Token Robot

You know, the one that's made out of metal.

In The Team, one of the members is a robot, while others are humans (or other, more "organic" lifeforms). This robot might've been built by another member of the group, or the robot might've existed before they joined the team.

As the lone robot, a number of "social" robot tropes may be in play: the members might treat it no differently from normal humans (or at least no differently from their more organic friends), especially if they're a Ridiculously Human Robot, though at least a few of them (usually the Jerkass of the group) might think of them as Just a Machine. On their end, depending on the robot's intelligence, they might either be just a silent, obedient member, someone who can speak, but only in a technical/intellectual manner, up to having full-fledged emotions that lets them interact with fellow members like a normal human would. If they are a Ridiculously Human Robot that looks human in appearance and/or being mistaken for human, There would be possibly a reveal of them being a robot if the other members don't know it already, either by the other members finding out for themselves, the sole robot getting a massive injury that could potentially be fatal to an average human, or probably through a Tomato in the Mirror moment.

Depending on their capabilities, the robot may pose as The Smart Guy, The Heart, or The Big Guy, or a Support Party Member. The robot is often the member to take damage more than other team members would, simply because they can potentially be repaired - at least when there is a good enough mechanic character around to help.

Compare to Robot Buddy whose traits may overlap with this, Forgot He Was a Robot, Robot Girl, and Ridiculously Human Robot. May overlap with Robotic Reveal. Contrast with Token Human.

Subtrope to Token Non-Human. Its distinction compared to a token robot, a token non-human's sense of cultural identity, family history, personal identity, personhood, and team dynamics, among other factors, is likely to be very different. The token non-human counts as a natural/organic being while the token robot is an artificial being.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cromartie High School features Shinichi Mechazawa, a Tin-Can Robot who apparently isn't aware of his appearance and believes himself to be a normal human Japanese Delinquent just like everyone else in the school, despite that he frequently transforms into a fully functional motorcycle. In fact, the only two characters who notice the Elephant in the Room upon his immediate introduction are the two main characters, Kamiyama and Hayashida, who are often the only sane people in the entire show's cast.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In Dragon Ball GT, Giru joins Goku's team as the sole robot.
  • Subverted with Magetta in Dragon Ball Super. At first glance, people are likely to believe Magetta to be a robot, but he is actually an alien race known as metalmen.
• HuGtto! Pretty Cure has Ruru Amour/Cure Amour for the protagonists' post - Heel–Face Turn, a Ridiculously Human Robot from the future who rebels against the Criasu Company after being showed kindness from the other Cures.
• Negima!:
  • Chachamaru Karakuri of Negima! Magister Negi Magi is the only robot student in class 3-A. While she's not the only robot in the series, she's the only one with any significant focus. Of course, many students don't know or just ignore initially that she's very obviously a robot.
  • In the sequel to Negima, UQ Holder!, Ikkuu Ameya is the only robot of the titular organization.
• The Artificial Intelligence from Outlaw Star of a spaceship has the name of Gilliam II but has enough sentience to be considered as a member of the tribulation. He has the physical form of mini-robots to attend different parts of the ship as fixers and controllers of it, but Jim Hawking painted pink one of them to get an individual version of Gilliam II, which later became part of the group in reunions.
• Tokyo Mew Mew: Team Mew Mew has Masha, a Fairy Companion / Mentor Mascot Robot created by Shirogane who acts a assistant to the Mew Mews who detects Chimeras, Aliens, and Mew Aqua.

