#ITSELF!!! INGROUP!!! THERES DELICIOUS FRUIT HERE CMON

[silentwalrus1]

oh did you not like sys tem coll apse? why not if you don’t mind me asking

Spoilers for system collapse below!

- felt very much like publishers/editors or whoever else were like hey Mwells this series is a smash hit you got anything else in the tank? And mwells scraped together a bunch of discarded scenes and concepts from the prev books and mushed that together into a minimum viable product

- no growth - all character arcs are either rehashes of what already happens in prev books or have no impact whatsoever. MB already learns that it cares about its friends and its friends care about it, that it can rely on them (hello Network Effect aka the most SLAMMIN AWESOME scifi action story i’ve read all DECADE); Tarik being a former corporate death squad trooper or whatever has absolutely no effect or consequence on anything; MB has even already crafted its own narrative & shared it, hello the documentary with bharadwaj??? the files it cut together for 3? THE WHOLE CONCEIT OF THE SERIES WHICH ARE THE MURDERBOT DIARIES WHICH ARE FRAMED EXPLICITLY AS NARRATIVES MB DELIBERATELY CRAFTS & SHARES WITH OTHERS???

- the climax of the book is. A montage.

Of our heroes making a powerpoint presentation.

I WISH this had been cool. It would’ve been hysterical to have a Final Battle be a pptx fight. Except.

It was. A montage. And then all the actual defining decisions happen offscreen. We don’t even get to see our heroes DO the actual thing - MB’s hacking gets a lot more detail than the construction of the pptx. Furthermore, how is this any different from what the corporate side is doing? Literally they’re both presenting competing propaganda pitch decks to a skeptical investor board that has what they want. It doesn’t actually matter that One Of These Powerpoints Is Always True And The Other Always Lies - how is it meaningfully different from a narrative & character standpoint? Right from the start of the series, PresAux are markedly different to all prior humans MB has had experience with - they are non-corporates! In this story about corporations/capitalism ruining everything! And then our other main heroes we meet, ART’s crew, are aggressively ANTI-corporate! So to have the climax of this latest book be “well both sides did the same action but one of them was objectively cooler bc it was Righteous - no dw it’s all happening offscreen anyway. Who cares.”

Well. Idk man, i was fucking bummed! It was boring!

Not to mention that the entire stakes of this whole… thing… are so lacking, as a reader? The rehash of prior arcs is especially poignant here, because none of the central concerns of the book feel like they matter. MB has already spent 5 books dealing with emotional disregulation, chronic issues caused by interactions of its organic + nonorganic parts, its attempts to navigate freedom, personhood and relationships in societies of bots and humans as a construct that is neither bot nor human but its own third thing, and learning to rely and trust itself and others. The first five books do this masterfully. System Collapse introduced nothing new, didn’t develop any relationships or plot arcs, regressed MB’s own main arc for no reason and ignored the entire symphony of a thesis of the entire damn series previous. Wish it wasn’t so :/