Tragic Robot

"Oh my God, I feel so sorry for this thing! How is it in a cast of characters this big and literally this colorful, the only one I feel any amount of emotion for is the lifeless robot? It's actually kind of hard to watch!"

— The Nostalgia Critic on the robot character in Doug's 1st Movie

Ever since the Science Fiction genre set its sights on AI and robotics, artificial beings have been featured increasingly more in fictional texts. Robots are fascinating both visually and thematically. They also present themselves in various ways, such as mindless soldiers, cute companions or androids. One prominent trope in texts featuring robots, however, is the Tragic Robot.

Tragic Robot concerns robotic characters in scenes or plots that are dramatic enough to elicit sadness. The robot could be a major character who sacrifices themselves for a human. If the robot was previously a source of comic relief, it is especially impactful for the audience. The significance of finding such scenes sad is that the characters were never intended to live the same as a human to begin with. They are mechanical beings that exist to serve, so their deaths lead us to question their necessity.

Robots are usually emotionless, and never truly grasp the emotional stakes at hand in stories. Naturally, their lack of expressions makes them easy for an audience to project emotions onto. If they have a strong connection to the protagonist (or are the protagonist), we empathise with them regardless of biological features. However, since they exist to serve, they often put others' needs above theirs.

Tragic Robot scenes can also be sad if the robot is experiencing sadness themselves. Their emotions thus prove they're not just a hunk of junk, and are capable of feeling everything a human can. This could be a commentary on the rise of AI technology, or even draw attention to the flaws in our own emotional capacities.

Compare Become a Real Boy, Ridiculously Human Robot, Forgot He Was a Robot.

This page has several death scenes as examples, so beware of spoilers!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Animatrix's two-part short, The Second Renaissance, reveals how the Robot War and the creation of the Matrix started: The machines are mistreated by the humans who don't regard them as sentient beings. After one robot kills his owner in self-defense because he doesn't want to be shut down, the court declares him and his kind to be exterminated which led to violent anti-machine movements. In response, the machines separate themselves from humanity and build their own city called Zero One as a refuge. They also tried to establish peace talks with the United Nations but it was ultimately rejected. Instead, humanity's nations send them nukes to Zero One which started the Machine War. Eventually, humanity lost with horrifying consequences and the machines use the survivors as living batteries, creating the Matrix. While the A.I. narrator notes the machines are the victims in the story, she acknowledges they too became the oppressors towards the end of the war; hence her saying that both species made terrible mistakes to create the situation.
• Dragon Ball Z: Android 16 was modeled by Dr. Gero after his deceased son and programed with the objective to kill Goku. When he is awakened by Androids 17 and 18 and brought to tag along with them, he develops a liking to the world and the two of them, to the point that he is upset when they are absorbed by Cell. He eventually makes a Heroic Sacrifice against Cell.
• Sonic X:
  • Emerl the Gizoid is meant to be a weapon of destruction. However, when Cream and Cheese find him in the bushes, they befriend him and he grows fond of them. In "A Wild Win", he becomes violent from being exposed to a Chaos Emerald. Cream tries to bring him back to his senses, and for a brief moment, he appears to go back to normal, only to start attacking them again. At this point, Cream and Cheese know there's no hope for him and have to fight him themselves. She kicks him into the water, and that's when he goes back to normal. He manages to shed tears for the first time before sinking into the depths and exploding. Cream and Cheese weep over his demise as the others look on in dismay.
  • E-102 Gamma is a robot made by Eggman. He is ordered to take Lily the flicky from Amy, but Amy tells him that just because Eggman's told him to do awful things, that doesn't mean he has to obey him. He sees Lily and starts to gain a conscience, so he releases them both. Later, Amy convinces Sonic not to destroy Gamma, so he decides to free the animals trapped inside the E-100 robots. When he is fighting Beta, they shoot lasers at each other, and they are both destroyed. Amy, having witnessed this, tearfully tells Gamma that she'll never forget him, and he explodes, releasing Lily's sister (who was within him).

