Pick Your Human Half

Tachikoma 1: Oh, now I get your drift. If we just act a little more robotic...
Tachikoma 2: We might stand a chance of the Major liking us!
Tachikoma 4: Exactly!
Tachikoma 3: It's the ultimate robot strategy plan!
All four Tachikomas, in unison: [monotone] We are robots. We are robots. We are robots.
Tachikoma 3: Aaaaaah I can't do this anymore!

— Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

If a major robotic character looks human (is an "android" in the looser sense of the term), there is a very good chance that they will act robotic, being unemotional and uncreative, and given to Robo Speak. On the other hand, if a major robotic character looks completely mechanical, there is a very good chance that they think and act quite human, exhibiting plenty of emotion and saying quite human things even if they say them in a Robo Speak accent.

Apparently, major robotic characters can look human and act mechanical, or vice versa, but seldom show the same nature both inside and outside. This makes dramatic sense: an android that both looks and acts human is hardly different enough to be any fun; a robot that looks and acts mechanical is really more of a prop than a character, unless you put a lot of effort into inserting some interesting behavior, usually human but less obviously so, into the character.

The Spaceship Girl trope is a counter-trope, since she usually both looks and acts human; the audience is only reminded that she's not human when she refers or reacts to her status as a ship.

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Examples of androids that act mechanical:

Anime and Manga

• R. Dorothy Wayneright from The Big O. Although she is capable of feeling anger/happiness/longing/etc., she is unable to express these emotions to a great degree. Thus, she comes off as a very mechanical Deadpan Snarker. However, it's suggested that this isn't a shortcoming of her programming or construction, but the effect the death of her "Father" had on her, which would be a very human reaction.
• Ghost in the Shell's androids pretty much act completely robotic. This is discussed with the Tachikomas in that the justification for giving an advanced AI to something that's not humanoid is that giving an android an advanced AI would immediately result in the Uncanny Valley.
• Subverted in Time of Eve: In public, androids have holographic rings over their heads, act quite unemotional, and tend to only follow commands. Thinking of androids as or treating them similar to human beings is considered at least nerdy, or highly taboo. However, in the Time of Eve cafe, where the rule is not to distinguish between humans and androids, it is impossible to tell who is which, and their true personalities are let loose.

Comic Books

• The Vision always looks like just an oddly-colored human being, but his personality flip-flops with the trope; there have been times when he acts like a human, there was a time when he became a cold machine, and finally the writers settled for having him as a robot with feelings, but talking in terms that imply a monotone voice (as much as it can be implied in written media).

Films — Live-Action

• Subverted by Ash in Alien, who successfully passes for a human who is as stiff and unemotional as an android.
• Chip from Not Quite Human, a robotic teenager. Although he averts the classic behavior to some degree (he has free will, understands emotions and can use subterfuge to trick people), he exhibits many robotic quirks, such as limited facial expressions, twitchy movements, and decorating his dorm room with posters of famous robots. His robotic girlfriend Roberta qualifies even more, since she lacks Chip's experience and free will. For instance, she was not the least surprised that he too was a robot, since a statistical extrapolation of her limited social group back in the lab would suggest that roughly one in five persons was a robot.
• The T-800 (Mark II) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day slides along the scale. When he first shows up looking just like a normal Badass Biker, he is almost as inhuman as his predecessor from the first film. As the film progresses, the more banged-up he gets, with his robotic half showing, the more human he starts to act. Justified in a deleted scene where John and his mother take out his CPU and reset the switch, allowing him to learn and function as more than just an automaton.
• In Toys, there is a gynoid who, while looking human, doesn't really act like a robot at all. She doesn't really act normal, either. She acts like... well... a crazy person? Crazy in the dumb funny way.

Literature

• Inverted in the Humanx Commonwealth novel Cachalot, in which a stiff-necked, unpersonable government official is rightly judged not to be an android, because any decent android would've been programmed to act more friendly than that. In short, he's "too mechanical to be mechanical".

Live-Action TV

• Lt. Cmdr. Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation is presented this way, to explain his slightly off appearance, lack of emotion and inability to use contractions. The reasoning why is even explained in-universe: while his predecessor, Lore, still had the white skin and yellow eyes, he had full emotions (and the ability to use contractions)... and immediately used them for evil purposes. Data was made deliberately less human in an attempt to compensate, the idea being that he'd instead gradually gain humanity through experience and thus hopefully turn out, well, not evil.

