#TMBD racism

[rjalker]

System Collapse is just so bad it'd be funny if not for the completely unnecessary transmisia (That doesn't even fucking make sense lofl).

So here's the things it's not:

It's not plot driven

It's not action driven

It's not mystery driven

It's not character driven

There's just 60,000 ish plus words of a whole lot of nothing happening and us being literally told things are happening.

We're told Murderbot has a Systems Collapse™ 😱 (A horrified emoji clutching its face in fear), and we're told that it's making mistakes.

As in it literally keeps going "I'd fucked that up" "Oh look another mistake I'd made" "I was useless"

But not like, actually making any real mistakes. Martha Wells is continuing the pattern of the 6 first books in the series, where we just get told Murderbot is making mistakes instead of Murderbot actually making mistakes, but this time it's even more glaringly obvious that that's what she's doing because it happens like 50 times. For no reason.

(And not even in a "Murderbot's self esteem is spiraling and it's having a horrible angsty time" way. No. It's fine except for where we keep being told it's not fine. But if you go off of what we're shown, it is, in fact, literally fucking fine. because it's bad writing.)

"not instantly noticing a door on the other side of the giant dark room" is not a mistake worth commenting on. No, not even in an in-universe sense. And especially not worth doing so what felt like fifty fucking times for things just as inconsequential.

If she wanted us to believe that Murderbot was actually making mistakes and performing at sub-optimum efficiency or whatever...how about have it fucking lead a group of humans into a room with people pointing guns at the door and someone gets shot because it wasn't paying attention or couldn't focus? Bonus points if the humans it's babysitting had been trying to draw attention to the problem but it kept shooting them down (No pun intended) and insisting it was the security and it knew what it was doing.

no, we can't do that, because that would require Murderbot to actually makes mistakes that matter.

And with Martha Wells writing, that's never gonna happen because all of her protagonists are overpowered Mary Sues who are never allowed to "lose" in any real way, and that includes making actual mistakes. (And, as many of my other posts have talked about at length, this is also why none of her characters will ever become physically disabled no matter how many times they get blown up or stabbed or shot or eviscerated)

So she's just gonna keep literally telling us that Murderbot is making mistakes about things that are not mistakes and don't actually matter. And that's all that we're ever gonna get.

Even in the book that's supposedly about Murderbot Having A Mental Breakdown 😱 (another horrified emoji).

And just like the rest of the book titles, this one has nothing to do with the actual story being told, at all. It is in fact the worst title so far because it's just so blatantly "clickbait" and a lie. lol.

I literally said aloud to Walks when I was 20 pages in, "I feel like this is gonna be a Steven Moffat".

And yeah, I was right, it literally is.

The first literal 99 pages, not even joking, are just referring to the Systems Collapse™ 😱 (another horrified emoji) the book is named for, and referring to this event, which already happened, offscreen, before this book started, as, literally, redacted.

Implying constantly that it's some huge big traumatic deal with far-reaching consequences and major impacts on our main characters.

And we literally do not even get told what this event was until literally page 99.

And then by page 101 we're done talking about it.

And we are literally told what happened. Not even shown it from Murderbot's perspective.

Because it...wasn't even aware of it at the time. It remembered sitting while the humans were talking, and then its very next memory is waking up in the medical bay, perfectly physically fine as always.

And you may be thinking in petrified horror, "oh gods, what happened during the time it doesn't remember?" and imagining all sorts of plausible and horrible scenarios.

And uhh, well I don't want this post to have any more spoilers than it already does, so I'll make like Martha Wells and just tell you: None of the things you're probably imagining, which would make sense and fit within the story and justify all this drama around the event, are what happened.

What happened, is, like the rest of this book, a whole lot of nothing.

And as I said above. This book is not driven by the plot. It's not driven by a mystery. It's not filled with action. And it's not driven by the characters or their emotions.

Nothing in this book seems to matter, except that we just keep being told it matters, like we're told Murderbot is making mistakes.

I love character-driven stories. If this book were 60+ thousand words of nothing but intense Murderbot introspection and development, I'd have loved it.

But it's not. And there's nothing else to make up for the fact that it's not. All the other books had either interesting action, interesting characters, a lot of funny things, or a lot of sad things. This has exactly none of those things.

It's not funny, it's not sad, it doesn't have any interesting character interactions, the plot, which is overly complicated and doesn't make sense, wastes a whole lot of time doing nothing, and we just keep being told that Murderbot is Especially Traumatized™ right now, but not actually shown this in any way. We did not need to be told that Murderbot was having a mental breakdown in book 5, it was fucking obvious from the way it was acting. We were shown the fact that it was breaking down.

