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Full-Conversion Cyborg - TV Tropes
"He lost over 99% of his body fat in less than a week using this one simple procedure!"
Sith Inquisitor:
What do you think? Can you eat [Darth Skotia]?
Khem Val:
It is more machine than man, I think. Bad for the digestion.
Darth Skotia:
Ha! Fools.
Most fictional cyborgs are still visibly human. They might have Artificial Limbs, or an Electronic Eye or two, but they obviously started as a fully organic person, and the organic parts predominate. The Full-Conversion Cyborg is not like that. The Full-Conversion cyborg has had pretty much their whole body replaced with technology, and usually appear like a robot at first glance. Sometimes, only their brain remains; in other cases, a limited core of organic systems is kept to keep the brain supplied with blood and nutrients.
In appearance, these cyborgs can vary from metallic versions of their previous selves, appearing as a Ridiculously Human Robot at first glance, to being so heavily modified, upgraded, and loaded with additional limbs, systems, and add-ons to barely even be humanoid anymore.
People's reasons for becoming beings of this sort vary. A common origin has them suffer from horrific accidents that left the majority of their bodies unsalvageable, requiring the placement of their surviving parts in an artificial shell. Others take a more Transhumanist route, replacing and upgrading more and more of their original bodies in an attempt to become more effective at their chosen vocations or to achieve a higher state of consciousness. Others still are the result of Unwilling Roboticisation, often intended to turn them into living weapons. The Full-Conversion Cyborg tends to have a high chance of showing up in Cybernetics Eat Your Soul or What Measure Is a Non-Human? plots, given that, going solely by proportions, they're closer to robots than people.
Compare Brain in a Jar, which one of these would be without their body; Man in the Machine, who is reliant on cybernetic parts but has more of their body remaining; and Brain Uploading, when a character sheds their organic body entirely. Contrast Artificial Human, Meat-Sack Robot, Wetware Body, and Wetware CPU for situations where machine intelligence takes on more organic materials.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- The DCU:
- The first Robotman was a Golden Age superhero. After being fatally wounded, his brain was transplanted into the robot body he had been working on.
- The second, better known, Robotman was a founding member of Doom Patrol, who was a racecar driver whose brain was preserved in a robotic body. He's usually written as The Heart, in an ironic contrast to his physical state.
- Superman:
- The villain Metallo, a.k.a. John Corben, is a man whose brain was placed in a robot body powered by green Kryptonite after a freak accident. Some incarnations feature him trying to return to a normal life, only to fail and be pulled back into villainy.
- Hank Henshaw, a.k.a. the "Cyborg Superman", is a human who was transformed by cosmic radiation into a digitized being capable of inhabiting and controlling any type of machinery, whether said machinery has computerized components or not. He normally takes the form of a "cyborg" version of Superman made of Kryptonian technology and cloned flesh, primarily to insult his hated archnemesis and to gain all of his powers and abilities in addition to those granted by his cybernetic half. However, even if his entire body is destroyed, as long as there's even a tiny piece of machinery that he can "jump" to, he can survive and build himself a new mechanical body.
- Global Frequency: A Global Frequency team is sent into a military base to confront a soldier who went insane after seeing what the experiment he volunteered for turned him into: an overpowered, hideous cyborg who only has his eyes, brain, and a few scraps of skin left. He specifically mentions that his penis was replaced with a wire in his cortex that gives him pleasure when he kills.
- Grendel: Grendel Prime, at the time he's first introduced, is little more than a head and upper torso with mechanical limbs. By the time of Batman/Grendel II, his only remaining human parts are his brain and eyes. The intervening events are described with gruesome Body Horror in the prose novel Grendel: Past Prime.
- Invincible (2003): Cecil's right-hand man Donald Ferguson has been rebuilt from death so many times that he's over 98% robotic.
- Judge Dredd: After Nero Narcos' original body was injured beyond repair, his brain was extracted and placed into a mechanical body that gives him all the benefits of being human.
- Howard Quartz of Ro-Busters and ABC Warriors is a human brain in an otherwise mechanical body; since he is still 10% organic, he is legally considered a human, and is nicknamed "Mr. Ten Percent". Ro-Busters implies that he gradually replaced his human parts with mechanical parts; Savage retconned this by introducing him as a human who gets critically injured in the Volgan War and has his brain transferred to a robot body to save his life.
- Spider-Man: The villain Silvermane is a cyborg consisting of his human head and brain and various vital organs (heart, lungs, etc.) housed in an otherwise completely robotic body.
- Star Wars:
- Star Wars: Darth Vader: One of the transhumans (or, transalien, in his case) created by Doctor Cylo is Commander Karbin, a Mon Calamari who, at the end of the Clone Wars, suffered injuries when his ship was destroyed that left him on life support for eighteen years. Cylo dealt with this issue by replacing all of his unsalvageable organic components, leaving Karbin as an organic head on a four-armed mechanical body.
- Beilert Valance, in both Star Wars (Marvel 1977) and in the new canon, is revealed to be this. Prior to 2018, the assumption was that he was a human with replaced parts.
