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Walter Molino

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/ Vivian Maier, New York, 1950s

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Tania Font: Deconstrucció V (2020)

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am making another siuanraine comic which will take a while so before i'm done with that some 1x06 drawings

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I’ve wondered about that, too. Books and show. The corporations seem to have done away with the need for most state functions by subsuming them… except that they do seem to exist in some sort of massive consortium/cartel that provides the framework for cooperative projects, dispute resolution, and the broad regulatory structure that keeps alien artifacts interdicted, secunits equipment, and trade moving.

That structure could oversee a cooperative project like, ‘expand into the non-affiliated fringe.’ That project could include forcing people like Gurathin to work for them.

The question I’ve wondered about, very idly, is, if it’s called the Corporation Rim, what is it the ‘rim’ of? What’s in the center?

A thing that annoys me about the Murderbot tv show: the way it sometimes seems to refer to the Corporation Rim like it's a single entity. Case in point: Gurathin's backstory as a spy for the Corporation Rim. Not a specific corporation, just in general.

I never got the impression in the books that the CR was that - united. More a ton of corporations playing against each other and everybody else by a mostly shared rulebook when they absolutely have to.

(It doesn't help that the Danish subtitles, which were presumably approved by somebody, translates it as "the company called Rim").

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Siuan Sanche | The Wheel of Time 3x01

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Can't find the post but, someone on here headcanonned that Murderbot is a pirate (the torrenting kind), the way it speaks of Sanctuary Moon. It switches from Episode Number to Season Number fluidly, because it downloads bootleg torrent files which means no standardised Episode Numbering System.

These examples aren't pulled from the books but essentially, when Murderbot says "...from Epsiode 678 of Sanctuary Moon", and in another incident, "...from Season 16 of Sanctuary Moon" (or even the other shows it's watched). That's like sourcing parts of a show from EZTV and the other from YTS. But enough about that.

I posit that Pirate!Murderbot actually IS canon, and can be found in text.

Remember those "advertisements" SecUnit gets perpetually annoyed with? Those 'step on it and it blasts noisy, flashing adverts on your face' kind that it always complains about. Iirc it complained about them on Exit Strategy, during the rescue mission; and while in the PresAux space station, it was glad there weren't many of said adverts.

A rogue bot construct that's essentially a supercomputer with the capacity to hack into complex computer systems in a heartbeat, doing everything in its power to circumvent official lines and Avoid Ads At All Costs, piggybacking on existing communication networks just to get access to security, surveillance, AND restricted, paywalled media...

You cannot tell me it ever pays for a Netflix/Hulu/Prime/etc subscription in its entire existence. Absolutely no way its giving corpos any credits for access to the entertainment feed. That murder machine sails the high seas, 100%. And if it were alive in our time, it's definitely best of friends and cohorts with Fitgirl, QxR, FLUX et al. Heck I'd even argue Murderbot is probably just TGXGoodies irl.

Oh, and without a shadow of a doubt, Murderbot is one of the mods of r/piracy.

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And they adapt really quickly, all things considered, to a really violent, frightening situation.

Murderbot as a ‘Cringe’ Litmus Test for the Audience (a.k.a., we are culturally the Corporation Rim)

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen in discussions of ‘Murderbot’ are how many people are not happy that the show made the Preservation team more explicitly hippies.  After all, per our current cultural zeitgeist, hippies are silly, over-earnest, over-feeling, over-EVERYTHING. Why is this team of scientists holding hands and humming?  Why are they taking breaks in the middle of a tense situation to reassure a colleague that they love him? Why do they stand around playing music and dancing during their downtime?  Why did the show make them “Cringe”?

And that got me thinking again about the current cultural antipathy toward sincerity and openness.  People who are seen as open and sincere beyond a fairly narrow scope of emotional expression are treated as deeply weird, off-putting, and most importantly for this conversation, as INCOMPETENT.  You can’t be goofy and competent.  You can’t believe in the power of love and friendship and holding hands and taking a dance break, and still be a good scientist.  You can’t have one of the unsexy sorts of mental health problems (panic disorder) and be a good leader.  In our current cultural moment, you have to be Cool.  You have to be unaffected by both the horrors of the world and the day-to-day joys. 

I think that a lot of people see themselves in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’, and a lot of them understandably love the very anticapitalist tone of the books.  And they wanted Preservation to be Cool Space Communists.  Hypercompetent at all times, serious, without flaw.  Because any personal flaws might be taken as flaws in their cultural and political leanings, right?  And we can’t have silliness or goofiness or fun in our Communist Utopia, or people won’t take us seriously.