Here? Nope. No show, all tell, and what we're being told isn't even true...probably all of the time, to be honest. There's no point where something bad happens and then Murderbot goes "that was bad". No, the telling isn't a reaction to the showing.

We just get told things and that's supposed to make them true. But that's not how storytelling works.

Oh and all the rest of the problems this series has had until now? yeah Martha Wells is still continuing those. Augmented humans AKA cyborgs AKA disabled people are still explicitly excluded from the group of "human", because Martha Wells saw The Imperial Radch series talking about how THE EVIL FUCKING EMPIRE does not consider disabled people to be human, and decided that was a cool thing to do without...the whole thing where it's evil to do so, and that's the whole fucking point.

Literally the entire point of this in The Imperial Radch is to show that dehumanizing people is something fashists do. But Martha Wells missed that part, so she's just gonna keep dehumanizing disabled people in The Murderbot Diaries as a point of course. With no contemplation by anyone or anything that hey maybe this is a bad thing to do.

She's still still making up millions of excuses to avoid freeing other enslaved people because she thinks robot rebellions are too cliche to be interesting, so the alternative is "don't free slaves whenever you get the chance because ummmm what if they're enslaved for a good reason and decide to murder everyone?" Yeah, we're on book 7 and she's still doing that shit.

She keeps showing us that Murderbot is just as overpowered as the rest of her protagonists, but all of sudden when it comes to freeing other slaves, now all of a sudden poor little Murderbot can't do anything because ummmmmmmmmmmmm it'd have to....*checks notes* hack the security system first. ya know, that thing it's done millions of times? that thing it does without hesitation or trouble literally all the time?

It's like the fucking Democrats every time they win office. Oh no, sorry, they can't actually do anything in this extremely powerful position to help people, they're actually totally powerless and um we should give them more money and more power and then they'll be able to do the bare minimum to help people Vote Blue No Matter Who [heart emoji]

Murderbot can hack anything it wants whenever it wants at any time, and only chooses not to send space stations crashing out of orbit to be polite.

But ohh, as soon as there's another enslaved SecUnit in front of it that it has the power to free, then all of a sudden um there's nothing it can do, it can't hack the security system all of a sudden.

Literally this:

[ID: The meme of someone putting on sunglasses, originally saying, "I can't read suddenly. I don't know." Now edited so the top is captioned, "Murderbot when it's given the chance to free other slaves:", with the person now saying, "I can't hack suddenly. I don't know.". End ID.]

And this isn't a character flaw, this isn't Murderbot being traumatized and falling for the same propaganda that justified it being enslaved.

No, this is all because Martha Wells thinks robot uprising and slave rebellions are too cliche. Literally. They're too cliche. And these people are enslaved because they're so dangerous. So they should stay enslaved. And we're on book fucking 7 so far. So the racism is continuing and there's no sign of it stopping any time soon.

Sarcasm: Slavery is fine apparently as long as you're scared of what the enslaved people will do if you free them! Such great morals. Definitely couldn't have been unpacked in the second book at all.

The first few books were always making excuses not to free other slaves, but they've never been so blatant about being excuses until now. There is genuinely no excuse for keeping this shit up at this point. She's already spent the first 6 books showing us how completely overpowered Murderbot is. Pretending it suddenly can't do anything only when it's time to free other enslaved people is so fucking transparent and racist. Like I said it before and this book is just further cementing the fact that these books, despite the premise, are just slavery apologism at this point. We are on book 7! Seven! you don't need seven fucking books to deal with this shit!

Anyways don't waste money buying this book. Get it from your local library or the Web Archive or borrow from a friend. It's not worth spending money on. If your local library doesn't have it yet, make an Official request for them to get it.

The only thing worth reading it for is so you can see exactly how not to tell a story, because the problems in this one are so fucking glaringly obvious at all times.

Worst Murderbot book published so far. -5/10. Do not recommend. Definitely do not spend money on it.

[rjalker]

People are really acting like whitewashing in live action just happens in a vacuum and doesn't contribute to or stem from white supremacy at all.

What do you think is happening to all the people of color whose roles are instead being given to white people? you think more jobs just appear out of thin air? you think those jobs won't also be stolen by white people? You think whitewashing is just a silly little thing that only people on the internet care about?

doubly fucking so when the character cannonically has dark skin. Colorism is absolutely a factor. And it gets even worse when the character is explicitly nonbinary and aroace.

