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alt title(s): To Become Human "Oh, Tom Servo, you've got Pinocchio syndrome!"
The extreme of I Just Want To Be Normal. The character either isn't human to begin with, or has a curse that has taken away their humanity. Often involving an artificial being such as a robot wanting to be a flesh-and-blood creature — or at least closer to one in ways it feels are important, like becoming creative. Quite often, the protagonist is a machine that acts exactly like a normal human, to the point of being able to pass the Turing test.
They are looking for a way to obtain it. Despite Applied Phlebotinum and magic being able to do everything else, it seems the power to turn someone into a mortal human being is incredibly rare. In those cases where someone does get the instant magical cure, they'll often throw it away, saying they want to earn it, or "it's the path, not the destination." Whatever that means. Of course, Failure Is The Only Option, at least until the Grand Finale.
This is often a goal of Robots, Vampires, Werewolves, Half Human Hybrids, etc. After all, Humans Are Special. Who wouldn't want to be one? (Although there may be some who wouldn't, of course.) This applies even if the character is Cursed With Awesome as a result of being nonhuman.
Named, of course, for the puppet who wanted to Become A Real Boy, but much older than that. The Shapeshifting Lover or the Talking Animal who is really a victim of Involuntary Shapeshifting are figures of long standing in Oral Tradition.
Very often overlaps with What Measure Is A Non Human. Contrast Humanity Ensues.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- Livewires subverted this trope — the protagonist, Stem Cell, was an Artificial Human built with all the emotions of a human, who needed to learn to alter those emotions in order to survive.
- Swamp Thing's origin changed him from a man into a living pile of vegetation, and his main goal was to return to normal. In a twist, when Alan Moore took over the book (in his first major writing gig for DC), he took away this motivation with a Ret Con that didn't directly contradict any previous material. Swamp Thing discovered that he was not a man who became a plant monster; he was a mass of plants possessed by the memories and spirit of that man, who was, in fact, dead. Regaining his humanity was then no longer a goal, and he instead became an Anthropomorphic Personification of nature.
- Comet the Super-Horse from pre-Crisis DC. He was originally a centaur called Biron who wanted to be fully human, unfortunately Circe made a mistake and made him fully horse instead. The reason he has superpowers is because the spell couldn't be reversed, so Circe gave him superpowers to try and make up for it.
- Sidenote: That's a common thing with Greek myths, as the gods couldn't undo their gifts, so when they wanted to change their minds, they had to alter them. Cassandra and Tiresias are two notable examples.
- Subverted in Big Guy And Rusty The Boy Robot, in which Rusty is proud and grateful to be a robot, and when he accidentally gains organic parts, the fact that he now experiences pain hinders him in battle to the degree that he spends the rest of the episode trying to remove them. He even expresses confusion upon reading the story of Pinocchio, and doesn't understand why anyone would want to become a real boy.
- Likewise, Scud The Disposable Assassin is fond of stating, "It's cool to be a robot." When a screenwriter tells him of a script similar to his life, Scud is disappointed at the ending, where the hero is rewarded with humanity. He hangs a lampshade on it by asking the writer to not pull a Pinocchio. "Make him proud of what he is, and you've got my $7.50."
- Mr Eff from JtHM was a Styrofoam pastry display. His master fed off Nny's imagination to make him more real when he needed. Unlike Psycho d-boy, who only wished to please his master and get Johnny to commit suicide, Mr Eff tried to keep Johnny alive and killing for as long as possible till he can become fully real. He failed. Johnny killed himself at the end of Issue #4, and issue #5 he was "Taken back into" his master, along with Psycho d-boy, saying "Fuck! I was so close!".
- Subverted in The Mighty Skull Boy Army, Unit 1, a cute, toy-like robot, once voices his hopes to never be a real boy...because he fears puberty, and all those snips and snails...
- X-51, aka Machine Man, aka Aaron Stack, of Marvel Comics has wanted to be/believed he really is human in most of his incarnations. In Earth X, Uatu the Watcher strips him of his human appearance. Late in the trilogy, an alternate universe version of himself appears who used his creator's DNA to create a human body for himself and tells his robot counterpart that his programming makes him human enough already.
- In his Nextwave incarnation, Aaron is very open about his robotness, possibly due to the fact that he now runs on beer, and regards his teammates with some contempt.
- Played with in Elf Quest. After the defeat of Big Bad Winnowill, who spends some time in human form, Mender (who has the same fleshshaping/shapeshifting powers as Winnowill - though none of her experience) decides to try it out for a while too. He doesn't do very well.
