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canmom · 1 year

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when robots got muscles

You can blame @centrally-unplanned for this post. She(?) wrote...

The ‘chrome’ designs pioneered by illustrators like Hajime Sorayama (Sexy Robot from 1984, for example) tended to be more in vogue at this time (or just…a hot girl, who is apparently a robot, trust me bro), you don’t see designs like this too commonly until later (ask resident robo-fetishist/animator expert @canmom for details on that timeline).

After a challenge like that how can I refuse? Although the question is ‘when did robots get muscles’, this turned into something of a historical survey of robot designs from the 80s on with a throughline of biomimesis.

(Originally this was just going to be an excuse to talk about Ghost in the Shell... but I gotta be thorough.)

This was all brought on from this picture from a 1989 fanart magazine...

by an artist going by ‘Facepunch Tatebi-kun’ (顔面強打たてびー君, Ganmenkyouda Tatebii-kun). I remarked that it was interesting to see these kinds of ‘robot muscles’ in a picture from 1989, since I thought that kind of design became popular in the 2000s.

On some reflection, I think I gotta revise that opinion! I think ‘robot muscles’ became a thing around the mid 90s in anime; in the West I think it took a bit longer. But you can also see precursors already before that.

So. One thing artists are super into is biomimetic robots. That is, robots whose form (and perhaps function) is similar to animals, especially humans. The word ‘android’ referring to a human-like automaton dates all the way back to the late 19th century, but the modern ‘android, robot, cyborg’ taxonomy apparently became established around the 40s.

There’s two types of humanoid robot that get a lot of play, especially in anime. One is the convincingly humanlike cyborg, which is the same size and shape as a normal human; the other is a what we call in English a ‘mech’, i.e. a big robot you can sit inside.

Of course, if your androids just act like humans all the time, then there’s not much point having them be robots. To really create the frisson of contrast between human and mechanical forms you have to show the mechanism somehow. This could be because the machine isn’t perfectly human-like, and has visibly mechanical joints - take a look at the works of @sukabu89 for very inventive depiction of this theme - or, the android could be damaged or undergo maintenance.

When you attempt to translate biological forms into a more mechanical design language, the traditional way has been to use hard, rigid shapes, since these make the contrast especially clear. In more recent designs, particularly as we started to see real robots with ‘artificial muscles’ such as the ones created by Boston Dynamics, we get another sort of design language to express ‘mechanical parts’, and robots start having more biological forms with exposed plasticy muscles.

So let’s tell the story. We begin at the end of the 70s.

the dawn of mechaguro

For an early example of ‘mechaguro’ (a term I’m applying very anachronistically!), when a robot gets smashed up, we have Alien (1979). This film did a ridiculous amount to define sci-fi design language, and of course the alien itself blends mechanical and biological forms, with its glossy black surface allowing it to seem to melt into the exposed pipes of the spaceship. But let’s focus on the character Ash, a secret android who is broken apart in the second half of the film.

When Ash is torn apart by the alien, his insides consist of weird white plastic beads and a milky fluid that seems analogous to blood. It’s not clear what the function of any of this tech is - it’s intended to be vague and mysterious. The outside is biomimetic but the inside is anything but. He has a kind of artificial skin which resembles a latex mask.

The Terminator films are another major touchpoint for 80s science fiction. Late in the film, Arnie starts taking damage which reveals the Terminator skeleton underneath his fake skin.

The stop-motion Terminator model is basically designed according to the principle of ‘replace human bones and muscles with hard metal bits’. So you have a metal skull, metal clavicles (which are pistons for some reason), metal shoulder blades, hydraulic pistons generally in the places where muscles are. e.g. in the above picture you can see pistons that stand in place of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and in this picture...

...you can see metal scapulae and piston biceps and triceps and a piston. The shoulder joint by contrast built in a very non-human-like way. Also there’s random tubes everywhere lol.

That’s generally how androids are portrayed in the 80s. The ‘droids’ in Star Wars are similar; C-3PO is an arrangement of metal plates with gaps suggestive of underlying mechanical details and rudimentary joints and pistons.

In Blade Runner, we have the Replicants, humanoid robots - but by the premise of the film, they are essentially indistinguishable from humans. So when the Replicants die, we never really get to see their robo-innards.

and now, anime

OK, that’s the big four Western 80s sci-fi movie series; what of anime? Of course, androids in anime go all the way back to Astro Boy. But most of these early designs don’t really focus on mechanical details all that much. Super robot designs are more like tokusatsu suits than anything. There were certainly instances of impressive mechanical animation in the 70s, with early experts including Kazuhide Tomonaga on Space Battleship Yamato. Then there’s Hayao Miyazaki’s episodes of Lupin III Part 2 which featured proto-Nausicaa flying a prototype of the robots from Castle in the Sky. It would be some years before anyone could come close to matching these!

The original Gundam in ‘79 famously started the ‘real robot’ movement [Animation Night, so let’s take a brief look at how a Gundam fits together.

Generally speaking, the way Gundams are drawn in Gundam ‘79 is kind of rough. The methods to animate these rigid mechanical systems in super accurate perspective were just not yet established at the end of the 70s, certainly not on a TV budget. The actual joints on the Gundam are left very vague, but it broadly speaking seems to move like a human in armour.

But the OVA boom was about to begin, and while it would be a while before we saw the heights of Headgear/Production I.G./Gainax, things were going to change a lot. Mechanical design and animation was about to get much more sophisticated very very quickly.

In 1982, we have Super Dimension Fortress Macross, with robots that transformed into fighter jets. Its robots are designed by Kazutaka Miyatake, who cut his teeth doing mechanical design for Space Battleship Yamato and Daicon. The Macross TV series introduced the world to the animation of Ichirō ‘Missile Circus’ Itano. [AN64] A plane with legs... honestly looks kind of goofy, but Itano’s ambition to have a highly mobile 3D camera that could move in ways that would simply be impossible in live action marked a huge step up in how robots are animated. And this would get refined even further in the film Do You Remember Love.