Real actors exist who could fill this role, but instead of letting them have the job, it's getting tossed to rich cisallohet white men once again.

And everyone's fine with this because they refuse to grasp the concept that every job designed for Queer people of color that gets snatched up by a cisallohet white man is one more Queer person of color who's out of a fucking job.

[rjalker]

The character:

[ID: A cropped section of official art for The Murderbot Diaries, showing Murderbot, a person with dark brown skin and black hair, vaulting over a table while a other characters, both with lighter skin, watch it. End ID.]

Murderbot is explicitly nonbinary.

The actor cast to play the role:

[ID: A photo of Alexander Skarsgård, a white man with shaved blonde hair, posing for a photo. End ID.]

Alexander Skarsgård is a cis white man. Being cast in the role designed for a nonbinary person of color.

And 99% of the fandom is completely overjoyed about this.

And if you point out how blatantly racist and exorsexist this is, they completely ignore the racist section, and accuse you of "demanding androgyny from nonbinary people".

Like he's not literally a cis man.

[rjalker]

people: The Murderbot Diaries is the most complex deepest most intricate thing ever it's so fun to analyze and obsess over the smallest details. Fiction is so important and amazing and important.

Me: *points out really blatant bigotry*

the exact same people: Ohh my god it's not that deep you're just triggered. It's just a silly book it doesn't mean anything it shouldn't be analyzed it's not that deep stop making up problems where there are none. Why are you so triggered over a book it doesn't mean anything fiction doesn't mean anything fiction has nothing to do with reality

[rjalker]

anyways. here's a fucking thread pointing out the blatant racism. At least there's one other person besides me who has a problem with this shit.

actually since Reddit fucking sucks for archival purposes I'll just copy and paste the entire thing here:

April 3rd 2024 for posterity.

____

Title:

So you understand that AI voice acting steals jobs from real voice actors, now can you understand that giving roles designed for Queer people of color to cishet white men is also stealing jobs from real Queer people of color?

Post:

Whitewashing does not exist in a vacuum.

Cis people giving roles designed for trans characters does not exist in a vacuum.

For every cisallohet white man who gets a role that was designed for a nonbinary person of color, there is now one more nonbinary person of color who's out of a job.

Rich successful white men do not need any more roles in Hollywood, especially not roles that should be going to Queer people of color. In the official art, Murderbot has dark skin. It has the darkest skin out of everyone in the Preservation Aux team.

[ID: A black and white digital drawing, showing a scene from The Murderbot Diaries book series. Murderbot, an androgynoid with very dark skin, wearing a white shirt and light pants, is leaping sideways over the chairs the other characters are sitting on, using one arm on the armrest to swing itself over, with its face hidden, and only the back of its head visible. The other characters are staring up at it in shock, confusion, and amazement: Ratthi, who has dark skin that is slightly lighter than Murderbot’s, is below it, throwing one hand out in shock, sending his mug of a dark liquid flying. He is wearing a light, long sleeved shirt and skinny jeans. Pin-Lee, who has light brown skin, is standing at a short table in the background, wearing a long sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a short skirt. Bharadwaj, who has brown skin, leaning forward over the table to stare, with only her long sleeved shirt visible above the table. Overse, who is white, is sitting in a chair next to Ratthi on the left side of the screen, looking up, with Arada’s light brown, bare legs and feet in her lap, with a beaded ankle bracelet. Overse is wearing a long sleeved shirt and leggings, and her own shoes are kicked off on the floor in front of her. End ID.]

Colorism exists in the real world. People with darker skin face more systemic hatred and disenfranchisement than people with lighter skin. Racism is already a systemic inescapable problem. Colorism only makes it worse.

Murderbot in the official art is not just a person of color, it has dark skin, and is the darkest of all the "main characters" we see.

Real dark-skinned, Queer actors deserve the opportunity to shine in roles designed for them. It is blatantly racist for these roles to instead by stolen by white people of any kind, but especially heinous for the roles to go to cisallohet white men who are already incredibly successful.

Because Alexander Skarsgård and Apple TV have made the blatantly racist and exorsexist decision to cast him in the role for Murderbot, this means that real nonbinary people of color have just lost what could have been a breakout job opportunity.

If you understand that using AI for voice acting is depriving real people of jobs, then you also need to grasp that allowing white people to steal roles meant for people of color without any backlash or criticism is directly contributing to and upholding white supremacy.

Every role meant for a person of color that goes to a white person instead is another person of color who's now out of a job.

