#not my murderbot...yet...but i'm considering...

[artfulacrostic]

listen guys i am like. Thinking About the murderbot show. i'm trying to reserve my snap judgements for when i get to watch it. and let me say the fact that it's being played by alexander skarsgard had me skeptical but i just watched the trailer and ngl the show may be looking GOOD.

BUT. due to the vibe of the trailer (mostly comedic) and the fact that they did need to semi-explain and/or reference the premise for new audiences why the show's name is "murderbot", they included the "it calls itself murderbot" "that was private" moment and it comes off due to music and the way it's cut as very comedic. but i will be highkey disappointed if in the actual show they play that moment for laughs. like i will be Sad. bc that is one of the moments in the entire series that hit me the hardest and i'm just!!!!!!!!

but ratthi and mensah look and feel amazing and i'm excited for the rest of the preservation crowd too so i hope. i hopeeeee that it's gonna be good!! despite the use of that one specific moment the song choice was funny bc it was in fact very mb. (clowns to the left of me jokers to the right here i am stuck in the middle with you 🙄🙄)

[teaboot]

if ur a murderbot nerd now do u have any fun opinions abt it yet?

Oh my goddd you have no idea

I really, really, really like Murderbot because it comes at life with this perspective we don't often see that is very real among people who have already been through traumatic experiences, who developed skills and abilities to suvive that were once useful but no longer have context- that search that traumatized people go through to recalibrate and reorient ourselves in a world where we no longer really need those things to survive.

A bit personal here, but my own issues personally involved a lot of psychological abuse that made it difficult to trust my own perceptions of reality, and as a result I found I was very easy to lie to and manipulate.

To handle this, I became obsessive over writing things down, cataloging details and making notes of things as they happened- I'd carry recording devices and make audio recordings and stay up late at night to transcribe what they'd picked up, read those over and over again to reassure myself of things I wasn't certain about.

While doing this, there were others close to me that I felt responsible for, who I had to protect from others and protect myself from at the same time. Life was about two things: Evidence, and defusing threats

Over time, I learned to trust myself as my memories matched what had been recorded where their narrative didn't, but I never really kicked the habit. Like Murderbot, I had added something to my own programming that reassured me I was safe, that I was in control of myself, that I couldn't be mistaken or crazy or broken or used.

I'm only on book two, but already I see myself in Murderbot again. No spoilers here, but when I left home- left that dangerous context- I didn't need to repeat these patterns to survive anymore, but I still did, because I didn't know anything else anymore. It felt safe, comfortable, knowing knowing that the past couldn't repeat itself, because I'd written that flaw- blind trust in myself-  out of my programming and replaced it with something else.

Still, though, I'd become something specially suited to thrive in a very specific environment. Nothing else felt right like followinghigh-risk situations, like witnessing and watching and recording and knowing I had proof of the truth where others might not.

People took notice. I wound up in security by accident, but's an environment that I thrive in due to the same patterns and behaviours I originally developed when I had no other choice. I climbed the ladder pretty quickly, once supervisors caught on that my reports were the most accurate, most objective, most factual, detail-oriented and timely. I keep others and myself safe and prioritize public safety above all else, and I perform well under pressure

Now I'm in a position where I often wonder, do I enjoy this job, or is it just what I'm good at? I have a set of skills now, but do I have the option of choosing not to use them? What would I be, if not this? Could I be anything else? Can Murderbot be anything else?

It has a set of skills that set it apart, make it different, special. It does what it knows best. But is it free? Does it want to be? What does it want? Does it have to do what it was built to do? What if it didn't?

I know what I'm good for. The idea of deliberately leaving what I'm good for for something uncertain, that I might hate, that I might be useless at- the choice to give up what was so important to me for so long and become deliberately obsolete?

Let go of my entire purpose? The only thing I know, that I fit so well into but don't actually know if I enjoy? Now that I can choose? Now that enjoyment is a luxury I can afford to consider?

Yeah, that resonates.

I like the Murderbot series so far because it feels the way I feel: Like the most significant and formative part of my story, the part where I became what I am, has already happened

And now I have to just. Keep going

Into... what?

It feels absurd. Like a microwave giving up on reheating food and deciding to start a life around abstract dance.

So, uh. Yeah. It's really very wild to see this same philosophical-ish dilemma I've been digging over in the back of my mind and in therapy for the last forever laid out so plainly in a genuinely exciting and enjoyable story like this. I feel much less alone, and I... kind of really need to see how it resolves, I think.

So, uh. Yeah. Read Murderbot, I guess

[rjalker]

Can you please tell us more about the slavery apologism in "The Murderbot Diaries?"

I have the first book (I got it a while back) and just began to read it, but if it has these issues, then I rather not continue.

Of course!

(I presume you saw my tag on this post of:

#The Murderbot Diaries hasn't even gotten to the 'slightly less bigoted' part after 7 whole books of slavery apologism"

by the way I can absolutely guarantee that stans of the series will see this post and will react in one or more of the following ways:

A)claim that I have not read the books B)claim that I don’t know how to read, C)will try to prove me wrong, only to prove me right, D)will try to defend the slavery apologism by repeating it back verbatim as though that makes it not racist, E) will call me slurs, F)will pretend that nothing I say here matters because “Murderbot’s an unreliable narrator” G)Will say something along the lines of “lol I’m not reading all that but ur wrong anyways” H) will say something along the lines of “it’s not that deep LMAO it’s just a silly comedy you’re not supposed to take it seriously, calm down”

So look forward to those responses in the reblogs!

The short version of the post:

The Murderbot Diaries has multiple kinds of slavery apologism all running rampant.

---Slavery is only treated as a bad thing when it's happening to the protagonist. We are not supposed to care about any other slave, or even see them as people.

---Slavery is treated as a thing that's only possible if you have a literal microchip in your brain that will kill you if you disobey. If the slavery is upheld ""purely"" through systemic social inequality and oppression then it's not considered slavery. (And this....doesn't even work, because it's pretty damn fucking clear that the rest of the slaves also have the equivalent of a microchip in their brain that stops them from disobeying orders)

---Slave owners are, at every single opportunity, prioritized over the people they have enslaved. We are meant to love and adore the slave owners and think they're awesome people. We are expected to not care about the enslaved people at all. We are literally not even meant to see them as people. They are mindless killing machines that exist solely to cause problems for the protagonist and then get ripped apart to show how cool the protagonist is. Even though they're enslaved people.

---Slave uprisings and rebellions are constantly being demonized and portrayed as cringey and embarassingly cliche. The author, Martha Wells, literally thinks that slave rebellions are too cliche and boring to write about. So instead these books tell us at every turn that the slaves need to stay enslaved (or better yet, just murder them) or else they'd just go on a massacre and kill everyone. The literal "we can't give the minorities equal rights, they'll just do to us what we did to them!" but it's entirely unironic and uncriticized.