Fairy Tales
- Beast in Beauty and the Beast
- In The Greek Princess and the Young Gardener
 , a fox demands that the hero cut off his head at the end; this is needed to transform him back to a man, as he is the enchanted brother of the Greek Princess. Similarly, in Lord Peter, the cat demands that her head be cut off, which proves to turn her back into a princess, and The Seven Foals demand the same, which turns them back into seven princes.
- In The Seven Doves, The Twelve Wild Ducks, The Seven Ravens, and The Six Swans, the sons turned to birds are rescued by their sister, turned back into human form.
- The hero of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Black Bull of Norroway, The Brown Bear of Norway, The Enchanted Pig, the dog in The Daughter of the Skies, and The White Wolf each wish to marry the heroine because if she lives with him for a time, he will be freed of his Involuntary Shapeshifting. Unfortuantely, she invariably violates a prohibition, which puts him in the power of the person who transformed him, and she must find him again to free him.
- Subverted in many other fairy tales, especially if the main character is born or was an animal, but it is a "skin" that covers a human body. These characters are forced into permanent human bodies due to people, usually a fiancee, burning their animal skins. It gets so bad at times, you wonder if this is really a happy ending, even though it is supposed to be one, as in one story, a girl who gets her goat skin burned tries to jump in after it, having to be held back by the prince.
- In many of these folktales, the character is upset because they do not want to be found out or they will be under a worse curse if the skin is broken.
Film
- David (Haley Joel Osment) in Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Anviliciously, complete with a Blue Fairy. Specifically noted as being so inspired, too.
- Number/Johnny Five in Short Circuit, who has gained self-awareness and understands himself to be alive; thus he must fight to prevent being "disassembled" (which for him would be "death") and convince others that he does have human emotions and thought processes. Though he is an extremely fast reader, in the second film, he intends to study the books Pinocchio and Frankenstein more closely, clearly identifying with the plights of both the puppet and the creature.
- Andrew in Bicentennial Man. He's a robot who was accidentally created with a quirk in his hardware that allowed him to feel emotions and learn unlike other robots of his kind. The major plot line involved him wanting to be officially recognized as being human, and involved his many decades of work on inventing artificial organs and other life-sustaining techniques, which he applies to himself in addition to marketing them for general use. In the end, he's finally recognized by the government as being human, as he dies on his 200th birthday. Having replaced his entire body with his self-invented artificial organs, he has become mortal, a prerequisite for humanity.
- The basis for the movie, Asimov's original story, ends similarly, but instead of his artificial organs giving out, he actively makes the decision to let himself time, realizing that in order to be human, he has to have mortality. Thus, only when he dies is he really alive.
- The backstory of Edward Scissorhands reveals he almost was exactly like an ordinary human, but his Inventor died before he could furnish him with proper hands; thus he is virtually unable to touch others. It's suggested in the film that there's the possibility he could still be made "complete" in that way, but that never comes to pass. Perhaps more importantly, when he falls for Kim, he does whatever he can to make her aware of his love for her in hopes she will reciprocate it, despite what he is.
- The Robot boy Electronic from Russian film Electronic's Adventures also wishes to become human, which is especially funny given that his human double Syroezhkin envies him.
- In the book the problem was not to become human, but to think like human.
- Green Snake: The titular Green Snake and her sister White Snake are two female ophidian spirits who seek to become human in order to raise their status on the karmic scale and incidentally experience human love.
Literature
- Pinocchio, of course.
- Isaac Asimov's The Bicentennial Man is about a robot who, over the course of two hundred years, deliberately becomes more and more human.
- A fairly rare example of an animal with Pinocchio Syndrome and a rare example of someone who wants to be human for all the wrong reasons is King Iofur from Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (depending on which side of the pond you are from). It is also a quite rare example of where a character wants to be perceived of human by their actions but knows that there is never going to be a chance of physically becoming human.
- Also, on the subject of animal kings who crave to be seen as human, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
- Nope. King Louie is from Walt Disney's The Jungle Book. In the original story, the monekys have no leader and no law (which to someone like Rudyard Kipling and his audience is a sure sign they are bad people).
- Several characters from Charles de Lint's Urban Fantasy novel Memory and Dream.
- The classic Little Mermaid story.
- Minerva in Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. An administrative computer who learns to be human and falls in love. Eventually has a human body created so she can implant her personality into the body and experience love as a human, and not incidentally become the lover of the man she fell for in the first place.
