Honestly? You gotta check out anything in the 'Detroit: Become Human' fandom tagged Connor/Hank. The baseline is already a cop and an android learning to see each other as people, but the fics that really dig into Connor’s evolving emotional framework get me. Some writers handle his slow-dawning self-awareness like he’s learning a new language for feelings he wasn’t programmed to have, and Hank’s gruff mentorship turns into something way more fragile. It’s less about the hardware and more about that weird, beautiful space where code starts to feel like consciousness.
There’s this one story where Connor keeps replaying a memory of Hank laughing and tries to understand why the audio file triggers a processing error he can’t resolve. The emotional depth comes from that mismatch—a machine trying to quantify a human moment and failing, which ironically proves he’s becoming something else. That specific, almost clinical approach to emotion creates a different kind of ache than your typical angsty romance.
For a complete left-field pick, I sometimes lurk in smaller fandoms like 'The Murderbot Diaries'. The fanfic there explores SecUnit’s profound desire not to be human, wrapped in layers of dry, terrified sarcasm. The depth is in the rejection of the trope, which is its own powerful emotional statement.