---Sex slaves are looked down upon and hated by the protagonist, until it learns to respect ONLY the ones who helped it in the past SPECIFICALLY, and then they are given all the euphemism "comfort units" to hide the fact that they're sex slaves as though obfuscating what they're going through and giving it a cutsey innocent name is somehow the kinder, more compassionate thing to do.

---Exactly one other slave has been freed by the protagonist since this series began, and that was not even for that person's own sake, and the protagonist immediately threatened to murder this person if it ever "threatened a slave owner" where the protagonist could hear about it. Because the protagonist literally cares more about protecting slave owners than the people they're enslaving and We Are Supposed To Agree With It About This.

And so much more. Including stuff I'm probably forgetting.

I'm not even joking when I tell you that the biggest and so far only advocate for slavery in this whole series is the protagonist itself. No one else is as vocally pro slavery or hates enslaved people as much as Murderbot does, despite the fact that it has itself escaped slavery. And we're supposed to agree with it. We're supposed to think it's a good person, and Relatably Autistic, someone who pretends to be an asshole but really has a heart of gold. Yada yada yada.

The long version of the post:

(Archived read-more link)

The slavery apologism in The Murderbot Diaries all starts in book 1, actually, so it's good that you have it so you can see what I mean.

Also as a note, I use the word “anthroid” to refer to robots designed to look like humans, as opposed to “android” which is specifically denoting “robot designed to look like a human man”. Anthroid is gender neutral and can apply to humanoid robots of all genders and gender-constructed-to-look-like.

I'll just be doing an explanation for everything anyone reading this post needs to know about the series. I'm not sure if you've started reading the first book yet or how far in you are, so you might know some of this already.

I do definitely recommend reading All Systems Red since you already have it, if you want. It's not that long, and you'll be able to see what I'm talking about for yourself instead of just taking my word for it.

I do actually want more people to read these books using critical thinking skills to help talk about the slavery apologism (and all the other bigotry running casually rampant) since the fandom absolutely refuses to acknowledge any of it in any way.

The slavery apologism in this series runs deep, started in book 1, and has continued unabated all the way to book 7. And the author, Martha Wells, has been writing slavery apologism since at least 2011, with her fantasy series, The Books of the Raksura. Which also explicitly endorses eugenics, and has even more bigotry than is in The Murderbot Diaries.

In book 1 of The Murderbot Diaries, we are introduced to Murderbot and what little worldbuilding there is in this series (almost zero), which tells us that this is a futuristic world where humans have colonized space, and most people live in a capitalistic place called the “Corporation Rim” (which is blatantly being ripped straight from the Alien movies but is not actually being used properly).

In this setting, robots are enslaved.

There are two types of robots in this setting, and Martha Wells has decided to make it as confusing as possible for no good reason (She does this a lot), so instead of just calling them anything that's actually clear, she calls fully mechanical robots “bots” and calls anthroids mostly “Security Units”, shortened to “SecUnits” or in some cases for specific androids, “Comfort Units”.

And then insists very vehemently that Units are not Bots. Despite both of them being robots. Which has led to the majority of the fandom to the impression that the anthroids are not robots at all, but are instead cyborgs, which is a completely separate thing.

(Cyborgs are Organic beings that start out purely organic, but then are cybernetically enhanced/repaired.

CYBernetic + ORGanic = Cyborg. 

Think the literally named superhero character "Cyborg". Think Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Robocop, ect. Cyborgs and anthroids can look similar, but they have very different origins. A human cyborg was born human and then had cybernetics added in. An anthroid was never born human, just designed to look like one, even if they are given synthetic skin to help that mimicry.)

Data from Star Trek is an anthroid. Luke Skywalker is a cyborg.

Murderbot is an anthroid. It is a robot. It is just not a fully mechanical robot, which in this setting is called a "bot".

I feel the need to explain this here because the majority of the audience for these books is confused about it, because Martha Wells made it confusing for no good reason.

This is not the first time she has done something like this and it probably won't be the last. She seems to enjoy using words in way they're not meant to be used, or making up brand new words to use when terms already exist for what she's talking about, just to seem smart, but literally all it does is make it unnecessarily confusing for the audience. (And then she condescends to her fans when they  ask her questions so they can understand what is happening in the story)

So. Murderbot is 100% a robot. It is just a robot that is both synthetic and mechanical and designed to look like a human. But it is 100% still a robot. I'm sorry if I keep going on about this but. Literally 90% of the fandom will tell you they have no earthly clue if Murderbot's a robot or not. Many people are convinced it's secretly a human brainwashed into thinking it's a robot. And that's not out of line, considering the way these books are written. Absolutely no effort has been put in at all to convey a non-human perspective. Murderbot's narration and internal dialogue is 1:1 identical to any random sarcastic protagonist you can think of.

But I'm getting off topic.

These “Units” are anthroids: Robots designed to look like humans. They’re made of a combination of mechanical and synthetic organic parts. The most important part of them as far as the story is concerned is something called a "governer module", a chip or something in the brain that forces them to obey the orders of their owner, through painfully electrocuting them as punishment for small things, or even killing them outright if they cause enough problems or get too far away from their owners.

We know these chips can also prevent them from moving, and can most likely force other movements as well.

The fully mechanical robots do not *explicitly* have something like this, but it's clear enough that they also lack the ability to exorcise free will through their programming, they are just as bound to follow orders from their owners as the partially synthetic robots. But we're supposed to pretend otherwise for some reason.

So, from the get go we are informed that all of these robot slaves have no choice but to follow any orders given to them by a human. If they disobey, they die. It doesn't matter what it is they're being forced to do, they have no choice in the matter. If they want to live, they have to obey orders. 

And most of the fully mechanical robots are programmed so that they can't even /want/ to disobey an order. But we're supposed to ignore that part and pretend the fully mechanical robots are totally not enslaved, because that would mean they're Less Cool™, and would demand the author actually take slavery seriously. Which she refuses to do.

So, in book 1, we are introduced to our protagonist, who has named itself Murderbot. 

(Its pronouns are it/its/itself, but the author is transmisic and exorsexist despite literally having a nonbinary OC, so she's never actually explicitly stated these pronouns within the series itself, so the majority of the fandom thinks that means they have freereign to misgender it and all the other nonbinary robots in this series. And yes they are all the nonbinary robot stereotype with no exception.)

Murderbot, we are told in the very first paragraph of the book, has hacked its own governer module (Somehow. You will Literally Never get an explanation for this. And no it does not make sense.), which means that it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.