Comic Books

• 5 Worlds: The main trio has Jax Amboy, a famous Starball athlete who looks painfully human-looking. He was a prototype who was made by his adoptive uncle that could hold the sands of the five planets. He is also the token robot of his Starball Team, The Amber Leatherheads.
• In The New Mutants, Warlock the Technarch (no relation to Adam Warlock) filled this role. Though not from Earth, he was still considered a mutant among his own alien race of Mechanical Lifeforms.
• Red Tornado is an android superhero filling the role of the robot member of the Justice League of America:
• Runaways have the Meat-Sack Robot Victor Mancha, Ultron's "son". Because of his status as a robot, he has electromagnetism powers and is very good with machines and computers. He doesn't have the typical robotic social awkwardness, though, because he was raised believing he was human — although the other team members can still be wary of him due to his future identity as a super-villain.
• Inverted in The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers: the team is a bunch of robots with Token Human Verity Carlo.
• Young Avengers: The first run has Jonas, a younger version of The Vision made by downloading the Vision's operating system into Iron Lad's extremely advanced futuristic armor. He primarily filled the role of The Smart Guy, as he was essentially a super-tough humanoid supercomputer. He also gradually learned about human emotions as the series went on.
• Although other robots have joined the team briefly, The Vision normally fills this role in The Avengers.

Eastern Animation

• Pororo the Little Penguin has Rhody, a robot made by the scientist Eddie.

Films — Animation

• Big Hero 6 has Baymax, a healthcare robot built by Hiro's late older brother Tadashi and is modified by Hiro to help fight crime.
• In Treasure Planet, the heroes (consisting of one Token Human and various aliens) are joined in the third act by BEN, a robot who served in Captain Flint's Space Pirate crew but lost his memory due to his memory chip being removed.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien:
  • Alien: Science Officer Ash is revealed to be a robot shortly after he's outed as The Mole, working for the Company to recover an alien lifeform even at the expense of his crewmates on the Nostromo. He doesn't show remorse for betraying the crew, but hates the fact that he's hard-coded to obey Company orders.
  • Aliens: Bishop, the executive officer on the Sulaco, is a robot programmed to be loyal to the crew. Ripley's betrayal by Ash the robot leaves her profoundly distrustful of him. But he proves to be a Creepy Good crewman and even gets a Big Damn Heroes moment despite admitting his own fear.
  • Alien: Resurrection: Annalee Call is a rare second-generation robot, built by other robots not to be bound by orders. She infiltrated the mission in a Zeroth Law Rebellion to rescue humanity from its own worst elements; in a role reversal, she sees Ripley-8 as an abomination at first but comes to empathize with and befriend her.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Avengers team has Vision, who joined the team after Avengers: Age of Ultron. His body is made of Vibranium bonded to organic tissue and was intended to be the Big Bad's final and superior body. It was eventually stolen and had J.A.R.V.I.S. transferred into it.
  • Subverted with Nebula, a member of The Guardians of The Galaxy who joined in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and was originally organic until her father forcefully made her mostly robotic.
• Star Wars:
  • In Solo, L3-37 is the only droid to be part of Solo and Beckett's crew.
  • Rogue One: K2-SO, the defected Imperial battle droid, is the only droid among the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that steal the Death Star's plans.
  • Played with R2-D2 and C-3PO in The Original Trilogy who are Those Two Guys.
  • The Sequel Trilogy has BB8 amongst Rey's allies who is a Unintelligible, Silent Snarker, Robot Buddy sidekick just like R2-D2.
• One of the five protagonists (including Toto) of The Wizard of Oz is the Tin Man, who is, as the name implies, a man made out of tin and is one of the most well-known examples of this trope.

