Marissa Faireborn


 * Marissa is a human in the Generation 1 continuity family.



Captain Marissa Faireborn is an officer in the Earth Defense Command. Tough and headstrong, she performs her duties with strict military professionalism. She may be small and squishy, but she sure knows how to use a knife. Even the Decepticons respect her as a proper adversary.

Also, she's great at surfboarding.

Animated continuity

 * Voice actor: Susan Blu (US), Komiya Kazue (Japan)

After the destruction of Unicron in 2005, the peace that followed in the next year was soon interrupted by the return of Galvatron. In the midst of this Decepticon uprising, Blurr and Wheelie were stranded on Jupiter's moon Io while safeguarding Metroplex's transformation cog. Marissa Faireborn was sent to retrieve the two and their cargo, but alien lipoles native to Io destroyed her spacecraft, stranding her as well. Sky Lynx eventually arrived to rescue them and fend off an attack by the monstrous combiner Predaking.

Tricked by a holographic representation of her father, Marissa was kidnapped by a spacefaring Quintesson scientist. Also captured were Ultra Magnus, Cyclonus, and Wreck-Gar. She and the other prisoners rebelled, but not before their vessel hurtled through a black hole and into another universe. This made them all different colors, but despite this setback, they were able to return home unharmed.



Another Quintesson experiment, one intended to alter the past to benefit themselves, sent unstable chronal energy across the universe. This caused Marissa to temporarily age-regress into an infant.



Marissa had a short affair with smuggler Dirk Manus, who was attempting to transport a highly-experimental molecular recreator to the Quintessons. Though their feelings were mutual, he was merely using her trust to help pull off a heist. Marissa discovered his scheme, and with the Technobots' help (and some double-crossing by Manus) foiled the Quintessons' plans. Though Manus got away from the authorities, she had switched his booty with mimic dust. Despite losing a fortune, Dirk was amused and impressed at Marissa's doublecross.

Later, Marissa attempted to console a depressed Rodimus Prime during a visit to Japan, when they were suddenly attacked by Dead End and Wildrider. Rodimus was run off the road, and before Marissa could come to his aid, the Decepticons had escaped with the Matrix of Leadership.

Dreamwave Comics continuity


As Bumper and Warpath attempted to haul the deactivated bodies of Jazz, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, Windcharger, and Wheeljack out of an Oregon lake, they were arrested by Commander Marissa Faireborn and a legion of EDC troops. After taking them into custody, Fairborne recruited Jazz, Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, and Bumper to accompany her and the EDC Night Force to San Desto.

A sweep of the town uncovered no sign of its inhabitants. Marissa established a good rapport with Jazz, and instructed her troops to follow his orders as they would hers. Soon enough, they were attacked by an army of Insecticon clones, who decimated the EDC troops and captured Bumper. Jazz and Marissa managed to escape to a garage, where they found a veritable abbatoir of human and bovine remains. The Insecticons tracked them down, forcing them to flee into a subterranean egg chamber, which Jazz promptly torched. This prompted an attack from an enraged Shrapnel, but Sideswipe and Sunstreaker managed to cover Jazz and Marissa's escape back to the surface. Once there, they were confronted with more Insecticon clones and the cerebro-shell-controlled human citizens of San Desto. While the Autobots were unwilling to risk killing the helpless thralls, Marissa waded into the army with fists flying. Further bloodshed was prevented, however, when Bumper took out Bombshell, neutralizing both clones and slaves. Back at EDC headquarters, Marissa saw Jazz and the rest of the Autobots off.

As a result of Marissa and Jazz's shared battle experience, their strong mutual respect may have blossomed into a romantic attraction. This was outwardly obvious enough to inspire Sideswipe to refer to Marissa as Jazz's girlfriend.

Sometime later, Faireborne was chewed out by her superior over the loss of Night Force. Despite her objections, he ordered her to reactivate Project: Centurion.