Video Games

• Apex Legends: Ash and Revenant are both Simalcrums (human minds uploaded into cybernetic bodies) with human-like faces. Both are also cold-blooded killing machines.
• BlazBlue's Murakumo Units look completely human when not in their Powered Armor but play with this to varying degrees. Nu-13's the most obvious case, what with speaking with Robo Speak and Machine Monotone (unless she's near Ragna) and exhibiting an emotionless demeanor, but as the series progresses, she's shown to be rather batshit insane and is quite a Mood-Swinger. Lambda-11's a much straighter example a la Data, and Mu-12 initially starts off of this courtesy of Terumi's influence, but once she regains her sense of self, she acts normal.
• In Fallout 4, this applies to the coursers, particularly potential companion X6-88: they look human enough to infiltrate human settlements, but even a brief conversation with a courser makes it clear that they are devoid of empathy. The constant Creepy Monotone does not help.
• Orianna from League of Legends is a Robot Girl (the result of a human being slowly replaced by Magitek parts as her body failed her). When she gave up her heart to save her father, she lost her humanity. Orianna serves as a Foil to Blitzcrank, a distinctly mechanical Steam Golem who has a personality and just generally seems more alive.
• Aigis from Persona 3, though she slowly acts more human as the story progresses thanks to Character Development.

Western Animation

• In the Futurama episode "I Dated a Robot", we find out that the appearances and personalities of celebrities can be uploaded onto "blank robots". The results look like their human counterparts but lack individuality and lapse into Robo Speak. It's a strong contrast to Bender and the other Ridiculously Human Robots in the show, down in the next list.

Examples of mechanical-looking robots that act human:

Anime and Manga

• Again in The Big O, we have the piano-playing robot, who, unlike Dorothy, speaks exactly like a human and shows the full emotional range that a human would have. He was built to play the piano so well that he taught Dorothy how to play with subtle nuances. In the second season, we then come across a mechanical detective; he has built-in equipment for forensics, but aside from that, he approaches cases in the same way a human would. He also takes on this particular episode's case for personal reasons. While there are other androids and gynoids disguised as humans, neither of these two attempt to hide what they are and are treated as professionals in their fields.
• Mechazawa from Cromartie High School is a Tin-Can Robot who acts exactly like a human student, and people treat him like one at almost all times.
• The Mons of Digimon are actually computer programs, and are all shapes and sizes, from fluff-balls to Humongous Mecha to Eldritch Abominations, but act very human (or at least, display a human level of mannerisms and emotions).
• The Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are sentient tanks that manage to act cute and human, despite looking like giant blue mechanical crabs on wheels with multiple eyes around their bodies. In the episode "MACHINES DÉSIRANTES", this trope comes up as a subject of conversation among the Tachikomas themselves. One of them theorizes that as advances in cybernetics technology blur the lines between humans and machines, humans are becoming nervous about any robots that seem too human. Thus, any robots which require a human-like appearance (in order to interact with human environments) are given less advanced AIs so they're not perceived as a threat, while more advanced AIs are confined to obviously non-human bodies.^note What originally sparks this philosophizing is the worry that Major Kusanagi is displeased by the Tachikoma's emerging self-awareness. She is, but not for the reasons they think: the Major simply thinks that it would be a liability to have robots on the battlefield navel-gazing.
• Gynoid Chachamaru from Negima! Magister Negi Magi starts with a pseudo-skin face, but antenna ears and visible joints make it obvious she's a robot, at least to those without a Weirdness Censor. She gets a full body pseudo-skin cover later, though, but retains her antenna ears. She's gone so far as to develop a crush on the main character.

Comic Books

• The title character of Atomic Robo is a humanoid robot whose head is a smooth, rounded lump of metal — his most expressive features are his eyes (he gets a lot of mileage out of his eyelids). Despite this, he acts like a snarky, down-to-earth guy whose job just happens to involve mad scientists, talking dinosaurs and other weirdness. We even see his pop-culture-filled "adolescence" growing up with Nikola Tesla.

Films — Animation

• All the robots from WALL•E fall here with the exception of the security bots, which are interchangeable mooks that the protagonists can smash, shoot, and zap without guilt.

Films — Live-Action

• The Black Hole: V.I.N.CENT looks like a multipurpose tin can but has a rather distinct personality.
• I Am Mother: The eponymous Mother is a mechanical robot with the voice of Rose Byrne. Given that its role is to raise children, a more gentle, empathic voice is needed. The movie leaves it ambiguous whether Mother really does feel an emotional connection to her 'daughter' or is just a Robotic Psychopath.
• Interstellar: The robots look like someone gave Monoliths the ability to move, but they're Benevolent A.I. with rather charming and helpful personalities. TARS in particular cracks jokes and develops a rather snarky friendship with Cooper over the course of the film.
• Star Wars: Played with in C-3PO and R2-D2. Threepio is specifically designed to be an "interface" between humanoids and roboty-robots, and thus is more human-looking and -acting than most droids. Artoo, by contrast, is entirely inhuman and speaks in beeps, but has a much more relatable personality.