Live-Action TV

• Andromeda: The Andromeda Ascendant herself is a Sapient Ship, with one instance running on a gynoid avatar named "Rommie".
• The Aqua Bats Super Show: Jimmy the Robot is a Ridiculously Human Robot on a Super Team of otherwise humans with powers.
• Dark Matter (2015): The Android, who resembles a human woman; however, she is very mechanically minded and, like the aforementioned Data, is often not as emotional as the other crew members.
• Get Smart: Hymie the Robot, possessing superhuman abilities and a tendency to be overly literal. Interestingly, Hymie himself name-drops this trop in the 1989 reunion special, Get Smart Again, in which a character mentions that his country club has a robot for a member and Hymie replies, "I know him; he's a token robot."
• The Good Place: Janet is the Artificial Intelligence of The Good Place...except not a robot.
• Legends of Tomorrow: Although The Legends are a group of mostly meta-humans and normal humans plus a shapeshifter, the team has Gideon II, an artificial intelligence construct that was or will be created by Barry Allen who assists the Legends with their Time Travel Missions and acts as the group's encyclopedia. In an alternate timeline, she gains a full robot body as a member of an all-girl trio, The Sirens of Spacetime.
• Lost in Space (2018): Jupiter 2 has The Robot, Alien artificial intelligence that killed nearly everyone on the Resolute and caused the crashing of it. It was befriended by Will in the first episode and became a member of the team, despite the other members of Jupiter 2 being freaked out by it.
• The Orville: Isaac, the ship's science officer who's from a hyper-advanced race of Mechanical Lifeforms. And turns out to be an advance scout for their anti-organic crusade.
• Red Dwarf: Kryten, a service android who has great difficulty disobeying human orders or, far more importantly, calling Rimmer a "smeghead".
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The robot Data. Plot elements involving him include his drive to become more human, the crew's growing acceptance of him as an individual, the arc where the crew advocates for android rights on his behalf, the occasional prejudice against him as an artificial life form, and many more.
• The Umbrella Academy (2019): Although she's not a member of the Academy's superhero team, Grace Hargreeves or Mom serves as the children's caretaker and was modeled and programmed by the children's adoptive father, Reginald Hargreeves. She was built especially because of Vanya, Number Seven, who murdered her previous nannies with psychokinesis.
• Yo Gabba Gabba!: The Gabba Gang has Plex, a yellow robot who helps solve most of the team's problems.

Radio

• Marvin, the morbidly depressed robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) who appears as the current page image. This character also appeared in the novelizations and the TV series.

