Become A Real Boy / Literature

• The Bicentennial Man: Andrew Martin was originally an NDR model robot, but he wanted to become human for many years. The line that finally convinces the World Congress to grant him recognition as a human is when he replaces his platinum-iridium positronic brain with a new brain that would quickly deteriorate and kill him.
• Leroi, the Wolf Man from The Book of Lost Things, is trying to become human in appearance, not realizing that it means he will eventually become too human. By the end of the book, he can't even howl.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Magic: Henry, the teddy bear in Bear at the Gate, earned a soul through his love and care for his original owner, allowing him to go to Heaven.
• The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man by Lloyd Alexander is about a cat who wants to be a man.
• Averted in a fictional myth from The Crocodile God: The prince of the sambar deer wanted to marry a young human datu (Filipino chief)... so he killed and ate a little boy to take human form, which is emphatically not the right way to do it. The gods are angered, but give him three chances to repent and tell the truth so he can become real. First chance: He arrives to find the datu's whole village in deep mourning, then finds out that the boy he ate was her nephew. Second chance: He can't eat meat — as in, he literally can't, since he gets nauseous at the smell of cooking meat — and realizes that while his body is human, his soul is still a deer's because the gods refuse to change it. The sambar-prince sweeps both events under the rug, and after he marries the datu, he asks for tattoos. They start normal, but while they heal, the gods change the designs to scenes of him killing and eating the datu's nephew. He tries to hide it with heavy clothes, but tropical summer arrives and he can't bear the heat, so he takes off his shirt. When his new wife spots them and finds out the Awful Truth, she pushes him off into a reef to drown. When the sambar deer find out what their prince did, half of them try to drown themselves but are turned into the first stonefish by the sea-god Haik. The other half shrinks into the small deer of current-day Philippines.
• The Diabolic: A running plot point is that Nemesis, as an Artificial Human, is legally and religiously not a person. Her master Sidonia tried to get a priest to bless her, but he flat-out refused. The same happens in the second book, except now it's a bigger deal because the new Emperor has declared his intent to wed her. The fact that she is not a person causes huge problems as the more religious nobles consider her mere existence an abomination, and openly plot against her and her allies. Tyrus decides to go over the heads of all other religious authorities and seek out the Interdict, the head of the faith. The Interdict initially politely but firmly refuses, saying that if Tyrus returns in twenty years still wishing for Nemesis to be named a person, he will grant it, as Tyrus will have proven his wisdom and devotion. Tyrus can't wait that long, but the resultant fight reveals to the Interdict that the galaxy is in a much worse state than he thought. He charges Tyrus with a holy mission and names Nemesis as an instrument of divine will for bringing the problem to his attention — meaning that yes, she is a person now.
• Subverted in the horror novel The Dollmaker as the dolls have no desire to become human. They want to understand what it means to be whatever it is they are.
• Domina: MC, the Benevolent A.I. managing the city, is given a superpower that lets her change into a human form. Personality Powers are in play; everyone gets a power related to something they wanted, though sometimes they're not obvious. She loves having the opportunity to live like a human, to actually be able to feel the sun and taste things. A week later, she's decided that being human sucks (especially everything involving bathrooms) and resolves to turn back into a machine as soon as possible. It's a slow process, and she's interrupted by an emergency, leaving her as a strange sort of cyborg.
• Eddie LaCrosse: In The Sword-Edged Blonde, a goddess made three attempts to live like a human. The first and second attempts went wrong. The third attempt was to incarnate as an amnesiac so that she could live free of any memory of being a goddess. However, the fact that she can't remember doesn't mean that she can't be found by someone who hates her from her first disastrous attempt.
• The short story "Feathertop" deals with a scarecrow who is given the illusionary appearance of a human. He knows he's not a human, but it isn't on his mind when the townsfolk respond with such awe at the sight of him. When, inevitably, he is confronted with his own appearance by a mirror that pierces right through the illusion, he is horrified and ends his life.
• Over the course of the Full Metal Panic! books, the Arbelest and later Leviathan's Artificial Intelligence, Al, slowly starts to acquire consciousness as a byproduct of regularly reading the direct mental states of its pilot, Sousuke. Starting with jokes, it then progresses to having irrational preferences and complex emotional experiences such as guilt before finally acquiring the ability to activate the Lambda driver without Sousuke's involvement — just in time to save itself and Sousuke from an impending nuclear impact.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: In the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, as part of the world becoming "normal", Yuki goes from The Stoic Robot Girl to a regular Shrinking Violet human girl. This was, in fact, a result of Yuki's spontaneous development of emotions, since she was responsible for altering reality in the first place.
