It might sound weird, but that kind of thinking is what made me dislike the big Sentinels from the moment i first saw them in X-men TAS. Yes i disliked them so much my teenage mind actualy switched off "rule of cool" and went towards considering the costs, colleteral damage and public outrage that these things should cause.
Which got worse over time. Because eventualy i wondered how if a country could have giant flying killer robots and openly deploy them in their own cities, the rest of the world would just shrug at that?
Because if anyone in the US government would have that kind of technology, it would result in a reaction from other countries and lead to an arms race.
This is also one problem i have with the destruction of Genosha in Morrison's run (besides the destruction itself being a pointless shock moment which robbed the franchise of several interesting world building possibilities), when a giant robot kills 16 million people in a few minutes, the world would react.
Everyone would want to investigate where it came from, who build it, who send it, how advanced the tech is and how it could be replicated or countered. The mutants would be the leasts of anyone's worries with that (especialy since their number just got reduced to an 8th of what it was a few hours ago).
Which is funny because i'm a fan of many mecha games and universe, so it's not like i dislike stompy bots in general (though i prefer them piloted) in my works of super hero fiction or can't ignore the whole logic issues behind them. But the moment i saw them in the first episodes of X-men TAS i just couldn't like them. I think they were one reason i never got myself to watch the show on Saturdays.
To me they looked silly with these faces and their purple paint job, their programming made them act stupid, they were impractical for what they were meant to be used for and for all their size they went down far too easy.
I guess the various other super hero cartoons of the time might have affected me though. Spiderman TAS featured much more subdued laser shooting secruity robots and the Spiderslayers were secretly deployed prototype tech produced at the demand of a criminal mastermind. Superman TAS had an almost practical looking mech suit the hero had a great fight with in the first two episodes. Big Guy and Rusty actualy adressed the logistics and even founding behind a giant combat robot and their targets were giant monsters so the size and armaments fit. Gargoyles also featured much more reasonable hero hunting robots.
When i finaly gave the X-men another chance it was by looking into the comics of 1997, which was when Operation Zero Tolerance was going on and featured what i still consider a much more reasonable model of Sentinels with the Prime types that were human sized, capable of hiding among the population and actualy acted smart.
Later X-men Evolution also did the Sentinels better in my opinion. Not only were they more compact looking, but also lacked the silly faces in favor of "glowing eyes" and were created by a clandestine organization as secret weapon.
So yeah everytime classic giant Sentinels show up in the comics, i'm almost predestined to roll my eyes and wish they would disappear in history section of the X-men franchise again.This man here speaks the truth. Can't believe I didn't think about that until he mentioned it. So true, if other countries saw those big sentinels or a robot destroying an entire island regardless of the occupants the entire world will respond with a direct attack or at least investigation.Very much cosigned, and kudos for the references to Spider-Man and Superman TAS from the same era. Spider-Man TAS, especially, was my favorite, and I loved the crossover/team-up with the TAS X-Men.Yeah he does but I raised this issue more than a year ago on the 'Unpopular/Controversial opinion on the XUniverse' thread.It annoyed me to no end how comics went with the idea of huge robots for so long.I mean they are supposed to find and either apprehend or destroy mutants who on top of having powers can hide in buildings ,narrow alleys basically any nook and cranny they fit in and you tell me a 50 foot sentinel will find them and smoke them out without destroying human property and causing human maiming and death because of how cumbersome their movement or indiscriminate their weaponry is? It's beyond implausible ,it's retarded and I was happy with how DoFP the film at least designed their future sentinels they were lithe and absolutely deadly.All sentinels should not exceed 7 or 8 feet to be at the very least a credible extraction or search and destroy platform if that size leaves them a bit too conspicuous for infiltration