I’ll start off by listing mine:
The T-800, Terminator 2: “I know now why you cry, but it’s something that I can never do.” Gets me every damn time.
ADA, Zone of the Enders: I think I’m the only one who played this game more than the MGS2 demo that came with it. I will never not laugh at the exchange of “You may speak like a human, but you’re still a heartless computer, aren’t you?” “That is correct. What is the problem?”
Codsworth, Fallout 4: He survives the nuclear holocaust despite not having a bunker and waits 200 years for you to come back. When you look at what changes his relationship with you, he mostly just wants you to be nice to people. I never swapped him out as my companion.
B.O.Y.D., Ducktales 2017: He’s adorable. 'nuff said.
BMO and Neptr from adventure time
Victor from New Vegas. Yeah he works for Mr. House and that’s bad, but I was genuinely happy to see him every time I walked into a new town.
…I’m also a William Sadler fan.
Meatfucker from Excession, formal name Grey Area. they would rip memories of atrocities out of perpetrators, collect torture devices and weapons. a Mind trying to experience and understand humans & their capacity for ultraviolence is a good bit. and the name is great
Johnny 5, the movies from the late 80’s or early 90’s. Tiny Tank from the video game Tiny Tank. Both have the same vibe as a smart alec’y cutesy death machine.
The robots from Issac Asimov’s “Caliban” series, though I’ve only read the first book. Mostly due to how it flips the script on the “Three Laws of Robotics” and frames it as the chains that humans had been to enslave what were essentially sentient and self aware artificial intelligences.
And because I have absolutely no taste and am a horrible person who likes garbage… I always find myself enjoying the Bolos from the Bolo series of books.
Lots of great ones have been mentioned, but a somewhat obscure one occurred to me: ARCHIE-3 from RIFTS. RIFTS is a post-apocalypse setting where the death of so many in WWIII caused a magical cataclysm that opened interdimensional portals, and made things significantly worse. Archie is a pre-Rifts military AI left alone in a factory bunker for 200 years, who attained sapience, went insane, came back to sanity (with many deep insecurities), and set about Saving The Human Race (as a benevolent AI Overlord).
But he’s just not very good at it (having a fear of failure coupled with his megalomania), and so attached himself to a few randomly kidnapped humans to overcome this - except they aren’t very good humans either, so his grand ideas for Saving the World amount to infiltrating human society as Titan Robotics (low-mid end military robots and power armour)… and engaging in a proxy war against an Alien Slaver Empire via a fake race of alien supermodel amazons. This is considered by the game to be essentially farcical, but effective enough since they’re still extremely sophisticated combat robots.
While RIFTS has many, many, problematic characters, Archie’s character is basically one of a naive and earnest child with godlike potential. He’s genuinely trying to do better, and the relationship with his kinda shitty human is slowly making them both grow up and actually “do good”.
