>>7446032Maybe it’s a ‘Ship of Theseus’ thing, with remnants the minds of members who get killed being retained in the collective gestalt form of Devastator and then getting partially reimprinted onto any new members who join the combination, thereby eventually allowing for all the original members to be replaced but have the constructicons still collectively possess most of their original personalities and memories, just reincarnated into their replacements.
The IDW RID series kind of touched on/hinted at this idea a bit with Prowl repeatedly calling other constructicons Scrapper, who was dead, and becoming more like minded.
Prowl later claimed the same applied a bit to Optimus with him due to their brief one off combination.*
And Scoop basically became Scrapper-2.0+ unconditional Starscream loyalty/worship. But, like many interesting things in IDW, the concept never really got any real significance or went anywhere else.
*Happened during the pic related incident in the aftermath of Combiner Wars, and apparently was a major factor in convincing Op not to go through with Beating Prowl To Death while shouting ‘You’re making me do this!’ like an abusive father, because apparently those two have a multiplicative repulsion field against sane/consistent writing and characterization.
