#i'm gonna go all murderbot on their ass

[khentkawes]

All I want for Christmas is...

...to utterly destroy the pornbot infestation and leave their corpses as a smoldering warning to future bots menaces!

[memento-mori-twilight]

I blame Batman: Failsafe for everything happening in Gotham War rn.

The whole failsafe machine that the Zur En Arrh alter ego (which was never an alter ego in its previous conception, but just a name Bruce adopted when he became essentially Superman in a different planet) made.

that was literally just an unstoppable robot that didn't really have any reason to exist or get activated beyond the writer just wanted it to.

Because woe behold that Bruce "explore all angles" Wayne makes a crime fighting robot that decides to strike before doing even the barest minimum of research.

A failsafe machine that only was designed with Batman in mind (oh and with Kryptonite blades for Superman just because)

In an issue that had Batman literally fall from space and survive atmospheric reentry with just his cape, cowl, a bit of space debris, and his squishy human body BECAUSE BATMAN, even though his ass should be either space ash or crimson goo scattering over the Artic.

And God, why is Zur En Arrh even this bastardized alter ego? Why do this?!?

During Failsafe, Zur En Arrh being the one in control of making/deactivating the murderbot (sans Alfred, who wouldn't have let this Zur En Arrh alter bullshit go for this long if he was aware of it anyway, but now that he's dead who cares ig) didn't make sense, especially with how we know Bruce usually has more than a few fallbacks to stop his shit going fully chaotic if they're as hair-triggered to set off like Failsafe was.

Zur En Arrh was never meant to be this terrifying. It was meant to be silly, a neat flashback to when Batman was able to do more for more people than he normally could. It was fun Silver Age goodness that should have been looked at fondly, not with disdain as readers are going to now.

And it's all Zdarky's fault. Thanks for ruining it. I'm gonna be over here reading Wayne Family Adventures until this gets retconned or firmly established in Elseworlds.

[chayscribbles]

chayscribbles’ monthly writing update ☆ august/september 2023 double feature

☆ STATISTICS.

words written: 4273 in august; none in september BUT that's because i did a lot of revising

projects worked on: Gemini Heist in august; Andromeda Rogue in september, then procrastinated so hard i ended up writing a few paragraphs on Third, Secret Wip

proudest accomplishment: i compiled all my AR1 beta feedback without giving in to the urge to set the book on fire and also myself

books read: Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries #5) by Martha Wells

☆ GENERAL COMMENTS.

so basically i started off august decently solid, working on gemini heist while andromeda rogue was off being torn apart by the betas. (i'm joking. it didn't get torn apart. i think you guys were being way too nice actually.)

and then all kinds of shit hit the fan in my personal life all at once in mid-august. both good and bad. it was a lot.

anyways the first half of september was spent recovering from all that, BUT i took a week off work mid-september to catch my breath and also get back into writing, and it was really good for me.

on another note! i am very seriously considering making an etsy shop for some of my art, because as much as i loathe the thought of monetizing my hobbies, we are living in a cost of living crisis, and i don't wanna be in my ice water soup era forever, ha. anyways stay tuned. (and if you think it would be a good idea/you think yourself or others would be interested in buying things PLEASE LET ME KNOW. EXPLICITLY. because otherwise i will assume no one cares and the idea will fizzle out.)

more specific wip-related comments + featured excerpt below.

☆ COMMENTS: ANDROMEDA ROGUE (draft 2 editing)

i went through all the beta comments during my week off and while i am glad it doesn't look like i'll have to do any more BIG rewrites, editing sucks and i want to give up.

☆ COMMENTS: THE GEMINI HEIST (draft 0.5. okay fine it's draft 1 but i feel better about myself if i call it draft 0.5 okay)

honestly when i was working on this feels sooo long ago i don't even remember what there is to say?

i hit 20K at some point in august. i think.