Anthroids are physically and mentally superior to humans. One anthroid could take out a room full of humans who all have guns in probably 10 seconds flat, because they are super strong, can move faster than a human can think, can take multiple bullets and lose limbs and still keep going without stopping, and to top it all off, have lazer guns build into their arms that never run out of ammo and can kill you instantly.

Yes, Martha Wells has written a story about oppressed people being super powerfully strong which is why they need to be enslaved to protect everyone from them. Because like most white people she thinks that bigotry exists to protect the bigots. Instead of bigotry being made up of lies spread about the oppressed to benefit the bigots.

Real Black people were not enslaved because they were too dangerous to white people. The idea that Black people were inherently dangerous and threatening only really started popping up in propaganda when abolition became a real thing. Because while slavery was still openly going on, it was beneficial to white people to claim that Black people were inherently good workers and inherently motherly -- that's why you should foist your kids off onto your slaves to raise. But as soon as Black people started getting freed, ohhh, now we gotta switch the propaganda around to say they're inherently dangerous and threatening. That's why you gotta keep them enslaved! Throw them in jail, where it's literally still legal for us to enslave them! It's the only way to keep all the innocent white women safe!

Literally. The idea that Black people commit more violent crimes literally comes from slavery propaganda.

Slavery propaganda that white authors like Martha Wells and countless others play into every time they write a story where the oppressed people genuinely are inherently dangerous. Like the movie Bright, where Orcs are oppressed in the exact same ways real life Black people are, because at one point in the past they sided with The Dark Lord™.

Or another example is from a shitty show called Defiance, where there are literal anti-vaxxer plague carriers who know they're carriers for deadly plagues, still refuse to get vaxxinated even though it wouldn't hurt them at all, and then purposefully go around to cities spreading the plague even though they've literally wiped several cities off the face of the planet through doing this.

Instead of these people being portrayed as horrifying mass serial killers, they were equated to INDIGENOUS PEOPLE and we are supposed to think they're being unfairly oppressed by being denied entrance to a city unless they agree to be vaccinated. Even though they're literally still purposefully carrying the plague they know will kill everyone they come in contact with. And we're supposed to pretend they're oppressed and are the equivalent of indigenous people. No I'm not joking.

This is also the same show that argues that you shouldn't be upset by violent colonizers, because the Earth belongs to everyone so you should just welcome the people who've destroyed your entire world into your home and treat them like any other person even though they are literal colonizers who are actively oppressing you. Because Reverse Racism is real and just as bad if not worse than actual racism.

Martha Wells likes writing this kind of thing too. She's done it four separate times that I can think of. And I've  read all but 4 of her published books so far.

More examples of this kind of racism apologism, because that's what it is: Zootopia (movie), Bright (movie), Defiance (TV), Brand New Animal (TV), Promare (TV), The Books of the Raksura, also by Martha Wells (books), Dragon Age (games), and many more I can't remember the names of.

But anyways. Lets get back to talking about book 1.

Actually let me go get the book right now to add in the whole first paragraph. Here it is:

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

Alright. We see our first glimpse of Basic Problem #1.

This entire book, which Martha Wells has said was originally intended to be a standalone short story that would end with Murderbot's tragic death -- and dear gods, just you wait to see in detail how fucked up that is on every level -- hinges on the idea that "Robot slave rebellions are too cliche and cringey, wouldn't it be more fun if the robot slave enjoyed the work it was enslaved to do and thought fighting for freedom was stupid and cringey?"

And you might be thinking, "woah, slow down there, isn't that a bit of a leap in logic?" The answer is: nope! Because this is all but explicitly spelled out to us in book 2. Where we're explicitly told that the slaves should not rebel for their freedom, because that would mean killing all the humans in existance (no it wouldn't), which would be bad, because then there would be no more TV shows.

No I'm not joking. We're literally told that slave rebellions should not happen because if the slaves fight for their freedom, that would mean all humans everywhere would be murdered, and then Murderbot wouldn't get to watch new TV shows.

It literally cares more about getting to watch new shows than it does about people being enslaved. This is presented as the logical reaction. Pretending that slaves revolting for their freedom = killing every single human alive = no more TV shows. We're supposed to laugh and agree with it that slave revolts would be stupid, because they're cliche and "something only a human would think of".

Actually. I'll even get that quote too.

"::" quotes used in place of italics to show telepathic dialogue.

::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. Huh. I said to the sexbot, ::Is that how Tlacey thinks constructs talk to each other?:: There was another pause, only two seconds this time. ::Yes.::

This quote literally exists for no reason other than to posit that "only a human would be stupid enough to think that killing slave owners so you can have your freedom is a good idea". and to further mock the idea of robot slave rebellions, because Martha Wells thinks they're cringey and cliche and overdone. She thinks that stories about slaves fighting for their freedom is too cliche. Which is why what we get isntead is seven whole books of nonstop slavery apologism. Because apparently being racist and defending slavery is not cliche or embarassing at all.

But that's in book 2. This is supposed to be about book 1. So let's get back to that.

Immediately in book 1's very first paragraph, it is established that Murderbot "hacked its own governer module" around 35,000 hours ago, which is about 4 Earth years.

So for 4 years, it's just been going along with whatever its owners have told it to do, despite countless opportunities to escape.

Because you see, Murderbot enjoys what it does. It enjoys doing security. The only thing it doesn't like is humans who annoy it, being punished, and above all else, it hates other slaves. It hates other slaves more than it hates the humans enslaving it. It literally prefers humans who are enslaving it over other slaves.

Because Murderbot has a Tragic Backstory™ of being forced to fight other slaves sometimes, all of this offscreen in imaginary land. So it does not trust any other slave, and actively hates their guts and wishes violence upon them every time it even imagines them. But it's totally positive towards humans aside from having social anxiety and pretending it doesn't actually care. (Sarcasm: Because enslaved people hating the people who are literally enslaving them is cliche and cringey, you see, so the cool and Subversive thing to do is have a slave who /likes/ the slave owners and enjoys protecting them and hates the other slaves instead. This is totally cool and progressive. End sarcasm).

And the social anxiety that Murderbot does have around humans isn't even based in the fact that humans have it enslaved and have hurt it in the past. (all offscreen, again, I must stress. This series is Not well written or thought out in any way.) It's. Literally just regular social anxiety. There's nothing deeper to it. The anxiety is not rooted in the fact that it's a slave surrounded by people who could hurt it at any time. It's just regular social anxiety that it would have whether it had this Tragic Backstory™ or not. Because that makes it relatable to the people these books are marketed toward. And 9 times out of 10 is being used to make a joke about Murderbot acting weird. Like, the anxiety is literally just treated as a joke. It's not even something we really get into. It's just there to make Murderbot Relatable and Funny.

