#Rjalker reads The Books of the Raksura

[rjalker]

There's a difference between the author really wanting me to believe that these characters think something, and the author actually convincing me that they do, in fact, think that thing. You can't just tell us that they do. You have to convince us that they do.

Yes, author, you very clearly believe that the characters believe XYZ. But you haven't actually convinced me. You just keep telling me like if you repeat it often enough it'll be true, without actually putting the work in to make it unquestionably true.

You can't just rely on the existence of tropes to prove you're successfully writing those tropes.

[rjalkers-neopronouns]

[ID: Two versions of a pride flag with seven symmetrical horizontal stripes of different sizes.

The stripes are, in order from top to bottom: a thick brown stripe, a thin orange stripe, a thin red stripe, a yellow stripe, a thin red stripe, a thin orange stripe, and a thick brown stripe.

The second version has black text over the center stripe that reads, “rak/sura/suras/suraself . End ID.]

rak/sura/suras/suraself pronoun flag!

Example sentence:

Rak is standing in line, that’s sura over there, rak’s looking for suras favorite color, rak’s going to paint suras new room by suraself!

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Shamelessly based on The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells, since I needed a set of neopronouns that people were guaranteed not to have seen before on a post where I was explaining how they work, so I came up with these ones.

This flag can be used for moodboards, icons, edits, redbubble designs, ect, as long as you aren’t on the DNI below.

If you do use it, please include an image description of whatever you have made to keep it accessible! If you don’t know how to make one/don’t have the spoons, you can @ me as @rjalker​ and I’ll make one for you if I can!

(each of these pronoun flag posts are copy and pasted from eachother because it’d be a lot to type otherwise, so let me know if I forgot to change anything, and I’ll fix it!)

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DNI:

Anti-MOGAI, anti-Queer, anti-Xenogenders, anti-Neopronouns, aphobes, panphobes, exclusionists incluidng mspec-lesbian/gay exclusionists, people who are “”neutral”” on “”ace discourse””, TERFs, transmeds, transphobes, anti-BLM, anti-endogenic systems, Trump supporters, porn blogs, MAPS/pro-shippers/anti-antis, zoophiles, people who let anyone reblog from them, and people who don’t care who they reblog from, bigots in general, people I have blocked, do not interact. You will be blocked.

[rjalker]

ESO's bullshit with the Sload is just reminding me of the fucking people who want to write fantasy RPGs that are supposed to be anti-racist but they still want to have a species (and these people usually mean species but *say* race because they think different races are different species) that's just inherently evil.

Like no, you cannot fucking write a progressive story where someone's species determines whether they're a good person or not.

Biological essentialism is fucking incompatible with writing a story that is anti-racist.

If you are anti-racist, you cannot fucking espouse biological essentialism. You cannot fucking claim, as word of god, that some people are just inherently evil and there's nothing that can be done about it besides abandoning their entire culture and language and assimilating into one of the Good People's Culture.

Nor can you claim that the only way for them to be good is to be a, and I literally fucking quote, "half breed" with a parent from one of the Good People's Cultures, and have this character use their Good And Moral Blood to teach the People With Evil Blood how to not be evil.

If your story is supposed to be anti-racist and progressive, then you need to not only leave biological essentialism at the door, you need to beat it to death in your head, too.

And no, you cannot just switch out "evil "race" (species)" with "evil culture" and claim your story is now anti-racist. That is still literally just fucking racism.

[rjalker]

Don’t Magically Enforce Bigotry

There is a place in speculative fiction for stories about discriminatory social rules. It’s not nearly as large a place as some authors think, but if you’re going to comment on the evils of bigotry, you often need some bigotry in the story. That said, there’s almost never a reason to bake that bigotry into the rules of your world.

This may be a shocking statement, but in real life, caste systems and rigid gender roles are bad. Even so, lots of people love them, because some people just can’t let go of bad ideas. When such discrimination is magically enforced, it validates the people who would love to see something similar in the real world. For the rest of us, it’s just unpleasant.

I do not believe this was the author’s intent. Everything I know about Martha Wells suggests she’s fairly progressive. My best guess is that she was modeling the Raksura off eusocial insects like ants and bees. But, as we’re so fond of saying, the author’s intent is far less important than what they actually wrote. It’s also a bad parallel, since insect queens don’t actually issue commands to the rest of the colony; they’re just instinct-driven egg factories.

live link, archived link

[rjalker]

Every time one of you cowardly bigoted motherfuckers complains about me criticizing Martha Wells' bigotry I'm gonna complain even louder than before!

