#transformers dreamwave

Starscream uses his thrusters as weapons! Badass, they then fight in the air as they spiral down towards earth

Classic Megastar Sex scene

Megatron gets humiliated and is now serving Starscream

Book 3:

Megatron gains control over the Decepticons again, Skywarp is second in command, stuff happens. In the end they are fighting the big bad guy, and Starscream decides that now is the time to take over the decepticons, then they start fighting each other

Megatron was about to lose when suddenly Omega Sentinel saves him! If I had a nickel for everytime Megatron gets saved by a huge bot from Starscream...

Starscream comes back and attacks, Megatron is again saved by another bot

More chaos happens, I wanted to include this because that's hilarious

Classic Starscream

Then, after all that, Megatron is like, "wanna be second in command again?" I am at a loss for words but also not surprised.

And on the individual character angle. From what I remember, IDW doesn’t play with this much despite swapping combiner members a lot, but if you swap a team member out how would that affect the psychology of the combiner? Like we know new members can dictate effectiveness (Prowl and his polycule), but not how or in what ways aside from the self evident ones. Would a new member make the gestalt more timid, more aggressive, more courageous? For that matter, what dictates a combiner’s personality? Usually they don’t even have one. Name one character trait of Menasor as his own bot. Are their personalities, if they have them, derived from the most prominent aspects of their components (i.e. Bruticus is more greedy)? An average of that attribute across the group? The leader, but still affected by the others? Independent entirely, but influenced by the group’s willingness to work together? Does the number of members complicate or simplify things?

Drone combiners are a whole other very weird but much less interesting can of worms. Energon’s combiners I’d lump in there too but the idea of the combined form being the guiding intelligence over 5 separate bodies is both similar to some characters we see in RID 15 and very distinct in its own right, just in my opinion not fitting for the traditional combiner teams as characters.