The recent in-depth development of hybrid high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems poses looming adaptability challenges to protection. The various and disparate direct current (DC) transmission topologies can profoundly affect the operating characteristics of DC transmission networks, which result in the lack of performance of conventional DC protection schemes in such topologies. This significantly limits the application of hybrid HVDC technologies. This paper proposes a single-end protection scheme based on the transient power waveshape for fast and sensitive detection and classification of different types of DC faults in hybrid HVDC transmission lines. The fault characteristics and their causes under different fault conditions are analyzed in detail with a pre-introduced linearized transient model of a hybrid HVDC transmission system, demonstrating that the formation of the fluctuation characteristics of local measurements is mainly determined by the buffering and absorption effects of lumped-parameter reactors on transient traveling-wave (TW) energy. Simulation results verify the sensitivity, rapidity, reliability, and anti-interference ability of the proposed scheme when applied to hybrid HVDC transmission lines. Furthermore, it is confirmed that the proposed scheme is adaptable to symmetric voltage-sourced converter (VSC) and conventional line-commutated converter (LCC) based HVDC transmission lines.