Persona 3 - Aigis, Biotech Robot

In Persona 3, Aigis is a character the game calls a “mechanical maiden.” She is a robot modeled after a human female. Though she looks human her thoughts and way of speech are still robotic in nature, as seen through her monotone voice and diction. In this scene, she comes back to the group after being completely repaired from a fatal attack that left her not functioning anymore. Though her physical wounds have been healed, the attack left her with an emotional wound; she suffers from a sort of inferiority complex. As a machine, her creators have given her a task to “protect humans from Shadows”, entities born from the negative psyches of human beings. In this scene, she has an inner conflict as to what is her purpose in life if she cannot fulfill the original role her creators have given her, and ultimately resolves her inner conflict by giving herself her own role and purpose in life.

To have mechanical maidens like Aigis in society would be interesting to say the least. It could turn out to be like the Futurama episode where the men end up dating the robots and eventually, the birth rate ends up decreasing dramatically due to infertility. Or, maybe robots develop a rebellious attitude and try to rule the Earth. On the other hand, having sentient robots that can evolve and mature internally like humans can seems like a beneficial factor in society. As humans, we can probably learn more from robots about our own personal struggles to find our own “roles” or “purposes” in life. To integrate human-like robots into our society will probably take a while to for us to adjust to, but it will be a way for both sides to fully understand each other and come to a balanced system where humans and robots can equally coexist and work together to better society.

Part of what the creators wanted to get across is the idea of having an exact purpose in life. Aigis can be viewed as a piece of biotech technology that humans may develop someday. However, her inner struggle of finding her purpose in life is a dilemma that probably a lot of humans face in life. Where do we want to go? What do we want to do? These are questions that only we can answer, and though the "how" question may be left unsolved, that is something that is figured out along the way and is a part of living a truly human life. One way the creators tried to get this idea across is through Aigis herself and her character development. She initially starts off being robotic and apathetic about most human concepts and ideas, sort of the equivalent to a average coach potato who really does not care about anything in the world. But gradually, as she spends more time with humans, she starts to worry and care more, and through that she finds her own purpose in life that nobody else can take away from her. Perhaps what the storyboard writers were trying to get across is the idea that to find out what we truly want to do in life, it's best to look at what we actually care about and how to apply our goals to that precious idea, person, or object. Aigis's struggle truly makes the audience ponder about their own goals in life, and perhaps, as a side effect, relate to Aigis's own situation, thus making her a more memorable character within the plot of the game.

Aigis is a character that explores what it truly means to have a “life”, to be truly human. Before, she could be considered to be emotionless, only putting her mission and task as the first priority. After spending time with the humans, she begins to care deeply for them and value their friendship together. In a sense, to be human, one must have some sort of emotional attachment to somebody or something. In Aigis’s case, her humanity or emotions arose from her strong bond from her friendship with the group. In another sense, being human also means not having a single pre-defined purpose, or in other words, one is able to freely choose his or her destiny. Aigis’s original purpose was to protect humans forever, however, failing that, she decided on her own accord free from the creators who built her that she would choose her own purpose, that purpose being to “live”, even going on to say that how she’s going to do that is a part of living and being human as well. We as humans may not know exactly how our lives are going to play out, but how it is going to be played out is something that we are free to choose on our own accords, and not somebody else’s.