Personality component

A personality component is a piece of Transformer anatomy in the Generation 1 portion of the continuity family of the same name.

A personality component is a part of a Transformer's anatomy that, as its name suggests, governs his or her personality. When it is removed, a Transformer becomes dumb and vacant, though he or she can still move about and be directed. The process of removal and replacement seems fairly safe; the Decepticons have been known to extract them from prisoners and destroy their bodies, storing the personality components in the Decepticon Detention Center. Installing a personality component in a non-Transformer machine can cause spontaneous reconfiguration, but not always.

Sometimes personality components look like energon cubes, and sometimes they look like inscrutable technical equipment covered in human-scale gauges and screens.

Fiction

Generation 1 cartoon continuity

We've replaced Starscream's energon with Combaticon® brand personality components. Let's see what happens.

At some point in the past, Megatron ordered a group of political prisoners known as the "renegade Decepticons" stripped down to their personality components and put into storage on Cybertron. In 1985, Starscream infiltrated the Decepticon Detention Center in search of them, hoping to use them as an army to overthrow Megatron. He found them and took them to Earth, where he installed them in abandoned World War II military vehicles. Doing so instantly caused the vehicles to reconfigure themselves into different, yet still human-based, forms (such as a B-17 bomber becoming a space shuttle and an F4U Corsair becoming a helicopter). Starscream called them the "Combaticons" and announced their names as they transformed to robot mode, though it's unclear whether he was giving them these names or just acknowledging them. The Combaticons parlayed with their would-be benefactor, whom they didn't remember and to whom they felt little indebtedness for their freedom. Nevertheless, Starscream was still able to lead them against Megatron (with the help of a little blackmail). Starscream's Brigade

For Brawl's personality, that actually looks pretty advanced.

However, their rebellion ended in failure, and Megatron was able to capture and reprogram the Combaticons' combined form of Bruticus to be loyal to him. The Revenge of Bruticus This seemed to work, though the Combaticons' individual quirks sometime still caused Megatron headaches. For example, after a disastrous battle against Defensor that left all but Swindle in pieces, the remaining Combaticon sold the wreckage of his comrades to humans across the globe. When Megatron confronted him about it, Swindle pleaded that greed was programmed into his personality component. So Megatron decided to use self-preservation as a more powerful motivator, putting a bomb in Swindle's head that would go off if he didn't reassemble the Combaticons within 15 hours. Swindle succeeded, but the team couldn't merge... because, it turned out, he had neglected to find Brawl's personality component, which had ended up inside some filthy human youths' science-fair project. The personality component turned the kids' robot hostile and potentially deadly, though the havoc he wreaked didn't seem to have a particular goal. Swindle eventually recovered the personality component, but the kids had gleaned enough information from it to use it as an eavesdropping device, overhearing the Decepticons' plans when they reinstalled it in Brawl's body. B.O.T.

Notes

• The idea of a "personality component" is just one of many in the vague and confused world of Transformer sentience. Its relation to the spark and the laser core, not to mention Vector Sigma, is unclear at best. It doesn't help that the two major portrayals of personality components are different in their physical properties and effects.