I was unaware of the organic parts but honestly probably? I'm going to rule for now to go ahead and submit and I'll check with a friend who has read the book on whether it fits the criteria

There is also that this is specifically about the relationships between robots and non-robots. As when I did Artificial Kids, I'm doing this because if there's one thing I love in fiction, it's a robot (or any other artificially created character) who has a best friend who is also Other in some way, and they find belonging in each other. While I am certainly not against bonds between robots, or robots having multiple meatbags or meatbags being friends with multiple robots, the point is that this is not specifically about robots, but about the relationships between robots and living people (or nonliving- still got my fingers crossed for someone to submit a robot + a ghost). Just because it's called the robot riot, don't discount the equally important meatbags on the team.

Cyborgs are meatbags, because a person doesn't stop being human (or expanding for the sake of fiction, whatever they started as) just because they get some prosthetic parts. Even if they get a LOT of prosthetic parts. Even if more than half of their body is prosthetic parts. They're still human (or whatever they started as). To run a cyborg as a robot would go against some very specific opinions I have about cyborgs vs robots in fiction.

It's not banned from other tournaments because other people have different relationships to it than I do, but I would be genuinely upset if a CR character won any of my tournaments, and I won't run anything I can't make peace with a victory

The bracket will be split into two halves, one based on numbers and one based on enthusiasm, with the final being between the winners of those two halves. I have too many bracket ideas on the board to do two back to back for the same blog.

Or, to put it another way, if the player character is a specific avatar that the player is meant to project onto, that counts, but if it's a fully customizable character created by the player wholecloth, that wouldn't (so again, Pokemon player characters count even if they're somewhat customizable, but the much more customizable player character from ACNH wouldn't. If that makes sense).

Yep! The third wheel can be either robot or meatbag or some surprise third thing that is neither, like robot/meatbag/ghost- as long as there's at least one robot and at least one non-robot, we're good 👍