Giant Robots. Fictionilized and idealized both in western and asian fiction, most notable Japanese for the latter. There is a strange obsession with these metal beings, often times 10 to even a hundred times our sized. What is the logic behind that?
A robot does not have to be necessarily human. A car assembly arm at a factory can be considered a robot, or even a vending machine. Yet in most fiction, giant robots are 99% of the time represented by giant, humanoid destruction machines, with guns, lasers, swords and all manners of weapons being drawn and fired from every limb and orifice. A visual, explosive orgy, if you will. Why is it that they’re mostly humanoid, or resemble as such?
My theory is that we, as humans see ourselves as extremely fragile and weak creatures. This is especially true if you consider our place in the universe, the earth a tiny speck on the cosmic map. Any threat even remotely bigger than us could quite literally squash us as we do bugs. Our countermeasure? Even bigger, metallic versions of us, that are piloted by us.
Humans seek these giant metal gods to help combat these threats. Piloted by human pilots themselves, to give the empty vessels a human ‘touch’, as mere computers, no matter how sophisticated can not emulate the human judgment system perfectly. But I digress. The main point of building the robots in our form, is to emulate the human values we… value, such as willpower, courage and perseverance. A iron body to emulate perseverance, a drive that runs on the pilots hot-blooded screams, or the machine operating way past its performance limit due to the human’s evolutionary will to survive taking over. All these system serve to copy, and magnify immensely what humans have used to survive through the ages.
At its basest form, we create these giant robots as giant avatars of the human being and spirit, fighting these intergalactic threats as humans, taking command of our own destiny, fighting the good fight and piercing through the heavens.