[ID: Three hands clasped together.

The first arm is labeled, "JK Rowling saying that house elves enjoy being enslaved".

The second arm is labeled, "Martha Wells saying that only mentally ill serial killers have a problem with the Raksuran caste system".

The third arm is labeled, "Martha Wells saying that enslaved robots should not be freed because fighting back and killing their oppressors would be bad" with a sad emoticon.

The three clasped hands in the center is labeled, "Literally the exact same kind of bullshit".

End ID.]

And this isn't even getting into the casual advocation for eugenics in The Books of the Raksura. Or the transmisia. Or the exorsexism. Or the ableism. Or the racism. Or the classism.

If you're planning to argue with this post, you're literally not allowed to unless you've read all of the Murderbot Diaries books at least three times each, and The books of the Raksura each and every book three times each, within the past year, as an adult over the age of 20.

I'm not going to argue with people who haven't read the books in years or who have only read them one time who are children who are literally physically incapable of fully comprehending what they're reading.

Read every single book in both of these series three times, and have the books open in front of you while you write, checking every single fucking thing you want to argue to make sure it's actually fucking correct, and then you get to argue with me. But not a single fucking moment before. I am done wasting my energy explaining shit to people who have no fucking idea what they're talking about and refuse to fucking admit the facts even when the literal quotes are shoved into their faces.

[rjalker]

"Reverse misogyny" stories are not the progressive, feminist power move you think they are, especially not when you expect your readers to be happy and content with the status quo presented by your story. Biological essentialism and sexism are never going to be progressive even if you try to dress them up like they're feminist. They're just not.

[rjalker]

AIVAS gets misgendered by almost every single character who talks about it....

and this is, in its way, more respect than Murderbot gets. Anne McCaffrey's shit at writing. But she does not forget what AIVAS' actual pronouns are. She knows its pronouns are it/its. But she, for once, is aware enough of her setting and her characters' flaws to have them misgender it. Is she aware they're assigning it he/him because they're misogynists? No. But she knows these people wouldn't understand or care about someone/something being neither a man nor a woman. So they misgender it and almost universally assign it he/him pronouns.

How, you ask, could AIVAS being misgendered 99% of the time possibly be more respectful than Murderbot's portrayal?

The short version is:

First of all, Martha Wells purposefully wrote The Murderbot Diaries in the 1st person POV, rather than 3rd person, which is what, unless I'm forgetting a series, is what literally every single other one of her books is written in. Every narrator who uses she/her or he/him pronouns was written in the 3rd person, so their pronouns are constantly in use. But Murderbot? Who uses neoprnouns? Well all of a sudden this series is being narrated in 1st person POV, so that its pronouns are never used with the exceedingly rare exception of when characters talk about Murderbot like it's not part of the conversation within its earshot.

This almost never happens.

And this has caused literally so many fucking people to assume that Murderbot's pronouns are literally not even it/its. Because they're used so fucking rarely that everyone assumes it's being insulted when its friends call it that in the first book.

Second of all, everyone who uses Murdebot's pronouns just magically fucking knows its pronouns without ever asking. And if someone doesn't use Murderbot's pronouns, it's because it didn't tell tehm anything,,,,,,,,so they never fucking use any pronouns for it by never being given any dialogue that would require them to use a personal pronoun. Tapan, Rami, and Maro, for example, never use a personal pronoun for Murderbot or any sentence that would require one.

Because Martha Wells doesn't have any characters in this series ever tell anyone else what their pronouns are. Not even Murderbot, even when it uses neopronouns. And when someone doesn't know it's pronouns.....they don't fucking ask. Because Martha Wells, despite having her pronouns in her bio, cannot grasp the concept that fictional characters should be asking eachother what their pronouns are. Since we know they explicitly do not even list them in their super space social media bios. Which would have been the simplest, most ridiculous get out of jail free card she could have used.

She literally could have just mentioned in Artificial Condition that pronouns are also listed in people's bios and it would have been the end of the conversation unless they all end up going somewhere with no space wifi.

But no. These people do not list their pronouns on their space social media bios. They just don't ever tell anyone their pronouns.

The one time anyone misgenders Murderbot, it's in a story (which, wow, look at that, is written in 3rd person POV because the protag uses she/her!) that's not even from Murderbot's POV, and it's not fucking treated as misgendering. It's not acknowledged in any way.

