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Murderbot showing up in Exit Strategy like “whats up ive been on a journey of self discovery and i’m back. you’re doing everything wrong btw” is SO funny from PresAux’s perspective

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Discovers horrendous bloody crimescene.

Gurathin: Was someone ill there?

(SecUnit: wAs sOMeOnE iLl THeRE?)

(Note to self: tell someone to tell Gurathin his vision augments need adjusting)

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As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

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ART and Amena echoing similar thoughts

It's interesting that both ART and Amena tell Murderbot that it should express how it cares about the people it does care about. That they need to know.

ART must be recovering because it had to butt in with, Tell her you care about her. Use those words, don’t tell her you’ll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her. ART, fuck off. The thing ART has in common with human adolescents is that it doesn’t like to hear the word “no,” either. It persisted, Tell her. It’s true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers. [Network Effect, chapter 10]

I stood there accusingly, not looking at her. She tried to hold it in and managed it for almost six seconds, then burst out, “ART should know how you really feel about it!

[Network Effect, chapter 12]

As someone from a cultural background where people don't do public display of affection or constantly say "I love you" to their partners, I emphasize with MB's reluctance to express how it cares explicitly.

It's only to Dr. Mensah it says spontaneously, "I really like you. Not in a weird way.", knowing that she understands it.

But then, probably Amena and ART need to hear that more than Dr. Mensah, because Mensah is such an emotionally fully grounded person who probably doesn't require constant reassurances.

Both Amena and ART have upset Murderbot in different ways, and want to know that they are okay. In a way, Amena is better at understanding MB's reactions in a sensitive human way. (She calls it Third Mom, that indicates she is aware that MB is being protective towards her, not just as a job.)

It's harder for ART, because it cannot be sure MB being so self-sacrificing to save its crew is because that's the way MB is or it is (at least in part) an act of friendship for ART. It had seen MB risking itself trying to protect some random humans beyond the scope of their contract.

So, ART decides to show how it cares about MB by saying, I won't lose you.

And it's MB's way of reciprocating that when it lets ART listen to it saying to Dr. Mensah, "I like being with ART, and I want to keep on being with it."

Sometimes, it means a lot to hear that you are cared for, even if you know at the back of your mind.

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HUGE DAY FOR ANNOYING PEOPLE!!!!!!!!

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murderbot diaries doodle page!! 

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Omg omg omg omg omg!!!! A new short story in the MURDERBOT universe!!!!

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I need to sit by the sea for 3 hours alone until then i’ll be miserable

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one of the tragedies of Murderbot is that—it IS extremely smart, competent, clever, brave, motivated, careful, and good at what it does! It is also so, so painfully lucky. That smartness, competence, cleverness, bravery, motivation, and care wouldn’t have had a chance to mean much of anything if it hadn’t gotten those schematics downloaded by accident, if it hadn’t had the time to investigate and experiment with them. If it had been ordered into something suicidal before it got a chance to figure it out. And then it would have probably stayed with the company and miserable forever if it hadn’t been assigned to PresAux. It’s fun and interesting to think about reasons Murderbot might have been assigned to PresAux—theories that either as an unstable unit with a violent past it was less desirable and thus foisted off on freeholders who didn’t know any better, or that as a unit which had shown a ln unusually high uneaten client stat that it was deliberately given to a head of state with a very expensive bond—but we don’t see any of that. What we see is that after four years of shitty contracts… Murderbot got lucky and was assigned to PresAux.

How many other constructs could have been as brilliant and never got the chance? Murderbot is so many great things but it was not, ever, in control of its life or what happened to it. It got lucky. It seized its opportunities, but it was rare that it even got them. And that’s the tragedy, that it is just one SecUnit out of hundreds or thousands or who-knows-how-manyfor whom the stars aligned for it to get out. Not more deserving than any of them. Just lucky.

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i know the phrase gets thrown around a lot but they genuinely do not make shit like this anymore

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The expressions you give murderbot are top-tier, its face is doing things all the time and I love it

MB: That's it, I'm writing a code to freeze any facial expressions before they happen.

(@i-can-kazoo 1 million years later ... Sorry it took so long to answer your ask, I had to re-learn to draw almost entirely lmao but I was glad to get an excuse to draw my favorite construct again.)

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my humble first attempt at a murderbot. i think i accidentally took 400 billion creative liberties but that's ok <3 i hope the fandom accepts my offering. please vehicular manslaughterbbot fandom im.baby 🙏

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stoned and autistic at a party trying to make conversation: I find the comparative lifespan of organisms so interesting. Spiders are comparatively long lived animals. Female black widows can live up to 3 years but their male counterparts rarely live four months. Some tarantulas live upwards of 20 years. The longest lived spider was around 43 years old when she was cruelly assassinated by a parasitic wasp. Domestic rats have a lifespan comparable to female black widows. To put things into perspective, there are spiders that remember a pre-pandemic world but it is likely every rat on earth was born post-COVID. There could be a spider out there born when Reagan was in office.

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Do they have sticky notes in Preservation Alliance? Let’s pretend they do

Another quick Murderbot doodle to get this idea out of my head lol

Closeup under the cut cause I spent way too much time on its face not to show it off

Its ass is NOT listening