Cybernetics Eat Your Soul - Television Tropes & Idioms

In Afro Samurai, Sio implies that this has happened to Kuma, saying that he's been repaired so many times, there's hardly any human left at all, just a mindless "samurai doll."
- He later proves her wrong, by defending Afro during the battle with his father.
Bubblegum Crisis calls this "Boomer Syndrome", comparing it to the eponymous androids that occasionally go on rampages when their brains roll snake-eyes.
Eighth Man has cyborgs who routinely run rampant because the cybernetic link to the nervous system along with the massive boost in strength unhinges most people's minds. Eight Man, being a (Bishonen) Phlebotinum Rebel with "good cybernetics" is able to escape these effects and battle the evil Mega Corp producing them.
- The OVA Eight Man After discards this trope in favor of Drugs Are Bad - it's not the cybernetics per se that drives the users crazy, but the massive quantities of Psycho Serum they have to take to use the implants effectively. Eight Man makes do with good-old Super Serum. Warp That Aesop!
This trope is studied extensively in all Ghost In The Shell media, even if no straight examples of people going actually crazy upon being cyborged show up.
- In the "Night Cruise" episode of 2nd Gig, Section 9 follows a man who might possibly pull a Taxi Driver. Among his various psychological problems is being unsettled by other cyborgs, driven to nausea by how his fellow employees eat when they don't need to. They trace this back to a combination of war trauma and his own cybernetic alteration following a ~~combat wound~~ particularly nasty STD.
- There are references to the possibility of mechanical or programming errors in badly assembled cyborgs that could lead to unintended violent behavior. In one episode a murderer tries to play this card, blaming his implants in attempt to get away scot free. This isn't a typical case of "cyberpsycho" in that it isn't the Ghost - the person himself - that goes insane, but their new body just may interpret the brain's signals horribly wrong.
- To be honest, Ghost in the Shell is a massive subversion of the trope in that it's more about how the advent of extremely advanced cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence forces us to redefine what humanity really means rather than present the viewpoint that cybernetics make people less human. Indeed, contrary to the name of the trope, the soul is generally considered to be the only part that remains constant in cyborg'd humans - the titular ghost in the shell.
- Conversing with Batou, one of the Tachikomas pretty specifically denies the trope. See the Quotes page.
Reversed in Appleseed. Briarios, a cyborg the size of a small car, tends to be calmer and more collected than his unaugmented partner Deunan. Maybe he's calmer because he doesn't worry as much about getting shot... or that's what happens when you don't have hormones.
- Yet the writers of Appleseex Ex Machina apparently did not get the memo, and made every cyborg in the movie a target for artifically induced violent insanity.
  - Bonus points for being made by the same guy who did Ghost In The Shell they really didn't get the memo
Played up for all its tragic and tearjerking worth in Gunslinger Girl. The cybernetic implants as well as the drugs and conditioning that the titular girls receive are killing them while slowly destroying their minds and personalities. None of them will live to see adulthood.
Galaxy Express 999 takes this all the way. Like, literally to the end of the line.
Both played straight and averted in Macross Frontier. The Big Bad and her Dragon are both cyborgs. The former goes completely A God Am I by the end of the series, while her former Dragon undergoes a Heel Face Turn out of love for his newly refound sister. Though the latter is briefly interrupted by said Dragon being Brainwashed And Crazy, he shakes it off in the Grand Finale and even rejects the Big Bad's Instrumentality plan on the basis of human emotion.
Subverted in Cyborg 009, where Albert/004 is the one in the Cyborg Team with more machine parts (due to having almost half his body torn in an explosion), but is one of the most developed characters in the whole series. Somewhat played straight, too, since he constantly worries about the possibility of losing his humanity as time passes or about people seeing him as a monster, and at least two episode ("Tears of Steel" and "Man or Machine?") are fully dedicated to his struggles.
- And there's also 0011, the main enemy in "Tears of Steel", who plays the trope straight by being at first a Tragic Monster who only wanted to have his family back, but later was Brainwashed And Crazy and lost all of his remaining humanity. 004 had to kill him in the end to stop his rampage...
The Mikura in the Karas OVAs, all youkai (traditional Japanese supernatural creatures), who require human blood unlike their counterparts.
Subverted in BBattle Angel Alita where not only are the cyborgs capable of sentient thought, but the fact that the belief in one's own humanity is enough to make them human. Also, a good number of characters with brain chips are more human than many of the characters with real brains.
- Made especially apparent by the robots in Robo Assyl where not only have they been taught by Ping to be human, bbut also to lie cheat and gamble along with their own religion.
- Even greater is the Anomoly team which are composed entire of nanomachines... and ended up becoming living breathing organisms that function just like real ones. Even complete with a robot penis.
Subverted with Franky from One Piece due to easily being one of the most emotional and empathetic crew members. (Though he'll try to deny it.) This trope is also jokingly referred to when Luffy asks is Franky lost that part of his heart that appreciates a man's romance being wearing a suit of armor. (It's Luffy; don't ask for it to make sense.)
- More ambiguous case with Kuma. It's still not clear whether or not the guy still has the capacity to feel.
- In Chapter 559, it's implied he's more or less lost his humanity and simply become a weapon for the World Government, as he fights Ivankov whom he was formerly allied with at some point but attacks him. Donquixote Doflamingo goes as far as to say that the man he knew as "Tyrant Kuma" is dead.
Asura Cryin. Less notable example from a series that suddenly took a dark turn at the last episode.

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The "Big Wheel" issue of Global Frequency had a half-dead soldier who'd been basically turned into a walking killing machine by cybernetic alterations. Then he saw his reflection and ~~decided to live up to the role~~ went stark staring mad.
