FemBot

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    Another reason we dig giant robots.

    In a story where sentient robots are commonplace, some of those robots are designed to look feminine. This tends to include sleeker, curvier bodies and bumps on the chest, as well as possible makeup-like patterns on the face. Other Tertiary Sexual Characteristics may also be present.

    Differs from a Robot Girl in that a Robot girl is basically a girl who happens to be a robot, while a Fembot is a robot who happens to be female. While robot girls always look human with the possible exceptions of antennae or metal joints, fembots are unmistakeably robotic with female bits welded on.

    May not make too much sense when robots in a given universe lack certain "functions" or if the robot is male while in construction.

    Fembots tend to be rarer in fiction, simply because it's easier to design a robotic character that doesn't look distinctly feminine than one that does. It's not enough to add Tertiary Sexual Characteristics or a Breast Plate. The obvious question is "why", when robots don't reproduce sexually; but one can also say "why not", and further "why are genderless machines lumped in with males by default anyway?" When this trope applies to Humongous Mecha instead of robot, they are almost alway piloted by girls.

    The name comes from the 1970's Bionic Woman and from Austin Powers, though the fembots in those were robot girls. If you're interested, the technical term for these bots is 'gynoid'; same root as 'android', but 'andro' means male.

    Examples of FemBot include:

    Advertising

    • A commercial for canned goods that aired during the Superbowl in the 80's featured a sleek, CGI-created female robot, animated by matching the movements of a female model in a reclining chair. Unsurprisingly, the commercial spot was called "Sexy Robot".

    Anime

    • Aphrodite A, Diana A and Minerva X from Mazinger Z and Venus A from Great Mazinger.
      • Getter Q and other female robot mooks in Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-hen are also this. Go Nagai seems to love this trope
      • Not to mention Wingle from Mazinkaiser SKL.
      • The PSX game Getter Robo Daikessen! introduces Getter Zan, a Getter Q expy that comes complete with its own different forms.
    • AnRyu, KouRyu and TenRyuJin from GaoGaiGar.
      • Also Piggy, the robot maid that serves all the GGG robots, and may or may not have flirted with Mic Sounders at some point.
      • Piggy clearly had a thing for Volfogg, the final scene of GaoGaiGar Final has them holding hands.
    • Bo and Boo formed the arms of the Mighty Orbots.
    • Neo Sweden's Nobel Gundam from G Gundam deserves mention here.
    • Mahou Sensei Negima: Though treated in story as a normal human girl, Chachamaru's first body was very obviously that of a robot, with visible joints, jetpack boots, mostly being emotionless (except involving doing stuff like helping kitties and her crush on Negi) and Unusual Ears for good measure. Also breasts, long hair and seemingly what amounts to sexual excitement when let's not get sidetracked there right now. Apparently, nobody actually noticed the not-quite-human bits besides the resident Meta Girl. She upgraded into full Robot Girl status, though, even before becoming indistinguishable in appearance from a human.
    • Go Okusaer, Neo Okusaer, Volspinner and Core Gunner of Godannar
    • Gynoids are central to the plot of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

    Comics

    • Morrigun is a female member of a warrior robot band called the ABC Warriors. Her combat abilities are derived from secondary bouncer software; her primary function is waitress.
    • In Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X Men, he introduced a new villain called Danger, the AI from the Danger Room developing a murderous personality and building a female-looking robot body for itself.
    • Platinum (AKA Tina) and, now, Copper, from DC Comics' Metal Men.
    • Jocasta, formerly of the Avengers (about 100 iterations ago).

    Film

    • One of the earliest examples in film is Hel, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. She/it is eventually disguised as the film's heroine, thus becoming a Robot Girl.
    • The cover art for the film Liquid Sky has one of these.
    • Despite being called Fembots, the ones that appear in the Austin Powers movies are Ridiculously-Human Robots and not these. At least they have machine-gun jubblies.

    Literature

    • The French novel La Femme Endormie from 1899
    • The JN ("Jane") series of robots in Isaac Asimov's short story "Feminine Intuition". The story is practically a lighthearted deconstruction of the trope: US Robots experimenting with artifical sexual characteristics, the project engineers becoming bashful once they get a feminine voice working, and Susan Calvin rolling her eyes at the whole project as hard as she can.
    • The robot population in Fritz Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads" is divided into males and females because it turns out to be very beneficial to robotic mental health to be able to have sex—robotic sex, which entails sharing power on the same circuit. They don't have to do this by an exacting emulation of human sex, but that's the way it works out culturally, possibly in a collective form of wanting to Become a Real Boy.
    • The Stalker Fang of Mortal Engines, while technically a cyborg, not a robot, is designed to look feminine, being sleeker and more elegant than other Stalkers.
    • The titular character in the obscure TSR sci-fi novel Warsprite, whom the main human protagonist still falls in love with.
    • In the novel Code Of The Lifemaker sentient robots (the result of a damaged alien factory ship crashing on the moon Titan and attempting to fulfill its damaged programming imperatives) living in a medieval society actually come in 'male' and 'female' flavors, right down to the females becoming pregnant as a result of programming code exchange which they then upload into one of the many sprawling factory computers where the 'child' is assembled.

    Live Action TV

    • The androids (including of course the Anne-droid) in the Doctor Who ep "Bad Wolf".

    Music

    Tabletop Games

    • Warforged in Eberron are usually asexual, but those who identify strongly with a female gender identity may modify themselves into Fembots.
    • The Nova ESR from Monsterpocalypse.

