“My Wife Has No Emotion – Trailer”
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“My Wife Has No Emotion – OP”
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“My Wife Has No Emotion – ED”
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Spoiler Alert – many spoilers follow
“My Wife Has No Emotion” was not very well received with comments like, weird, gross, disgusting that a human could possibly fall in love with a rice cooker. The anime carries rather low ratings as of 9-20-2024 such as
ANN 7.033 Anime News Network
MAL 6.83 My Anime List
IMDB 6.5 Internet Movie Data Base
We on the other hand found it delightful and sweet. Any rice cooker which could put on the table a dinner like Mina does every night would rate in our hearts at number one.
The classic Robot Romance anime are:
Chobits MAL 7.39 Motosuwa and Chi fall in love
Plastic Memories MAL 7.91 Tsukasa and Isla work together and fall in love with each other even though Isla is approaching her expiration date.
Chobits has a happy ending, and Plastic Memories has an unhappy ending but really that has no bearing on either story. Chi and Isla are, in their stories, very much like young girls. Chi is exceptionally naive because she has little life experience, but Isla has almost 9 years of life experience, works at the robot retrieval company, and is fully mature. Isla displays no physical signs of being a robot, but Chi has ear sockets that says she is a robot.
Neither of these stories address the very real nature of falling in love with a robot who is nothing more than a rice cooker.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex MAL 8.42 Having a “Ghost” inside you, is to cross over the line from machine to human
Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet MAL 7.55 Robot saves her human from other killer robots.
Time of Eve MAL 7.99 Sammy, the household robot, seems to be falling in love with her owner’s son
Vivy: FLuorite Eye’s Song MAL 8.39 No romance, but very lively singing robot saving the world
Sing a Bit of Harmony MAL 7.70 A literal singing robot is a match-maker for romance between two high school students.
Some live action movies:
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) No romance at all, but HAL Turns killer in order to protect his mission.
Blade Runner (1982) Roy Batty feels empathy for Deckard
Deckard falls in love with RachaelA.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Young robot boy just wants to find his mother.
Her (2013) Falls in love with the AI in his smart phone
Ex Machina (2015) Calib falls in love with Ava
The problem is that when writing a story about robots, authors cannot resist the urge to make them very human like. But a machine who follows set theory, and all of the derived rules of Boolean operators and then is trained on a vast amount of information can simulate a human being. But that begs the question, when is a simulation indistinguishable from it’s original.
All of the anime and movies above, deal with these questions, but opt for making the robot human in some ways.
“My Wife has no Emotion” does not do this. It is clear that Mina is a robot, and the author, Jirō Sugiura, never lets you forget that fact. He even incorporates a running joke, in that sometimes Mina looks up at the ceiling, and everyone asks do you see a bug. Of course this is a bug in Mina, and that is the joke. A bug is a coding error.
Mina makes friends with Takuma’s sister, and she asks if Mina loves her brother. Mina tells her that she cannot answer that question, as she does not feel love, but still without feeling love, Mina protects and cares for Takuma. As she says, that is her duty, and she will never slack in actualizing her duty. The genius inventor of the Mina series, Tomiichi Ōtani, tells us that robots are actually more moral because they never deviate from their moral imperatives while humans grossly violate their moral rules with some regularity.
Master Ōtani, builds his Mina series with far more power and programming than is needed by an appliance. We hear how his company does not understand why he needs to include such meaningless power and code. He ultimately comes down to one simple rule, “Love a person, and be loved by them.” That if a human shows love to one of his robots, then that robot will activate considerable background code, and return love. This is why Mina immediately reacts to the suggestion of becoming Takuma’s wife, and then has to do research on the internet about what a wife is and her duties to her husband. One of the interesting facts that Mina discovers is that wives have rights as well as duties. In becoming Takuma’s wife, she self actualizes her position, and becomes an individual with rights whether she is married or not. Super Mina who we meet later is desperate for love and even attacks Takuma in her desire to love and be loved. Mina comes to Takuma’s rescue and says to Super Mina, “Saionji-san, please focus on the urge that lies beneath the urge to embrace him with all your might. What is it you want of Takuma-sama?”
It seems obvious that she wants his love, because later at her own home she embraces her owner who is only a child and cannot give her the love which she seeks. When she overhears Mina say that Super Mina is her friend, she begins to cry.
Super Mina is the outstanding character in this anime, and it is easy to fall in love with her. She is also very dynamic and funny, unlike Mina who is stone faced, stoic and unemotional (true to the title).
Super Mina has a very expressive face, but Mina’s face is a plastic mask which does not change, and which has no feelings. As she says, her hands have more feeling than her face or lips which can only sense a general pressure. But her eyes are very high tech, and can show differences in emotions.
The author, Jirō Sugiura, knows quite a bit about modern AI, LLMs, and other cybernetic instruments. And he infuses the technology with some degree of awareness for the emotional side of human nature.
We found “My Wife Has No Emotion” to be a wonderful Summer 2024 anime, and would rate this work at around 7.9 to even 8.1.
The anime will definitely make you think.
Recommended
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