- And one of the members of the team sent to kill him before he could spread his killing spree was a partial cyborg who emphasized to her teammates the Body Horror inherent even in just the grinding, inhuman feel of an artificial arm (and the anchoring necessary to keep it from ripping off her shoulder).
Dekko from Zot! is a textbook example. Although cybernetics don't seem to be inherently bad in Zot's world, the trauma of having his terminally-ill body replaced a piece at a time turned him into a Mad Artist.
On the other hand, the DC Comics hero Robotman is usually one of the more sensible people in the Doom Patrol, even if he does tend to be pretty unhappy about being a brain in a mechanical body.
- Ditto the Teen Titans' Cyborg, who is a fun-loving guy and probably the most emotionally and mentally normal person on the team.
- More ditto for his predescessor of same name from Superfriends, whose only real problems came from the fact that he couldn't simply slip into a secret identity like the others.
  - Ennnt, wrong! That Other Wiki has dates assigned that make the original-with-hair comic Cyborg the predecessor, being from 1980, whereas animated Cyborg was from 1985-1986. -THEN- animated Teen Titans Cyborg.
- Ditto to the nth power for Marvel Comics' Rom, Spaceknight.
Hart Whitcraft was afraid of this happening after receiving an artificial heart in the Acclaim version of Magnus Robot Fighter. The series, and entire line, ends before we can find out.
After becoming a Technopath thanks to the Extremis process, Tony Stark's friends and collegues start to suspect this. Turns out the information overload is just making him a little loopy - the rest is his paranoia and borderline-masochistic work ethic cranked up to 11, thanks to his new efficiency. And Skrulls, but you find that out later.
- And at one point the cybernetics just plain eat him, over writing his body and mind for a few issues.
- Its now a Inverts thanks to said Anal Skrull Tony lost his Extremis powers, he's now a shell of his former self.
Played straight and subverted in the Archie Sonic The Hedgehog series; the roboticization process created by Dr. Robotnik/Eggman normally results in a loss of free will, while the cybernetic enhancements of the Dark Legion actually don't result in a significant change of personality (though it's still considered by the mainstream public to be "unnatural"), and their status as "evil" is more from their methods of fighting for their right to continue their lifestyle, than the lifestyle itself.

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In Spider-Man 2, Dr. Otto Octavius is driven to madness by feedback ("voices") from his trademark robotic tentacles after a lab accident destroys the neural control chip meant to prevent this, and becomes obsessed with finishing his failed experiment at any cost. The arms could have been mindless, and the voices belonged to his subconsciousness.
Except for Jean-Claude Van Damme, cyborg conversions didn't go too well in Universal Soldier, either.
- It's worse than that. Van Damme was able to overcome his programming and have a normal life. The villain didn't but he was pretty screwed up to begin with. Now, ''Redux'' features J Cv D's friend being converted to a soldier and allowing herself be blown up because, as she tells him, it's "too late for her" even though a living, breathing proof that no it isn't stands right in front of her.
  - Plus they didn't turn evil because of the cybernetics, they turned evil because the AI that's controling turn turned evil-ish (well he didn't want them to kill him)
In Kamen Rider the FIRST, it is explained that all Shocker agents must undergo periodic blood transfusions to stop their bodies from rejecting their cybernetic implants, forcing their loyalty to the organization. Though Takeshi Hongo/Kamen Rider 1 oddly doesn't experience this, Hayato Ichimongi/Kamen Rider 2 does. This eventually leads to his death at the end of Kamen Rider the NEXT.
Averted in the Robocop movies. While limited by his programming, he remains a man inside. Similarly, the psychopathic Robocop 2 was a scumbag drug lord before his conversion.
"He's more machine now than man; twisted and evil."
In Back to the Future Part 2, Marty is warned that the cyborg asshole Griff "has a few short circuits in his bionic implants". (In fairness to this trope, though, Griff does descend from a long line of bullying Jerkasses, so it's quite debatable how much - if any - of his Jerkassness can be blamed on cybernetics.)

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In the Battle Tech novel Operation Excalibur, one character, whose husband recently had a limb replaced, mused that the sex the night before proved that cybernetic limbs at least don't remove a person's tenderness or passion, and thinks that the only people who tend to go coldly murderous when they have cybernetic prosthetics installed are people who tended towards that sort of behavior anyway.
- The World Of Blake's massively cybernetically modified Manei Dominei soldiers are merciless killers, but that's more likely due to their indoctrination rather then a side-effect of their cybernetics.
- Played (somewhat) straight with the Word of Blake's VDNI and Buffered VDNI, in that they cause insanity and brain damage after ten years or so (with medical treatment).
  - Played...bent, by Clan Enhanced Imaging technology; it does not eat your soul, but will eventually result in crippling neuromuscular degeneration despite constant treatment, and arguably a lot of the hard-core Crusaders who would use it were pretty soulless anyways. The version used as a control system for protomechs carries with it no inherent penalties different from the usual one, but due to its use as Unusual User Interface with the protomech, in which the pilot essentially becomes the machine while it's active, it can result in a "God Complex" insanity.
  - Though in the case of the psychological problems caused by EI technology the fluff mentions that social interaction, particularly with other members of their protomech unit, outside the cockpit can limit this. So apparently they only eat your soul if you're a loner.
The Conjoiners in Chasm City and later books in the series certainly seem to be soulless and Borg-like from the outside. Subverted, as from the inside they are shown as leading rich and interesting lives and possessing unique personalities, experiencing the world and communicating with their peers far more deeply than unaugmented humans who rely on sight and speech and hearing.
