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twin high maintenance machines

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i cant BELIEVE our unreliable narrator forgot to mention its outfit includes a cool hat

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we are LITERALLY in a DESERT in SPACE and if they dont put a fucking hat on that construct im going to tear the book apart with my teeth

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Just deleted a harsher version of this post but,

It's been very weird watching "Murderbot is not just an unreliable narrator, but a highly unreliable narrator" build steam through the fandom and become a communally accepted reading such that people add it as a disclaimer or even a statement of fact to otherwise unrelated fandom posts because it's just ... not, in my opinion, an accurate reading of the text. And people aren't even putting it forth as a possible interpretive lens anymore, they're just - stating it as if it's both true and something everyone agrees on.

When it started, people were just saying "unreliable narrator" or even "somewhat unreliable narrator," and I didn't agree with it, but I saw the point. Murderbot has strong opinions on things that it doesn't hesitate to share, it struggles with self-awareness at times, and there are occasions when it's made a blanket statement about the nature of constructs or machine intelligences that it later started to question as inherent qualities of SecUnits or just part of its own unique personality as an individual. If your definition of what an "unreliable narrator" is is broader than mine, I could certainly see Murderbot just squeaking in at the more reliable end of that spectrum.

But people are now casually tossing off "extremely unreliable" and -

There are first person narrators in fiction whose narratives contain such strong contradictions that its clear they must be intentionally lying about major events, and the reader can retroactively no longer tell what parts of the narrative are true or false.

There are first person narrators in fiction who are experiencing mental health related breaks from reality such that you cannot tell which events in their story actually happened and which were hallucinations.

There are first person narrators in fiction who are pushing an agenda so strongly (and I'm not talking about just having a point of view on the narrative events at all, I'm talking about "the fictional prologue explains that the narrator wrote this in prison as part of a plea for sympathy and lighter sentencing from the jury" kind of agenda) that everything described has such an extreme spin on it that you can't trust the narrator's depiction of any event to be accurate.

Not only does Murderbot not fit into any of these categories (no, not even the third one, having an opinion is not the same thing as being a spin doctor), but I struggle to see how anyone could place it in comparison with these and then decide in good faith that Murderbot is hanging out with them at the "extremely unreliable" end of the scale.*

(I also really want to know who the first person narrators are whom this section of the fandom considers to be reliable narrators, because if any subjectivity at all renders a narrator unreliable such that one whose only questionable quality is a particularly strong personality and perspective falls at the "extreme" end of the scale, how could any narrator at all qualify as "reliable.")

*in the deleted post I said something snarky about how I read "Murderbot is an extremely unreliable narrator" as "I have never read another book before," and that was unfair, which is why I deleted the post, but I do wonder if some of the people pushing this interpretation don't read a lot of first-person narrated fiction and therefore don't have a great basis of comparison with overtly unreliable narrators vs those who are a bit subjective but to a more normal degree

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Mercy and ART from NULLverse (specifically a scene from a chapter of Statements NULL: Fall Out Bot). Mercy (and NULLverse) belong to @blessphemy

[ID: a digital painting of Mercy grinning at the camera while clutching its face on a dark background, surrounded by many many semi transparent eyes in a vaguely mandala formation and being held by many semi transparent hands. A large star shaped eye looks at the viewer threateningly over its shoulder. Its eyes are a camera aperture with a glowing red center. It is wearing a Memphis patterned tank top. A signature reads: Roki! 2025 /END ID]

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As a free being, Murderbot is struggling with personhood, with how being a free person means your personhood comes before function. That it might even be able to rewrite its function. But! it’s at the veeery beginning of this after experiencing a lifetime of trauma. And the lifetime of trauma has left some deeply damaging coping mechanisms (and beliefs).

Canonically, MB gleans self-esteem from the following: when people recognize it’s there to help them, when it solves something in a clever way (bonus if a human sees), and when it successfully saves its people. At first glance, most of those have to do with people recognizing it’s a smart, independent entity who is good at its function. But a lot of that esteem is actually coming from its easy ability to be a martyr. To destroy itself for others, maybe even as a sort of final proof that it’s “good.” Safe. In Network Effect, Murderbot remarks that ART had told its crew about Murderbot, but that it had made MB sound safe and not like a terrifying Murder Machine. MB has so much anxiety around people perceiving it as dangerous that to be described neutrally, let alone positively, feels off to it.