Video Games

• Battle Corps grants you three characters, the humans Jack and Becky, and the token Cyborg Jang.
• In Chrono Trigger, Robo fills this role. Given that your party is composed of people from many different time periods (including a Nubile Savage from 65 Million BC, a frog swordsman from about 400 years before the "present-day", and possibly a Zeal-ean mage alive from at least 12,000 BC), Robo is both the only non-human (Frog notwithstanding) and the only party member to come from after Lavos emerges.
• Contra: Legacy of War for the Playstation have the mercenary team of four consisting of the two humans (one of each gender), Bubba, an alien mercenary, and a powerful robot soldier codenamed CD-288.
• Cookie Run: Ovenbreak has the playable character Ion Cookie Robot,a Token Heroic Orc built by Aloe Cookie who helps the other cookies stop Cyborg Cookie during the Cyborg Menace Event that happened in May 2019.
• In one of the later chapters of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, the robot Thursday joins the party along with Gordon and Jennifer.
• Don't Starve: WX-78 is one of the playable characters among mostly humans and is a Token Evil Teammate based on how much disdain it has for all organic life.
• One of Ninten's allies in EarthBound Beginnings is EVE, a robot that is built by his great-grandfather, George, who stole PSI from the aliens. EVE is destroyed after the boss fight with R7038XX and bears the seventh melody.
• In the Fallout series of games, starting with Fallout 2, each game has a robot companion, Skynet in 2, Sergeant RL-3 in Fallout 3, and ED-E in Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout 4 averts this initially by having Codsworth and Curie, but Curie can be uploaded into a Synth. The Automatron add-on adds Ada and you can create your own robotic companion at special workbenches.
• Among the five heroes of Gaia Crusaders, M-985 is the only playable character who is a robot. It's also armed to the teeth with weaponry, but slower than the human playable characters, making it a Mighty Glacier character. Though the trope is subverted given some of the bosses are Promoted to Playable after their defeat - one of the bosses is also a robot.
• Cortana from Halo, who is an Artificial Intelligence that accompanies the Master Chief on whatever team he is on.
• In Jet Set Radio Future, the band of the GG's took an old and abandoned prototype of the Noise Tanks (a cyberpunk-like rival gang in the first game and Mecha-Mooks in this one), reprogramed it and became "Roboy", the Robot Buddy of the gang who serves as Save Point in the game and later as Secret Character.
• Legacy of the Void: An entire subspecies of Protoss robots (made in imitation of Protoss forces and given the memories and personalities of actual Protoss) known as Purifiers is discovered and taken out of storage. One of them received Fenix's memories, but unfortunately from before the Protoss ever met the humans (so none of the first game's Character Development for him). He's used as a support power, wreaking havoc for half a minute before warping back to the mothership, and eventually takes on a new name to mark that he's not the Fenix everyone keeps expecting.
• Live A Live: The protagonist of the Sci-Fi chapter, a little spherical robot named Cube, ultimately serves as such for not only being the only robot actually helping the humans in his chapter, but also being the sole robot among the seven ^note acually eight if Oersted is counted heroes.
• In Magical Starsign, Mokka is the only robot among the six main characters. Notably, he's the only one among them to fully avert Squishy Wizard, instead being a Mighty Glacier.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2 has Legion, an autonomous geth platform that is recruited for the Suicide Mission late in the game. There is also EDI, the fully-fledged artificial intelligence of the Cool Starship Normandy, but she is more of a disembodied voice on the comms than a robot.
  • In Mass Effect 3, EDI gains a physical body, allowing her to come along on missions with Shepard, although the "body" is merely another terminal for her, while her main cores are still on the ship. Legion (provided it/they survived) only appears as a non-recruitable side character during the Rannoch arc.
• Nuclear Throne: There is one robot, aptly named Robot, among the playable characters, who are mostly mutants.
• In Puyo Puyo Tetris, Zed is the only member of the S.S. Tetra who happens to be a robot, serving as the Parental Substitute of the Tetra's first mate Ess.
• In Puzzle Quest Galactrix, one of the six crew members is the robot ED24, who enables you to hack the Leap Gates.
• Skullgirls: Unlike characters like Peacock and Big Band who are cyborgs, Robo-Fortune is the only playable character who is wasn't even organic in the first place. She was designed by Brain Drain to see out the Skull Heart to use for his own purposes in her Story Mode.
• In most Sonic the Hedgehog games, Omega serves as this for Team Dark. Having been originally built by Dr. Eggman, Omega turned against his creator after being locked in a room and forgotten about, leading to him becoming friends with Rouge and Shadow.
• Spyborgs has three playable heroes, the first two, Stinger and Clandestine being cyborgs. The third of them and the largest of the bunch, Bouncer, is entirely mechanical and communicates by beeping (at least, until The Stinger where it's Suddenly Speaking).
• Star Fox: Although not a pilot for the team, R.O.B 64 serves as the Star Fox team's robotic assistant throughout the series providing assistance from the Great Fox.
• Out of the main characters/bosses in Undertale, we have Mettaton, a killer robot built by Alphys who hosts a well-known talk show and owns a hotel.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: K1-B0, better known as Keebo, is one of the sixteen students of the Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles, with his title being the "Ultimate Robot". Unbeknownst even to him, he was actually created for the audience of the Danganronpa reality show could vote on his actions through his "inner voice".

Web Animation

• The Most Epic Story Ever Told in All of Human History: Epic Robot Guy is the sole robot member of the cast. His allegiance from the trailer isn’t entirely clear, but due to his Red Eyes, Take Warning and apathetic attitude he is implied to be on the side of the villains.
• Red vs. Blue: The side of the red team has a robot only capable of speaking Gratuitous Spanish named Lopez. He briefly loses his token status with the introduction of Lopez Dos.0, but he quickly gets it back following Dos.0's Face–Heel Turn and later death.