Fan Works
Films — Animation
- Justice League Dark: Apokolips War: Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Martian Manhunter, Mera, and Starfire all end up being horribly mutilated by Paradooms and eventually turned into Darkseid's cyborg Furies. Their bodies have become mostly machine with very little of their original bodies remaining, with Wonder Woman arguably being the least horrifying-looking out of the five. All of them are freed from Darkseid's control through various means and rejoin the heroic side during the final act.
Films — Live Action
- Alita: Battle Angel: A great many of Alita's enemies, and especially Grewishka and Zapan, have full robotic bodies and only the face that retains organic parts.
- DC Extended Universe: As seen in a security footage in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Victor Stone had basically only his torso left from the car accident that crippled him. By Justice League, the cybernetic body the Mother Box gave him only left half of his face organic.
- Godzilla vs. Kong: Mechagodzilla looks on the surface like it's purely cybernetic, but it's ultimately revealed to be this trope: the neural transmitter which controls the Mecha's actions is using the undead, telepathic upper-skull of Ghidorah's leftover severed head as its Wetware CPU, and Bernie Hayes furthermore speculates that there's likely a second piece of Ghidorah's DNA (believed by Bernie in the movie and explicitly stated in the novelization to be a second skull, although neither version of the story explains where the hell a second skull came from given the nature of Ghidorah's death) integrated in the actual Mecha to act as the receiver. At first, Mechagodzilla is strictly under its builders' control, but once the Mecha is empowered with untested Hollow Earth energy, what's left of Ghidorah's consciousness re-emerges and takes control of the Mecha for itself, ironically turning Godzilla's Evil Knockoff into Godzilla's Arch-Enemy reincarnated as a Robotic Psychopath.
- RoboCop
- RoboCop (1987) doesn't go into extreme detail over what remains of Alex Murphy, but largely implies all that remains is his head and some minimal organs in the chest (It's established that he DOES need to eat, or rather, be fed, "a rudimentary paste that sustains his organic systems.") And though he has a full face under the visor, note Expanded Universe materials establish that it's literally just that, a FACE transplant. The skull underneath it is synthetic, answering the question of "Why don't you just shoot him in the mouth?" the rest of his head's exterior is metallic. In the second movie he gets dismembered but survives with only his head and half his torso intact.
- RoboCop 2: When the villain Cain is critically injured and captured, OCP uses the opportunity to convert him into a cyborg against his will (temporarily rendering him a Brain in a Jar while he goes through drug withdrawal, which doesn't help his mood), banking on using his Nuke addiction to keep him under control. Go figure, it turns out placing a brain with a god complex, a sadistic sense of humor, and zero empathy into a massive, heavily armed robotic body is a bad idea, and Cain goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against OCP and the police the second he has a chance.
- In RoboCop (2014), Murphy is "lucky" enough to keep his whole head, lungs, and his right hand. The hand is separate from the other organic parts, keep as a very literal interpretation of the directive to "have a human hand pull the trigger". This version of Murphy was self-aware from first activation, but unaware of his new bodily makeup. When he sees the extent of the damage, his first response is to beg for death.
- Star Wars:
- General Grievous was originally a fully biological Kaleesh warrior, but was left hideously injured and nearly dead in a bombing. The doctors tasked with putting him back together were only able to salvage a few organs — his eyes, brain, and some others in his chest. The rest of his body was replaced with a fully mechanical shell — notably, one patterned after Kaleesh armor instead of his original body — and in the process he opted to receive a number of upgrades to make himself a deadlier warrior, such as an extra pair of arms, immense strength, and brain implants that gave him much faster reflexes and dexterity, turning him into a living weapon.
- While Darth Vader has quite a lot more "meat" left than Grievous, his augmentations are still extensive and pervasive. Due to becoming a quadruple amputee in lightsaber duels (right arm to Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones, remaining limbs to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith) and being badly burned by lava on Mustafar, his distinctive suit is as much life-support system as armor. His skin was replaced with an artificial substitute, his Vader Breath comes from a respirator that supplements his barely-functional lungs, and X-Ray Sparks from Palpatine's lighting in Return of the Jedi shows implants in his neck at the least.
- The B'omarr Order was a group of ascetics who surgically extracted their own brains to become a Brain in a Jar as a form of intentional sensory deprivation so they could achieve enlightenment. More senior monks were permitted to connect their brains to cybernetic spider-like bodies for practical needs. Jabba the Hutt's palace in Return of the Jedi is a B'omarr monastery that the Hutt Cartel took over about half of; a monk's walker is briefly visible when C-3PO and R2-D2 enter at the beginning of the film. In both Star Wars Legends and the new Star Wars Expanded Universe, they retook full control of the palace after Jabba's death.
Literature
- Aeon 14:
- Cyborgization extends to this in many cases, such as the "mechs" in the Rika's Marauders series. Built by the Genevian Alliance as Super Soldiers during their war with the Nietzschean Empire, mechs have their limbs removed and replaced with attachment points for cybernetic limbs and weapons, a Brain–Computer Interface installed that includes a Restraining Bolt and a torso compartment for an AI core, and internal batteries for all their various add-ons (it's noted that some of Rika's c-batts would have to be removed in order for her genitalia to be made usable again). Later models have artificial skin to remove the need to take mechs out of their undersuits for cleaning.
