Decapitation

This article only exists to please him.

Decapitation is a means of defeating an opponent by which his head is removed. Depending on the continuity, this may lead to death.

Optimus Prime loves it while Bonecrusher hates it.

Give me your FACE!Optimus Prime revels in his favorite tactic, Revenge of the Fallen

Fiction

Generation 1

Marvel Comics continuity

Time to face facts.

After defeating the Autobots, Shockwave removed Optimus Prime's head from his body for the purpose of accessing the Creation Matrix. The New Order Prime's head remained conscious and able to communicate with Buster Witwicky. The Worse of Two Evils! When he was finished with Prime's head, he disposed of a fake Optimus Prime as part of a ruse to trick the Autobots. The Autobots did indeed find the head and install it back on Prime's body. The fake head took control of Optimus's body and immediately started attacking the Autobots. Prime Time!

Cartoon continuity

Heading into the realms of disbelief.

Optimus Prime was decapitated by Hook as part of his disassembly after falling into Megatron's trap. This did not prevent him from being able to have partial control over his body parts. City of Steel

Cybertonium depletion caused Powerglide's head to fall off, though he still had full control over the rest of his body. Desertion of the Dinobots, Part 1

IDW comics continuity

Where knocking your block off has a rather more literal meaning than first intended.

Runamuck was decapitated by the Whirling Reaper. His head remained alive, fully conscious and still able to speak until another reaper smashed it with a very large boulder.

Live-action film series continuity

Optimus Prime uses it as his main killing tactic on Decepticons. He does it rather ruthlessly with Bonecrusher. Transformers

Frenzy was decapitated, but his head lived on, taking a cell-phone alternate mode of its own. Frenzy is able to do this because he has a special, decentralized, modular nervous system.

Two years after this, Optimus takes this tactic to the utmost extreme, using his blades to tear off Grindor's face in a battle in a forest, while later using a blade to slice off the Fallen's face in Egypt. Revenge of the Fallen

Animated continuity

The Headmaster uses his Headmaster unit to cut off the heads of Transformers so that he can take control over their bodies. Yet this does not kill his victims.

Two stand out examples of surviving decapitation are worth noting. The first is the example of Megatron, who was decapitated during an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Transform and Roll Out He was sent into stasis lock as a result, but was reactivated fifty years latter thanks to Sari Sumdac's key, which had been powered with the energies of the AllSpark. Home Is Where the Spark Is

The other major example is Starscream, but this is atypical. Starscream's survival was because of an AllSpark fragment embedded in his head, meaning he could survive any normally spark threatening injury as long as the shard was in his head. Mission Accomplished

Trivia

• In most continuities, decapitation seems to merely be an inconvenience to Transformers, but in the movie continuity it generally results in death, with Frenzy being the exception due to his decentralized nervous system.