He wants to have friends sooooo bad. My favorite depictions of shockwave are the ones where that whole "cold, calculating, and emotionless" persona is just an act and you can see he very much *does* have emotions beneath the exterior, just emotions that are hard to read because he's not so good with tone and facial expressions. I feel like cyberverse took a lot of cues from tfa, and one of those cues was shockwave secretly being kind of a lonely hot mess was a great one.
@@AfterthymeGaming I'll be honest, a lot of the loneliness aspect is a bit up to interpretation, but I could write an entire essay on why I firmly believe that's exactly what he is. (The hot mess part is just pure canon tho lmao) This is a guy who's been hiding in enemy territory for, in the very least, 50 years. Most likely much longer than that, and all that time he's had to pretend to be someone he's not for fear of being found out. Even if he's much stronger than an autobot, he can't fight the whole of cybertron, he knows damn well getting caught means death. Imagine keeping your entire personality suppressed in favor of something palatable that appeals to the people you fucking hate, never getting attached to anyone, never letting yourself socialize beyond casual work interactions with the people you see day to day, and only seeing the people you actually care about through report calls that can only ever last a few minutes, or you risk being caught. That shit takes a toll on your psyche! I'd be coming apart at the seams after a few months of that, but this motherfucker's been holding out like that for decades, maybe even centuries. Absolute trooper, but I have to assume that's eating him up inside. You can absolutely see the hot mess aspects through 90% of his appearances as Longarm. He's dead terrified that somebody will figure him out. He makes rash decisions, he gets nervous, he's constantly calculating whether or not his head's on the chopping block, and it affects his whole charade. The only reason he never got caught until team prime came along is because most of the autobots were either too dumb or too wrapped up in their own bullshit to suspect anything, because in any other series he would've made for a terrible spy. That man is a Trainwreck. This doesn't really confirm loneliness outright, per se, but one of his lines that lives rent free in my head is "before long, this will be home." Like... This isn't a guy driven by conquest for conquest's sake. This is a man driven by longing. It's not violence out of hatred or revenge or just for the fun of it, but so he can go back to the planet he was made on, and truly call it a home. After all the fighting, the repression, and the espionage, after all he's had to endure, all he seems to want is a normal life without having to cram everything he is into a neat little nonthreatening shape half his size. That's what megatron promised him. Freedom and equality on cybertron. And he'll follow the guy who swears he can give him that until the end of time. At least that's my interpretation, he's not on screen very often and he doesn't get that many lines, so a lot of it is inferrence and headcanon, but I like to think it's a valid reading of canon.
@SWDude2710 well 2001 RID had Sky Byte, Scourge, and a pretty good Megatron interpretation. Also the Autobot brothers were all pretty good characters.
![Transformers: Cyberverse - Shockwave Appearances [Season 1]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