Literature

• In the futurist book 2081, there are laws that prohibit making androids that can be mistaken for people, mostly for safety reasons (e.g. so rescue workers will know to save the humans first). How much different they need to look varies from country to country.
• The Bolo stories all revolve around tanks that start about the size of houses and move up from there. Their AIs are modelled to be courteous Warrior Poet types, to offset the fact that one of them could sterilize a planet. You don't want strange, alien mindsets running around with your guns, after all. It's to the point that they are usually more moral, ethical, and all-round better people than the flesh-and-blood humans who give them orders.
• Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, along with almost every other computer, robot or happy vertical people transporter; their designers give robots and other mechanical things that speak "Genuine People Personalities" which are copies of people's personalities.
• Zane Gort and Miss Phyllis Blushes, robot lovers from Fritz Leiber's novel The Silver Eggheads. The dichotomy is rationalized by Zane, who tells the human hero that if you tried to cram all the AI circuitry of a real robot like himself into the same chassis with all the human-mimicry devices of a "femiquin", the result would have to be 10 feet high or as fat as a circus fat lady.

Live-Action TV

• Orac in Blake's 7 is a cuboidal Perspex box of circuitry and flashing lights, but has an entirely organic-sounding and very expressive voice and a ridiculously human personality. He's the possible Ur-Example of "Second Law" My Ass!, being arrogant, anti-human, amoral, lazy and sarcastic.
• K9 in Doctor Who is a boxy Robot Dog, and is prone to sarcasm and ego.
• Red Dwarf:
  • Kryten looks like a partly melted shop window dummy, and is prone to irrational jealousy and getting worked up over petty annoyances, even if he can't master other human skills like lying and insulting people. It eventually transpires that his personality is a sort of parody of his creator's ex-boyfriend.
  • The Skutters are utility droids comprising boxes with three-fingered claws and aren't even able to speak, but enjoy watching Westerns and playing at being cowboys, and are Silent Snarkers whose claws are well designed for flipping V signs at Rimmer.

Tabletop Games

• This is the point of the Reforged philosophical movement of warforged in Eberron. Warforged are 'living constructs', mechanical beings that are metaphysically and magically a bit closer to biologicals, and the Reforged goal is to embrace their living side, so they do things like pick a gender identity, wear clothing, try to figure out ways to handle eating food, etc.

Video Games

• Apex Legends: Pathfinder is a cheerful, happy-go-lucky Cyber Cyclops, in contrast to the aforementioned sociopathic androids Ash and Revenant.
• In Fallout 4, this applies to all the clearly robotic companions: Curie and Codsworth are Mr. Handy robots, floating spheres with three eyes and three arms, while Nick Valentine is late-model Gen-2 synth^note He suspects he's a prototype for Gen-3 synths' intelligence and neuro-copying as "Nick Valentine" was a police detective from before the war, fundamentally humanoid but with gray skin, mechanical eyes, and chunks of his face missing to reveal wiring beneath. They're also three of the most consistently good and decent individuals you'll meet in the Wastelands. Curie is even a romantic option, albeit only after being uploaded to a gynoid synth body and becoming essentially human. Codsworth and Curie appear to be Mr. Handy/Ms. Nanny robots with higher-end robot brains, as many other such robots of the same model series are less intelligent than them.
• Robo-Ky from Guilty Gear XX, particularly in Accent Core Plus, besides his ridiculously Robo Speak vocabulary, has a very Jerkass personality, an identity complex involving Ky Kiske (whom he was based on), and quite the libido. The one that shows up in Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator-'s story mode (which is set several years later) on the other hand is shown to have a more heroic personality.
• HK-47 and T3-M4 in Knights of the Old Republic, as deliberate echoes of R2 and 3PO. Of course, HK-47's "human half" is a kill-crazy psycho... Other examples are B4-D4 and T1-N1, from the Czerka office. Both are uncannily similar to 3PO and R2, except for being quite sociopathic.
• Blitzcrank from League of Legends is a huge steam golem who possesses free will. Blitzcrank became a very popular celebrity in the city of his creation, to the point that when he petitioned for personal autonomy he received overwhelming public support. It only took a few weeks for the government to recognize him as an independent sentient being.
• Portal:
  • GLaDOS has quite the personality, but her body is just a tangle of wires and computers. Justified as having once been a human, with her brain uploaded.
  • While most sentry guns have a limited (still makes you want to spare them) set of responses, the defective ones in Portal 2 just don't get enough time to show their personality.
    Defective turret: I'm different.
  • However, a non-defective turret in the last co-op level yells a unique and coherent statement, and they all can apparent make an opera.
  • Some of the personality cores have a surprisingly human behavior. If they aren't chanting Madness Mantra, that is.
  • Wheatley, despite being literally a ball, has a very developed personality.

