There's one more character I'd like to give praise to, but I don't think he can really count since, while he is from a cartoon, the cartoon he's from is only tangentially related to Transformers, and that is the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon.
The character from that show that I wish to speak of is my favorite character of that show, who is not a GoBot, but is instead the human Matt Hunter. Of the Guardian's main three human allies (alongside Nick Burns and A.J. Foster), Matt was awesome. Legitimately.
I loved his cynical, sarcastic, straight man personality. Compared to how Spike and Sparkplug Witwicky of the G1 Transformers cartoon would often just accept or be in awe of the Transformers and everything they said and did, Matt in the GoBots cartoon would instead often speak his mind bluntly and recognize when something was too ridiculous even for that show's standards, calling out those absurdities as though Hanna Barbera was using Matt as a means to insert a layer of self-awareness into the show. If something completely nonsensical or unbelievable happened in that series, Matt would be right there rolling his eyes accompanied by a response like "You gotta be kidding me!" or "Oh brother!" This also helped to emphasize how much of a good head he had on his shoulders, presenting him as one of the most rational of thinkers in that show.
Plus, unlike
many of the Transformers' humans allies, Matt was a man of action who was quick to leap into battle when necessary, never hesitating to pick up a laser rifle and open fire on the Renegades, either right alongside the Guardians or even in cases where he was the only one around to engage the Renegades
by himself. That's hardcore.
He's even gotten a few hits on Cy-Kill himself a few times, earning the Renegade leader's acknowledging Matt as a constant thorn in the Renegades' sides whose irritating threat to the Renegades' plans was not to be taken lightly (which also shows how differently Cy-Kill and Megatron viewed humans, as Cy-Kill had shown multiple times to have seen some valuable usefulness and resourcefulness in humankind, while still seeing his race as the superior one, but I digress).
However, this isn't to say that Matt was perfect. Far from it. The times where he didn't seem well written were mostly in episodes where something was wrong with either just Leader-1 or all the Guardians in general, and yet UNECOM (United Earth Command) couldn't realize that the Renegades were behind it. And sadly, there were more of these kinds of episodes than what was necessary, and most of them tended to put Matt among the humans who were honestly fooled into thinking that Leader-1/the Guardians had genuinely turned evil, despite all the other episodes that had Leader-1/the Guardians in a firmly healthy and trustworthy relationship with the humans. It was episodes like this where the follies of 1980s cartoon stock plots really came to the forefront, and Matt's characterization suffered for the plot demands of those episodes.
Thankfully, though, the number of those dumb episodes was far outweighed by all the other episodes that had Matt acting in-character, so outside of those isolated dumb instances, he was genuinely cool.
So I guess that would make it:
