Already had this stuff in mind because I was posting on twitter. One of those thought chains of 'having fun posting one thing, oh damn, that makes me think of another, oh damn, now I ended up on this, and still wanna talk about it.'
Obviously, mecha with more organic origins will have an advantage here with sometimes just having you know, organs, spines, etc but tbh even fully machine insides are still really cool to me and are scary and impressive in their own way. Seeing pistons, cables, tubes, pipes, etc all within the inside of a fictional robot just kinda adds to a feel of it being 'real' and when I say real I don't mean realistic, I just mean as a thing that has.... well, things that make it go.
This has always been a thing, it's not done solely by 'real robots,' which itself is already kind of a loaded concept, but like, for instance, lots of Mazinger art is just 'what if the Mazinger's armor was removed' and that is a consistent, recurring element. There's lot of artwork, figures, etc that have been around for a while that take what is the grandpa of piloted robots and try to put all these parts inside of them.
For me, I can just say like, it's just a giant aesthetic appeal! Again it doesn't matter if the insides themselves are realistic, or consistent, or anything like that. Their very existence just always improves designs for me. Like, tbh, I don't think I've ever seen someone draw the insides of a mecha which then has me go 'Damn, that sucks!' I love them all. I love when models do it, having fake pistons that move in and out when you move an arm or a foot, I love when artists like Mamoru Nagano go ham and just make an entire inner frame for their designs ahead of time, I love when IBO made it a basis for making the mecha feel mass produced, I love how Dunbine frequently has art incorporating organic components inside of a bunch of machines, I just simply love when the mecha have insides.
to add to dylan's, post especially the nagano part, its always interesting to see in more outwardly mechanical designs, how each artist approaches the very organic concept of a "skeleton" and such inner for their inner frames.
building the shape language of that inner frame in a way, that is interesting to look at, has that hint of more humanoid organic look, while still adding the greebles and more "hard" shapes of standard mechanical design, is kinda of a skill that is particularly hard to master, even more so when adding the fact you will need to design everything to have shell put over it later.
i am still very much baby at doing it, and have properly tried it yet, but like dylan said, its neat!
