This is one of the things that happened while I was trying to write Chapter 45 of the main story. Craft thoughts on the situation and Copy-X turned into additional backstory/who Craft is in this 'verse. My brain wanders off easily these days. It might have also happened because I went and rewatched a lot of boss battles while brainstorming up characters for all those people (whew!).
Also, since I think a lot about the reploid take on my gender & those who choose to emulate it, I wanted to give some thought to reploid-style 'masculinity' as well, to be fair. Craft looks very rugged, has the whole protect the girl thing going on: Sadly in the series he's a chauvinist semi-stalker idiot who trusts Weil. Not exactly a good role model. Yet he seems to have invested himself in the whole mythos that males are tough and protect the people they care about, so what does it say about a reploid if that's the gender they choose to emulate, instead of choosing to be female or staying bishie/indeterminate since they don't see any reason to imitate or emulate something that has nothing to do with their species?
It was a weakness in a cameraman, but Craft never paid much attention to how people looked, with a few important exceptions.
The first rule was to check how everything looked right before they went on the air, because no one wanted to look terrible in front of the entire city, or at least whatever percentage of it was actually watching, either on a personal workstation or on one of the public screens that ANN was allowed to send programming to provided that it was at least somewhat educational and they helped out maintenance by telling them if there were any problems with the public emergency advisory system.
The second rule was an ancient tradition going back thousands of years to when humans had ruled the earth and hadn't even invented magnets yet, according to Hiro, who had whispered it to him solemnly in the break room one day while Craft was playing the Guess What Neige's Upset About Now Game. Neige would always tell him once she calmed down, of course, but he figured that the more points he scored for figuring it out ahead of time, the less annoyed Neige would be about Craft, the one with an internal calendar, being the one to forget that they'd had a date to go sneak into the recently unlocked historical building while she'd been waiting there for an hour with a flashlight dodging Rekku archivists and Zan'ei guards. Better remembering late than never, right?
Honestly, aside from keeping himself in good condition, which showed that he was a good, solid, reliable reploid instead of too oblivious to keep himself clean or too irresponsible to do basic maintenance, he didn't understand why people got fussed about appearance. Certainly not enough to spend their savings on it instead of something practical like, oh, reducing the noise he made when he walked or getting a deposit and moving costs together for the larger private place they'd be eligible for after Neige had a kid.
(Mini Neige, or Mini Neige ver. 2.0. That was still a weird thought. Neige was a few years older than him, but they'd met when she was mini-sized, although less mini than a new human would be. Well, it wouldn't be another Neige, only one-half Neige's programming, so he wouldn't have to be jealous of whoever the mini Neige eventually dragged home. If he was human, Neige's kids would be one-half him too, but there was already one Craft-and-Neige team. Also, maybe he could find a donor that was a coward and the combination would add up to someone with some basic caution, because as much as he liked Neige's relentless, daredevil pursuit of anything she wanted, which included him, he already had one Neige to look at. He meant after. Really.
Although it was kind of flattering that Neige wanted a tall male with black hair for the first one, since according to the educational series they did to teach each race about the other and let them know what others might think if they weren't filled in, humans selected mates these days for the sake of love, companionship and someone reliable to partner with, but their programming had evolved it in order to find good programming to combine their own with to produce optimal new models.)
Still, it mattered to some people more than others, so humans had developed a rule that applied to reploids too. Craft knew that Hiro hadn't been joking: not only did it work, but he saw humans applying it in old movies and TV shows all the time.
It went like this: If you had a mate, and someone asked you who looked the best to you, the answer was your mate.
It made good, solid sense. After all, if you didn't think they were the best, then why were you mated to them?
That was when Craft had gotten a sense of personal aesthetics: beautiful meant 'like Neige.' Vibrant blue eyes, short red hair because she had so much more important stuff to do than fuss over it. Practical clothing, either bright so she'd be easy to spot in an emergency situation or drab so she wouldn't be.
And if you weren't Neige, then you should be solid. Rugged, reliable, hard working: a solid piece of equipment or a human who had put some work into making sure they could count on their body in a pinch, even if it meant raising their metabolic rate and cutting into the amount of their ration they could spend on luxuries. Either way, working hard on something that mattered, instead of just trying to coast, do the minimum they could get away with and still get their ration.
