SDB also has a poll up about robot girls. I'm not that into anime, but I gather that robot slave girls are a common theme. Kinda the ultimate objectification of women, right? I mean, oh, it's ok -- they're not people, just robots! Sure, they look and act like people, but they're just sophisticated things. Eh. There are enough men who see real women in that same way that the concept of robot girls makes me uncomfortable.
Not that I don't understand the allure. Love is addictive, and a robot girl you could completely control would love you and never do anything to hurt you... but it's a misshaped fantasy. Such love would be just an illusion, no matter how real it felt. Falling into a trap like that would be no different than a heroin addict's permanent ecstatic torpor. The concept is a sort of emotional pornography (other forms of which are all around us).
Isn't the point of love that someone chooses to be with you?
Update:
A connection to Islamofascism.
Exactly. That's why I never understood the whole Stepford Wives thing. Along those same lines, it makes me better understand why God gives us freewill, although there are times I wish he hadn't.
Most of the robot girls I listed are not "slave girls" in the sense that you are referring to. They're all quite different in character terms, and several of them are effectively human-level in intelligence and in decisiveness. That's not necessarily obvious to someone who hasn't watched the series they come from, though.
SDB: Perhaps I'll have to do some research! What makes them so attractive to so many men, if they're not ideal artificial women?
Well, there was an episode of Futurama where Fry falls in love with a Lucy Liu-bot he downloaded from the internet...
...and there's a "public hygeine" movie talking about the dangers of loving a robot...
and yeah, pretty much it holds up the idea that such love is an illusion. There was an interesting exploitation angle to the episode, on top of the obvious pornographic aspects.
As I write this, the winner in the poll is Cyberdoll Kei. What distinguishes her from CBD May (who has half as many votes) is that CBD Kei has an effective IQ of 50,000.
The second most popular robot girl in the poll is Mahoro, and she's not a slave, either. In my description of her, for her "Major faults" what I wrote was "Ecchi nanowa ikenaito omoimasu!". That was an in-joke for those who'd seen the series. It's something Mahoro says a lot, and what it means is "I think that dirty thoughts are bad." Mahoro is a prude, and one of the running gags in the series is the way that Mahoro finds and confiscates all of Suguru's girly magazines. And every time she finds one she lectures him about it.
Meanwhile, anyone who tried to treat Android 18 as a "slave" wouldn't live very long. The last person to try it was her creator, Dr. Gero, and his fate was to have Android 17 (her twin brother) jump on Dr. Gero's head and smash his brains into mush. (You can be sure that if 17 hadn't done it, 18 would have.)
In "Chobits" there are just as many male-form persocomms as female-form persocomms.
But who cares about facts? It's more fun just to sneer, isn't it, Michael?
It occurs to me that a lot of the attraction of the robot girls comes from three things: first, they're usually idealized female forms (and what nerd doesn't want a supermodel girlfriend?)Second, there's probably an inherent presumption that their "erratic" female behaviors are just programmed "flavor", and in fact their minds are very logical and less prone to disagreement. Since men tend to think that women are "illogical" (whether they really are or not), I'd imagine that's a strong appeal. The third thing is that the robots tend to have superhuman (or nearly) abilities in a number of areas, and I think that a lot of men find a significant attraction to the idea of a powerful woman loving them, since it shows that she isn't trying to extract anything from them.
The fact that CBD Kei won Steven's poll is probably a pretty good judge of what it is guys really want -- a smart, beautiful woman. That she's a robot is ancillary.
This is, of course, simply my opinion based on the guys I know who have expressed interest in such things before. (I am not a psychologist and very happy that way. Not that most of them really know what they're talking about, either.)
I do tend to agree with Steven that your judgment was hasty and based mostly on an outsider's perception of what anime characters are like, rather than any real experience, Michael. Granted, there's a subset of anime (hentai, really) nerds who just want dumb, subservient female characters with giant jugs, but that doesn't reflect on the artform any more than the existence of porn films reflects on the movie industry as a whole.
I, and many others, enjoy anime for its complexities and willingness to explore reality through surreality. Animation is a powerful artform, and the Japanese treat it as an adult medium rather than something suitable only for children.
Of course, there do exist anime which are of the wish-fufillment variety with robot slave girls... there exist many of these various sorts of "harem" shows, where the nondescript protagonist (the better for the view to insert himself in) has a wide variety of girls inexplicably falling for him; they certainly don't have to be robots. (Happens the reverse with girls as main characters, too.) Of course there are the porn versions of the same, too. Since there's such a wide variety of tastes, there are some that get disturbing.
Of course, one might as well say that merely sitting at home and watching Casablanca is easier than going out and finding a real relationship. There's some truth in that, too; any sort of fictionalized romance can be a substitute for the real thing. That's a danger in art.
Steven Den Beste -
Re: Your comment, "But who cares about facts? It's more fun just to sneer, isn't it, Michael?"
Come on. I've read your blog (I was quite disappointed when you announced you were hanging up your hat), so I know you're smarter than that. Go re-read Michael's post of 02:20 AM. He admits ignorance and asks to be educated. I grant you, you do educate him, but then you go and ruin it with a condescending quip like that one, which was totally uncalled for. Michael was not sneering; he was making a specific value judgment that unconstrained love is better than constrained love. (A judgment you seem to agree with, I'd add, from reading your "No they're not slaves" post). Granted, he was attacking a straw man, but he was unaware that he was doing so. So cut him some slack and understand the point he was trying to make, instead of claiming he was "sneering", OK?
SDB: Yeah, as RM said, I wasn't sneering. I'm actually quite interested in the topic now that it appears to be substantially deeper than I suspected.
The real problem was jumping to the conclusion that "robot girl" == "slave girl". If anything, it's the human girls in certain genres of anime that are more likely to be subservient, and that's most likely a nostalgic desire for traditional Japanese sex roles ("yamato nadesico"), something that's increasingly rare outside of escapist entertainment. Even in the increasing number of anime series that are based on "dating sim" games, the hero is forced to choose from a variety of stereotyped women, at most one of whom fits that mold.
-j
"I, and many others, enjoy anime for its complexities and willingness to explore reality through surreality. Animation is a powerful artform, and the Japanese treat it as an adult medium rather than something suitable only for children."
Cypren, that was a very strong and meaningful comment to me. I've often tried explaining to people how anime isn't just something that only fits into the childish cartoon genre as so many people seem to think of it (as well as the porn only genre). It's like motion pictures... for kids to adults... but animated, which gives even more freedom for the imagination, ecchi or not.
As for Mahoromatic, I believe they were appealing to at least two types of viewers. When I first heard about Mahoromatic, I was expecting a cliche "robot slave girl"/maid slave story with nudity, or at least an overload of fan service, where that is the main focus. Instead, I found an amazingly touching and complex story about a boy and his android maid, along with the large ammount of fan service. I could've done without the latter, but I must admit, the story wouldn't be as great as it is without it. I actually cried at/near the end of both series.. lol. Where would we be without a slight sense of realism (where people do in fact have to be naked from time to time, and are in fact human with natural sexual emotions), and comic relief.. although it too was sexual. Mahoromatic proved to me that excessive fan service can be done in good taste (mostly), without taking away from the story, as I'm sure most porn and hentai does. The fact that it was a well written story (with beautiful animation) is all that matters to me.
Exit the fantasy world and return to normal life. No harm done.