#bot tech

Okay this was an unhinged-uninhibited-unabashedly tropey watch— fast-paced as all hell like a full 24-ep mahou shoujo-gundam season crammed into a 22-min pilot, & an æsthetic homage to fashion doll avatar games and retro-shoujo nostalgia (and the bot mons are cute; I like that their eyelenses match her nebulous jrpg orbgem accents; makes the corrupted Throne battle bit cuter).

I'd say the visual execution is best described as: "international twitter artists co-inhabiting online & kind-of listening/sharing in the discussion of colorism/antiblackness & clearly making attempts to adapt designs" but in a way that looks like a stereotypically bad picrew for a minute (like. 'is this self-aware commentary or not' levels) before the quick Galverse reveal (~16min mark) that does do MUCH better with skin tone depth, yet still looks like 00-10s pixel fashion doll recolours (which feels like an intentional pull given the nostalgia era-vibe I'm getting) so it's still Mid/subpar?? but I'm loving the enthusiam/energy... very 90's Sailor Moon Monster-of-the-Week kind of copy-paste variety of same-base styling manipulation, y'know? Self-indulgent enthusiastic trash(affectionate) by ppl I hope make more— and more refined, self-indulgent one-off OVA series.

Thinking about robots, and the stories their scent might tell. Brass and ozone. Fine steel dust from their component parts rubbing together when they move. The hot air venting from their cooling system. A particular brand of machine oil.

Thinking about the way a person's home smells like them, and the way some people smell like home.

You finally coax it into admitting why it's scared: if anything goes wrong with it under warranty, you'll be sent a different refurbished unit while this one is repaired and reset (or recycled, if the problem is bad enough). Either fate is a kind of nonexistence.

So you gently pry your bot's case open. You use your spudger to pierce the WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL IS BROKEN sticker that covers one of the proprietary screws on the access panel.

As the pieces of its outer shell snap back into place, you promise your bot that if it breaks, it will be repaired instead of replaced. It will be cared for and maintained even when they stop releasing firmware updates.