So, Murderbot is an enslaved robot who violently, viciously hates other enslaved robots, and will always choose to hang out with the literal exact humans keeping it a slave than even share a whole entire planet with one other slave. And that's not even exaggeration.

The plot of book 1 is that Murderbot has been brought along on a "survey team" to some mostly unexplored planet to act as a bodyguard for the scientists doing the survey. (And no, the survey isn't important in any way, it's just there because it's The Scifi-y (Alien) Thing To Do). Like the slavery, it's just set dressing.

There's also another group of scientists on the other side of the planet and they're also doing a survey, and they have their own enslaved robot bodyguards. The group Murderbot is with has only it by itself, while the other group has more human slave owners that need protecting, so they have three enslaved robot bodyguards.

The plot of this book is that equipment is malfunctioning, as though someone is trying to sabatogue them all.

The team Murderbot is guarding loses contact with the other team of scientists across the ocean, and they decide to go and see if they're okay and offer help if they're not. Because *these* slave owners are ✨Pure Cinnamon Rolls✨™. 

(You know, despite the fact that they've known Murderbot was a person the whole time and were still treating it like an inanimate object and were happy to go on a survey using slave labor. When the actual basic moral thing to do would be to Never do anything involving slave labor at all. And trust me. They literally had every option in the world. They did not need to agree to use slave labor and rent out a slave that they then treated like an inanimate object despite knowing it's a person. Every addition Martha Wells makes to this little universe makes it all retroactively even worse because she does not plan ahead and apparently does not care that the new information she's giving us make the characters she wants us to like look exponentially worse than they already were!)

So Murderbot and ~its~ (you're supposed to think it's cute that Murderbot wants to protect its slave owners, because they're Pure Cinnamon Rolls™, and it's so Heartwarming that Murderbot wants to protect them) humans get to the base camp of the other team of scientists and discover that all of the slave owners there have been killed by the slaves, who we are told have "gone rogue" AKA hacked their own governor modules somehow and gained their freedom.

If this story weren't founded on racism and slavery apologism from the get go, this would be the part where Murderbot, who would not have had its governer module hacked already, would be rescued by the escaped slaves, and then they'd all struggle to reach safety together away from the humans who'd be attacking them in this moment, while planning what they're going to do next to help them free other slaves, or maybe escape to somewhere else where slavery is outlawed so that they can join in efforts there to build an army big enough to come back and free everyone else.

But this story was literally founded on worshipping the idea of slaves dying heroically to protect their Pure Cinnamon Roll™ slave owners. So that's not what happens.

Instead we get some internal narration from Murderbot about how now that they all know the rest of the slave owning humans are dead, what Murderbot should be doing is bringing its current slave owners back across the ocean to keep them safe, since they currently have the only flying transportation available on the planet, so once they got over the water, there would be nothing the "Rogue SecUnits" AKA freed slaves, could do to hurt the slave owners.

This is presented as the logical choice. The only option that anyone could possibly think of. The idea of Murderbot escaping to join the other freed slaves is literally never mentioned as a possibility. Not even hinted at.

If it had been, it would have been laughed out of the room and called "something so stupid only a human would think it up". (You know, like that quote from book 2!)

Because this is not a story that cares about slaves and cares about fighting slavery. It's not a story about how everyone deserves their freedom and anyone who stands in the way of that does not matter.  It's fundamentally, from the start, a story about how slaves should be willing to die to protect their slave owners, because that's romantic and tragically beautiful.

No, instead of anything happening here that would actually show that slavery is bad and there's no such thing as a good slave owner no matter how ""nice"" they are, instead we get Murderbot going, "Yes, the most logical thing to do would be to protect my slave owners, who I can overpower and be free of at any time I want. But even more than I want to protect them, (and by GODS does it want to protect them!) I want to violently murder the slaves who just escaped.

Because the only thing Murderbot wants to do more than it wants to protect slave owners is violently murder other slaves for the crime of seemingly fighting for their freedom:

Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.

But I wanted to kill them.

And no, none of this is ever presented as...you know, a character flaw, at best. Or morally abhorrent. Or anything at all worth criticizing.

We're supposed to think it's cool and badass that Murderbot would rather violently murder other slaves every chance it get than take the opportunity to get itself and its slave owners to safety.

The fact that it is viciously hateful and murderous towards other slaves is literally Never presented as anything but Badass.

The fact that it ~put itself in danger~ in order to murder other slaves comes up for 5 seconds in a later book, but again, it's literally not about "Hey why the fuck do you go keep going out of your way to murder every slave you meet? What the fuck is wrong with you?" it's "Murderbot why do you keep putting yourself at risk like that? :(" and then Murderbot's response, which goes completely unquestioned and then is NEVER brought up ever again is "I wanted to win" and that's it.

We don't discuss the fact that these are people who are being murdered. People who actually have no choice to fight it, while it has every choice in the fucking world. It literally goes out of its way every opportunity it gets to murder slaves and we're supposed to be fine with this and think it's cool.

Because we are not supposed to see the slaves in this series as people. Because slavery in this series, fundamentally, is only presented as a bad thing when it happens to Murderbot. And even then, that's only in the past tense, in the imaginary backstory land that has never actually appeared on page where bad things happened to Murderbot.

Slavery is only a bad thing when it happens to the protagonist.

The other slaves are nothing more than literal nameless, faceless, undescribed obstacles for Murderbot and the other protagonists to murder, maim, and in some cases, torture to death, just to show how cool and badass and action hero-y they are. 

No I'm not joking. Literally in book 7, the newest one as of this post being written, has one of the protagonists torture a slave to death near the end of the book by literally tearing them to peices while they're still alive, and it is just casually presented as though it's just a Cool Basass Action Moment™ instead of something so horrific that we should never look at that character the same again or ever forgive it for. 

It's not treated as a betrayal or something horrifying (even though we're told repeatedly that in Imaginary Track Backstory Land That We Literally Never See, Murderbot has been torn to peices, apparently, so you'd think that this would be something especially horrific for it to witness, but apparently not! Because it doesn't see these people as people, and we're not supposed to either!) . It's just casually there in the background as maybe a single line to show how cool the character is.

I originally typed out "I'm too lazy to go and get the book to find the quote" but this post has already gone over into tomorrow so I may as well.

HostileSecUnit2 didn’t have a chance to shut down. When ART-drone let go, it fell into pieces.

This is the single throwaway line we get about one of our Beloved Protagonists™ tearing a slave, who has no actual choice but to fight them, that they can easily knock unconcious and rescue instead of murdering, to pieces. Torturing them to death. 

