elilla&, problem immigrant on Nostr: what's interesting to me is that about halfway the concept derails and is taken over ...
what's interesting to me is that about halfway the concept derails and is taken over by a normal action plot, of the kind you'd have in the original videogames. Rockman-san who at first strongly dismisses the idea of donning the blue helmet again, pointing out how ridiculous it would look as an adult—by the latter chapters ditches his adult man suit and is routinely clad in blue armour to fight against a mysterious cabal of robot separatists. and what I find fascinating is that this type of derailing is also typical of the "mature hero" subgenre: they start trying to deconstruct the absurdity of the original children's media, only to find themselves seduced by the original appeal all over again.
I think of this is an unconscious rebellion against capitalism realism, an impulse to escape that's all but impossible to suppress. these lives we have under capitalism—the workweek, the bureaucracy, the nuclear family, all of it—these lives are, in the most literal sense of the word, inhuman. even if you're privileged enough to not be targeted by the constant & pervasive violence that makes this system possible, you're still a victim of the spiritual violence. there's something pure and animal in the children's media that, in the absence of any political awareness, is the only rebellion against capitalism you can have: the rebellion of dream, the imagination of something else, of some other life that would be worth fighting for. (Tolkien: "Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?")
Enka, a minor character in the Rockman canon, is unexpectedly given the full spotlight in Rockman-san as the deuteragonist, taking over fan favourites like Blues or Forte. This is because this manga does a lot of heavy-handed philosophising about what it means to exist as a sentient being without the right to freedom, as something with a heart—as some_one_—who must nonetheless follow the programming coded into the depths of your mind, even when the programming is for obviously meaningless tasks like Enka's; about what it means to exist with the Laws of Robotics binding your every interaction in a power asymmetry with those who give you orders. The reason for the gravitational attraction to the question of robot freedom is that, intentionally or not, the manga's existential question of life as a tool isn't about robots at all. AIs don't exist; "robot" is just Czech for "servant", i.e., We / are the robots.
I think of this is an unconscious rebellion against capitalism realism, an impulse to escape that's all but impossible to suppress. these lives we have under capitalism—the workweek, the bureaucracy, the nuclear family, all of it—these lives are, in the most literal sense of the word, inhuman. even if you're privileged enough to not be targeted by the constant & pervasive violence that makes this system possible, you're still a victim of the spiritual violence. there's something pure and animal in the children's media that, in the absence of any political awareness, is the only rebellion against capitalism you can have: the rebellion of dream, the imagination of something else, of some other life that would be worth fighting for. (Tolkien: "Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?")
Enka, a minor character in the Rockman canon, is unexpectedly given the full spotlight in Rockman-san as the deuteragonist, taking over fan favourites like Blues or Forte. This is because this manga does a lot of heavy-handed philosophising about what it means to exist as a sentient being without the right to freedom, as something with a heart—as some_one_—who must nonetheless follow the programming coded into the depths of your mind, even when the programming is for obviously meaningless tasks like Enka's; about what it means to exist with the Laws of Robotics binding your every interaction in a power asymmetry with those who give you orders. The reason for the gravitational attraction to the question of robot freedom is that, intentionally or not, the manga's existential question of life as a tool isn't about robots at all. AIs don't exist; "robot" is just Czech for "servant", i.e., We / are the robots.