In terms of design, we’re really moving our inspiration from ‘tokusatsu suit’ to ‘military hardware’ here. A Macross suit has to look like something that could transform into a plane, so its silly little arms and legs have to look kind of plane-like. In any case, we are definitely still in a world of hard and rigid robotics.

Dallos (1983-4) dir. Mamoru Oshii is known as the first OVA, if not the first successful OVA [AN115]. It features a variety of mining robots on the surface of the Moon, which are generally less humanoid, taking their design cues from JCBs...

...as well as humanoid robots with fairly clear joint patterns...

...and more humanoid robots too.

The eponymous Dallos, however, is a huge humanoid robot that looks like this...

Here we have a pile of mechanical shapes that vaguely calls to mind a human face. It’s suggestive of motifs we’d see later in works like Akira.

A year later in 1985, Megazone 23 really kicks off the OVA boom in earnest [AN 103]. It also has a robot, in the form of a transforming bike that can become a humanoid piloted mech...

You can see mechanical designs and shading have become considerably more detailed; its motion is a lot more complex as well with a ton of indulgent background animation shots. The actual details of the bike -> robot transformation are rather brushed over. But to sort of sum up the design language: we have organic but hard-edged shapes contrasted by inorganic but round shapes. (These terms ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ refer mostly to symmetry and a sense of ‘flow’ in the shape.) There are few right angles as such, but a lot of broadly boxy topology. The shapes are broken up by elaborate specular highlights in complex shapes, a motif of the later Kanada school.

OK, but that’s all variants on ‘rigid robot’ so far - what about the androids? What about the more directly biological designs?

Following the enormous success of Megazone 23 Part I, Toshiki Hirano got the chance to adapt his favourite lesbian cosmic horror hentai manga Fight! Iczer One into a rather more tame OVA which released from 1985-87. In terms of mechanical design, this starts to do some interesting moves towards blending biological and mechanical forms...

Of course it has a robot in addition to the requisite bishōjo and lightsabers. In contrast to the boxy shapes we’ve seen so far, the robots in Iczer-One have a much more curvy organic sort of design language. Still, there is not a lot of emphasis on the precise details of mechanical articulation outside of select shots. (It is however notable for the first ever Obari punch!)

Despite the change in shape language, these are still very clearly animated as metal plates and not yet muscles.

In 1984 we have a very important film (for this narrative, and in general), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the film that created Studio Ghibli. Here we have the ‘God Warriors’, giant humanoid weapons with the ability to shoot a massive laser out of their mouth. Rather than robots, these are very much biological in nature, having to be grown in a kind of cocoon. In the film version of Nausicaa, an incomplete God Warrior is released, leading to an iconic scene animated by Hideaki Anno in which the God Warrior attempts to blow up the oncoming wave of Ohmu.

The God Warrior’s melting flesh is gorgeously animated, bubbling and sloughing off in great big lumps as the skeleton pokes out from underneath. Throughout, Nausicaa is full of beautiful and impressive animation of both machines (mainly planes) and biological (the giant insects), but the God Warriors, as human-made lifeforms, bring the two together. However, this strand wouldn’t be especially followed up on for a long long time.

Right, but what about Bubblebum Crisis (1987-91)? That is, after all, the iconic 80s robot girl OVA. It’s inspired heavily by Western robot-related films like Terminator and Blade Runner; here we have ‘Boomers’ (never stops being funny) as androids that can appear convincingly human. Like the Terminator, the underlying metal parts can burst out. Here we have a metal frame designed to resemble muscles, and also metal tentacles.

The shapes of these robots are a lot more organic. The robot neck has tubes that sort of resemble the neck muscles, metal plates that resemble pectorals and abs and deltoids and biceps and so on. You’ve even got a direct riff on the Terminator ‘fleshy face falling away to reveal metal skull with glowing red eye’! Under the plates there are clusters of tubes which also heavily resemble muscles. Also you’ve got the classic ‘three small circles’ motif there.

Contrasted against them are the Knight Sabers, who aren’t cyborgs as such but fight in powered exoskeletons which fit the design motifs of robot girls.

These suits are quite form-fitting, with a rubber under-layer and metal shells on top. There is definitely some attention paid to how they’ll articulate around the joints. One very recognisable 80s motif is the sort of extending spike thingies you can see on her hat there; there’s also the jets that extend out behind the suit. And, you have that multi-layer shiny highlighting of course!

Still, the way the characters move in Bubblegum Crisis is still very squarely Kanada School poses; big movements, lots of held poses accentuated by flashing and line boil, not a lot of concern for conservation of momentum or anything like that.

For a contrasting strand we can look at the rise of the ‘Otomo school’ (if you will) of realism. Around the end of the 80s, a pool of talented animators were gathering around Katsuhiro Otomo. Their most famous work is Akira, but I’m actually going to begin with Robot Carnival (1987), a wonderful anthology of short films from 1987. This features a huge variety of interpretations of the concept of robots.

For example, for Kōji Morimoto, later co-founder of Studio 4°C, the robot is a kind of cobbled-together steampunk Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a very cool design with all sorts of asymmetries and exposed parts suggesting its cobbled-together nature. And although all the robot does in this short is stand up and then fall over, a great deal of attention is paid to the little details of its articulation and its movement through space.

Presence, directed by Yasuomi Umetsu, is notable for its steps in the direction of realism - Umetsu’s characters are hyperdetailed and in some ways over-drawn. The opening shots establish this is a world where lifelike androids are common, when an android gets his head kicked off and stolen by children. Here the robot-as-doll metaphor comes in, something that will be increasingly central in the next decade. The robot girl is essentially a human-sized doll in a room full of other toys. Her creator smashes her to pieces with a wrench; later her ghost visits him as an old man. We see the girl attached to a bunch of wires, but she bleeds like a human.

