where your spark resides

Lads wake up, insane new meta just dropped.

The fact that it wasn’t even intentional makes this 1000x better.

Set a course for high jinks and mild peril 💥🚀💫✨

I think about this comic by @herzspalter at least once a day, and this post from @brotoman-exe inspired a sequel.

The comic I had originally made was from the very first chapter, so I love to see this now that the comic is over, so wholesome and full of positivity ;w; Thank you so much for linking me to this, I am so happy you liked my little song comic!! This is very cute and made me smile instantly.

“The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” by Rembrandt

but

Thanks! It was a lot of different things, honestly. It’s definitely very specifically structured like a movie would be, so that was part of it. Because again, I’m essentially setting this in knightverse, even though knightverse/beeverse is basically a hypothetical at this point as it consists of one movie that hadn’t quite decided if it was a reboot or not yet. Another big part of it was the one scene in Prime where Knockout has June and Fowler in his trunk and - quite genuinely - asks them how long they’ve been dating because they bicker like an old married couple. While that was also a funny and memorable gag, it did get the gears in my head turning because - if KOBD were canon - Knockout would’ve been speaking from experience there, as a married man himself.

And that ties into how Knockout has one of the more interesting fandom influences on his character that I’ve seen. Canonically, he’s vain, self-indulgent, and not often really taken seriously for his expertise. While a lot of this would usually lend itself to the easy conclusion of fandom portraying him like… well, like they do with Rodimus for lack of a better comparison, instead there’s the collective headcanon (within the part of fandom that ships kobd) that Knockout is actually a family man. He’s a dedicated husband and has a kid. Which I love.

So with that in mind I thought, huh, this would be a movie that would be fun to watch; we’ve seen boy-meets-car ad-nauseum in TF media, and Travis Knight gave us a great girl-meets-horse car movie, but you know, that’s still a young protagonist, and still presents any of the cybertronian characters as cars before they’re presented as anything else. 

This AU on the other hand has a single mom as a protagonist, who finds out that her close friend who she thought was human is actually a car who is actually an alien robot. Rather than bonding over a shared experience that unfolds throughout the movie’s plot, they bond over shared experiences from throughout their lives - they’re both medical professionals who worked together at the same hospital in Reno, they’re both romantically lonely (June with her bad divorce and abysmal dating life, Knockout with his husband being in a coma), they’re both (as June later finds out) parents who both feel that they’ve done a shitty job by their kids (with June dealing with a custody fight at the time the plot takes place and Knockout having left his kid behind in the war when he fled). They’re very close friends who’ve spent a ton of time together. TF movies often struggle with “humanizing” the Transformers; by presenting Knockout as “human” and then subverting that, he’s established to the audience as a character before a plot device. And while the human-meets-car set up focuses on finding commonalities among their differences, best-friend-and-coworker-turns-out-to-be-a-car instead explores their differences among all that they have in common.