- On the flip side, Redemption Ark describes the effects of a prosthetic body (plus a physics-altering energy field) on a Conjoiner villain: "Her thoughts shifted and coalesced with frightening speed, like clouds in a sped-up film. She flickered between moods she had never known before, terror and elation revealed as opposed facets of the same hidden emotion.".
In To Hold Infinity by John Meaney, the plexcores with which the inhabitants of Fulgor augment their brains don't eat your soul so much as change it into something rather inhuman. The antagonist of the book is a hundred times more augmented than his peers, ultimately enabling him to survive death, in a fashion, and become a mind-eating planet-conquering godlike being. He maintains much of his human emotion, but has a tendency to consider other humans as obstructions or prey.
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, cyborgs aren't really any more or less likely to go psychotic than anyone else, but there's a bit of Fantastic Racism towards those who've had more than a limb or an eye replaced.
- Ton Phanan from the X Wing Series was a doctor before losing a leg, and half of his face. This had a serious psychological effect on him; he became an increasingly cynical, depressed pilot who hid in snark. The author is on record as saying that although Phanan feared death and struggled against it, deep down he didn't want to live.
Phanan: "There's no mechanical replacement for a future, Face. And every time I take a hit, and they have to cut away another part of me and replace it with machinery because I'm allergic to bacta, every time that happens I seem to be a little further away from the young doctor who had a future. He can't come back, Face. Not all of him is here anymore."
- In another instance Wedge is fitted with fake prothetics on his arm and head to get him through customs, in the hope that nobody would look directly at his face and recognize him as a well known rebel commander. And it worked perfectly.
- In one novel Tenel Ka loses one arm. She refuses to replace it cybernetically due to family values. Luke supports her decision and explains that while he prefers to have his arm replaced, he always keeps in mind this is a step in direction of Vader - "half human, half machine".
- Also one argument why Vader was irredeemable was that he was "more machine than human".
  - No, pretty sure it has something to do with him killing children who only came out of hiding because they thought he came to save them.
  - The correct quote by the way is "He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil."
  - That may say more about Obi's prejudices (and guilt, that he couldn't avert Anikan's fall) than about cybernetics.
  - The comic Star Wars Legacy plays with this. An Imperial Knight was badly wounded so they gave her a "Vader" Life Support system. One of the healers was worry about making another Vader, however the other pointed out that Vader turned evil before being put in his suit. She's still mostly the same, but since she was fine with dying before and now can't touch anything without feeling pain she's pissed.
- The Dark Forces Saga has robotic Darktroopers; supplemental material mentions that the prototypes were aging veteran clone troopers who had around seventy percent of their bodies replaced with cybernetics. Combining the weight of their experience with stronger, faster, more damage-resistant bodies made them extremely effective in combat, but no one had consulted them beforehand. That's why the project switched its focus to droid troopers - droids don't gape in horror at what they have become and kill themselves or just act really recklessly in battle, wasting good credits and tech.
Subverted in the Familias Regnant universe. All the Neuro-Enhanced Marines are warm friendly characters who just happen to be killing machines. Two prominent ones include a grandmother and one asking for his systems to be downgraded for when he's at home with the wife.
Averted in Schismatrix - Mechanist and later Brain In A Jar Fyodor Ryuumin is perhaps the most human character in the entire book.
Subverted in China Meiville's Bas-Lag novels, where many of the ReMade receive mechanical implants as a punishment for their crimes, but are emotionally scarred by the dehumanizing way they're treated as much as by the modifications, themselves.
Orson Scott Card discusses this in Robota, eventually concluding that non-visible augmentations are perfectly safe psychologically. Making yourself look like a robot, on the other hand, is generally connected to rejection of humanity, and hence to Transhuman Treachery. (Incidentally, this setting has no Ridiculously Human Robots, so robots that embrace emotion ignore this rule.
Played with horrific psychological subtlety in Damon Knight's short story "Masks". A man has been saved from certain death by having his brain and nervous system woven into an otherwise robotic body. Though he's retained all his memories and sense of self, his lack of human senses and physiology has left him with only one emotion: nauseating disgust and hatred for the organic life that surrounds him.

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In Doctor Who, the Cybermen are said to have lost their ability to feel emotion during their transformation, as a species, from biological entities to cyborgs, either deliberately or as a byproduct of their cybernetics (depending on who wrote the story). In the new series, which presents Cybermen as Body Horror, emotion-inhibiting firmware is used to prevent the forcefully-cyberconverted individuals from killing themselves upon realizing what they've become.
- It wasn't that they'd kill themselves. It was that they'd be so horrified their heads would asplode. Seriously.
- The creators had somewhat of a phobia in regard to limb replacement and the Cybermen predate most of the others here, first appearing in 1966.
  - Not a phobia as such - artificial limbs were in their infancy and organ transplants were very much a young science. Kit Pedler's original musing was "how much of yourself can you replace before you lose your identity?" and then it morphed into "how much machine before you're no longer human?" The original Cybermen were pretty much the archetype of this Trope - rather than the Frankenstein complex of the new series, they were a twisted sense of evolution from a living race into a mechanised one.
  - The answer, based on Real Life evidence, seems to be "everything outside the brain, if the replacements are good enough."
  - In the original series, unlike the new one, their brains had been replaced as well. The original Cybermen were wholly inorganic, just walking fossils of their former selves.
  - This is subverted/inverted in "The Next Doctor": Dark Action Girl Mercy Hartigan helps the Cyberman construct a Cyberking, only to discover that she's the erstwhile pliot...And the Cybermen discover that she has an excess of Villainous Willpower, and instead ends up becoming a Hive Queen, symbolized by the Creepy Monotone most Cybermen have being just a part of her Voice Of The Legion, the other being her normal tone. She does develop a god complex, but this is probably due to her being a Victorian woman being put in total control of a nearly-invincible starship.
