Robot tropes you're getting tired of

[Extyr]

These last few months, I've been getting increasingly bored of catastrophic malfunctions in fembots stories. The kind where the robot is only good for the scrap afterward. Evil boo's latest story kinda haunts me as it basically boils down to torture porn. I'm fine with it existing and in its genre, it's pretty good, but I'd like to see stories where the focus isn't the destruction of the fembots.

I miss robotman's stuff. It was just the right mix of sex, love and mindlessness. I could do without all the faceoffs though.

So what do you think is overused and what would you like to see more of?

[Lithorien]

If I had to go with overused, it would be the sleeper tropes where nothing really happens. Part of the appeal to me is the mechanical aspect - but if the character could just be described as "normal, but with wires and steel instead of blood and bones," it's not really up my alley.

That said, more malfunctions would be fantastic. Especially ones where the sentience is lost slowly, rather than instantly.

[smalk]

I agree, I don't fancy complete destruction. But hey - we all have different taste.

[JeffCapes]

I really liked Evil Boo's last story, but maybe I like torture porn.

[zerodin]

The slightest sexual stimuli causing a catastrophic meltdown.
You have to reason that a fembot is an expensive item designed for fucking. Why are so many of them prone to essentially self destructing, when the get so much as a slap on the ass?

[Kube²]

it's totally depend on the type of fembot.

if the "thing" is clearly sentient, destruction and catastrophic malfunction story are horrible to read and I don't like them.

But is the "thing" is just a thing, even with a very advanced simulated personality, I have no problem with destruction.

I would say if the destruction/Malfunction show that the robot was not sentient when it was functionning properly it's okay.

For me it mean that a malfunction story that "remove" the sentience before destroying the bot is equally wrong than a story destroying a sentient bot.

[NatalieBayer]

dont get me wrong, I love damage and destruction, but it's not an all the time kind of thing for me. I absolutely agree that its a little bit torture porn, and a little bit BDSM. I totally agree that it's a trope that has been appearing more and more recently.

That said, once I get my commissions out of the way I have plenty of non-destruction robot stories I want to write. Honestly, I think that there are just a lot of people who see damage and destruction as a really easy way to show case a robots internals without the need for so much set up. Basically if you have a robot and you want to show them off as a robot then you just have them get his by a car of fall down the stairs or something. You'll see that a lot in TV as well. Its an easy reveal, with a small amount of set up and obviously the shock value is there.

------------------------------

As for my own opinion on a trope ive seen to much of, my money is on Bimbo style robots. Like, I get that it add's to the "she fake, not real, look how not human she looks." But ehh, I just dont like the aesthetic of it. I, personally, prefer a robot that looks and acts totally human..because it makes the reveal so much more delicious.

[33cl33]

Not that this is reflective of this community so much as sci-fi in general... My biggest pet peeve is "synthetic people."

IE - fully conscious, sometimes organic, free will, etc... but still treated like robots, so they're slaves. So the only possible conclusion is that they inevitably rebel and kill us.

I think AI is fascinating. And I would be very interested in exploring more fiction and reality that involves artificial general / human-like intelligence.

But I'm sooooooo tired of using super-advanced-AI as a stand-in for slavery, racism, gender conflict, etc. We can tell far more salient and compelling stories about those dynamics using real people. Using AI-driven robots as a stand-in for slaves or subjugated women / minorities just distances the audience even further from engaging with the idea of actual slavery and subjugation.

Robots (not self-motivating, super intelligent, essentially human ones but very human-like-appearing, pre-programmed machines) provide a platform for exploring humankind's relationship to really good illusions. And that, to me, is more interesting. And almost completely lacking in media.

[jolshefsky]

We can tell far more salient and compelling stories about those dynamics using real people. Using AI-driven robots as a stand-in for slaves or subjugated women / minorities just distances the audience even further from engaging with the idea of actual slavery and subjugation.

This is exactly the nuanced perspective I appreciate. There is definite validity in the stories of subjugation, but to use AI seems like a dilution of real issues.