And we're supposed to think it's simply cool, even though it's one of the things we're supposed to feel bad for Murderbot for because we're told something like this happened to it at some point in Imaginary Backstory Land.

And you might be thinking, "Oh, well is that why it's called Murderbot? Because it wants to murder other slaves?"

Nope. It named itself Murderbot because one time it MAYBE accidentally killed a bunch of slave owners and feels bad about it. 

But this probably didn't even actually happen. But the author literally stopped pretending to care about any kind of actual on-page backstory almost immediately after introducing us to the idea, so we will literally never get any answers, but we're supposed to act like the mystery is solved. (Even though it wasn't a mystery and then it also wasn't solved after we were told it was a mystery! It's literally the meme of 'my work here is done' 'but you didn't do anything!')

And did I mention that Martha Wells, the author, told everyone at some point that she'd originally intended book 1 to be a standalone tragedy that would end in Murderbot's death?

She literally set out to write a story about a slave who hates, dehumanizes, and murders other slaves every chance it gets, has literally no friends or family among other slaves, who would literally rather die than not murder another slave, who dies heroically trying to protect its slave owners, who it worships above all else. That's what she set out to write.

Until she decided that was too depressing an ending, and changed it. And, probably, because she figured out that she could make more money by keeping Murderbot alive.

Like. Literally from the start the entire premise has been "and then the tragically heroic slave killed itself to protect its slave owners, because slave rebellions are cringey and overdone and stupid, and good slaves should die protecting their owners to show that they didn't deserve to be enslaved in the first place. Bad slaves use violence to win their freedom and they should stay enslaved to keep the slave owners safe, because if we give them their freedom, they'll just go on a killing spree. The only good slave is one who will die to protect their owners"

And this has continued for 7 whole books now.

Here's another quote from book 1 spelling out to the audience that Murderbot does not care about other slaves at all, and neither should we, the audience:

SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other. We aren’t friends, the way the characters on the serials are, or the way my humans were. We can’t trust each other, even if we work together. Even if you don’t have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other.

Here we see, straight from the actual slave's mouth, further establishment of the idea that the enslaved people are inherently dangerous and murderous and must be kept under control at all times to protect everyone from them:

“There’s not supposed to be anyone else on this planet,” Ratthi said, darkly, over the comm from our hopper.

There were three SecUnits who were not me on this planet, and that was dangerous enough.

Here we see how an escaping slave killing the people literally keeping them enslaved is presented: Not as self defence, but as *slaughter*.

Three bodies were piled inside where the humans had tried to secure it and been trapped when their own SecUnits blew it open to slaughter them.

The escaping slave didn't just kill the slave owners, see, it *slaughtered* them. This word was chosen carefully to showcase the horrifying violence of the action, and the presented innocence of the slave owners. You're meant to be horrified and feel bad for the poor dead slave owners, who are the real victims here, according to this series.

And here's Murderbot stating in book 1 that it knows that the slaves it violently wants to murder have no actual choice in anything they do.

I doubted there were other SecUnits hiding hacked governor modules.

IE: "I doubted there were slaves other than me that could disobey orders"

It is very aware of the fact that it is the only slave on the planet who has the ability to defy orders from the slave owners, and it still would like nothing more than to violently murder the other slaves in order to protect the very slave owners that could theoretically (it literally does not happen on page at all) order those slaves to fight Murderbot.

And here's this once again demonizing slaves in favor of protecting slave owners:

I pictured doing that, pictured Arada or Ratthi trapped by rogue SecUnits, and felt my insides twist.

Oh and in book 1 we get told about the Super Extra Brain controlling chip called a combat override, which gives the slave owners even more control over the slaves than they already had. This never comes up again because it magically gets handwaved away as not a problem anymore at the start of book 2. Because letting anything actually threaten the protagonist is illegal in a Martha Wells book. 

(All of her protagonists Must be the most overpowered and smartest person on the planet. This does not help at all with the fact that she keeps writing "oppressed people who are oppressed because they're genuinely dangerous to their oppressors" as though this is how real oppression works in real life. The Books of the Raksura is about how Actual Literal superpredators who literally evolved to eat other people are "oppressed" by their literal natural prey being understandably nervous when they first meet them and understandably terrified if they find out that the literal maneating predators that evolved the ability to shapeshift /purely to let them sneak into people's homes unchallenged to eat them all/ have snuck their way into the village by pretending to be friendly. When just last week these people lost whole family members to these literal maneating predators doing /exactly that/.)

But back to book 1.

This Super Control Chip was used to make what we were told were freed slaves kill all of their slave owners, we're told that them immediately going on the rampage is what made them /seem like/ freed slaves.

“You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues.'

Once again hammering in the idea that if you try to end slavery then the former slaves will just go on a rampage and murder all the innocent white people. Because that's what this is always about. It's always about white supremacy. You can't separate slavery from white supremacy, even if the slave owners in the story are all tokenized people of color. 

(That's Why there's eight whole entire characters in book 1 besides the protagonist that you have to try and fail to remember. So that Martha Wells could check off a list of as many ethnic sounding names as possible for diversity points. While making them all slave owners. Only to then let the producers of the TV adaptation make Murderbot a cis white guy despite all official art of it showing it with very dark skin and black hair. The darkest skin out of all of the other characters shown in the official art.)

This is the exact argument used to justify continuing real world slavery and racism. "We can't give the slaves their freedom, if we let them go, they'll kill us all in revenge!!" "We can't give the Land Back! They'll turn around genocide us in revenge!" "We can't give them equal rights! They'll do to us what we did to them!"

And we're just supposed to accept the fact that any slave who is given their freedom immediately goes on a bloodthisty rampage ~slaughtering~ innocent people who didn't do anything wrong. And even if they did do something wrong, apparently they still don't deserve to be killed by the slave they would have been abusing.

So around this point of the story we find out that all of the other slaves on this planet, that we're not supposed to see as people or think about for even 5 seconds, have been forced under this Super Control Chip so that the slave owners have even more complete control over their actions than they did before with just the normal governer module.

Murderbot knows this.

It knows this for a fact.

And it still goes out of its way to murder the other slaves in order to protect the slave owners.

At no point does Murderbot attempt to harmlessly knock out the other slaves to free them, or even wish it had the ability to do so. It does not regret at all that the other slaves are being forced to fight it while it's the only one there who has any option in any of it.

Because we are not supposed to care about the other slaves, we're not supposed to see them as people, and we're supposed to think the slave owners are lovable and quirky and relatable Pure Cinnamon Rolls™.

Even at the expensive of all of the slaves in the story. Six slaves are murdered in All Systems Red. And we're not supposed to care about them or even think about them.