- The Cat Who Wished To Be a Man by Lloyd Alexander is about a cat that wants to be a man.
- 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 A Real Boy. Well, real girl, but same idea.
- The children's book The Velveteen Rabbit is about a toy rabbit who wants to be real.
Live Action TV
Tabletop RPG
- The overriding goal of the player's characters in the role-playing game Promethean: the Created is to complete "the Great Work" — transforming from dismembered, animated corpses into human beings. This is actually possible (if very hard), making this one of the few examples of the trope where the goal can be achieved in the end (and one of the very few game lines in the World Of Darkness where a "happy ending" is not only possible, but encouraged).
- Of course, since this is the World of Darkness, achieving that goal almost invariably involves creating more of your kind, an endeavor in which success is immoral, and failure is... undesirable.
- Maligno, the "carrionette" darklord of Odiare in the Ravenloft D&D setting, thought he was the real son that Giuseppe created him to be, but the parents of the children he entertained destroyed his delusion. In revenge, Maligno murdered them with the help of other animated toys.
- No surprise that this trope gets used a lot elsewhere in Ravenloft too. 3E even introduced a prestige class for afflicted werebeasts struggling to suppress or eliminate their lycanthropy.
- The "Transformed Animal" archetype in Feng Shui are animals that managed to become humans (or their offspring, in later Junctures) because being human offers better opportunities. However they fear magic since it may cause them to revert to animal form, which spells the end for the character as far as playability goes. In other words, they've all become "real boys", and just want to avoid going back.
Video Games
- This is the goal of Organization XIII from Kingdom Hearts II, although they were humans before losing their hearts and becoming half-human half-nothing.
- If they just wanted to become human, it probably wouldn't be too bad, but their goal was to become human with the power of Nobodies, which apparently would require a lot of people to die. So, bad.
- Their goal (well, the goal of most of them) was neutral at worst, noble at best. But their methods were... shall we say, lacking in moral fiber. All I'm saying is that when one of your missions as Roxas in 358/2 Days involves undoing a drop in Heartless population, you know you aren't playing the good guys.
- 358/2 Days outright states that Xemnas's goal is actually to become "a great being" using Kingdom Hearts power, not unlike what Xehanort's Heartless was doing in the first game.
- Xenosaga subverts this with Ziggy, who used to be human, but is now mostly robot. He wants the rest of him to be robot too.
- Aigis of Persona 3. She gradually does become more human as the game goes on in terms of personality.
- Sora in Ever17, complete with its very own reference to the Pygmalion Plot. She's a little worse off than many of the characters here: She doesn't even have a body. No really, she doesn't.
- In World of Warcraft's new expansion, Cataclysm, the Worgen of Gilneas have developed a cure to allow them to retain their humanity while transformed into their Werewolf forms, but are still looking for a way to get rid of the curse completely.
- The goal of Daniella in Haunting Ground is to become "complete". Understandable, given that she's a homunculus. But in order to do that, she's got to slice open the protagonist to get her Azoth first...
Western Animation
- Subverted by Futurama where Bender is perfectly content to be a robot (albeit a ridiculously human one), and whose transformation into a human in a comedic What If episode was disastrous. He did once say that his lack of human emotions "makes him feel sad"
- Jenny in My Life As A Teenage Robot, despite the fact that without her powers Earth would have been enslaved and/or destroyed dozens of times. (But you can't expect her to think rationally, she's a teenager after all.)
- Spot/Scott in Teacher's Pet''.
- The version of Mega Man seen in Captain N The Game Master.
- Brainiac 5 becomes a Real Boy (...somehow) in the finale of Legion Of Super Heroes season two, after he defeats the Brainiac 1 programming within him. The fact that he was already a Mechanical Lifeform was actually lampshaded: "I was emotional as a robot, can you imagine me as a human?"
- The four main characters of Street Sharks spend some of their time trying to figure out a way to get turned human again. Mostly they seem more concerned with finding their dad though. Also, when they did find a cure in one episode, they ultimately chose to turn back into sharks to continue to fight crime.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the first animated series) had an episode where the Turtles found tainted cookies that would've turned them human. Michelangelo swipes some because he was sick of being treated like a freak by the people of New York. Of course his brothers had to turn him back because the transformation would've eventually killed him.
Webcomics
- Humorously subverted in a letter to Ask Dr Eldritch: a robot writes in to ask why everyone around him thinks he secretly desires to be human, when he's actually quite satisfied to be a robot, which in his opinion is far superior to humans.
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