I did think of one recently: I tire of the imagery of weaponized fembots. Can't we just want them for sex and/or companionship? It's a big turn-off to "accessorize" them with machine guns. If it's an attempt to demonstrate wielding "power" so-to-speak, then it's a lazy one since a clever AI would be so much smarter as to have power in intelligence. Think Ex Machina and how Ava just puppets Caleb around with her manipulative intelligence. An advanced AI would simply pacify us with perfect sex robots. (... please.)

[33cl33]

We can tell far more salient and compelling stories about those dynamics using real people. Using AI-driven robots as a stand-in for slaves or subjugated women / minorities just distances the audience even further from engaging with the idea of actual slavery and subjugation.

This is exactly the nuanced perspective I appreciate. There is definite validity in the stories of subjugation, but to use AI seems like a dilution of real issues.

I did think of one recently: I tire of the imagery of weaponized fembots. Can't we just want them for sex and/or companionship? It's a big turn-off to "accessorize" them with machine guns. If it's an attempt to demonstrate wielding "power" so-to-speak, then it's a lazy one since a clever AI would be so much smarter as to have power in intelligence. Think Ex Machina and how Ava just puppets Caleb around with her manipulative intelligence. An advanced AI would simply pacify us with perfect sex robots. (... please.)

Ex Machina gets it right in two very subtle moments - Ava smiles to herself in the mirror toward the end, giving us the only sign that she might be sentient... And then also (at least in the original script - it was cut because they couldn't make it work) as she approaches the helicopter pilot, we were supposed to see what "she" sees, which is just a series of metrics and code. Reminding us she's not a person, but something entirely else.

So subtle, and so overlooked by most critics and thought pieces.

[FaceoffFembot]

magical love interest that conveniently comes with a remote control

also great takes on "synthetic people". i don't hear about enough popular works actually engaging with questions borne out of actual robotics and cybernetics - how we project empathy, the effects of automation and to who's benefit, the feedback loops of algorithms... at best the "synthetic people" trope is misery tourism, at worst it's exploiting extant discriminations and inequalities for glamour with plausible deniability and comfortable distance.

[tdlsn]

I did think of one recently: I tire of the imagery of weaponized fembots. Can't we just want them for sex and/or companionship? It's a big turn-off to "accessorize" them with machine guns

[Saya]

Generally speaking, I have a few tropes both large and small that I am a bit tired of:

- The Emotionless Robot. Aside from being kind of done to death when it comes to robots and androids, it carries a whole slew of unfortunate connotations involving people who are neurodiverse. The idea that someone who doesn't process emotions in the same way--or can't--and has difficulties following human social cues is some kind of terrifying "other" is one that plenty of neurodiverse people can both relate with and find insulting. That said, you can do this right. A very good example being the better Data-centric episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the character's struggles to understand emotional beings around him are used both to show his own development into a more complex individual and a mirror by which we can evaluate our own emotions and social mores.

- Robots With Emotions Are Human Converts/Mind Copies. There's a bit of subtlety with this one. When used to explore a human's transition into an unrecognizable form, analogous to someone coming to terms with physical or mental changes after a serious accident, this when done tastefully is a very cool idea. Sadly, hardly anyone ever does it that way. The typical use of this trope is to establish why a robot has emotions and a personality in the first place, and comes across to me as a boring, lazy cop-out. An example of this done wrong for me is Cayde 6 from Destiny, as in the second game, they make mention how he--and by extension all Exos--are either copied or uploaded human consciousness in robot form. This just immediately robs the character of any real interest to me. He's no longer a quirky, irreverent AI, which presents all kinds of interesting questions, but ultimately makes him the same as some guy wearing a suit of armor.

Robots Are The Enemy Other. The amount of times I've seen robots depicted as evil or amoral for the sheer reason that they are machines. And while this ties into a lot of legitimate social concerns about corporate power and reckless automation while also directly addressing their starry-eyed predictions of the world of tomorrow, at the same time, this has also started to take on an anti-technology and anti-science bent, as though these things are one and the same. It's a "shoot the messenger" philosophy and it's boring. Why can't there be friendly robots in settings that tackle issues of corporate abuses and automation pushing humans out of the workplace? Why must every robot with a smile and a expressed desire to help be scrutinized for betrayal by the mere fact of its existence? Make more friendly robots, fiction writers.

