"Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe we're sick of you too? Sick of the stunts we have to pull? Sick of you guys fucking things up for us?"
A novella-length pair of Armitage III fanfics, comprising How She Has Burned and From Blue to Red Again.
The series progresses from personal drama to civil war as it continues the story of Naomi Armitage: a robot built to give birth to human children, but who discovers that her true fulfilment lies in saving her dying race. Saving said race turns out to involve a lot of harmful-to-humans actions, however, and since her partner is human... well, it all goes from there.
Notable for taking the political and ethical implications of the original series and turning them up to eleven.
You can read them here.
This work provides examples of:
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Armitage will stop at nothing, up to and including murder, to keep her kind alive. Her opponents are various shades of bigoted, including "will stop at nothing, up to and including mass murder, to see her kind dead".
- Ceiling Cling: Armitage is, presumably, hiding on the ceiling when she drops down on Bit Part Badguy Lance Mccallon. She proceeds to subject him to Murderous Thighs.
- Continuity Nod: A bunch of them.Didn't they know country singers were extinct?
- Darker and Edgier: Downplayed. The original show was gritty and violent to begin with, giving this work not a lot of room to get Darker And Edgier, but Ross's outbursts of bigotry, Armitage's willingness to kill children for her own ends and the discovery that the police are genociding Thirds, among other things, definitely sink the world into Crapsack territory. And that's before we get to the War Arc.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Inverted. Isa is kind to Armitage in the beginning, but she soon reveals herself a military hardass who increasingly lacks tolerance for her flamboyance.
- Electronic Speech Impediment: Julian gets one. As well, the Thirds in cyberspace have electronic appearance impediments, as the server doesn't have the power to render them properly.
- Evil Knockoff / Grand Theft Me: Combined. Armitage's Evil Knockoff is her stolen body, animated by a mindless soldier program.
- Facial Horror: Numerous robots (and, it's implied, humans as well) get their faces melted off. By hydrofluoric acid squirt guns.
- Fantastic Racism: The author's works are made of this trope, in general. To be fair, so was the original show.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: The Thirds' infrared vision.
- Heroic BSoD: Armitage goes through some small ones that are literally this. Ross even refers to her as "bluescreening".
- Power of Love: Subverted, and that subversion called out.
- Robo Family: Armitage spends a lot of time deliberating over whether her human family or her robot family mean more to her. She chooses the robots.
- Shout-Out: Plenty to Blade Runner.
- Thank the Maker: The first fic in large part revolves around this.
- What Is One Man's Life In Comparison?: Armitage's rationalization for killing a human to get hold of the required materials to make new Thirds.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Both played straight and inverted. Each side thinks this about the other.Armitage: If the future of humanity depended on you killing just one Third, would you do it?
Ross: Armitage...
Armitage: Would you? - Wetware CPU: The Thirds have them, which causes problems when Armitage and Julian try to replicate their design.
- What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Zig-zagged. Armitage feels passionately for her own kind, but when it comes to her own (human) child she admits that she doesn't know how to love her, and the one time she's left responsible for her, she stashes her in a cardboard box. (To be fair, they didn't have a crib.)
- Would Hurt a Child: A rare female protagonist example. Armitage is quite willing to sacrifice her human child to resurrect the Thirds, because it's "just one life".
