Talk:Combatant

Delete and fold back into protoform

Is there any purpose to keeping this on its own page? They have their own name, but in every conceptual way they are identical to protoforms as we currently understand them. They look like liquid metal, they're Cybertronians who have assumed a base form between taking alternate modes (which multiple continuities have explicitly established as still being protoform state). If Cosmic Rust and the Rust Plague are conceptually identical enough to be merged, so is this. TransFormersfan1 (talk) 16:35, 22 June 2021 (EDT)

I agree. But if we're going to keep them separate, at least they should link to each other in their notes sections. --Fritz (talk) 20:11, 22 June 2021 (EDT)

At first, I was going to say that Cosmic Rust and Rust Plague had similar enough names that they could easily be conflated while Protoform and Combatant don't... Until I saw the note about them never being named in the show and the term coming from a sourcebook, and in light of that I'm inclined to agree they should be merged. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 20:21, 22 June 2021 (EDT)

They're Putty Patrol-like mooks, not immobile "prototypes", who got dropped quickly because those early episodes didn't have consistent lore. Interpreting them as protoforms is a retroactive reading influenced by media that was released nearly a decade later. Saix (talk) 21:02, 22 June 2021 (EDT)

I can agree that this is a retroactive interpretation, but it's far from a stretch, and the wiki has done this before. The live-action film series has plenty of protoforms who go around and fight, and are explicitly depicted as "core" forms they take between alt-modes, which is exactly what these are. Whether or not they were intended to be a kind of protoform at the time (which I think they are, especially considering this is a Beast Era product), from a conceptual and readability perspective, they fit the bill. I think we should fold it back in, add Combatant to foreign names and make a note about them. I'm happy to do it. TransFormersfan1 (talk) 11:21, 23 June 2021 (EDT)

We are not in the business of making up interpretations that the fiction hasn't made. They weren't called prototypes or protoforms (which were explicitly immobile newborns in stasis pods in the only fiction they showed up in by 1998—Beast Wars) at any point in the cartoon or in concurrent media. They're generic mooks who got upgraded into the Autorollers before they realized, whoops, the Autorollers have a backstory. Saix (talk) 11:51, 23 June 2021 (EDT)