- Helpless Female Robots. Here's a touchy subject. A lot of times in fiction, whenever a female robot is seen, they're almost always used as victims in some form or another. Be they victims of the implied "Androids are Slaves" trope to be rescued by human or android men, or as helpless, docile servants who will be effortlessly destroyed in order to display their purity, in contrast to more masculine, threatening machines. This isn't to say such characterizations of female robots as powerful and assertive don't exist, but the vast majority of depictions lean into stereotypes that are as unfortunate as they are trite. I want more Avas, Doloreses and TX's, please. I want more female androids with assertiveness and confidence, who can face foes and challenges and be capable of kicking ass, even if they don't always win and even if they are villainous. Which brings me to my next point:

- Being A Robot Sucks. The vast, vast majority of depictions of androids and robots go out of their way to show what a miserable, joyless existence it is. And this isn't merely in the physical sense, but in the mental sense as well. Most robots are depicted as being miserable by pure fact of their being robots, rather than for any real existentially deep reason. And the solution always seems to be "become human" or "become more human-like". While I love human-like robots, it'd be nice if something showed a robot coming to terms with what they were and learning to enjoy what they can do in a constructive way (or an awesomely destructive way, if they are a villain). After all, a lot of us can probably remember a time as kids where we thought being a robot was awesome. Why does that have to go away when we're older?

[Steve]

emotionless robot is not a trope it is how machines work. machined do not have emotione.

[Aaack]

emotionless robot is not a trope it is how machines work. machined do not have emotione.

I would argue that. If you program a robot to react at emotional stimuli then you're program emotions to it.
If you argue it's not real emotions because it's programmed I wonder if you're aware you're biologically programmed by instinct and hormones to emotions too. Then if artificial intelligence can't have emotions because it's programmed, no one is really emotional.

[Miss Pris]

We can tell far more salient and compelling stories about those dynamics using real people. Using AI-driven robots as a stand-in for slaves or subjugated women / minorities just distances the audience even further from engaging with the idea of actual slavery and subjugation.

This is exactly the nuanced perspective I appreciate. There is definite validity in the stories of subjugation, but to use AI seems like a dilution of real issues.

I did think of one recently: I tire of the imagery of weaponized fembots. Can't we just want them for sex and/or companionship? It's a big turn-off to "accessorize" them with machine guns. If it's an attempt to demonstrate wielding "power" so-to-speak, then it's a lazy one since a clever AI would be so much smarter as to have power in intelligence.

I'm pretty much in agreement with most everyone here in terms of what's getting played-out, and in regards to 33cl33's and jolshesky's posts specifically, I have to conjure up my inner, old, posh British man and yell "here, here!" Once upon a time, sci fi could use stories of robots, or AI in general, to make an actual good point about a subjugated population in a society, make people think, etc. No one was really having those conversations on a larger scale outside of niche populations; the analogy was subversive, and potentially transformative... once. But now we have those conversations every day (which I am glad for, don't get me wrong, but why would we then need to see that echoed yet again in sci fi, turning what was once a subversive genre filled with commentary about our present society into a hack job?) Good sci-fi (and that should include then good fembot and similar material about that subject) becomes far more interesting when we use them to discuss the nature of the human and our relationships (of various kinds) with technologies, what it means to be sentient, what it means to "feel" (love, desire, pain, etc.) Even in erotica - yes, there is a place for the quick, efficient, and visually stimulating, but we become accustomed to it, and then bored - complexity can pique out interest. Seeing machines that resonate with our sense of the human can be intriguing, as can seeing an AI that has a totally alien mind.

