#murderbot but only tangentially

[snailchimera]

A while back I saw an otherwise perfectly fine post about Murderbot and ART and the general progression of their relationship that, for no goddamn reason, decided to mention the "autistic people lack theory of mind" idea. It wasn't about autism. It wasn't refuting the idea that a character was autistic. Autism was not mentioned elsewhere in the post. It was just there, a brief, random, vaguely dehumanizing aside that I tried very hard to let go but apparently I can't.

First off, as used in that post, it implied that an adult autistic person is incapable of considering a situation from another person's perspective. That's straight up false. That's not going to be my main point but I just need to get it out of the way. Difficulty reading someone is not remotely the same thing as being unaware that they have their own experiences and thoughts, or unable to consider their perspective provided you've been given the necessary information to know/guess what that perspective is. I'm not saying Murderbot is autistic, but I am saying that it would not need subtle spaceship body language, whatever that would entail, to determine that actually yeah having a rogue SecUnit running around where all your delicate machinery including your brain is might be kind of worrying and it's not unreasonable to draw some clear boundaries. That actually is clear just from thinking it through.

Second, the idea that autistics lack a theory of mind comes from one particular study done with autistic children. The children watched a short puppet show. In it, one puppet placed an object in a box, then left the room. Another puppet came into the room, moved the object, and left. The first puppet came back into the room, and the children were asked where the puppet would look for the object. Allistic children usually said the puppet would look in the place where the puppet had originally put the object. Autistic children usually said the place where the object currently was.

So here's my question: did the autistic children know they were allowed to give a "wrong" answer?

Because here's the thing. Being autistic means that, from a very young age, you are painfully aware that your perception of the world around you is not the same as other peoples'. Normally I'd emphasize the difference in sensory perception here, but actually it's not uncommon for autistic kids to think everyone experiences certain sensory input as horribly painful and other people are just better at not reacting badly to it (this is also true of allistic people with pain conditions, as an example). But knowing you're missing social cues? That's near unavoidable. People are constantly assuming you know things about how they feel and why they're taking a specific action, because it's "obvious". You know you're supposed to know. You know it's supposed to be easy, so easy in fact that when you say you don't know these things you're accused of lying. Allistic people constantly assume you have context that you don't have, context that they're presumably getting from things like tone of voice, body language, etc. It's like being presumed fluent in a language that you only have a limited grasp of, and accused of not listening, not caring, or even not understanding the idea of language as a means of communication when you can't understand everything other people say.

A common complaint autistic people have about allistic people is in fact that allistic people expect us to be mind readers. Of course that's not true- allistic people expect us to pick up on forms of communication that we easily miss or misunderstand, but they are in fact communicating- but given the nature of our puppet show, that feeling might be relevant, right?

Let's imagine a different puppet scenario. Puppet A puts their ball in a chest. They leave the room. Puppet B moves the ball from the chest to a cabinet, but leaves a note saying where they moved the ball to. Puppet A comes back into the room, reads the note, and correctly locates the ball.

Now another one. Puppet A puts their ball in a chest. They leave the room. Puppet B moves the ball from the chest to a cabinet, but leaves a note saying where they moved the ball to. Puppet A comes back into the room. They don't see the note, and can't find their ball. When they ask Puppet B where their ball is, Puppet B is furious. B left a note! What is wrong with A that they can't read a simple note? A must have read the note but ignored it just to have an excuse to bother B.

Autistic children are surrounded at all times by invisible notes, and people who react extremely negatively, sometimes even violently, when they find out you're not reading their notes (because you can't, because you don't even see them).

So. Puppet A puts their ball in a chest. They leave the room. Puppet B moves the ball from the chest to a cabinet. Puppet A comes back into the room. The allistic child has never had to consider whether they themselves are missing information that everyone else who watched the puppet show has. They know there's no way for Puppet A to know the ball was moved. They correctly state that Puppet A will look in the chest.

Puppet A puts their ball in a chest. They leave the room. Puppet B moves the ball from the chest to a cabinet. Puppet A comes back into the room. The autistic child has been in many situations where they're expected to know something they had no way of knowing, like the new location of a ball they weren't told was moved. They've been in many situations where another person knew what they didn't know, even though they both received the same information. They've gotten in trouble for not knowing things. Maybe they've made people they care about angry or sad by not knowing things. Now there's an adult, an authority figure, the kind of person who might punish you or get you in trouble with your parents for giving them the wrong answer, asking you where the puppet is going to look for the ball. Well, you can't just assume you know what the puppet knows. Maybe the puppet read an invisible note. Or maybe (remember these are very young kids), the puppet is like you, someone who can't read the invisible notes, and they're going to get in trouble for looking in the wrong place unless you help them.

So you don't give the answer that makes sense to you, that Puppet A looks in the chest because that's where they left the ball. You give the "right" answer, the actual location of the ball, the answer Puppet A was probably supposed to be able to figure out in some way you know you can't see.