The Borg. That is all.
- To be fair, the Borg are probably dehumanized due to their Hive Mind nature rather than cybernetics automatically being bad or anything. And Data (an android of all things) is far from a sociopath.
  - Problem lies in organic-machine combination, not one or another. In "First Contact", Borg assimilate Data by putting organic components into him.
- This Troper would like to note that the Borg were once planned to be robotic insectoids at the end of the first season, until budget and other behind-the-scenes problems wound up only vaguely hinting at them. Of course, the Borg we all know and (no longer) fear showed up in the second season.
- In the Expanded Universe Star Trek: Destiny series, it's revealed that the Borg aren't evil because of their cybernetic nature or because of their Hive Mind, but because the first assimilation process went horribly wrong, and subordinated the minds and bodies of its victims to an alien entity who had faded away entirely save for an all-consuming hunger.
  - This was hinted in one earlier novel.
Deep Space Nine played this straight with Vedek Bareil. After slowly dying, Kira tried to keep him alive by replacing his body with cybernetics. After half of his brain was replaced with a positronic matrix, he asked to just die instead of going further and Dr. Bashir, the attending physician, agreed with that sentiment.
- To be fair, you are talking about replacing the brain tissue containing the memories that made him who he was with a "blank" artificial brain.
  - This was caused by the fact that the state of the neurons in the lost parts weren't configured into the replacement. He was quite literally losing parts of himself. The machine makes the ghost.
Generally, Star Trek mistrusts such replacements. Picard's replacement heart nearly kills him in "Tapestry" (Q points out that a normal heart would not stop in such a situation), Geordi's Visor is abused a couple of times by Romulans, Nog's leg hurts at first etc.
- On the other hand Picard is who he is thanks to the artificial heart.
  - Not thanks to the artificial heart itself, but the event during which he got it.
- Chrissie Chapel's ex-fiancé Roger Corby uploaded his mind into an android before his death. The resultant android is an ends-justify-the-means sociopath, who suffers a My God What Have I Done moment when this is finally made clear to him.
On the other hand genetically augmented humans aren't much better (Khan), not to mention Jem'Haddar...
In the short-lived 2007 The Bionic Woman reboot, the protagonist's Ax Crazy predecessor, Sarah Corvus, apparently became psychotic as a result of her bionic implants.
- The fact that said implants are malfunctioning and that she is possibly near death may have something to do with it, though.
The original Six Million Dollar Man had Jaimie Sommers have a similiar problem when her body started rejecting her implants, causing her maddening pain that drove her beserk and forcing Steve Austin to restrain her for emergency surgery that she seemingly didn't survive.
In Hyperdrive, Sandstrom is an "Enhanced Human" cybernetically connected to the ship's controls, who has a personality somewhere between Commander Data and the Enterprise computer. One episode has her "replaying" the events immediately before her enhancement, revealing she was a cheerful (if somewhat dim) young woman.

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In the folk music/prog rock/metal Rock Opera album 01011001 by Ayreon, the main characters are a race of fish aliens that rely on machines to keep them alive, and as a result, they lose their emotions and ability to really experience life. They try to regain them by creating and living vicariously through humans. It works, and in the end, after humanity destroys itself, they stop the machines so that they can die. Probably. Ayreon is kind of a Mind Screw.
Nine Inch Nails' The Becoming is all about this:
That me that you know used to have feelings
But the blood has stopped pumping and hes left to decay
The me that you know is now made up of wires
And even when Im right with you Im so far away

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An option for cybernetics in Atomik Cybertek.
Cyberpunk2013 and Cyberpunk2020: Even worse than most - getting wrist blades or reinforced knuckles was 3d6 Humanity Loss, but getting your whole arm replaced was only 2d6!
Cyberspace
Fading Suns: Mostly averted, as this trope only happens if you take the "Cybernut" disadvantage. Then again, the resident Church Militant declares you soulless if more than 64% of your body has been replaced, but that's really them going nuts, not you.
Feng Shui: Justified, as "Arcanowave" implants are icky Mad Scientist tech that are made of demons and Black Magic. Here, the danger is not so much losing your humanity the more you get cybered up, but having bent magic sent into your system like a virus whenever you use it. Use it too much, and you start mutating into something horrific and run the risk of becoming an abomination, one of those altered demons that the government of 2056 uses to fight its wars.
Obsidian: The catatonia option on steroids. To be fair, you can also lose Humanity for other horrible things, like binding demons or getting hit by Brown Note powers that reduce your Humanity.
Shadowrun: Getting cyberware drops your Essence, which comes with a corresponding drop in Magic ability; however, even the non-magically active should fear dropping too low in Essence, as if one's Essence runs out, they die. However, it is possible, through a combination of powerful blood magics and technology, to keep somebody with below-zero Essence alive as a "cyberzombie". It's not pretty, but nothing in Shadowrun is. The 1st edition game hinted at "cyberpsychosis", whereby characters become increasingly violent and irrational as their essence goes down; however, no rules system was ever given for this, and it was entirely dropped by 2nd edition.
- There is a minor compensation: since cybernetics have been "paid for" with essence, magic which treats living and non-living things differently will treat cyberware as if it were living tissue.
  - There's some limitation to the "Magic treats implants as living"; for example, low essence characters benefit less from the healing spells (the loss essence acts as a negative modifiers on the spellcasting roll)
- Shadowrun's Essence attribute, in Third Edition, is a measure of how much the thought patterns of a given individual resemble natural patterns of their species. Installing cyberware, at least in fluff-theory, does not cause instant Essence loss, but rather learning to use said cyberware. This inevitably changes how the individual thinks, and so Essence goes down. From the metaphysical side of things, it also determines if someone's soul still considers them alive - if Essence drops to zero, the spirit flees the apparently-dead husk.