- One extreme example is Malorie in the Warlord series, a pirate queen whom Katrina has removed from her body and kept alive as a Brain in a Jar to punish her for enslaving her earlier. Katrina later has her brain installed in a spider-like robot body when she needs her services for a caper, which Malorie shortly decides she actually likes better than her original human body and keeps after Katrina makes her a permanent part of her crew.
- Inverted with some AIs later in the series: Corsia has a Wetware Body grown for herself after falling in love with the human captain of the ship her core is installed in. It's stated to be capable of birthing children.
- All Tomorrows has the Gravital, which started out as a race of post-human scavengers called the Ruin Haunters, and rebuilt their civilization using alien Lost Technology. As their sun expanded into a red giant, they prepared themselves for the apocalypse by upgrading their bodies with cyborg parts, ultimately becoming completely mechanical.
- Colony: After suffering fatal injuries, the luckless protagonist Eddie O'Hare awakens to find his mortal remains plugged into an extremely clumsy mechanical body; his only organic components are his severed head and spinal column, currently suspended in a glass jar attached to the neck of his new body. It's eventually revealed that the process is so psychologically jarring that most recipients either die of shock or go completely insane - as was the case with Paulo San Pablos, the hitman that followed Eddie onto the Willflower.
- Diamond Dogs. The team attempting the increasingly deadly and complicated traps of the Blood Spire have to modify their minds and bodies to replace severed limbs, increase their intelligence and survival ability, and pass through doors which get smaller the further you go. Eventually they resemble greyhounds covered with diamond armor, the "diamond dogs" of the title. The Mad Scientist who carried out the augmentations is convinced it's his greatest work and kills himself so he won't have to change them back, leading the Sole Survivor stuck in that form.
- Futurepunk:
- Agent G: These are called "Shells" (as in Ghost in the). Notably, Shells look identical to human beings on the outside and are seemingly able to live normal lives in-between missions. They are also Implacable Man killing machines in the service of the government or Private Military Contractors.
- The Cyber Dragons Trilogy also has full cyborg bodies but they have become more commonplace with cheap knock offs and plastic versions replacing the extremely expensive ones from Agent G They are still extremely expensive but no more so than extensive plastic surgery.
- In Glasshouse, the Amnesiac Hero has flashes of his time as a soldier whose body had more in common with a 21st-century tank than with those who drove them.
- Legends of Dune: Cymeks are a group of transhuman brains in jars that make use of fully mechanized bodies. Said bodies are typically purpose-built for a specific function and are rarely humanoid. Undermining their more-robot-than-human nature is that they stand with Omnius and his thinking machines against humanity.
- Pilgrennon's Children: The villains of The Emerald Forge have used Jananin's Brain–Computer Interface technology to place the brains of dolphins and some of the organs of other animals into mechanical wyvern and griffin bodies that Gamma can control with her mind.
- Rebuild World: Common for hunters in this Cyberpunk setting, but most of these came to be via We Can Rebuild Him. Many hunters carry a Brain Uploading 'black box' device on their body to be recovered post-mortem, with a saved version of their consciousness inside, such things often being part of an insurance plan, which is why corpses are taken in Search and Rescue operations. This kind of backup results in some enemies coming for Resurrection Revenge on Akira as this. The various Sense Loss Sadness this leads to is explored in depth. Nelia, being a brain-only cyborg, has the benefit of her connection to her prosthetic bodies allowing her a Brain–Computer Interface to plug into her vehicles and control them as if they were her body, allowing her to be an Ace Pilot of Mini-Mecha and a Badass Driver.
- Seek:
- Winnifred had her limbs, her lower body, and most of her lower face amputated shortly after birth and replaced with cybernetic equipment, and later on replaced most of her remaining bone with more cybernetics. The only organic parts she has left are her upper skull, brain, part of her neck, and her heart. Such augmentations are required amongst the Twenty-Nine Families.
- It's possible for someone to invert this trope by growing a whole new flesh body to remove their nearly complete cybernetic augmentations, though this is frowned upon by the Twenty-Nine Families, as one of Winnifred's uncles was banished for doing so.
- The Ship Who...: Shellpeople are cybernetics carried to an extreme, somewhere between this, Wetware CPU, and Man in the Machine. In this setting babies and young children who would survive only with great difficulty otherwise are wired up and placed into life support capsules called "shells". They don't grow and can't move or use the senses they were born with, instead relying entirely on sensors and connections built into the shells. Adult shellpeople are implanted into and in complete control of entire space ships and space stations, which they percieve as their true bodies. As there are some things shellpeople just can't do, they take partners called "brawns" to help them out.
- Soon I Will Be Invincible: The majority of Fatale's body is cybernetic, due to a horrific vehicular accident she suffered while on vacation in Brazil. She originally joined the NSA because they were the only ones who could afford to pay for the upkeep her body requires, but she joins the newest iteration of the Champions because Black Wolf can also afford to keep her in one piece.
- The Space Odyssey Series: According to the first book, the Benevolent Precursors progressively replaced their bodies with cyborg implants as they wore out until the only organic components left to them were their brains. And eventually, Brain Uploading made even this obsolete, with the race existing as mechanical minds inhabiting Sapient Ship bodies — until they transcended physical existence altogether.
- Whateley Universe: Deathlist, an A-List supervillain named for the large number of heroes he's killed, has only his brain and a few other vital organs left from his original body. He had been a cyborg most of his life, having been thrown into a trash compactor by his parents when he manifested as a mutant.
- Whitchapel Gods prominently features a supernatural disease called the clacks that turns living beings into machines bit by bit. As it's a Steampunk novel, the machines tend to run on clockwork and coal power.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Tin Woodsman started out as a munchkin whose body parts were gradually chopped off by an enchanted axe and replaced until there was nothing left of him but tin. This notably is adapted out of the Film Adaptation.
- Worm: Sphere was driven insane by the Simurgh and used his skill with artificial ecosystems to extract all of his internal organs and seal them inside an armored, humanoid robot body. Due to its largely featureless white appearance, he became known as Mannequin.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who:
- Starting with their second appearance in "The Moonbase", the Cybermen became this, having all-encompassing huge metal bodies and fully integrated mechanics. While it's consistently agreed that internally, they still retain some organic parts (and that they can convert other humans and humanoids into Cybermen), the exact details are never given. It's regularly shown that the majority of them is mechanical, to the point that they're sometimes mistaken for robots by those unaware of their true nature.
- The parallel-universe Cybermen created on an alternate Earth by Cybus Industries in "Rise of the Cyberman"/"The Age of Steel" are described as being nothing more than human brains in completely mechanical bodies.
- The Toclafane from "The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" are humans from the distant future who had their heads removed from their bodies and placed into spherical robotic shells to survive after the last stars in the universe went out. Unfortunately, the conversion completely destroyed their sanity, and now they willingly serve the Master and kill on his orders because they think it's fun.
- The Cybermen created as a slave army by Missy in "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven" are cyber-converted human skeletons without even organic brains, inhabited by copies of the originals' personalities with the emotions removed, created using Gallifreyan "Matrix" technology.
- Power Rangers:
- Power Rangers Time Force: Frax, Ransik's Co-Dragon, was originally the goodhearted Doctor Ferricks who treated Ransik after Venomark attacked. Ransik repaid him by destroying his lab, stealing his medicine, and leaving him for dead. Ferricks's robot assistants saved his life by replacing his missing body parts with mechanical ones, after which the Maddened Into Misanthropy doctor infiltrated Ransik's organisation under the guise of a robot in order to plot his revenge. His revenge fails, and Ransik punishes him by killing the Ferricks personality and reducing Frax to a loyal helper robot with no free will. This so horrifies Ransik's daughter (who had been Ferricks's Secret-Keeper for a short time, assuming that her father had a good reason for his actions) that she betrays him to the Rangers, kicking off the series finale.
- Power Rangers: Dino Thunder: Terrance "Smitty" Smith used to be a brilliant scientist, but an experimental chemical he was working on destroyed his body. Mesogog rebuilt him into the armored cyborg Zeltrax.
- Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: Mig and Benglo of the Fearcats initially lost to the Rangers. Then Flurious used his Gyros to transform them into powerful cyborgs. This didn't buy Flurious any loyalty, however; the Fearcats feigned it until it was no longer convenient for them.
- Star Trek: Discovery: Bridge Bunny Airiam, who appears to be an android, is revealed to be one in "Project Daedalus". After suffering catastrophic injuries in a shuttle crash, she had to be cyberized to the point that even parts of her brain were replaced with computer memory that she has to download to offline storage periodically or run out of space. This allows her body to be taken over by the rogue AI Control, forcing Burnham to Mercy Kill her via airlock.
- Super Sentai
- Choujuu Sentai Liveman: Doctor Mazenda gradually replaces her body parts with mechanical appendages throughout the series, with the goal of giving herself a fully robotic body to preserve her beauty. She eventually fully roboticizes herself, but only as a last resort to keep her brain from being extracted, as by that point she'd come to regret forfeiting her humanity.
- In Tensou Sentai Goseiger, Robogog turns out to be one of these, having transplanted his brain into a robotic body.
Manhua
- My Beloved Mother have the titular character, Milan, a robot caretaker serving as the guardian of the Raised by Robots protagonist, Sinbell. For most of the story Milan is assumed to be just another caretaker robot issued to orphans, until the final chapter's revelation that Sinbell's biological mother, Aya, uses herself to shield her son from a massive gas explosion - her Dying Wish is for her consciousness transplanted into the robot prototype, Milan, for her to continue her duties as a parent. Which means Milan the robot is a vessel for Aya's soul.
Music
- The Mechanisms: Drumbot Brian has had everything but his heart mechanized. Later live shows give his performer full-face makeup to match the lore.
Roleplay
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech: The Manei Domini were a group of elite, independent forces inside the Word of Blake, all of whom had cybernetic parts. While many Manei Domini only had a few implants and could easily pass for human (particularly ones who specialized in infiltration and spying, the Zombie infantry and most of the high-ranking Manei Domini of all types had extensive prosthetic replacements to the point that they were usually at least 75% artifical.
- Cyberpunk (RPG):
- Adam Smasher debuted in Cyberpunk 2020, but he was one of many "full conversion" or "full 'borgs". There was the Gemini that was made to look like a human, several that looked robotic, an aircraft, and the fearsome Dragoon. The Dragoon was a 7-8 foot tall killing machine barely controlled by cyberware and drugs, the only organic part was the human brain that controlled it. Many "full 'borgs" opted for a Brain in a Jar system where they could swap bodies.
- Borgware in general is how one normally does full conversion. It generally requires an Implanted Linear Frame, which in turn requires high Body and Grafted Muscle and Bone Lace to be installed first. The highest grade of linear frame requires two applications of Grafted Muscle and Bone Lace before it can be installed. It is also very expensive and very taxing on your Humanity and Empathy, placing your average solo at serious risk of going cyberpsycho.
- Magic: The Gathering:
- The Unstable joke set introduces the Order of the Widget, a group of well-intentioned but rather insane artificers who replace body parts to function better. Many consist of little more than a head and a limb or two mounted on a clockwork or steampunk mechanical body; their leader, the Grand Calcutron, is enhanced to the point of being completely immobile and no longer actually counting as even an Artifact Creature in game terms, but just an Artifact.
- Phyrexians start out as flesh-and-blood newts, but gradually replace most of their bodies with machinery in a process called compleation. In the novel Planeswalker, Xantcha pries the faceplate off a dead Phyrexian priest to show her companions that nothing remains of the creature's original body but its brain.
- Rifts: Full-conversion cyborgs have their entire bodies except for their brain and spinal column replaced with machinery. Many lean into the unsettling aspect of their appearance, opting to have their facial plates sculpted into demonic, skeletal, or otherwise monstrous shapes. Others prefer a facsimile of their original face. Some will go so far as to have their original face transplanted onto the robot body, kept alive with artificial blood vessels (assuming they don't just keep their entire head and only switch the skull out for cybernetics, which may be the most common option).
- Shadowrun:
- The 2nd Edition supplement Cybertechnology. It is possible to replace a person's arms, legs, torso, and skull with cybertech, with only their brain remaining from their original body. However, cybermancy magic must be used to allow the recipient to survive the complete loss of all Essence, and even then they become a cyberzombie.
- Fourth Edition added Cyborgs, who were Brain in a Jar types that no longer had a physical body. This averts the normal neurological effects of losing too much of one's organic body and also makes them at home in cyberspace to a degree not even Technomancers can match, but the downside is that they're very limited in the real world because rather than operating a physical body directly, they have to take control of a drone like a Rigger and pilot it, and their ability to perform tasks with that drone is based on the software programs they have for it rather than individual skill.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Servitors, cybernetic automatons used in all aspects of Imperial function, from scribes to maintenance workers to gun platforms, are usually vat-grown, but criminals, heretics, and failed Space Marine candidates can also face servitor conversion. They're mindwiped and stripped of all humanity, and the human parts mostly exist to not violate the Imperium taboo on true AI.
- The Adeptus Mechanicus believe that flesh is weak and corrupt and are encouraged to replace their organic parts with cybernetics to become closer to the Machine God. Recently-inducted priests typically only have a few enhancements, such as a mechanical limb or two or bionic eyes, but as they progress through the ranks they swiftly become far more machine than man. The eldest and most respected of their order are often little more than brains in purely mechanical bodies, often modified and added to to the point that they're barely even humanoid anymore.
- Space Marines of the Iron Hands chapter have a similar attitude to the Mechanicus. Newly initiated members have their left hands replaced and keep going from there, eventually replacing everything but their brains and progenoid glands if they live long enough.
- Necromunda: Ambots are created by taking the central nervous systems of ambulls — large, insectoid alien animals — implanting them with neural controllers and wiring them in mechanical shells modeled after the ambulls' natural bodies; the resulting cyborg is then mainly used for excavation. This allows ambots to retain their natural digging instincts while benefiting from greater mechanical strength, endurance and built-in tools. Like servitors, this process also allows their Mechanicum creators to circumvent the Imperium's ban on AI.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: Holtz Flores was a victim of the Mechanika Virus like most of the inhabitants of Noctis City, but instead of getting the free bioskin from the government, he simply decided to have the rest of himself permanently roboticized, with the exception of his brain.
- Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.: Dozer-class F.R.E.A.K.s are mostly mechanical save for their brains, as they happen to be F.R.E.A.Ks. whose Healing Factor has finally run out due to defects in the cloning process.
- BioShock:
- BioShock: This is essentially what a Big Daddy is, albeit in a proto-Diesel Punk version. A Big Daddy is created by selecting a criminal or other person on the fringe of society, grafting their organs into a huge metal diving suit, and mentally conditioning them to protect the Little Sisters. Point Prometheus features a lengthy section where Jack undergoes the process.note although seemingly not the non-reversible elements, as seen in the endings where Jack is seen conspicuously suitless. This still doesn't explain what that machine did to his voice box, though.
- BioShock Infinite: The Handymen retain only a few of their original organs in their massive steampunk bodies, most prominently their heads and hearts — which can be seen via a porthole in their torsos and shot by wily players. Given the powerful but clumsy tech that was used to remake them, Handymen find this condition agonizing.
- BlazBlue: Relius Clover modified his wife Ignis and his daughter Ada into cyborg puppets that resemble metal versions of their former selves.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III: In Multiplayer, David "Prophet" Wilkes is easily the most augmented specialist. He is said to be 70% cybernetic by the time the game's events happen.
- Copy Kitty: Every Cyber in the 'verse was a Randomly Gifted person who was roboticized (usually of the unwilling kind) by the Cybers presumably to expand their ranks. Isotope, the one who appears in game doesn't even look like she was ever organic, and judging by the developer's worldbuilding, that's par for the course.