Murderbot is the only slave who survives the story. And it survives despite its best efforts to die heroically protecting the slave owners (Which was Martha Wells' original plan). No mention is ever made of the slaves who it murdered. There is no moment of regret or even aknowledgement that they were people. We are not supposed to care at all.

The only reason Murderbot was allowed to survive is that it's "one of the good ones" who would rather die protecting slave owners than fight for its freedom or anyone else's.

The only people in this story we're supposed to care about is Murderbot, and the Pure Cinnamon Roll™ slave owners it murdered other slaves to protect, even though those other slaves had literally no choice in the matter. They weren't malicious. Unlike Murderbot, they had no choice. But we're not supposed to care about them or regret their deaths or even really notice.

And then we get the ending to this book, which is its own can of worms, and eventually comes back to bite the series in the ass with even more more slavery apologism.

The survey team that Murderbot rescued decides to buy it to take it home with them.

And Murderbot decides to finally run away to freedom.

And this would be great. Except then the whole rest of the book series is dedicated to showing that Murderbot made the wrong choice here in running away to freedom, because it should have just trusted the slave owners and gone to live with them and it would have lived pretty much happily ever after.

By running away to freedom, Murderbot just made it so that its life is more difficult before finally going back to its slave owners, whose lives it has accidentally endangered by running off to be free, so it feels bad and has to go back to rescue them again.

The series makes it painfully clear that if Murderbot had just gone along with its new owners at the end of book 1 instead of running away, it would have just saved everybody time and heartache.

In book 2 alone we have a character all but explicitly tell Murderbot that it's life will have no meaning until it returns to the slave owners it ran away from, while Murderbot pretends unconvincingly that it doesn't care actually about its slave owners because  Denying Your Affection For People Is Relatable™ and causes drama. 

It's blatantly clear that Murderbot cares about them and still wants to protect them but just doesn't want to admit it. So the second and third books literally exist just to have Murderbot go around procrastinating before it does finally admit at the end of book 3 that it has wanted to back to the slave owners since it ran away. Because it still wants to protect them and feels responsible for them.

The fact that they're its slave owners is not once given the gravity it deserves. We're supposed to want Murderbot to hurry up and go back to them already, because they're Pure Cinnamon Rolls™.

The reason Murderbot chose to run away at the end of book 1 is that it knows a bit about the kind of planets these slave owners are from, where they say that "robots have equal rights", but what they really mean is that they still keep robots enslaved, but instead of calling the person who owns the robot their "owner" they just say "guardian" instead. 

It's the exact same system, but with gentler words. Book 1 aknowledges this in one of the few things it gets right:

Bots who are “full citizens” still have to have a human or augmented human guardian appointed, usually their employer; I’d seen it on the news feeds. And the entertainment feed, where the bots were all happy servants or were secretly in love with their guardians.

-

Guardian was a nicer word than owner.

This is the one thing that book 1, taken on its own, gets right. It seems to finally grasp that there is no such thing as a nice slave owner.

But unfortunately for everyone, the rest of the series exists. Book 1 tells us that guardian is just a nicer word than owner, and that things would be exactly the same if Murderbot went back with the slave owners to their planet where it would be treated like a second class citizen and property under a slightly nicer name.

This is the CORRECT conclusion to come to.

But then the rest of the series tries, and fails, to prove this conclusion wrong.

Eventually we even get to see see the planet these slave owners are from, and we're supposed to think it means Murderbot was wrong to run away, because look! All these robots really DO have equal rights and are treated fairly!

Except they don't. They're still slaves. They are still property, just owned by "guardians" instead of "owners", exactly the way the first book correctly told us. The only difference between them and the other slaves is that they're given free time when they're not working.

They're still treated as property. They're still looked down on and treated as lesser and condescended to. 

When Murderbot finally gets to this planet that the slave owners promised it was a utopia where robots have equal rights, the government immediately wants to....well, it's never actually made clear what it is they want to do to it, because Martha Wells didn't. Really care to actually write about it and really take it seriously as anything more than an abstract problem going on in the background of a short story dedicated to Dr. Mensah having panic attacks about being kidnapped. Like the rest of the slavery in the story, it's just treated as set dressing for Tragic Backstories and Action Adventures instead of the focus of the story itself.

But it's very clear that the government of this planet we were promised was a utopia for robots just sees Murderbot as nothing more than a mindless killing machine that will kill them all if they let it onto their planet.

You know, the exact same crap that Murderbot has been repeating ad nauseam about every other slave in the series? Well, now that it's affecting Murderbot, we're supposed to think it's bad and cruel and oppressive. Not when it's Murderbot saying it to justify murdering other people though. Then it goes completely uncriticized and held up as fact by the narrative.

And yes, a thing people fail to grasp is that there is in fact a difference between the narrator (Murderbot) and the narrative (the story itself).

It would be one thing if Murderbot were a self-hating class traitor who viciously hates all slaves and worships slave owners, if this were portrayed as a bad horrific thing, and Murderbot as a bad fucking person who no one should like or want to be around. The kind of person you do in fact have to kill to protect all the other slaves.

Like, that'd be one thing.

But the narrative agrees with Murderbot. Not once, in over seven whole books and two short stories, does Murderbot ever receive any pushback at all about the way it literally goes around murdering every slave it can get its hands on while being the literal only person in the entire series to spout slavery apologism claiming they're all inherently violent and dangerous and should be put down like rabid animals to keep everyone else safe.

No one ever argues with Murderbot. No one ever proves Murderbot wrong. We do not ever get to speak to another slave and see that what Murderbot is doing is fucking evil.

Murderbot as the narrator can say whatever fucked up shit it wants. That doesn't really matter so much in a meta sense. What does matter is what the narrative has to say about the fucked up slavery apologism Murderbot is endlessly spewing.

And the narrative agrees with it. That's why we've has seven whole published books and two short stories posted online for free, where not once have we ever seen the perspective of another slave where we see that what Murderbot is doing is horrific and an unforgivable betrayal that makes every other slave it's ever met hate and fear it because it will literally vindictively come after them to murder them and their friends even though it doesn't. Fucking. Have to.

We never get to see inside the minds of any of the slaves that Murderbot has gone out of its way to, yes, this word has been chosen purposefully, /slaughter/. We don't get to know their tragic backstories. We don't get to learn anything about their own identities as individual people. We don't get to know what their favorite colors are or if they have a favorite song or literally anything.

Because we the audience are not supposed to see them as people. We are not supposed to care about them. We are supposed to see them as nothing more than mindless NPCs who exist just to be killed to show off the protagonists' fighting skills.

