One of the easiest ways to visually indicate that a character is a Cyborg (and is therefore no longer wholly human) is to give them some kind of masklike mechanical plating or apparatus on their face that replaces part or all of it, usually covering their mouth and nose but not their eyes, and creating a stark contrast between their organic and inorganic bits at eye level. In less extreme cases, a character might just have an obviously artificial-looking lower face or jaw designed to look more normal, distinguished by how it's visibly a different color or is incongruent with the structure of the rest of their head. Most of the time, the reason the character has this is that they've either replaced their nose and mouth entirely or had them involuntarily removed in some kind of horrible accident. Characters like this are also much more likely to be Full Conversion Cyborgs with very little flesh remaining.
Because of the visual association, these types of faceplates can often serve as futuristic versions of a character wearing a bandana on their face or being a Gas Mask Mook. They may outright have additional apparati attached to their faceplate, like respirators, to give it some sort of additional function. An Electronic Speech Impediment is a given, since these characters' voices will almost always be electrically modulated due to their lack of a normal mouth. By the same token, it can make a character feel more mysterious and aloof; since they don't have a mouth or cheeks, they can't make a variety of most facial expressions and the only way to read their emotions is through their eyes, so it can be tough to get a read on what these characters are feeling unless they say it out loud. If a character combines a faceplate like this with another head accessory like a One-Way Visor or tricked-out goggles, they may end up looking indistinguishable from a robot at first glance.
Per the title, this sort of customization tends to show up in Cyberpunk very frequently, since an article of gear that covers the nose and mouth looks and feels inherently punkish and rebellious.
Compare Mysterious Veil and One-Way Visor. Can be a visual indicator of how Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. Might overlap with Retractable Faceplate (especially if the character has a Nightmare Face underneath). If the faceplate is genuinely just a mask and isn't somehow connected to the character's face, that's a Cool Mask.
Examples
- Appleseed: Briareus' face is entirely covered by a faceplate with a round olfactory device and four small round lenses around it, as he's a Full-Conversion Cyborg.
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners:
- Kiwi wears a faceplate and is by far the coldest and most distant member of Maine's crew, something that makes her inscrutable for most of the series. When she takes it off, it's not pretty. She has no mouth underneath, just a void in her head. It's no wonder that she turns out to be The Mole.
- Talia Yang has a faceplate replacing her jaw. She's a former corpo now running with the chrome-obsessed Maelstrom gang, and the faceplate serves to show the casting away of her old self. In her case, the faceplate can open up to form Monstrous Mandibles.
- Mad Max: Fury Road: Immortan Joe's breathing mask covers his entire mouth and has many wires and tubes protruding from it, while underneath is nothing but bloody flesh covered in oozing lesions and boils. Using it, he's forced his body to live long beyond what it's supposed to and makes him a dead man without his life support.
- Masters of the Universe (2026): Trap-Jaw's lower jaw is a jagged metal affair attached to the organic part of his face.
- Cyberpunk (R. Talsorian) might just be the Trope Codifier.
- Faceplates are a very common sight on people with chrome in the setting, and are considered a type of body plating in most versions of the RPG. While people with more money are capable of purchasing faceplates that open and close like a human jawline and are designed to closely resemble a human face, many cyberpunks go without fancy faceplates and instead keep their more basic and intimidating grill-like plates, sometimes going so far as to customize them to resemble the Scary Teeth of monsters to look even more imposing.
- The Maelstrom play this for horror. Part of their transhumanist Gang of Hats nature is that their members deliberately augment their faces with chrome that makes them look like mutilated zombies or monstrous bug people; they'll often have entirely missing jaws, chunks carved out of their faces and replaced with Extra Eyes, or bulky ocular augmentations crudely sewn onto their foreheads.
- Kamen Rider:
- In the Showa era, the Kamen Riders were mostly cyborgs. Though they did not sport faceplates in their human forms, they do form part of their armored Henshin Hero forms. The original Riders #1 and #2 sported mouthplates which were officially known as Crushers.
- Averted in the case of Riderman, who wears a suit with an exposed mouth. Justified in that he is essentially a regular human with an cybernetic right arm.
- Kamen Rider X has the Perfecter, which is seen being fitted onto his helmet in his Transformation Sequence.
- As a Mythology Gag, most modern Kamen Riders also sport distinctive mouthplates despite the fact that they are hardly ever cybernetic. For instance, Kamen Rider Gaim has a mouthplate called the "War Crusher", which appears very much like the Crushers of the original Kamen Riders.
- Kamen Rider × Kamen Rider Drive & Gaim: Movie War Full Throttle: The "Mecha Ryoma Sengoku" reconstructed by Megahex sports a metal mask, though the reconstructed Kaito Kumon (who joins the heroes) doesn't. This may explained in that Kaito originally died somewhat less violently than Ryoma.