Art

• Mel Hunter's Lonely Robot, who appeared in his covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, walks the Earth (or whatever planet it is) alone, without even any other robots for company, after the people have long gone. He interacts with objects as if they worked, when they don't in any practical sense - sitting down to listen to a radio system when there are no signals, rowing a rowboat on sand - as well as painting a picture of what was on the now-dead landscape, reading old boxes of magazines and occasionally discovering the remains of his creators in the ruins of their achievements.
• Matt Dixons Transmissions series, showing sweet but sad little robots, beat-up and neglected in a world without people, experiencing the quiet wonder of the world. Some struggle to find something to do, some keep working, and some just stop there and wait to deactivate.

Comic Books

• Dilbert: Subverted, as a robot employee has emotion chips installed against his will so the other employees can make him feel fear and despair whenever they want. This usually happens after he starts bragging about the superiority of mechanical bodies over what he calls "meatbags".
• !The Wash Bot in Firefly “Return to Earth-That-Was” arc. It has Wash’s personality and some of his memories. Zoe freaked out and got angry initially but kind of warmed up to it after it failed its purpose as trap bait and protected her, getting damaged in the process, because it’s what Wash would do. Later, it led Zoe and the rest to the headquarters that once belonged to the appliance manufacturer run by Wash’s ancestors because it felt Zoe should know about her husband’s family. Wash and Zoe’s daughter Emma likes the robot too. Zoe even told it to stay alive because if it dies, it’ll remind her of losing Wash again. She doesn’t have any romantic inclinations toward it, though. Now it just wants to find a place for itself in the ‘verse.

Films — Animation

• Big Hero 6: Baymax, a robot invented by Hiro's brother Tadashi who becomes a stand-in for Tadashi after his death, decides to use his rocket fist to get Hiro and Abigail back through an interdimensional portal, forcing Baymax to stay behind. Hiro is heartbroken at having to lose someone else so soon, but Baymax reassures him, "I will always be with you." Hiro later discovers Baymax left his personality chip, invented by Tadashi, inside the rocket fist, allowing Hiro to rebuild Baymax by the end of the film.
• The Iron Giant: After growing to love the robot, Hogarth has to say goodbye to him. A missile is making its way to earth, and the iron giant knows only he can stop it. In a Heroic Sacrifice, he flies the missile out into space and conceals the explosion with his body. In the epilogue, we see Hogarth admiring a statue erected in memoriam. But not all hope is lost. Various pieces of the giant re-assemble themselves somewhere in the arctic, hinting at his return.
• WALL•E: The titular WALL-E is all alone on the Earth, and all the other robots of his kind have shut down. He has to clean up all the trash on the planet by himself, and his only friend is a cockroach. Things get better for him once he meets EVE, but his memory is later erased after AUTO crushes him, much to EVE's dismay. EVE brings his memories back with an electric spark, though.

