i post tf fic ideas

i used to do daily fic ideas. now i do sometimes fic ideas! blog posts any ships. occasionally nsfw written content. tf fic ideas may in fact be of varying quality. this is a sideblog, it can't follow you back.

484 posts

[bad-tf-fic-ideas]

Occasionally Asked Questions (updated when necessary)

Q. What's this blog and what's it for?

A. This blog is a transformative fanwork. For a year I came up with a tf fic idea every day. Then I posted it. The purpose of the blog is a creative exercise to allow me to explore different fic ideas without requiring the time commitment of writing them all.

There's been some confusion about this, but this blog is not here to be an idea-generating resource for the wider fandom. It's my project.

Q. Can I use this idea anyway?

A. Yes, you can use the bad tf fic ideas to make fanworks in any medium if you want. I would prefer that anything you use these posts for is not for profit. Otherwise, go nuts.

Q. How do I credit you?

A. If you use one of the bad tf fic ideas and you choose to credit this account, then you can just write 'inspired by ...' in your author's note and link to the post.

Q. What do I do if I think something you posted is bad? Or what if it makes me feel bad?

A. This account is pretty agnostic about ships and characters. It occasionally contains NSFW written content. It contains all sorts of themes, including ones that may make you feel bad. And I don't delete ideas for being bad (see blog title for details). You can block the blog and you won't see it in your followed tags, though, which should take care of most of these concerns.

Q. Why did you block (or soft block) my blog?

A. Many possibilities! The most common one is that I often block blogs that appear to belong to people who are still in highschool or that have these "do not interact," policies that contain a) vague criteria that might or might not include this side blog (like if they say "basic DNI criteria," or "etc.," or something), or b) specific criteria that definitely does include this side blog.

Also, if you are rude to me, I will block you.

Q. Do you accept submissions?

A. No.

Q. I'm going to send you my idea anyway!

A. I probably won't post it.

Q. How often do you post fic ideas?

A. It used to be one a day. I did that for a year. Now it's less regular. (Update: I don't even know anymore. I am still posting, but I'm slow.)

Q. OP CHANGE YOUR NAME

A. 'tf-fic-ideas-of-variable-quality' may be more accurate but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

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(438) Megatron (any) becomes aware that he, and all the characters around him, are playing out roles in a story and recognises its format (live action film, cartoon series, comic, etc.).

Anyone else might have a breakdown, but not Megatron. He immediately comes to terms with the metatext and becomes dangerously genre-savvy.

'I'm the villain, and the villain is supposed to lose in this format — but I can tell a certain kind of story,' he realises, 'I can force the text to let me win.'

It all goes pear-shaped from there.

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(437) In an effort to learn more about how to care for each other's species, June Darby and Ratchet begin to exchange knowledge of biology with one another, often using their own bodies for demonstration.

Over a few weeks, this slowly veers from "so here's how you check someone's pulse and why that's important" into much more "why, June, you have such a wonderful sacral nerve structure" territory.

Team Prime thinks this is weird, but the bots mostly just squint, raise their hands in surrender, and leave the room when they discover the two engaged in a new demonstration. It doesn't get really weird until Jack walks in on his mum testing Ratchet's hydraulic fluid suffienciey.

Now he's very upset with both of them, and he's not quite able to articulate why.

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(436) TFP Starscream gets the ability to see ghosts. He can't force them to do anything and has no real power over them, but he can see them and the stronger ones can talk to him.

Although any Starscream would doubtless turn this to his advantage (and, through hubris, his disadvantage), I think this idea works especially well for TFP Starscream specifically because giving him extra senses that he cannot corroborate with others would make him twitchy and even more paranoid. Is he hallucinating? Having wretched processor errors? Cursed by the shades of those he deactivated?

This is a font of information for Starscream and also a tremendous, anxiety-inducing distraction.

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(435) IDW Brainstorm gets himself stuck in the Animated universe. He discovers Animated Perceptor deleted his own personality to make room for more science.

This seems both counterproductive and kind of offensive to Brainstorm — both in the context of his experiences with Chromedome's self-editing behaviours and in the context of his own greatest invention being a product of profound grief.

