Transformers Generation 1/Characters

Yeah, there's a whole slew of them. LET'S GET THEM ALL!

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Autobots

• Transformers Generation 1

Decepticons

• Transformers Generation 1

Cybertronian Empire

Liege Maximo

One of the Thirteen Original Transformers, created as a force of evil to keep the balance with his good counterpart, Prima. He's implied to be the founder of the Decepticons, and he left Cybertron with several followers to create a Cybertronian Empire that Terraforms conquered planets.

• Expy: Of Loki.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In an alternate timeline, he pulled a Heel Face Turn and sacrificed his Spark to stop that reality's Unicron.
• Man Behind the Man: to Jhiaxus.
• One-Scene Wonder
• Orcus on His Throne
• Out of Focus: Originally Liege Maximo was the evil member of the Thirteen and the cause of all darkness in the Cybertronian race before this role was given to the Fallen and Maximo was pushed into the background. Looking to be averted as of 2016/2017.

Jhiaxus

Function: Air Space Commander

"The only thing I fear... is myself."

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The general of the Liege Maximo's Cybertronian Empire in the G2 comics. Alternatively, Jhiaxus was a crew member on the Ark-1 and serves as Nova Prime's pet mad scientist; his obsession with forcing Cybertronian evolution has led him to introduce gender to the Transformer race, modify his own body into a form resembling that of Bayformer Starscream, and the creation of both gestalt and Micromaster technology.

• Canis Latinicus / Punny Name / Take That: Well aware that the Transformers Generation 2 series would probably be cancelled before it ran very many issues due to unrealistic sales expectations, Simon Furman named him after the pun "Gee, axe us!"
• Dark and Troubled Past: He is forced to confront his in Generation 2 issue #3. He was once a violent sadist, and has since cultivated a calm and reasonable personality in an effort to convince himself that he is a moral person. It turns out that's just a facade, and that he's still as bad as he always was. Naturally instead of admitting this, he's determined to kill Prime and the Autobots so they can't remind him of the truth of who he is.
• The Evil Genius: To Nova Prime's Big Bad in the IDW comics.
• Evil Mentor: To Shockwave, again from IDW.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Or the closest equivalent for a race of mechanical lifeforms, at any rate. He's even willing to experiment on himself, resulting in a body that has far more in common with the Transformer designs of the recent movies than Generation 1.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: IDW Jhiaxus had a very poor track record when it came to his experiments. The end result of his attempt to introduce gender to a genderless species, Arcee, became a psychotic and violent mass-murderer obsessed with tracking him down and murdering him as slowly and painfully as possible; and Monstructor, his effort at producing a gestalt, is a nigh-indestructible and vicious killing machine, about the only one that didn't go wrong his space bridge invention.
• Mad Scientist
• The Undead: Like all Dead Universe Transformers.

Mindset

• Mauve Shirt
• Meaningful Name: Meta example; he shows the mindset of the Imperials to the reader.
• Robo-Family: All Imperials are related to some Autobot or Decepticon via "budding", but he's one of the few ones whose ancestor is revealed, the Combaticon leader Onslaught.

Rook

• Foil: To Jhiaxus. He keeps his cool while Jhiaxus is slowly losing it throughout the comic.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Justified example. He leaves because Jhiaxus is out of control and he needs to inform the Liege Maximo.

Humans

Spike Witwicky

The Autobots' iconic human friend.

• A Boy and His X: A boy and his robotic best friend. And that would be Bumblebee.
• Badass Abnormal: After becoming Fortress Maximus
• Official Couple: With Carly.

Sparkplug Witwicky

Father of Spike and Buster.

• Badass Grandpa
• Badass Normal
• The Patriarch

Buster Witwicky

Spike's younger brother, and the Autobots' friend in the Marvel Comics.

• Badass Normal
• Badass Bookworm
• Blue Eyes
• Dumb Blonde: Averted, as he's actually quite smart.
• Heroes Want Redheads
• Real Men Wear Pink: He wears a pink shirt.
• Official Couple: With Jesse.

Chip Chase

Spike's wheelchair-bound best friend.

• Badass Bookworm
• Handicapped Badass
• Nerd Glasses
• What Happened to the Mouse?: He disappears from the show after Season 2. Considering he's never same in the room as Carly, one can only assume that bros did not come before hoes when Spike Witwicky was involved.

Carly

Spike's girlfriend and future wife.

• Badass Bookworm
• Dumb Blonde: Averted, as she's studied at MIT.
• Hair of Gold
• Official Couple: With Spike.
• Only One Name: Well presumably she became Carly Witwicky after marriage but her maiden name is a mystery.

Daniel Witwicky

Spike and Carly's son.

