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As a Star Trek and Murderbot fan this is all I could think about during this week's SNW episode:

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Also

The Rise and Fall of Sanctury Amelia Moon

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The Rise and Fall of Sanctury Amelia Moon

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Premium quality memes.

Murderbot + Onion Headlines [9/?]

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You, about 2.0

Network effect:

Nearing the end of Network Effect --

1. Does every one of Murderbot's problems ultimately come back to alien remnants?

2. I thought you guys were fandoming when you said that SecUnit and ART fought, made up, and then had a baby together. I did not predict that this was canon, or that you'd lifted it straight from Amena.

3. Murderbot 2.0 has a minute of downtime and immediately starts watching Sanctuary Moon... guess they really are the same person.

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It's funny outside your head too, I laughed out loud xD

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Shit, I think I need to resume therapy because I find myself bitter and jealous at Murderhelion xD. What do you mean these aroace bots have better love life and more intimacy than me :D. I was always bitter at human romance in media, but I was always fine with robot and and alien romance, because it's too distant and unrealistic. So this is not a good sign :D

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That being said, the fact that she's holding his face in her hand makes this Vulcan enough. My personal annoyance with SNW Vulcans making out isn't that they kiss, but that they don't do enough with their hands.

Yes, look at how Vulcans never kiss like humans. Never. Ever. It's something SNW made up because they hate Spock.

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Beautiful analysis, but as always when I see depression mentioned I'm like - is Murderbot really depressed though? To me it just seams... reasonably upset. Sure it's unhappy and has self-hate and self-deprecation which sometimes makes it careless with its life. But overall, it's actually doing a great job at surviving, and putting great effort into it and its wellbeing. Even its avoidant traits, I would argue, are actually self-care. It does it because it's an efficient way to NOT get depressed with all that is happenning in its life. And it's so proactive and active and caring and has its shit together and… I just don't see how a depressed person could function so well. I think that considering the trauma it survived it's really resilient and as ok as it's possible to be. It's definitely functioning better than me and I'm not depressed, I've done some online tests :D.

murderbot: personhood and loneliness

book spoilers! from the end of ASR to pretty much everything else.

murderbot is very explicitly depressed and has bouts of suicidal ideation up until the very end of exit strategy, and afterwards it's still paranoid and depressed, but the suicidal ideation (both 'not-caring' apathy that will lead it to abandon everything and just drift through the stars watching media until it powers down, and more proactive attempts like staying behind to die in mensah's rescue) seems to fully stop. even in network effect, when murderbot is incredibly upset and traumatized by thinking that art was murdered, its not displaying either.

it's so interesting, because it's tied to its self-discovery journey, and how it relates, in itself, to being a person - something that murderbot, circa all systems red, stringently rejects.

again, "person" doesn't mean "human"; the books sort this distinction out very quickly, and separate it from people who love it but can't halp but relate to it as a human very early on.

so first murderbot goes to ganaka pit, to find out if its desire for independence dovetailed with the memories of mass murder it carries. did it hack its governor module so it could slaughter a bunch of miners? did it slaughter a bunch of miners because something went wrong after it hacked its governor module? was it a murderbot by inclination, not just by the will of the system that created and abused it?

with art's help (whom murderbot is in such deep denial about it's almost painfully hilarious, but it also makes sense. it makes a deep personal connection with something that's of its own kind (mostly), and it makes sure to acknowledge no feelings about it at all, uh huh. compared to it, art looks like a paragon of self-reflection), murderbot discards this possibility, and it... does not help with either depression or suicidal impulses. so it's a person, and it's a person who's not a murderer; it's a person whose wish is, independent of its past owners' wishes, to protect others, even others it's mostly indifferent to otherwise.

but - i think at this point murderbot is actually backsliding deeper both into depression and suicidal ideation, because, well, with acknowledging his own personhood and value, it's forced to acknowledge its need for meaningful connection (because to be a person you are to ping off the other), and at this point its (understandably) convinced that this need is fundamentally doomed. its been conceived and used and seen and desecrated as a tool, an appliance, a slave, and it doesn't believe it can be seen in any other way. except that it's gotten juuuuust enough tantalizing data points to the opposite so it can't believe it wholeheartedly, so its tempted into hope, and it hates hope, of course.