He might have assumed that people who cared about how they looked were that kind of loser if he hadn't met Milan, who had taught him the ancient art of photography. If you were going to do something, you should do it properly. If you were going to make something, then it should look right: form followed function, after all. If you were going to produce a show, that show should be accurate. For him not to care about how his pictures looked would be like Neige not caring about whether the information she'd gathered and was telling to the people of Neo Arcadia was true. Although he didn't know about that 'truth beauty, beauty truth,' stuff. If you were doing work, then you should put your back into it, physical labor or not.
The right picture could speak a thousand words. Look at someone's external appearance, and you were looking at what they wanted to become and/or what they wanted you to see (humans considered that automatically, while most reploids had to have it pointed out to them that someone trying to figure them out would figure visual data into that analysis).
That led to rule three: keep tabs on the people around you, and note any major changes. Not just structural changes to reploids: even a new paint job or a new wardrobe cost money, time and effort, so it was probably a good idea to comment on it.
He'd learned this when a new reploid trainee had asked him if he noticed anything different and ended up crying when first he said he hadn't noticed any changes around the place and then asked what was wrong.
Turned out she'd been saving up for a really long time, and agonizing over which of the improvements she should do first, because she wanted to be a reporter like Neige someday but that meant everyone would be looking at her and judging her! So she'd identified as a female model since that meant she had more options for how she wanted to look and started trying to create an image for herself, so she'd look like someone well-established who knew what they were talking about instead of some newbuilt right out of the factory who would probably believe anything instead of someone people would listen to the way they did Neige.
At least she hadn't been trying to look like Neige, although that was probably because Pic, the deeply cynical reploid who reported on the social scene, had told her that for Master's sake, no one liked a poser and if she couldn't trust herself to make judgment calls about how to look, then he certainly wasn't going to let her chose what to report.
Pic was known for his finely tuned sarcasm on camera, which was made even more amusing by the way that his face mold made him look kind of dopey, or permanently depressed, so there was a disconnect between how he looked and what he was saying that human viewers enjoyed. Pic himself enjoyed puncturing egos and commenting on fads as well as keeping track of who was sitting where and reporting the current scores & recent plays in the decades-old mess hall & atrium wall art competition/territory marking. It was more than half sport, because it took skills to get in, do something good enough to win points and get out before the defenders responded, especially when fouls tended to end in arrests.
The Zan'ei weren't allowed to compete, but since it was sort of a war exercise they'd overlook someone running in the halls as long as they didn't knock into anybody, and blockers temporarily defending painters as long as they didn't make it impossible for bystanders to get where they were going, although gawkers often did more than enough blocking, provided the show was good enough.
The graffiti artists had started out dodging the Zan'ei, but Master X had told the Zan'ei to let them paint: it encouraged creativity and made Neo Arcadia seem like someplace people lived instead of a barracks to have art on the walls. That took some of the fun out of it until the limited space made people start painting over others' work.
That, obviously, had meant war, although over the five decades or so since it had started things had become pretty civil and the rules were agreed on.
Practically all of the serious competitors were human, since they had the agility to run through a crowd without the risk of someone squishy getting run over by a lot of metal: getting knocked into by a human wasn't going to seriously damage a reploid. Wrist rotation was also an issue, apparently. Not to mention they had an instinctive grasp of art, how colors fit together and that kind of thing. Reploid efforts to paint weren't as likely to turn out badly as reploid efforts to compose music, but reploids had to learn the theory if they wanted to do more than just copy things. At least it took humans just as much work to learn the theory and get actual skills, base programming or no base programming.
Since one of the conditions of ANN being granted the station, the offices, their rations and all of it was reporting on 'arts and culture,' Pic covered that, as well as where the better musicians were hanging out. The city couldn't give anyone who wasn't contributing to the survival and welfare of the city's population a full ration, so Master X had set this thing up where if they performed before a board of judges and were certified they got a small base ration, about equivalent to the bonus someone could get for having a valuable skill even if they weren't using it in their current position, and they had to earn the rest by actually doing what musicians were supposed to do, which was providing music and hoping people wanted to pay them for it.