- Cyberpunk 2077:
- Adam Smasher used to be a human but cared so little for his organic side that in the current day, he's almost entirely robotic (96%, to be specific), his flesh now consisting of nothing more than small amount of skin stretched over a robotic face. And even the face may not be real, given that realistic skin coatings for cyberware have been a thing in the setting for in-universe decades.
- In the Phantom Liberty DLC, Songbird is revealed to effectively be a fullborg from the waist up, with her head, arms and chest being replaced by chrome. Unlike Smasher, this was far less consensual and was implied to be due to the FIA taking advantage of her being severely disoriented from her trips to the Blackwall.
- Cyborg Justice has an ostensibly human player character starting the game by dying in a space accident before being converted into an almost entirely mechanical cyborg by the other cyborgs on the planet. Since this is a full conversion, the only important part of your character's body is the core (containing both the brain and main reactor). Since the other parts are swappable and replacable , this comes with the option to relieve enemy cyborgs of their limbs before attaching them to yourself.
- Daemon X Machina: The player character, known only as the Rookie, can become one by upgrading themselves, with each upgrade replacing more and more of their organic body with cybernetics until barely anything organic remains.
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Player Character Adam Jensen is working as a security officer for Sarif Industries, which makes cybernetics, when he's grievously wounded in a terrorist attack against the company. The company has his body almost completely rebuilt using their latest technology, to the point where the only part of him left that is indisputably OEM is his brain.
- Doom (2016): Samuel Hayden is a UAC chairman encased in a powerful 10 foot tall mechanical body. Hayden was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, meaning the only organic pieces of his new body are only parts of his brain.
- F-Zero: Mighty Gazelle's backstory is that he used to be a human until the "great accident" nearly killed him, and his body had to be replaced with cybernetics to save his life. There's not a single organic part seen on his body. The only time players can see his original appearance is when Gazelle wins a Grand Prix in X, as seen at the top of this page.
- Fallout: Robobrains are robots controlled by a human brain implanted into a transparent tank on their heads. Most are little more than psychotic automata due to the extensive conditioning and mental scrubbing, but one group of eccentric magnates deliberately turned themselves into robobrains, minus the conditioning, to make themselves immortal.
- Final Fantasy XIV: Quickthinx Allthoughts, the leader of the Illuminati, is revealed to be more machina than goblin after he survives getting a bullet to the head from Mide. The heroes had thought he was merely wearing a mask and partially cybernetic prior to the reveal.
- Hi-Fi RUSH: Roquefort doesn't look like one at first, appearing mostly human with only a few cybernetic implants. In reality, the vast majority of his body is mechanical, something that becomes extremely obvious once he transforms into a gigantic mechanical werewolf.
- League of Legends: Orianna pushes this trope to its limit, as every part of her is now mechanical, even though she started out as an ordinary human girl. After she succumbed to the effects of toxic air, her body parts were slowly replaced piece by piece until only her heart remained, which she ended up transplanting into her father to save his life.
- Mass Effect 2 reveals that the Collectors, despite appearing to be Insectoid Aliens, are heavily-disguised cyborgs. They were originally a race conquered and enslaved by the Reapers, but as indoctrination destroyed their intelligence, they were implanted with Reaper tech to compensate; over generations of cloning and genetic experimentation, more implants were added to replace organs that failed to form, until the Collectors were reduced to carapaces draped over highly-sophisticated machinery. Today, they're just cheap clones kept active through one-size-fits-all implants. And that species that the Collectors used to be? The Protheans — a race so different that you'd be hard-pressed to find similarities between the two.
- Mega Man:
- Mega Man Zero: Chronologically, Dr. Weil is the first of this type, as previously humans "just" had cybernetic implants. Weil, meanwhile, not only had his whole body replaced by machinery, his mind was converted into data and downloaded into said body. Said body is both The Needless and has a godly Healing Factor in its self-repair systems. The only "flesh" he has left is the skin making up his face and his hair, and it's shown up-close in Mega Man Zero 4 when revealing he survived a Kill Sat and again after Zero makes him explode that it's machine underneath. This was meant to be The Punishment for causing the Elf Wars and turning Earth into a barely habitable world, but Weil despite hating his condition used it to his advantage to survive long enough to plan his revenge centuries later. Even when he's seemingly Killed Off for Real after fusing with the Ragnarok orbital cannon and having the whole station break apart and burn up in atmosphere, Weil's spirit survives the intervening centuries bound to the remnants of Ragnarok, becoming Model W.
- Mega Man ZX: These become more common by the time of the series, albeit still in a minority since humans still prefer (albeit far more extensive) implants. The Sage Trinity of Legion are all humans who gave up their old bodies to live with bionic bodies (Masters Thomas and Albert chose to keep their human features and hair, while Mikhail went further to include a more obvious mechanical body). It's implied Ciel did this to herself, since she was still active just a few years prior to ZX despite there being a two-century Time Skip between it and Zero 4, and Albert actually went one step further by having his "Legion" body be Actually a Doombot while he converted his real body in secret into a cyborg as part of his plan to become the Ultimate Mega Man.
