All of the humans in Armada and Energon.

 

They’re not forgettable, but they are some of the most annoying fictional characters ever made.

 

Restricting to characters that actually appeared in fiction, most of the Pretenders for me.

I know they started with six each and they were all shown in the Marvel series, but I can only name three Autobots and four Decepticons of the first wave of Pretenders. And from everything that came after, only Thunderwing and Bludgeon made an impression. I know what Bludgeon's team mates look like, but their names... And the Autobot Pretenders from that wave...they featured in a Marvel comic and I know one was called Doubleheader because he had two heads (and his role in Roberts' Eugenisis novel), but that's where it ends: one was a walrus who played Ismael/Ahab and another one. There was also an Autobot Mega Pretender who featured in the issue with the alternate future where Galvatron ruled, the green helicopter who was released as Bacchus in Japan.

These Pretenders all appeared in the Marvel comics, I've just read those comics, but their names...I can't recall.

 

I'm cheating with toy-only character, but:


RotF-era Scouts get lots of praise, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone even mention Rollbar. I guess it doesn't help he looks like a knock-off shell-forming Optimus Prime, but you'd think being a Red Bull truck would give him some useless trivia points.
The repaint Wideload is even less memorable, since his robot head and truck mode are similar enough to Rollbar's.

 

Beast Wars Airazor is just sad. She doesn't have a personality... But that's because she never gets the opportunity to do anything. In basically every appearance after her first, Airazor gets shot down immediately. She is hilariously pathetic.

In The Trigger, Scorponok shoots Airazor down and injures her wing, so she spends 90% of her screentime on Tigatron's back recovering. When she finally heals and flies up to help the Maximals fight the Obelisk, it shoots her down again with zero fanfare.

In Other Voices Part 1, Airazor finally gets some banter with Rattrap... For about half a minute. Then the aliens kidnap and torture her. Then she spends basically the rest of the 2 parter as a non-entity.

In season 2, Airazor just gets killed off with Tigatron. Yay!

It feels like the writers legitimately hated Airazor. She has no focus episode, she barely spends any time with the Maximals besides Tigatron (Her and Dinobot never interact once in the entire series), and she gets shot down so much she's basically the Maximal version of Waspinator. The only time Airazor ever gets any love after her debut is Call of the Wild, and she's pretty awesome there. Of course, she still has to get shot down and recover in the CR chamber.

 

The baby dinobots.

 

you would be surprised

 

I remember Airazor almost entirely because she got no personality.

Maybe this is a bit of a cheat because it's not that the characters themselves are forgettable, but honest to god I don't think I can specifically remember anything that any of the Coneheads did individually during G1 except for Thrust getting run over by Optimus in the movie. What I mean is that I know they were there and I know they did stuff but if you described me a scene of a Conehead doing something in an episode I don't think I could tell you which one it was that actually did it. So it's like in my mind they don't exist as separate characters but rather as this weird sort of "Schroedinger's Conehead" where I don't know which one specifically is present in a given scene until I put the episode on and observe it.

 

Pyra Magna and the others who form Victorion, Mistress of Flame, Swift, Maxima, Termagax, Aileron, Rubble, Codexa, there's probably others but those are the ones I can name off the top of my head.

 

I'd very much prefer to forget some of them, but to be fair, they had some sort of... uhm, annoyingly memorable "personalities." To an extent anyway.

Where as... Energon Cliffjumper? Or Downshift? Ehm.

 

You know... This is sadly true. The ones I remember from childhood are Primal, Rattrap, Cheetor, Dinobot , Rhinox, Silverbolt, Blackarachnia, Tigatron and Depthcharge. Am I forgetting anymore Maximals that appeared on screen?

 

I guess technically Tigerhawk? Unless you want to count him as being more or less the same character as Tigatron given the similar-ish look and the same voice.

 

G1 has a lot of characters that start off memorable and then fade into the background

 

I count "them" as the same

 

Yeah totally! He was that guy with the face!

Seriously Skids G1 though. Two episodes only said one line and I'm not even sure they ever even said his name in a context where you can put a face to the name.

 

Skids had a pretty good story arc in Marvel, though.

 

Any new characters spawned out of G2. But I blame Hasbro's poor marketing choices for that.

That's okay. I'll continue to hold a candle for Rapido, Windrazor, Sizzle, Manta Ray, Deluge, Gobots and the rest in my heart until I die.

 

I don't even count Tigerhawk as a "them" because the only think Airazor contributes to the finished product is wings. If he looks like either bot it's Tigatron, he sounds like Tigatron, he basically acts like Tigatron once he gets his personality back, and then the other big part of his character that we get is Vok space magic. If not for the wings I would forgive people for thinking he's like weird transmetal 2 Tigatron. Airazor is so superfluous that I honestly don't even think about her spark being present in the body to any meaningful end.

 

So your asking me to go out my way to remember characters I've forgotten about because they that dull and uninteresting? Isn't that pretty much a contradiction in terms?

 

Consider characters that you remember specifically because they didn’t do anything worth remembering. There are plenty.