I'm not a psych expert. My only claim to expertise here is as an actual autistic person (diagnosed, twice actually due to a mixup with the transfer of medical records across state lines). But I have read enough to notice a trend in autism studies of taking the least charitable possible interpretation of any difference between autistic and allistic people (see the "rigid morality" study, in which sticking to one's moral stance when presented with rewards for abandoning it was pathologized in the conclusion because autistic people did so more than allistic people). There's a very long history (a part of the larger very long history of eugenics) of deliberately looking for ways to scientifically support the decision to treat autistic people as subhuman, or nonhuman.

That is probably why so many of us like stories about sad robots.

Anyway that's my rant, it's over, thank you for reading to the end. If you actually wanna take something from this whole mess, just... try to be kind to people. Do your best to understand where they're coming from, and help them understand where you're coming from.

[specialagentartemis]

📂HEADCANONS

YEAH

Trying to think of ones I haven’t already talked about A Lot

Murderbot describes Preservation as "a complicated barter system" because it doesn't really have the words or concepts to parse what it's looking at: primarily a gift economy. An economy with a robust central government that does a lot of distribution of primary resources, and a social logic based more on providing than consuming. Farmers and agriculture techs don't produce food to then trade to other people, they produce food that's then re-distributed to everyone as needed by a central organization, and the farmers and ag-techs are given what they need and want by others who, y'know, eat food and express gratitude for Having Food. People don't trade for health care, doctors provide health care to whoever needs it because that's what they've trained and chosen to do and are given what they need by others for their service in providing health care.

Pin-Lee doesn't tend to have a lot to trade but she is a lawyer who keeps things functioning between Preservation and the Corporates, does the legal work that allows Preservation citizens to safely travel, and helps to maintain the contracts that prevent other more opportunistic planets fromtaking advantage of them. She provides this service to the planet and gets what she needs from other people who provide other services. Gurathin helps to maintain the university's database infrastructure, when he's getting coffee he doesn't need to offer to like, make a database for the coffeeshop, it's just understood that he's providing a service to society and partaking in another service to society. Arada and Ratthi are research biologists and their work is only tangentially productive to The Planet but I'm sure there's a public outreach or education aspect that's expected of a lot of researchers - learning without sharing what you're learning is socially unfair, even if their lectures are mostly only attended by students who are told by their teachers to go watch them. But it's kind of understood that by being an adult in the world, you are doing something that contributes to society and to others in some way, and as such are entitled to having your needs met as well.

It's a reciprocity-based logic of actions rather than commodity exchange, and honestly it works because 1) Preservation's population is relatively small, 2) there is a lot of bureaucratic organization work making sure everyone is getting what they need, the government is SO many committees 3) a whole lot of labor is done by machines (non-sentient robots) and bots (sentient robots). The reliance on bot labor is absolutely gonna be something Preservation has to think more about.

Citizens also every once in a while on rotation get called for a kind of labor tax akin to the way jury duty works, where every couple of months you have to put in a day working in the central town food court washing dishes or something. There are also Perks offered for jobs that might be a harder sell for people to do, like premium station housing.

Straight-up money that comes into the station from outsystem trade and travel mostly gets re-invested in supporting Preservation travelers off-planet into societies that do use money (like PresAux's ASR survey), or buying materials or machines that are hard to make locally (like ag-bots, or some spaceship or station parts for repairs).

However where barter comes in is on a more interpersonal one-on-one level, more similar to commissions. You grow a lot of carrots while my grapefruit tree is producing a lot more fruit than I could possibly eat, want to trade? You make ceramics as your primary Work, I'll trade you something if you make me something specific I have in mind. Can you help me fix my roof? I'll get you some good wood when the lumber trees are mature next year. Developing skills for these kind of interpersonal more-specialized trades is a significant motivation, too. And different skills and jobs inevitably attract more status and impressiveness than others. But it's not barter exactly so much as reciprocity, a strong culture of civic duty, and a highly organized government.

[comfortunit]

ALSO also this is tangential at this point but i love to write fiction with characters who are against or outside of the gender binary and i thought like, an entire series where the characters singularly and only use It for not only the protagonist but another really important character, a fictional universe written to exclude transphobia from the outset with nonbinary minor characters thrown in at random, and you still have people misgendering the fucking protagonist and finding ways to write in misgendering it into the text. at least i could pretend people would respect my character choices when i look at mainstream fandoms but seeing the like rampant transphobia in a series that is trans itself? heartbreaking. depressing. made me want to put down my pen for a whole moment (not even getting into how much "person treated like product/who had their agency invalidated learns how to direct their own life" narratives mean to me and expecting to see people who got that theme instead of. treating it like a product to force to do whatever they want. do people not see the sad irony there. its like seeing an anime girl whos character arc is "people objectify me against my will and i fight against it to reclaim my personhood" and then watching the fandom/company turn around and only sell/interact with highly sexualized shit of her. like i THOUGHT people who were fans of something showing corporate and consumer hypocrisy would be a lil smarter! ive underestimated the average persons ability to be in denial of things and themselves however) ok ok im done sending my silly little asks i hope you have a good rest of your day