• Badass Adorable
• Jumped At the Call: And he did much better than Hot Rod.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: For his father.
• Tagalong Kid

Doctor Arkeville

A Mad Scientist ally of Megatron who specializes in mind-control in the Season 1 Three-Parter The Ultimate Doom, in a bid to become the ruler of Earth once Megatron has harvested all its energy.

• Even Evil Has Standards: Even though Doctor Arkeville happily enslaves human beings by the hundreds with his hyno-chip implants, he draws the line at cold-blooded murder, and is visibly horrified by Megatron's callous proposal of leaving them to die in favor of gathering energy, showing clear concern for the safety and welfare of his slaves over his conquest of Earth.
• Hollywood Cyborg: The top of his scalp and his left hand are metallic-mechanical replacement of biological ones.
• Obviously Evil: Well, the word Evil is in his name, after all.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: He's not seen after Starscream leaves him on Cybertron.

Jesse

Buster's girlfriend in the Marvel comics

• All Women Are Lustful: Not that Buster's complaining.
• Fiery Redhead
• Official Couple: With Buster.

Marissa Faireborn

The Autobots' main contact/ally in the Earth Defense Command. Daughter of Flint and Lady Jaye.

• The Captain
• Fiery Redhead
• Legal Jailbait: In the infamous Kiss Players, she's twenty, and looks twelve for no apparent reason.
• Reasonable Authority Figure
• Writers Cannot Do Math: In Season 3 of cartoon (which takes place circa 2005/2006), Marissa is (seemingly) in full command of the EDC and looks to be in her early to mid twenties. Logically this means she was born sometime in the mid to late 1980s yet Lady Jaye was rather noticeably not pregnant in G.I. Joe.

Other

Nova Prime

A Matrix-bearer and leader of the Cybertronian people from countless millions of years before the time of Optimus Prime, Nova Prime ruled in a time when the Cybertronian race was enjoying a golden age of prosperity and power. Seeing his species as the greatest form of life in the universe and thus deserving of its rulership, the expansionist Nova gathered a crew of loyal and likeminded Transformers to crew a vast spaceship known as the Ark-1; ostensibly theirs was a mission of exploration and mapping the galaxy, but in reality their goal was one of conquest. Fortunately for most other forms of life, the Ark-1 and its crew vanished into the Benzuli Expanse shortly into its maiden voyage and was presumed destroyed with all hands. This turned out not to be the case, however; instead of destroying them, the Benzuli Expanse flung Nova Prime and his crew into the Dead Universe, its fell energies transforming them until they were neither living nor dead. Now, millions of years later, Nemesis Prime, still holding to his expansionist ideals, intends to merge the Dead Universe with our own in order to create a reality where Cybertronian life reigns supreme, but how much of this is his own plan and how much of it comes from the creeping, malevolent sentience which sustains him cannot be determined...

• Adaptational Heroism: Every time he appears outside of IDW, he's recast as a better person either being a straight up hero or corrupted by outside sources.
• Big Bad: For the IDW comics prior to All Hail Megatron.
• Dark Is Edgy
• Dark Is Evil
• Evil Costume Switch: A variation; when we first see Nova prime in a flashback his colour scheme is predominantly white, but as Nemesis Prime his colour scheme is inverted.
• The Undead

Quintessons

Quintesson: Guilty or innocent? Quintesson Judge: Innocent. Quintesson: Feed them to the Sharkticons.

• Abusive Precursors: In those continuities where the Quintessons colonized Cybertron in the distant past and built robotic slaves who would eventually turn against their masters and become Autobots and Decepticons. Needless to say, the Quintessons aren't happy about being given the boot by their former servants, and seek to either re-enslave or destroy all Cybertronians.
• Always Chaotic Evil
• Combat Tentacles
• Depending on the Writer: There's always the question of whether or not they created the Cybertronians, but who made them is up in the air.
• Hanging Judge
• Heel Face Turn: EU materials reveal that the Quintesson who restored Optimus Prime to life, Klementia, brought this about in his kind using his good graces with the Autobots to negotiate an armistice before spearheading several peaceful reforms in Quintesson society.
• Jerkass
• Kangaroo Court: They are fond of simply declaring everybody who they try as "innocent", then dropping them into pits full of Sharkticons anyway. A bailiff admit pleading for one's life "sometimes helps... but not often."
• Squishy Wizard: The Quintessons are technological geniuses but can be defeated by their own Sharkticons (who are about Bumblebee's size).
• Toyless Toyline Characters: By modern standards a Quintesson toy is virtually impossible and certainly not profitable. Forget having one in the '80s.
• War for Fun and Profit: Quintessons were war profiteers in the original cartoon.