OH YEAH i "finished" act 2/7. the quotation marks are because i absolutely did not finish it, i only finished writing all the main plot-relevant scenes and skipped anything else. which means there's like a whole chapter and a half that haven't actually been written bc they're probably gonna be exposition or character building stuff that i haven't figured out yet and i'm hoping will be easier once i know what actually happens in the rest of this story. (reminder that i am a plantser.)

anyways i suspect this wip will be going dormant again for a while as i focus on getting AR ready for publishing. (sidenote it's been over a year since i started the GH draft and i feel like i've done fuck all on it besides come up with useless lore and make extremely specific playlists. world's slowest writer. the playlists slap, though.)

☆ FEATURED EXCERPT.

uh have this random snippet of Euna about to pop off!

Somewhere far, far, away, Leo was shouting, “Just get your ass out of there, Li!” but her voice seemed muffled in Euna’s ears, blocked out by the rage that had been steadily mounting ever since that guard shot her arm and ruined the fight for her. All she could hear was the blood rushing through her own ears, the buzz of the guard’s electrified gauntlets, the crackle of the electricity in her own hand. She reared her good fist back and slammed it into the guard’s face. Their nose made a sickening crunch against Euna’s knuckles. Blood flowed down over their mouth and chin as they staggered back, but Euna wasn't done. Her right arm, still spouting sparks, swung into the side of their head, finally bringing them down. Before they could get up again, Euna dropped on top of them, pinning them to the ground with her knees on their chest. She grabbed their shoulders and yanked their upper body off the floor, preparing to slam them down one last time— Purple light surrounded her. For a frightening second, she couldn’t move. Then she was thrown off the guard and dragged, upside-down, through the air towards the exit.

☆ TAGLISTS. let me know if you want to be added/removed to any of them.

general taglist:

@nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @onomatopiya @quilloftheclouds @ashen-crest @writeblrfantasy @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @extra-magichours @avi-why @lefttigerobservation @chazzawrites @bardolatrycore @innocentlymacabre

andromeda trilogy taglist:

@bebewrites @nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @onomatopiya @akindofmagictoo @quilloftheclouds @nora-theteawriter @ashen-crest @corpsepng @writeblrfantasy @toboldlywrite @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @cheerfulmelancholies @extra-magichours @writeouswriter @cilly-the-writer @lefttigerobservation @rose-bookblood @drowsy-quill @chazzawrites @cynic-and-chief @enchanted-lightning-aes @aesa @outpost51

gemini heist taglist:

@florraisons @akindofmagictoo @cream-and-tea @nicola-writes @memento-morri-writes @antique-symbolism @rose-bookblood @afoolandathief @pepperdee @avi-why @zonnemaagd @chazzawrites @analogued @enchanted-lightning-aes @innocentlymacabre @kahvilahuhut @celestepens @cilly-the-writer @extra-magichours @onomatopiya @outpost51

[ilovedthestars]

never have you ever written...

Body swaps!!

I was gonna say no, but actually, yes! Once! In an AUpril thread on the murderbot discord, where we were noodling about some body swaps during ASR!

Which i think you knew already, because I wrote a snip in response to a snip that you wrote--about Mensah and MB bodyswapping. My snip was right after they fixed the body swap situation, so like, technically I suppose it might not even count as writing body swaps lol. But it was part of the narrative we were constructing as a group.

(This trope is fun, but also leads to certain kinds of Awkwardness that I don't like as much--so I don't really see myself writing it again anytime soon. And if i did, it would likely be in snips, rather than a whole story where i have to actually explain why the body swap happened and all the consequences etc.)

My snip isn't on ao3 or anywhere, but I'm fairly happy with it as a snip, so I'll share it under the cut :)

---

It was disorienting, settling back into my own mind. Everything felt out of alignment, and I spent 0.65 seconds worrying that something had gone wrong, before realizing that I could think in fractions of a second again. I could think again, at normal speeds, instead of stumbling along sluggishly with organic-only hardware. I had gotten used to human processing speeds eventually, but it had felt like wading through mud, and now I was sprinting. My systems were all there, reconnected. Memory was intact, and so was my storage, still full of all my media (I had really missed my media). Risk and threat assessment were online, performance reliability was within acceptable ranges, and my governor module was yelling about protocol (I had not missed that). I started a diagnostic to make sure that the human who had been camping out in my brain for the last few hundred hours hadn’t messed anything up. I reached out into SecSystem, expanding my awareness, checking that my hacks were still in place. I opened a dozen new inputs—I had cameras again. I loved cameras. I was never going anywhere without camera access again.

