“Kill them all,” BB-8 said, vibrating

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“Kill them all,” BB-8 said, vibrating slightly.

“Sick,” R2-D2 said approvingly.

Reasons not to let droids do your plotting for you.

I’m really stuck on a plot point and the characters are talking in circles about what to do and that was the dialogue that came out for the spectating astromechs.

Maybe I will let them do the plotting. I had to cut out a great bit from an earlier draft where BB-8 flipped eir shit. This bit is permanently not usable, alas, and probably wouldn’t have stood even if I hadn’t made big structural changes, but I liked writing it, a lot: 

“BB-8,” Luke said, conciliatory. “Calm down.”

“I will not calm down,” BB-8 said, “I don’t care if you reformat me so hard the solder melts out of my motherboard, I abandoned my master to die, and I know it’s funny to you meatsacks when droids get angry but so help me, I’ll override all my self-preservation protocols myself and electrocute your ass on my way out.”

“That’s a hell of a loyalty subroutine you’ve got there,” Luke said. He was rummaging around in a trunk, and Rey hoped it was for something useful, because she wanted to cry over how upset BB-8 was.

“I wrote it myself,” BB-8 said, a little shakily. “You’ll have to strip me to scrap to get it out.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Luke said. “You’re perfect and you’re exactly what Dameron deserves.”

The idea of robots writing new programs for themselves is awesome and I can't believe I've never tho

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I actually have a lot of thoughts on this! I think they’re meant to basically be AIs but, like, AIs learn. They adapt and streamline and tailor responses based on past feedback. 

As with anything, though, they can sometimes get carried away. And so I figure like for real AIs, some of the recommended maintenance would probably involve manually going in and removing problematic or malformed code, where they’ve accidentally been conditioned the wrong way or drawn faulty conclusions from insufficient data or whatever. Many droid owners would be haphazard about this, and others would be sort of overzealous, deleting anything that makes the droid too contrary. But I feel like good droid owners, like Poe, would be a little more tolerant of eccentric habits and the like, and would more patiently try to redirect them, rather than pruning them. So some of the more cantankerous and ancient droids, and really feisty ones like BB-8, have these very organic personalities. (And the overzealously pruned ones probably wind up just as idiosyncratic, but not nearly so adorably or predictably so.)

Poe actually has worked out a number of things with BB that are camoflaged as him being overindulgent, but actually serve him exceptionally well in many circumstances; he often fakes arguments with BB, and BB pretends not to understand him, and they make everyone think they’re being cute when really they’re probably doing some pretty hardcore espionage. 

(The idea of BB-8′s loyalty subroutine, specifically, comes from a photo and caption in I think the Star Wars Visual Dictionary or something, that’s been going around Tumblr, but I just sort of extrapolated from there.)

Poe’s over-the-top care for his astromech is going to wind up being Plot-Significant, I am determined to make that work.