Primus

The Lord of Light and counterpart of Unicron, Primus is the Creator God of the Transformers. The spark of each Transformer is a piece of his lifeforce, and combined, they form his essence, the Allspark. He created the Thirteen original Transformers to man his body in planet mode, but when The Fallen betrayed him, Primus was forced to go into stasis, in an effort to prevent Unicron from finding Cybertron and devouring it, which would destroy that universe. Like his brother and his creations, Primus is a multiversal singularity, meaning there is only one version of Primus in the vast multiverse.

• Bigger Good
• Genius Loci: He is Cybertron, or, at least, trapped within Cybertron. It varies Depending on the Writer.
• Manipulative Bastard: And he's supposed to be the "good" one.
• Minor Major Character
• Omniscient Morality License: Everything he does is in some way to combat Unicron and protect the universe, but that doesn't mean its convenient or pleasant for the little guys.
• Physical God
• World of Badass: He is Cybertron. And nobody would deny the Transformers are Badass.

Unicron

The primordial personification of Chaos and Darkness, Unicron is the ultimate force of evil in Transformers--not simply in Generation 1, but in all iterations of the brand. Like his brother and archenemy Primus, Unicron is a multiversal singularity--in all the myriad realities of the transformers universe, there is only one Unicron. The Chaosbringer has seen our existence, our reality, and he has taken offense; Unicron's greatest desire is to consume and annihilate all of creation, all possible realms of existence, until naught remains but an infinite void of absolute nothingness, at the center of which he shall sleep forever more, his tasks complete. You cannot destroy Unicron permanently; blow up his physical body, and he simply reforms in another part of the multiverse to continue his never-ending quest to devour all reality.

• Always a Bigger Fish: While they haven't come into direct conflict (yet), Unicron has just recently been trumped as the biggest threat in the franchise, by the Elder Gods.
• As Long as There Is Evil: Eating planets is just something he does for shits and giggles. While he does get energy from the death of the inhabitants, he doesn't need it. As long as someone in the universe has a negative thought, Unicron will live.
• Bigger Bad
• Cosmic Horror: Those who have seen only the movie believe Unicron to be little more than a Planet Eater, but the truth of the matter is that Unicron consumes all things--matter, existence, time and space, all of these are mere morsels snapped up to sate his unholy hunger, however briefly.
• Deal with the Devil: Occasionally the Chaosbringer will see fit to empower mortal creatures with a fragment of his essence, upgrading their bodies and granting them new abilities in order to carry out whatever tasks he requires of them. The most well-known of these Heralds of Unicron is Galvatron, though there have been many others, and not all of them exhibit the same degree of independence and free will as Galvatron did. Unicron cares little for his pawns, however, and in the end his goals call for their consumption as well.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Service to Unicron leads to madness and loss of self.
• Eye Beams
• Genius Loci
• It's All About Me: His idea of a perfect reality is him and him alone.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Dark God utterly loathes existence with a passion, and is slowly making good on his goal of consuming all of creation; Unicron has already devoured more than a fifth of all possible universes.
• Physical God: Specifically, a dark god.
• Planet Eater: When Unicron says he wants to be alone, he damn well does something about it. If he eats everything, then all will be a part of him, and he will finally be alone.
• The Red Baron: The Dark God, the Chaos-Bringer.
• Satan: the equivalent in Transformer culture.
• Ultimate Evil: As befitting robo-satan, verging on Robo-Angara-Mainyu.

The Fallen

One of the Thirteen Original Transformers created at the dawn of time by Primus to crew his planetary shell, the being once known as Megatronus Prime served as the guardian of entropy, overseeing the orderly dissolution of all things in preparation for the next creation. Destruction came to fascinate him too much, however, and as he forgot his original purpose he gave himself to Unicron, turning on his former master and his brethren amongst the Thirteen. The Fallen, as he is now known, is a cosmic force of evil, his physical form little more than a cage for the raging inferno of chaotic power which constitutes his essence; he can only be defeated, never destroyed. Like Primus, Unicron, and the other members of the Thirteen, The Fallen is a multiversal singularity--as such, The Fallen of Dreamwave Comics and The Fallen from the Michael Bay movies are the same character.

• Deal with the Devil: Like his dread master, The Fallen has been known to bargain with and empower the lesser mortals of the multiverse, tempting them with the forbidden promises of dark science and entropic magic that they might see to his dark designs.
• The Dragon: To Unicron.
• Physical God
• Satan: A more direct analogue than Unicron.
• Wreathed in Flames: The eldritch energies contained within The Fallen's body cause him to appear constantly ablaze in unholy fire.