Transformer feet:

5. Optimus Prime

4. Thundercracker

3. Prowl

2. Springer

1. Blaster

it doesn't matter what he does. he does something good? hate him. he does something bad? still hate him. he does something neutral? he needs to fuck off from the story. he's in the background of a scene without any lines? can he please leave. when he died in cyberverse i rejoiced and almost cried tears of joy. i skip his panels in all the comics he appears in. i got so pissed that he had his own spotlight comic and when he got to make his own movie. i hate that he got his own arc in skybound. i loved prime because he wasn't there and i refused to read the aligned novels because he was there. when i heard that he died i decided to actually read it because i wanted to see him dead. i hate that he gets shipped at all. i respect fans shipping him with others, but i blocked all of the tags that have his name and his ships and mute artists who draw him all the time because i would have high blood pressure. if an artist i follow draws him one time i just glaze over it and scroll really quick so that i don't have to see him.

he just angers me. it doesn't matter to me if his portrayal in all of the continuities differ. good, bad, or neutral, i want him gone from the story. there really is no reason to hate him, and that's okay i think. it's like if someone hates bumblebee because he has been in every transformers media as one of the main autobots ever since his decades long hiatus. as a bumblebee fan, i don't understand those people. it makes no sense to hate him since he is a friendly and charismatic character. but at the same time, i do connect with them in their hatred. sometimes you just need to hate on a character without needing to justify it. because why not? why should we like characters that we don't have strong opinions on just because the rest of the fandom tells us to? why should we conform to the opinions of the masses? why should i force myself to like a character in one iteration, and hate another version of him in another continuity? in fact, i can hate all of him, no matter what version and backstory. i could just not bring myself to like thundercracker. and that's fine.