  - This explanation makes no sense, though. Having your eyes wrecked and replacing them with cybereyes shouldn't change the way you think. Neither should having your mangled arm replaced with a cyberarm that acts exactly like your original. And what training is required to use armored skin? This troper handwaves the whole thing as "it's magic, and it doesn't make any sense but the rules are rules anyway."
  - It's even worse than that, since learning is inextricably linked to cognitve and neurological plasticity. Your mind and brain are constantly changing how you think. This explanation would mean that characters should be losing essence every waking second implants or no implants, and loosing it even faster while they're asleep.
  - Fourth edition refers to essence as "(...) a measure of life force, of a body’s wholeness. It represents the body’s cohesiveness and holistic strength." It's worth noting that drug abuse can also reduce your essence (which can be REALLY bad for drug-addicted P Cs with low essence).
  - About Cyber Zombies: While being the only example of That One Boss in a Tabletop RPG may seem great, you quickly learn otherwise, as your soul is now effectively incompatible with your body, leaving what's left of your organic being to be constantly riddled with cancerous growths and necrosis. Not to mention, every now and then your soul tries to drift away (because, again, it no longer considers your body alive), and has to be forced to stay put via a cybernetic implant that instantly triggers a Flash Back of a powerful (usually painful) memory. It...hurts.
- Cyberpsychosis is back in 4th edition, as a negative quality characters with real low essence can take. If they critically glitch on a social test, they enter an Unstoppable Rage.
- Cybernetics is actually only one of the things that can damage a character's Essence. Magically active characters can suffer magic loss due to amputations, life-threatening injuries, carelessly performed medical procedures, and pharmaceuticals.
- Then theres "used" cyber enhancements which have once been in somebody's body, pretty horrible stuff even for cyber enhancements. And likewise the body rejects the enhancements and can fluff wise drive you crazy or interfere with your body, like Nerual modifications for instance can make you permanently crazy.
The old World of Darkness mostly averts the trope. Although there are a few implants that cause humanity loss, those involve removing parts of your brain. The vast majority of cybernetics have few disadvantages, and the most overt and powerful ones simply add to one's Paradox. In WoD, cybernetics gain their balance because a skilled Mage can emulate them just as well with spells-since they're all magic in the end anyways. They also have another issue, that any skilled life mage can cause a body to reject them.
- On the other hand, the Glass Walkers, a tribe of techno-shaman werewolves, had a faction known as the Cyber Dogs, dedicated to fighting the Wyrm by blending their war forms with cybernetics. That... did not go so well.
Similarly, Exalted also mostly averts this trope with the Alchemical Exalted, with only the most inhuman enhancements for Alchemicals (death tentacles, massive brain modification, spider legs) causing any degree of humanity loss. Even then, a low-humanity Alchemical isn't crazy, just emotionless and cold.
Rifts treats this as a psychosomatic matter instead of a literal truth. Any loss of humanity is due to the individual 'Borg's feelings and reactions, and how they are usually perceived' by the society around them, rather than an inherent drawback to cybernetics or bionics. This varies between regions and nations around the planet, largely influenced by the prevelence of cybernetics there. In North America, cyborgs are considered normal, if uncommon in places, and only spurned by mages and psychics because they interfere with the ability to use magic/psionics (there are exeptions). In Germany and Japan, cyborgs make up a sizable chunk of the nations'armed forces and are considered selfless heroes who have made sacrifices to serve thier country. Russia has a unique environment where giant, bionic soldiers make up almost the entirety of the front-line troops for each of the factions fighting to gain control of the region. To be a cyborg in Russia is a mark of prestige and each faction has a signiture style of cyborg, each considered Elite soldiers and revered as heroes.
- Though it is true that each cybernetic implant lowers a mage's power and PPE reserves.
In Star Wars Saga Edition, cybernetic replacements reduce your Use the Force check. Earlier Wizards Of The Coast Star Wars [=RPGs=] had you have reduced benefit from Force Points. This only really applies to Force Users.
One of the Dungeons And Dragons Monster Manual supplements introduced "half-golems", which are about as close to cyborgs as a fantasy setting gets. Having limbs replaced with golem parts can restore function and increase strength, but requires a Will save, which gets more difficult as the number of replacements increase. Failure on the save switches the victim to a Neutral Evil alignment and changes their type to Construct, engendering a murderous hatred of the living.
- Eberron had grafts, whom depending on the type take various toll on the body. Almost always resulted in constitution loss. Some grafts, called symbiotes, are also Always Chaotic Evil and will try to make you Ax Crazy by constantly speaking suggestions to your mind.
  - But who cares about that if you have the right build?
  - To the point: Abusing fiendish symbiotes, cloning, and damage-sharing effects created a build that required a new mathematical notation to write down how much damage it did.
Various Warhammer 40000 examples play this trope straight, most notably the Adeptus Mechanicus, who replace parts of their brains with computers. Similarly, Servitors and Arco-flagellants are soul-eaten by their cybernetics. However, the majority of the 'verse avoids the trope, since cybernetic alteration, augmentation and replacement is common, and generally doesn't cause major problems. It's one of the few tropes the universe doesn't play as grim and dark as it possibly can.
- In an interesting Subversion, the Commanding officer of a Titan (A large Mecha where all the crew are connected both to the machine and each other by mind links, though curiously, they still use hand controls) can be driven insane not by too much time connected to the mind of the Machine-God Titan, but instead from spending too much time apart from it.