Cloud by Manabu Ōhashi features another humanoid robot, an Astro Boy-like child recognisable as a robot based on his segmented torso and legs and robotic ear... cones. Here the robot is a standin for human emotions, the boy’s struggles projected onto the constantly changing sky as he walks against the wind.

Strange Tales of Meiji Machine Culture: Westerner’s Invasion by Hiroyuki Kitakubo (later to direct Golden Boy, Roujin Z and Blood: The Last Vampire) is a sendup of mecha shows in which two very goofy looking steampunk robots operated respectively by Japanese and Western crews duke it out, laying waste to the city around them. The Japanese robot is basically a big wooden samurai...

and the Western (more specifically American) robot is, uh

sorta big barrel with little eyes on top? I’m not entirely sure what the deal is with this design!

That’s really not relevant to our story tbh I just think it’s a neat short.

Chicken Man and Red Neck, by Takashi Nakamura, features especially distinctive robot designs. The film is kind of a dream sequence in which a terrified drunk man witnesses the revels of the machines of Tokyo, transformed into robots; the robots are extremely shaped, moving through a world that is pretty much just pistons...

These robots call to mind the dancing demons in Fantasia’s Night On Bald Mountain sequence, or even Bosch.

Otomo’s own segments feature the Robot Carnival itself, a vast mechanical structure built as... well some kind of entertaining spectacle, but which now drives around the post-apocalyptic wasteland dropping robots which explode as bombs. It’s cute.

OK, to wrap up the 80s, we gotta cover Akira (1988) [AN34]! Akira has plenty of impressive mechanical animation of helicopters, hovercraft thingies, satellite lasers and of course the famous bike, but it doesn’t really feature robots as such - but what it does have is a blending of mechanical and biological forms in its climactic sequence where Tetsuo’s psychic powers go out of control. First, wires start to spread like the roots of a plant from his robot arm - less an actual machine and more something he assembled with his psychic powers...

He takes a bullet, and the mechanical wires and muscles start to blend together and spread out like a slime mold...

...which he can extend as essentially a giant tentacle.

When his powers fully go off the rails, he bulges out into big blobs of flesh which have both veins and wires running over them. These burst out of the metallic parts as well.

He turns into essentially a giant biomechanical baby.

Did Akira invent these images of blending biology and machinery? Probably not, but I’m not really familiar enough with manga of the time to say. What can at least be said is that Otomo’s absurdly meticulous style could really sell it. Otomo was truly a god of perspective and detail; Akira the film was an enormous, prestigious production that threw ludicrous effort and resources towards realising his vision (which doesn’t mean it paid its inbetweeners much more...). A lot of the animators who worked on Akira would go on to be prominent in...

the 1990s

So, the 1990s. If the 80s was dominated by the later Kanada School, the new movement of the 90s, at least as far as film animation goes, was ‘realism’.

But before we get onto that, let’s take a brief look at Gunnm (1990). Known as Battle Angel Alita in the West, this manga by Yukito Kishiro depicts a world in which most people are cyborgs; it was adapted to an OVA by Madhouse in 1993 and became wildly popular overseas. Its protagonist Gally, aka Alita, starts out the story as a wrecked cyborg body like this...

Looking at this design, you can see similar patterns as we have so far. We have metal clavicles, metal sternocleidomastoid muscle, metal pectorals, metal spine. There aren’t robot muscles, per se, but there’s a lot of attention to detail on mimicking biological shapes.

Before long she is rebuilt (twice in the manga, once in the anime). Her new body is like this...

...which is to say a skintight bodysuit in the middle, and metal arms. These arms, although designed in a way that indicates hard surface and with a hinge joint at the elbow, are designed in a way that mimics the flow of muscles in a human arm. By contrast, her sorta-love interest Yugo has a body like this:

which gets mashed to pieces in the finale of the OVA. There’s a striking mechaguro scene in which Gally catches Yugo, but leaves him hanging by a fraying arm, which snaps, leaving him to fall to his death. Compared to later iterations of the ‘robot arm torn apart’ device, this one’s relatively light on detail...

Cyborg bodies in Gunnm are used as a visual indication of character type. Gally has curves but also sleek robo muscles: she’s a Beautiful Fighting Girl, sweet but also extremely powerful. A huge ‘muscular’ cyborg with wide shoulders is likely to be a brute. Yugo here has much more plain, simple shapes with visible bolts, not precision pieces like Gally.

I don’t know how much of this originates with Gunnm. I’m sure the idea of cyborg girls was in the air long before, but this became an influential example on the tail end of the time of the 80s bishōjo. One device that is notable here is the idea of a ‘full body cyborg’, which is only human down to the brain (or perhaps not even that). Body swapping is a major theme in Gunnm, something that would be expanded on before long...

And if that was going out, what was coming in? Let’s look at Patlabor, which traces the evolution of the Headgear artistic collective and IG Tatsunoko into Production I.G.. This is about as down to earth as giant robot stories can get, with robots as just everyday machines used for work and by the cops. But where things really go nuts in animation terms is the opening to Patlabor 2 (1993).

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Here you can see some of the most impressive sequences of mechanical animation ever drawn. We see pilot Noa testing out the robot, and especially notable are the scenes of the hand flexing and of walking. Enormous attention is paid to the articulation of joints. The robot’s hand can swivel 360 degrees, unlike a human; however, like a human, the articulation of the fingers seems to be controlled by hydraulics in the forearm (whereas in humans, the muscles and tendons in the forearm control our fingers). When the robot’s foot steps, it flexes like a real human foot, with believable joints, and a sensible arrangement of pistons to absorb force.

It’s not imitating a human’s muscles, but the attention to the details of the robot’s mechanical design serves precisely to draw our attention to the ways it’s like/unlike a human - the robot’s hand impossible motion immediately contrasted with its pilot shot from the same angle. And the perspective drawing is absolutely impeccable. The robot is made of purely rigid structures, and the way rigid structures articulate is not at all how a human’s joints articulate.

