Would Not Have Known About This Comic Without Them - Blog Posts

I saw a post talking about how media like Detroit Become Human that use robots as a metaphor for racism never quite hits the nail on the head because, well, robots aren't people and the fear of being replaced by automation is a legitimate one.

And it made me think about Rockman-san.

Which is coming out very soon as Mr. Megaman, in English, so might as well talk about it now!

For a gag comic, Rockman-san has a very melancholy tone to it. It often touches on concepts like deterioration, obsolescence, and... well...

Automation.

The original Robot Masters of the Rockman-san comic are sentient. They can think, they can feel, they can love. It's a staple of Rockman/Megaman media for its Robot Masters and Reploids to be self-determining, but Rockman-san takes that to its extreme and, without getting into spoilers, has a real blurring of what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine.

Their humanity is what labels them as "dangerous," and that type of robot is being phased out and replaced with robots that can't think or feel. Yup - AI took the AI's jobs. The RMs are largely struggling with employment - some are having difficulty holding down a job, while others have been pushed out of the industries they were made for and find the work they took up to survive unfulfilling, while others are finding fulfillment in repurposing their hardware and programming to a new career. They have a variety of ways they experience the hardships of the world that... honestly hit me pretty hard, my first time reading, because it was probably the first time I'd read a story that felt like it was really talking to my actual lived experience as an adult.

By including these more real world ai machines, it reminds the audience the RMs are fantastical and highlights what the narrative is trying to analyze - "what does it mean to be self-determining? what does it mean to be sentient? is it a blessing or a burden? what rights does a fully aware, self-determining, sentient being have if it is not human? when do they become a person? what do you have to strip away from a human to make them no longer a person?"

Rockman-san manages to balance a narrative of robot discrimination while acknowledging that the presence of robots in their world is harmful to humans. It acknowledges that, by making the robots sentient, the scientists have accidentally created an underclass of person - the robots are thinking, feeling people who have to work to survive, to pay for energy, pay for repairs, pay for a place to live, pay for recreation. Robots work longer hours for less pay and have no legal recourse.

Rockman-san hits the nail on the head that this benefits the wealthy and harms the working class. Capitalism rears its ugly head yet again. The sentient robots get exploited, abused, and tossed aside. The working class suffers and dies. The wealthy profit.

And the finger gets pointed to the exploited underclass rather than those in power, as it so often does. But then... how would one ethically close Pandora's box? What changes would allow humans and robots to coexist? Can they coexist?

Just, something about how Rockman-san handles its robot rights narrative resonates, y'know? It doesn't rely on cheap parallels that don't really work. It's mostly asking questions of Megaman's premise. There's a lot of varying life experiences and opinions expressed by the characters, and it doesn't really ask you to agree with any of them - not even Rock or Dr. Light. We're not trying to come to definite answers, just exploring what it means to be alive and how to live in a society, how it works and how it fails.

I dunno. I'm not about to say it's a perfect narrative, but there's something about it I like.