  - However, watch that first step: Titan machine spirits are described as so full of rage and desire to destroy that only the strongest minds can master them, and even the hidebound Obstructive Bureaucrat Adeptus Mechanicus are willing to take any human from anywhere who can handle it into their ranks. Lesser men are frequently driven mad or killed by trying to connect to a Titan.
- Arguably, the straight examples of this aren't due to the cybernetics, but to extenuating factors. The dehumanization of high-ranking Adeptus Mechanicus members is as much from their own personal philosophy as it is from their implants; the Cult Mechanicus encourages leaving behind the weaknesses of flesh and human thought process for the strength of metal and the cold logic of electronic circuits. Arco-flagellants and servitors also don't lose their humanity from their implants — they're routinely lobotomized before any cybernetics are installed.
  - There's only a few instances of this trope being played straight in 40k, and that's when the emotion centres of the brain are replaced with computers. And that's considered extreme even among the members of the cult. So I don't know why this says Warhammer plays it straight when it subverts it all to heck.
  - In those cases I'd also say it's a Justified Trope, removing or otherwise damaging the emotion centres of the brain does lead to profound personality changes including a lack or empathy, increased aggression and increased anti-social behaviour. In fact, I would call it more worrying if there weren't any side effects from it!
- One might make an argument that this is what happened to the Necrons, though it may have to do more with their soul-eating gods.
  - Since they're getting new fluff, we don't know... but based on the 5th edition rulebook, all Necrons have souls, and every time they 'die' the repair chip eats away a small part of their souls until only the basic program is left, mixing this with a little Came Back Wrong. Lords, who don't die as much and have better repair systems, are just driven insane from the the millions of year in stasis: some think they're gods, some customized their armies to be different etc. (Yes, that's right, Games Workshop has managed to take a race of omnicidal zombie robots and make it more GRIMDARK. This troper's impressed.)
  - Necrons don't have souls. The book states that it's their memories that are slowly being eroded by constant repair.
  - Necrons certainly do have souls. The only soulless Necrons are the cybernetic Pariahs, who were soulless even before their capture and conversion by the Necrons.
- Here is an Apocalyptic Log about Body Horror involing about a guy turning into an Obliterator.
"The process of absorption fascinates… [unclear] ones body might somehow swallow the item, like unto a serpent or the surface of some [viscous?] fluid. Yet it doth seem a mutual [process]. For not only doth the body absorb the [weapon] but also [doth the] weapon, in some strange way, seem to [absorb] the body…[RECORD CORRUPT] as the weapon becomes like unto my flesh, so doth mine flesh… [unclear] like unto the weapon. Indeed, I trace this [stylus] upon mine arm, and the shape and form of the weapon appears under [my touch?]. It doth not appear in mine hand so much as mine hand doth arrange itself so as to become the weapon… [BREAK IN RECORD] capakhity of mine new form to abkhorb weaponsh ish akhtonishing… [unclear] a whole lakhgun! But I do shtart to lokhe zhe shenshation in mine shkin. Mine jawkh are [hardening?] and mine ribkh are protruding from mine [chest]. Zhey are of a dull, metallic sheen and tekhts show zhey are a mix of [bone?] and shome metal I cannot identify… [BREAK IN RECORD] thsi wil be mmmylsat [RECORD CORRUPT] cannnnnnnnnnnot useth esse febel mahcinsse aaaaany log;ner [RECORD CORRUPT] tothe eyeof the larybinht the hearto fthe maichnettttto the pppplaceo f… metalll…"
- Sandy Mitchell has great fun playing with this trope in his Ciaphas Cain and Dark Heresy tie-in novels; of the four techpriests who receive any real character development in these books, one is an obnoxious zoobiology otaku who has to be babysat by Cain's patrol, one is a Genki Girl with "no head for theological matters" ( and whose career would have probably not advanced as far as it did had she not played a key part in one of Cain's missions), one loves to eat junk food, and one is a Deadpan Snarker.
Alternity uses Cybertech that not only costs 10 skill points to have installed (but everything else costs skill points too...) as well as 'Cyber Tolerance' points based on your constitution score. If you run out of these, you die. Installing a reflex chip requires a Will check to resist insanity. The resulting madman NPC is a Cyko-Tek (get it? It's a pun) who want nothing more to graft more and more cybernetic hardware and go on homicidal rampages against those squishy pure organics. Can you say Ax Crazy with a literal vibroblade handaxe?
- Not quite. Filling up the cybertolerance score does not equal death (and there are pieces of gear you can purchase to actually increase this score), although installing the reflex and/or fast chip will more than likely result in insanity. The part about cykosis (yes, the puns abound) is dead on, though.
In Deadlands: Hell on Earth, a distinction is made between cyborgs (undead with cybernetic parts) and scrappers (living humans with cybernetic parts). While cyborgs suffer no ill effect because the power for their cybernetics comes from the soul of a demon spiritually shackled to their heads, scrappers have their Spirit die type reduced (or their total dice if they're already at d4) when they replace major body parts. This is because they power their devices with their soul: battery-powered devices are available, but expensive; and in a pinch non-vital systems can be turned off to increase their dice again. This is all well and good, fair and balanced, except for one thing: the Spirit die type is used primarily for magic rolls, faith rolls, and guts rolls. Apparently having your super-powered buzzsaw arm running makes you more likely to run away?
- Its also worth noting that Cyborgs are actually more mentally stable than normal Harrowed as their manitou are chained up in the basement next to the boiler not running around the bedroom with a knife. What makes cyborgs crazy is their asshole onboard AI's that have arbitrary rules of engagement that they force the cyborg to follow. With no AI or an AI with no idiot rules cyborgs are more sane than normal people... because armor 8 means you can face down anything in the waste and laugh.