The sequence above was animated by Atsushi Takeuchi. But across the board, the bar was getting pushed for mechanical animation. For example, observe this cut from Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team (1996-1999), in which the robot tears off its own arm and beats up another robot. The precision of the way the joints are animated and the way the robots move in space is just completely on another level compared to what Gundam had been doing a couple of decades prior.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about robot muscles, and we’re just a few years out from that now!

The year that robots got muscles, at least as far as anime is concerned, is 1995.

You can probably guess the next part. In 1995, we get Eva and GitS. Let’s start with GitS, to continue the Production I.G./Mamoru Oshii thread. The opening sequence of GitS, animated by - who else could it be? - Hiroyuki Okiura - has to be one of the most iconic segments of video ever drawn. Here’s a merely 720p youtube upload but go and find the place you have GitS stored on your hard drive and watch it in proper quality eh.

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OK, yes, a lot of it is a naked lady floating around, sue me or whatever. But the sense of form. We see early on an appearance of ‘robot muscles’, here closely resembling real muscles...

We can see from the way this is drawn that it’s made of a combination of artificial muscles, solid segments, and flexible, fabric-like panels. One of my favourite shots at the beginning shows the solid segments of the skull clicking into place. Here we have a very clear contrast between the angular, hard edges of the mechanical pieces against the organic forms of a human body.

Elsewhere in the film, we see various incredibly cool bits of ‘wouldn’t be fucked up if a body did this‘, like the fingers...

Here, what we expect to be soft biological fingers is contrasted with unexpected rigidity, mechanical joints under a shell.

Also in this scene we encounter a robot body that has been stripped of her arms, legs and hips but is nevertheless still alive...

most extraordinary hacker in the history of cybercrime and you have your titties out and yet you still can’t get them to stop misgendering you, smh

For the Terminator, having its body smashed up and continuing to walk was a demonstration of its strength. Here, as would become perhaps an increasing motif, having a robot body is a source of vulnerability: people can do things to you that would kill an ordinary human but you keep going through it. Not surprisingly, ‘robot body maintenance’ is a recurring porn device. (One that GitS deploys in SAC s2).

But of course this all builds up to the all time classics of mechaguro scene at the ending where the Major attempts to tear off the hatch of a spider tank. Muscles ripple individually under the surface of her skin, her arms bulge in exaggerated contraction, and then her arms fully tear apart under the force.

Here, we’re showing her as mechanical not by contrasting rigid forms with biological ones, but by exaggerating the biological ones to the point of doing something extremely unnatural. Human muscles do not generally flex in such an individual way, nor are they strong enough to tear the arm apart, but robot muscles? Yeah, they could do that. This sets up the next scene where the Major lies unnaturally still, but can still exert control through hacking through her union with the Puppet Master.

Robots holding onto something so hard their arms explode has become... if not a recurring image, then at least one that was called back decades later in Violet Evergarden.

The final scene of GitS brings back the image of robot-as-doll, with the Major’s consciousness now uploaded into a black-market robot body that resembles a child in a dress.

This is further expounded on in Oshii’s second GitS movie Innocence (2004), with its Ballade of the Puppets in the soundtrack as Batou and Togusa (and eventually, the Major) are attacked by essentially an army of ball-jointed doll gynoids. The puppets’ movements are extremely unnatural and erratic acrobatics, constantly flipping all over the place; when hit by bullets, panels pop open to reveal the underlying brass skeleton. It’s a very cool image. (The thing that lets the sequence down is the extremely dated CGI and aggressive digital compositing.)

It also has Donna Harraway as a literal cyborg!

Now, the GitS movies didn’t drop fully formed out of nowhere, but draw on the work of Masamune Shirow. The manga has a somewhat different design sensibility than the movie, distinctive and shiny as all Shirow’s art. It is more rounded and organic, less cold.

So, the basic design of a cyberbody originates with Shirow. You can see it on this page (unfortunately from a flipped version, translation Dark Horse):

You might be able to determine from how the nurses are dressed that, yeah, the GitS manga is in significant part fetish porn. But really nerdy fetish porn, which is the best kind. This chapter is almost entirely dedicated to explaining how cyborg bodies are constructed in great detail, from the ‘sensory film’ (that’s what’s being applied in the opening to the 1995 film) to the hair implantation.

It’s interesting seeing how some of the more out-there designs of the manga, like Chief Aramaki, are transformed into the realist style of Hiroyuki Okiura. It’s Okiura, so it works great of course.

I don’t know if there are manga examples of such detail about cyborg bodies that predate Shirow.

Anyway, that’s just one of the two punches dropped in 1995. The other is Neon Genesis Evangelion. To the pedants: sure, the Evas are not actually robots, but they’re giant cyborgs that play the role of ‘robot’ in the story and they look like robots so I’m counting them.

Anyway, the thing about the Evas is they are incredibly lithe. They run, rip and tear and swing heavy objects around in a way that’s both weighty and distinctly biological. Their bodies are extremely flexible compared to prior mechs (look at how much the spines bend in that Iso cut from EoE!), but not without hard, rigid components such as the shoulder towers. Their jaws are bestial but feature mechanical-like components like interlocking hexagonal teeth and jet-like vents. They are in short a fantastic design that blends biological and mechanical features.

The impact of Eva on just about everything can’t be overstated, but as far as robot design, well. There certainly were works that leaned on the precedent set by Eva, as for example RahXephon, which also treats robots as something spiritual, prone to popping into a blob of weird little bubbles just like in Eva.

There’s a great deal missing from this account. I am very focused on anime because I’ve watched a lot more anime than I’ve read manga or played games from this period. So I’m sure there’s major foundational works I’m missing here!

the 2000s

When did the West start to catch up? eh that’s subjective - David Cronenberg was way ahead of the game! - but specifically in the sense of robots with mechanical muscles, I think the major points in the timeline go a bit like this.

