I wish I had it in me to really write something long and detailed instead of just writing about the long and detailed things I want to write, but if some good Transformers fic about what being at war is like, I'd definitely wanna read it.
Because the reality of warfare is that it's often boring as shit.
If you read any real account of war, the majority of it is so banal -- it's just shift-changes, running endless mock-skirmishes, keeping people busy and endlessly wondering where the next meal is gonna come and how. The parts where war movies cut to fancy rooms with maps projected on the walls, during those times soldiers aren't just suspended in time or put away in boxes like toys, they'll be still at the camps or in the trenches, keeping watch or sleeping or cooking or fucking around, and a lot of times how a camp is when it's not in the middle of an engagement tells you much more of what those people are like instead of how they act when they're shooting at someone.
Me, I love me some high-stakes strategy chess where the big minds are trying to guess at what the other force is about to do, as well as visceral and bloody high battlefield drama -- but there's so much about Cybertron's society that would make for incredibly interesting banality, too, like how they're a society with arts but not much free time, with very elaborate self-expression but is still highly fungible as far as any individual member of that society is concerned. For a majority of the cast, being at war would probably mean way more leisure and way less structure than what they're used to. Think of the potential in that.
This is also why I keep thinking about how there's a definite gap in analysis where people don't consider that the Autobots are as much a conscript army as the Decepticons, really -- part of being a professional soldier is that you're trained to deal with the fighting better, which makes the most high-stress parts less stressful but ironically makes coping with the banality harder than it would be for a conscript. Fighting a war is dehumanising for all participant, regardless of the context you're getting shot/shelled at, but for characters whose identities are rooted in that dehumanisation, there's also potential for real healing in being around a mixed group that has to reckon itself according to the people in it when nobody is getting shot at, either.
There's also a good opportunity to look at how the arc of war, especially after mechanised warfare became more and more prominent, has turned kind of... self-perpetuating, and how becoming more soldier, less whatever-they-were-before-war contributes to that. Honestly, TF keeps flirting with the idea that war is hell and that there's an inherent tragedy to warfare, but it never quite gets there because "war" and "battle" are treated as synonymous so often.
(I honestly blame getting back into Basara for this, because ironically for being as goofy as it is, it's actually pretty good at being thematically anti-war while being boisterous shonen.)
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