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X (My concept art for my upcoming novel: “Mega Man X: I'm a Irregular.”) :3

Hey, everyone! I created a WhatsApp channel specifically to share my process of writing the novel. It's a novel I started thinking about last year! I'll be waiting for you there with open arms! :D

The link is this one below :3

I made this commission for: @eway

Aki and Suna! It was fun to do this great commission! :D

Me when I was || Me now :)

This is my character development, LMAO.

He's my friend, okay?

My master robot "TightenBreath Man": (The one on the left.) together with "Gel Man": (The one on the right.) by: @galaxerknight2 in twitter.

My childhood crushes. 👩🏻‍🦲❤️

All right, we know that X is the first android to possess free will to choose either good or evil. (I think that this construction of free will is not something that was given to him as a “gift,” since I want to believe that this practice is the result of Light having learned so much from Rock, ProtoMan, Roll, and his other creations.)

The point is that, for me, X is not just free will; deciding and that's it. No, for me, he is the process of understanding it.

The key point of the entire root of the X saga is when X builds the first Reploid with his own hands at the request of Dr. Cain. WAIT! Here's my question that has kept me awake ever since I read that Archie comic...

How old was X mentally to take on such a responsibility?

To answer this question, I had to consider Piaget's stages of cognitive development:

Sensory-motor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.

Why did I decide to study X's mindset using these stages of human cognitive development? That's the point: these are stages of development and also what shapes that “free will.” If you don't go through those four stages, then what you end up with is incomplete freedom.

I will explain each stage based on Piaget's theory:

Sensory-motor stage: The first stage in which you learn about the world through direct action.

Preoperational stage: As the name suggests, “before operations,” this is where symbols begin to form, but the logic of causes is not yet understood.

Concrete operational stage: Here, the reality of rules begins to be understood.

Formal operational stage: The ability to think abstractly, to reason about the impossible.

That said, X definitely had to develop these four stages of cognitive thinking in order to “mature” that process of growth in his free will. However, in the Archie comics, we know that X was awakened, studied by Cain, and then built the first “reploide” with his own hands. Here comes the tricky part: if the pre-operational stage mentions that the logic of causes is not yet understood, then X was still there. X possessed language, yes, fully, he said "hello, Who are you?“ And also in the fragment of the animation The Day of Sigma (2005), he said, ”X... Is that my name?“ So, being someone who believed in hope (because they told him so more than once and he was made a standard-bearer by being the ”father" of the Reploids), he internalized it so much that he decided to take on everything. He confused freedom with hope.

Choice is a burden, not a privilege. Now, from that replica of incomplete free will, what do we have? We have the “mavericks,” those who are called “bad” choosers, but let me tell you that they inherited that incomplete freedom from X. They made those decisions because they believed they were free, immature decisions, not evil ones. This would explain why Reploids are vulnerable to the Maverick virus even without the virus, and it is also why they believed that if they chose “wrong,” they were free.

Remember when, at the end of X's campaign in Mega Man X4, he tells Zero directly that if he becomes a Maverick, he should stop him, even if it means destroying him?

Well, we can take this with a grain of salt: X wasn't afraid of becoming a Maverick, X was afraid of “not choosing well” and dragging everyone down. Do you remember that in the animation Sigma's Day (2005) there were prisons for Reploids? Of course, when Vile was taken away to be locked up, this was a moment before the young Reploid generation of X and Zero's time, as it was “believed” that they could be redeemed, and three wars later, the entire Reploid society “realized that they couldn't.”

And this also explains the endless cycles of war: X's hope does not come from power, but from human learning. For me, the X saga is not about “guilt for existing or being more human than humans themselves,” but rather “guilt for not having understood.”

So... (Here I begin to question Dr. Light XD) Tell me then, Dr. Light: Did you want to give X a “life,” or was he just a tool to ‘prove’ that good can win? Literally, X was both a child and the “father” of a species, and recognizing that burden, he threw himself into war. He was always the root of everything, and that's why, in a way, he felt guilty for everything, for killing his former comrades, for holding out that hope for everyone, and Zero believing in him. Zero lost Iris because she took to her grave the ideal of Repliforce, who fell one by one because of pride, a pride that was born long, long ago and is the egocentrism that results in half-replicated free will. And then we come to Mega Man X7... Man, did you really write X as a preacher of pretty words after he retired from being a Hunter? Do you really think X would stand idly by in the middle of a war? X isn't like that. He knows that if he does nothing, people will die.

So, that free will was never complete. It has been suggested that X is the one who “always chooses good” or “is the pacifist who maintains his serenity in the midst of wars that repeat the same thing over and over again.” No, X is not perfect. He is human and had to idealize “hope” to make sense of the losses in wars and so that Reploids and humans could coexist in peace. That is why characters like Lumine emerge, who in a way wanted to cut off the “root” of wars. If X had known that perhaps... he needed time to develop his free will as the wars went on, I think he would also have devised some way to understand the root of the problem and change things so that there would be no more deaths due to the error of that understanding; However, we know that this never happened. X never knew and tried everything to contain the war, and when he “knew” that the cycles continued on and on (here we can refer to Command Mission), he had no choice but to try to prevent the wars from ending worse. It is no longer an idealized world without conflict, but a world in which conflict is inevitable, and all you can do to prevent what remains from being lost is to contain it to a reasonable extent.

This is my analysis of the “adam” of the reploids with “freedom.”