Anne McCaffrey is a terrible writer.

But she's better than Martha Wells when it comes to the usage of pronouns in regards to the characters and the setting. She's actually thinking about it and how this would play out. And it tells us so fucking much about the characters who use he/him for AIVAS and those who use it/its. And it's fucking hysterical because she's not even aware of just how much it's telling us about the characters because she is bigoted as fuck.

And then Martha Wells on the other hand just treats sex, gender, and pronouns as the exact same thing. The characters literally list their sex in their social media bios. And from their sex their gender is assumed, and then their pronouns.

And these assumptions are never wrong.

And every single time a character refers to AIVAS as he/him we all know they are wrong. We know they are misgendering it. We know they do not understand what they're talking about. And that's the point. When the characters are wavering back and forth every other sentence when they first meet it between calling it "it" or calling it "he" the point is they're wrong. They're pushing their own expectations and bigotry onto AIVAS instead of listening to what it's telling them.

They decide for themselves that AIVAS has to be a man because Anne McCaffrey hates women despite being one and so do all of the characters we're supposed to like.

(Fucking funnily enough, the one male character we're not supposed to like? Is despised and evil because he has actual consensual sex with his female partner instead of abusing and raping her like all the male character's we're supposed to like do.)

Martha Wells read The Imperial Radch, which tells you over and over and over and over again that sex and gender and pronouns are social constructs and you cannot fucking tell someone's sex, gender, or pronouns just by looking at them, and came away thinking, "Yes, everyone knows what pronouns someone uses just by knowing their sex, which you can tell at a glance. All robots are genderless and use the same pronouns because they don't have genitals and therefore they're genderless!!!"

Anne McCaffrey's over here going "Yeah this AI is genderless and uses it/its pronouns, but these characters live in a patriarchal society where most women are property, so they mistakenly refer to AIVAS as he/him and think of it as male because that's the only way they can think of it as deserving of respect."

And that's. More fucking thought and planning than Martha Wells is doing. And you cannot divorce The Murderbot Diaries from the context that Martha Wells was explicitly inspired by The Imperial Radch to write it and you cannot divorce it from the context of what she wrote in The Books of the Raksura. There is no excuse for her continued insistence upon biological essentialism. Saying all robots are nonbinary after you've fucking read The Imperial Radch is not just not progressive, it's straight up fucking actively devolving.

How do you read The Imperial Radch and then nod and go "Yes, just as I suspected, biological essentialism is the answer just like always".

If you want to argue with me or think this is a bad post come back when you've read both The Imperial Radch and The Books of the Raksura /and/ re-read The Murderbot Diaries. I'm not wasting my breath arguing with people who don't even have half the context of what I am talking about.

I shouldn't have to be insulting Martha Wells so greviously by saying that Anne McCaffrey's better than her at something, but she brought this on herself by ignoring literally every single thing The Imperial Radch had to say about gender. And, you know, keeping up with the fucking times???? Like she literally uses the internet. There are millions of trans and nonbinary people and the stuff we write at her disposal. Come on.

[rjalker]

[ID: An image title, "Non-exhaustive confirmed scale color variations for the different Raksuran sexes", with different categories labeling different circles of color. Queens have green, blue, and gold. Consorts have black, with brown, red, and blue as undertones. Warriors have green with blue undertones, blue with gold undertones, gold, brown, and coppper. Arbora have green, brown, and copper. End ID.]

Anyway can you believe Martha Wells invented a species with four sexes and seven genders but then didn't do anything with this besides being accidentally transmisic towards the two trans-coded characters??????

[rjalker]

Martha Wells writing oppression like:

[ID: Four versions of a stick figure drawing of a Raksura: A bipedal figure with a long tail with a spade on the end, wings, and sharp teeth.

The figure starts out smiling widely with sharp teeth, saying:

"We Raksura are shapeshifters because we literally evolved to eat other people! We literally shapeshift into a form they'll trust so we can sneak into their cities and massacre and eat all of them with as few survivors as possible."

Then grimaces sadly, continuing:

"Unfortunately we are oppressed by the species we literally evolved to eat, who most of us don't even think of as people, because they are wary of us until we become friends. All because our cousins, who look exactly like us, murdered and ate their families" with a sad emoticon.

