@rhpurasu replied to your post: Not to be openly bitter or anything, but I keep...
Yeah, yeah, like KO would do it with the intent of pissing Wheels off but it wouldn’t really work in the way KO intended, because they’re pretty securely married and all and yeah, they feel p sorry for KO because of BD. And shit heck yeah actually? If KO AND BD had joined the Autobutts, that’d be a really obvious parallel of big crushy husband and mouthy racer husband!
Ok but I wanna comment on this separately b/c I keep thinking about this, and I keep finding more parallels between the Wreckers and KOBD and I can’t believe that most of this probably wasn’t intentional, since despite never having interactions that would make this apparent, they are such neat dark mirrors for each other.
From his introduction onward, Knockout is always thinking about the situation image first -- not just through vanity, his defining characteristic, but also in how he integrates himself into the Decepticon power struggle despite really having no reason to be interested in it. His interactions with his team are also defined by how his attitudes change to take advantage of the situation -- approaching Starscream as a Fellow Schemer, and Megatron as a simpering lackey b/c hey lol works for Starscream
Wheeljack, in contrast, gets introduced literally in the middle of an action beat that we learn he landed in because he is pursuing some own agenda of his we don’t get a sense of until much later. His introductory episode also has him straight-up saving himself from the trouble he got into, further defining him through his agency and doing a good job validating the “no team but me” attitude he starts out with.
Congeniality vs independence. Social integration vs freedom of action.
Next, I mentioned before that both of them have useful secondary skills -- and indeed, Knockout being a Medic Of Dubious Expertise (who is nonetheless never shown to be anything but capable) is what gives him a foot in the door with the Decepticons. But that’s the thing, isn’t it, he’s a bit of a medic who does nothing, focusing on getting in on the power struggle instead. No sign of focusing on the action in sight.
There’s also an element of objectification to his status as a member of the team, which I always thought put a bit of an interesting spin on him deciding to start showboating and not stick to just Doing The Job They Brought Him In For. You could easily read some slighted ego into the idea that he’s just the medic, y’know?
Wheeljack (even without being aware of his status as a legacy character and all that implies) is also established to have a bunch of useful secondary skills. He’s a pilot, he’s got the same specops background as Bulkhead and his proficiency in engineering exists in the subtext. Also, his nominal foil in the team is Ratchet, who is the resident Smart Guy, and they’re presented at being at odds largely because they’re intellectual equals who just Can’t Fucking Agree On Anything.
And Team Prime would love to have him for reasons that have nothing to do with that! And they aren’t cagey about wanting him on the team, and Wheeljack never even questions it, it’s just that he has shit to do and a terrible tendency towards the aforementioned “no team but me” thinking. The little bit of an arc he gets is all about going from that to “okay, no team but me and Bulk”, to “okay, maybe team” before he’s hit with a crisis and has to deal with that offscreen.
And then you finally have their partner dynamic. Knockout and Breakdown are joined at the hip, but their actual relationship is always left sort of vague and Knockout doesn’t let anything slip about how he feels about Breakdown’s death. Wheeljack and Bulkhead get limited interactions, with all of them belabouring the point about how much they mean to each other, and we get to see in glorious real time Wheeljack freaking the fuck out when something happens to Bulkhead.
Like, wow, though. And I know there’s definitely more, it just took me so long to type all of that out I forgot half the shit that was going on in my head while I was typing it. Like, I don’t even need to get into all the ways the parallels between Bulkhead and Breakdown complement this, or how the team dynamics for them also end up mirroring each other (and would do so way more if Wheeljack had been in the main cast). It feels like someone made a challenge out of taking two characters with lots of surface similarities and then making them diverge as hard as possible, and it’s kind of beautiful.