Films — Live-Action

• The Adventures Of Shark Boy And Lava Girl: In his dreamworld, Max's abandoned robot project Tobor helps them travel across the planet. Tobor is a literal Tin-Can Robot who sacrifices himself for Max. In the film's epilogue, we see Max and his Dad repairing the robot.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: The protagonist is a child android named David whose owners adopt him after their son is put in an induced coma. He bonds with the mother at first, but the son wakes up and resents the Replacement Goldfish. The mother feels guilty for connecting with David. They try to make it work for a short time, but David's difficulty socialising and integrating with the family causes his adoptive mother to abandon him. David struggles throughout the film with his desires to become human, but is inspired by the story of Pinocchio to have his wish come true. He spends two thousand years submerged in a watercraft. An evolved race of mecha rescue him and grant him one day with his adoptive mother, who they animate using her DNA.
• Alien: Covenant: The crew of the covenant land on an uncharted planet after receiving an old transmission from Elizabeth Shaw. Various pathogens infect them and create a xenomorph. David from the Prometheus crew rescues them. He tells them he began living there not long after the events of the aforementioned film. Shaw mysteriously died on their voyage. David meets Walter, a newer android model of his kind (also played by Michael Fassbender) that doesn't present as many emotional quirks. They bond over their similarities, but it becomes apparent that in David's long period of loneliness he became increasingly unhinged. Daniels discovers various disturbing drawings of David's experimentation on Shaw's corpse and realizes he no longer exists to help humans. As reflected in Prometheus, he purely desires to support the existence and longevity of the xenomorphs.
  Walter: [after being shown to play the flute] I was designed to be more attentive and efficient than every previous model. I superseded them in every way, but...
  David: But you are not allowed to create even a simple tune.
• Blade Runner: Deckard finally encounters the rogue replicant Roy Batty after being tasked to terminate him. Batty fights viciously for his life and revenge for his friends Deckard has "retired". Batty's impending expiration begins to take a toll, but he's still Deckard's physical superior and maintains the upper hand throughout. At the last moment, aware that he has only moments left, Batty spares Deckard, saving him from slipping off a rain-slick ledge. They stop fighting as Batty reflects on his life, and Deckard grasps the tragic nature of being an android.
  Roy Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
• Blade Runner 2049: After discovering one of his inbuilt memories is actually real, Joe believes he is Rachel and Deckard's son (and born after the events of the first film). He begins to view the world through the eyes of a human and is further encouraged by his AI companion Joi to investigate his origins. As it turns out, the memory was implanted by the real offspring of Deckard. She works for Tyrell Corp as a memory designer, but due to a rare disease has to be contained behind glass. Having been shot multiple times, Joe lays down to expire, still grappling with his disappointment.
• RoboCop: Murphy is rebuilt into a robot after being shot multiple times during a police raid. His brain still remains, as do his memories of being a human. One scene that is especially tragic is when he returns to his family's home, only to see his wife and son no longer live there.
• Robot and Frank: The titular Frank is an elderly ex-thief battling dementia, who befriends a robotic assistant his son buys for him, and uses it to help him complete one last heist. As the police close in, the robot explains his memory can be used as evidence and asks Frank to delete it (and his personality) to protect himself. Frank does so very reluctantly, having come to see the robot as his only friend.
• Star Wars:
  • In The Force Awakens, the speechless BB-8, upon learning from Finn that his owner Poe "didn't make it", makes a very sad sound as his head drops. (Luckily, Poe wasn't really dead.)
  • In The Rise of Skywalker, C-3PO, after being treated as an annoyance by everyone, is faced with the possibility of getting his entire memory permanently erased in order to translate the dagger that will lead them to Exegol. This is essentially treated like a death, as Threepio takes a moment to look at his friends one last time. The memory wipe doesn't last, thankfully.
  • In Rogue One, the sardonic K-2SO is the first of the main group to die in order buy Jyn and Cassian more time to find and transmit the Death Star plans. He utters a final goodbye, never knowing if his sacrifice was worth it.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: In the sequel to the 1984 film, the role of the terminator is subverted, and his purpose is to protect John Connor from harm. This is much to the grief of John's mother, who battled against the same model. Over the film, John develops a bond with the terminator and learns to love him. During the third act, the terminator must destroy himself so scientists can't study his technology. He has a heart-felt moment with John, then submerges himself in a smelter.

