Astroboy

Ever since the 50's, when the first Astroboy manga was being written and illustrated in Japan, the title character has been subverting the trope of inhuman emotionless robots. Although the story has changed many times over the years through numerous reboots, the themes have always remained constant. Created with the intention of replacing the inventor's deceased son, Astroboy inevitably ends up leading the many discarded and mistreated robots of the world in a heroic campaign to prove that robots deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. The key element that makes this different from other robot stories is that Astroboy is actually a great friend to humanity, even despite the many people who do not treat him or the other robots without any dignity or respect. In many ways, Astroboy is a more perfectly compassionate and innocent boy than most humans could hope to be. He hopes to show humanity through his own example that robots can be good and deserve equal treatment as citizens.

Artificial Intelligence was not a very well understood concept, let alone a developed technology, at the time Astroboy was first conceived. The term itself was only just coined in the same decade that the original Astroboy was being penned. However, the idea that technology can be abused and that the consequences could be dire is clearly present in these stories. Although Astroboy is fundamentally good, many other robots that are abused end up going berserk and attacking people. Others still are intentionally designed by humans for nefarious purposes. Curiously, Astroboy is usually credited in the show with being the first robot with a soul, or certainly the first intended to have one, but it is gradually revealed that Astro is far from special in this regard. Rather than having special personality traits that other AIs possess, Astro is merely the first robot designed to be treated with human dignity. Although his father/creator ends up rejecting Astro for not being a proper duplicate of his human son, something about the act of having been treated with humanity grants Astro a sort of special quality that begins to spread to the other robots in the story. Japan, of course, the nation of Astroboy's origin, has a long history of attributing humanlike qualities to objects as if they could be absorbed from their owners. The sacred reverence that samurai were said to have for their swords, as well as the myth of the tsukumogami (objects which gained a soul after being used for an arbitrarily large number of years) point to a common cultural understanding that these can be qualities which can be observed in inanimate objects as if through projection. Of course, robots can also easily be a stand-in for any oppressed or enslaved race or socioeconomic class as well, and this makes the stories easy to digest for most audiences even despite the constant pushing of the theme that robots can have feelings, too.