Lady Quick Switch wrote:Red Alert....Paranoia and delusions!
Paranoid personality disorder, to be more specific. To whit:
Those with the condition are hypersensitive, are easily slighted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions to validate their prejudicial ideas or biases. Paranoid individuals are eager observers. They think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger, disregarding any facts. They tend to be guarded and suspicious and have quite constricted emotional lives. Their incapacity for meaningful emotional involvement and the general pattern of isolated withdrawal often lend a quality of schizoid isolation to their life experience.
That's, uh...pretty much Red Alert's character bio right there. He hasn't quite reached those depths in the game, but he probably will before the Soundwave mess is over.
Omega Supreme, on the other hand, suffers from extreme social isolation that has left him nearly suicidal. His massive size and the problems it cause in terms of interactions with his peers (along with the military propaganda that he was fed when he was built as a superweapon in the last great war) makes it almost impossible for him to identify or sympathize with a normal Transformer. He thinks of them almost the same way that a human would think of an insect or small mammal -- intellectually he knows that they're alive and that he shouldn't hurt them without reason, but emotionally it's a challenge for him to care. He's a sociopath, basically, and he recognizes that in himself and hates it.
Lugnut is fairly stable, but his obsessive love for Megatron certainly isn't healthy.
Megatron himself is hugely narcissistic, along with having the impulse control and emotional development of a six year old child. Unlike most Megatron's, he's not a psychopath and he
does care about others and the world around him. But because of his giant ego, he 'knows' that he's the only one who can fix the problems he sees in the world, and woe be to anyone who gets in his way.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Predacon is the picture of mental health. He enjoys his work more than is strictly necessary and he can compartmentalize any feelings of empathy that might get in the way of his endeavours in mad science, but that doesn't stop him from being rational and having a clear grasp of the world around him.
Skullgrin has a textbook case of dissociative identity disorder -- his mind is split into two personalities. The cool, analytical and intelligent 'strategist' Skullgrin is his original self. But his sponsors in the gladiator's ring didn't think he was entertaining enough, so they subjected him to an illegal procedure to try and overwrite his personality with a new one. It failed, and the new 'berserker' persona only emerges when Skullgrin is enraged or his life is in mortal danger. And all of a sudden, my plans to replace him with a different plot-relevant character in a few months' time don't look so attractive.
Soundwave is in pretty much the same boat as Omega Supreme, isolated and cut off from normal Transformer society. But unlike Omega, who hates his sociopathic tendencies, Soundwave embraces what he has become. He is, however, somewhat unhealthily obsessed with getting revenge on the Autobots who made him into what he is.
I guess that leaves poor Smokescreen as the only member of my roster who has his head screwed on straight.
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