Kiss Players
Voice actor: Lyrian (Japan)

Marissa Faireborn is a 20-year-old American woman from New York, where she met and became friends with Shao-Shao Li. As a child, she resented her military father, and when she was once rescued by Optimus Prime, she quickly came to view the Autobot leader as both a father figure and more. Ten years later, she joined a (possibly all-female) commando resistance movement and attempted to steal Prime's corpse from the Earth Defense Command. When the rest of her strike team was taken by surprise and slaughtered, Marissa elected herself as the backup plan.

She quickly sliced the clothes off the Kiss Players who stood in her way, but was briefly incapacitated when struck from behind by a Kremzeek bullet fired by a nearby Autrooper. Hurling her knife through the air, she cut open Prime's trailer and discovered his body...only to see the Autrooper summarily eject its Kiss Player partner and begin to fuse with the Autobot's corpse.



Marissa kissed Prime, fusing with him and triggering a transformation that restored him to life and converted his body into its Dodge SRT-10 form. Now the two travel together, battling Legion agents and eluding both the E.D.C. and Hot Rod, who believes Prime to be an impostor.

Marissa wears various skull-themed accessories. As they have a pattern of renaming one another's possessions, Optimus Prime has dubbed the design on her shirt "The Three Skull Brothers." She has been known to carry several knives, at least one of which is sharp enough to slice through reinforced metal when hurled through the air.

Marissa considers Optimus Prime to be her boyfriend, and merges with him to share her knife-wielding skills by kissing him. She is also a professional surfer.

No, seriously.

''Early previews of the series implied Marissa to be a current or former E.D.C. member. However, the actual development of the story has not indicated this, and the E.D.C. logo on her shirt in early images has been replaced with the set of three eyepatch-wearing skulls referenced above.''

Kiss Play Position
In the wake of the final battle, Marissa, Atari and Shao-Shao formed a singing idol group called "Kiss Players" with the cassette Transformers Glit, Sundor and Rosanna. As they performed at the Brave Maximus Fortress stop of their world tour, the Sparkbots Stardust, Angela and Zangetsu appeared and instructed the three humans to kiss them. Complying, they were teleported to Sherman Dam in the year 1985, just in time to witness an historic battle.

At Angela's behest, Marissa kissed the Sparkbot to transform her and rode the flying lion to Optimus Prime as he prepared to battle his enemy Megatron atop the dam. Angela ordered Marissa to kiss the Autobot leader, and when she did, a fragment of the Allspark emerged from his chest. Invisible to her future partner and obliged to return to her own time, Marissa regretted that she could not stay and try to avert Prime's deadly fate-to-be.

Kiss Players

 * Convoy x Melissa (Kiss Players, 2006)




 * Available only as part of the headliner Kiss Players set, Marissa's first-ever toy is a soft-plastic PVC figurine with a permanent pucker, designed mainly to sit demurely on the robot-mode shoudler of her partner Convoy. Unlike the previous human-partner PVCs from the Binaltech Asterisk line, Marissa is pre-posed in a sitting position, and while she can be used to ride inside Convoy's vehicle-mode driver/passenger compartment, her hands cannot go on the steering wheel. An optional lower body piece, stand and arms give her a leaning pose, but she cannot stand up straight. She comes with a surfboard (that she really can't use) that becomes a sword for Convoy or can separate into a pair of long serrated knives. The set also comes with a CD containing the first 5 episodes of the Kiss Players radio drama and a new 10-minute audio story directed by series designer Oshima Yuki.


 * This set was originally intended for release in the Binaltech Asterisk line as "Black Convoy meets Marissa", but was cancelled due to low sales of the previous toys before it was even officially solicited. How much difference there is between the planned Asterisk version of Marissa and the final Kiss Players version is currently unknown. (Although it could be assumed she was likely originally wearing some pants)

Trivia

 * Although Marissa's father has long been accepted to be the G.I. Joe member Flint (aka Dashiell Faireborn), there were no statements as to the identity of her mother until recently. In an interview on the Sony BGM re-release of The Transformers: The Movie, former Transformers writer and story editor Flint Dille confirmed fellow G.I. Joe member Lady Jaye as Marissa's mother.


 * In the Dreamwave comics continuity, Marissa was the grand-daughter of the heretofore unseen Nathaniel Faireborn, who was the founder of the EDC in that timeline.