- Metal Gear: In between Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Raiden was converted into a full-body cyborg. He usually leaves his mechanical parts uncovered, with only his face looking consistently organic. Four years later, full-body cyborgs, such as the Winds of Destruction and assorted Elite Mooks, are much more common. Sundowner is trying to use the process on children to turn them into Child Soldiers, using Raiden's experiences as a template.
- Metroid:
- Metroid Prime: Hunters: Weavel is one of these, having become one after being left for dead in a fight against Samus. The only organic parts of his body left are his brain and spinal cord.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: 94% of Ghor's body is stated to be completely mechanical, while the other 6% is what's left of his original body. He's typically a Nice Guy known for making charitable donations and occasionally working for free, although in his battle armor he becomes a lot more aggressive.
- Mortal Kombat:
- The Lin Kuei cyborgs such as Cyrax and Sektor appear visibly robotic, but they still retain a human brain and spinal cord to function and maintain their personalities. An ongoing plot with the faction has the leader trying to cyberize the whole Lin Kuei and restrict their memories, turning them into unquestioning soldiers. Cyrax actively rebels against this plot, while Sektor ends up being the one to further push it with the goal of himself becoming the new head of the Lin Kuei.
- Besides Cyrax, Smoke (in the original timeline) and Sub-Zero (in the new timeline) also end up as cyborgs with a few human parts.
- Mortal Kombat 11: Frost willingly turns herself into a cyborg after aligning herself with Kronika and willingly betrays Sub-Zero as she felt he didn't appreciate her potential. Not only that, she also forcibly robotizes her ex-Lin Kuei comrades into Cyber Ninjas out of pettiness. When he notices what she has done, it horrifies Sub-Zero as he didn't like being robotized. Even the other kombatants express their dismay at what Frost has become. During non-story fights, one of Frost's Fatalities involves ripping out the opponent's brain and placing it into a Cyber Lin-Kuei body. While some of the kombatants such as Shao Kahn and Kano are unpleasant to begin with, seeing them mechanized against their will is jarring. It is one of only two Fatalities in the series (along with Shang Tsung's Soultaker in previous games) that inflicts a Fate Worse than Death rather than just killing the victim.
- No Straight Roads: Neon J is a war veteran who implicitly went through a We Can Rebuild Him situation; his head, limbs, and lower torso are all visibly mechanical, and it's unclear exactly how much of his body is still organic. Zuke even mistakes him for a robot at one point before being angrily corrected.
- Dr. Nefarious from Ratchet & Clank used to be an organic alien◊, but was later made into a robot. You wouldn't know that from looking at him, though; he has no visible organic parts whatsoever, not even in the dome atop his head. The same thing may or may not also apply to his Alternate Self, Emperor Nefarious.
- RoboCop: Rogue City: OCP is working on Project Afterlife, a project that promises to give dying people a second chance at life in robotic bodies. In the final mission of the game, the Old Man has his brain transferred into a RoboCop 2, but he ends up going insane and becomes the game's Final Boss.
- Spider-Man (PS4): The City That Never Sleeps DLC focuses on Hammerhead undergoing cybernetic conversion following a brutal shooting at the hands of Yuriko Watanabe. Basically, apart from his head, the majority of his body is a gigantic heavyset mech.
- Star Wars: The Old Republic:
- A sidequest on Dromund Kaas features the renegade Sith Lord Grathan having captured loyalist Imperial soldiers and had their brains surgically removed and installed in droid bodies as experimental Super Soldiers. The Player Character meets one who awoke before he could be fully programmed and begs them to kill him and his comrades and destroy the research, and to tell his commanding officer what happened to them.
- The Sith Inquisitor's story on Dromund Kaas pits them against their master Lord Zash's rival Darth Skotia, a Sith Lord who has had so much of his body replaced with cybernetic parts that the Inquisitor is able to use Hollywood Hacking to sabotage his body, allowing them to assassinate him so that Zash can advance her career. You can also suggest to Khem Val upon first meeting him that they eat him, but Khem remarks that trying to eat something with so many machine parts is "bad for the digestion"—which Skotia thinks is Actually Pretty Funny.
- Stellaris has "ascension perks" that allow empires to embrace the machine to varying extents. The Cybernetics perk simply involves cybernetic parts — reflected by the addition of the Cyborg trait to pops and leaders. The general population becomes hardier and more productive, whilst leaders become more effective in their general areas and live longer. Meanwhile the Synthetic perk allows the empire to transcend their fleshy/vegetal/fungoid/etc. bodies entirely and become true machines... though Spiritualist empires will decide the transcendent empire committed mass suicide and were replaced by soulless machines and attempt to wipe out the abominations.
- Warframe: The Grineer use cybernetics to make up for their Clone Degeneration, replacing failing organs piecemeal until there's very little of the original flesh left. Vay Hek in particular appears to be nothing more than a head (with cybernetic eyes and nose) mounted on a mechanical frame, which detaches and flies away when he's defeated. It's often said that the Grineer are better at repairing broken bodies than they are at making them right in the first place.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 1: The Faced Mechon pilots are so heavily cyborgized that very little of their original bodies remain past their heads, and many of their organs have been removed.