Whitewashing characters for live action adaptations does not exist in a vacuum. It's not harmless. It's not "chronically online" to have a problem with it. It's a direct result of white supremacy, and literally allows white supremacy to continue being upheld.

AI steals jobs. So does whitewashing. If you care about one, then you need to also care about the other. White supremacy and whitewashing go hand in hand. Apple TV deciding to whitewash Murderbot is not harmless or simply "cringey". It's literally real life racism, colorism, and white supremacy, even before we get into the blatant exorsexism and transmisia of stealing roles from out trans nonbinary people.

____

and yes. If people comment I will also edit all of those comments into this post because Reddit fucking sucks and you can't save it to the Wayback Machine. So this post will keep getting edited and probably get even longer.

Edit: actually no I'm just blocking all these people.

[rjalker]

people like to say that "hacking your governer module is a metaphor for opening your mind to more possibilities" and like. zyg. have you actually thought about that statement for five seconds before you typed it out? Murderbot spent 35,000 hours After it ~hacked its governer module~ still doing the exact same thing as before. You're also completely ignoring the fact that constructs who haven't magically been given Main Character Specialness also want to be free.

But you know, Martha Wells refuses to treat them like actual people who deserve freedom, so why am I surprised that the fandom, which is filled with racist people, says victim blaming slavery apologetic shit like this thinking they're being profound?

You can't just say things that sound profound without actually thinking about what you've just said and how it applies to the media. Because now you're making the argument that enslaved people who aren't the main character are the "real ones" keeping themselves enslaved rather than the literal murder chip that will fry their brain if they try to escape.

And this is another part of why white authors need to stop coming up with (pseudo)magical "justifications" for slavery. It lets your audience say absurd things like this without any critical thinking.

[rjalker]

I fucking hate it when people go "oh Progressive™ art gets so much more scrutiny than things Blatantly Made By Conservatives™~! How come my favorite Queer movie gets criticized for being racist so much? How come my favorite author gets criticized for being transmisic so much? It's such a double standard!"

Are you sure it's a double standard? Are you sure it's not just that you think any criticism is too much criticism? Do you understand the purpose behind pointing out criticism and telling people they've done something hurtful? Do you think it would be even remotely constructive to explain to conservatives that they're being racist? Do you understand why people are more willing to educate self-styled Progressives™ about the ways they're being bigoted?

Are "progressive" stories and creators actually "held to a higher standard" or do you just think they should be immune to criticism because the author appeals to people like you in particular?

Someone taking the time to explain in detail why XYZ "progressive" author is racist but not bothering to explain why ABC bigoted authors is racist is not "holding progressive creators to higher standards".

It's assuming that people who call themselves progressive actually care about learning from their mistakes and genuinely want to do good in the world, including unlearning bigotry they didn't notice.

If you're supposed to a be a good person, the thing you do when someone points out bigotry is apologize and do better in the future. Not bemoan the fact that no one sits down and writes a five thousand word educational essay telling the MAGA Don't Tread On Me Republicans where they've gone wrong and how it could be fixed.

I think you people are just insecure bigots who don't like seeing your favorite creators called out for bigotry, so now you have to pretend that they're being uniquely oppressed because other oppressed people are taking the time to educate people about the ways they're being bigoted and hurting people.

And again. You people need to aknowledge the fact that criticizing bigotry from people who say they want to be good people is a hell of a lot more likely to be productive than criticizing the bigotry of people who've openly and happily dedicated their entire personality to being racist and bigoted "to own the libs".

It's not a double standard. It's literally just people trusting that people who call themselves progressive actually want to be progressive.

[rjalker]

A lot of people in fandom clearly believe that the only kind of media analysis you should ever be doing is "interpret it solely in an endlessly praising, strictly homosexual sense, with emphasis on the sex part"

No other forms of analysis are welcome. You're not allowed to criticize the media for any of its flaws, or even point out the fact that it's flawed. You are not allowed to talk about the things in the work that are explicitly Queer and not in a strictly homosexual way, especially if the explicit Queer rep is aspec in any way, and especially not explicitly aroace. Because in fandom, everything has to come back to sex one way or another, no matter how many Queer and Disabled identities / traits the fandom has to erase to get there.

You can have an explicitly nonbinary character who's aroace and disgusted by the idea of being in *any* kind of relationship, including queerplatonic, who is touch averse and the narrative does nothing but respect this and show this character getting more comfortable with asserting its boundaries around being touched, and the fandom will still insist on misgendering it and shipping it with a guy they're whitewashing and pretending that it actually enjoys being touched, it's just too socially anxious / self-loathing to admit it.