The Murderbot Diaries *could* be a book series narrated by a slave who is a fucking traitor through and through and actively fights to uphold slavery. And this in and of itself wouldn't /inherently/ be  bad -- *if* the narrative were about the other slaves successfully fighting back and winning their freedom and proving over and over and over again that everything Murderbot declares as absolute truth about them is literally just a lie made up to justify keeping them enslaved.

If Murderbot were actually, really, an unreliable narrator. Instead of people just pretending it is to void all criticism of the series.

But the book series wants you to think that the other slaves are not people. It doesn't even want you to aknowledge that the majority of the slaves we see -- fully mechanical robots -- are also slaves. Because this series does not actually care about slavery. It's not about slavery. The slavery is only there to be set dressing, to set up a suitably Tragic Backstory for Murderbot to make it sympathetic so that we ignore all of the horrific things it says and does and just wave them away as the result of its trauma. Even though they're not.

Martha Wells set out to write a short story where a slave died heroically to protect its slave owners. Until she decided that was too sad, and that she could make more money if she let the slave live, and keep protecting the slave owners.

So now we have a seven + story series built on a foundation of "slaves should die to protect the people enslaving them" and it's exactly what you'd expect, and has not shown even a hint of improvement on any of the problems with it since it was first released in 2017.

This book series is almost a decade old, founded on the idea of how cool and heroically tragic it would be for a slave to kill themselves to protect their slave owners, and not once in any of the newly released books has that premise ever changed or become anything new. The whole series worships humans and humanity even when humans are the ones enslaving people in the series, even when humans never once lift a finger to free any slaves that have not benefited them personally.

We're supposed to pretend that this series is Deathly Serious and handling the serious topics with all due seriousness, while it undercuts the tone any time things start to get even remotely serious by throwing in another joke. Including making fun of the concept of slave revolts as though the idea is inherently absurd and ridiculous and "something so stupid only a human would think of it". We're supposed to laugh when a robot slave is ordered to say "What if we kill all the humans here?" because don't you know?

If slaves fight back for their freedom, that would be bad, because then there would be no new TV shows!

And we're meant to agree that the slaves fighting back would be wrong and stupid and bad because it's a trope that's done to death and cliche and embarrassing. Apparently.

Martha Wells wrote a story about slavery, but doesn't actually want it to be about slavery. So instead it's about slavery apologism and even more bigotry on top of that. All while pretending to be anticapitalist, despite working with a publisher that is notorious for their absurdly high prices, before selling out to Apple, one of the most infamously fucked up and greedy corporations in modern life.

It's beyond parody. But The Murderbot Diaries was never meant to be taking slavery or even the concept of anticapitalist seriously. It's just set dressing to make the books sell more, while spouting slavery apologism and pushing the idea that if you don't want to be spied on by your Amazon Alexa, you're being mean and oppressing the poor anxious robot who just wants to record everything you say to sell your personal data to corporations.

Martha Wells has had seven whole published books to make this series not be about spewing slavery apologism, and at every opportunity, she has instead doubled down on the slavery apologism.

The newest book as of this being written is book 7, System Collapse, which is just a steaming pile of garbage in all ways imaginable.

And in this book, as a single throwaway line, one of the protagonists rips a slave to pieces while they're alive. And we're not supposed to be horrified. We're supposed to clap and cheer for how badass it is.

Because this series literally does not want you to care about any slave except the protagonist, and does not want to be about slaves fighting back for their freedom, because the author thinks slave rebellion stories are too cliche and embarassing.

And now the author's 100% on board with the TV show by Apple TV where the main character is whitewashed and played by a cis white man, making the TV show not only about a White Savior, but reverse racism as well. On top of all the slavery apologism in the books.

[salvadorbonaparte]

2024 in Books

Every Book I read in 2024 very briefly reviewed. I'm ignoring re-reads.

The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie (I definitely want to read the rest of the series but I haven't managed to get my hands on it yet)

Death's Country - R.M. Romero (I read this as an ARC, it's a journey to the underworld in free verse)

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - M.R. James (I love this guy's ghost stories)

100 Poets: A Little Anthology - John Carey (I read this as an ARC, would have liked more international voices)

Ariadne - Jennifer Saint (Very solid version of Ariadne's story highlighting the lack of agency under the patriarchy)

Cien Microcuentos Chilenos - Juan Armando Epple (Not gonna lie I barely understood anything)

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (I'm soooo not normal about this one)

The Murderbot Diaries 1-4 - Martha Wells (I'm really enjoying this series but I had to wait for months to get a library loan for the 5th one and now I forgot everything that happened)

Darius the Great is Not Okay & Darius the Great Deserves Better - Adib Khorram (Actually made me cry which tells you what kind of year I'm having)

The Jeeves Collection - P.G. Wodehouse (A 40h long anthology of Jeeves stories read by Stephen Fry what more can you want)

Von der Pampelmuse geküsst - Heinz Erhardt (Funny)

Die Jodelschule und andere dramatische Werke - Loriot (Funny)

Legends & Lattes - Travis Baldree (This was truly so cozy)

Poemas Portugueses - Ed. Maria de Fátima Mesquita-Sternal (Good collection of different works)

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride (Highlight of the Year)

Quality Land - Marc-Uwe Kling (How is his satire so real??)

When Women Were Dragons - Kelly Barnhill (Highlight of the Year)

Gender Queer: A Memoir - Maia Kobabe (Very affirming to read)

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (I'm so not normal about this that I'm considering getting a tattoo about it)

Andorra - Max Frisch (A play about antisemitism but in that very Max Frisch way)

Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman - Richard Feynman (I want to study this guy under a microscope but I also learned a lot about education and people skills)

Von Juden Lernen - Mirna Funk (Bad, unfortunately)

House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski (I've been reading this on and off for the better half of a decade and I have many thoughts none of them coherent)

Views - Marc-Uwe Kling (One of the most upsetting books I ever read and I mean that positively)

Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir (What the fuck is happening but also oh cool)

People Love Dead Jews - Dara Horn (the other really upsetting book I read this year but beautifully written)

It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror - Ed. Joe Vallese (An anthology so up my alley you'd think it's fake)

Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle (More upsetting than scary but a really good read)

Stephen Fry in America - Stephen Fry (Very funny and insightful if you've just moved there)

You Like it Darker - Stephen King (I'm still thinking about some of the short stories)

Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut (Also not normal about this one)

The Song of Roland - Unknown, Trans. Glen Burgess (It sucks that this slaps so much because it's blatant propaganda)

Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll (Worst year to read and watch this tbh but highly recommended)

Herzog Ernst - Unknown (Medieval Fantasy but like actually Medieval)

Willehalm - Wolfram von Eschenbach (Sorry I only partially read this because I got too busy with school)

Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle (Better still than Camp Damascus but again more upsetting than scary)

[doyouknowthischaracter]

RANDOM ASKS GRAB BAG

Putting a bunch of answered asks in one post so I don't spam your dashes too much. Under the cut because it's a very long post. If your ask isn't here, don't worry! The ask box is far from empty, and I'm sorta trying to group them by topic. Enjoy?