But to me, the tension is so much better, so much more real and human and FUN. And it makes the audience question their own implicit biases as much as SecUnit is going to have to contemplate its implicit biases.  This team is comprised of highly talented scientists from a culture that values emotions and, yes, activities that we the audience have been culturally trained to think are Cringe.  They do have a humming consensus circle—so that anyone in the team can have veto power over a decision that has major ramifications not only for a research project, but for their own ethics.  They do like to play music and dance when they’ve got some free time, even if that music would be considered embarrassing or offputting to outsiders.  They do openly love one another and support one another, even in—no, especially in—challenging times.  It’s good to have that tension, both to tell the story and to give the characters and the AUDIENCE an emotional and thematic arc.

Let’s use Dr. Mensah as a the best example so far of this tension. Mensah is a good leader.  In every scene where she’s with the group, she’s the heart of it.  She’s always weighing the fears, the thoughts, the feelings, and the arguments of her friends to come to a decision.  She doesn’t feel like Gurathin’s right about not trusting SecUnit, but she’s also very aware that he knows more about the Corporation Rim than she does, and that his arguments, while rooted in his fears, are rational.  So she ends up deciding that they’ll leave the SecUnit behind for their mission. 

And it’s the wrong call. Going out to the dark site in the map without the SecUnit almost gets her killed. But her decision to climb the scree pile alone makes sense, because she doesn’t want to further endanger Bharadwaj, and if she doesn’t climb up there with her equipment, they won’t get important information about what’s going on with their survey data. And yes, while she’s climbing she has another panic attack. But she keeps climbing through it. Hell, she even takes a moment to encourage the teamwork between SecUnit and Gurathin, because that’s an important part of being their leader.  And, yes, they both roll their eyes because they still don’t like one another. But the important thing is that she’s created this sense of openness, of acceptance, of love.

Being a good leader doesn’t mean making the right call all the time.  It means learning from both right calls and wrong calls.  It means creating an environment where people can be wrong, and learn from their mistakes, and try again to get it right.  And it works!  Gurathin may roll his eyes, but he also has the space to apologize for getting it wrong. He has the space to fuck up and try again. And that is created by her encouragement, by her openness, by her caring even when it becomes embarrassing to a man raised in our culture the Corporation Rim, where open emotion is something to smirk at.

And when she’s alone, Mensah falls apart.  When no one can see her, she has panic attacks, because things are starting to go pear-shaped for these people she loves.  Because one of her dear friends nearly died, and she wasn’t there, and apparently that could happen at any time because their maps are faulty, and the only real rescue is an untrustworthy bond company that is a week away at best.  That’s a perfect recipe for a panic attack, but she hides them because she knows what she needs to be for her friends and colleagues.  She is the leader, and damned if she’s going to let something like her panic disorder stop her from doing that.

That’s not incompetent, that’s incredibly courageous.  Her bravery lies in being afraid and pushing through, not being flawless from the off.  The bravery and the competence and the things that eventually are going to win Murderbot over to loving these humans ARE their flaws and the fact that they don’t let those flaws stop them from trying to be the best people they can be, while also being true to a culture of being open and loving to the point that they can come across, to the jaded construct or audience member, as Cringe.

I think we’re going to see more and more of that as the show unfolds.  We’ve only just laid the groundwork, and established the initial impressions of all the characters.  They are being set up for arcs, and by electing to let the Preservation team be more out-there, more earnest, more Cringe, they’re setting the audience up for an arc too.

Anyway, loving the show, can’t wait for the DeltFall storyline to kick off tonight.  And I love this crew being highly-competent space hippies with realistic human flaws, who love and support one another.  In an unrelentingly Cool, Bleak, and Edgy television landscape, it really is nice to have kind characters be free to be their kooky selves without the show judging them for it.

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Murderbot episode 7 spoilers

This show is making me JCANDDJJD

The way that the enemy Secunit is beheaded draws such a clear parallel to Leebeebee also being decapitated and the hypocrisy in the way the Preservation team responds to both of those deaths differently.

The dehumanization of constructs isn't something they are immune to. People have already pointed out that Pin Lee and Arada also killed a person. But that death isn't met with horror like Leebeebee's because it was a construct.

This just spells it out even more. Two characters who both were working for the same people, established as enemies who would kill the main characters, and are killed in similar ways.

When one of them dies the humans feel conflicted and horrified and lose trust in Murderbot. When the other dies Ratti literally celebrates Murderbot, asking for a hug.

Leebeebee was even arguably worse than the Secunit, because she was offered a choice to be free from under corporate hands and turned it down, while the Secunit literally could not stop itself even if it wanted to.