In 1999, there’s the Matrix, which leans heavily on anime. This features a similar ‘robot takeover’ premise to Terminator, but here it’s biomimetic robots modelled after squids, with clouds of constantly moving tentacles that sweep behind them. After making a cool half a billion dollars, the Wachowskis decided to pay all their favourite anime directors to make short films. I’m not going to comment on every part of the Animatrix, since most of it isn’t really relevant, but I will point to this horrifying cut by Takeshi Honda in The Second Renaissance in which a robot woman has her clothes torn and then skin bashed off by a mob. The framing, motion, her expression of abject terror, and the ‘reveal’ of her ‘true’ nature, all viscerally call to mind a trans bashing.

On the manga side, a big one to mention is Gantz, a gory nihilistic seinen manga which ran from 2000-2013. The characters in Gantz fight in special latex-like suits which take on the appearance of muscles while engaging superstrength, but can also sustain damage that causes them to drip fluids from ports located at the neck and become fatal to their wearer. Gantz was adapted to anime by Ichirō Itano in 2004, but I haven’t seen it so I can’t comment on any notable animation.

Cyborgs are a favourite subject of games, but in the 2000s, games are really pushing art direction and biopunk stuff is in. Half Life 2 (2004) has its spider-crab like Striders and dropships and so on. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997) bases its whole concept around the sheer variety of weird creatures that would inhabit its dystopian factory. And I gotta give a shoutout to Septerra Core (1999) - in case one other person has played that lmao

At some point after 2005, Boston Dynamics became a viral sensation thanks to their robot BigDog. BigDog is just welded steel and hydraulics, but its lifelike hopping movement style definitely brought to mind the idea that the future of robots is going to be in biomimesis.

So, 2007, here comes Crysis to melt your PC! This is an FPS with the not-uncommon premise of being a supersoldier fighting (country America hates) and also aliens, but its gimmick was that you have a special exosuit that wraps around your body with artificial muscles, making you much stronger and manlier or whatever.

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This is indicated by a visualisation that could be right out of a toothpaste ad, where tiny little balls drop into the character’s pores and somehow go straight into the bloodstream which is of course a void full of flying red blood cells. And so on. It sold the game, though! The ad there focuses almost entirely on the suit and not the character wearing it, who is basically an irrelevant soldier man. What it entailed in gameplay terms is that you have a mode switcher so you can have strength or armour or invisibility or whatever. But it’s cool military superscience, you see!

Anyway. Not like my preferred flavour of cyborg is any less stupid I guess x3

In the same year, Bayformers started. These films’ robots are honestly just visual noise, there’s so many moving metal shards going every which way that it’s next to impossible to discern any sort of underlying mechanical principle. A similar ‘overwhelming business’ visual effect would be applied the next year in Iron Man, kicking off the MCU. So mechanical muscles definitely weren’t the only expression of ‘hyper-advanced robot’ in Western visual media in the late 2000s.

I’m going to end my story with two more games: Horizon Zero Dawn and NieR Automata.

Horizon features a world inhabited by a large variety of robot animals, using the peak of AAA rendering techniques. The robots are designed to be biomimetic after both modern animals and prehistoric ones, and feature a combination of hard surfaces and softer biological muscles. For example, a robot horse:

The discipline of making designs like these now has a name: it’s called ‘hard surface modelling’ and it involves boolean operations and bevels and other techniques designed to create a balance of hard edges on a surface against the smoother parts. The design language of Horizon says that the hard plates are white, the soft parts are very dark and may be patterned like a cloth texture, and there can be small colour accents here and there.

I think you can definitely see the influence of Boston Dynamics’s robots (and recent military tech in general) in these designs, iterated on through a decade and a half of increasingly intra-referential concept art. They are visually very busy designs, but there are a couple of recognisable features that draw attention by being inorganic, such as the cylindrical fuel tank at the back. Vitally, the silhouette is very readable.

This robot T. rex for comparison serves as a world boss monster, and you can see it’s got a bunch of military looking attachments that look like radars and missile launchers and so on. As real tech evolved, so too did our idea of what a scary robot ought to look like.

So, that’s where this kind of design pattern has gone in mainstream games.

Now to finish, a brief comment on NieR Automata. Its designs draw hard on those of Ghost in the Shell. Visually it draws a strong contrast between the Machine Lifeforms, who have inorganic shapes (spheres and cylinders) and very visible and plausible mechanical joints, and the doll-like androids, who might as well be human (although A2 provides some contrast in an android who is damaged enough for the underlying materials to show through). The mechanical nature of the androids is communicated by the acrobatic way they move and the interface elements, and dead androids you find in the field - and later when they start losing arms and stuff, it’s a whole thing. But just like humans in Yoko Taro Games, they’re capable of dying in a puddle of blood.

(I guess if you take one thing from this post it’s that if you’re a robot, don’t expect to keep your arms.)

Robot muscles gives you a chance to give both the ‘anatomy porn’ of drawing something very precisely right, with the added bonus of giving you a reason to draw the muscles écorché, and the chance to make it weird and defamiliarised by splitting it with mechanical elements. In short... they look cool!

In this whole post I’ve basically not touched at all on illustration. I can point to a variety of illustrations of robot girls, but in terms of periodising them, I just don’t think I know enough. Though it’s safe to say that cyborg bodies in various states of construction or disrepair are now a mainstream of concept art - and that Ghost in the Shell is usually cited as an influence. I don’t know if robot muscles ever truly became the mainstream way to depict a robot, but it does feel like they’re increasingly common.

One artist I will briefly mention (besides sukabu), mostly bc I think they’re neat, is Haruyo Megurimu, who draws these very intricate designs of ‘necrotech’ which is sort of very biological robots extending out of human bodies - limbs extended on long spindly insectoid strands, jaws splitting open, that kinda thing. Can’t say who influenced them or anything but it’s a compelling extension of the idea into a particular corner of aesthetic space.

