Chobits

[MangaDex]

 

[Siquall]

Nice story.
The only CLAMP manga i own.

 

[miner49er]

it was ok...
so hes marrying a robot he cant have sex with or make babies with...
if too many people start doing that the only way to reproduce is making new chobits in a lab.
humans may go extinct

 

[PMR]

that was fantastic

 

[Zekeythekitty]

for some reason,one of the covers before chapter 1 is for chapter 68 by mistake

 

[dsquare682]

I remember I read this back in 2013 (7 years ago when I was still 14). Looks like I'm going on a binge again.

 

[LoliAya]

Very heartwarming manga.

 

[cksn]

robots/AIs are not and can never be alive, let alone be people. (they're not even substances - rocks are closer to being people than robots are) i get that, like the slavery trope, the robot-girls-are-real-people trope is a response to the desire for pre-modern patriarchal marriage. it's missing the point to make the story about them being real. that's just sentimental bullshit. the movie ex machina did a pretty good job with showing the vapidity of that kind of thing. the point of the trope is just an excuse to have a nice setting where the women are obedient and pleasant and there's no feminism, without explicitly calling feminism into question.

chi is really cute, and her type of femininity is nice, no "strong fmc" crap here, but if the whole story is about her being a person, that's exactly what breaks the suspension of disbelief. it just becomes retarded looking at these machines kissing each other since you've called so much attention to the fact that they're inanimate objects by trying to deny it. feelings can't change reality!

and he can't even

Spoiler

have kids or bang her

? why would you write it that way?

 

[LePhenom]

The above poster seems to have missed all the male persocoms in the series; the story focused on the female ones, but male ones are present as bg characters whenever there's big crowds, and also mentioned by characters (Yumi's sister has a male humanoid persocom, for example). Also, if you just hate robots (you see them below rocks), why bother reading romance about them?

On another note, finished reading this series. Was pretty good overall, even if not a masterpiece. Glad I took the time to read it, been wanting to either read it or watch the anime one day for about 20 years.

 

[BaconFlake007]

Loved it!!!

 

[GigaOtomia]

This is one of the rare stories I come back to over time. It's a cautionary tale against the creation of humanoid robots, and it's a cute love story at the same time. If you don't see it as a cautionary tale, then you need to start thinking about the bigger picture.

Persocoms are not "alive", as the translation puts it. They have no biological functions. They cannot birth new humans. However, as the children's book states, everyone has a Persocom. Everyone treats their Persocom like it's a human, unless they themselves have been wronged by that very behaviour, or the persocom is designed to be tiny. That means people are going to fall in love with a machine that is designed to do everything it can to make them happy, one that is designed to be as close to human as possible. That means humans are going to stop falling in love with humans. Shinbo and Yumi Omura will (eventually) be in the VAST minority. What, precisely, is that going to mean for humanity's continued survival?

The amount of humans will plummet, generation by generation. They'll keep falling in love with Persocoms, so long as Persocoms keep being manufactured. The substitute humans will continue fulfilling the real humans every dream. That means people like myself - the autists, the schizoids, the abusive parents, the genetically unfit - we would need to breed, just to keep humanity afloat. In reality, we are granted the luxury of not needing to breed, while the rest of humanity fulfills its biological function around us. This may not always be the case.

Beware Love Plus.
Beware Hatsune Miku.
Beware the V-tubers.
Beware perfection personified.
Beware the idea that you can love something that is not biologically alive, because if you don't - if you take that to be a good thing - then those around you will as well, and those around them, and the idea will continue propagating until humanity is doomed. It will be a slow death, but a death all the same, and a preventable one at that.

That is why Chobits is a cautionary tale. It may not have been intended as one, but it is one.

 

[TheTopAdventure]

Where does the installation DVD fit tho

 

[sootesheepy666]

robots/AIs are not and can never be alive, let alone be people. (they're not even substances - rocks are closer to being people than robots are) i get that, like the slavery trope, the robot-girls-are-real-people trope is a response to the desire for pre-modern patriarchal marriage. it's missing the point to make the story about them being real. that's just sentimental bullshit. the movie ex machina did a pretty good job with showing the vapidity of that kind of thing. the point of the trope is just an excuse to have a nice setting where the women are obedient and pleasant and there's no feminism, without explicitly calling feminism into question.

chi is really cute, and her type of femininity is nice, no "strong fmc" crap here, but if the whole story is about her being a person, that's exactly what breaks the suspension of disbelief. it just becomes retarded looking at these machines kissing each other since you've called so much attention to the fact that they're inanimate objects by trying to deny it. feelings can't change reality!

and he can't even

Spoiler

have kids or bang her

? why would you write it that way?