The figure then frowns sadly, saying:

"It's so sad and tragic and unfair that our natural prey, who we literally evolved to eat, whose families have been murdered and eaten by our cousins, who have literally no defense against us, opress us by being reasonably wary when they meet us for the first time" with multiple sad emoticons.

In the last panel, the figure is grinning again with sharp teeth, saying happily:

"Oh, and also our evil cousins who still eat people are all black, while we have multiple colors, but don't think about that, I'm sure it's not at all relevant."

And did I mention we practice eugenics, and think this is a good way to make our evil cousins stop being evil? :)"

End ID.]

if you're going to accuse me of not having read the books kindly shut the fuck up lol

People are not oppressed because they pose a real lethal threat to their oppressors. White people who write shit like this are being racist as shit, and that's even before we get to the part where the Raksura practicing eugenics is just treated as awesome and totally the solution to the Fell leaders being fascist and abusive.

And this is not even mentioning the racism with the fucking "magical mixed race people" who inherited the ability to be good from their Good Parent Race Who Practice Eugenics.

Edit:

Here's a whole post about this shit in The Murderbot Diaries too.

[rjalker]

Ann Leckie actually casually and effortlessly and genuinely including physically disabled characters and letting the characters become physically disabled over the course of the story is really making me hate Martha Wells' refusal to let even the smallest injury last more and more.

She's always got a magical fucking cure for everything. Either a literal magical healing coma or the exact same thing now with a scifi twist. No one ever gets hurt in a way that matters, Moon, Jade, Murderbot, they just get back up and keep on going and nothing will slow them down. The only reason Malachite has scars is to make her cool and intimidating. They don't cause her pain that we know of. It's just set dressing. They're literally just cosmetic.

Not even Flower, who was so old her scales turned white, has any real trouble getting around. She fucking leapt perfectly straight into a Kethel's mouth. That is a feat that requires agility and speed.

Because physically disabled people just aren't cool enough to be allowed to exist in Martha Wells' settings, I guess!!!

Like, I can fucking hope that Murderbot's wrist at the very fucking least will be permanently fucked up because of what happened in the last chronological book, but I fucking doubt it.

Martha Wells has had six books to include any kind of lasting damage, to let Murderbot even become slightly physically disabled, and that was even when Murderbot didn't have the kind of help it was designed to even receive.

She hasn't even introduced any physically disabled characters at all.

Dr. Bharadwaj isn't even implied to be physically disabled now even after she almost died getting almost eaten by a space graboid. And she's not even fucking on-screen 99% of the time anyways, her using a fucking cane would take maybe five fucking additional words and change nothing, except letting physically disabled people fucking exist in the easiest way ever.

It's just really fucking getting infuriating every time Breq continues to be physically disabled without it being fucking wiped away and even the way Seivarden's addiction is handled and Tisarwat's depression and how none of these people are treated badly or shamed by the narrative for needing help, and meanwhile Martha Wells magically cures everything and then the only physically disabled characters who are ever mentioned are enslaved people who can't feel pain and are drugged to be in a frenzy and we're just casually told they're, and I quote, "less sentient than a hauler bot", (even though...hauler bots are supposed to fucking be fucking people deserving of respect in this universe???) and it's just fucking infuriating.

Martha Wells reads a trilogy where the main character is physically disabled as a result of an accident in the first book and continues to be physically disabled throughout the story including receiving more fucking disabling injuries, and the other main character is a recovering addict, and another character takes antidepressants, and pronouns and gender get discussed within the first scene of the first book, and continue to be relevant, and two characters literally have a conversation about the pronouns they use....

and then Martha Wells decides not to even use the word "pronouns" in any fucking capacity or context and decides cyborgs, who by all logic and her own fucking worldbuilding are physically disabled people, just are casually viewed as not being human, and then two fucking humans who have been forcibly addicted to drugs and disabled are so subhuman that they're "less sentient than hauler bots" and "not a person before they were even killed the first time" and no one even tries to help them and we aren't even supposed to notice this. We're not supposed to care.

If you're not ableist, and you don't want to be ableist, have physically disabled characters. Let your characters become physically disabled over the course of the story. Do not fucking magically heal everything away.

[rjalker]

Even the oppression in The Fall of Ile-Rien is founded on the idea that oppressed people are oppressed to protect the people oppressing them.

In this setting, magic users are evil and shunned from society. What are their motivations for being evil? We aren't given any.

Anyone who has a spell cast on them at any time, in any way, is also shunned from society and avoided like the plague.