Being in my own body again was a relief. I was not going to miss disgusting human bodily functions, and I was really not going to miss talking to humans. Although I guess I hadn’t minded talking to these humans as much as usual. It had been kind of nice to be treated like—like a human.

But I wasn’t a human. They had been nicer than I’d expected, but only because I looked like one of them, and that had never been permanent. I didn’t want it to be permanent. I was glad to be back in my own body. Back to security protocols and hiding behind my armor and half-assing my job. I didn’t have to care anymore. Caring about all of this had been exhausting, and I never wanted to talk about it again.

Across from me, in her own body, Dr. Mensah closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She stretched out her arms, and then exhaled loudly, relaxing her whole body. “Thank goodness.”

Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “We have some things to talk about.”

[blessphemy]

✨ Fic Writing Review 2023 ✨

thanks for the tag @non-plutonian-druid!

the actual format of this game is this post but i rearranged it a bit so that i could hide my extremely long list of fics under a cut

Fandom fic events 2023

Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange

Yuletide Draft Dodgers

Murderbot AUpril Collection (open and accepts submissions)

2023 Aspec Murderbot Diaries

2023 PresAugust

We Were It // It Will Be Us: A TMBD Art Exhibition (open and accepts submissions)

Botober 2023

Upcoming 2024

Events:

i'm doing the Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange (2024) :3

Perhaps i'll post something for the annual 3/3 for Three collection idk (this collection is open and accepts submissions, and it spikes on March 3rd of each year)

WIPs:

Gift exchange fic

Absolute monster of a nullverse!network effect AU fic. i'm trying so hard to get draft 1 of this beast finished it's been beating my ass for over a year but i'm gonna Get It

Continue Via Solitude updates.

a 5+1 ASR bad ends fic that explores some meta shit. namely trust, forgiveness, and sci-fi horror genre vs canon.

Words and fics 2023

let's find out just how cringe (fun) i've been on ao3. i'm like. jeebus creebus i've posted a lot this year huh.

105,486 words of fan fiction. all of it murderbot. let's look at them going right down the statistics page (default sorted by hits, tho it gets kind of messy at the end with and i got lazy):

30,336 words of Via Solitude, an All Systems Red AU where murderbot has to do wilderness survival.

~5k words that's just a repost of Threat As Greeting, except with fresh interactive CSS effects.

3,346 words top 3 SURPRISING things you didn't know about the SECUNIT who pulled you out of an INCINERATOR (2023 gift exchange) outsider POV from the characters featured in Wells' pre-canon short story

1,502 words Aspec Drabbles (for the Aspec Murderbot Diaries event) it lot of fun to work with strict 100-word drabbles.

13,837 words References NULL: Logs From Project Murderbot [nullverse] the most purely concentrated angst/whump from the nullverse series yet. handle with care or skip it.

6,552 words How To Go On A Camping Trip - a guide for anxious SecUnits who are bad at vacationing (2023 gift exchange) i really liked this one tbh. fun standalone.

2,488 words Improve Your Baby AI With This One Weird Trick! (2023 gift exchange) my personal fic-titling theme for the gift exchange was "clickbait."

7,875 Alien Refuge (AUpril inspired) This is a Homestuck crossover, and reportedly the first time multiple people willingly interacted with homestuck-affiliated content, and they liked it. gottem. it's also pretty good, i did a nice job injecting homestuckism tone into the murderbot narrative style If I Do Say So Myself.

911 words No Comment: Shut Up And Dance [nullverse] fluff and humor. tfw your secunit friend (murderbot) is crashing in your living room and you (dr. ratthi) have insomnia.