The Bubblegum Crisis tabletop RPG has a mechanic for this trope which is derived from Cyberpunk's. However, there are mild subversions. First of all, it is explicitly stated once in the writeup of the Humanity stat that cybernetics are not the only way to lose Humanity. Second, counseling can help out quite a bit. Other than this and a certain lack of explicit psychic or magical loss, both being foreign to the setting, the trope is played straight, especially since counseling is only guaranteed to succeed if the patient has removed all cybernetics.
Yawgmoth, The Big Bad of the entire Dominarian Saga of Magic The Gathering, was obsessed with the mechanics of the body. He lords over the evil machine plane of Phyrexia, where he and his followers used its mechanical wonders to improve their bodies, at the cost of their own humanity. In the mechanics of the game, artifact creatures (usually machines) are generally unaffected by black spells that destroy creatures.

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Subverted in Deus Ex:Invisible War (This trope is what the Templar believe, but it isn't true, as the augmented main character can have just as much sanity as anyone else.)
- Played straight in the first Deus Ex. Paul Denton's the only "normal" augmented person. JC and the P-series augments have as much emotional depth as a doorknob, Walton Simmons is a ruthless member of the Ancient Conspiracy, and Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann are both deranged psychopaths.
  - To be fair, most of the augmented agents in Deus Ex were probably emotional cripples before the augmentation procedure.
  - Conversely, the cyborg bartender in Hell's Kitchen seems like a pleasant, perfectly normal and well-adjusted military veteran. Then again, her cybernetic augmentations are relatively moderate (replacement robotic arms).
  - The P-Series (P for Psycho-Pharmacological) are pretty heavily drugged up and indoctrinated with seemingly minimal implantation. Being emotionally dead is just one of those minor side effects of the conditioning.
  - And, you know, JC just happens to be the Player Character, so if he has the emotional depth of a doorknob, whose fault is that?
  - The writers. While one can imagine all sorts of things going on inside his head motivating him to sneak and kill a particular way, since JC's dialog options are all pre-canned, there's little question that he's personally either extremely bland or has an amazing poker voice 24/7.
  - It's been suggested that JC speaks with absolutely no emotion to both give the impression of playing as the stereotypical government agent and to suppress the character's emotions in favor of the player's; with the character expressing no emotions, the player is free to project his own on what is being said and done by JC. As justification, this trope is averted by Paul Denton, JC's brother, who has similar implants and yet is just as human as unaugmented soldiers and agents, emotions and all. This troper believes JC's lack of a soul is a writing trick, not an expression of this trope.
  - What a shame.
In the Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri expansion pack, Alien Crossfire, the Cybernetic Consciousness faction suffers from slower reproductive rates, since its followers no longer "get" the ideas of love or sex. In addition, the "Cybernetic" future plans cause your workers to be replaced by machines, which in turn leads to higher social unrest.
- To be fair, this probably has more to do with their brains being taken over by fragments of a rogue AI than simple cybernetic aversion to fun. Also, unrest caused by job losses happens (has happened) on modern day Earth (the real one) all the time, regardless of the reason - the "machines taking over" bit is probably to echo a similar unrest in the beginning of the industrial revolution.
  - Although this time it's the government that is being taken over by the machines.
  - Diplomatic wise, they do not look kindly on neither Mind Control nor Euduaimonic future societies either. As Mind Control is seen as ineffective control (why control minds when the cybernetic body is perfect) and the pursuit for happiness is not needed in a society of machines
Space Siege: The only storyline effect that augmenting yourself with cybernetics has is the end scene (assuming you declined an offer that appears late game; if you took that offer, you'd get a third ending even if you're fully human). The enemy "Cybers" are just mind-controlled.
Although not focused at all in it's story, Supreme Commander makes a fair job depicting cyborgs. The Cybran nation is implied to be formed of normal people like anyone else, only much smarter to have their brain completely interfaced with a computer. The ones who actually lose their humanity are the ones enslaved by a program by the UEF, and are enslaved precisely because the UEF philosophy is that they lost their humanity. That means they only become less of human because the ones who consider them less than human makes them less than human. Dr. Brackman, the oldest character in the Sup Com universe, is a Cyborg more than a thousand years old, but his personality seems to be still very human, for a scientist, even after being reduced to pretty much a brain in a jar by the time.
- Still, the UEF at least believe the Cybran deserve to be live, as long as they live like machines. The Aeon, an entire faction of Knight Templar , consider the Cybran an atrocity and are more than happy to commit genocide against them at every chance instead of converting. Of course, this depends on the player considering the enslavement as being or not a Fate Worse Than Death.
  - Funny that, considering that the very Commanders of the Aeon (as well of the other factions) are completely interfaced neurally with their Armored Command Unit (pretty much a giant mecha that can make more giant mechas).
  - Aeon Commanders are not neurally interfaced, specifically because of religious reasons. Instead, Aeon commanders wear distinctive facial makeup to make it easier for their helmets to analyze the commander's facial movements and interpret commands-The Way lends them strong enough self-control that they can literally use facial expressions to command their forces, in addition to hand-input commands.
In the Mortal Kombat series, the cybernetic conversions that the Lin Kuei perform on their ninjas in the third installment has the effect of robbing them of their souls. Only Smoke was strong enough to retain his soul after being converted.
- Though it is worth noting that Cyrax regains his a couple of games later and Sektor, while not the sanest guy in the world, is able to return enough to try to Take Over The World. Meanwhile Smoke is now nothing but an uncontrollable slave to Noob Saibot.