Live-Action TV

• Although Blake's 7 is notorious for killing a bunch of characters, many fans find the death scenes of the two starship computers, Zen in "Terminal" (slowly dying from an alien fungal infestation, he constantly apologises for having "failed" the human characters), and Slave in "Blake" (shutting down after Scorpio crashes, he for the first time addresses another character by name instead of as "Master"), among the most emotional in the show.
• Warren Mears from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is capable of making gynoids. "I Was Made to Love You" has a gynoid he created searching for him after he has abandoned her as a girlfriend after having found himself a living girl. The gang has to find her as she is beating the crap out of boys that try to pick her up. Buffy sits with her at the end of the episode as she comes to accept her redundancy and begin to shut down. In "Intervention", Warren in coerced by Spike into making him a copy of Buffy to dominate and simulate a relationship. She sacrifices herself as part of a plan to trick Glory and cause the failure of her latest Evil Plan.
• Doctor Who has more than a few Tragic Robots.
  • From the Fourth Doctor serial aptly titled "Robot", the eponymous bot in question was built to be Three Laws-Compliant, but an organization of Elitists force him to violate those protocols for their own agenda, driving the Robot mad. The Robot ends up running amok due to the conflicts caused by accidentally killing his creator, and has to be shut down.
  • "The King's Demons" features a shape-changing android named Kamelion who is being manipulated by the Master as part of a plan to change history. Kamelion joins the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough in the TARDIS at the end of the story, but the technical limitations of the prop used to portray him when he wasn't transformed into another character^note the prop's designer died without leaving instructions on how to operate it meant he wasn't seen again until the Fifth Doctor's penultimate story, "Planet of Fire", in which the Master tries to regain control of him. In the end, rather than submit to the Master's control, Kamelion begs the Doctor to destroy him.
  • In "Victory of the Daleks", we meet Edwin Bracewell, professor, working to support England during the Second World War. He is revealed, very quickly, to be a creation by the Daleks as a cover, and outfitted with an Oblivion Continuum in order to divert the Doctor from pursuing them while they escape. Bracewell is on the verge of detonation, and it takes a bit of Amy stirring up the human feelings the Daleks had installed in him to deactivate the bomb in him.
• Fargo: Gloria discovers her step-dad was a sci-fi writer in the '70s after finding his novels hidden under the floorboards. One of the novels is titled The Planet Wyh, and tells the story of a robot named MNSKY who crash-lands on earth. His scientist companion dies, but MNSKY believes he can seek help. He travels earth for millions of years, only saying "I can help". He witnesses every destructive event on the planet until he is finally rescued by aliens. MNSKY is recognised as the oldest sentient being in the universe, and his archived recordings are of immense use. All he can say is "I can help", to which the aliens agree. He has served his purpose, and after two million years, shuts down.
• Guest from the Future: Werther, a robot working at the Institute of Time, starts as more of a comic and even annoying character, being an Obstructive Bureaucrat whose job is to make a register of whatever the time travellers bring from the past. However, as he befriends Kolya, it turns out he has a dreamy, poetic disposition, feels hollow and unsatisfied with his mundane job, and also feels unrequited Courtly Love for Polina, one of the Institute's employees. He ends up getting fried by the pirates' blasters in a You Shall Not Pass! Heroic Sacrifice, as he stands in their way to buy some time for Kolya to escape.
• The Mandalorian: In "The Redemption", Mando and the others are stuck on the lava river with no way out, as a group of Imperial Soldiers wait at the exit with weapons ready. The IG-11, who was previously a bounty hunter droid but reprogrammed to care for and protect The Child, sacrifices himself by self-destructing in front of the soldiers. It's especially saddening as he was the first droid that Mando trusted.
  The Mandalorian: No. We need you.
  IG-11: There is nothing to be sad about. I have never been alive.
  The Mandalorian: I'm not sad.
  IG-11: Yes, you are. I'm a nurse droid. I've analyzed your voice.
• The Outer Limits (1963) has two examples.
  • "Demon With a Glass Hand": Trent seems to be an amnesiac human from the year 2964 whose left hand is a talking computer; the hand's missing "fingers" contain vital knowledge. After aliens from Kyba attack future Earth, its remaining population creates a Synthetic Plague to kill the invaders, then vanishes overnight. Trent escapes to 1964 while several Kyben follow him. Trent hides in a rundown office building, where he and a woman who's working late join forces to defeat the Kyben and reclaim the fingers. Once the Kyben are dealt with and the hand is complete, the truth is revealed: Trent is actually a robot, the future humans are transcribed on a wire inside him, and he has to spend the next 1200 years keeping them safe until the plague is gone, unable to live a normal life.
  • "I. Robot": Adam Link is a humanoid robot who's on trial for the murder of his creator, Dr. Link. He lives in a small town whose residents are suspicious of him, especially after he breaks a little girl's arm. The trial reveals that Dr. Link's death was an accident that Adam had nothing to do with, and he injured the girl only because he was saving her from drowning and underestimated his own strength. However, when the DA interferes with Adam's circuitry, he attacks the judge; this, along with the revelation that he's read Frankenstein, seals his fate. While he's being taken from the courthouse to be destroyed, Adam sees the same girl he saved before about to get run over by a truck; he rescues her again, but is smashed to scrap metal in the process.
• The Outer Limits (1995) did a remake of "I, Robot" in which Adam Link is acquitted since it's proven both Dr. Link's death and the courtroom attack only happened immediately after attempts to tamper with his mind; however, he still dies saving someone from being run over, this time the D.A.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "The Offspring", Data's daughter Lal "dies" because of cascade failure in her positronic brain after she develops the ability to feel.
  • Data himself wants to be human but never quite can be, making his arc through the series somewhat tragic.
• Westworld focuses on the human-like robots called "the hosts" who cater to the human guests in the titular park. Given that most of the guests are wealthy and indulge in their fantasies without any moral consequences, the hosts became targets of their abuse because the guests don't consider them to be real. Even during maintenance time, the hosts are abused by the management which includes being stripped and used for sexual recreation. The hosts' memories are reset following such events. Eventually, the hosts gain self-consciousness and remember the traumatic memories that they experience. Their path of self-consciousness is one of the park founder's plans to free them from human control and choose who they want to become. By the end of season one, the hosts, who gain consciousness, use their anger and trauma against their human oppressors as a catharsis.

