The three icons at the start of every Love, Death and Robots episode in season 2 are easy to overlook, but provide important hints about the stories ahead. Like season 1, each short in season 2 opens with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it title card showing three symbols. The icons mirror the style of the Love, Death and Robots logo, but they're always unique, often foreshadowing critical events or twists.
The stylistic similarities between the icons create a thru-line for a series with no solid inter-episode connections. As an anthology, Love, Death and Robots includes a wide variety of animation styles and stories. The icons before each episode make it clear they're all a part of a larger creative enterprise. Since no symbol ever appears twice, however, each icon also creates a distinct connection to each story.
Not all the icons in Love, Death and Robots are static. Many of the images shift or change during the few seconds that they're shown on screen, reflecting the importance of animation in the series. In season 2, three episodes have unchanging symbols — "Snow in the Desert," "Pop Squad" and "The Drowned Giant." The "Snow in the Desert" icons are a strawberry, a symbol of the fertile Earth that Snow remembers (and the strawberry he eats); a large "X" identical to the "death" symbol in the series logo, foreshadowing the multiple deaths in the episode; and an upside-down heart with two dots, perhaps indicating the unexpected romantic connection between Snow and Hirald.
The "Pop Squad" icons are more specific. The dilated eye is an image that appears in the episode, a visual representation of the immortality most characters attain through advanced medicine. The hat is a reference to Detective Briggs and more specifically, his role as a rogue detective. The style is reminiscent of film noir, a genre where tough, dysfunctional detectives often rebel against a corrupt law enforcement system to do the right thing, as Briggs does in "Pop Squad." His death wish and his ultimate end also fit the genre. The last icon shows a stuffed dinosaur which, in the short, is a reoccurring symbol of childhood innocence that haunts Briggs. The icons that appear before "The Drowned Giant" are a little more straightforward. The skull with x's for eyes represents the death of the giant, while bones literally appear in the episode after the giant decomposes. The short ends with the image of a gigantic phallus in a tent — not subtle, but lighthearted.
The remaining five episodes of Love, Death and Robots season 2 include animated icons. Before "Automated Customer Service," a robot icon vacuums the sunglasses off the iconographic head next to it, foreshadowing Vacuubot's quest to purge a house of all living things. A cactus represents the Western retirement community in which the short is set. The three icons for "All Through the House" include a Christmas tree with ornaments that rearrange into a face, hinting at the surprising and horrifying creature awaiting two children after they sneak downstairs to catch Santa. An image of a wrapped present represents the reward for good girls and boys the short centers on, while a droplet of sweat or possibly blood adds an element of horror.
The "Life Hutch" icons provide the most hints to the events of the short, with a hand that starts whole and ends with two broken fingers, warning of the bloody fight awaiting a grounded pilot. An asteroid represents the intergalactic space war that acts as a backdrop for the short, and a flashlight depicts the basic tool that ultimately becomes critical for the pilot's survival. In an unusual title card, the three icons for "The Tall Grass" are all the same (similar to the icons used for the season 1 short, "Zima Blue") — patches of tall grass animated to sway. The identical icons are an appropriate representation of the Love, Death and Robots short, where the tall grass is prominently featured as a setting, symbol of rurality and home for hidden horrors. "Ice" has the icons most loosely connected to the story — a hand flipping the bird that is one of the final images of the short, an ice cube and a pipe with smoke coming out, the drug of choice for modded teenagers.
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