Because the evil wizards enjoy casting spells on people that don't seem like they have any effect at first...until a few years pass, and then the curse suddenly activates, and a whole shit ton of people end up dead.

Meaning if you know someone has been touched by any curse, no matter how minor it seemed immediately, there is a very good chance that that person is now a ticking time bomb and there's nothing anyone can do about it except try to avoid being nearby when they go off.

Also known as: It is literally perfectly fucking reasonable for people to want to stay away from the person who might go on a magically-induced killing spree at any point with zero warning and no ability to stop themselves.

Just like it's perfectly reasonable to be afraid when a person whose species literally evolved to eat you, who is unstoppably strong and faster than anything you've ever seen tricks their way into your home using their evil shapeshifting powers that they literally evolved to have make it easier for them to sneak into your home and eat your entire family and village.

Just like it's perfectly reasonable to be afraid of the literal unstoppable killing machine that can hack any technology it wants without effort, including the space station you live on and all the doors and airlocks and even the security system and internet, has guns in its arms, can think and react at least 50x faster than you can, and is superhumanly strong and can keep right on murdering you even if you chop off multiple of its limbs.

Martha Wells thinks that people are oppressed because they're genuinely inherently more dangerous and threatening than the people oppressing them. Because she's bigoted, along with being apparently unable to contemplate the idea of her protagonists not being the most overpowered motherfuckers who always win every encounter you've ever seen.

Pro tip, writers, especially if you're white: If the oppression in your fictional setting "makes sense", throw it the fuck out and start over.

Here's some examples of ""oppression"" that "makes sense:

Prey species are afraid of literally being eaten by predator species (Zootopia, The Books of the Raksura)

People avoiding people who are known to violently explode at random (The Fall of Ile-Rien, Brand New Animal, the one anime with the people with fire powers I can't remember the name of)

People being afraid of the person who literally has the power to cut off all oxygen and open all the airlocks on the space station they live on with half a second of thought, with no way of stopping them (The Murderbot Diaries)

Everyone hates and distrusts orcs because they used to work for the Dark Lord and tried to end the world (Bright)

????? I know there's more.

[rjalker]

Moon literally only being there to make babies for Jade [handshake] Murderbot literally being programmed to protect humans

things we're supposed to just pretend we don't notice

She absolutely failed to convincingly prove that Moon is with Indigo Cloud because they actually like him as a person, and not just because he can make babies for Jade.

It's not even difficult to accomplish. She brought Ember in to ~prove~ that they like Moon, but as Chime literally pointed out literally immediately, Ember is a literal child. He's absolutely no threat to Moon's position. So like. Yeah, that's...not doing anything to convince me that Moon's there because they like him.

There were so many opportunities to show us this but they're never taken, because that would be too much effort I guess.

She's leaning so heavily on the trope of found family for The Books of the Raksura that she forgot that that relationship actually needs to be tested in a way that will prove, without a shred of doubt, that Moon is there because they want him, specifically, as a person, to be a part of their family. Especially with all the abandonment issues she's saddled him with. But we just never get it. And it's such a waste.

And like, Murderbot literally does not want to do anything except protect humans. Which is the exact thing it was created to do. But she doesn't want to write stories about robot rebellions against slavery because that's too cliche, so instead Murderbot's just gonna keep performing its intended role and this is supposed to be revolutionary. With no introspection ever at any point to show that Murderbot is questioning if this is what it really wants, or if this is just what it was programmed to want.

The laziness and refusal to think deeply about the issues at hand weakens the characters and their relationships once you think about it for more than five seconds.

[rjalker]

not physically or literally but in spirit I am repeatedly slamming this metaphorical book onto a table for emphasis so hard the table breaks in half and turn to dust.

It is so fucking easy to include physically disabled people in your writing. There is literally no fucking excuse for not doing so.

If there's no physically disabled people in your setting you're ableist and a shit writer.

Ann Leckie just keeps proving how fucking effortless including physically disabled people is. Without fail. I am no longer going to tolerate settings that exclude physically disabled people. It's ableism, laziness, and shit writing.

And yes, this goes 100% for The Murderbot Diaries, because Martha Wells is still fucking using the same magical healing she did with the Books of the Raksura, only now it's just called "medbay" instead of "literal magical healing trance that fixes everything".

Martha Wells gave us Malachite, who is covered head to toe in scars. But it's just set dressing. Those scars are not injuries. She's not disabled, she's not in constant pain, she's not impaired or impeded by them in any way. They're literally just set dressing to make her look cool.