    Toys

    Video Games

    • Juana in EarthBound Zero, and her sisters, Nancy and Kelly
    • The Gretel series in Time Splitters.
    • Dolores from Zone of the Enders: Dolores, i arguably straddles both lines. She has many of the characterizations of a Robot Girl, but happens to be a Humongous Mecha.
      • Enough to be the star of her very own hentai doujin, Dolores X. No we aren't linking you to it!
      • Plenty of Orbital Frames, including the Nephitis and Ardjet, look pretty feminine as is.
    • Virtual On gives us the Fei-Yen and Angelan series of mecha, modeled after Magical Girl archetypes. (Fei-Yen is a Magical Girl Warrior whose iterations frequently resemble a waitress of some sort, while Angelan looks like a White Magician Girl, but is probably more an homage to Belldandy.)
    • The Custom Robo games have the aptly named Aerial Beauty and Sassy Sexy Stunner robo types.
    • Genders not revealed, but at least these robots in Super Robot Wars look female enough that the resident Ascended Fanboy Ryusei fall heels over it: Valsione (this one also looks ridiculously human), Angelg, and the Fairlions. Possibly also Fiona's Excellence Eternal, just to differentiate it with Raul's Excellence Lightning, so it's given a MUCH more FemBot-ish appearance.
      • Also, any of the above in an SRW game? Ryuusei's been there, drooling. Especially the French Dragon twins.
    • The unnamed sex fembot from Heavy Metal FAKK 2. Julie is less than pleased (more like disgusted) at her addition to the team and takes the first opportunity possible to off her.
    • The service droids from Mr. Robot have a distinctly feminine shape.
    • The Praetorian Clockwork androids in City of Heroes come in both male and female varieties. So far IVy is the only one that can be considered qualify as sentient.
    • X-Men Next Dimension added a sleek, flying "Sentinel-Beta" to allow for more variety when compared to the male, large, grounded and slow Sentinel-Alpha. Apart from moves shared for plot reasons, they were quite different, averting Distaff Counterpart.
    • Several from Xenogears. Two are playable (Vierge and Crescens).

    Web Comics

    • Lincoln, Persephone, and Hades from Coga Suro.
    • In Freefall robots divide themselves into gender categories based on how much talking they do. None of them particularly look gendered, and the identified females are commonly bigger and stronger than their male peers.
    • Last Res0rt has several female robot combinations:
      • Gangrel (and Breya) are Cybee dolls with female owners; it's implied that Cybees are designed to mimic their owners, so the dolls may be technically genderless until paired up with an owner.
      • Siege is either a Replacement Goldfish or a Brain In a Jar, but either way she still considers herself female.
      • Peloton, who is very much an out-and-out fembot, complete with breastplate, eyelashes, and corset / gorget combo with Tron Lines.

    Web Original

    Western Animation

    • Futurama features fembots in quite a few episodes. Several of these have been Love Interests for Bender.
    • Transformers also has female Transformers from time to time, who include Action Girls (both regular and Dark), medics and damsels.
      • Especially notable names include Arcee (pictured above) and Blackarachnia.
      • Strika is a fembot—which are outnumbered about five hundred to one in Transformers—that doesn't look even remotely female. Has a lovely voice, though.
      • The Marvel Comics Transformers series responds to a letter asking why there were no female Transformers with something to the effect of, "You assume that Transformers are male and female, and that any Transformer not explicitly female is implicitly male." Unfortunately, the current IDW Comics series opted not to do it that way, having a Mad Scientist turn an Autobot female to see what happens if you throw gender into a genderless race. The victim, Arcee, talks about how people treat her now, and even use different pronouns, and... basically, not being one of the boys anymore. It becomes clear that Jhiaxus didn't introduce gender to a genderless race, but a woman to an all-male race - and of course, there is no good reason for non-sexually-reproducing robots to be male, either. Things wind up making much less sense than they would make if the question were simply ignored, as most series have.
      • Transformers Cybertron gave us Thunderblast. Let's see... Non-Mammal Mammaries, Underboobs, and in one scene in ep. 32, visible nipples.
    • Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot
    • Neosapiens in Exo Squad are not robots but close: asexual Artificial Humans created as slaves for normal humans. One'd think that making them in two (cosmetic) genders would be superfluous but it was done for some reason...
      • Note that it wasn't until the end of the series that giving Neosapiens the ability to sexually reproduce was even seriously discussed.
    • In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Jimmy constructs a robotic substitute mother (AKA Maternotron) while his own mom is away at the spa.
    • Kim Possible has the Bebebots, a trio of feminine robots with a Hive Mind (and...well, beehive hairdos). They were initially made to be dates, but were later redesigned to be weapons of revenge.
    • X-Men villain Master Mold was voiced by a woman in Wolverine and the X-Men. When Xavier encountered it in the end...Yup, gigantic metal titties.
    • Big Brain from an episode of Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot, the first female robot built by Grizzle. She was programmed to be the "smartest robot ever," and thus had a mecha-librarian design.
    • Silica from Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. At first a hardassed and snippy bureaucrat, ala Hermes' boss in Futurama, Han Solo expy Dag (really, just Solo with a darker skintone and more "Pimp") reprograms her by going up her ass (all her key circuits are there), slapping her circuit board open, reprogramming her personality center, and turning her into a sultry sexbot. Psychoanalyzing this scene is, all-in-all, a bad idea.
    • Four robotic replicas of Leslie Cohen appear in the Venture Brothers season one episode "Past Tense".
    • On Star Wars the Clone Wars. 'The BD-3000 "Betty Droids" that serve in the Galactic Senate and Executive Buildings.
    • In an episode of American Dad!, Roger and Steve are attempting to write a porn movie script. Steve keeps adding robots.

    Steve: When will people get that ROBOTS ARE EROTIC?

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