YMMV / Metallic Rouge

• Awesome Music: Rouge by YU-KA.
• Abandon Shipping: Given the very premise of the series - that of two young women gradually bonding as they accomplish a herculean task together - and the chemistry Naomi and Rouge have with each other, not to mention the lengths Naomi goes to in her effort to rescue Rouge in Episode 5, many people were hoping for there to be some romance between the two characters, not unlike the general fandom perception for Chisato and Takina in Lycoris Recoil. Some people dropped the ship however when a character profile revealed that chronologically, Rouge is a ten-year old minor while Naomi is twenty-three (with it later revealed that she's actually 40). However, others have pointed out that Rouge is a literal robot, and how long she's existed doesn't translate to her being a literal 10 year old. Specially when she looks, acts and is treated (by both the narrative and characters) as an adult.
• Spiritual Successor: To quite a few series and franchises.
  • Parallels to the Blade Runner franchise come up a lot. Similar to the first film, the protagonist is tasked with hunting down rogue androids roaming around their respective settings. And like the second film, said protagonist is also a Hunter Of Her Own Kind. Both stories are also dealing with themes of discrimination against androids (racism in Blade Runner's case, indifference and subversion of Androids Are People, Too in Metallic Rouge's). That's not even getting into the setting where the opening establishing shots of Rouge's first episode clearly takes inspiration from the downpour atmosphere of the Blade Runner franchise (just with less flying cars, holographic billboards, and neon lights). And while we never see it in person, Blade Runner 2049 alludes to Mars as an off-world colony; while Rouge setting takes place in a far-future terraformed Mars.
  • It is not difficult to see Rouge as an Expy of Mega Man Zero-era Zero, if the term 'nean' was replaced with 'reploid.' Like the Immortal Reploid, Rouge is a rather muted but determined crimson robot with a green energy sword and a friendlier handler who exists in a setting where 'reploids' are second-class citizens dealing with a troublesome civic crisis regarding their purpose and liberty. Borrowing a bit from Mega Man X is that the neans Rouge is fighting are mavericks whose programming and capacity for free thought renders their Asimov Code moot, making them a danger to humans and other neans alike. Going even further, Rouge and the Immortal Nine fight like they're in Mega Man ZX, having super-powerful transformations that give them their gimmicks. If Viola was counted as a Warm-Up Boss like the Zero and ZX series occasionally had, (such as Aztec Falcon or Giro) the show would even have the typical Mega Man structure of having eight boss mavericks across multiple stages to defeat.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: If one gets past the Mind Screw nature of the fifth episode, the basic narrative Rouge is being fed is that she shouldn't be killing the Immortal Nine because they simply want freedom. Indeed, much of the story up to that point showed that neans were a criminally repressed minority that frequently faced brutal crackdowns, unable to fight back because of their Asimov Code. Where this falls apart is that, of the Immortal Nine characters shown on screen, about half of them are unrepentant monsters. Rouge specifically calls out Afdal as a 'broken man,' but that doesn't exactly excuse the fact he was killing people due to Just Following Orders, or the fact he actively murdered people due to a nihilist streak. Later, we see Jill - really Sylvia - start ranting about how humanity placed a curse on her people and need to pay just as her actions get a nean killed to prove a point when there were several ways she could have resolved the situation without bringing humans to harm and getting the nean killed because he did nothing to protect them. Giallo especially brings the rest of the group down, due to being a dangerous rabble-rousing gangster murdering people and selling out his own kind for cheap laughs. While it's true most of the neans deserve justice for the horrific treatment visited upon them, the Immortal Nine in particular are made up of both some of the most innocent neans and neans who really are a danger to themselves, others, and humanity. One of the Nine calling Rouge out to be evil feels hollow due to the above cases against them, especially when she calls Rouge out for Just Following Orders when that was exactly what Afdal himself was doing.