So, I'm a very visual person, and there was a brief period when I could watch standard "porn"-style porn and it was... titillating, let's say, but I got bored with it quickly. The people all looked the same - especially the women - and they did the same things, over and over again, and pretty soon, it just became a turn-off. It's in the nature of human beings to be more interested by and excited by the "new." And, just like standard porn, seeing the same tropes over and over can make fembot, AI, and robot stuff seem stale. This might be a part of the increase in the BDSM stuff (all over the erotica landscape, not just in some of the stories here.) People are seeking out something beyond malfunction and "face-off" tropes. (I'm a little biased here, to be fair, because neither really engage me, though; I like cyborgs, sentient AI, etc. - only into malfunction if self-repair is involved. I know these tropes are still important for some people, and I'm not saying this to suggest that such material go away, but maybe they need to become their own, kind of "classic" thing, and new themes need to be explored in new content. I say this planning one day to put my money where my mouth is; I'm writing something that could be described as "erotic sci-fi" with a human and an AI, trying to explore new themes in desire and experience - but who knows when I'll be done with that?)

In terms of the machine guns and similar militarized fembots, one of the things I found in my background research for my dissertation were some (semiotic/psychoanalysis-based) feminist academic books and articles from the 1990s criticizing the image of the cyborg as a part of the phallocentric, military-industrial-complex fantasy of 1980s neoliberal capitalism blah blah blah that academia has moved way past for the most part (but are still useful to discuss as a foil to more up-to-date feminist theory and to the "non-human turn" in the social sciences which would frame the cyborg far differently.) Bringing both some of those ideas into the discussion, as they're salient as a commentary on their time, and the more recent arguments against them into the discussion (btw, I highly recommend for that Anne Allison's "Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines" for a different take on the cyborg) - maybe, in addition to the machine-gun fembot trope being played-out, we're all just over that hyper-alpha-male image of masculinity that the machine gun-outfitted cyber soldier embodies. The 1980s are over, and the ripped, oiled and sweaty, machine-gun-toting blunt instrument "hero" (or fembot) just doesn't pique our collective interest anymore. We expect our action heroes to be smart and complex now, so why not our fembots? The appeal of the killer fembot may have been that edge of the masculine image/expectation in the feminine, that "something new and different" that's just worn out now. That whole hyper-militarized trope in media, politics, and masculinity itself is very "Boomer." I think we've evolved past that in terms of what engages us. Maybe we're just looking for something more subtle now than a blunt instrument. I don't know. Just a thought.

[Uncom]

h

[Spaz]

Fembots that can feel pain.
Just, why? I can't think of any reason to build a fembot that can feel pain, except for, like, medical training reasons or something. But even then, those kinds of fembots wouldn't be sold to the public.

It would be to prevent themselves from getting too damaged, thus keeping costs down, I would think.

[ministrations]

I think this is why our fetish is so thankless for content creators. Every one of us has a different laundry list of wants and titillations. Do balloon fetishists have the same type of debates about helium vs. air?

My personal feeling is that malfunctions are way overdone, especially in the XXX content. There are definitely good exceptions, like Fection’s work. But malfunction scenes and stories have to build up or else the narrative breaks apart. (And I would love to one day see a story in Fection’s universe where the robot works, for the record.)

It really doesn’t work for me to see a standard sex scene except where the woman malfunctions every 75 seconds like clockwork...in those cases I would have preferred to see just the straight sex scene. That is why I’ve been mostly scared off of clip buying.

That said, because we are talking about tropes and not “things I don’t like,” I agree with every one of Saya’s points. For instance, it was so annoying watching the Sarah Connor Chronicles writers paint Cameron into a literal corner. The cherry on top was how the male terminators took months to destroy, but the one female terminator of the week was neatly neutralized in three minutes (and the one good idea they had with the T-1001, her coming to terms with replacing a human for an extended period, was criminally underexplored).

Artificial intelligence, synthetic (lifelike) body, and you’re two-thirds of the way to a good story in my opinion. But moderation and consistency are key. I don’t need to be hit over the head in every paragraph or every line of dialogue. Maeve’s malfunction in Season 1 of Westworld was excellent precisely because it was so unexpected.

Forgive my rambling. If there’s a writers circle on FC I’d love to join it...or if there isn’t, would anyone like to start one with me?