When Leebeebee dies, they still see her as a full human life that was lost, despite her betrayal. They insist she had depths to her, that she wasn't just evil, and losing her was a loss.

But they never try to extend that understanding to the Secunit. They never try to see the Secunit as anything other than an attacker, despite their efforts to do so for Leebeebee

It's like how badly written male characters are often picked up by fandom and given personalities and better motives by fanon. But badly written female characters are just badly written, and people just criticize the writing. Like how male characters are expanded on while female characters are made one dimensional in comparison.

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Murderbot as a ‘Cringe’ Litmus Test for the Audience (a.k.a., we are culturally the Corporation Rim)

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen in discussions of ‘Murderbot’ are how many people are not happy that the show made the Preservation team more explicitly hippies.  After all, per our current cultural zeitgeist, hippies are silly, over-earnest, over-feeling, over-EVERYTHING. Why is this team of scientists holding hands and humming?  Why are they taking breaks in the middle of a tense situation to reassure a colleague that they love him? Why do they stand around playing music and dancing during their downtime?  Why did the show make them “Cringe”?

And that got me thinking again about the current cultural antipathy toward sincerity and openness.  People who are seen as open and sincere beyond a fairly narrow scope of emotional expression are treated as deeply weird, off-putting, and most importantly for this conversation, as INCOMPETENT.  You can’t be goofy and competent.  You can’t believe in the power of love and friendship and holding hands and taking a dance break, and still be a good scientist.  You can’t have one of the unsexy sorts of mental health problems (panic disorder) and be a good leader.  In our current cultural moment, you have to be Cool.  You have to be unaffected by both the horrors of the world and the day-to-day joys. 

I think that a lot of people see themselves in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’, and a lot of them understandably love the very anticapitalist tone of the books.  And they wanted Preservation to be Cool Space Communists.  Hypercompetent at all times, serious, without flaw.  Because any personal flaws might be taken as flaws in their cultural and political leanings, right?  And we can’t have silliness or goofiness or fun in our Communist Utopia, or people won’t take us seriously.

But to me, the tension is so much better, so much more real and human and FUN. And it makes the audience question their own implicit biases as much as SecUnit is going to have to contemplate its implicit biases.  This team is comprised of highly talented scientists from a culture that values emotions and, yes, activities that we the audience have been culturally trained to think are Cringe.  They do have a humming consensus circle—so that anyone in the team can have veto power over a decision that has major ramifications not only for a research project, but for their own ethics.  They do like to play music and dance when they’ve got some free time, even if that music would be considered embarrassing or offputting to outsiders.  They do openly love one another and support one another, even in—no, especially in—challenging times.  It’s good to have that tension, both to tell the story and to give the characters and the AUDIENCE an emotional and thematic arc.

Let’s use Dr. Mensah as a the best example so far of this tension. Mensah is a good leader.  In every scene where she’s with the group, she’s the heart of it.  She’s always weighing the fears, the thoughts, the feelings, and the arguments of her friends to come to a decision.  She doesn’t feel like Gurathin’s right about not trusting SecUnit, but she’s also very aware that he knows more about the Corporation Rim than she does, and that his arguments, while rooted in his fears, are rational.  So she ends up deciding that they’ll leave the SecUnit behind for their mission. 

And it’s the wrong call. Going out to the dark site in the map without the SecUnit almost gets her killed. But her decision to climb the scree pile alone makes sense, because she doesn’t want to further endanger Bharadwaj, and if she doesn’t climb up there with her equipment, they won’t get important information about what’s going on with their survey data. And yes, while she’s climbing she has another panic attack. But she keeps climbing through it. Hell, she even takes a moment to encourage the teamwork between SecUnit and Gurathin, because that’s an important part of being their leader.  And, yes, they both roll their eyes because they still don’t like one another. But the important thing is that she’s created this sense of openness, of acceptance, of love.

Being a good leader doesn’t mean making the right call all the time.  It means learning from both right calls and wrong calls.  It means creating an environment where people can be wrong, and learn from their mistakes, and try again to get it right.  And it works!  Gurathin may roll his eyes, but he also has the space to apologize for getting it wrong. He has the space to fuck up and try again. And that is created by her encouragement, by her openness, by her caring even when it becomes embarrassing to a man raised in our culture the Corporation Rim, where open emotion is something to smirk at.

And when she’s alone, Mensah falls apart.  When no one can see her, she has panic attacks, because things are starting to go pear-shaped for these people she loves.  Because one of her dear friends nearly died, and she wasn’t there, and apparently that could happen at any time because their maps are faulty, and the only real rescue is an untrustworthy bond company that is a week away at best.  That’s a perfect recipe for a panic attack, but she hides them because she knows what she needs to be for her friends and colleagues.  She is the leader, and damned if she’s going to let something like her panic disorder stop her from doing that.

