Mechanical LIVING beings

This rant is written using generic "you": that is, not accusing any specific reader, just speaking in generalities to all of fandom. If you've read fanficrants, you've seen this before.

You people going elitist about how Zoids are better as serious war mecha and that the battle story is better for not painting them as alive...what universe are you reading?

Recent example? Storch's fanbook Ex (link is in Japanese, proper summary pending). The Zoidians in it don't like the idea of Blox, which were artificially created by humans - the remote-controlled Flyscissors are even worse in said characters' eyes. They mention how while Blox are easy to make and good mecha for their size, they're not really alive...that the connection of Zoid to pilot is lost, etc. To them, the Zoids are living beings, even though most humans see them as just machines, and they don't like the idea of them being entirely man-made.

The same theme of humans seeing only machines and Zoidians living machines is seen in at least one other story (the long one in Everything of Battle Machine Beasts, which I admittedly just skimmed), and the "living machines" half is all over the freaking place in early "history"...Zoids are thought of as companions early on. Look at the "nature is the enemy, people and Zoids are friends" philosophy that went to hell when the disasters stopped and people multiplied and started wanting more territory. Even with Zoids becoming combat mecha and the wild ones getting their cores ripped out and stuck in smitey shells, some of the companions thing seems to have stayed with how people treat them. There's also multiple references to Zoids thinking for themselves (and not just in the form of berserker AIs) or otherwise showing that there's things beyond the machine side, no matter how domesticated they've become. At the least, they pick up on pilot emotions, much as a dog might react to its master's feelings...artificial or not, that is not a trait one wants in a straight-up unfeeling battle mecha.

In other words? If you want a seeeerious continuity where your machines are mindless without any of that wishy-washy "they have brains/souls too!" stuff, Zoids canon is not for you.

I don't mind people having their own personal take on things - everybody does that. I've seen it done well. But to claim that chunks of canon aren't there just to pick on anime fans or go on about how said canon universe is better? Not cool. There are a lot of things I didn't like about CC, but picking on it for having living Zoids while glorifying the modelverse is just silly.

Now that the rant's out of the way, let it be said that I really want to mess with this in fanfic form and would love to see others do it too. The idea that such oft-anthropomorphized machines like transport/battle mecha (look at how we call ships "she" and people talk to their cars) could be seen as actually living has lots of potential, I think, both as an obvious and underlying theme.

Take your car. If you don't have one, imagine you do. If you dislike cars, make it a motorcycle, or hovercar, or whatever form of transportation you'd most like. Something you'd use a lot, get attached to, and possibly name. Now, instead of being entirely assembled, this car was built partway in a factory, with what amounts to the engine and "brain" being taken from a critter you'd consider a companion or friend...like the family dog, or your cat. While it mostly performs as "our" cars would, it still acts a little like your pet dog...you can talk to it and it'll listen, maybe respond, and if you're skidding out on the highway and have lost steering it's gonna help you out...maybe not in the way you wanted, but it doesn't want to crash either!

Would you still treat it the same as "our" cars? Even if you would, do you think everybody would, especially if cars had always been that way and you'd never had the chance to think of them as just machines beforehand?

Maybe that's a crap analogy, but you see what I'm getting at? One technology is based around taking the living and making it machine, the other (Blox) is about taking machines and making them mimic life. You could even debate whether Blox should qualify as life post-war in the vein of Data or the Holodoc, but with less singing and no Borg Queen sex. Granted, I wouldn't want to explore too many moral issues...more the culture clash, and possibly the issue of feral Zoids proving destructive to wild species from the perspective of a scientist. Yeah, dork, I know.

...I just need some more refined plotbunnies to go with this. Isn't that always the way?