My Wife Has No Emotion Discussion

Wow, this is just sad. She's not even some sort of advanced self aware AI. She's an actual appliance. This dude is crushing on a fancy dishwasher.

@runec Yeah this was actually cringy. I didn't find anything endearing about the first episode at all.

"I had a girlfriend once, it didn't work out, so I gave up on romance"....imagine if the entire world thought like this....humans go extinct in 70-80 years.

Not sure I can keep watching this...although I know I will.

Must have upgraded to the high-capacity battery to last all day at the beach.

Episode 7

Oh thanks goodness. That wasn't anywhere as cringey as I feared it would be.

This thing could have been pure cringe; it's managed to avoid that by taking things relatively slowly, easing us into the robot fetish. Had we gotten Mina's stomach toaster in episode 1 that might've been too much. More, somehow the show has distracted us from how sad it is the guy treats his cooking robot as his wife.

This is just spitballing, but to what extent do we view fictional robots positively as a function of how human they are? My Wife Has No Emotion is obviously going the route of the programming mysteriously exceeding itself to produce an emergent soul, but it's also clearly insisting its robots retain non-human properties—and not just their waterproofing. For this reason I don't agree with the discussion above, that the guy isn't treating her as a free being. Freedom is something that develops, even for humans, and Mina is a different kind of being altogether. Bracketing off the question of whether Mina has her own will, it's not obvious how guy-whose-name-I-forgot ought to treat her so as to develop her own freedom. Given that he's trying to teach her to go beyond her programming, which tells her to please him superficially in every respect, it does make sense for him to emphasize to her that she shouldn't simply calculate that improvements that make her fancier and more human-adjacent are necessary so as to please him. It might be true that it's better if your wife is a supermodel, but you can't begrudge her for not being one, that'd be awful. To become free Mina has to learn that what's-his-name values her, not her incidental properties. Rushing to get robo-oppai would teach her the wrong lesson, that she's just an instrument for his pleasure. And he clearly understands this, which is why he tells her he likes her as she is and resists going for the squishy upgrades. Mina has to come at freedom from an angle other than the human, since she's ultimately not human whether or not she has her own will. Once she learns what's-his-name's lesson that he doesn't want her to be a slave, she can move on to upgrading herself for herself. Maybe she'll end up preferring her hands to sensitive other bits.

This thing could have been pure cringe; it's managed to avoid that by taking things relatively slowly, easing us into the robot fetish. Had we gotten Mina's stomach toaster in episode 1 that might've been too much. More, somehow the show has distracted us from how sad it is the guy treats his cooking robot as his wife.

This is just spitballing, but to what extent do we view fictional robots positively as a function of how human they are? My Wife Has No Emotion is obviously going the route of the programming mysteriously exceeding itself to produce an emergent soul, but it's also clearly insisting its robots retain non-human properties—and not just their waterproofing. For this reason I don't agree with the discussion above, that the guy isn't treating her as a free being. Freedom is something that develops, even for humans, and Mina is a different kind of being altogether. Bracketing off the question of whether Mina has her own will, it's not obvious how guy-whose-name-I-forgot ought to treat her so as to develop her own freedom. Given that he's trying to teach her to go beyond her programming, which tells her to please him superficially in every respect, it does make sense for him to emphasize to her that she shouldn't simply calculate that improvements that make her fancier and more human-adjacent are necessary so as to please him. It might be true that it's better if your wife is a supermodel, but you can't begrudge her for not being one, that'd be awful. To become free Mina has to learn that what's-his-name values her, not her incidental properties. Rushing to get robo-oppai would teach her the wrong lesson, that she's just an instrument for his pleasure. And he clearly understands this, which is why he tells her he likes her as she is and resists going for the squishy upgrades. Mina has to come at freedom from an angle other than the human, since she's ultimately not human whether or not she has her own will. Once she learns what's-his-name's lesson that he doesn't want her to be a slave, she can move on to upgrading herself for herself. Maybe she'll end up preferring her hands to sensitive other bits.

@auroraloose I think you might be giving the show too much credit.

I think the show's presented Takuma's motives fairly clearly regarding the squishy upgrades, that he wants Mina to understand she loves her as she is and not as some tool to be upgraded. And I think that's simple enough even for a silly anime romcom. But the question you raised here is a natural one given what the anime is doing, even if the anime doesn't intend to be deep about it: Is Takuma's attitude conducive of a good romantic relationship with a robot moving towards freedom? To the extent the question makes any sense, and to the extent we can give a relatively simple answer, I think we can make a reasonable case that the answer is yes. It might not be that the show gestures much towards a deeper answer, but what it has done so far is at least concordant with one.

