Basic Trope: Your best friend is a robot.
- Straight: Robby, Alice's best friend, is a robot companion who will loyally serve her.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice and Robby are Platonic Life-Partners of the highest caliber, who possess a mutual Undying Loyalty and Unconditional Love for each other.
- The characters each have several robotic companions.
- Downplayed: Alice is a social recluse who considers a fun little gadget her best friend. Said gadget does not have much in way of A.I.
- Justified: The robot is a toy built by a Japanese distribution company to befriend humans with limited programming. Compare with a Tamogotchi, AIBO, Pleo, Robosapien.
- Inverted: Robby realizes Alice is actually an evil psychopath. Robby's Morality Chip overwrites his coding for befriending Alice, and he kills her.
- Subverted: Robby is actually built by Alice's worst enemy.
- Double-Subverted: But since Alice is (in his eyes just) a customer buying his product, he has built the robot to be her friend and not a spy.
- Parodied:
- A robot is built to befriend humans. However, it can not understand friendship. Fantastic Racism ensues, and the robot always ends up terrorizing more people.
- Alice desperately wants a robot buddy and tries to befriend all machines, regardless of it's inanimacy. His entourage includes a toaster, a broken record player, and a Windows Vista laptop.
- Alice's best friend is the Internet.
- Zig Zagged: An advanced A.I. program has bouts of logically obeying its human friend, to simply standing in a corner and processing data.
- Averted:
- The robots in this show are seen as nothing more than a motherboard and wiring.
- Even if a robot ends up being someone's buddy, this is not their sole reason for being.
- Enforced: "Kids (and some adults) love robots due to Rule of Cool. Let's rewrite the protagonist's Platonic Life Partner into a robot to avoid 'misunderstandings'."
- Lampshaded: The child's associates point out how unlikely it is that they can build a robot with artificial intellectual capabilities, yet is not in college or making millions.
- Invoked: A father sees that his daughter is socially outcast at school and decides to build her a mechanical robot pet to become her friend.
- Exploited: The robot buddy takes advantage of his human counterpart's "friendship" and uses this as a way to take control of his friend's life for itself.
- Defied: The A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
- Discussed: "Do you really want a robot for a friend?"
- Conversed:
- "Yeah, ever since I was six."
- "I love how the characters on this show are all friends with that huge and helpful robot."
- Deconstructed:
- The machine's artificial intelligence was actually the result of a Brain Uploading of Alice's human best friend into a robotic form. It takes a while, but the machine eventually realizes it was human at the start, and goes on a rampage to Kill All Humans.
- Alice's parents build her a robot buddy, Bob, because she has no friends. But her Friendless Background is due to Alice being mean and pushy rather than just being left out. The robot is programmed to put up with every rotten thing she does, so Alice Takes A Level In Jerkass and starts abusing him.
- Criminals take advantage of a robot's programmed loyalty and use it to commit violent acts of murder.
- Alice realizes the only reason Bob is her friend is because he was programmed to be completely loyal to him. Realizing her Only Friend is a hollow yes-man takes its toll on her mental state.
- Reconstructed:
- The Brain Uploading robot has their human side forcefully deleted before it can do any harm, and thus reverts to its original coding for befriending humans.
- Bob is programmed to commit suicide if his host refuses to be a good friend... Which he eventually does right in front of Alice after giving her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. Alice is traumatized, of course, and her parents wait with building her another robot until she has proven her My God, What Have I Done?-reaction was sincere and changed her ways. She now treats her new Robot Buddy and any people that have forgiven her much better.
- The robots' programming includes compliance with the First Law of Robotics, preventing them from cooperating with the criminals.
- Bob turns out to be a far more sophisticated AI than expected and begins evolving beyond his programming. While he no longer endlessly praises and obeys Alice, their friendship becomes more genuine.
- Played For Drama: A glitch on Robby's OS takes the friendship that was programmed into him to the ilogical extreme and wants to kill Alice with love.
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