Toys, comics, cartoons, movies. All the universes. Official works and fanworks. If it's Transformers, bring it on in!
Character babble: Ricochet
I have a way of picking up relative obscure characters and being fascinated by both them and the possibilities they could bring -- if only the source material did something with them.
Ricochet (originally named Stepper, but I have my habits) is a lovely example of this phenomenon, on both counts. Granted I'm drawn towards snipers and the like, so that may be bias speaking 😁
Still, there's a waste happening here. Now granted in certain continuities or universes there's no lack in snarkbags needing anger management skills, but Ricochet has some detail to him that makes the irritability all the more interesting -- like the fact that his temper makes him hard to talk to, but he spends his time flocking around with fellow marksman-type Bluestreak. Now there's some interesting potential plot development: why does Ricochet have the patience to deal with King Chatterbox but not with the average sod? And since they go out and have friendly(-ish, lol) shooting competitions just how competitive are they? :D
The "justice" angle is also fun to mull over. Did something fire this up, or intensify it? Does Ricochet's ferociously strong sense of justice clash with more pragmatic Autobots -- and not helped one little bit by his hair-trigger temper, I'll bet.
Just so many possibilities here, ha. And that's without getting into the "gets mangled and needs a life-support auxilary system" part, whether Nightstick is involved or not. (since this element pops up in, say, the IDW universe already, it's something that could be played with even without the Targetmaster angle.)
Alas, aside from some Japanese publications (manga, including a Guidi-drawn short for United and I will own that limited edition figure one of these days, damn it), Ricochet is still basically unused despite existing since 1987. I've seen the one time he was supposedly in the background in an IDW book, and I call shenanigans on that one; Dreamwave did better, with him obviously in one of the tanks filled with Shockwave's clone projects, but alas nothing came of DW.
(a storyline with Ricochet straight-up cloned from Jazz, and I didn't get to have it. the world is unfair.)
I'm leaving aside Shattered Glass in all this, because SG is so damned weird it really is basically a different character with the same name 😁
So, yeah, missed opportunities and me nattering about the most minor of characters. Whee!