And that’s all I’ve got I think. There’s definitely big gaps like. More recent sci-movies. Western comics. Nevertheless, that’s an arc.

If you’ve read this far: thank you for indulging my autism.

#robots and cyborgs #character design #robots #cyborg #history #anime #manga #ghost in the shell

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fayes-fics · 10 months

Text

It Had To Be You: Chapter 4 - You've Got A Friend

Masterpost PREV | NEXT

Pairing: Benedict Bridgerton x fem!reader, Modern AU

Summary: Set a couple of months after Chapter 3, Benedict and you are becoming best friends.

artwork credit @colettebronte

Warnings: discussions of sex, swearing, publically faked orgasm

Word Count: 3.1k

Authors Note: Unbetaed. A multi-chapter modern rom-com retelling of When Harry Met Sally. In this chapter, we see vignettes of Benedict and reader's growing friendship. And well... this ends with a twist on the famous scene. Yep. You know the one. Enjoy <3

21 months ago (3 months later)

Benedict Bridgerton is one of your best friends.

If you had uttered that sentence to yourself ten, even five, years ago, you would have laughed your head off. But it's funny how life turns out. In the months after you reconnect, you start to meet up regularly, at least once a week, sometimes more, and you text almost constantly. Becoming each other’s crutch as you rebuild your lives as single people.

On the surface, you couldn’t be more opposites, but he’s matured, and you find his company the most soothing and the most fun. Be it while having dim sum in Chinatown, wandering Victoria Park or helping him set up his new warehouse flat. There's always a tiny frisson, an undercurrent of something between you that, to be honest, makes it more appealing. A pilot light of heat that could, maybe one day, become a bonfire if the timing were right. You are not sure it ever would be, but it would be stupid to deny to yourself that it's there. There is certainly no one you like to verbally spar with more.

He FaceTimes you as you lay in bed on a regular Tuesday in September; it's become a habit. Just jabbering away until one of you falls asleep. Talking about everything, anything, and something nothing, watching a show or film together in digital silence. A comforting presence.

“What are you watching?” he hums, scratching his beard.

“Don't judge me,” is your instant response, and he chuckles.

“Tell me,” his voice drops an octave in a way you are sure he knows has an effect on you. Physically. A little shiver down your spine. Bastard.

“Titanic,” you mutter as he bursts out laughing.

“You hate that film!” he exclaims, and you wish you could throw a pillow through the screen.

“That doesn’t sound like not judging!” you bemoan but concede he is right.

“Channel?” he asks, still giggling.

“Four… wait, are you going to watch too?”

“Of course, then we can argue about it in real-time,” something in that offer makes you feel comforted. “It's near the end!” he decries after briefly pausing to change channels.

“How would you know?” you lobby, and he fixes you with a pointed stare.

“Please. This was Gen’s favourite; I had to sit through it five bloody times.”

“How is she?”

“No idea. She didn't speak to me after the breakup. Besides, wasn't she your friend?!”

“Yeah, but we lost touch,” you sigh, “sometime about seven or eight years ago, she moved to Bristol, and then we sort of drifted.”

He hums noncommittally, watching the movie, “So you’re saying Rose should not have saved him by sharing that door,” he states as the final scenes unfold onscreen before you both.

“I never said that!” you argue.

“Yes, you did! In the car on the way from uni!” he smirks.

“No, I didn’t!” you volley back indignantly.

“Fine, okay, you didn’t.” He rolls his eyes.

“I mean, that dick was so good, they fucked one time, and she returned to the ocean to say goodbye to it 70 years later,” you point out drolly.

He tosses his head back and laughs so hard you can’t help but join in.

“Fuck that’s the funniest take on this film I’ve ever heard,” he wheezes.

“Right?! I can’t take credit; it's a comedy routine; I’ll send you a Spotify link,” you offer.

“Look forward to it,” he giggles.

The urge to ask him if he’s ever had sex so good he’d go to the spot it happened to commemorate it is on the tip of your tongue. You’re almost surprised he doesn’t use the opportunity himself. He’s definitely grown up.

“Are you sleeping okay?” he asks, rubbing his eye wearily.

“Doing better,” you admit, “not completely there, but better than I was.”

“Do you still sleep on ‘your’ side of the bed?” he inquires with air quotes.

“No. I’ve taken to sleeping wherever now,” you answer truthfully.

“Wow, you’re doing so well,” he sighs. “I feel weird if even a leg wanders over to ‘her’ side… and this isn’t even a bed we shared.”

“Yours was a marriage, mine merely a long-term relationship,” you try to justify why he might still be more impacted than you.

“Same difference, except you don’t have a lawyer bleeding you dry arguing about shit…. Urghh, I need a drink.”

“No, you don’t,” you argue, “stay in bed and drink your water.”

“You can be very bossy sometimes, you know?” he opines but reaches for his glass of water on his bedside table as he says it, doing exactly what you suggest.

“It’s for your own good,” you point out.

“I know, I know. I suppose I should thank you. You’d be surprised how little men give a shit about their friends' well-being, even their best friends.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” you fire back. “You’re all clueless idiots with the EQ of a shrimp.”

“Wowwww, okay,” he mimes being shot in the chest, “please don’t take out your Dr Tom issues on the rest of us unsuspecting shrimps.” It’s in jest, but you can hear the underlying argument and know he’s right.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. You don’t have the EQ of a shrimp. I’ll give you, hmmm, a crawfish,” you offer with a giggle.

“Oh great, thanks,” he deadpans, “Could you not at least give me lobster?”

“Okay, fine. I hear lobsters are very smart, so you flatter yourself there, but yes, okay, lobster Ben. Please go get some sleep.”

“Alright,” he yawns, “can I call you my lobster too?”

“Why?” you frown sleepily, bemused.

“Some lobster thought it could predict the World Cup winning team—always thought it was right. That’s very you,” he stares pointedly down the phone camera at you.