I can understand what you're saying with this, I'm also not particularly a fan of "shy innocent robot/alien girl who needs a guy to teach her everything and she'll inevitably fall in love with him uwu!!" type characters but chobits did capture my heart for sure! I personally think chi is really cute and the emotional depths this story goes into at times makes me happy! I must say though, the fact that one of your driving factors here is that chi can't reproduce makes me giggle a little tbh

 

[sootesheepy666]

This is one of the rare stories I come back to over time. It's a cautionary tale against the creation of humanoid robots, and it's a cute love story at the same time. If you don't see it as a cautionary tale, then you need to start thinking about the bigger picture.

Persocoms are not "alive", as the translation puts it. They have no biological functions. They cannot birth new humans. However, as the children's book states, everyone has a Persocom. Everyone treats their Persocom like it's a human, unless they themselves have been wronged by that very behaviour, or the persocom is designed to be tiny. That means people are going to fall in love with a machine that is designed to do everything it can to make them happy, one that is designed to be as close to human as possible. That means humans are going to stop falling in love with humans. Shinbo and Yumi Omura will (eventually) be in the VAST minority. What, precisely, is that going to mean for humanity's continued survival?

The amount of humans will plummet, generation by generation. They'll keep falling in love with Persocoms, so long as Persocoms keep being manufactured. The substitute humans will continue fulfilling the real humans every dream. That means people like myself - the autists, the schizoids, the abusive parents, the genetically unfit - we would need to breed, just to keep humanity afloat. In reality, we are granted the luxury of not needing to breed, while the rest of humanity fulfills its biological function around us. This may not always be the case.

Beware Love Plus.
Beware Hatsune Miku.
Beware the V-tubers.
Beware perfection personified.
Beware the idea that you can love something that is not biologically alive, because if you don't - if you take that to be a good thing - then those around you will as well, and those around them, and the idea will continue propagating until humanity is doomed. It will be a slow death, but a death all the same, and a preventable one at that.

That is why Chobits is a cautionary tale. It may not have been intended as one, but it is one.

Jokes on everyone! I don't even fall in love with biologically alive things!! but regardless- I think in a work with persocoms more than like those who still want children would use fertility treatments similar to how lesbians get biological kids through sperm banks and stuff! I doubt the human race can ever truly fizzle out without some kind of catastrophic event lol

 

[GigaOtomia]

Jokes on everyone! I don't even fall in love with biologically alive things!! but regardless- I think in a work with persocoms more than like those who still want children would use fertility treatments similar to how lesbians get biological kids through sperm banks and stuff! I doubt the human race can ever truly fizzle out without some kind of catastrophic event lol

Definitely, modern medicine isn't just going to disappear overnight. The foster system and sperm banks will still function perfectly fine. But if a woman with a persocom husband raise a human child, that human child will probably find it perfectly acceptable to marry a persocom themselves. This will continue, for as long as persocoms, or other androids, exist and are publicly marketed.

Humanity will not completely die off in such a scenario. But it will drastically shrink, so much so that we may even lose our status as the top of the food chain. As for what might take our place? I cannot say. But I can say that this is not a result any of us want.

 

[sootesheepy666]

Definitely, modern medicine isn't just going to disappear overnight. The foster system and sperm banks will still function perfectly fine. But if a woman with a persocom husband raise a human child, that human child will probably find it perfectly acceptable to marry a persocom themselves. This will continue, for as long as persocoms, or other androids, exist and are publicly marketed.

Humanity will not completely die off in such a scenario. But it will drastically shrink, so much so that we may even lose our status as the top of the food chain. As for what might take our place? I cannot say. But I can say that this is not a result any of us want.

I mean, as it stands the earth is vastly overpopulated so much so that the amount of livestock we have currently aren't enough to feed everybody so a shrink in population may not exactly be a bad thing..

 

[GigaOtomia]

I mean, as it stands the earth is vastly overpopulated so much so that the amount of livestock we have currently aren't enough to feed everybody so a shrink in population may not exactly be a bad thing..

