Ssssooo haaaaiiii for the questionnaire ~
Ooh, this is fun... One of the things about Starscream is that he's - like lots of the others - more continuity-dependent than people give him credit for, but let me have a go at some that are reasonably consistent...
off the top of your head: notes for characterization? what are the most essential traits of this character to you (personality traits, important connections/dynamics, voice)?
He's very, very good at pretty much everything he tries, and just a little bit less good than he thinks he is; that gap between perception and reality drives a lot of his interactions with the rest of the world, both in that he over-promises and under-delivers and in that he under-rates the people he's dealing with. (And also in that it drives some of his own insecurities and his need to be the best).
Somebody drew a distinction between the throne as the seat of power, the thing that allows you to make real meaningful change, and the crown as the trappings of power, the thing that makes you feel important. Starscream, consistently, is much more into the latter than the former. He can't be satisfied with getting what he wants if the world hasn't seen him do it, and again that undercuts him in terms of real actual achievement.
And he never, ever really gives up, which is probably what I like most about him. In quite a lot of continuities, getting killed stops him only for long enough to confuse everyone.
Voice-wise, I always envisage him as a particularly unpleasant academic: he never says outright what he can imply, he's sure he's cleverer than you (and his vocabulary implies it) and he's a master of phrases that mean the exact opposite of what you might think. It's great fun.
Dynamics - whatever he's got going on with Megatron is wildly continuity-dependent; he's a bit more consistent with the rest of the Elite Trine. But I think in general he doesn't interact with people so much as with what they represent to him: The Competition; The Support Staff; and so on.
2 adjacently—do you think fandom does the above traits justice? why or why not?
The usual thing: lots of people do, and lots don't! There's certainly a set of people who flatten him into a poor abused flower in need of a white knight, which I think does him a profound injustice even in TFP (where he is most obviously and definitely abused). Conversely there are also plenty who flatten him into a scheming trsitor who is always in the wrong (which also does him an injustice, even in G1). But there are more who write him three-dimensional and variable and interesting, and there's a lot of writing using him...
3. throw this character at any other character of your choice to bounce off each other as outsider pov to each other— regardless of timeline or logistics (crossovers allowed if you're interesting about it). why this combination? what insights would they have on each other?
I imagine G1 Shockwave and Starscream both failing entirely to understand why the other is as he is: Shockwave undermines himself by not understanding the motivational element as it is, and Starscream's explicit presentation of his drivers is so very different from the emotional stuff going on under the surface that I can see him just pitting it all in the "too difficult" box and getting caught out later. Starscream, meanwhile, knows Shockwave's a lot more emotionally driven than he lets on, and a bit about why. But he doesn't reason from there to that fact that Shockwave is genuinely motivated by Finding Things Out rather than Being The Best Knower, because that's not how he operates as a scientist...
4. how do you think you would react to this character in real life and vice versa? would you prefer be a million miles out of range, be amicable classmates, or fall desperately in love? (bonus: arrange a hypothetical date between yourself and this character. getting silly with it is encouraged (fakedate them! escape a dinner date through a bathroom window!))
Stating the obvious first, I would infinitely prefer to be very significantly out of range of the giant, well-armed, evil alien robot with no sense of proportion, thankyouverymuch. But even assuming some kind of humanformer version, or positing myself s a Cybertronian - I've had a Starscream in my working life, and I would go to very considerable lengths to avoid having one in any part of my life ever again. One of the joys of him in fandom is that he creates drama, which is absolutely not a joy irl.
5. Ideal flavor of rotating for this character? crack them open and dissect them— do you want them tormented, pining, or being loved + comforted? do you have any specific scenarios you like to think about?
I want him making trouble, fundamentally.
6. weave a web of dynamics through the cast for this character: which dynamics are you most interested in? both canonically and through extrapolation/speculation— which dynamics are the richest to you, and why?
The thing about Starscream is that he does this for himself, because he quite genuinely thinks of the people around him in positional terms. That said, I don't think either canon or fanon makes enough of his leadership dynamic with the rest of the air force in particular - we see individual relationships with a few Seekers and blanket statements about his being either an amazing leader or a terrible one. I want to see him actually leading a group where he has to do it at scale and get some things wrong and some things right. And - someday when I have the skill for it - I want to write the interaction between him and Megatron and the Decepticons as a collective in leadership terms - the corrosive nature of the things they all do and the horrible vicious spiral of it. Some of which I think is consistent across continuities...
7. do you have particular niche takes on this character? defend those takes. (openly controversial takes are permitted, but also: hyper-specific headcanons which you believe in and no one else has considered enough to disagree with yet. pick a hill to die on.)
Starscream is a lot less cultured than he pretends, but he absolutely is a ballet aficionado (or Cybertronian equivalent), and - at least in IDW - is instrumental in reshaping the setup to be more frame-positive. He does this absolutely as a function of trying to get something else he wants done, initially, but then it hooks into his own feelings around his frame and he doesn't stop. Also, as a bridge player, he is one of those people who puts the opposition off by being horrifically unpleasant to his partner. And he psychs far too often.