[Propman]

I'm not interested in "this is a mindless robot, therefore I can do whatever I want to it" - especially if the robot actually *behaves* like a human being. Whether this is a human, it's debatable, but I think that the perpetrator is still an asshole. That said... that's your fantasy and your imagination.

Malfunctions are fun because they show "she is a robot", but for me they're a mean to an end, not the point

[Erntoron]

- When the only real robot content is in the beginning and maybe the end. The rest of the video is just regular porn, that's just such a complete waste.

- Really loud whirring; I actually like it if it's done subtly (Goddess Alexandra's Dominatrix Mode for example) but mostly it's the same stock sound played so loud it bursts your eardrums out.

- Headphone pieces = robot; mostly in anime, the robot has a completely normal body and appearance, but the ears are two metal wing pieces? It's also often seen in GINO content, so maybe that's why I don't like it.

- Hypnosis videos disguised as robot videos. Basically GINO the porn.

[tdlsn]

Hypnosis videos disguised as robot videos. Basically GINO the porn

Hope the folks in the commercial updates thread are viewing this.

[zerodin]

Hypnosis videos disguised as robot videos. Basically GINO the porn

Hope the folks in the commercial updates thread are viewing this.

I can't agree with this any harder.
Hypnotized women are no more robots than statues are. They should be splintered off into their own "central" forum and wiki.

[--NightBattery--]

I dont personally think any writter should aim to please me. My poetry teacher said even turds are meant to shine under the right poolish.

And while getting tired might be a bit to much and some media knows how to exploit cliche; I certainly have grown certain disdain to deus ex machinas for the robot kind in the form of:

Robot overcammimg programming
Just take for example terminator 3 when the T800 suddenly shut downs after being reprogrammed. Maybe it was stablished that T800s could develop sentience but hey one cant just over ride the faulty thing one uses to overide. Unless you got some accesory rebooting brain somewhere. A more annoying version of this would be when it is emotions that make the robot overcame its programming. It is rather ironic. Since emotions are programmed responses even biologically.
A robot suddenly snapping out of reprogramming with no good reason than the power of love is just a huge turn off.

Super strong house robots
Anime has made abuse of this a lot. Companion robots loaded with weaponry and wall crushing strenght. If they are the property of some Dr. Light or anyone that seemingly built the robot and has some defensive role in their stories I give it a free pass. But otherwise I find it a bit weird companies give people in peace time a companion with hydraulic power to throw a car over a river or being loaded with military grade equipment when the robot is mostly meant to be quietly at home. It just opens a pandora box into stories that makes said stories exquisitely cringy if suddenly said household machines turn into heroes and have to fight other robots out of their unexplained strenght for mopping and making tea.
It can be a fun thing tho. As long is threated without seriousness or its some weird normality in the world story. Like medabots or Robopon.

[Rotwang]

Here are a few of my issues :

1) Very human parts merged with hard mechanical parts. It's the Bjork robot. It's supposed to be a "hard" shell but you have all the delicate facial elements of a human being for the mouth and eyes. From an engineering point of view that is a nightmare to get done. Our faces are quite complex muscle structures, attached to and supported by bones. Same with the easy to remove rubber face, where are the attachment points, how does the rubber face move ?

2) Super Strength in every robot. It's not much bigger than a regular human, but it has the power output of a 20-ton mechanical digger. It's like building a household mixer that has a 2000 horsepower engine in case you need to blend titanium or something ?

3) The robot that is impossible to distinguish from a human being or cannot be disguised as a human. Organic androids aside, it's difficult to make a robot that is indistinguishable from a human. In fact it's a huge added cost, except of course when they have a plot point where it has to be hidden and is obviously a robot then it will stand out at any moment ... If you do have an issue with robots and need complex methods and tests to figure them out, why did they go all those extra steps in the first place ? The worst bit of that trope is the robot that can't be identified from a human, but then has a built in laser cannon or some very obvious robotic feature that is visible to the mark I eyeball, but defeats high tech devices ...