“Fine, I’m your lobster too,” you stick out your tongue a little.

He chuckles as you settle deeper into your pillow, flicking off the TV as the credits scroll. Even you can acknowledge having a person to talk to is so comforting right before sleep.

“Goodnight, lobster Ben,” you yawn, your eyes drooping.

“Goodnight, my little blue lobster,” he murmurs.

“Why blue? Cos I’m sad?” you hum, eyes closed.

“No,” he chuckles gently, “I have my reasons,” he says quietly, and you pass out as the call drops off.

——

“So I had that dream again,” you mention offhand as you wander down the Southbank from Waterloo a few weeks later. It’s a crisp October day; you’ve taken the afternoon off work to visit the Tate Modern—there’s some exhibit he wants to see.

“The sex dream?” he verifies, weaving around an old lady who shoots him a disapproving look.

“Yup,” you confirm, kicking through the colourful pile of leaves under one of the trees. “So we are going at it up on this roof terrace, and this time he flies away just before I orgasm. I mean, what the fuck is that!?”

“Let me get this straight: you’re having sex with some mythical half-man half-dragon creature?” he seems completely bamboozled by the idea. “And just before you can come, he flies off?”

“Yeah. What do you think it means?” you ponder.

“I think it means you need to get laid,” he laughs.

“Great fucking insight Sherlock Holmes,” body-checking him with your shoulder. “What about you? What’s your latest sex dream?”

“It’s always the same one. There’s this woman. She walks in, just wordlessly strips off my jeans and climbs onboard,” his cheeks have a high dot of pink that looks adorable, almost as if he’s embarrassed to say it.

“What does she look like? Are we talking Halle Berry? Helen Mirren? Florence Pugh?”

“I dunno… she’s just sort of faceless,” he gestures vaguely.

“Hmmm. Unusual. So then what happens?”

“I always wake up,” he sighs, staring into the middle distance, over to the Millennium Bridge.

“Wait….,” you stop walking and grab his arm, “...a faceless woman strips off your jeans and sits on you, and that’s the only sex dream you’ve had… ever?!” You can scarcely believe it.

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous, I know. I’d like to state for the record that I’ve had a much more varied actual sex life. And daydreams? Top fucking notch. But my unconscious, sleeping dreams? Very not sexy or just this one recurring one.”

“Does it ever change? At all?”

“I mean, sometimes I’m wearing trousers, not jeans?” he offers, looking nonplussed as to what else to add.

You cannot think of anything to say to that, so you just shoot him an exasperated look and walk away towards the entrance. How on earth can he get to sleep at night if that’s all he’s got to look forward to?

“Dinner after this?” he offers as you stare up at the giant sculpture suspended in the main Turbine Hall. It's been a fun few hours of wandering the exhibits.

“Oh, I’d love to, but I can’t,” you obfuscate, feeling sheepish as you bring your gaze to him.

“Hooking up?” he inquires with a comedy eyebrow wiggle.

“Maybe,” you deflect, tucking your hair behind an ear, somehow bashful to talk with him about your first date in six years. “I’ll have to see how the date goes first.”

“A date? That’s wonderful!” He seems genuinely enthused, a big smile claiming his whole face.

“Yeah, I mean… I hope so? Let’s see. It’s been a bloody long time,” and saying that, nerves flare in your belly. “Not sure what I should wear, to be honest,” you admit, glancing down, self-conscious of your jeans and simple black top. “You think this is okay?”

“Of course it is,” he dismisses casually. “You look as beautiful as you always do,” the compliment just falls from his lips as if you asked about the weather. It still gives you that slightly gooey sensation under your ribs. Bastard.

——

The next evening you’re three cocktails down at Bar Americain on a night out with some work friends when your phone buzzes.

BB: How was the date?

Y/N: He cried about his custody arrangement at the table.

BB: Divorced dad, eh? How fast did you scarper?!

BB: Guess it will be a while until you can get that orgasm, lol.

Y/N: ... I err, didn't?

Y/N: Oh, I got one.

BB: You slept with him?!?

You always love to push it with him when you are tipsy, be a little daring with what you say. So you have your tongue in your cheek, wishing you could see his face when he reads what you are about to reply.

Y/N: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, the crying didn't turn me on. Not one of my kinks. But he had these nice hands, and I could tell from his jeans something good was going on down there. I was right. 8 out of 10, very nice.

Y/N: And he didn't grow wings to fly off before I had an orgasm, either… so win!

BB: How does one hang up on a text….?

Y/N: 😜

Five minutes later, your phone buzzes again.

BB: Wait. Do all women rate the dicks of the men they sleep with?

Y/N: I don't know all the women in the world, Ben…

BB: How is that an answer?

Y/N: 🤷‍♀️

“Ant…” Benedict calls, tossing his phone aside on his kitchen island and going to consult his brother across the room. He’s pretty sure that can't be all women, can it?

——

“I don't understand this at all,” Kate frowns, resting her weapon on her shoulder like a lumberjack.

“What don’t you understand?” you reply, staring at the target at the other end of the cage. You've decided this is an excellent cathartic way to do girls' night—just flinging axes at Whistle Punks after a hard work day in early November.

“You think he's attractive?” she pauses to applaud your throw as it smacks just below the bullseye.

“Yup.”

“You get on really well and Facetime and text every day?”

“Yup.”

“He’s straight?”

“Yup.”

“But you’re NOT fucking?” Kate quizzes, shooting you a look as she steps up to the plate.

“Nope.”

“I literally don't understand,” brow creasing as she takes her aim.

“Why can't you be proud of me? Not just crawling into bed with him on the rebound. He’s become a really close friend. Plus, I get the straight man’s perspective on things. It's really helpful now that I’m back on the market again. I can talk to him about sex stuff, and he's honest,” you argue.

“Sounds wrong to me…”

“Kate, you are fucking a married man,” you point out her hypocrisy archly.