Even when the author is going out of her way to show that the character hates being touched and as soon as it starts to realize that its boundaries will be respected instead of trampled over, it starts stating and enforcing its boundaries more and more firmly and easily. Until it becomes second nature for it to tell people not to touch it, instead of saying nothing because it's learned helplessness from never being able to say no before.

Even when the entire theme of the series is "respect people even if they're different from you", fandom cannot let any kind of Queer representation exist unless it's the white gay men having sex kind. Even if it means they have to misgender and whitewash the protagonist and whoever it's being shipped with, and erase literally everything that makes it who it is as a character, to do so.

There are literally endless white, gregariable, not explicitly sex repulsed characters people could be writing porn about instead, but fandom always has to whitewash and erase Queer identities they don't like so they can write porn without having to give a single shit about other people or think about the bigotry they're perpetuating by taking nonbinary, touch averse, aroace characters and turning them into misgendering porn fuel.

These people will literally even resort to shipping slaves with their legal fucking owners, despite the author repeating endlessly over and over again not to fucking do this. Literally. The author tells you not to ship slaves with their owners. But fandom will still do it because they are that fucking poisoned by amatanormativity and cannot fathom the idea of just treating aroace people like whole people who aren't missing anything.

They'll literally ship slaves with their owners and then act surprised when people think they're absolutely vile people.

[rjalker]

This is literally from book 2.

:: added to indicate telepathy.

Martha Wells making it very clear she thinks that robot slave uprisings is a cringey and embarassing cliche. And with book 7 out now, what do you know, absolutely no signs of this idea being challenged in any way.

Because even though Martha Wells is literally the one who decided to write a story about enslaved robots, she doesn't want to write a story about slaves fighting for their freedom. Because she thinks that's cliche and cringey and bad. Because oppressed people violently fighting for their rights is *Faith mimicking Buffy voice* wrong.

::What do you propose to do?::

[Murderbot the former slave asked the currently enslaved person]

There was a pause. A long one, five seconds. ::We could kill them.:: Well, that was an unusual approach to its dilemma. ::Kill who? Tlacey?:: ::All of them. The humans here.:: I leaned against the wall. If I had been human, I would have rolled my eyes. Though if I had been human, I might have been stupid enough to think it was a good idea. I also wondered if it knew a lot more about me than what little was in the newsburst. Picking up on my reaction, ART said, ::What does it want?:: ::To kill all the humans,:: I answered. I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, ::That is irrational.:: ::I know,:: I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.

Sarcasm: Slaves wanting to kill the people enslaving them is "irrational" because then who would make new TV shows? Clearly getting to watch new TV shows is the real priority, here! End sarcasm.

And like, as I keep saying, this would have been fine to do if the point here was that Murderbot Is Not Immune to Propaganda and has just as much work to do dismantling the Pro Slavery Propaganda as everyone else.

But we are now at seven whole fucking books.

And Murderbot still hasn't fucking learned that Hey! Slaves Are People Too Even If They're Not Me!!!!

And even if Murderbot never learned this lesson it'd still be fine because you can in fact have protagonists who are bad people, you can even have protagonists who are horrible people! If only any of the other fucking characters or the narrative cared about freeing slaves!!!

But no!!!! Every other character is just as fine as Murderbot with murdering slaves instead of trying to rescue them! The seventh book has ART, who we're supposed to love, casually rip a slave limb from fucking limb while they're still afuckinglive and we're supposed to think it's badass and not horrific!!!!

Martha Wells just keeps constantly reinforcing the idea that slaves are too dangerous to be given freedom, and at seven whole entire books, I'm done waiting for the other shoe to fall, because it's clearly never going to!

Martha Wells didn't set out to write a story about how slavery is bad and everyone deserves equal rights when she decided to write The Murderbot Diaries, she just read The Imperial Radch series and thought "cool robot!!" and ignored literally everything else!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She can't even be assed to treat her own robot characters like actual people within the setting! She goes around calling Scary Disabled enslaved people "less sentient than hauler bots" even though she's the one who decided to write a setting where robots are supposed to be people!!!! But she literally can't even be bothered to treat them like people!!!!

[rjalker]

Your post about sci-fi slavery came across my dash - it seems like you've read the whole Murderbot series, and "regular" slavery is definitely a thing that comes up, in the form of peoples' lifelong forced indentured servitude to corporations on colonies or mining facilities. Just seemed like a odd bone to pick, when it's there pretty clearly (in Artificial Condition, Network Effect, and System Collapse at least).

