A/N: When working with Brawl I found that he tended to lean more towards 'anger' than 'fear', so his phobia isn't as 'phobic' as I would have hoped.
Only one more until the end.
Brawl
Katagelophobia: the fear of ridicule.
He wasn't stupid.
He didn't think of himself as a genius, though. One of the last things he wanted to be thought of as was a genius, a nerd, an intellect. Intelligence always seems to bring its own special kind of stupidity along with it. All one had to do was look at Starscream to see a perfect example.
Brawl wasn't a genius. He wasn't stupid enough for that.
There were different types of intellects. There were those with book smarts and battle smarts and tactical smarts and street smarts. Business geniuses who could sell you your own processor before you knew it was missing. Artistic wonders who could, with a few strokes of a brush, capture a mech's soul and bring onlookers to tears with joy and sorrow and other emotions.
Supposedly. Maybe. He had never had much interest in the fine arts.
Brawl preferred those with a useful talent. A tactician who could plan for a hundred different contingents and change strategy at a moment's notice. A warrior who knew how to inspire his fellow men into the fiery heart of battle and make then believe with all their spark that they were gods and couldn't be touched. An interrogator who could strip a mech's processor of all useful information within moments and never leave a trace.
True genius. Useful. Important.
Brawl didn't have any of that.
He was a tank, literally and figuratively. Not the fastest thing on the battlefield, sure, but you didn't need to be fast when you could blow half a mech's torso off at two thousand yards. And he was tough enough to take a direct hit from just about any weapon other than Megatron's fusion cannon and receive hardly worse than cosmetic damage. His alt mode could cross any terrain except mud with ease, and had enough power to drag prisoners or comrades or stuff that needed dragging.
He was strong. He was tough. He was useful, in his own specific tank-like way.
And yet they called him stupid.
Brawl found that very confusing and more than a little hypocritical. It wasn't as if the common Decepticon could be considered intelligent, or even very smart. He'd seen Seekers fly into walls. Constructicons blow themselves up. Cassettes pick seriously one-sided fights.
And for some reason, that didn't seem to matter to the other Decepticons. They seemed to assume that a mech's speed was an accurate representation of his processor power. That because he was big and slow on the outside, he must be the same on the inside. That he was only good for a laugh and for combining with his team members. That he has no use on his own.
It was frustrating. He wasn't very smart, yes, but he wasn't stupid. He didn't need to be mocked by mechs that he could deactivate with his bare hands. It was annoying to enter a room and hear chuckling in the corner as some 'bot recounted whatever he had done on that particular mission. And yes, sometimes he got confused and went the wrong direction or blew up the wrong target or ran over a teammate. But in the end it really didn't count for much.
He was a war machine, rolled off the assembly line specifically to fight for the Decepticons. He didn't need an advanced processor to handle whatever 'bots did with an advanced processor. He had a targeting computer and a battle computer and enough firepower to destroy anything standing in front of point B when he left point A.
He was useful in a very specific way, and that way did not include higher processing functions.
Most of the other Decepticons were exactly the same as him. Megatron's army was primarily war builds, and war builds were not known for their great intelligence. They were all built to fight, to live and die on the battlefield in a glorious clash of metal against metal. And sure there was the occasional mutant that made the common fighter look less intelligent then a pre-programmed drone. Bastards like Starscream, a scientist and a military model who could defeat almost any of his subordinates in both war games and mind games. But for the most part, they were all the same. Equals.
They weren't better than him, no matter what delusions they were operating under.
He was built for war, and that was all that mattered.