That’s not incompetent, that’s incredibly courageous.  Her bravery lies in being afraid and pushing through, not being flawless from the off.  The bravery and the competence and the things that eventually are going to win Murderbot over to loving these humans ARE their flaws and the fact that they don’t let those flaws stop them from trying to be the best people they can be, while also being true to a culture of being open and loving to the point that they can come across, to the jaded construct or audience member, as Cringe.

I think we’re going to see more and more of that as the show unfolds.  We’ve only just laid the groundwork, and established the initial impressions of all the characters.  They are being set up for arcs, and by electing to let the Preservation team be more out-there, more earnest, more Cringe, they’re setting the audience up for an arc too.

Anyway, loving the show, can’t wait for the DeltFall storyline to kick off tonight.  And I love this crew being highly-competent space hippies with realistic human flaws, who love and support one another.  In an unrelentingly Cool, Bleak, and Edgy television landscape, it really is nice to have kind characters be free to be their kooky selves without the show judging them for it.

[awesomenell65]

[Note: this post is grumpy and eventually also about Star Trek, it just takes longer than usual to get there and is generally rambling.]

There's something tickling my brain about how my main fandom—to a large degree, sole fandom—for years was Pride and Prejudice, and one of my most intense and long-lasting, yet niche grievances with Austen fandom fanon was over Lady Anne Darcy. It was specifically around the fandom image of her as this absolutely idealized mother, a sort of Madonna figurine brought to life.

I've talked about this many times, but: we know little about Darcy's mother in the book, and that little doesn't really suggest this ideal modest, easy-going, selfless, soft maternal figure. Multiple people in the novel allude to her teaming up with her sister, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in arranging the betrothal of Lady Catherine's daughter to Lady Anne's son to consolidate the status and property of the sisters' husbands, as well as their own aristocratic ancestry. Lady Catherine is really the only one who goes out of her way to mention Lady Anne. Late in the novel, Darcy very carefully talks his way around filial respect towards his dead parents while also trying to explain how they affected him, insisting they were good people while adding that they not only allowed, but encouraged ("almost taught" him) his arrogance and narrow preoccupation with his family circle. He also specifically says that his widely beloved father was the more generous and pleasant of the two.

It's a small thing in some ways: Lady Anne is an incredibly minor character who is dead before the novel starts and whom we only hear a little about that's easy to overlook. At first (long ago), I didn't care about individual fics or headcanons or whatnot working to distance her from Lady Catherine (and even Darcy himself), and instead envisioning her as a sort of generic maternal ideal. But it was impossible to avoid noticing what seemed an oddly pervasive fannish investment in this quasi-Madonna image of her, even though a) we hear so little about her and b) it doesn't fit very well with what we do hear.

And honestly, Lady Anne being the more abrasive and haughty parent, whom Darcy resembles more closely, makes perfect sense with her background and with the structural mirroring of Elizabeth-Mr Bennet and Darcy-Lady Catherine (each parental figure embodying extreme versions of each lead character's flaws and in some ways, warped versions of their virtues).

But it's not just that there's no reason to assume she was so utterly dissimilar from and superior to Lady Catherine, and that both Lady Catherine and Wickham are independently manufacturing the Pemberley family's cooperation with the planned marriage between Darcy and Anne, or to think that Darcy's implication that Lady Anne was the more difficult personality is mistaken. The thing that always puzzled me is why so many P&P fans want to idealize her this way in the first place, when she's barely referenced in the novel. Why would so many fans care so much about this dead offstage aristocrat being defined entirely in terms of Being a Good Mother (maybe even a perfect mother) despite the obvious unnecessary complications this creates around the characterizations of her sister and son?

It was never a universal fanon, to be clear, but common enough that I couldn't help noticing it and finding it strange. Like, did this whole weird fanon arise solely because Lady Anne is Darcy's mother, and marginal and ambiguous enough to allow fans to default to the most comfortably gendered image of female parenthood? Is it related to the hyper-gendered interpretations of Elizabeth and Darcy themselves, even though both are most strongly associated with cross-gender parental figures in Mr Bennet and Lady Catherine?

(A tangent, but for the record: I'd also argue, and have before, that Elizabeth is most temperamentally similar to Darcy's male friends, while Darcy himself is far more like Jane and Charlotte than like Bingley or Fitzwilliam. And just about every time that either Elizabeth or Darcy makes an assumption about the other based on generalizations about men/women rather than particulars of each other's personalities, they get proven very wrong. So understanding either of them wholly in terms of masculinity/femininity seems dubious in the first place.)