- Star Wars:
- After sustaining near mortal injuries on Mustafar, Darth Vader was forced to have numerous cybernetic augments added into him, including a respiratory device that gives him his trademark Vader Breath underneath his helmet.
- General Grievous is a Kaleesh Full-Conversion Cyborg who wears an entire metal exoskeleton, and as such has a completely rigid face and mouth that doesn't move, with only his eyes being visibly organic. His augmentations have also given him a very distinctive electronic rasp to his voice, although in some of his earliest appearances before Revenge of the Sith it's not as pronounced because at the end of the series, Mace Windu injures him by crushing his chest with the Force, damaging his lungs and electronics.
- Warhammer 40,000: As part of their general transhumanist philosophy, members of the Adeptus Mechanicus have almost always replaced large portions of their faces with metal gadgetry and plating to the point that they often look indistinguishable from creepy-looking robots underneath their hoods. In typical 40K fashion this is also highly stylized, with techpriests often having additional feelers or robotic tentacles draping off their faceplates to look even more inhuman. It also makes their military forces, the Skitarii, look like
classic Gas Mask Mooks.
- Helldivers II: Cyborg Radicals feature faceplates in their design that are intended to make them look scary and inhuman, which Super Earth exploits when putting together demonizing propaganda about the Cyborgs as a nation.
- Mech Arena: Sunny, a Legendary Pilot that specializes in Assault weapons, is said to have grown in a tough neighborhood and hailed as a hero in his community for his resolve to protect the innocent from criminals; he only joined the titular tournament to prove the grand prize, a youth serum, was a scam by Everlife to prey on the vulnerable. He appears as a young man wearing an electronic face mask that glitches into a monkey's fangs to go with his yellow, Chinese-patterned jacket, a Telescoping Staff, a bead collar, and a cybernetic monkey tail as part of his Sun Wukong theme.
- Mega City Force: The lower half of Cyborg's face is replaced by a grill-like faceplate, in order to provide some amount of visual distinction between him and RoboCop.
- Metal Gear: After becoming a Full-Conversion Cyborg in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Raiden has a metal exoskeleton with a visibly artificial steel jaw that reinforces how much of his body and himself he's lost over the years. By the start of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance he's adopted a more natural-looking faceplate, but after his initial body is destroyed he's placed into a new upgraded one that goes back to the "obviously artificial jaw" look. At the very end of the game, it's shown that he's found a more natural faceplate for that body as well.
- Neon Rhythm: Neon wears a pink-and-blue faceplate with colored neon lights on it. This also makes it so that her eyes and body language are the most expressive things about her, which adds to her Seen It All weariness. It also emphasises how she feels like an outsider in Contract Rush as a Fish out of Temporal Water, since by that point no one else around her is a cyborg.
- Overwatch: Genji is a Cyber Ninja who was rebuilt after suffering near-fatal injuries, and part of his appearance is a stylized faceplate that covers his upper and lower face, with a thin Tron Line One-Way Visor that he sees through. It's periodically shown that he can remove parts of the faceplate to show his true face behind it, though given the extent of his injuries (including scarring all over and a lack of anything organic below his upper lip), he naturally prefers not to.
- Quake IV: A common sight among the Strogg is a faceplate bolted onto the lower face. This can be seen on Berserkers, Gunners, Scientists, Sentries, and Tacticals.
- Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus has face plates covering most of the tech priest's faces, to varying degrees, as part of their body conversion. A common one covers the mouth, and has something covering one eye.
- SCP Foundation: The most-visible aspect of Director Calvin Bold (in charge of the Decommissioning Department)'s augmentations (added involuntarily by an accidental run-in with an anomalous medical system) are those to his face, with his eyes being replaced with crystalline compound eyes and most of the lower half of his face being covered by a permanently-attached rebreather mask connected to his respiratory system.
- Cyberpunk: Chamber's Bullets: Most of Clutch's face and lower jaw have been replaced by Needle with a purple faceplate after an unspecified accident a while ago. Hilariously, at one point in Episode 22 Hysterio0 forgets that he has this and suggests that he could try to silently mouth a command to Breach, which prompts Stradomyre to suddenly declare "I DON'T HAVE A MOUTH!"
- Nightmare Time: The episode "Time Bastard" features Executive Andrew Kilgore, CEO of CCRP in 2104. He's a cyborg who is now more robot than man, with a robotic arm, eye, and faceplate. Of course, since Nightmare Time was a very low-budget Zoom performance, the "faceplate" is just aluminum foil taped to actor Jeff Blim's face.
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) has Trap-Jaw, a villain whose lower jaw has been replaced with a metallic replica sporting jagged teeth.
- The Transformers: In a cast of Ridiculously Human Robots, stoic Decepticon lieutenant, Soundwave, stands out with his mechanical vocoder voice speaking in Machine Monotone, and while almost every other Cybertronian has eyes, nose, or a mouth, Soundwave has a single visor and a mouthplate.