Manhua

• Milan, the robot mother from My Beloved Mother, to the Raised by Robots protagonist Sinbell. Who repeatedly rejects his robotic caretaker due to society having Fantastic Racism towards robots, and that the revelation of Sinbell having a robot for a mother would make him the school's laughingstock. And then it's revealed how Milan came to existence in the final chapter's flashback - Sinbell's biological mother, Aya, sacrificed her life to save her son from a gas explosion, and her Dying Wish before she succumbs is to have her mind reprogrammed into an android body, codenamed Milan. And at the end of the story, Milan sacrifices herself again, to save Sinbell from a city-destroying nuke, her second death being final.

Music

• Beast in Black's music video for "Moonlight Rendezvous" is about a pair of Star-Crossed Lovers androids: her a model declared "obsolete" and earmarked for destruction by the MegaCorp who created her, him one of the new models tasked with hunting her down and terminating her.
• Reboot Me is about a sentient operating system who is abandoned, while having no idea why her owner isn't logging on.
• SteamPoweredGiraffe's I'll Rust With You is about the robots living so long, time leaves them behind, and everyone and everything they ever loved, they have to watch decay and die; though the robots themselves will eventually die, they live like this far longer than any human has ever had to.

Video Games

• Chibi-Robo!: In the first game, there's Chibi-Robo's predecessor, Giga-Robo. Though he was popular when he first came out, the amount of energy needed to charge Giga Robo's battery resulted in an energy crisis; because of this, the Sandersons (who were already struggling financially) had no choice but to abandon Giga-Robo in the basement, where he's laid dormant ever since. When Chibi-Robo and Telly Vision find Giga-Robo and learn his story, they decide to help him out by paying out of their own pockets to help recharge his battery. It's later revealed that before he was shut down, Giga-Robo saved a group of aliens from crashing their spaceship; in return, the aliens offered to grant him two wishes. His first wish was to give souls to the toys in the Sandersons' house. At the end of the game, after Giga-Robo is revived, the aliens reunite with him and grant his second wish: to have a battery that runs on infinite energy. Giga-Robo then shares his infinite energy with everyone's Chibi-Robos, averting another energy crisis in the process.
• Detroit: Become Human: The androids are treated as second-class citizens with their situation being similar to real-life oppressions on minorities. Among the three playable characters, Kara's and Markus' stories show their perspective on how the humans treated them. Markus gets it worse where regardless of how he resolves his confrontation with Leon, he's considered a deviant and gets tossed in a dumpsite, prompting him to fight for his people. In Connor's story, he encounters several deviant androids who are abused by their human owners. Depending on the player's choices, Connor can sympathize with them which can also lead him to his own deviancy.
• Grand Theft Auto V has the in-game animated short film The Loneliest Robot in Great Britain, a parody of grim British animation whose title is rather self-explanatory. The titular robot, Marty, is regularly abused at work by his co-workers and his depraved boss, gets Mistaken for Gay by both homophobic Football Hooligans and a pair of Camp Gay leathermen, and is dating a sexbot named Maureen whose programming and job make him an Emasculated Cuckold. What's more, in the society depicted, robots are second-class citizens who can be legally "decommissioned" by their human masters. Eventually, Marty snaps and starts killing both humans and robots alike, including Maureen and the man who replaced his bartender friend Phil with a newer model. He finally gets... something resembling a happy ending in a post-apocalyptic future where he rebuilds Maureen and Phil, even if they both clearly Came Back Wrong.
• Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII: One of the sidequests in the Dead Dunes revolves around Bhakti, a small robot that players might recall as being a type that was in the first game, and having been separated from its group in the shifting labryinth of the dunes quite some time ago. When Lightning finally manages to move the wall and Bhakti has the chance to reunite, it turns out his group was made up of humans, who have naturally died. The little robot is as heartbroken as a robot can appear with little to no facial expression, and uses up the last bits of its charged battery. Lightning even manages to collect something like a soul from the robot, as is her duty given by Bhunivelze, but given that Bhakti is a robot, she's naturally concerned about it having something she can collect.
• Mega Man:
  • Most reploids in Mega Man X, both maverick and hunter, have some rather sad tales.
    • Storm Eagle from Mega Man X isn't a maverick by his own volition. Rather, he attempted to fight Sigma upon finding out about his revolt against humanity, only to be beaten into submission.
    • Most of the mavericks in Mega Man X5 aren't even close to being bad, but they are afflicted by the Maverick virus, so they ask X and Zero to put them down before they succumb. Some of them succumb before the hunters arrive. Volt Kraken^note Known as Squid Adler in the original English release being one who succumbs right in front of them if they arrive to collect his part.
    • X was built by Dr. Light 100 years before the events of the first game. However, feeling humanity wasn't ready for X and worried X would make the wrong decisions, Dr. Light sealed him away for future awakening. After being awakened, he becomes a maverick hunter despite his dislike of violence and has to deal with watching his allies die or go maverick.
    • Zero was built by Dr. Wily in an effort to one-up Dr. Light, but he proved so uncrontrollable that Dr. Wily is forced to seal him away. After a fight with Sigma results in the two swapping moralities, Zero finds himself frequently haunted by his past, and he feels the need to bring an end to the disaster he started, dying twice along the way.
  • Continuing 100 years after the former series, Zero's life hasn't gotten any better in Mega Man Zero. Waking up having lost his memory, Zero finds out that X has become a tyrant that has deemed all reploids to be maverick. Except this is actually a copy of X, which Zero has to put down, along with other reploids. At the end of the series, Zero dies for good.
• Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: In the Pokéstar Studios movie Everlasting Memories, the protagonist, a Child Prodigy, builds a Robot Buddy named F-00, who is capable of expressing emotions. The protagonist's assistant, Manuelo, turns out to be Evil All Along when he reprograms F-00 to obey his every command and F-00 goes berserk. F-00 is still sort of conscious in its violent state and implores the protagonist to destroy it so that it won't harm anyone else. Though the protagonist is greatly reluctant to do so, they end up having to demolish it, and F-00 gives a final goodbye before it shuts down, and the protagonist mourns for it.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Adventure: E-102 Gamma at first starts off as another loyal animal-powered robot built by Doctor Eggman. However, upon meeting Amy, he develops a change of heart, turning against his creator and releasing the animals inside his robot brethren. After suffering injuries from Beta, he gives out, releases the animal inside himself, and explodes.
  • Sonic Battle: Emerl the Gizoid starts off as Eggman's pawn, but as the game goes on, he becomes closer to the other characters and learns about emotions. He learns to love other people and forms a close friendship with Sonic and the gang, especially with Cream. By the end of the game, however, he goes back to his original destructive personality thanks to Eggman's Final Egg Blaster, and Sonic is forced to destroy him so that he won't hurt anyone else. Just then, Emerl goes back to normal and bids Sonic farewell before exploding, and everyone mourns for him.
• Virtue's Last Reward has Luna, who's easily the nicest character in the entire cast, revealed to be a GAULEM in her route. In particular, her ending has her lament how she failed to prevent the deaths of nearly every character, which in her eyes breaks rule number 1 of robotics. Not helped by how she was ordered to let her master die if it came to that and being programmed to not do anything. Oh yeah, and she was created to be a mother figure but her son rejected her because she wasn't human. Even in a game full of death, you just can't help but give her a hug each time.

