Talk:Kids and Cute Robots

Does he really belong here? However much the child version might be hated, I don't think he meets the criteria -- he's totally relevant to the plot because that movie is part of his backstory. How is The Phantom Menace not about him? How is he secondary to the main action? Even if he doesn't do "enough" in that movie, considering the entire six films he's clearly a very major and essential character.

This is a golden oldie, one of the first tropes I added to TVT back in the day. I realized I didn't have it on my "created by" list and went looking for it. To my surprise I couldn't find it. So I went looking for it on TVT. I couldn't find it there, either. It took a spot of Googling and Waybacking, but I discovered that not too long before the fork, it got nuked by the "Stop Having Fun!" Guys at TVT for having evolved into either just a list of shows with kids and robots, and/or complaining about such a show you didn't like.

Which, to be fair, they were kind of right about.

So I rescued the most recent source from the Wayback Machine, and rewrote it a little to try to address those criticisms. I've posted the rewrite here for comment, clarification, and refinement. (I've also taken the opportunity to fix the name to match what JMS originally wrote instead of what I erroneously remembered. Further renamage is not out of the question, if someone comes up with something both more appropriate and pithier.)

Note that I have included no examples at all. This is not for lack of'em -- the source has many, many, many. The problem is, a lot of them really are examples of what the trope evolved badly into. Since what I'm asking for people to contribute may change the criteria for the trope, I am holding back on adding any of them until there's a consensus about what the trope should be -- and then I'll filter what I have and put the examples that pass muster back in.

If you have any examples you'd like to add, propose them here first unless we've finished nailing down the requirements., okay?

Thanks!

Looks good.

Needs examples and it's golden.

Okay, I've filtered the original examples down to this set -- about a quarter of what it used to have. I'll leave the page here in the Workshop for at least a little while longer, to let folks comment or contribute when they get home from work and settle in for the weekend.

Do Edward and Ein fit the bill? Ein's only a cyborg. But Edward is definitely not a main character; if she was, the plot would be Lupin III in Space instead of Broke Every Episode.

They were among the original examples I filtered through. But quite honestly, I didn't think that they fit the criteria -- they never struck me as embodying the same kind of annoying useless cute that, say, Boxey and Muffet did on on the original BSG.

If no one has anything more to add or suggest, I'll launch this tonight.