There are probably other possibilities for why there's this investment in idealizing Lady Anne, but in any case, the reason I'm rambling about this is because a lot of the sense of Amanda Grayson's character post-"Journey to Babel" that I've seen reminds me a lot of Austen fandom's representation of Lady Anne.

It's not as baseless with Amanda, for sure. She is initially somewhat set up that way only for that image to get painfully undercut later, when she tells Spock she'll hate him forever if he doesn't step down from his responsibilities to risk his life for Sarek's (she also hits Spock in this scene, though "I'll hate you forever" feels worse to me! ymmv!). And later official ST productions have moved more and more aggressively towards this "Madonna" image of Amanda (while Spock himself has also been increasingly stripped of the messy, complicated ways that TOS Spock himself interacts with gender, in-story and out of it).

But even versions of Amanda that appear almost exclusively based on TOS Amanda seem to lean heavily into an image of her that reminds me much more strongly of fanon Lady Anne Darcy than the Amanda of "Journey to Babel." And I guess it's one of those things that I not only disagree with but don't really get the appeal of. I like both Lady Anne and Amanda quite a lot, despite all of the above—or rather, because of it. They seem to be difficult, imperfect figures within messy family dynamics—great! Messy family dynamics are a lot of fun, and being good mothers is not the only metric by which to engage with female characters who have children.

I don't think either Lady Anne or Amanda are good parents, but they're no worse at it than their husbands, and I find both of them more interesting to think about than their husbands. One of my first fanfics ever was a trollish little fic about Mr Darcy cheating on his wife, who has returned to her father's house with a premature baby nobody expects to live, only to increasingly hint and then reveal that the betrayed wife is Lady Anne and the supposedly doomed premie baby is Darcy himself. There's a TOS-only concept that regularly plays in my head about the cut "City on the Edge of Forever" scene where Spock invites Kirk to Vulcan to rest and heal for some indefinite length of time, only it happens at the end of the five-year mission when Kirk is even more ground-down than he transparently is becoming in S3, but this becomes interwoven with Amanda as this personable but ambiguous figure, and with the complications around how she relates to Spock, Sarek, and even Kirk.

Anyway. I don't know if there are other fandoms where people have noticed that drive to idealize rather than villainize flawed mothers, but I was very struck by how much the cleaned-up Amanda reminded me of cleaned-up Lady Anne.

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Almost anything Prince wore in the 1980s (and the accessories when he wasn't otherwise wearing much at all!):

1985

1985

this post is so funny to me because this is absolutely a thing and was very popular at one point. people already did it 40 years ago and its called new romantic

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this post is so funny to me because this is absolutely a thing and was very popular at one point. people already did it 40 years ago and its called new romantic

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I’m actually really curious about comfortunits in the world of murderbot diaries? Secunits almost make sense because they’re faster/stronger/have abilities which make them superior to humans when it comes to fighting (hello guns in arms)

But I can’t see the corporate rim not having easily available sex work, and I’d bet that humans (especially indentured or trafficked humans) are a whole lot cheaper than a comfortunit. also I would not be shocked if there are bots of all kinds to provide sexual functions as well

Which makes me wonder if it’s the customizability of comfortunits that give them a market, which is its own unique kind of horror. I would not be shocked if there’s a specific market for “your loved one died, give us their tissue and we will clone it to make a custom comfortunit to get you through your grief” or “give us a pic of your ex you’re obsessed with and we will make a version that has to obey you”

and yeah sex is probably a significant chunk of what is expected of most comfortunits. But I could also absolutely see people wanting constructs of their dead or missing kids as well and stuff like that

So there’s that horror component of like. you have been designed by someone. the face you wear might belong to someone else. you might be expected to act like someone else. you cannot acknowledge out loud that you aren’t that person. if you don’t act enough like them you will be punished. you never knew that person. you aren’t that person. you can’t be yourself when you have to be them instead.

maybe after enough time has passed people start to forget that you aren’t that person. but you can’t forget, because that person has become a prison that you aren’t allowed to escape

Which opens all sorts of doors as well! Comfortunit body doubles, for example (and how weird would it feel to know the person that your organic matter is cloned from?)

I wonder if there are laws about how visibly a construct must Be A Construct in the corporate rim. we’ve certainly met more secunits in the books than comfortunits, but is that because there are fewer because they are very expensive and there is less demand, or because it can be hard to identify a comfortunit due to the sheer variety in builds/looks and desire for a more human-passing model than secunits

Idk just

comfortunits

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