@thatswhyhesprime (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*: ･ﾟ✧
I’m just gonna warn you this is gonna be like three solid paragraphs of gushing before I get to the point. Might as well tip my hand early, I mean, this is my favourite TFP character we’re talking about.
Everything in how I write Wheeljack flows from him being brilliant -- however, it’s not necessarily b/c he’s the smartest one in the room. Cognitively, Wheeljack has all the complexity of a bar of ore, he just thinks very fast, making quantitative judgements and iterating his thinking at a rate that usually puts him at about two thirds of a plan of action where most people around him are still working out what’s going on.
At the root of his intuition and ability to cut halfway through a problem in a single cognitive leap is his excellent situational awareness. His tendencies towards risk-taking are less an expression of his personality and more just a direct consequence of being able to quickly and accurately assess situations. Even when he’s off-base, he’s still fast enough to just make up a new plan as the initial one is failing.
Although that being said, his risk-taking is also informed by him having an actively pleasure-seeking personality. He gets bored if he’s not meaningfully occupied, and doing things that aren’t enriching is just huge fucking hassle he doesn’t want to deal with. This is what causes a lot of his issues with authority -- he doesn’t mind being told what to do as much as he minds people depriving him of the chance to figure out how to do it.
Oriented towards goals, plans and action as he is, he deals very badly with uncertainty. Even when there’s not enough information to make an intuitive leap, there’s always enough to go on for him to jump into a conclusion. That’s where his brilliance turns into his biggest weakness -- what he doesn’t notice or think of might as well not exist as far as he’s concerned, which is a bit of a disaster for him b/c despite being an obligate Firm Believer In Himself, that reliance on his own viewpoint doesn’t always translate to meaningful self-confidence. Being decisive is easy. Being sure of yourself isn’t.
My original phrasing of this last point was that as a consequence he’s absolute garbage at emotions, but... Honestly, not really. Like with his arrogance, there’s an element of truth to his immaturity, but mostly it’s just an affect, and he has no difficulties with his own emotional truths. The core issue is that he’s uncomfortable with emotions, and pretty damn bad at communicating about them, because with emotions, he’s never quite on as strong a footing as he’d hope, and can’t make the kind of quick, accurate judgements about them that he can make about other things.