soundwave’s telepathy, for the ask meme?
Send me a headcanon and I'll elaborate on that headcanon
is that Soundwave isn’t actually a telepath. He’s maybe partly a telepath. He says he’s a telepath, everyone else says he’s a telepath, and I write ‘telepath’ in fics, but. I don’t think he’s a telepath. If he is a telepath, it’s a secondary factor compared to his synesthesia/empathic abilities. My reasoning is:
-Going by the traditional definition of a telepath (if you think a thought, a telepath can pick it up), if Soundwave is just a telepath, he should have no trouble reading Shockwave’s mind, as Shockwave quite obviously thinks. He thinks constantly. But Soundwave can’t get anything off of Shockwave, and it’s specifically mentioned it’s because Shockwave’s emotions were cauterized by shadowplay (iirc in the comic it was stated to be because of empurata, but that was before shadowplay/empurata were readily differentiated from each other).
-Unless I’m absolutely making this up and I don’t think I am, Soundwave also has a harder time picking up the individual thoughts of a combiner, most notably the Constructicons. I’m inferring this is because their thoughts and feelings tend to run together; like... 95% of the time the Constructicons are of a like mind and don’t disagree that often, and if they do, it’s one speaking out and the other 4-5 are laughing at them. In canon it’s defined as a ‘unity of purpose’, and was part of the reason it was hard to make combiners that worked long-term.
-In his monologues, Soundwave hardly (if ever) refers to thoughts--it’s usually emotions, or emotions-then-thoughts.
-Soundwave’s ability to pick up electronic transmissions is never really explained or explored beyond him being able to hear + disrupt them when the plot calls for it, but it definitely doesn’t feel like he’s particularly good at it. If he was, wouldn’t he have just spent his whole time eavesdropping on Autobot transmissions and they never would’ve been able to keep secrets from the Decepticons?
So tl;dr I use telepath because that’s the easiest functional equivalent I can find for Soundwave’s outlier ability, because ‘empath with synesthesia and limited telepathic and/or electronic sensitivity’ is really a mouthful.
