okay but both of the robot powers and rex things cause robots cool
trust me, i know how much you love robots babe
They’re two alternate takes based on some deep seated fears that Blue has. Business’s treatment of GCBC has made Blue deeply, deeply afraid of being a robot, because he was treated like one for ages, and it’s scarred him.
In the robot Powers route, Powers WAS a robot all along without knowing thanks to a chip that makes his mechanics (minus his ‘bionics’) seem like flesh and blood to him. It’s finally discovered by Rex looking a little too closely with Master Builder vision, which lets you see the parts everything can break down into. At one point, an old wound that Powers is sensitive about gets opened, and on a hatch above his power source is the Octan logo. It’s one of his absolute worst nightmares come to life!
In the robot Rex route, it’s Cosmo who sees that Rex isn’t organic, and Rex reacts... poorly. He has a lot of rambles about how much it makes sense (he was so obedient as Emmet, so compliant, so generic, so bland, all of it makes sense if he was just a robot off the assembly line) as he breaks down, because the realization comes with a redux of the “are my thoughts even my own” existential crisis that Rex had regarding The Man Upstairs. He eventually adjusts and ends up being kind of reckless with himself (mechanics can be repaired so much easier than flesh and blood), but he’s back to his normal self. He acts perfectly human, which means he’s perfectly stupid.
In both routes, the resident robot boy has both a) deep seated fears regarding if their loyalties are programmed in and b) a very unsettling factory default setting.
For Powers, he gets kind of paranoid that the reason he loves Rex could be that there’s programmed loyalty to members of Business’s bloodline, which Rex worries about in equal measure. His factory default makes him endlessly loyal to Business again, and he nearly wipes himself out of existence trying to make Business proud and bring him The Special.
For Rex, the worry is that he’s got programmed loyalties to Octan employees, and so his love for Powers could theoretically be that loyalty extrapolated onto a more human mindset. His factory default setting... is Emmet. It’s very, very unsettling to watch Rex acting and talking exactly like Emmet, and after he’s restored, he wants to claw his default settings out of himself, one digit of binary at a time.
They’re both pretty sad alternate takes, but the boys have each other, at least!
