In a broad sense, the novel covers themes of gender dysphoria and unhealthy codependent relationships, examining them through the eyes of a robot maid named Pan and her creator, a scientist named Amy. Over the course of half a year, Pan begins struggling with memories of her previous life and her dependence on Amy, which puts a strain on their relationship.
The novel can be downloaded from itch.io at this link.
It covers heavy themes and contains graphic and sexual imagery; lists of content warnings are available on the download page. Due to its short length (it takes about an hour to read), all spoilers are unmarked.
Absolutely Perfect Specimen provides examples of the following tropes:
- All for Nothing: Pan distracts herself from her struggles by focusing on the garden, which she prides herself upon, but all of her work is rendered useless when a storm passes through and destroys it. She becomes distraught and doesn't even attempt to fix the mess, adding another issue to her worsening condition.
- Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear how Nikki became Pan, since Pan herself hardly remembers her previous life outside of flashbacks. It's suggested that Amy turned Nikki into Pan as a way to cure her gender dysphoria, but ended up using this to enforce her own desires on Pan's body.
- An Arm and a Leg: Pan's arm falls off when she slaps Amy after finally having enough of her verbal abuse. Amy creates a temporary replacement until she can switch bodies.
- Bitch Slap: Pan slaps Amy in a fit of rage as Amy's chewing her out, finally asserting that she's had enough of Amy's abuse. Her arm falls off in the process.
- Bittersweet Ending: Though Amy is dead and Pan is heading toward the same fate, Pan ends the story having finally escaped her abusive relationship, essentially dying as herself.
- Cartoon Creature: Maggot, a dog-like creature stitched together from different animals, looks more like the disembodied head of a teddy bear than anything.
- Casual Kink: A major part of Pan and Amy's relationship is kink, both in terms of casual sex and in Pan's submissive role to Amy in other aspects. Pan is the idealized petite, frail doll who is innocent enough to treat like a child (to the extent that she eats nothing but sweets) but adult enough to have sex and take care of Amy's cooking and cleaning — meanwhile, Amy asserts the role of parent (being the literal creator of Pan), sexual partner (having sex whenever she feels like it), and owner (asserting total control over Pan's schedule and meals). The unhealthy balance between casual life and kink gradually spirals out of hand.
- Content Warnings: The download page contains two levels of content warnings, one more general and one more specific, to prevent potential spoilers from learning the specific details of certain plot events.
- Deconstruction: Absolutely Perfect Specimen deconstructs the dominant/submissive power fantasy of master and maid, by starting as an idealized and lighthearted depiction of such a relationship and gradually showing how unhealthy and toxic it can become.
- Destructive Romance: Pan and Amy's relationship is entirely unequal; Amy only cares about Pan enough to mold her into her plaything, while Pan's obsessive dedication with pleasing Amy comes at the expense of her own identity and mental health.
- Eye Scream: Pan kills Amy by repeatedly stabbing her in the eye with a screwdriver.
- Fan Disservice:
- On a broader scale, the whole novel is meant to turn a common sexual fantasy on its head — a Robot Girl meido who simply obeys their master's orders while having little free will or independent thought — by examining the unhealthy thought process rooted behind it. Pan is deeply dysphoric and unhappy in her position, knowing that something is wrong with her even if she can't fully articulate it, while Amy is abusive, micromanaging Pan's life and gaslighting her into submission.
- For a more specific example, the sex scenes gradually start out as idealized and fluffy, and gradually becoming nauseatingly realistic, culminating in a point where Pan vomits when she can't take the unpleasant sensations anymore.
- Foreshadowing:
- It's pointed out early on that Pan and Amy live next to a massive graveyard. As it turns out, Amy harvests dead bodies to sustain Pan...
- When Pan is cooking, special emphasis is given to her gutting a pumpkin and wanting to drink the juices that comes out when she's cutting a steak. Both of these foreshadow Pan eventually cutting Amy open and eating her guts.
- Gaslighting: Heavily implied. While Amy tells Pan that she can't survive at all if her life support cable is removed, Pan discovers that she can, though she's unsure of how long. When she removes it for the last time, she ends up dying shortly afterward, though this is just as likely to be due to sustained injuries and fatigue as it is her cable being removed.
- Gorn: The novel becomes notably gory by the end, with Pan's body literally falling apart, and then her killing Amy and eating her guts while drenched in blood, all presented to disquieting effect.
- Grave Robbing: Amy graduates from Organ Theft to grave robbing when it's revealed that she has dozens of bodies kept in her lab, all for the sake of making Pan a more human-like body.
- Hope Spot: Pan still believes that Amy can fix her problems as her condition deteriorates, but Amy's quick fixes only make things worse. In particular, the life support purse that she creates to let Pan explore the outside world — it leads to one of Pan's happiest days in a long time, but only serves to reinforce the nightmare that living at home is, and she never gets another chance to leave her house.
- I'm a Humanitarian: In the climax of the game, after stabbing Amy to death with her own screwdriver, Pan's hunger is so overwhelming that she begins eating Amy's insides, finally getting real sustenance she was waiting for.
- Lethal Chef: Pan notes that, though she's a skilled chef now, she was averse to cooking as Nikki and generally relied on instant noodles. As her condition worsens, her cooking skills deteriorate, until she's only able to create a haphazard stew.
- Mad Scientist: Amy is skilled at creating artificial life, having produced Pan's body as well as a little chimera called Maggot, which she affectionately treats like a dog. True to form, she spends most of her time locked away in her laboratory, only rarely interacting with the outside world. Her obsessive nature leads to her exerting an unhealthy amount of control over Pan.
- Organ Theft: Pan suspects that Amy still has Nikki's dead body in her basement, and just moved her vital organs into Pan's robot body.
- Pronoun Trouble: Pan initially doesn't know what pronouns to use for Nikki, her previous identity. She defaults to "he" at first, but gradually switches to using "she" instead.
- Sleep Deprivation: As her condition worsens, Pan has trouble sleeping — her dreams just become nightmares of her previous life, and eventually her room becomes uninhabitable due to mold. It gets to a point where she can't even cook properly.
- Spit Take: When Pan makes Amy a truly horrible stew, Amy takes a sip without looking and spits it out immediately.
- Sweet Tooth: Enforced upon Pan, as her programming will only accept sweets to sustain her. Even when she gets sick of them, she can't bring herself to eat anything else, thus starving herself until she finally can't take it anymore and eats Amy's guts.
- Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: Inverted; Pan becomes so depressed that she stops eating, as it makes her nauseous, even though her hunger becomes unbearable.
- Trans Tribulations: Pan thinks that Nikki might have agreed to Amy putting her into a more feminine robot body to alleviate her gender dysphoria. However, Pan begins experiencing dysphoria in her robot body, finding that she longs for the stronger and more capable body of Nikki.
- Uncanny Valley: Pan herself is a cute, cartoony, doll-like robot who only skirts the uncanny valley occasionally, mainly when she notes that she's inhumanly frail and delicate. It's much more obvious with Pan's new body, which — while never shown in full — is said to be stitched from dozens of corpses like a Frankensteinian nightmare. Pan immediately realizes that she would rather die than live in that kind of body.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: After a nauseating round of sex, Pan vomits. While it's described in detail, it isn't shown, though there's an unused image of it in the code.
