Web Animation / Transformers Combaticons

Transformers: Combaticons is an animated series made by Keyan Carlile, creator of Transformers Animated Season 4, on Youtube. It features the eponymous Decepticon team as they make their way across the galaxy in a variety of hijinks-filled misadventures after the end of the war on Cybertron.

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Tropes featured in this series include:

• Adaptational Badass:
  • Professor Princess was merely a run-of-the-mill human supervillain in Transformers Animated. THAT Professor Princess is merely an extension of a multiversal singularity capable of destroying entire planets and universes at whim.
  • ROTF Jolt's appearance during the credits has him having inflicted a lot of damage to Brawl during their arena fight.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Brawl is nowhere near as bad-tempered as his canon counterpart, instead being one of the few sane bots among the Combaticons who's mostly resigned himself to just living through the antics of his comrades and is a massive fan of "Humans Animated".
• Aliens of London: Brawl features a Scottish accent that is absent from his canon counterpart.
• Alternate Self: Professor Princess is a multiversal singularity with counterparts in every single universe, with her original self from Transformers: Animated being shown alongside counterparts in the style of The Transformers and Transformers: Prime. The Combaticons also encounter many other versions of themselves from throughout the Transformers franchise.
• Angrish: Onslaught is seen muttering complete gibberish as he struggles to keep his rage in check while going into the cockpit of the Combaticons' spaceship to chew Vortex out for her reckless piloting.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Swindle manages to give Professor Princess pause by asking her why she's using violence to eliminate violence from the multiverse, causing her to enter a Villainous Breakdown that erases her from existence.
  Swindle: Professor Princess! I want to negotiate. (...) You wanna destroy all life in the multiverse in order to eliminate violence, eh?
  Professor Princess: That is correct! And in 13 seconds, Professor Princess shall!
  Swindle: I've got a pitch for ya! Ending all life's kinda ... violent. Seems more violent than any Transformer's capable of. If you wanna eliminate violence most effectively, you've probably got to start with ... yourself. Right?
• Badass Boast: When the Combaticons are at Professor Princess's mercy, Blast Off prays for Primus to save them which causes Professor Princess to loudly yell "I KILLED PRIMUS!"
• Bait-and-Switch: Swindle seems to have betrayed the Combaticons for Professor Princess, only to prove he's still on their side by using her hypocrisy against her. It turns out he was doing it as part of The Bet with Onslaught (that Onslaught never made; Swindle forged his signature).
• Beleaguered Boss: Onslaught is stuck with having to keep a bunch of chaotic idiots in line, something that irritates him to no end. As he puts it in the pilot episode:
  Onslaught: I merely want one cycle without CHAOS! Is that too much to ask?!
• Benevolent Boss: Even if he's always being driven up the wall by the antics of his subordinates, Onslaught does care for them, which is shown when he attempts to reassure Vortex that even if she's not the most powerful or intelligent bot around, she still matters in her own unique way.
• Bookends: Onslaught begins coughing shortly after the pilot opens. In The Stinger, Astrotrain has a coughing fit.
• Brick Joke: The pilot opens with a furious Onslaught asking who broke the pipes in the team's ship. At the end of the episode, Brawl admits that he did it.
• The Cameo: A few characters from across the Transformers universe that haven't showed up yet make appearances in the credits:
  • Onslaught faces off against many different versions of Sideways.
  • Tarn is seen facing off against Vortex on an unknown planet.
  • Swindle is in hot water with Bludgeon and Straxus as he tries to talk his way out of trouble.
  • Blast Off runs away from Rail Racer.
  • Brawl fights Jolt in an arena.
• Cessation of Existence: Professor Princess is erased from reality after Swindle calls out her hypocrisy, and that includes all her alternate counterparts too. However, The Stinger implies she might return somehow.
• Contemplate Our Navels: Brawl gets oddly introspective after Professor Princess is defeated.
