Hi Barbie yes your post about fluff inspired this

On the one hand I am extremely obsessed with Bulkhead's and Wheeljack's very obvious feelings for each other, but also I keep seeing them done as a beta couple so much that it kicks the contrarianism up and makes me go ">:/ what about their friendship, though".

Like even when they're very clearly in stupid, they wouldn't be mooshy like that. They're still snarky and spend as much time roughhousing as they do hugging and cuddling (note to fandom: have you seen??? dudes being affectionate?? It doesn't look the way you think it does) and also they were friends first and the kind of affection they have for each other is entirely explainable within the framing of "we would have probably died multiple times over without the other guy here".

And >:/ >:\ far be it from me to want less kissing but I would honestly take a no-homo reading that preserves their actual dynamic with each other than a lot of the 'shippy' stuff I get for them that. Doesn't. That kind of just makes them interchangeably boyfriends like any other couple.

It doesn't help that the interchangeably boyfriends version almost always casts Wheeljack as a settled-down casanova, either, which is my least favourite take on his character in Prime. No, it's technically not wrong, but it's just completely uninteresting to me to make him a worse version of a trope he was already kind of awkwardly shoved into, which tracks much better when it's taken as a thing he's doing in-universe to bolster his social standing.