2,922 words MetaMorphoSys (AUpril inspired) listen i NEED the next big fandom trend to be an AU world where people metamorphose inside cocoons. hear me out. HEAR ME OUT. in this fic we take the fridge horror of canon murderbot diaries and make it visceral, wet, biological, and ethically Even Worse. get yr Amena emotions also.

0 words SecUnit Technician Bingo Card it's funny. idk.

3,438 words nullverse reference sheet [nullverse bonus content] self indulgent AU notes

2,290 words Systems: Splorch [nullverse bonus content] a friend of mine said "how long until we get a fic with #oviposition in the murderbot diaries ao3?" i took the answer to that question into my own two capable hands at 7.5 hours. you're welcome.

2,562 words Artifacts NULL: Fire Festival [nullverse] slice-of-life friend times with nostalgia vibes. how far we've come.jpg.

388 words Entries shared by the Society for Conservation of Feed Artifacts (SCFA) (created for TMBD in-universe robot art gallery, which is an open collection that accepts any submissions!) wait this reminds me i have one more to post. i'll get to it.

9,314 words in 31 fics written for (Botober 2023) daily prompts. turned out to be a fun exercise and exploration of bot culture tho it took me longer than the month of october to finish.

4 fanarts of fics that i liked.

26 fanbindings where i printed out and made booklets out of fics that i liked.

2 translations.

3,080 words Refrain [nullverse bonus content] if you're unfamiliar with my Brand this will sound unhinged. if you are familiar with my Brand you know by now that i have a knack for taking literally Anything and treating it with tender loving care and unexpected deft so this doesn't even surprise you. tl;dr it's porn of two bots having a deeply OSHA-unapproved Fuck Session, there's no genitals involved, and it's tagged #Vivisection. it's pretty good if you're into robots and perhaps mild gore.

Rules & Tags for this game

Rules: Feel free to show whatever stats you have. Only want to show Ao3 stats? Rock on. Want to include some quantitative info instead of stats? Please do this. Want to change how yours is presented? Absolutely do that. Would rather eat glass than do this? Please don’t eat glass, just keep on scrolling.

@fishdetective @beatrice-otter @snugglyeldritchjellyfish @ilovedthestars and anyone who feels like it

[spitblaze]

Aaaaah I have so many questions for the Android Therion AU. Ravus Industries has def used Therion for Less Than Legal activities and I wonder how much of their treatment of him skirts on the rights of an android as well (honestly in a capitalist hellscape I'm surprised they have any at all as much as there's a sense of 'we made you we own you forever unless you can afford to buy yourself outright')

That aside, I am *very worried* for Alfyn's safety as Ravus Industries tries to get Therion back. Like... they don't have issues killing if they use androids for assassinations. owo;;

Well, even in a capitalist hellscape there's civil rights lawyers. How far the rights of artificial lives go is...up in the air, at this point. Can they vote? Can they own property? Are they considered citizens? Do anti-discrimination and labor laws apply to them? Unclear, and probably varies between jurisdictions. Either way, androids have at least been around long enough at this point that they're not like, a chattel slave class outright. Also not super common, maybe one out of every 50 or 100 people is an android, but enough that it's a sizeable population, enough that they cannot be considered property outside of specific circumstances, and Therion happens to fall under that legal category.

Therion (and by extension Gareth) are officially and legally, despite having just as much going on upstairs as any human being, property of Ravus Industries. The paperwork was all filed beforehand, he's made with a specific purpose in mind and 'would pose a danger to others' if not under the control of the company, or they claim that he has no true intelligence and is therefore not sentient enough to qualify as a citizen, or something. I'm not gonna pretend I know enough about civil rights law to make up what those exceptions are, but just know that Ravus either fudged most of em or paid off some politicians to let them keep the whole thing hush-hush or both.

There's probably a good few sympathetic scientists and engineers who consider him fully human but unable to really do anything about his situation without jeopardizing their own. There's clearly others, like whoever wrote his file, who look at Therion and only see a tool. One that's helped Ravus Industries take down competitors and acquire their tech and research illicitly, but in this case one of the benefits of Therion being private property is that responsibility lies on the company, not him. Legally speaking, at least. I'm sure some of the less-sympathetic caretakers threaten to reprogram or scrap or replace his parts every time there's a mistake, because he's not a person, he can't learn, he's a machine who has defective parts.

