arctic-hands:

I think Airachnid got shafted. She’s like the only one in the chain of command to express any concern for the Deception troops, and she got punished for it, AND Megatron didn’t even have the decency to off her himself. It would have been so cool to watch her be second in command and how she and Megatron would bounce off each other, but she was utterly wasted as a character imo

I agree. When she was trying to make the Decepticons leave Earth to avoid Unicron (before being stopped by Soundwave), the Vehicons seemed alright with it, Knockout seemed alright with it, Breakdown didn’t complain.

As evil, selfish and flawed as she is, Airachnid was relatively polite to other Decepticons while part of the group and I don’t remember her hitting or threatening any Vehicons nor actively plotting against Megatron – despite not wanting to be there in the first place. Compared to Starscream, that should have felt like a big improvement.

This all shows just how dysfunctional Megatron’s army was at that point, he was too eager to kill anyone.

And I think Soundwave maybe felt threatened by Airachnid, since he presented her traitorous behavior to Megatron by quoting a few of her lines to him without much context. It seemed like she was saying “Megatron has fallen! I, Starscream Airachnid, now lead the Decepticons!” instead of her intended “Megatron is either dead or Unicron has him, let’s leave this exploding planet.”