  Brawl: Infinite realities means infinite possibilities. Somewhere in the deep cosmic sea may lie a dimension where "Humans Animated" was renewed for a fourth season. If there is even a one percent chance of that outcome, I will hereby-(starts rambling as the scene changes to Blast Off)
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Combaticons attempt to take on Professor Princess by combining into Bruticus. It doesn't go so well since Professor Princess is a literal multiversal singularity who's really, really powerful.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Onslaught's orders during a battle on Protohex caused Vortex to lose everyone she ever loved, which also causes her to develop self-worth issues.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Swindle gets a cosmic entity who claims to have killed Primus to destroy herself by pointing out the biggest flaw in her motivations.
• Drives Like Crazy: Vortex is especially guilty of this, piloting the Combaticons' spaceship with reckless abandon while it's being pursued by the World-Ender's forces in the pilot episode.
• Evil Laugh: Nightbird and Astrotrain laugh maniacally at how the Combaticons are helping them achieve their goals without even knowing it... only for Astrotrain to end up coughing after laughing for a bit, which he passes off to Nightbird as the result of a sinus infection.
• Fashionable Asymmetry:
  • Vortex's arms have very different designs, whereas her legs are the same except for the feet. Also, one of her helicopter blades is a different color.
  • Onslaught has a cannon on one arm and a pincer claw on the other.
• Final Solution: After witnessing the bickering between Onslaught and Vortex, Professor Princess decides that the only way to end violence once and for all is to wipe out every single universe.
• Gainax Ending: As it turns out, the entire pilot episode was an episode of a TV program the Combaticons were watching. Onslaught even asks "What did we just watch?!.
• Gender Flip: Vortex, for the first time in any Tranformers-related media, is depicted as female in this series.
• Great Offscreen War: As explained by Chris McFeely, Optimus Prime used the Matrix of Leadership to save Cybertron from Professor Princess.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In a post credits scene, Astrotrain and Nightbird are revealed to be manipulating the Combaticons for their own agenda.
• Headbutting Heroes: Onslaught and Vortex. Onslaught wants an orderly team, but Vortex really gets on his nerves.
• Hypocrite: Professor Princess claims to hate violence, yet she's perfectly willing to use violent means such as destroying entire universes to "bring peace" to the multiverse. Swindle calls her out on this by pointing out how what she's doing contradicts her stated aims.
• Knight Templar: All Professor Princess wants is to bring peace to the universe. Problem is, it involves destroying entire planets and races just because they're fighting each other, and it later extends all the way to universes, making her claims ring quite hollow.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Blast Off, Brawl, and Swindle are visibly unnerved when Professor Princess makes her appearance after her fleet is wrecked.
• Medium Blending: Professor Princess turns the Combaticons into various kinds of bread, as in bread painted in their respective colors and shot in live-action.
  • Swindle briefly turns into an action figure version of his G1 self when the Combaticons land in Professor Princess's dimension.
  • Professor Princess makes a live-action human arm come out of her mouth to grab Onslaught with, which Keyan states to be the arm of her voice actor.
• The Multiverse: Professor Princess herself is a multiversal singularity, and the Combaticons run into alternate versions of themselves after Professor Princess drops them into a portal to her own dimension.
• Only Sane Man: Brawl's blase attitude makes him this compared to Onslaught, Vortex, Swindle, and Blast Off. Although Blast Off himself becomes this when everyone is too distracted with their petty squabbles and hobbies to fight off the enemy fleet.
• Puff of Logic: How Professor Princess meets her end.
• Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits: The Combaticons here are closer to a Dysfunction Junction that Onslaught barely manages to hold together thanks all the idiosyncrasies they possess, be it Vortex's insubordination, Blast Off's neuroticism, or Swindle's constant sales pitches, to the point that their combined form Bruticus has difficulty keeping itself united. Of course, all that is thrown out the window when the Combaticons do decide to band together.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Brawl tries to take his leave after noticing how Professor Princess' essence is about to go boom. He doesn't get far and still ends up stranded alongside the other Combaticons.