Visual Novels

• Metal Gear Mk. II from Snatcher has a very cute, emotional personality and is capable of enjoying food, forgetting to perform tasks that it intended to do, and even having orgasms — and looks like a scaled-down version of the bipedal walking tank with his name.

Webcomics

• The planet Jean in Freefall is being terraformed and overseen by half a billion robots, many of whom are running sophisticated neural nets that let them develop human-like intelligence and personalities. Enter Sawtooth Rivergrinder, the robot shaped like a giant beetle who engineers waterways for a living and cosplays as Sherlock Homes for fun.
• The more advanced clanks from Girl Genius often have complex personalities, like the Ax-Crazy Castle Heterodyne or Anevka Sturmvoraus. Agatha's 'dingbots' go so far as to be Sparks.
• Pretty much any of the Robots from Gunnerkrigg Court. The only known exception are the TicTocs, which look and act like birds.

Western Animation

• Practically any robot in Futurama, most notably main character Bender, tend toward a Tin-Can Robot look and are Ridiculously Human Robots to varying degrees.

Aversions:

Anime and Manga

• Averted in Astro Boy with the eponymous Robot Kid. He wouldn't make a very good Replacement Goldfish without being able to pass, after all...

Films — Live-Action

• David, the android boy in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, looks and acts perfectly human, especially after his ability to love gets irrevocably turned on. However, he doesn't act particularly normal...
• Averted by Bishop in Aliens, whom neither Ripley nor the audience would've realized was a synthetic (all right, artificial person) if he hadn't cut his finger.
• Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet is very definitely mechanical both in form and manner — though his polite, robotic personality is not without its charms.
• Tony Stark's robot helpers in the Iron Man Films are plain mechanical arms with no dialogue, a few sound effects, and minimal expressiveness. They get most of their character from how Stark interacts with them.

Literature

• The Chee of Animorphs look like bipedal mechanical dogs without their holograms, but act human. Turn on the hologram, though, and no one can tell the difference, meaning they usually both look and act human except where violence is involved: they're hardwired to be unable to harm a living creature (restraining is still possible though), and the one time it happens Erek the Chee begs for the Animorphs to get rid of the MacGuffin that allowed it because he doesn't want any other Chee to live through that.

Toys

• Exceptions in Transformers include Soundwave, who talks in Robo Speak, and Shockwave, who speaks with Machine Monotone. Both have relatively inhuman-looking faces, especially the latter, who is a Cyber Cyclops.

Video Games

• 20XX has a downplayed version with its two main contractors. Both of them look and act pretty human, even kicking back on the beach when you win the game, but Nina — who could pass for a human in Powered Armor — is more calculating and professional, "robotic", while Ace — who has an LED display for a face, making him look less human — is more "human" in behaviour, being given hints of a reckless and sloppy attitude. This is made clearest looking at their rooms: Nina has her name neatly printed on a rectangular plate, while Ace has carved his name into the door in a scrawl and carved a kill tally right next to it. Averted with most of the other robots, however, which act more like furious animals than either humans or robots — even the bosses do things like giving a Roar Before Beating.
• Comprehensively averted in Mega Man, as most of the named robots act pretty human, but especially the most human-like ones, who tend to be protagonists and major characters — Mega Man, X and Zero are the most prominent (in that they have their own series), but Proto Man and Bass aren't exactly coldly logical themselves.

Webcomics

• Al and Sulla from O Human Star both look and act completely human. Brendan's Gimel 75 butler plays it straight, though; he looks robotic but acts fairly human.

Western Animation

• The plot of the Futurama episode "Rebirth" involves robot versions of Leela and Fry being created by uploading their personalities and appearances from security footage at Planet Express. These robots are indistinguishable from the originals in looks and personality, to the point that both believe themselves to be the originals until injuries reveal the gears and wires, and Fry's robot was able to live in the original's place without his friends noticing the difference.

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