Referencing this post probably. Or this related one.

Yes, I am aware there's other forms of slavery in this series, and no it's not an odd bone to pick, because the only other slavery that exists in the series is always in the background and always off-screen and never the main focus of any story.

It's not taken seriously, just like the main form of slavery isn't either.

The plot of System Collapse, no pun intended, collapses in on itself as soon as you think about it for more than five seconds, because the entire premise is that the people need to agree to be enslaved in the first place. Which isn't how slavery works.

Whether or not "regular" slavery is also a thing in the setting (only ever in the background!) does not fix the fact that the major form of slavery in the setting is the fake kind that doesn't actually exist and doesn't understand how actual oppression works, and plays into slavery apologism.

And Martha Wells can't even take the fake version of slavery she's invented seriously and treat it with the gravity that it's due, why should the fact that there's so-called 'regular' (not even) slavery in the setting only in the background fix the main problems I pointed out with my original post?

Again. Cannot stress it enough. The plot of System Collapse is that people have to agree to be enslaved before they can be enslaved and all they have to do is say no and boom. Suddenly you can't enslave them.

That is not how slavery or oppression work at all. That's just a whole new brand of victim blaming and slavery apologism to come out of this series. And it's not the first. Murderbot literally argues all the time that other constructs should remain enslaved because otherwise they'd just murder everyone. That's not even fantasy slavery apologism, that's just straight up antiblack slavery apologism that was and still is used to defend real life slavery.

I recommend you try rereading the series. Because we have seven whole books out now and it shouldn't have taken more than two for Murderbot to become actually anti-slavery but even in book 7 we can fucking even have that yet. The only slaves in this series whose lives matter are random humans who don't even get to be actual characters with personalities or matter in any way besides hurting Murderbot's feelings, and Murderbot itself. ART tears an enslaved construct to fucking peices while they're still alive and it's treated as perfectly reasonable and Badass™ instead of the most horrific fucking torture and cruelty.

I don't know how to tell you or anyone else reading this that thinks this series is good at handling slavery, but murdering slaves, and literally torturing them to death by literally chopping them into fucking peices while they're alive is in fact incredibly fucking evil and not actually anti-slavery or pro-liberation.

ART could have literally just fucking knocked that person unconcious or, as @walks-the-ages pointed out: get this: Knocked them unconscious and disabled thier fucking governermodule. ART is the most advanced fucking bot in the damn series, it can do anything it wants. Am I supposed to believe it can't hack governer modules? Am I supposed to pretend that it had no choice but to CHOP A LIVING PERSON INTO PEICES TO TORTURE THEM TO DEATH in "self-defence"?

If Murderbot had a story to tell about getting literally chopped to peices while it was still owned by the Company, it would be treated as horrific and traumatic and terrible.

But when one of the literal heroes of the story does that exact fucking gruesome thing to another enslaved person right there on the page, it's perfectly fine and cool and just shows how Badass™ ART is.

That's not fucking arguing that slavery is bad. That's arguing that slavery is bad when it happens to the protagonist.

If you're reading this post, go read the first post I linked too. Here it even is so you don't have to scroll back to the top.

Edit: you've also completely and utterly failed to address any of the things I brought up in that original post, and instead you're just trying to deflect by talking about the other slavery in the setting, even though that doesn't refute my original statements at all.

[rjalker]

dear gods The Murderbot Diaries fandom is being just as exorsexist as usual.

insisting that if ART is voiced by a female voice actor, that means they're pushing gender onto it and "making it heterosexual".

meanwhile they have absolutely no problem with a white cis man playing Murderbot, a nonbinary person of color.

But as soon as a female voice actor is considered for ART, who is just a nonbinary as Murderbot, now suddenly it's a problem.

Because these peole can't stop at being racist and exorsexist, they have to add misogyny in too. It's 2024 and these adults have no fucking problem treating white male as the absolute default and then start getting upset when a nonbinary character is going to be voiced by presumably a cis woman. When they have no problem with a nonbinary person who is literally not white gets played by a cis white man.

[rjalker]

No one:

The Murderbot Diaries fandom: Actually, it's absolutely fantastic that the acting role designed for a nonbinary person of color is going to a cis straight white man!!! This is the best decision ever. I love this actor. No one could be better suited for the job. Oh, what's that? You have a problem with this blatantly racist and exorsexist decision? Well, clearly you just think nonbinary people owe you androgyny!

