AllNewSuperRobot wrote:Dr. Caelus wrote:AllNewSuperRobot wrote:However, in Mondas' words: "Generally most people don't see robots as being coded, at all. Just as a robot. An "it", a thing, a construct.
I don't buy that. Even if that were true, there's an enormous difference between a Roomba and C-3P0.
Between a real life robot and a fictional one, sure. Real world robots (even the fancy Boston Dynamics ones) are thought of as machines. Which is something subjectively projected onto fictional ones too.
The Droid Army in Star Wars Episode 1 or un-skinned Terminators similarly can be viewed as such.
That interpretation can also be dictated by real life experience and value judgements. To paraphrase the old saying: The difference between people who walk the walk (Nonbinary, LGBT+ etc), instead of talk the talk (Social Media virtue signalling). If someone nonbinary doesn't think a robot (at any level of sophistication) is good representation to them, in lieu of a human (animated or not), they are right to make that call.
I think that has less to do with them being robots and more with them being faceless, figuratively (
and literally) mass-produced mooks, much like the completely-organic Stormtroopers. On the other hand, completely unique robots with clearly-defined personalites, like the before-mentioned C-3P0, or Data, or
Ninjago's
Zane, or
every single Transformers that isn't a sparkless drone or an army builder, tend to be treated and accepted as people both in- and out-of-universe.
Also, how does that leaves series like
BIONICLE and
Shadow Raiders, which have absolutely no humans in sight? If they chose to add representation to a future reboot, it wouldn't count because they're "not human"?
This reminds me of something I read once about
The Chronicles of Narnia (I'm looking for the site but I can't find it right now). Basically, some Christian fundamentalists criticized the books for portraying Jesus as "an animal", to which Lewis basically responded "to a child, a talking lion is a person".