Web Videos

• Too Many Cooks: At first, the introduced cast is full of ordinary human characters, with the only oddity being how many there are. Then Smarf the robot-cat is introduced, showing how things are beginning to go off the rails. He's still the only robot member by the end, though, and gives a sign of greater intelligence when he decides to hit the literal Reset Button to stop the chaos.

Western Animation

• In Atomic Betty, X-5 is the crew's robot as well as The Smart Guy on a team that consists of him, an alien, and a human.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Team Lightyear consists of the legendary Ambiguously Human space ranger Buzz Lightyear, two aliens named Mira and Booster, and a Robot named XR who was made by the Little Green Men to serve as a partner for Buzz.
• On the original Danger Mouse series, Quark the alien had a robot appropriately named Grovel. Every time his name is called, he drops to the ground and apologizes. Once in a while he'll come up with a correct fact only for Quark to comically miss the point.
• The Fantastic Four (1978) famously introduced H.E.R.B.I.E. to the team as a replacement for the Human Torch, whose licensing rights were held by another party. He had the Torch's ability to fly while also bringing an assortment of R2-D2-like gadgets and tools stored within his casing.
• Futurama has Bender, the sole robot of the Planet Express crew who is an alcoholic, abrasive and is the best friend of Fry.
  • This gets lampshaded in "Less Than Hero" when Fry and Leela form a superhero team and he drops loud hints to be asked to join:
    Bender: With two humans, you'd think there'd be a robot in there. To balance things out? But whatever.
• In The Jetsons, the titular family live with one another, two pets (a dog and an alien), and a Robot Maid named Rosie.
• In the Martha Speaks episode "Verb Dog: When Action Calls!", Martha dreams that she and her friends are superheroes. Most of them just have powers in the dream, but T.D. is a robot and, being a robot, he lacks a sense of humor, can extend his arms, and is called The T.D. 603.
• Out of the akumatized victims in Miraculous Ladybug, Robostus is the only one of robotic origin. His normal identity is Markov, a highly advanced robot built by Max who can feel emotions.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot:A rare example where the token robot is the protagonist. Jenny or XJ-9 is a Fembot built by her "mother" to protect the earth from evil forces and is the only robot in her group of friends and attending her school.
• Ninjago plays with this trope quite a bit with the ensembles that the ninja make.
  • The ninja team has the Ridiculously Human Robot, Zane, although he wasn't revealed to be a robot until a little bit into the series. Post-Season 3 Zane has him looking more robotic and then loses his token status when PIXAL joins the team much later.
  • The Ninja Replacements, a team formed by Jay to stop Nadakhan's wedding and to rescue the other ninja from the Djinn Blade, has Echo Zane, a nindroid built similarity kin to Zane who was found in Dr. Julien's lighthouse to give the poor man some company.
  • Played with in Season 8 when P.I.X.A.L, the second Samurai X, and an assistant robot built by Cyrus Borg, eventually joins the team and is a member of Lloyd's Resistance against the Sons of Garmadon in Season 9. She was also a temporary vital ally in Season 3 and then later served as Voice with an Internet Connection from Season 4 - Early Season 7.
• The main team on Ready Jet Go! has Face 9000, a talking computer who serves as a teacher of sorts to the kids. Everyone else in the team is either an alien or a human.
• In Sym-Bionic Titan, Lance and Ilana are accompanied by Octus, a bio-cybernetic robot who poses as a nerd named Newton while in school, and as their father outside of school. He serves as the "mind" of Sym-Bionic titan.
• In Time Squad, every Time Police unit operates with a human/robot pairing, and this holds true to our main characters- officer Buck Tuddrussel and his robot partner Larry 3000- but they ended up adopting an eight-year-old history wiz named Otto Osworth and this disrupts the balance. Larry is often put into the role of the caregiver for the two childish humans when he should be their equal. This tokenism gets more apparent when time traveling, as Larry is naturally the only robot in the group that often includes his teammates and the historical figures he's working with.

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