[rjalker]

"We have to let bigoted allos ship aroace explicitly everything-repulsed character! We can't tell them they're bigoted! Just let them do whatever they want without criticism!"

Nope :)

If you ship Murderbot you're a bad person. If you erase the canon Queer representation of marginalized people to replace it with something more palatable to you you're a bad person.

If you literally cannot be normal and not ship exactly one (1) fictional character that is explicitly, cannonically repulsed by romance, sex, queerplatonicness, and touch, you are a bad person.

This is not up for a debate.

If you erase everything that makes a cannonically Queer, disabled character who it is, you're a bad person and you should, in fact, feel bad about it.

Just because you're doing the bigotry in fandom doesn't make it magically harmless. You people literally just hate aroace people, nonbinary people, and touch averse people.

[rjalker]

Very funny to see bigots (who pretend they're not being bigoted, because they ~totally~ agree with me, for sure!) call me terminally online because I criticize the rampant bigotry in The Murderbot Diaries fandom for maybe two days every two months when I remember it exists and check the tag only to see dozens of new bigoted posts that no one else is criticizing because the rest of the fandom is filled with either bigots or people who refuse to call it out. Lofl.

"You're so terminally online!"

Bitch I have barely been online for the past two days. Almost like your shitty ableist insult is completely meaningless and literally just insulting on the basis of ableism that you're gonna pretend isn't inherent in it.

[rjalker]

I have been informed I have a "pattern of behavior" in The Murderbot Diaries fandom, of *checks notes* let's see...

Calling out exorsexism

Calling out racism

Calling out aroacemisia

Calling out ableism

Politely correcting misgendering

[ID: A screenshot from a video clip of a person frowning at the camera, saying, "Yeah, I sure hope it does!". End ID.]

[rjalker]

And this:

"https://rjalker.tumblr.com/post/714363795425968128/martha-wells-writing-oppression-like-id-four"

Also applies to The Murderbot Diaries. Where Martha Wells has continuously condemned slaves fighting back against the people who have enslaved them so that her books, which are about an AI that freed itself from slavery, are not following the cliche of robots who are enslaved by humans wanting to rebel.

Because apparently, avoiding cliches is more important than slaves being free! -.-

I'm not even joking. She literally continuously has the “free” robots arguing with robots who are more enslaved than them that rebellion is stupid and counterproductive and illogical.

Martha Wells wants to write oppression, but she also cannot fucking stand letting her protagonists be actually weak in any way, and she must have her protagonists be the strongest most overpowered fuckers ever.

So instead of writing about how oppression really works, what she's actually writing is just saying that oppressed people are oppressed because they are dangerous and violent and terrifying and pose a very real lethal threat to their oppressors.

To the point that, in The Murderbot Diaries, literally even Murderbot, the fucking protagonist, explicitly says this shit.

It literally says that other robots like itself should continue to be enslaved because otherwise they are too dangerous and scary to be allowed freedom, and if they can't be enslaved they should be killed because they just pose such a horrible terrifying threat to decent people.

Murderbot is “one of the good ones”, because it doesn't want to rebel or fight for its freedom, it wants to keep doing the job it had when it was still brain-chip-that-kills-you-if-you-disobey enslaved.

Martha Wells also cannot seem to grasp that slavery is a thing even when you do not Literally have a microchip in your head that'll kill you if you disobey, since literally all of the slavery we actually see in the series is facilitated only through this magical science fiction device and nothing else. We're supposed to not think of ART as being enslaved because it doesn't have a brainchip that'll kill it if it disobeys. Because ART is Special™ and Not Like Those Other Nonverbal Disabled-Coded Robots, just like Murderbot is Special™, because it wants to watch TV instead of fighting to free itself or anyone else from slavery. And this is not because it's so traumatized and terrified of humans that it's too afraid to fight back, no, no, you see Murderbot just thinks slaves revolting is stupid and not going to accomplish anything except uhh....*checks notes* stopping it from getting to watch new TV shows.

And nobody else in the fandom gives a single fucking shit about this because they think that Murderbot being autistic and Amazingly Relatable™ makes all this shit okay.

(And like, to all the people constantly expressing amazement that Murderbot's a robot and yet it's so relatable...that's because it's literally not written in any way that tells you it's a robot. It's written the exact same way as literally any other snarky sarcastic relatable human protagonist. This is not a difficult concept. You forget that Murderbot's an AI because Martha Wells didn't bother to write it like an AI in any fucking way.)