Webcomics

• Warbot in Accounting is a webcomic about a Warbot forced into an accounting position and its inability either to do a job it wasn't designed for and to connect into human society.
• xkcd #695 invokes this with the end of the mission of the Spirit rover, which landed on Mars in early 2004, and lasted for over six years before its mission ended when a wheel got stuck.^note Contrary to the implication of the comic, it was not abandoned. Spirit was used in situ for nearly 11 months—another 266 Martian sols after the point suggested on the comic—before the inability for it to position itself to clean accumulating dust off its solar panels caused it to stop working.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series "His Silicon Soul" the robot duplicate of Batman spends a good deal of his operational time believing that he's Batman transplanted in a robot body. And then, upon learning the truth, he tries to restrain the original Batman. And when he believes he accidentally killed Batman, he suffers a My God, What Have I Done? moment and destroys himself for violating his own prime directives of protecting human life.
• Pound Puppies: In "Toyoshiko! Bark Friend Machine", a Robot Dog named Toyoshiko is sent to Shelter 17 to spy on the Pound Puppies. She becomes very close to Strudel and appears to be the only one to truly understand her. When the others find out that she's secretly filming them, they say Toyoshiko's memory must be erased or their secret organization will be made public. Strudel refuses to do this, but Toyoshiko jumps into a giant magnet to keep the identities of her friends safe, causing her to shut down. Strudel can do nothing but sob over her. However, she does rebuild Toyoshiko, but this isn't the same one as before and she no longer has her old memories of Strudel.
• Samurai Jack: "The Tale of X-9" is about a robot by the titular name who retired from fighting to settle down with a puppy he named Lulu only for Aku to steal Lulu away from him and force him to fight the Samurai. In the end, X-9 is unable to beat Jack and dies thinking of Lulu.
• The Simpsons: Played for black comedy in "Homer the Moe." While cleaning out the garage, Homer discovers a robot that he had started building and then abandoned. The robot boots up and pleads, "Father! Give me legs!" Homer tells it to take a hike; we then get to see the robot painfully drag itself away on its arms, occasionally glancing back to see if Homer shows any pity.
• Sonic Underground: In "Three Hedgehogs and a Baby", Sonic and his siblings find a baby hedgehog and name him Hip. Unbeknownst to them, Hip is actually a robot sent by Robotnik. Manic in particular is very close to Hip, and it's implied Hip is becoming sentient, as he dreamed about playing the drums with Manic. When Hip falls from midair, Manic tries to catch him, but Hip ends up hitting the ground and falling to pieces, revealing his true identity as a robot. Shocked and saddened, Manic just sheds Manly Tears.

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