At any rate, uh...Alfyn is definitely in trouble, lol. Like luckily he's still a country boy who can handle himself (Still has swarthy carpenter genes and experience with an axe, probably has a shotgun or whatever the 31st century equivalent would be), and magic is probably still a thing in the 'sufficiently advanced science' way (still thinking about how osvald just does math so hard it makes fire. baller), but ultimately the one thing that's keeping him safest is the fact that all of Therion's remote activation and tracking parts were disabled or removed after his initial escape. That's it. Ravus wants to turn Therion into a Homing Murderbot so bad so they can just retrieve him very easy so they can make him. idk. steal whatever the Wyndhams are doing or murder union organizers or something. The Fantasy Pinkertons are absolutely on his ass.

Luckily Alf at least has his trusty repair van and mobile engineering kits, as well as his usual irresistible charm that nets them allies wherever they go. Ravus Industries is a well-known company that employs a lot of people, but, uh. So are Nestle and Apple, if you catch my drift here. And it's not like they're alone, either! Tressa knows enough about how businesses and boards of investors work to predict what Ravus is gonna try, Olberic and Cyrus together have enough practical and theoretical knowledge of tactics to make for very effective planners, H'aanit knows how to live off the grid and hide your tracks and is the only member of the party who can wield a shotgun with more precision than Alfyn. Ophilia and Prim are also there, idk what they do, Prim is better with diplomacy and has less qualms with muder than Therion and Ophilia is probably very good at finding them allies or places to lay low (what are you going to do, say no to a bishop???).

I have MANY thoughts. some of them related (Cordelia may or may not be a C-suite at Ravus and is very conflicted on what to do about the situation bc she thinks the robot is hot and should go free but knows the practical use he has to the company. either way therion doesnt like her) some of them not (prim has her own goals and possible beef with Ravus but keeps getting distracted by h'aanit who is a lethally hot butch lesbian) but. im having a lot of fun thinking about the whole thing. heehee hoohoo funny sci-fi au

[rjalker]

[ID: The "Is this a pigeon?" Meme, edited s that the person is labeled, "Assholes in the Murderbot fandom".

They are pointing at a butterfly that is labeled, "Murderbot, who is explicitly aroace, romance-repulsed, sex-repulsed, touch-repulsed, and also aplatonic".

They are asking, "Is this free shipping material? I'm going to erase every aspect of Murderbot's personality that gets in the way of shipping :) Because fuck aroace people and fuck touch-repulsed people :) :)".

End ID.]

Dear Murderbot fandom, especially the people who have decided to ship Murderbot with Gurathin and erase literally everything that makes Murderbot Murderbot because those traits get in the way of shipping:

Fuck you.

Aroace characters do not exist to be your shipping material. Especially not aroace characters like Murderbot who are explicitly romance, sex, and touch repulsed. And considering Murderbot's absolute revulsion to the word "relationship", no, you do not get to fucking pretend you're shipping it queerplatonically while you're also literally erasing its touch-repulsion to pretend it actually really enjoys being touched, it was just shy before -.-

Are you fuckers aware that touch-repulsed people actually fucking exist? That aroace people who literally want absolutely nothing to do with romance and sex and relationships of any kind literally fucking exist?

How the fuck do you people get handed a book series that as a fucking miracle actually treats touch-repulsed people with absolute respect, and then turn around and decide you're gonna fucking erase it anyways????

If you aren't aroace AND sex-repulsed AND romance-repulsed you have NO fucking business even thinking about shipping Murderbot with anyone, no, not even queerplatonically.

If you are not fucking touch-repulsed you have NO fucking business writing about Murderbot being touched.

I swear to fuck, people. These books actually do some things perfectly right, and you all still have to make asses of yourselves by erasing anything that doesn't lend itself perfectly to fucking shipping.

If you only care about shipping, then fucking pick literally any character besides Murderbot to write shipping shit about.

