It’s an old pun, but it works for this. If you read my post last week, you’ll know I’ve thoughts on RWBY, and not all of them are good. But, at the very least it gives me ideas that I can use in better ways. So long as I change it enough and say where the idea’s from, it’s not plagiarism. My idea would transform the character and change the plot around them to the point where the two versions aren’t the same.
Sorry to get all technical on you about plagiarism, but I’ve been watching this video and it’s on my mind. Go watch it, it’s good. Also I’m aware I’m effectively being a backseat writer here, but bare with.
The Point
Getting to the point, my idea for the Penny character would be to lean into her being a robot. What I mean by this is that, while in the show she is physically a machine, she still has emotions and the reaction times of a normal person. The blades she can pop out of her back may as well be in a bag.
Her emotions are due to her having Aura, a plot device to give everyone an energy shield in fights, but it also seems connected to the soul? The writers of RWBY explain it poorly and I won’t dwell on it. Her creator/dad gave her a bit of his for the sake of building her properly. In essence, she is a sapient human who happens to be made of metal and wires. If she wasn’t a real girl, she wouldn’t be ashamed of being a robot and want to hide her shredded hands and metal underneath (from Ruby). That’s Ruby’s whole point in reassuring her:
My Hypothetical (outside of RWBY)
In this hypothetical, I would have her be more inhuman. She is a robot, have her act so. Have her personality be more of a user interface, a way for people to easily interact with her. The same could be said for her emotions and appearance: make the robot a woman, because most people would want that. A cute, human-looking one too for the sake of sympathy. Except she might not even be sentient if I write it so. I like the idea that her love/friendship for whoever the Ruby equivalent would be is… false. A machine talking to the person it knows the most and has the most data on. Perhaps we could see a robot that can be sociable and feign emotion simply switch off those parameters and act with efficiency.
Then there’s what I said about reaction time. She’s a machine. More than that, one built for defence/combat. To quote the quick googling I just did: “a typical Wi-Fi connection processes data at around 50 million bits per second. This is incredibly fast when compared to the human brain, which processes thoughts at just 10 bits per second” (link here). The processors in a computer are far faster than a human’s brain. Therefore, a robot should be able to think faster than a human. Sounds simple, right?
I propose an idea: have a fight or scene from a human perspective, then switch the machine. A simple conversation for the human takes a minute or two, but the machine is experiencing it so much slower. Or at the very least, is intaking far much more data. Of course, in a fight, it’s a matter of how fast the machine is built to move. You’d have to put some sort of scale in so that this Penny doesn’t punch through someone from minute one.
That leads to another point: intuition. Machines don’t have it. looking at ChatGPT, it’s not smart, it’s just a mechanical parrot that takes words and gives you something that sounds like what you want based off similar ideas. I say give the robot that kind of vibe. (I’m not going to use an AI to write this character’s dialogue, but it’d be a funny experiment.)
Back to RWBY (briefly)
Going back to RWBY and the actual character of Penny, I think I’m missing the point with all this speculation. The point of the character was to have cool fights, be cute, and get killed to make Ruby and the audience sad. She’s a lump of words and a 3d model voiced by somebody (credit to Taylor McNee for her performance) for the sake of a story, as is everyone in this show. But, like RWBY itself, she could have been something else. She wasn’t made to be an inhuman robot; the point of her was to riff on Pinocchio. RWBY has/had a motif of basing its characters on fairy tale characters or other such popular characters
Away from RWBY and back to me
All this talk made me think: I want to do the sci-fi story I was planning to do. That would be this one here. It’s self-promoting, yes, but why not? I can make the Penny equivalent the AI assistant. They put her in a robot body, but it’s still a helper AI that still advertises and listens to everything they say for the sake of offering them things to buy. I want that story to be a slice-of-life story. Nothing too heavy, and a chance to flex my writing-women muscles (third times the charm, I suppose).
It’s nice speculating and having a think about what I would do with a character, and I can use that idea for my own work. Hope you found this entertaining, at least a bit. Please let me know if you want more depth to these posts.
Links
- Thanks for reading! If you like this, please check out my published work:
- The Spider and the Moths, on Impspired.
- A Model Dwarf, Wolf in Sheep’s Therapy, on Impspired.
- Cramped Quarters, on New Contexts 4.
- Endure, Reclaim, in New Contexts 5.
- Lost and Found, in New Contexts 7.
- The Cleaner’s Burden, in Apocalypse Now?.
- The Last Man Standing on the Ash Heap, on Impspired.
- Or, you could have a look at my last blog post, here.
- Also, I have a Fiverr page, check it out if you need proofreading or copywriting work done. Link here.