Murderbot’s got complicated feelings about itself! I mean, going off its name alone: “Murderbot” is a pejorative like “sexbot,” which reduces these incredibly complicated machine/organic hybrids to a crass understanding of their function. That MB calls itself this is a little tongue-in-cheek and a little genuine self-abasement.

But despite the name, Murderbot’s function, as it understands it, is self-destruction. To sacrifice itself for humans. It might literally be coded into it, and it was definitely shaped this way via a “social development” that ensured it experienced dehumanization and alienation.

This dehumanization and alienation it endured at the hands of the company made it associate bodily harm with good things (or positive things, at least). Let’s start by looking at when it was still with the company: getting injured meant time in a cubicle, where it could have some uninterrupted time for itself. it could watch media in an enclosed space where it didn’t have to worry about anything but itself for a bit.

Then once it’s with the PresAux crew (or ART), it gets tangibly *physically* cared for when it is injured. People show it care and regard and help put it back together.

It’s worth mentioning that when MB is hurt, its cognition is often down. This means it can’t be as guarded. It’s vulnerable, and in this state it is treated with care. It is finally getting some direct emotional support in these moments. It’s also tangible proof that people are considering it, that they have not abandoned it like the survey instruments at the beginning of ASR. Getting rescued is something we know really melts it. It’s almost like a really painful test: if Murderbot proves it’s not evil by destroying itself, its reward is people go back for it… but the test is still predicated on usefulness.

So we have all of these examples of how Murderbot’s self-esteem is tied to its own physical harm, and that it gets positive feedback in certain key ways when it’s injured, but i think it goes further than that. There are actually at least two examples of deliberate self-harm in System Collapse:

After Leonide torpedoes their diplomatic approach with the separatists, Murderbot is so distressed it thinks about how it wishes it could smash something, especially itself.

Later, MB observes Iris almost throw her interface, and it says: “Been there. Threw my whole body at a wall once.” This is more frustration than straight up distress, but the impulse to harm itself to combat negative feelings still holds.

Its body is a thing. The company owned it. There are logos on it that it can’t remove, and any record of its self-sacrifice is erased. Swiped clean. Its physicality is that of an appliance it has no control over, but maybe its physical destruction can redeem it in the eyes of others. So, harm is evidence of a good job, it is a means of proving itself, it’s a release valve, and a means of receiving care.

But all of this disregard for its body goes deeper into really upsetting existential territory that I will get into in another post.

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also let's never forget ratthi likes sanctuary moon. murderbot says something cool and wise and everyone's nodding while it gets two seperate messages from art and ratthi that just say. i know what episode that's from.

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Murderbot, its favorite human and its... ART.

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feelin a bit of an art block, so i cleaned up a mb doodle from a while back. no energy to draw but wanting to draw? turns out cleaning up stuff you've already drawn helps a bit

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Robot Dysmorphia

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i feel totally normal about this and the scope of my desire is completely average

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that one exchange in fugitive telemetry

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I just finished rereading Network Effect, and something that stood out to me this time was the way that MB refers to 2.0 in the first person. Amena considers 2.0 to be like ART and MB's kid, and maybe that's closer to the truth than what MB thinks, but MB definitely considers it to be an extension of itself.

When it argues with 2.0, it says "I can't sit here and argue with myself all day". MB refers to it as 'other me', their name as 'our name', and when it kills 2.0, it says "I had killed SecUnits and combat bots before but this was me, sort of, okay not so sort of". It thinks of killing 2.0 as a form of suicide. And then it never addresses it with anyone else. It admits that 2.0 was a person to ART, but it doesn't go any further than that.

It is not even a little surprising to me that MB ends up having a psychological breakdown in the next book. It gives a different weight to Iris telling MB that she doesn't like to think of any part of ART dying. A part of MB did die. It died so that her life could be saved. And no one knows about it, or thinks about it in the same way.

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whatever. go my secunit

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I present: Murderbot, a concept

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ART is liquid... to me.

ft. Ratthi

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