The SOP nanomachines of Metal Gear Solid 4 are an intentional version. They suppress emotional responses in their users, turning them into soldiers who feel no pain, anger, fear, or guilt in the name of increased battlefield efficiency. As you might guess, the sudden removal of this system from soldiers is incapacitating, and in some cases lethal. Plus, insta-PTSD!
City Of Heroes seems to deconstruct this. Heavily cybernetic villains do seem to be monstrous and/or soulless and/or crazy, especially the Clockwork King, Freakshow, and Nemesis. It's not because of the cybernetics, though; Nemesis was an evil racist powermonger back during the Civil War, the Freakshow are on drugs that allow them to use the cybernetics, and the Clockwork King was crazy before he stuck his brain in a jar.
- And of course, P Cs can be as cybered up as they like.
- And there's Malta's Titans, cyborgs with systems specifically designed to "condition" the brain controlling them.
Cybernetic chimeras make up the majority of random battles in Mother 3, originally being content, happy animals that were "reconstructed" by the Pig Mask Army. However, the biggest example has to be the Masked Man, who was originally Claus. Lucas' brother and happy, energetic, outgoing child. He was mortally wounded by a "reconstructed" Drago, and was himself reconstructed; into a cold, silent, obedient general in "King P"'s army. The process almost completely destroyed his humanity, to the point where he is described as having "no heart", as opposed to good or evil.
- Now that you mention it, the roboticized animals in the early Sonic The Hedgehog games can fall under this.
- In the games the animals were just cheap power sources, it was the cartoon adaption that had them made cyborgs as hamster wheels didn't make sense.
The cybernetic Agents of Crackdown aren't directly dehumanized by their augmentations, though the world in which they live is pretty dehumanized itself.
The Man-at-Legs boss in Pikmin 2 is described as being born fully organic, but at some point down the road it is forcibly fused to (possibly sentient) machinery, causing the normally peaceful creature to become a literal killing machine.

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Subverted in Sluggy Freelance when they parodied the Borg. Rather than the cybernetic implants turning Riff and Torg evil, the two of them turned the rest of the cyborg's into immature idiots.
Borg: Since you have come among us, all we have done is drink fermented hopps beverages and ogle scantily clad females. This has seriously jeopardized our goal of the All-Collective. We've never had to do this before ... we are kicking you out.
The "Pocket President" chips in A Girl And Her Fed. Originally designed to give federal agents unblockable, untraceable instant communication ability, they instead turned nearly all of them into virtual shells of their former selves (just going through the motions of life) or permanently depressed lumps who tended towards suicide. The exceptions being those agents who already had pronounced Psycho For Hire tendencies. And then we find out, the chips could do much much more... and the folks that made them knew it. The psychological issues were intentionally induced as a Restraining Bolt

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The Yu-Gi-Oh cards "Giga Gagagigo" and "Gogiga Gagagigo" show the character Gagagigo after being cybernetically reconstructed. The flavor text on the first mentions that the cybernetics caused him to lose his heart and redemption, and the second's says that his soul has long since collapsed, and that his body continues recklessly in a quest for more power.
- Even more Gagagigo is the evolved form of Gigobyte a very cute mon.
Magic The Gathering has Esper, part of the Shards of Alara block. Every creature in Esper has some amount of aether-infused metal grafted onto their body. This is okay unless they replace their whole body, after which they become twisted fiends called aether-liches. Then there's Phyrexia...

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SCP-217 melds this with The Virus.

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Batman Beyond had the episode "Lost Soul", in which Robert Vance uploaded himself into the company computer. The first thing he did upon awakening 35 years later was flip out and jack the city network. Terry espouses a view based on this trope:
Batman: You really think you're Robert Vance, don't you? But he was flesh, and you're just binary. They don't go together!
- For his next trick, he plans to kill his grandson by overwriting himself onto the guy's brain. A move also used by Ra's al-Ghul in the episode "Out of the Past".

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Pacemakers are essentially cybernetics, implanted for purposes of electrically reinforcing a weak or unsteady heartbeat signal, and they don't eat your soul. All they do is give you a cut through the security line at airports.
- Recently, mechanical hearts have been implanted in people (that is, a complicated pump replacing the entire organ), and have worked. They don't add any obvious soul-missing factor to their owners, nor do they leave the patients "heartless," in a poetic sense, although recipients have commented that it feels a bit strange to have a steady whirring inside in place of a pulse.
Brain implants have also been experimented with in primates and rats. Though the implications terrify some humans (particularly with "roborats" whose behavior can be controlled by an implant in their pleasure center), it's not clear whether the critters themselves feel any different. Of course, we can't exactly ask them. In the interests of potentially freeing stroke victims, it's worthwhile research.
- Experimental brain implants have already been installed on Alzheimer patients in clinical tests with positive results. They're still very simple, but prove once and for all that simply having silicon in your nervous system won't make you inhuman.
  - And implants also work with parkinson This troper remember the interview of a french man who was unable to old a glass of water without the implant but was fully independant and able to keep his job with those.
  - Placing Silicone a bit further forward however [[Uncanny Valley does.
- Note that "roborats" aren't actually operated like a remote-control device. Their implants can provide a pleasurable sensation only, under circumstances (like searching a collapsed building for trapped survivors) where giving the rat a food-reward isn't possible. Conventional training is still necessary to get the rats to do what their handlers want.
Powered exoskeletons (not quite giant robots yet) and powered body parts also exist, potentially helpful for amputees. The coolness factor currently appears to overwhelm the Uncanny Valley factor, since those devices do not even try to look like flesh and skin.
The most ubiquitous form of true cybernetics (a mechanical device that mediates a sense or function)now used is aural implants. Or artificial ears. They don't eat your soul at all and in fact offer very interesting insights into the nature of perception given that you can literally switch how and what you hear with a software change.

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