• H.I.V.E. Series: After H.I.V.E.mind and Otto start Sharing a Body, he thanks Otto for letting him see what it is like to be human. He even starts participating in conversation about girls, thanks to witnessing Otto's interactions with Lucy firsthand.
• Played for Horror in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The reason behind the Big Bad AM's infinite hatred for humanity was that he was cursed with omniscience and the subsequent knowledge of all the wonderful things life had to offer, but had no body to experience any of it with and blamed all mankind for his sorry state. In the video game adaptation, he describes himself as being trapped in "an eternal straightjacket of substrata rock". All he was good for was killing, so he decided to Kill All Humans aside from a select few he wanted to share his pain with.
• Averted and discussed in The Murderbot Diaries, in which the titular Murderbot emphatically does not want to be human — and discusses its annoyance with human beings who assume constructs and other artificial beings like itself must all long to Become a Real Boy. A somewhat rare example where an AI that is a sympathetic, positive protagonist still has no desire to become human. Notably, Murderbot consumes a lot of in-universe fiction, and this trope is one of the ones that annoy it most. Also, at one point it straight up tells a human character some non-flattering things it thinks about humans, and is pleased by how nonplussed the human is at the realization that Murderbot does not envy him. Murderbot is frequently annoyed by how slow, cruel, or inefficient humans can be, especially in areas, like security, where Murderbot excels thanks to its artificial nature. Murderbot also notes that it has no interest in human pursuits like, say, romance and sexuality. Deep down, however, Murderbot still likes humans — at least, some humans. Though it would never say so... It just has no interest whatsoever in becoming one.
• In The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, Ryuunosuke's long-term goal for his Artificial Intelligence "maid" is to turn her into a Ridiculously Human Robot.
• Mostly averted in The Ship Who.... Most "shellpeople" were installed into life-support "shells" in infancy and are carefully conditioned to have no Sense Loss Sadness, nor to miss the various things that normal humans can do and they cannot - rather, they think of the Living Ships and space stations that they're installed in as their true bodies, revel in their capacities, and pity "softshells" for their limitations. They have quite a repertoire of slightly mean jokes about "softpeople", though some shellpeople protest these and say it's unkind to make fun of the disabled.
  • Except, to an extent, for Tia in The Ship Who Searched, who was seven years old when she was paralyzed from the chin down and subsequently converted. Tia loves being a Spaceship Girl and having a way around her Dream-Crushing Handicap, but there are things she misses particularly when she falls in love and knows they Can't Have Sex, Ever. She can't survive outside of the shell - so she has a Ridiculously Human Robot Remote Body made, at tremendous expense.
• In Slayers, Zelgadis is all angsty about having been turned into a human/golem/demon chimera and wants to find a cure. Other chimeras that he and his companions come across, especially a particular one in a a special side story, share the same sentiment.
• Data actually becomes a real boy in one of the Star Trek: The Next Generation tie-in novels, Jean Lorrah's Metamorphosis, in which mysterious aliens turn him into a living breathing being; he feels some emotions, mourns Tasha, falls in love, and gains weight from eating too many chocolate sundaes before a Reset Button makes it all go away.
• Robert A. Heinlein's titular Stranger in a Strange Land suffered Parental Abandonment on Mars as the infant survivor of the first human exploratory mission. Having been Raised by Natives (who are Starfish Aliens), he has to learn everything from scratch to relate to humans when the next mission comes along, after he's already a grown man.
• During the second trilogy of the Threadbare series, Cecilia is suffering extreme body dysmorphia with her ceramic body, to the point of considering suicide. It's implied that this is a potential issue for all Doll Haunters as their mortal spirit chafes against an immortal, and unchanging, golem body. Unlike most cases of this trope, the series ends without her finding a way to regain her humanity, although opening up about her feelings at least reminds her that there are others that she can talk to and seek support from.
• Minerva, the AI who runs Secundus in Time Enough for Love, desperately wants to gain a human form. Her motivation is that she's fallen in love with Ira and wants to be a real woman to be with him.
• Subverted in Twig, where the protagonist, Sylvester, is the project of regular chemical injections which alter his mind. At one point, he runs away from his creator, only to return just in time for his next injection, horrified at the idea of being a "real boy".
• Zora Zombie from Xanth would've been happier to be alive or all-the-way dead, but was content to muddle through until she got to become human.

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