“Yeah… and that's the point! I'm actually fucking him. What sort of Bert and Ernie shit do you and this Ben have going on?!”

“Please. Bert and Ernie are lovers,” you answer scornfully.

“Well, if they were, all the more reason you guys should be?!” she practically yells, hurling her axe with such gusto the manager comes to check on you.

——

Benedict takes you for dinner in the run-up to Christmas at some place so trendy it doesn't even appear to have a name. It's also where something transpires that haunts your spicier dreams for weeks.

As usual, it starts with you both squabbling.

“Oh please, women fake them all the time,” you dismiss, stirring your soup.

“I don't doubt it,” he agrees, “but men can do it too.”

You shoot him a withering look. “Please. Half of men can't even fake enthusiasm; there's no way a man could fake an orgasm,” you argue with finality.

His eyebrows shoot up briefly as you take a triumphant sip. He puts his fork down and wipes his face with a napkin. Then he makes a low rumbling noise. Perhaps the food doesn't agree with him. When he does it again a second later, you get concerned.

“You okay?”

He doesn't answer; he just makes the noise again. It's a low growl that almost reverberates around in his chest cavity, and something about it makes every hair on the back of your neck stand on end.

“Is your food bad?” you ask, a frown flitting over your face.

Again no answer. Benedict just makes another noise, louder this time. It’s definitely closer to a moan, and he takes a deep breath rolling his head to one side as if he's stretching his neck and really enjoying the sensation. Somehow you can't look away; you just stare at him, spoon in hand. Wondering what the hell he is doing, but captivated at the same time.

“Mmmm, that's it, baby,” he groans, and your insides are suddenly aflame. You've never heard his voice go into that register, it's low and throaty, and you feel a flush creeping up your chest.

“Don't stop,” he moans and throws his head back with a gasp, his Adam’s Apple bobbing hard, and it's then you realise what he is doing. He is faking an orgasm. Right here. In public. In a bloody restaurant.

“Okay, Ben,” you hiss, “fine, you win the argument,” attempting to get him to stop.

But it doesn't work. His head tips back down, and two dilated pupils bore into yours, a hazy ring of blue around black.

“Do you like that?” He’s staring you down as he says it, panting slightly, his jaw firm, challenging, goading.

You want to crawl into a ball and disappear. How much of that is because your fellow diners are starting to look over versus how much your body is rioting is undetermined.

“Yesssss,” he hisses, closing his eyes and biting his lip.

“Ben,” you warn, but again it falls on deaf ears. There is nothing you can do to stop this. Mortification routes you to the spot—that and the pounding in your ears and the little frisson of static running down your spine.

“You feel so good, baby,” he groans with a tiny tilt of his body; it's enough to make your imagination run wild—places it shouldn't. Dear god, this isn't right. He is your friend, one of your best friends; you can't be thinking such things.

To distract yourself, you look around at your fellow diners apologetically, shrugging as if you don't understand what he is doing. Thankful there are no kids in sight.

“Look at me,” he commands gruffly, and without thought, you obey; your eyes tear back to his. He is doing this deliberately, goading a response from you, from your body. And something in your snaps, you won't let him win like this.

“Go ahead, do it,” you mutter through slightly clenched teeth, so quiet only he can hear it. If he is going to do this, damn him, let him.

His hands wrap around the edges of the small table separating you, long fingers splaying out, and then his short blunt nails scratch down the wood. You don't think about those big, shapely hands doing the same thing on your body, no, definitely not. He is groaning and panting hard now, and it's utterly convincing. You can just picture him on top of….. STOP IT! You screech your mind to a halt. Don't go there.

“Come with me,” he snarls softly, just for you, and part of you wants to whisper back: yes, please, but instead, you bite the corner of your tongue to prevent a sound from escaping.

Then he turns theatrical, open hands thumping the table, grunting hard and rhythmically, and you just have to sit there and take it, so to speak. Just endure this weird mix of utter embarrassment and confusing arousal. Knowing you are flushed from head to toe. You daren't look around at the rest of the place, the buzz of conversation mostly dying out as they watch this formidable reenactment.

“Yessss, yesss, yessss,” he chants, and with a few convulsive body jerks and a long groan, his head lolls back, and he exhales a ragged breath loudly.

There are a few seconds of silence, and then he clears his throat, straightens up in his chair, shoots you a shit-eating grin, picks up his forks and jubilantly takes a bite of his dinner. He doesn't even bother to say anything; he knows he has won that argument, fair and square. You are still too shocked and disconcerted to speak.

“Sir, Ma’am,” the maître d' is suddenly at your table, “we would like you to leave, please.” his tone is decidedly stern. After a brief exchange of glances, you both burst into spontaneous giggles.

As you are bundled out of the door unceremoniously, not even being asked to pay, you hear a man ask a waiter a question that makes you laugh even louder.

“Did he have the daily special?”

Benedict taglist: @makaylan @foreverlonginguniverse @iboopedyournose @colettebronte @aintnuthinbutahounddog @severewobblerlightdragon @margofiore @writergirl-2001 @heeyyyou @enichole445 @enchantedbytomandhenry @ambitionspassionscoffee @chaoticcalzoneranchsports @nikaprincessofkattegat @baebee35 @crowleysqueenofhell @bridgertontess @fiction-is-life @lilacbeesworld @angels17324 @broooookiecrisp @queen-of-the-misfit-toys @eleanor-bradstreet @divaanya @musicismyoxygen84 @benedictspaintbrush @miindfucked @sorryallonsy @lilithseve @cayt0123 @hottytoddyhistory @truly-dionysus @fictionalmenloversblog @zinzysstuff @malpalgalz @panhoeofmanyfandoms @kinokomoonshine @causeimissu @delehosies @Mlovesbridgerton @m-rae23 @last-sheep @kmc1989 @desert-fern @starkeylover @corpseoftrees-queen @jeanfreau