Trannis is aDecepticon from theGeneration 1continuity family.

Minnesota Viking-bot

Trannis is aDecepticon warlord whose job is to do lots of stuff but be forgotten about whena morefamous one shows up.

Fiction

Marvel Comics continuity

MarvelThe Transformers comics

A young Trannis seized control of the Decepticon army afterMegatron's crew became lost on Earth. He conquered most ofCybertron, but the Autobots held their fortified capital ofIacon for hundreds of thousands of years until Trannis decided it wasn't worth taking, so he razed it instead. At that point, all of theCouncil of Autobot Elders exceptEmirateXaaron surrendered to him. Trannis immediately had them killed. Emirate Xaaron escaped to form an underground resistance.

Trannis eventually became complacent in his rule and fell out of favor among some of the Decepticons. TheDecepticon high command made plans to get rid of him, but theWreckers beat them to the punch when they assassinated him. The Autobots were pretty sure this would be a good thing.

Then he was succeeded byStraxus.Cybertron: The Middle Years!

Classics

InPrimax 207.0 Epsilon and related timelines, Trannis rose and fell much closer to the present day than his counterparts on worlds likePrimax 509.28 Epsilon.Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/05

Generation 1 cartoon continuity

The Transformers cartoon

The "early Decepticon leader" engaged on a campaign of conquest withhis soldiers. Towards the end of the Second Cybertronian War, he was chased bysome Autobot. The Decepticon leader used hislightning whip to knock his attacker off his motorcycle, but then that motorcycle crashed into his and made him fall off too. Before he even got up,Sentinel Prime jumped in and kicked the snot out of him.Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4

Wings Universe

Trannis used to lead the early Decepticons and itsASD-324-ddd-3e3c1 model Decepticon hordes before Sentinel Prime thumped him.Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/05 He resurfaced as the warlord of a Decepticon faction in the early days of the Great War. Under constant threat by theCybertron Elite Guard, he and the other Warlords banded together to form a war council. In one meeting, they reviewed footage of some of Megatron's men being wiped out by the Elite Guard. Trannis didn't much care, because they were Megatron's men, butStraxus andShockwave pointed out that the Elite Guard didn't care which faction those Decepticons belonged to. The Warlords began to cooperate. This didn't last long—Deathsaurus sentFalcon along to the next meeting with a bomb that killed Trannis and the other Warlords in attendance.A Team Effort

Beast Wars: Uprising

A tactical genius in their heyday,Preditron noted that theMaximals andPredacons would do well to learn from the Trannises in wartime.The Predacon Manifesto

Presumably theTrannis Fork River was named in honor of them.Derailment

Notes

• Trannis's name was the inspiration for that of an abandonedOTFCC 2004-exclusiveredeco of2001Robots in DisguiseRail Racer which would have been named "Dominus Trannis".Beast Wars: Uprising pays lip-service to this idea by describing Trannis as "tactical geniuses."
• The early Decepticon leader's model also turns up among theJunkions manipulated by the Quintessons in "The Big Broadcast of 2006". The model then has a more Junkionish deco and is likely someone entirely different.
• According toABN inRecordicons #9, Vector Prime "always lies about Five Faces of Darkness". If true, this would mean that the guy from Five Faces isn't necessarily Trannis; we're keeping this page as-is because there's no objective evidence either way, and at least this way "Early Decepticon leader" gets a name and prose-guy Trannis gets an actual picture.
• Trannis is seen wielding two red rifles, dubbedquagma rifles byAsk Vector Prime.