You're not understanding the sheer scale of what I'm talking about. There's an estimated eight billion people on earth at the moment, right? Downsizing might not be a bad thing? Let's implement Chobits worldwide, then. Everyone has their own android partner, and humans who want to fuck other humans become the vast minority. We'll be generous and say only one in twenty humans still only want to procreate with other humans, and a further one in fifteen - no, that's too unrealistic, one in five - remember that it's a good idea to partake in artificial insemination. That's 1/20+ 4/20 = 5/20ths, or one quarter, of that eight billion. That leaves two billion humans who remembered to have children. Next generation, people start noticing the decline. Actually, they've been noticing it for decades - a single generation of humans is a long time, after all - but still, the fraction of people making kids only goes up by two fifteenths (1/4 = 3.75/15 = 15/60, so we're up to 23/60), because Chobits are just that good at being replacement lovers. We're down to 766 million people left on Earth in about a hundred and seventy five years.

We've downsized the human population on the entirety of Earth, being generous, by about 94% in two generations. 6.13% (repeating the threes) exactly remaining. You don't think that's a bit extreme? I even originally did my math wrong since I was thinking about fifteenths - the original figure was 11% the amount of humans alive compared to two generations ago.

But anyone can pull numbers out of their ass, right? How many people do you think would choose a real woman over a perfect android partner who can't conceive?

 

[sootesheepy666]

You're not understanding the sheer scale of what I'm talking about. There's an estimated eight billion people on earth at the moment, right? Downsizing might not be a bad thing? Let's implement Chobits worldwide, then. Everyone has their own android partner, and humans who want to fuck other humans become the vast minority. We'll be generous and say only one in twenty humans still only want to procreate with other humans, and a further one in fifteen - no, that's too unrealistic, one in five - remember that it's a good idea to partake in artificial insemination. That's 1/20+ 4/20 = 5/20ths, or one quarter, of that eight billion. That leaves two billion humans who remembered to have children. Next generation, people start noticing the decline. Actually, they've been noticing it for decades - a single generation of humans is a long time, after all - but still, the fraction of people making kids only goes up by two fifteenths (1/4 = 3.75/15 = 15/60, so we're up to 23/60), because Chobits are just that good at being replacement lovers. We're down to 766 million people left on Earth in about a hundred and seventy five years.

We've downsized the human population on the entirety of Earth, being generous, by about 94% in two generations. 6.13% (repeating the threes) exactly remaining. You don't think that's a bit extreme? I even originally did my math wrong since I was thinking about fifteenths - the original figure was 11% the amount of humans alive compared to two generations ago.

But anyone can pull numbers out of their ass, right? How many people do you think would choose a real woman over a perfect android partner who can't conceive?

And? I am in no way disagreeing with your numbers because what you're saying is most likely true but I am asking, what would be so bad about that? I mean sure, less people means less life, less jobs, less population etc. but what's terrible about this? less people means less cars, livestock, overproduction of goods, less war due to lack of population, less global issues as a whole. and on top of that, everyone is happy with a robot lover. Humans provide nothing good to the world. Sure we try to prevent species extinction for animals but really how much of that is our fault in the first place? Humans are terrible so as I said, human population decrease or even full out extinction isn't an actual issue to anything but us and the animals we've domesticated into inability to survive in the wild.

 

[GigaOtomia]

And? I am in no way disagreeing with your numbers because what you're saying is most likely true but I am asking, what would be so bad about that? I mean sure, less people means less life, less jobs, less population etc. but what's terrible about this? less people means less cars, livestock, overproduction of goods, less war due to lack of population, less global issues as a whole. and on top of that, everyone is happy with a robot lover. Humans provide nothing good to the world. Sure we try to prevent species extinction for animals but really how much of that is our fault in the first place? Humans are terrible so as I said, human population decrease or even full out extinction isn't an actual issue to anything but us and the animals we've domesticated into inability to survive in the wild.

Well, that's a different issue, then. The main goal of any thing that is alive is to make more of its own species. This isn't a matter of opinion - it's baked into the genetic code of anything that consumes oxygen. Chobits are a flagrant betrayal of this goal, for the reasons I've outlined. Whether humans deserve to fulfill this goal or not is a moot point.

 

[sootesheepy666]

Well, that's a different issue, then. The main goal of any thing that is alive is to make more of its own species. This isn't a matter of opinion - it's baked into the genetic code of anything that consumes oxygen. Chobits are a flagrant betrayal of this goal, for the reasons I've outlined. Whether humans deserve to fulfill this goal or not is a moot point.

None of your comments illustrated the fact that reproduction is the biological purpose though, you simply gave me numbers and said how bad it is for there to be such a drastic decline in the human population unless of course, I read it wrong.