Ok but this makes so much sense??? Especially when it comes to his relationship with Junkrat??
I’m probably about to upset some RoadRat shippers, so first lemme clarify that this isn’t me attacking your ship. But there’s one thing I don’t see discussed much: Roadhog is canonically about twice Junkrat’s age.
In Wasted Land, we are shown that Roadhog was living a pretty solitary life in Junkertown. He seems to be on pretty good terms with a guy that runs some kind of scrap shop. The implication seems to be that they knew each other from before, maybe that they fought together in the war:
but in both the opening scene we’re shown that he seems to also have a pretty bad reputation, and that’s echoed again right before he gets involved in Junkrat’s fight.
We’re also shown that he’s awfully salty:
He keeps bringing up that Junkertown, and the world at large, deserves Bad Stuff. They deserve the raiders that hit his farm, they deserve to live in squalor, they deserve liars like Junkrat and violent people like himself. But during the bar scene, he has no reason to intervene. In fact, the guys beefing with Rat offer him a sort of Get Out Of Jail Free card to stay out of it. And we’re also told that this is the first time Roadhog and Junkrat meet: Junkrat all but tells him “You look like you could take these dudes, help me out, I’ll pay.”
Roadhog pretty much instantly pegs him as someone that can’t be trusted, so the fact that he risked himself to help out a con artist talking about a mystery treasure seemed kinda weird. It could be argued that he saw Junkrat as a ticket out of Junkertown, maybe, but what if Mako had had a kid? What if part of his saltiness and violent tendencies come from losing that kid in the war? Maybe it wasn’t a con artist he saw in that bar, but someone who had been torn from a stable life at a young age and forced to scrounge a living on the Hard Streets of Junkertown and was in over their head. Maybe he thought, ‘my kid would have been about his age.’