He sets out to restore Perceptor's personality (and coincidentally trample some personal boundaries) in response.

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(434) In a distant future on a cyberformed planet Earth, the few remaining Decepticons are in charge. They are capricious rulers. They mine relentlessly and view humans as an occasionally useful but ultimately disposable species. The protectors of planet earth, the Autobots, are relegated to old legends, in which they sleep endlessly on their own home planet, locked in stasis.

Post-apocalyptic humans, having adapted to their new circumstances like grim little champions, don't take any of this lying down. Enter Spike Witwicky: a plucky youngster selected to sneak through the space bridge to Cybertron and wake the last of the Primes, Optimus Prime, from his accursed slumber.

Someone has to get rid of the Decepticons. And Optimus Prime is the only one who can, apparently.

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(433) TFP: Raf is increasingly isolated by his advanced standing in all his classes and it only gets lonelier as he grows older and the gap between himself and his peers widens. Once he goes to college to study computer science— at fifteen — he feels forgotten by his family, too.

In this vulnerable state, Raf encounters Soundwave once more. Rendered toothless by being trapped in the shadowzone, Soundwave is still capable of communicating with Raf through their combined manipulation of code and symbol.

Raf grows more and more attached to a creature who understands him effortlessly, and Soundwave seeks a kind of resurrection through human technology. Through gentle manipulation, Raf can be persuaded to assist.

How THAT ends is the writer's choice.

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(432) MegOp. After the long war, Optimus Prime's wartime leadership is no longer relevant and he struggles to adjust to peacetime more than most of the other Autobots. Amid droves of returning neutrals and rebuilding efforts, he is heavily scrutinised by what feels like everyone on the planet.

He finds himself with a lot of feelings and no ready means of self-expression. So in the grand tradition of cybertronians in this condition, he takes up poetry.

He writes about war and grief and posts it anonymously to the global network — he wants to present the work to people, to reach for understanding. But he doesn't want it to be a log of Optimus Prime's feelings, available for all to judge.

But Megatron, half a planet away and equally isolated, recognises his voice immediately. He understands perfectly. (And he's definitely judging.) He reads the posts religiously, and he stews and seethes and tries to remember that he is no longer meant to be at war with Optimus Prime.

But it's hard for Megatron to read Optimus Prime's feelings about war and grief and suffer through it in silence. Eventually, the perennial urge to fiGHT OPTIMUS PRIME overcomes him, and he begins to reply...

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(431) x-rated comedy: Tarn orders a DJD all-hands orgy as a team bonding exercise, and Kaon sets someone's bodily fluids on fire with a stray spark.

This is presented from the outsider POV of a terrified prisoner upon the ship. They can hear everything very clearly. They must listen both to Tarn's HR speech and to the sounds of Kaon setting someone on fire by accident.

Whether or not setting someone on fire actually causes the orgy to halt is dealer's choice.

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YOU'RE BACK?

I've been sitting here on my own activity page all along. Lurking.

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(430) Continuity crossover: through some unexplained mechanism upon which the plot never elaborates, Earthspark Megatron gets punted through universes and takes over the huge body of Prime Megatron while he's comatose in mid season one (the "deathless slumber" after Starscream removes the dark energon that was keeping him alive).

The point of this fic is that Earthspark Megatron is quite a different Megatron, and now he has to manage the outcomes of all the decisions Prime Megatron made to get to where he is at this time.

He also has to manage Prime Megatron's relationships. There's his — apparently extremely intense?? — relationship with Optimus Prime. But there's also all the expectations of the Decepticon personnel, some of whom are eerily familiar and yet completely different. Whole toxicology textbooks could be written about Prime Megatron's relationships with his version of Starscream and Soundwave, for example.

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(429) Jack Darby gets badly hurt in an Autobot v Decepticon battle when he interferes to save Arcee with a timely distraction. After a short period of agony, he loses his left hand and most of the arm.

Ratchet helps replace his arm with the most badass cybertornian prosthetic.