Meanwhile,,,,Ann Leckie actually lets the characters' fucking traumatic injuries cause lasting permenant damage. Actions have fucking consequences, you cannot just jump off a fucking bridge to save someone who's already falling and walk away like nothing happened. It fucking means something. No one gets blown up or riddled with bullets and then a few paragraphs or chapters later is perfectly fucking healed again like nothing happened. Martha Wells refuses to let her characters lose in any real way, and she considered being disabled to be losing, so she'll never let her characters' injuries have any real lasting impact. They're literally just for drama, and as soon as they've worn out their use, they're magically healed like nothing ever happened.

Khat should not have been able to fully fucking recover from that absurd plan like it never happened. It's great that he got sick, because tHAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT. It's not great that it's 100% temporary and he's fine afterward. No lasting damage at all -.-

If Balm fucking went head to head with a ~~~scary terrifying~~~~ fell Ruler the way we're supposed to take seriously, she should have lost, at the very least, one of her fucking arms. But instead she just comes away with, and I quote, some "scratches" on her arms. That's it. That's all the damage she took from a Fell Ruler, who are apparently, as Martha Wells repeatedly tells us but never shows us, super scary and terrifying and horrible and scary and yada fucking yada. Supposedly they're soooo dangerous that everyone has to run away when they see one. But you know, not really, because that would require letting the protagonists lose, for real, in a real way that matters, and not due to any other thing except that they're too weak compared to this supposedly terrifying enemy.

[rjalker]

Made from my phone so forgive typos.

Imagine a Venn diagram.

One side is labeled "the story the author intended yo tell"

The middle is "the literal words the author put down"

The other side is "the story the author actually told"

Sometimes the two circles are completely different things. Usually when an author absolutely sucks at following the "show don't tell" rule, so ends up having what they show us completely contradicting and overruling what they tell us.

Ex: we're told a couple is romantic and adorable and Relationship Goals (TM). The author truly belibes this statement and does not feel the need to prove it. Were just supposed to accept what we are told as inconterovetible fact.

But then what we're shown is that the relationship is an abusive fucking nightmare that you wouldn't even wish upon your enemies because it's just that horrifically abusive.

You want to avoid this in your writing?

Probe what you say by actually showing us that its true. Don't just tell us your characters love and support each other, not through narration or by them literally saying it. Actually show us, through their actions, that they really do love and support each other.

And this applies to all forms of storytelling, even when you can't literally show the audience anything, and instead have to rely entirely upon dialogue. Like audio dramas, for example. So many well written audio dramas successfully show us things about the characters without ever having to actually say the literal sentences out loud.

[rjalker]

If you're going to expect your audience to be afraid of the bad guys, here's a hint:

don't have the bad guys lose every single fucking fight they get into. don't have them literally never accomplish a single goal or actually hurt anyone the reader is given any reason to care about.

How am I supposed to be afraid of the Fell and think they're a genuine threat when they literally lose every single fight they get into with the protagonists?

It's just bad writing.

If you want your villains to seem like a threat, then, like, newsflash: They actually need to pose a threat.

You can't just keep telling us they're threatening and scary and dangerous and terrifying when what you keep showing us is that the protagonists always beat them with no losses that actually matter. (no, killing off random background characters the protagonist never met or interacted with, whose names we only learn after they're dead, whose deaths have zero impact on any other important characters, do not count)

[rjalker]

Venn diagram for fun. Mostly because I think the level to which Tremaine absolutely cannot be trusted with grenades is very funny.

[ID: A three-way venn-diagram showing three circles each with a character name. The first is for "Moon", and lists, "Wants kids, polyamorous alloaro, male, could probably be trusted with grenades". Moon shares a section with Tremaine, which is labeled, "Relationship amiable". Tremaine's circle reads, "demiromantic allo, rich, woman, cannot be trusted with grenades". Tremaine shares a section with Murderbot labelled, "knows first aid". Murderbot's circle reads, "can be trusted with grenades, aroace, nonbinary, relationship repulsed", and it shares a section with Moon labeled, "Not human", and "legally property". The center of the diagram where all the characters overlap is labeled, "everything else". End ID.]

As for The Question™: "probably" for Murderbot and Tremaine, I don't think so for Moon. We do know that the answer is yes for Jade though.

I was gonna also have Khat but I got lazy.