- Your Turn to Die: In chapter 3-1, the remaining survivors in the Deadly Game end up meeting with doll versions of various deceased characters. One of these is of the real Sou Hiyori, though he ends up taking a new name due to his original name being used by one of the Death Game participants, Midori being the default new name. Near the end of the chapter, Midori ends up revealing he isn't actually dead, but he ended up replacing parts of his body with those of dolls, to the point that even he himself says he's more machine than human, with his human parts being used on the other dolls. This is done so as to confuse a device that determines whether someone is a human or doll, allowing him to cheat in a sub-game that utilises said device.
Webcomics
- A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: After her third upgrade, Snuffy becomes almost entirely mechanical. She gains a pair of robotic arms, a motor to move them with, neural upgrades to make her more intelligent, and a large rotary gun replacing most of her back. By the end of it, she's described as more machine than dog and as being almost entirely made of metal.
- Cassiopeia Quinn: Full-conversion cyborgs co-exist with Ridiculously Human Robots, with only the presence of limited organic material distinguishing them. The minor antagonist Dr. Karla Botz hopes to start a galactic robot uprising to dominate all organics, despite only being a cyborg herself. Notable examples include Zeke, who's pared down to a human brain in an otherwise purely mechanical body, and Motor Minx, who has a partly organic head and is entirely mechanical from the neck down.
- Homestuck: In the Dream Bubbles, a number of ghosts of Rufioh are seen to have had their heads grafted onto mechanical horse bodies; all these instances of Rufioh hate their life as a result.
- Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Past a level of conversion, it's easier for a Super-Soldier to become "five pounds of flesh strapped to a robot" than to work around the limitations of their remaining organic parts. Spider opted for a full machine body with tons of bonus features.
Jones: Oh man, was she okay, what happened to her?
Angel: Oh nothin', she volunteered for it, she just wanted to be a badass cyborg. Those upgrades can be super addictive.
- Outsider: The Umiak freely and unsentimentally modify themselves to meet whatever situations arise, and by the present day the vast majority of their population is vat-grown at need and many sport mechanical enhancements of various sorts. The most extreme examples of this are the hardtroops, highly specialized warriors that consist of little more than a nervous and digestive system inside of a large, powerful mechanical shell, which depending on the "model" can be further modified to sport any number of weapons and modified limbs to turn them into specialized shock troops and living weapons platforms. Notably, because all Umiak are artificially created to serve as living tools anyway, there isn't any great social divide between the hardtroops and their more organic fellow crew members.
- The Petri Dish:
- Bob is a cyborg, but the only organic component is his brain. He can breathe, pee, poop, and fart, but those are done with synthetic organs rather than organic ones.
- iBall is another cyborg, whose only organic component is his massive eye.
- Umlaut House:
- In the original comic Rick is fully cybernetic below the neck, his head can detach and skitter around on mechanical spider legs or attach to variant bodies. He even tries a female body in one arc so his boyfriend can avoid coming out to his parents. In Umlaut House 2 he clones a new body for himself and permanently grafts his head to it though.
- Also in the sequel, teenage superspy Eliza has replaced much of her body with cyberware. It's never specified how much but she assures her mom that her brain is still mostly organic and she survives partial skeletonization in one comic.
Western Animation
- Archer: Over the events of "Edie's Wedding", Barry, the show's resident cyborg, is shown to be completely robotic, even his follow-up appearance in the Season 7 episode "Motherless Child" shows him as a robot skeleton.
- Challenge of the GoBots: The titular characters are organic brains installed in Transforming Mecha bodies.
- Futurama: In "The Six Million Dollar Mon", Hermes replaces pieces of his body with cybernetics until he's reduced to an organic brain (and dreadlocks) in a hulking mecha-Hermes. Then he decides to replace his brain with a robot CPU as well.
- Love, Death & Robots:
- "Good Hunting": Yan, a Huli Jing, is forced against her will to become a steampunk cyborg to appeal to the mayor's sexual desires. After killing him, she approaches her human friend, who uses his mechanical prowess to give her an upgraded body able to transform into a mechanical version of her fox form.
- "Zima Blue": The eponymous artist has been cybernetically augmented so thoroughly that his few remaining organic components are hidden inside the polymer shell that's replaced his skin. And then it turns out that Zima actually used to be a robot that remade itself into a human, before remaking himself into a cyborg; during his climactic self-dismantling, no organic components can be found anywhere in Zima's body.
- The Simpsons:
- "Treehouse of Horror II": Mr. Burns uses Homer's brain to power his robot, which of course acts just like Homer (i.e not interested in doing any work at all).
- "Treehouse of Horror X": Dick Clark is revealed to be one in "Life's a Glitch, Then You Die", with his body melting when Y2K hits, followed shortly by his robotic endoskeleton.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!: Lord Duke Scrapperton was once an ordinary man who lost his leg in an accident and had to replace it with a robotic prosthetic. Scrapperton decided to get a "full matching set" and replaced his entire body with robot parts.
- SWAT Kats: Mac and Molly Metallicat were once notorious gangsters. But a prison escape left them both gravely injured, but washed up on the shore near the home of an eccentric retired scientist who did not know they were criminals, and saved them by turning them into bots.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- Teen Titans (2003): Cyborg was almost submitted to this by Fix-It, who actually thought was doing him a favor by replacing his remaining human components. Fix-It only backed off when he saw Cyborg's memories and was reminded of what meant to be a human.
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