#inapplicable

it absolutely is, much to my surprise

while Rockman-san and Rockman-chan are comedy mangas, there's a surprisingly serious undertone to the development of human/robot relations in it. one part that's brought up for all of one line is that since roll grows up to be a beautiful woman, some people question her and why she was made

whaT THE FUCK, DUDE

now, the franchise is no stranger to flirting with troves of potential philosophy to write about. these guys often just open up a treasure chest and then just run out whooping because they found a cool new spoon inside the actual mounds of gold, but holy SHIT this is just a FUCKING MINEFIELD they casually uncovered and then ran the fuck away from

there's a LOT of road to cover between the streets of "women should be allowed to look how they want, and some women want to be pretty" and "female robots are often designed to be attractive because their creator wanted it, rather than it being their own personal choice", and this sort of shit can cause a spontaneous game of 52-car pickup

even down the timeline, i would genuinely be amazed if reploids don't have to deal with this shit in-universe. X8 brought us Toyota tits Layer and Alia let down her hair and drew some lines on her breastplate with magic marker to imply cleavage. how do people in-universe feel about THEM?

thankfully, i plan on surviving the wormhole that splits off the X timeline from the Classic timeline, even if i have to hang onto the edges of the Time Skimmer to do so.

Battle Network isn't my favorite series in the franchise, but I like it quite a lot and so it's been a lot of fun zipping through the games again and one of the biggest things i like about it are the redesigned takes on existing Robot Masters, particularly the way they get split into two components: a human avatar and a network avatar. a humansona and a netsona. a persona and a fursona, if you will.

one of my favorite things about shounen anime is that everyone has a fucking Gimmick. nobody just casually likes baseball--they also have to wear jerseys everywhere, scream all hot-blooded about the necessity of teamwork, eat dinner off of the home plate, and sleep with their bat on a pillow stuffed with balls. some people will say this is unrealistic, but those people have clearly never talked to a Pokémon fan. plus, y'know, that's what most kids and teenagers do: they find something cool and feel the need to bring it up at every opportunity, because they're growing and want approval for their burgeoning interests. meanwhile, i fucking love it when people are passionate about their interests and make it their entire personality.

so in my opinion, the best Battle Network designs are ones that lean into this and are complimentary on both the NetOp side and the NetNavi side, both of them coalescing around a singular Gimmick and leaning into it with the subtlety of a hammer. Dex and GutsMan.EXE are great because Dex is all in on "guts" as a concept, acting primarily with his heart and charging straight through, representing both an overwhelming emphasis on strength and his misplaced confidence in sheer machismo. Count Zap is basically the best fucking character in existence, both as a compliment to ElecMan.EXE and as a standalone villain, and the anime only made him even better.

there's the stinkers, of course. Speedy Dave is a complete nothingburger of a character, to the point where both the games, anime, and manga have completely different takes on him that head up in entirely separate directions, and with QuickMan.EXE having absolutely no relation to any of them. both Mayl and Roll.EXE suffer from needing to be The Girl for their dedicated character gimmick, as written by people who think that Being A Girl is enough of a personality trait to write about this year. WHEW. time to take the season off.

but there's always going to be stinkers. that's kind of the downfall with any long-running series that A: needs to consistently put out Moar Content and B: focus on character designs first and foremost and fleshing them out second. they're showcases to get you to engage with the gameplay, and then the manga/anime have to pick up the slack after the fact. it's like being handed a glass cylinder and then being told "make this useful"--there's only so much shit an anime can do with a glass cylinder, and they sure as fuck aren't going to make it a dildo.

a) they would not have sex with you

or

b) you can fuck them, but only once because the sex would kill you, so you REALLY SHOULDNT FUCK THEM.

i have an ardent investment in humans not dying and so am more than happy to do what i can to prevent it

doodling the author avatar has put an itch in me. i will learn the ways of MSPaint, the way God intended for Megaman fan art, i don't care if it's 20 years too late for that to be relevant.

so have a roll doing the meme dance from that one game. pose very heavily referenced from it, hence the chibi proportions, but Powered Up Roll is about that size anyway

[i am aegosexual]

can who do