(again, there's a whole thing with art, who represents a connection completely independent of human intervention, and who at the same time shares murderbot's protective feelings towards at least some humans, and murderbot is like. Not Looking Here At All.)

enter miki, who's a bot, who's a 'pet' bot who has an owner, who's also a bot who's never been hurt or abused, and whose putative owner treats it like a friend/child combo and values its life over its own. miki causes a torrent of emotions in murderbot, most of them denial papering over repulsion/envy/curiosity, because okay, apparently there CAN be a connection that's not owner/slave, except that it seems to be owner/pet, which is only marginally better. but it's still a data point... and coincidentally, around here murderbot starts thinking about seeing mensah again. except it wants to bring it something of value - ideally bring it and slip away - i think this is the point where it subconsciously started to entertain the notion of the possibility of the tiny tiny chance that theirs might be a relationship of the equals, while being in complete denial of it.

and then wham, bam, exit strategy, wherein murderbot gets an apology from its human team for patronizing it, saves mensah heroically, attempts a heroic and suicidal last stand, gets saved by its humans, mensah stands between it and even a momentary repossession by the company without an ounce of fear for either side, murderbot heroically almost-kills-itself once again, and this time wakes up on preservation proper - and there its presented with its own legal identity, and some bonus illegal identities, and a widening array of independent, equal-to-equal choices. and it almost runs away again - of course it does - except that it sees that it's free to walk away, that at least here, by this people and this space, it'll not be made to stay or go against it will, or to be something it isn't, to the best of their imperfect ability.

and it trusts them.

(and, as far as i can see in further readings - it's still a snarky socially anxious depressed paranoid bugbear, and it never wants to die or drift away into its serials forever again. it accepts being a person among other persons, with all that it contains.)

(we have no idea how the show is going to slice and dice the rest of the book and where they'll take the adaptation - i'm assuming compressing everything from AC to FT into one season, and then doing NE and SC the other is the most expansive option we can get, and more realistically it'll do AC and ES, skip FT and RP altogether, and then, if they get a third season, deal with ART and alien remnants and so on - but given how deft and careful they were with the whole emotional arc in the first season and how concisely they packed it in, i can't wait to see how they're going to handle this. in the books, it's all happening very openly and also very much outside of murderbot's own self-reflection; in the show... we'll see. )

(also mensah canonically watched some Sanctuary Moon to understand murderbot, and murderbot had Feelings about it. damn yeah.)

(also yes, it canonically lifts show names and lines to lie to people. it's hilarious, especially that one time Arada calls it on it.)

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Before the gifs loaded and started moving I was like wait, I don't remember Pike leaning on a wall Murderbot style xD

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So Harry hits Jimmy with a wrench out of nowhere, admits he was trying to kill him, and Jimmy just shrugs it off, like, fair enough, and lets the person who just tried to off him to sew him up? xD

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you cannot convince me there was a heterosexual explanation for the way una was eyeing this bartender up

'if you're offering me a job on a starship' oh they were about to offer you something honey

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It REALLY sounded like her, didn't it? I noticed that too. But I don't find any info about her voicing it, and Alex Capp is credited for both episodes as the voice actress, so maybe she accidentally sounded like that...

Is the computer Mulgrew's voice?

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I too don't want Spock and La'an to be a couple, because I project heavily onto both, so that feels kind of incestuous xD. Let them be emotionally repressed bros, ok :D.

Oh damn NO nononope PLEASE tell me they're not setting up Spock & La'an?

Because I remember another shot of them dancing from the trailer, and since Spock for whatever reason can't be single in this show, it sure looks like it. Like yeah, their scenes in ep 2 were cute, but I was barely able to enjoy them, because I was instantly dreading where it's headed.

I still think they handled Spapel very poorly, and I still am not back to liking Christine nearly as much as I did before that whole 2nd half of S2, DON'T YOU BLOODY DARE drag my other fave girl down the same path, show.

Like truly, I wanna like Christine as much as I used to, but what she did to Spock still makes no sense to me after all the buildup, no matter how much the show tries to bend over backwards to put most of the blame of their relationship not working out on Spock. The fuck was that "they cannot be (...) at the mercy of their own emotional storms"? Jess & Ethan acted the hell out of that scene, but it made me so angry. This really was the show putting the blame on Spock.

And don't even get me started about Roger, this is just... Like I know he had to come into the picture but just. Yeah, yep, sure, we've had 1,5 seasons of amazing Spapel buildup, and they didn't work, but miraculously with him everything is the sun, and the moon, and whatever. And I'm just lmfao the whole time. Yeah. Okay.

Anyway, I really hope they don't put Spock into another relationship asap, making him as much of an airhead as Christine. But at this point, I won't be surprised.

This was such a fun comfort show for me, but now I'm just bitter in advance, I guess. Making an AU wedding ep. 2 was... Not it. I really wish they started with something that is... Not 80% Spapel drama, because as much as I used to (and deep down probably still do) love them, bloody give Spock a break.

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Is Trelane just some Q, or is he THE Q? His dad sounds like the Q, but I think it's canon he didn't have children until Voyager, right? So that's not him, but it could be his dad. So it could be that by the time of TNG Trelane was finally an adult, but barely, which would fit his mentality, he does act like some frat boy. He ditched his childhood made up name by then.