Airazor

Airazor is created on Earth rather than brought there. Her protoform emerges from a damaged stasis pod in "The Spark", and she nearly dies before her consciousness has properly formed; Rhinox projects his own mind into her spark to guide her into existence. That origin gives her a quality no other Maximal has, a sense that she is native to this planet in a way the crashed crews are not, and the show uses it: she takes to the peregrine falcon beast mode instantly and becomes the Maximals' aerial reconnaissance specialist.

Pauline Newstone plays her dry and self-possessed. Airazor is not the earnest counterpart to Tigatron's mysticism; she is the more practical of the two, willing to shoot when shooting is required, and her scepticism gives their scenes together a friction that keeps the romance from turning saccharine. In "The Trigger" two-parter she is shot down over the Vok's floating island and has to survive in hostile terrain, an episode that establishes she is dangerous without backup rather than merely fast.

Her arc is short by design. The Vok have been watching the Beast Wars from the beginning, and Tigatron and Airazor are the two Maximals who spend the most time outside the base, closest to the planet itself. In "Other Visits (Part 1)" the aliens take them both, moments after the two finally say what they feel. Cheetor arrives too late.

What she leaves behind is a genuine absence. The Maximals spend the rest of the series short two scouts, and the show does not pretend otherwise. When she returns it is as half of Tigerhawk, a body neither of them chose.

Peregrine falcon beast mode giving flight, extreme visual acuity and the best aerial reconnaissance capability on the Maximal side. Robot mode carries wrist-mounted missile launchers and retains flight. Limits: she is lightly built and cannot absorb punishment, is easily shot down by Terrorsaur or Waspinator in a straight dogfight, and her habit of scouting far from the base means she is frequently unreachable.

• Tigatron: the show's only sustained romance, built on shared scouting duty rather than declared early.
• Rhinox: he is present at the formation of her consciousness, and treats her with quiet paternal care afterward.
• Cheetor: he arrives too late to prevent her abduction, and it becomes one of the losses that ages him.

3H Enterprises' Primeval Dawn separates Airazor from Tigerhawk and restores her, which the cartoon never does. IDW's Beast Wars material uses her only lightly. Otherwise no significant divergence.

Abducted and de-sparked by the Vok in "Other Visits (Part 1)", her body fused with Tigatron's into Tigerhawk. Her spark reunites with his in "Other Victories"; the Tigerhawk body is destroyed by the Nemesis in "Nemesis (Part 2)".

• Voiced by Pauline Newstone, who also voiced the Predacon-era character Elders material in the franchise's Vancouver casting pool.
• Airazor's toy was female in the fiction but the mold was reused for male characters in later lines, a common Beast Wars practice; the show's writers chose the gender, not Hasbro's design brief.
• She and Tigatron were resurrected as separate individuals by 3H Enterprises in the convention storyline Primeval Dawn, one of the very few post-show revivals of Beast Wars casualties.
• The name is an original Beast Wars coinage rather than a G1 holdover, unlike Silverbolt, Inferno, Rampage or Scorponok.
• Her creation episode, "The Spark", is the origin of the spark-as-soul concept that every later Transformers continuity, including Transformers: Prime and the live-action films, ultimately borrows.

Where the cartoon, the Marvel comics and the toy bios disagree, or where a popular claim does not hold up. We record these rather than smoothing them over.

• Whether Tigerhawk constitutes Airazor's survival or her death is never resolved on screen, and the convention comics take a position the cartoon does not support.