Overlord (rank)

Overlords were a line of Autobot leaders from the Generation 1 continuity family.

Last of the Overlords.

The Overlords were a ruling lineage of Autobots on Cybertron before the onset of the Great War. With their end came a violent new dawn for the planet.

Fiction

Marvel The Transformers comics

During the era prior to the Cybertronian Civil Wars, a line of Autobot Overlords ruled Cybertron as a planet-wide autocracy. Over time, their power was shaken by overpopulation and fuel shortages, which caused the world to break up into feuding city-states. The last of the Overlords—an aging, rusted husk of a mech enfeebled to the point of needing a near-constant supply of Energon injected directly into his body to keep himself functional—attempted to keep rising tensions between the city-states at bay by instituting gladiatorial competitions that became known as "the Games". Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect, only widening the rifts between the city-states.

While a competition held at Tarn overseen by the Overlord was going on, athletes from Vos (including Tornado) attempted a plot to sabotage the city's power plant and blame it on Iacon, hoping to start a war that would take out both of their rivals. Though the saboteurs were discovered, they blew up the plant anyway, and Tarn and Vos went to war with both the Overlord and Iacon's athletes still within Tarn's city walls.

"Plaise, suh, may I 'aff s'more?"

The Overlord, accompanied by his trusted bodyguards Nightstalker and Ravage, along with the now ex-athletes Optimus Prime and Megatron, tried to make his way to the safety of Iacon. He was exhausted and unable to travel further without fear of complete deactivation by the time the group reached the Iaconian expressway, causing Optimus to go on ahead to seek help from the city while Megatron and the bodyguards stood watch over him. Unfortunately, they were set upon by shock troops—remnants of Tarn's nearly defunct military—and Megatron suggested to Ravage that they abandon the Overlord and try to jump a gap in the expressway to freedom. Nightstalker, in an extreme show of loyalty to his charge, defied the suggestion and then sacrificed himself to take out the shock troops.

His sacrifice was in vain; now almost completely out of energon, the Overlord pleaded to both Megatron and Ravage to spare some of their own energy to keep him alive, but they rebuffed him. Megatron was convinced that he would make a better leader of Cybertron even then, and Ravage agreed, noting that Megatron was the planet's best chance of weathering the inevitable change on the horizon. Faced with this shocking betrayal by his bodyguard, the Overlord perished, his death retold by Megatron to all who asked as his circuits giving out from the stress of coming under attack. State Games