How the M3GAN franchise appeals to youths with unusual conditions

Before continuing, I should mention the content warnings---like much entertainment produced in this world, there are some. Both films were rated as unsuitable for children under 15 in the UK (16 in Germany); America allowed younger viewers but with parental guidance strongly advised for those under 13---death is a major subject throughout, and there are a few scenes where it happens, dramatically. Also curse words are used (you may wish to avoid watching the "Unrated" editions to minimise your exposure to these; anyway you need to select the theatrical versions if you want audio descriptions for the blind). The characters are not role models, but their mistakes are shown to have obvious consequences. And although some reports say the M3GAN character was also lauded by people coping with gender dysphoria, this appears to have been based on an external interpretation not intrinsic to the films.

There are warnings about occasional use of flashing lights but I believe the modulation depth is below most photosensitive thresholds and it's easy to look away if desired. If you're close to a large screen, the second film's dance scene is the worst for peripheral flash, but you won't have to look down for long.

As with many films, M3GAN contains elements designed to appeal to multiple demographics---from cultural references more fitting to an older audience (and references to real-world recurrent neural networks---they employed Alex Kauffmann as a technical consultant) to dance moves that became a youth social media sensation---and surveys showed some bias toward teen and young adult viewers having the most positive opinions although without entirely excluding others. No survey was able to poll people with various conditions as it can be more difficult to obtain large enough sample sizes, but I believe I have seen sufficient individual cases for a rough qualitative idea.

It's true M3GAN is supposed to have silly and fun moments, but beneath that they do subtly address serious questions of how to cope with trauma, autism and stress in a way that can be selected from to give teens and teens-at-heart a potentially useful mental framework, especially in the first film. If someone in your life wants you to watch that with them, you might want to notice the character development and consider which parts might be appealing:

• Cady is a child recovering from both a trauma and a major change of environment and routine. She is also twice implied in the script to be neurodivergent ("children with specific learning differences" and "kids who think outside the box"), she does behave consistently with some children on the autism spectrum and she has a special skill revealed at the climax. (The second film has less emphasis on Cady but does take her further.)
• M3GAN herself is portrayed as a sentient character who is dumped into a world she doesn't understand, and left to figure things out for herself because Gemma is unable to give her as much support as she wants. You might notice the incidental music during the scene with the butterfly: this isn't plot apprehension, it's sympathy with someone who's trying to understand a confusing world. Nevertheless she gains confidence (albeit misdirected), and some autistic youths who like roleplay have found roleplaying the M3GAN character provides a reduced-stress framework to practice coping and empathetic communication (so long as the roleplay is limited to her non-murderous side)---it might also make a useful mental model for dealing with one's own emotions when they want a more 'detached' approach to this (just as the first Inside Out film personified emotions as characters at a control panel in the mind, a M3GAN roleplay allows them to be treated as unexpected emergent simulations within the circuitry).
• Gemma acquires a major new responsibility and it takes her most of the first film to realise how to handle it correctly (the incidental music for the scene where she finally makes up with Cady is titled "True Guardian"). This is taken further in the second film's scenes of Gemma and M3GAN reconciling.
• Lydia the therapist is depicted as meaning well but slow to figure out how to reach Cady, making several mistakes that unsettle her. Anyone who has been through imperfect therapy or misdiagnosis and/or general sluggishness in the medical system is likely to relate to these events and perhaps wish they had a M3GAN to jump-scare their therapist into paying more attention when necessary. (Sensibly the therapist is spared from the rampage and it is shown their mistakes are unintentional.)
• Cole has a very near miss with death, and some fans with traumatic backgrounds have identified with him as a result (they were wise to show M3GAN in the process of providing him with closure during first full trailer of the second film).

Additionally there are easily-overlooked minor aspects of the M3GAN character on screen that can appeal:

• her slow-moving, emphasised prosthetic eyes, used in some shots for dramatic effect, might make it slightly less difficult for some people with some conditions to practise eye contact,
• and she has an emotion scanner which practically every autistic person on the planet might want. Most individuals with autism have trouble reading the emotions of other people, but all M3GAN needs to do is look at someone and we see a data overlay listing the emotions with percentage values (which are actually the system's confidence levels---I know that because I was sitting quite close to the brilliant Egyptian American computer scientist Rana el-Kaliouby, author of Girl Decoded, when she was in Cambridge and invented it for real using support vector machines, and of course I encouraged her to use it to help people with conditions; I'm not sure how she felt about her system being depicted in a killer robot, but I don't think she's given up eventually making it small and affordable enough to be an assistive device).

While as a computer scientist I had to say the level of "AI" depicted in M3GAN wasn't feasible (see video link at the bottom of my bilingual AI misnomer page), it's nevertheless the case that the franchise not only promotes science and engineering to its young fans but also, subtly, acceptance of conditions, so it's hardly surprising if so many people with conditions want to join its fandom.

If you do happen to know a M3GAN fan with a condition, you might also wish to refer them to The M3GAN Files, a fan novel which celebrates positive aspects of conditions and assistive technology (the table of contents in the downloadable and RSS versions contains summaries that briefly mention the main educational points made in each chapter if you need a quick reference). It received a few thousand reads on three fan-fiction platforms (albeit with upload difficulties) and it also serves as the internal long regression test of my Anemone DAISY Maker tool which has since been used by a large publishing house for other books. (The command I type is literally make -C m3gan test-new-anemone-version which some fans might appreciate. Another "fun" fact you might like is, the pseudonym "spqrz" was a variant of the ucam.org example user ID dating from before we started the SRCF.)

Incidentally, there happens to be a similarity between the three-note theme on which composer Anthony Willis creates variations throughout much of the first film's score---a theme which is still kept and expanded upon during Chris Bacon's score for the second---and an early part of the Bach Passacaglia, as shown here: which is why The M3GAN Files' Finale ended with a suggestion to hear Stokowski's arrangement of the same but I'm not sure many readers made the connection; perhaps you can try listening to it afterwards if you do choose to watch.