right, and a MAJOR theme of mbd is, as martha wells put it (i'm paraphrasing), 'the 'ugly' parts of trauma that no one talks about'. murderbot is traumatized and it's a person but it is repulsed by the idea of being 'humanized'. it just wants to be comfortable after so much time spent being told what to do, what to be, everything. prescribing it pronouns other than what it itself has 'written' in its DIARIES (wow a concept... 🤯 first person pov. fucking mind-blowing, y'all, firsthand experience actually lets you know how someone thinks/feels/perceives things. i know. it's crazy), forcing things onto it, projecting things onto it, that it never opted in to... it's just more of the same. murderbot's ultimate goal is to feel like its own person, it wants to BE. it's literally a struggle for autonomy, and i'm sure humans in-universe and in the fandom alike, they just don't get it, they think murderbot is going about things in a counterproductive manner like "oh if it hates the company so much then why is it still so attached to being a secunit and protocols and all this bullshit?" like god do these people have any fucking idea how trauma works? have they ever understood the trauma of others? my guess is a resounding NO.

and re: my gripes about it being aplatonic and no one fucking caring enough to give it the decency of this canon fact in their fanfic re-creations of it; it GETS MAD at perihelion for trying to FORCE its emotions out. and people write this off!! because they want to believe this is like "aww it's MAD because it LIKES ART" like actually people who care about each other can be terrible to each other! and not everything is secretly cute and adorable! a big POINT of network effect is that ART DOESN'T GET IT; it DOESN'T know what murderbot wants, it DOESN'T know how murderbot feels. it DOES NOT GET IT. the fandom insists on smoothing everything over because the idea that murderbot might have genuine feelings of hate, or intrusive feelings that it both is internally upset with but also embraces... it's like they can't fucking handle this complexity. they can't. they act like they can and they can't fucking handle it, or i wouldn't see it represented so fucking atrociously in fanfic, lmfao.

it's fucking INFURIATING !!!! 🤝

[utilitycaster]

have your feelings changed regarding FCG as a character and the way he interacts with the group in light of recent discoveries? speaking of, do you feel differently about the way CR3 has tie-ins to CR1 versus CR2? (eg aeor, the aeormatons, ludinus). personally i find the CR2 references less... intrusive narratively despite also not having that much to do with CR3's intended setting. im not sure if it's just recency bias or the fact that i also prefer CR2 over CR1, or that there's less of them

Yes re FCG; I think I've made that clear but the addition of their interest in the Changebringer and their focus shifting to trying to more seriously help people, and in general their somewhat grating positivity giving way to a more complex range of emotions have all been helpful. I am still going to be frustrated by the subclass build but that hilariously hasn't come up because the most recent combat really was just a waiting game for them, and the second-most recent combat was them trying to kill everyone.

While the murderbot concept itself isn't super interesting on its own, I think Sam as FCG is tentatively engaging with the concept of "what does it mean that this was your purpose, to be helpful until you snapped and killed everyone", and that has a lot more narrative promise than "Oh, I'm not a real sweet little metal boy?" What does it mean to be from a society where you were considered a citizen? How do you fit in? What do you do now, literally over a millennium after achieving said purpose, when it still exists and has hurt people you care about?

And yes to the C2 vs. C1 tie ins. I try to be clear that I'm talking about my (well-informed) opinions here, usually, but like. Objectively, the Campaign 2 tie ins are normal consequences of living in the world of Exandria: the Mighty Nein restored Devexian, and the Cerberus Assembly is fundamentally changed through their actions, which means Ludinus is likely looking for new and more subtle avenues of power that are easier to hide from Caleb and the Cobalt Soul. Or perhaps he was always working on this, and it just didn't come up!

I don't see the aeormatons as any issue for Marquet in the same way that like, Artagan's gate is technically from Tal'Dorei but Jester is from the Menagerie Coast. While they originated from Aeor, we know from Calamity that they existed in other cities. It's very possible that FCG's target had been in, say, Cael Morrow, and that he spent most of his time there. The moon/Feywild stuff is also disconnected, but the center of the conspiracy does appear to be a hero from a major war in Marquet, and the solstice's ley nexus is likely in Marquet too, so it is still tied to the continent.

The Campaign 1 stuff on the other hand is really only here because two characters are from Tal'Dorei with extensive ties to Campaign 1 figures. Again: Fearne isn't from Marquet or even this plane, and Chetney is expressly from Wildemount, but both their stories center on happenings within Marquet, even if their own ties to the continent are new. But the only reason we're talking about the Air Ashari and Whitestone and Delilah is because Orym and Laudna are extended Campaign 1 references. I'd have similar problems, as I said, if someone was a Soltryce Academy student who could call on Caleb whenever they needed help; or if someone was a member of Fjord and Jester's crew. It's not that it's C1 and not C2; it's that it is unavoidably about things already pretty extensively explored in C1 and with direct ties to the PCs of C1. The C2 references are more tangential and Bells Hells is on their own for figuring out what all of this means, and that's interesting; having Keyleth around to solve your problems for you, or "somehow Delilah Briarwood returned" is not.