Duobot

The Duobots are an Autobot subgroup from the 2005 IDW portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Shock and Ore. Or Ore and Shock. Whatever.

The Duobots, Shock and Ore, look pretty indistinguishable. Even though nobody can tell them apart and they seem like throwaway guys, they've done a lot of stuff!

Fiction

2005 IDW continuity

The two Duobots made it through the war together, surviving the Battle for Hell's Point, "the day it rained" on Babu Yar, and the Simanzi Massacre, where they braved the Crucible. They also had a prankster streak, having once welded Prowl's hands together for a gag. The Chaos of Warm Things The Gloaming

The Duobots were members of Special Operations and reported directly to Prowl. One of their regular jobs was handling field agents like Skids and Getaway. Arm the Lonely Along with Drift, the Duobots were Prowl's agents aboard the Lost Light, charged with attaching a slow cell containing Overlord to the ship's hull and planting a tracer on its engines. How to Say Goodbye and Mean It Remembrance Day Ore went down into the engine room to carry out their second task as the ship was taking off from Cybertron, which unfortunately led him to be standing too close to the ship's quantum generators when they activated. The resultant suspension of the local laws of space-time caused Ore to be fused with the engine, killing him and causing an explosion that crippled the ship. Hurled to some bleak corner of the galaxy, the Lost Light was able to put down on a small planet, where what was left of Ore's body was found by Brainstorm who remarked that, on the bright side, at least now they'd know which Duobot was which. Hangers On Meanwhile, an amnesiac Skids crashed near the Lost Light: his homing device had locked onto the Duobots, his nearest handlers. Arm the Lonely

Ore's passing was observed by Shock, who then set about removing all incriminating evidence of their connection to Prowl, deleting the communication from him and heading down to the engine room to recover the discarded tracer. Unfortunately for Shock, he was set upon and killed by a Sparkeater that had been hidden in the bowels of the ship. The Chaos of Warm Things

Some time later, Ore came back to life thanks to the "psychic scream" of a Titan. Still fused to the engine and unaware of what had happened to him, he had a brief chat with Swerve before disappearing together with the Titan when it teleported away. You, Me, and Other Revelations

The Duobots would be rather ignomiously remembered when Whirl described a batch of fallen attackers as being "deader than a Duobot". Finis Temporis

Notes

• The Duobots were presumably created as an Autobot counterpart to the Duocons, though with wheels on their legs and treads on their upper backs they don't appear to share that team's "air vehicle upper body combines with ground vehicle lower body" design scheme. Indeed, Shock's lament in "The Chaos of Warm Things" that he is now a "walking misnomer" might even suggest that instead of being two vehicles who form one robot, the Duobots are two robots who form one vehicle, possibly making them the definition of the "duocombiners" mentioned in passing in "Patternism". And, in the artist's version of "authorial intent" Alex Milne confirmed on DeviantArt that he designed a combined alt mode for the two, but was keeping it private for possible later publication.
• Conversely, when asked about the Duobots' combined mode in a Q&A on the IDW forums writer James Roberts replied: "In my head, the Duobots don’t combine – they’re more like clones. Sorry!" (That said, Roberts had previously used the term 'Duobot' in his fan novel Eugenesis to refer to cassette combiner Slamdance.)
• As a product of the mind of English writer James Roberts, the fun double-meaning of Shock and Ore's names may not be immediately apparent to American readers. Try saying them out loud in an English accent.

Foreign names

• Japanese: Duobot (デュオボット Dyuobotto)