Everyone he knows, from his mum June to Agent Fowler to Sierra from school to Arcee to actual Megatron somehow, has an opinion about his missing and replaced limb — which is interesting because Jack... just doesn't have that many opinions, himself. He saved Arcee. Losing his arm is bad, sure, and there's a learning curve to the prosthetic, but he has no regrets.

Today's fic idea is: the loss of Jack's arm is a federal fucking issue to everyone who still has two arms, and not at all to Jack, who would really love to stop having this conversation already.

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(428) A little IDW/TFP crossover!

In which Brainstorm manages to convince Perceptor of the value of a time case experiment and it goes wrong. They both know they're technically not supposed to be doing it, but it's Brainstorm's (magnificent) life's work, so he's all in, and Perceptor finds it compelling enough that he convinces himself it's low risk.

The pair gets stuck in the Shadowzone where they run into Prime Soundwave. Together, the trio is just about clever and creative enough to slap together an escape system — which lands them, permanently, in the TFP universe. Perceptor and Brainstorm now have to navigate the postwar Prime setting, complete with its prickly and extra-spiky Megatron recovering from Unicron possession, its blasted dwindling Cybertronian species, its vicious predacons and its destroyed Matrix of leadership...

There are parallels everywhere but nothing is quite right. Luckily, Brainstorm and Perceptor have TFP Soundwave to guide them and introduce them.

Er. Did I say luckily...?

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(427) A fic in which Miko gets deeply into astrology. She experiences several coincidences that create the impression of accurate predictions (missing a test, a Decepticon attack, and/or a common lucky event that she misattributes to her daily horoscope, so on) and goes all in for about three months.

Bulkhead, Bumblebee and even Optimus Prime go along with it with varying degrees of extremely awkward acceptance and/or confusion. Ratchet, who is pretty conversant with astronomy in the context of astronavigation and who has never let a single thing go ever in his long life, loses his mind about it. The arguments are so loud and so childish.

Eventually, Miko receives a positive and lucky horoscope for a day in which she gets kidnapped by Breakdown to goad Bulkhead into a fight. She spends four bored hours trying to explain birthstones to Knock Out ("That doesn't — that's not — there is NO scientific — three of those are the same thing! They're all just quartz! Are you malfunctioning?") and eventually decides that provoking Knock Out into putting his rotary saw down and trying to perform actual cognitive tests on her is nowhere near as positive and lucky as the horoscope promised.

Miko decides that the awesome deterministic powers of the stars and planets have betrayed her and turns her back on them. Everyone is relieved, but nobody is more relieved than Ratchet.

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(426) This fic idea is for a fusion fic taking TF characters and dropping them into one of those low-conflict pastoral sims, like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon:

Retired miner Megatronus buys the most rundown shack on an old overrun farm with his hard-won and vastly insufficient workers' compensation money after a catastrophic workplace injury. Optimus Prime is a local historian with a messy past who comes by to learn more about some interesting artefacts he's digging up.

Rehabilitating the farm plays out as an extremely obvious metaphor for rehabilitating Megatron. Megatron's mood runs high to temper tantrums and stony silences, but Optimus manages to help with both.

Contains fluffy chickens and occasional graphic violence committed against the local population of nocturnal predators.

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(425) Crack treated seriously: Starscream embraces one of his many canonical opportunities to turn over a new leaf, but in true Starscream fashion he does it in the most intense and unhinged way possible.

He resigns his post (regardless of whether or not Megatron believes he has the authority to do so) and becomes absolutely obsessed with a new, completely mundane job. He is... opening a jewellery boutique. He is running a rust stick emporium. He is mixing his own line of low-friction polish for flight frames. He's deleting social media and retiring to herd electrogoats in the mountains.

Basically the whole cast has something to say about this.

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(424) In which rocks fall and nobody dies. Cyclonus and Whirl are trapped beneath a rockfall, crammed into a tiny space together. Cyclonus is injured and Whirl has to stick his hands — such as they are — into his insides and clamp a leaking fuel line until he can see a medic. It's a long four hours until help arrives.