• Shout-Out:
  • Swindle takes a lot of cues from his Transformers: Animated counterpart, especially with his Snake Oil Salesman-like mannerisms. Of course, he ends up encountering his Animated self during the Multiverse sequence.
  • Brawl mourns the cancellation of "Humans Animated" after Swindle brings it up, a nod to how Transformers Animated was cancelled after three seasons.
  • When Blast Off tries launching the turrets, he instead has the theme song to Transformers: Cybertron blasting from a pair of speakers.
  • "Humans Animated" has a few:
    • Thundercracker is named a writer, an allusion to his screenwriting career from the IDW comics.
    • Wildrider is named the (regular) director, a cue to how Animated Wildrider played the role of a director as a part of Team Stunticon's ruse to free Megatron.
    • Bulkhead is named the art director as well, an allusion to how Animated Bulkhead took up art as a hobby.
  • When Onslaught and Vortex argue over who is in command of the Combaticons' ship after meeting Professor Princess, Onslaught mentions the Decepticon High Council and the Decepticon Justice Division.
  • Professor Princess is shown destroying the planet Brobdingnag, aka the planet of giants from the Generation 1 episode "Child's Play".
  • During the multiverse sequence, Onslaught is attacked by his counterpart from the Transformers Film Series, Vortex and Blast Off are shot at by their Generation 1 and Transformers: War for Cybertron selves, Swindle has an encounter with his counterpart from Transformers: Animated, and Brawl gets possessed by his G1, movie, and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron versions before they are ejected via a kick by Brawl's IDW self. The team also gain the color schemes of the Shattered Glass and G2 Combaticons in a deleted scene.
• Show Within a Show:
  • Brawl likes to watch "Humans Animated", a Bland-Name Product version of Transformers Animated.
  • The events of the pilot episode are revealed to have all been part of an episode of Chris McFeely's Transformers: The Basics that the Combaticons were watching. They're completely confused.
• Skewed Priorities: After Blast Off destroys the fleet guarding Professor Princess and the Combaticons' spaceship with the bombs Swindle left inside the ship, Swindle mourns how they cost him 60 thousand credits apiece and the fact he's now down to seven of them rather than worry about the Combaticons losing their spaceship.
• Take That!: As Professor Princess destroys the multiverse, Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015), The Beast Within, the Transformers Film Series, and Transformers: Kiss Players are seen among those destroyed. Most of the destruction is reversed in the end as revealed in a message written in Cybertronian, though Kiss Players is conspicuously absent.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Swindle proposes to Professor Princess that if she wants to eliminate violence from the multiverse, then she should start with herself as wiping out the multiverse tops any other act of violence. Professor Princess actually goes through with it, wailing away as she and the multiversal extensions of herself are erased.
• Tempting Fate:
  • After Onslaught finds out that one of the Combaticons ruptured the pipes on their spaceship, Blast Off promises that everything else will be perfectly normal. Brawl then inquires if Blast Off and Onslaught ever looked out the window, which reveals that their ship is engaged with a fleet, due to Vortex being in the pilot's seat.
  • What happens when Vortex wipes out the initial enemy squadron:
  Vortex: The galaxy bends to my whim! Come at me! (cue the rest of Professor Princess' fleet exiting hyperspace) Oh no, never mind.
• The Stinger: The pilot has two. One is about Nightbird and Astrotrain plotting their next move, while the other is a Freeze-Frame Bonus implying that Professor Princess is Not Quite Dead.
• Unwitting Pawn: In The Stinger, Nightbird mentions that the Combaticons have been playing their parts in her plans for them flawlessly without even realizing that they're being played.
• Villainous Breakdown: Professor Princess ends up crying like a baby as she erases herself from the multiverse after Swindle points out the hypocrisy in her actions

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