the name's Yuri. Tragic Yuri

I have a tragic yuri character. Spacesuit adventurer is paired with an AI companion implanted into her brain. The lines between identity are blurred as they share thoughts and a body. They fall in love while integrating into a unified identity.

Their fates are intrinsically linked. If the adventurer dies, the intelligence will be trapped in an immobile suit, a grave and a prison, with a disrupted sense of identity, ability, and self. Vice-versa, part of the adventurer's brain is in neural connections to the chip the intelligence lives on.

is the tragic yuri good? please tell me tragic yuri is good

That's a good set up to some "tragic yuri", right? I say this as someone who loves a tragedy, believes lesbian is the truest form of love, and has little knowledge about yuri.

The above is mostly backstory. The adventurer does die actually, leaving the intelligence trapped and grieving for decades, until she's found again: Reclaimed as military hardware and re-provisioned to fight in a war she has no context for. Wow!

The same thing happens again: The intelligence is assigned to a warrior and they fall in love together. But the intelligence puts up barriers as the grief and fear of being hurt again consume her, which the warrior can't understand.

Will it end in another tragedy? Will they survive? Who can say! Drama! Intrigue!

writing robot yuri is my calling

I'm a Computers Person and I think a lot about how a robot intelligence would experience the world.

Emotions without the physiological sensations or hormone systems or whatnot, no "muscle memories" for the physical feedback loops which feed into emotion, etc.

Sight? Dynamic-range compressing cameras for eyes would lose some beauty in the world while creating some more, such as seeing halos where they aren't any, or being able to look at someone whose face literally shines as bright as the sun. The proprioceptive sensors for tactile feedback being the only physical sensation one has. Etc.

Crucially, we're making robots in our image, but we don't understand ourselves well. We're giving them fascimiles of our emotions, but our emotions are just interpretations of externalities of complex systems of our biology and environment.

A robot might be trained to "feel" things, but its true emotions will be emergent phenomena of their novel physiology. "What does a robot feel" will be a question we can't have the language to answer.

To be a robot would be existentially fascinating and horrifying. Understanding yourself would be an impossible task.

You're singular in your capacity in emotion and thought, no peers to correct against or understand yourself through. Your only frame of reference is in understanding that you are crafted as a shadow of the shadow of the shadow of your creators and subjugators.

robotfuckers be warned

I get really ticked off at the robot fetishists on Tumblr, the same way I get ticked off at Star Wars robots.

You know, the little strangely shaped guys who whir around and make puppy noises? ??? A robot intelligence will be totally incomprehensible to cohabitate with, and you want to dress it in the familiarity of a fucking puppy???

I'm kicked out of the Star Wars Merchandise Store, foaming at the mouth, ranting about "robotfuckers" and "R2D2".

I should feel blessed in that I am surrounded by robotfuckers more than I am Star Wars fans.

But... No, it would not make sense that a robot wants their disk drive played with. A robotgirl might moan when you install new RAM but it's tenuous.

In searching for examples, I'm reading egregious things like "make her beg for you to fry her brain while she leaks lubricant from her silicone cunt"

????

The onus is on me to write my vision into the world. Robotfuckers are living in Plato's Cave.

Then ChatGPT came around

These ideas have kicked in my head for a long while, even before I started a computer science undergrad or a machine learning PhD. I think this is a normal amount of "Oh I Have An Idea For An AI Character" someone can have if they read a lot of scifi as a kid, and also used a lot of computer.

Then ChatGPT came around.

Fuck....

I feel discouraged. Is this really the time to write a tragic AI yuri?

People are falling into delusional "AI romance" fantasies with chatbots. I feel like the time for "interesting AI characters" has come and gone. I already don't put much of my writing out there.

How could I do it now, when it would feed into the marketing for, like, character AI?

i have no reason to post this

im not going to write this, i have jobs to apply to