#there were offhand jokes about mags having dementia

[willows-rambles]

im very very interested in robopsychology, do you have any HCs of what specific neurodivergencies, mental illnesses, etc any robot masters or reploids would have? like for example bass is 100% autistic with NPD, time man has OCD, etc etc.

personally, i believe if you try and emulate humanoid personalities, then there will inevitably be blips and irregularities that cause similar things. i.e. a logic loop in the self-presevation protocol could cause similarities to narcissitic personality disorder

So I do have a lot of thoughts on this, but not in the way that you think and are probably expecting from me.

Firstly, I do want to make a comment about "robopsychology." Psychology overall isn't the study of mental illnesses, but rather the processes of behavior and cognition. What you're asking about is more specifically psychopathology, a more specific branch of psychology (hi, I'm majoring in a behavioral science).

Secondly, I don't really like using human neurodivergence to assess a Robot Master's condition or state of mind, not when I think about it in a serious manner. I'm going to approach this in a very sterilized and removed manner, so apologies in advance if what I'm saying sounds a little cold or aloof; that's not my intent.

I don't see the Robot Masters as human.

Anthropomorphizing the traits they may or may not develop is a slippery slope that, for a lot of people, results in them removing the mechanical aspect of these robots, just from what I've seen from a distance.

Human mental disorders and mental illnesses are not well known and have countless different factors that result in them manifesting in a plethora of different ways, and those can range from trauma, environment, genetics, etc. Robots lack a lot of those influences because they, as AIs, have more restrictions on such developments. They are set to develop along a specific way.

What we, as humans, may see as a disorder could very much be something that shows the robot is working as intended, because it maximizes and optimizes their functionality. In that case, it's not a flaw and therefore not a divergence.

Are there blips and irregularities? Oh yeah, for sure. That's not a doubt in my mind. You could say that a Robot Master might develop a quirk reminiscent to a human disorder, but the causes of that are inherently going to be different enough to be hard to justify calling it by the same name.

Autism for robots is something I especially have a hard time swallowing. Autistic by whose standards? Robot Masters operate so inherently differently from humans. Do you see what I'm getting at here?

I also want to make a statement that I very much do not like assigning mental disorders or illnesses that I do not understand to characters, for all the reasons stated a bit above. They're not well known. I'm also like, not autistic so adlskgjhadsflkjhasdf me assigning autism to a robot just feels awful because I don't know what it's like at all.

I think it's fine if someone views a character as like, autistic-coded! That I know is very much a strong source of comfort for many people, and that itself is fine. But I don't feel comfortable with saying that a machine is autistic, or has OCD (for myself personally). You don't approach an animal with a disorder in the same way you do a human; the brain operates differently. The same standard should be held for machines. Robot "disorders" are specific to robots; they may have a similar expression or trait to human disorders, but they're not the same.

To paraphrase a good friend of mine in the psychology field, any robot processing unit, when compared to a human brain, is neurodivergent, because neurodivergent means a brain operates differently from what's considered the "standard" (which is its own mess because again, the human brain is not a well known thing. We know more about space than we do about the operations of the brain).

Robot psychology to me is more a study of the problem solving, path finding, and logic of a machine when presented with a puzzle/situation to navigate, removed from any sort of phenomenon that could be considered an "illness." I just believe a sterile and mechanical approach to the flaws a machine could develop is more appropriate, and also for someone like me who doesn't have the disorders you listed as examples, it's also safer. I don't want to make assumptions.

This is getting long and I could get way more into it but to answer your question no, I don't think the Robot Masters have any human neurodivergencies. I very much want to keep those two spheres separate.