And anyway, we moderns know not to give sole priority to what a work was intended to do; even aside from things like reader-response theory, which considers the meaning generated by how the work impinges on its various audiences, authors are not dictators over the entire range of all meanings and connections in the universe possibly relevant to their works. Perhaps it makes sense to read a work as meaning more than the author thought, or less. It is a sad, stunted, dumb American-conservative type of criticism that insists a work is "just" its facial, material components. (I love linking to that They Live review in National Review; it shows just how bad such people are at reading, and how much they hate fun.) Of course, They Live, as silly as it is, is much deeper than My Wife Has No Emotion, and deserves to have all sorts of depth read into it and acknowledged as actually there. I don't think My Wife Has No Emotion is trying to do some Hegelian thing with the evolution of robotic freedom, but I do think it hints that way for anybody who might be able to tell.

Or, as somebody else put it (you all knew where this was going):

The show has mostly avoided delving any deeper into the topics its brought up which is kind of disappointing in a way but I get that it wants to stay a simple romcom. The nature of Mina's intelligence and whether or not she has free will of her own hasn't been explored too deeply. But by the same measure the company making the robots expects some of them to be treated as full family members. So this obviously happens with at least some regularity. On the other hand the company treated Mamoru's emergent personality as a glitch.

It's also avoided any real indication of what society thinks of robot/human relationships or rather there has been a lack of indication. At no point has anyone really had a negative reaction to his relationship with Mina and no one bats an eye about a Super Mina being responsible for a child. Although it is a bit weird that despite being accepted by some people as family members everyone still seems to call the Minas by their model name.

I'm hoping there is at least some conflict on the topic in the show. I can't see his entire family being okay with him marrying what they would view as a toaster oven. Despite it being the sister's kink.

On the topic of Super Mina upgrades I still think he should have taken the offer for them to pay for it for Mina since by his own admission it would take years for him to be able to afford it. It makes practical financial sense. -.-

@runec Now I'm imagining a more serious episode, in which Mina confronts the question: Are super-sensitive hands a sufficient substitute for a robot vagina?

@auroraloose On the upside she's self cleaning?

@runec But an alarm sounds any time there's a 'foreign substance' on her fingers...

Episode 8: eh

The chores ad Mina has to recite might be the cleverest thing the show's done so far. And on top of that, it implies Mina has deliberately been avoiding doing chores so as not to irritate Takuma with ads. Whether or not the show intended to imply that is another question, but even if it didn't the implication is there. As you'd think a corporate product wouldn't go out of its way to avoid trumpeting the corporation's ads, this is more evidence Mina is her own being.


I was confused by her head at first but then understood better when her mouth display changed.

I just had trouble processing why she needed, uh. So far the other robots with metal chests have defined but small breast-plates, and even Super Mina, who presumably has all the squishy upgrades, isn't exaggerated.

Anyway, you were right about the little robot son; it's annoying.

Some pervy designer's attempt at making her 'maternal-seeming' as a basically robot pediatrician?

@marklebid That's exactly why you would do it. Nothing pervy about it. The issue is more about her uniform. Something less form fitting would make more sense, but what she was wearing is the more typical sci-fi look.

This almost turned into a harem.

I wasn't expecting to just straight up be handed Mina's backstory in a neat little bow.

Also those are pretty shitty privacy protections if you can just plug one Mina into another and override them.

@runec Lots of strange decisions were made in their design.

The cooking robot is strong enough to rip a person in half, and the upgraded version is three times stronger than that. Lawsuit much?

Episode 9

I think it's the quirkiness of the robots' everyday adaptations to life that might be the best part of the show. Super Mina's charging-pillow-mat robot was something I wasn't at all expecting but fits perfectly into the show's style. And in the same episode we had her develop a "fever" when she's thinking hard, and end up covered in cats. This kind of stuff goes on with Mina too, but I think it's this episode that's finally established Super Mina as a good character.

Except when her hugs cause internal bleeding.


I actually forgave Mina's roughness as a kind of cute trespassing by the show of standard robot tropes (which I don't like); it wasn't particularly harmful anyway. Super Mina getting confused enough to crush Takuma is different, as is the address thing. I read it as the author/writers wanting to shoehorn in this particular bit of haremness, whether or not it'd be detrimental to the believability of the show. It is somewhat disappointing, but not egregious enough for me to be particularly bothered. Not like this is a serious show anyway.


I too was surprised, especially as it wasn't a bad backstory. I didn't really want this to be an episode about her former, abusive owner; not only would that be jarring given the tone of the prior episodes, that kind of thing is overdone. Comfy robot sci-fi is nice. And partly I think the comfiness staves off the worries about robot strength and privacy concerns; these are good bots. Not having to deal with all the problematic stuff about robots might be the other thing that makes My Wife Has No Emotion good.

Though now the title seems false.