Leave Murderbot alone. Leaves aroace people alone. Leave romance and sex-repulsed people alone. Leave touch-repulsed people alone.

People like Murderbot have almost zero fucking representation. Murderbot is literally the FIRST character I have EVER seen with any of these qualities where any of them are treated with fucking respect instead of being treated like a joke used to torment them.

You do not fucking get to take that away or erase it just because you assholes can't interact with any media without shipping something.

If you erase Murderbot's aroaceness, it's sex and romance repulsion, its touch-replusion, its aplatonicism, you are amisic and ableist.

Literally fuck you.

[specialagentartemis]

🌾🥚

🌾 A fic you really want to write but you haven’t (yet)?

I've rambled about this a lot on the discord and I swear it will happen someday: Anthropology Fic. i.e., Murderbot And Thiago Go Do Some Linguistic Anthropology Fieldwork In The Corporation Rim, Shenanigans Ensue. i.e., The Bisbee Deportation IN SPACE. Inspired by, among other things: the articles I read for my anthropological ethics class about ethnographers in places like Central American banana plantations and Brazilian favelas and Peruvian farmlands and Indian dalit communities, and their "subjects" asking the American anthropologists, are you just going to sit around being """neutral""" or are you gonna help; a year of cataloguing daily newspaper articles from an American mining town in the 1910s-1920s, tracking in what felt like real time the rise and fall of a miners' labor movement; and the Tolkienistic desire to show off my linguistic worldbuilding.

Thiago wants to go do some Anthropology in a Corporation Rim mining community that is attempting to unionize. Murderbot thinks this is a terrible idea but he will get his stupid ass killed if he doesn't have any security with him so guess who's coming too. The miners themselves are at turns suspicious of this interloper and resentful; either help, with all the resources you seem to have, or get out of the way while we carry out our union plans. Also there are SecUnits contracted at the mine and god doesn't that add more discomfort and labor rights questions to the whole thing!

I think about these OCs a LOT :') SecUnit A, If You Recall The Sky Or Not, Tamineh edi Ghotaka and Yeong-suk edi Ezun, YOUR DAY WILL COME

🥚 Any easter eggs you put in a fic that you hoped people would notice?

Hahahaha the fun thing about Murderbot Diaries fic is that every time MB references a piece of media, that's just me expounding about my opinions on movies or tv shows. In "Old Flame Episode," Xad and Oksis from Worldhoppers are Dax and Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the episode they're complaining about is basically just "Meridian" (terrible, stupid episode.) Avonovi, Ailat, and Nadirehs are of course Ivanova, Talia, and Sheridan from Babylon 5. Ivanova DID have a dumb old flame episode where her old flame turned out to have become a terrorist since she last saw him. Or maybe that was Talia. They both had them and they were both dumb. Similarly, "Artistic Choices" was nothing but this type of joke, referencing plot points in Riverdale, Star Trek TOS/ST:The Animated Series, and General Hospital. If I ever write anything with Murderbot referencing a movie or serial there is a 90% chance I'm lightly reskinning and vaguing about some movie or tv show I've seen.

[rogue-ai-cat]

Forgive me, it's 1:30 AM and I just had a weird realization. Come with me for this steam of consciousness journey.

So in book 6 there's the bit about whether or not one particular SecUnit should have to broadcast some sort of alert about what it is on the feed. They eventually draw an exceptionally unproductive truce where it has to make publicly available it's name and gender, having neither. It noted that it deliberately included nothing else because nothing else had been asked for.

Also in book 6, there's the bit with one of the younger humans and a guy who was lying about his age.

Alongside the fact that Murderbot never knows how old people are

It's literally not in the feed. Nobody has their age in the feed. And that seems SUPER weird to me. Like, my date of birth is part of my legal identity. There are situations where I'm not even asked what my name is ONLY my date of birth. Hell, even my prescriptions are filed that way at the pharmacy. You'd think that would be information that governments/corporations would want from every passing stranger.

Except it doesn't matter because they already have something to look you up by: your network address. Literally the feed device itself.

