Fandom Pimping/Brainstorming

[friendlylocalmod]

We're a month away from nominations opening, but it's never too early to start thinking about what fandoms you plan to offer/request!

Use the comments of this post to promote your robot-filled fandoms, or ask for recommendations of new fandoms to check out for this exchange. Any fandom is eligible so long as it has at least one character who fits the theme of Turing Fest; there are no requirements for fandom rarity or medium type.

(As a reminder, "robot" is just a term used for convenience. AIs, androids, mecha, machines, cyborgs, and any other character types within that technology-focused ballpark are welcome.)

Comments

[koraki]

Two comparatively short canons that I love:

Unit Two Does Her Makeup is a short story about three artificially intelligent sister security platforms and their differing personalities, told from the point of view of the one who has developed a fondness for makeup and fashion.

Tonari no Robot is a short yuri manga about a girl and an android falling in love with each other, being separated, and meeting again after years apart. While the romance is interesting on its own, the setting has a lot of potential for worldbuilding too.

[hokuton_punch]

The Marathon games! A classic FPS trilogy by Bungie (the Halo and Destiny people) available for free and featuring a multiplicity of varied, fascinating AI characters (plus a bonus zombie cyborg PC getting yanked around the galaxy by a couple of them) and an entire species of cyborg aliens. They're fun, they're free, they have a fantastic story, and if FPSes aren't your style, I can provide video Let's Play links, too!

[exchangebench]

Hotel is a short but heart-wrenching little manga about an AI named Louis, who's given the monumental task of guarding the last vestiges of humanity after the apocalypse. Louis is an absolute sweetheart who just wants to do his best and make his (human) parents proud. Googling "Hotel manga" will get you hooked up with scanlations easily. c:

[alias_sqbr]

Off the top of my head, 3 games with female/customisable protagonists:

Mass Effect trilogy: Space opera PC game with AI-ish villains, another morally complex AI species, and various other AIs, robots, and cyborgs. You get to explore various questions about The Nature of Sentience And Ethics through choices that affect the outcome of the story. Has an easy mode, and mods if you want to play it as a visual novel. The protagonist can be a man or woman and becomes a cyborg in game 2, they can date a bunch of cute people of various genders and species, sadly none are robots.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The post apocalyptic robot dinosaurs game. PS4 only. The protagonist is a young woman from the iron age culture that has grown up in the ruins of The Old Ones (eg, us) The previously peaceful robot megafauna they shared the land with have become violent, and the journey to find out why, and discover her own past, is very cool, and involves a bunch of fantastic artificial intelligences. Has a story mode which is pretty easy, but no mods.

Portal: A puzzle game where the system prompting you to do the puzzles becomes increasingly murderous. In a loveable way! The sequel, Portal 2, fleshes out the characters and worldbuilding more and is even better.

[laurus_nobilis]

Brave Police: J-Decker is 48-episode shounen anime from the '90s, about the power of friendship and also robots punching monsters.

The basic premise is that in the "future" of the early 21st century, criminals are creating advanced robots and monsters, so the police builds robots of their own to fight those. Deckerd, the first one of these robots, is supposed be a non-sentient mecha that will be piloted by a human. But a young boy finds him while he's still being built and treats him as if he's alive, and this makes Deckerd develop into a sapient AI - so now, instead of a mecha, the police has a robot officer that's very emotionally attached to a nine-year-old kid.

The show is mostly about Deckerd and Yuuta's friendship (and robots punching monsters), but it's got so many of the fun AI tropes we know and love: what makes a being sapient, how would humans deal with living AI, how relationships with other people shape our growth. It's a mostly light-hearted show with the occasional episodes that tug at your heartstrings, and it has a really loveable cast with plenty of robot characters that have interesting and varied relationships both among themselves and with the human cast.