I just like the concept of Starscream being more experienced, especially in terms of leadership. Sentinel berates him once he has captured him, but he also says that it had been pretty difficult to find the high guard, which means Starscream had managed to carefully and competently hide, feed and direct many troops.

Dee (just writing it like this because I feel dumb just saying “D” in the middle of a sentence lol), on the other hand, rose to the occasion with sudden violence and improvised rhetoric. He was good with it! He got all the old guys (gender-neutral) to shout his name and make a public spectacle of their new loyalty! Good for you my little dude, but being skilled with your mouth and words doesn’t mean you actually know what you’re doing!

Dee is an isolated twenty-year-old runaway driven mainly by revenge and betrayal who has murderous intent towards +*+The System+*+, which he has no clue how to dismantle effectively without the most basic gut feeling aka “kill the leader” (= Kill Sentinel; Kill Optimus, who reiterates the Primacy, which is now tainted in his eyes).

That doesn’t work. The system will still stand without The Leader TM. He also has no theory on how Said System works, differently from some iterations like IDW Megatron, nor does he have a solid mutual-aid net of friends/“colleagues”/fellow abused bots that would follow him like TFP Megatron has in characters like TFP Soundwave or Dreadwing.

He has no clue what the hell he is supposed to do, especially regarding how to command an army of people who are twice (or more) his age. But Starscream does. It is fascinating because, if done well, it could give Starscream an actual and rooted reason why he wants Megatron out: he is too naive, too emotional, too young to do this efficiently.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED Talk (Grammarly made fun of me with the 🤓 emoji because it feels like I’ve written a paragraph on a PhD thesis but that’s what writing a PhD thesis does to you 😭).