This says one thing to me. There is only one "feed". It isn't a social media company or something, it's an international network protocol that apparently everyone has agreed to.

And, in this universe, that seems really weird to me.

First of all, I assume there has to be at least a "dark web" somewhere. Some kind of system where you can only get to something by having it's hard address. You can't see it unless you know where it is.

And second, there are already nations on earth who have done or are working on separating themselves from the global internet, creating an isolated proprietary internet that their citizens have to use.

And honestly, if I were an awful company in the corporation rim and I wanted to keep my slaves from escaping, I would keep them from being able to access a network that could get off the planet. Now I know physical distance is still a barrier, but with a system that fast and that everywhere, the transportation of information is nearly inevitable. What I'm saying is, surely there are people who know of a promised land, and that's the LAST thing the corporation rim wants, because if there is one thing you should never underestimate, it's what a living thing will do to escape.

What I'm getting at is the fact that all of everything is in the same network is gonna come to bite the corporation rim in the ass now that there are rogue secunits around. Talking, especially to one another, is going to be the one advantage rogues have and they're all gonna hate it (I assume).

[rjalker]

This post is an addition to this post here. And here's the archived version.

That's the post where I went through each Murderbot book (+ the two short stories) and just added things in to remove the casual transphobia.

So here's the results after I did the math:

=================

=================

Book 0 (prequel) The Future of Work: Compulsory:

150 words added

It would have been less, but this is the first chronological entry in this series, so it needed to establish the backstory clearly.

=================

Book 1 All Systems Red:

79 words added

It can explain the backstory in fewer words since the prequel already exists.

=================

Book 2: Artificial Condition:

22 words added

Literally just having Murderbot list its pronouns when it makes the "I'm for hire someone hire me" ad in the feed, and having the humans also list their pronouns. It's literally effortless.

=================

Book 3 Rogue Protocol:

135 words added

Since Abene is introducing herself being nervous, asking for Murderbot's pronouns, ect.

=================

Book 4 Exit Strategy:

36 words added

literally just adding in a longer version of "and I taught the kids how to use it/its pronouns for me"

=================

Book 4.5, Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (that name is so fucking long oh my fucking god):

347 words added

because this is the one where Murderbot gets misgendered and that needs to be fucking corrected with all due anger especially given the context. Fucking weaponized misgendering. I'm gonna kick that man's ass.

=================

Book 5 Network Effect:

494 words added

just because there are so many scenes where new characters are being introduced / the raiders being mentioned and also Amena calls Murderbot "mom" and it's literally fine for nonbinary people to call themselves a mom or a dad or whatever words they want, but...that's not what was going on here. There was no thought, no introspection, nothing. And with the rest of Murderbot's characterization no, it would not enjoy being called a mom, especially not when it's in the middle of arguing with ART about how it's not one of Amena's caretakers.

=================

Book 6 Fugitive Telemetry:

5 words added.

Five. Words. Just five. Five. Five words. That's all it takes to add the word "pronouns" to the list of things included in feed bios and "pronouns = it/its/itself" to Murderbot's feed bio. That's literall all it takes.

=================

=================

So a grand total of 1,268 words have been added to the entire series so far to erase 80% of the transphobia that's just casually baked in.

Let me fucking check how many words the whole series has so far...

okay so the entire Murderbot Diaries series so far has 290,266 words if you include both short stories.

So 1,268 words need to be added to almost 300K, and it would remove 80% of the transphobia in this series.

1,286 out of 290,266 isn't even a full 1%. It's 0.44%.

0.44% can remove 80% of the transphobia from this series.

It's literally that fucking easy.

"But what about the other 20%?" You ask!

Well the answer to that is easy too: Literally just introduce more explicitly nonbinary human characters and have one or more of the already reocurring main human characters come out as nonbinary.

And there you fucking go!!!! 100% of the transphobia removed!!! And it's literally so fucking easy too!!!! Martha Wells could literally just take what I've changed and shove it into the books and I wouldn't even want any fucking credit or money!!! I'd literally just rather have these books not be transphobic!!!!!!!!!!!