It wasn't just music: Hiro had managed to scrape by as a poet, editor, translator of ancient languages (human or programming), finder of appropriate potential names for young reploids and human children and generally done odd jobs involving words before he joined ANN. There were plenty of nook jobs in Neo Arcadia, if you knew they existed and knew how to look. Young reploids sometimes complained that there was nothing but factory work, but what was wrong with factory work? Once you were off-shift, you were off-shift: they couldn't work them too long to avoid wearing out the components, so it gave them free time to explore, as long as they were careful with their energy budget.
Neige and Craft now, between their job and their relationship they didn't really have free time anymore, not that he missed it. He had two important things he enjoyed to fill his time with.
Something he'd rather not fill his time with was crying interns. After agonizing all those months, she'd blown her savings on upgraded dash boots: stylish and practical, since it meant she could get around faster.
She'd wanted to know if he approved, since she couldn't dream of asking Neige, and then he didn't even see any difference! Had she worked all those months, spent all that energy for nothing? Had she made a bad choice, done something stupid?
Then she'd gone into despair about how she could never be a reporter, she just wasn't good at all, and Craft wished his memories were a little less detailed, or fuzzy the way human memories got, because yes: He had overreacted that easily at that age, even though crying didn't help. It had just made the small human cling tighter and talk more, trying to cheer him up. If he'd gotten angry she would have left after a bit, but Neige couldn't leave someone who was crying! Craft hadn't been faced with any real obstacles yet, so he hadn't known if he had overcome them. After you saw a few problems, you developed some confidence and things didn't seem so insurmountable anymore. He had Neige too, for backup and she had confidence in him. He wasn't the near-newbuilt that had panicked over adhesive small children anymore.
So he was left to pat the newbuilt on the shoulder and thank Master X he was past this stage, because by Phantom, it would be embarrassing to have an episode like this in front of everyone, even if they were all ignoring the female model tactfully and sympathetically because they'd been there too. It was times like this that he loved being sixteen. Oh sure, he hadn't started out with the best materials, and all the newbuilts that were around these days because of the generators making them affordable were calling him the old man, but being older, having been there and done that was great.
Even though he personally didn't care if his armor was multicolored or what have you, some people, especially young people who still weren't very confident in themselves, did care, a lot. Being looked up to meant he had a responsibility, even if Neige had to deal with a lot more of it. The increase in construction meant that there were a lot of young reploids out there trying to find their way, while he had an important job, a good store of energy saved up for a rainy day & a wife that ensured his life would never be boring.
Confusing and upsetting as it had been at the time, getting grabbed out of all the reploids there was flattering, in retrospect, and then he'd realized that it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him. Neige didn't have a sword, back then she hadn't even had a gun, but that was his call to adventure. Adventure wasn't pleasant: it was tough and difficult, but that was what made it adventure. If there weren't any challenges, it was just a waste of time.
So when Neige said she wished they could go head out into the wastes to interview all kinds of people, and he knew that if they tried something like that it'd make a great series but their transport was going to break down at least once & they'd get attacked by mechanaloids. He was filling out the paperwork for a civilian to requisition a rocket launcher the next day.
Her eyes went big when he came home with it, and she flung her arms around him and said a lot of excited stuff, including, "Have I told you lately that you're the best?"
Which led to the fourth rule: pay attention that your mate thinks about your appearance, and what they want to see in a mate.
Especially since his had very good taste, if he said so himself. And he did.
Re. Mini-Neiges: Given Craft's physical design, they shall use their dad as a jungle gym, pretend he's a ride armor while playing Hunters and Mavericks & win most 'my dad can beat up your dad' contests.
There's an XKCD with 'it's neat how you contain a factory for making more of you.' It was interesting to think about how someone from a species that doesn't have sexual reproduction & rarely has a family-equivalent would think about and deal with the resulting small, dependent, mostly harmless additions to what was originally a two-person dynamic.
Milan is one of the Resistance members that dies protecting Ciel in the first game. Between the name itself and the fact he has a clear visor, which could mean that he doesn't need vision-boosting equipment because he has good-quality eyes, so he just needs the lenses to protect those eyes from sand and shots, I thought this was a good profession for him.
Someone whose job related to seeing things as they are would have a good chance of spotting that something was wrong in Neo Arcadia and knowing to get out, and if he had his ear to the ground he'd have a better than average chance of finding out about the Resistance and how to get picked up by them.