Make Wheatley a Shithead Again

In the Portal 2 fandom, I've noticed that many Wheatley lovers woobify him. I'm not going to lie, he is pretty woobifiable. But I think that sometimes, when people woobify a character, they tend to ignore or downplay all their flaws, which were often part of what made that character interesting in the first place.

This isn't to say that Wheatley is ontologically bad and shame on you for having him as your comfort character, just that he had a few shitheaded tendencies way before he got turned evil by GLaDOS's mainframe.

Wheatley's Flaws

I mean, obviously he's a moron. He's also socially awkward and self-conscious, which makes him very easy to woobify.

One of Wheatley's flaws that people don't mention as much is that he's kind of insensitive. He doesn't really think about the implications of what he's saying before he says it. An obvious example are his anti-human microagressions:

Here's an interesting story. I almost got a job down here in Manufacturing. Guess who the foreman went with? Only an exact duplicate of himself. Nepotism. Ended up giving me the WORST job, tending to all the smelly humans.

The...um... sorry.. I wouldn't say smelly. Just attending to the humans.

Sorry. That just slipped out. A bit insensitive. Umm... The smelly humans...

See also these quotes:

Oh, brilliant. You DID find a portal gun! You know what? It just goes to show: people with brain damage are the real heroes in the end aren't they? At the end of the day. Brave.

I'm guessing this wasn't one of the scientist's children. I don't want to be snobby, but let's be honest: It's got manual laborer written all over it. I'm not saying they're not as good as the professionals. They're just a lot dumber.

Wheatley's also a bit of a coward. That's not nessecarily a bad trait, especially if you live in a place like Aperture where everything is trying to kill you, but it's still worth mentioning.

Note: A lot of people think that Wheatley has signs of autism, or other mental disorders like ADHD or anxiety. As an autistic person myself, I can relate to a lot of his traits (awkwardness, accidental insensitivity, etc). That being said, being autistic doesn't automatically disqualify someone from the shithead position. See Elon Musk, a known autistic shithead who has often been compared to Wheatley.

Wheatley's Good Qualities

• He's one of the few characters in the game who actually tries to help Chell escape (although mostly because he wants to escape too).
• Despite being programmed to only come up with bad ideas, some of his ideas are kind of good.
  • He's the one who came up the idea to sabotage the turret production line.
  • Even GLaDOS admits that some of his traps are pretty clever.
• He seems to genuinely regret trying to kill Chell at the end of the game.
• He's sillay :3

What if Wheatley was Even Shittier?

So, Wheatley has both good traits and bad traits. And there's a lot of fan content that focuses on his good traits. But what if we went the other direction? What if we exaggerated his bad traits? Would he still be an interesting character?

It turns out there's already a character like this: Darren Lamb from Extras. Played by Stephen Merchant, Darren is an idiotic talent agent who has zero social skills who often actively makes things worse for his clients. His cluelessness makes him say and do extremely inappropriate and offensive things. However, he is still a really funny and likeable character.