Martha Wells is a white woman who thinks she knows how oppression works, and then she continuously writes oppression as though oppressed people are oppressed to keep their oppressors safe. Because she actually has no fucking understanding of how oppression really works.

And before the jackasses who want to pretend I have no idea how storytelling works come along, you can in fact write a story with an unreliable narrator who is not telling the truth, who is not portraying things correctly because of their own biases, and still manage to get your true fucking feelings across. It's literally not fucking difficult. I have done it many times. It's literally not difficult.

If we were meant to know that everybody saying that Security Units are so dangerous and terrifying is just propaganda and nothing else, or that Murderbot's fucking shittiness and traitorness towards other enslaved robots is literally just it falling to propaganda and being brainwashed, we would fucking know that.

But we all fucking know it's not literally just propaganda. Murderbot goes the fuck around hacking whatever it fucking wants whenever it fucking wants without anybody being able to notice and with there being literally nothing they could do to stop it. It can hack weapons scanners so it can bring guns wherever it fucking wants.

If Murderbot wanted to, it could literally fucking hack a space station to fall out of the fucking sky and kill everybody on board and they would be no way for anyone to stop it. They wouldn't even know that that's what it was doing unless it decided to tell them.

It literally has fucking guns in its arms. It can move faster than humans can blink. It is who knows how many times stronger than a human.

There's literally nothing anyone would be able to do to stop it from murdering everyone around it if it wanted to.

This is not how this shit works in real life. People of color are not unstoppable killing machines. Queer people are not unstoppable killing machines. Disabled people are not unstoppable killing machines. (And lets not forget that Martha Wells has just casually fucking decided that cyborgs, aka fucking disabled people, aren't human, and no one's supposed to question this or have a problem with it, or even fucking notice it! Literally the only people I've seen fucking saying “hey that's fucked up” are other disabled people!)

If you are writing about oppression, especially if you are a fucking white person, do not make your oppressed class literally the most overpowered and unstoppably “cool” thing you can fucking imagine because you are incapable of not making your Heroes the strongest most special fucking people ever.

Real oppressed people -- people of color, disabled people, queer people, people of oppressed religions -- are not oppressed because they are fucking apex predators who literally evolve to eat people and don't even treat people as people 90% of the time, nor are they superpowered robots who can hack literally whatever they decide to hack without anybody being able to stop them or even notice, who are more than capable of killing dozens of humans in only a few seconds, who literally have guns in their arms that do not need reloading and never have to be recharged.

Real oppressed people are not oppressed to stop them from killing everyone around them.

The murderbot Diaries wouldn't be this fucking horrible in terms of portraying oppression if Martha Wells could just fucking stop making her gods damn protagonists completely overpowered and unstoppable and the strongest person around.

If she actually understood how oppression worked, and was willing to resist the urge to make her protagonist the most fucking OP motherfucker on the planet, it would be fine.

But she thinks oppression is when people pose an actual real lethal threat to everyone around them, and the people they threaten band together for their own safety. She refuses to not make her protagonists completely overpowered and unstoppable and the strongest people in the setting.

This is the same fucking logic that anti-vaxxers use to claim that they are oppressed for being fucking plague carriers on purpose.



Martha Wells has no fucking clue how oppression actually works, and refuses to learn, which is why The Books of the Raksura are racist, and so are The Murderbot Diaries, especially because now the oppression takes the form of fucking slavery, and all Murderbot does is argue that slavery is good, actually, and everyone's better off if the other robots are kept enslaved.

That is just fucking racist, and not actually any fucking better than JK Rowling portraying the house elves as happy slaves who don't want to be freed.

And if you're going to accuse me of not having actually read these books, or just not understanding how storytelling works, fuck right the hell off.

Just because you refuse to criticize the things you enjoy doesn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about, especially when the majority of the people in The Murderbot Diaries are bigoted in ways that the series explicitly fucking condemns, and ship slaves with their owners despite Martha Wells saying over and over and over again not to fucking do that.

If you're going to comment on this post crying about how I'm oppressing poor Murderbot and I'm so mean...just shut the fuck up.

Real people are not oppressed because they are dangerous. White authors writing shit like this is racist and bigoted in too many ways to count. Martha Wells has done this shit before with The Books of the Raksura, and she's had six fucking books in The Murderbot Diaries series to get her shit together, and so far refuses to do that.

And this is not even fucking touching on the exorsexism and transmisia in The Murderbot Diaries, but I've already made dozens of posts on that topic.

And once again: If you're going to accuse me of not reading the books, or just not understanding how stories work, go fuck yourself.