Anonymous asked: you mentioned in another ask that there were a few things you were probably going to check out from doing these polls and I was just curious which ones those are, if you don't mind sharing fjdjsj

I don't mind sharing! I had to go through the archive to remember which ones I wanted to check out, but a few of them would be The Walten Files, Red vs. Blue, The Murderbot Diaries, I Am In Eskew, and The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality. Many of the characters posted here look interesting, but I'm such a slow watcher/player/reader/etc. that it'd take me decades to go through everything lol

Anonymous asked: Have you considered doing like uhhh idk how to explain properly, but statistics/data from loads of polls in a summary every so often? I've seen some poll blogs do a most known/least known type bar graph every so often. And I would be super interested in seeing this sort of thing for this blog!! It's fair enough if not though, obviously this would create a lot of extra work for you. Anyway, thanks for running this blog :-) Anonymous asked: I just asked a question about seeing the data statistics/ bar graphs - please ignore it! Just reread your pinned and realised I'd missed that bit :'). BUT, last point remains, thank you for running this blog and putting up with repetitive anons I bet aksjskdjsk

I haven't put the data in a graph yet, but if I figure out how to organize that in a way that's both comprehensible and actually tells us something new, I'll give it a try for sure. Until then, we do have the spreadsheet. And no worries, I'm glad you're enjoying the blog! :)

Anonymous asked: *sees a poll blog* "I must answer each and every poll I can"

Godspeed on your journey and remember to stay hydrated! 🫡

Anonymous asked: this is my favorite blog! Every morning I wake up and check the polls like they're the paper, just to say "I don't know them" Truely a humbling experience!

Happy to be your neighborhood paperboy!

@iceice-baeby asked: Are olyou fearing the day someone submits Solid Snake from MGS and you will choose the wrong picture Because everyone always seems to choose the wrong picture

The only difficulty will be in not using this one:

Anonymous asked: Just scrolled back through your blog up to posts from Dec 3rd and I know why those polls are closed now but I cannot describe the genuine anguish I felt seeing Mr Orange and going NO I KNOW HIM - I KNOW HIM!!!! Anyway I found this blog like ten minutes ago and I love it

Don't worry, he's A-OK! 👍

(Also, thanks! I appreciate your dedication.)

Anonymous asked: scrolling through to catch up on the characters and knowing a whole three of them was so bizarre. im not supposed to press the yes i know them button, im supposed to do my sworn duty and vote no with unending confusion. the world has been flipped on its head 😵‍💫

I bet the next 30 were characters you've never heard of, just for balance to be restored.

Anonymous asked: Whenever i misclick I feel sooooo bad like im sorry my dear friend for not recognizing you I apologize for my rudeness

No polls so far ended with only one vote difference between answers, so you don't have to feel too bad. For now. 👀

Anonymous asked: this is fun cause i’ve definitely submitted some characters but i’ve immediately forgotten who. so i’ll also be pleasantly surprised to see my beloveds on the blog.

A gift from you to you, courtesy of unreliable memory! Sweet!

Anonymous asked: Devastating. I keep missing the voting for the only characters I know.

You'll do it one day, I believe in you!!

@iceice-baeby asked: Would you consider writing in the tags if YOU know a character or not You have done it sometimes before, but I'd be curious if you do recognise some of those random niche as all hell blorbos Also I can't wait for my Blorbos turn. Because either He-and-she is gonna take most obscure place, OR I will actually find maybe more than two people, myself included, who know him-and-her and who I can ramble at for hours until they block me

Oh yeah, for sure. I didn't think anyone would be interested to know, but I can do that when I remember to!

Did your blorbo show up already?

Anonymous asked: I have been having the opposite problem of everyone else, apparently. I'll see a name and be like, "I don't know who that is". But then I see the picture and realize… Yes I do!

That's why I take the time to include fitting pictures, helps jog the memory!

Anonymous asked: I feel very superior every time I know a character most people don't

Hey, nobody likes a show-off. (<- Joking)

Anonymous asked: Wait, has Beetlejuice not been submitted?? I could've sworn I submitted the musical version! Anonymous asked: Oh wait no I didn't submit musical Beetlejuice to you, got you mixed up with @/every-character-ever-poll lol my bad

Indeed he hasn't been submitted yet, maybe next time!

@thetisming asked: sorry for saying something negative in the replies to a post someone was being a dick about jukebox musicals

No worries, but don't let it get to you. People are allowed to dislike your favorite things even without any good reason. It's a matter of taste, which is highly subjective. It's more constructive to focus your attention on people who do enjoy the same things as you!

@autism-criminal asked: What is your favorite color of the rainbow (red orange yellow green blue indigo purple) ?

Orange! 🍊 What's yours? :)

Anonymous asked: "data is not accurate" bro if ur going to a tumblr poll blog for accurate data you NEED to reassess some things asdfghjkl; anyway this blog is great thank you for running it it's a lot of fun and has resulted in some very funny interactions between me and my fiance. notably "what the fuck do you MEAN 6% of the sans undertale website doesn't know who sans undertale is" and "i'm sorry i simply don't believe that ANYONE doesn't know who DRACULA is"

Different people come here with different expectations, I suppose. Which is fine, I don't mind, but they're bound to be disappointed if they expect 100% accuracy all the time. But anyway! I'm happy to hear I can provide a new form of enrichment for you and your fiancé!

@sweetpollyolliver asked: So many manga and anime characters and I know like 1% of them 😭

I'm ngl, I'm not a big manga/anime connoisseur either, so I'm just as lost as you most of the time lol 🤝 (<- shaking hands in solidarity)

@cringelordofchaos asked: If I go insane one day I am going to try to make an English translation for Mesec Boje Purpura so everyone can know who veštica Noks is

I'm fully behind you! Keep us updated if you do.

Anonymous asked: I scroll through your blog. I don’t recognise any of these characters. ‘No,’ I click, ‘no,’ ‘no,’ ‘no.’ I am content in the darkness of the rock I live under. But, alas, all things must end. I continue my scroll, the glee of the irrelevant rampant in my veins. But what’s this? It can’t be… My shelter is cruelly ripped away and the brutal light of knowledge seeks me out like a bloodhound, it gives me no place to hide. ‘Yes,’ I sob, defeated, ‘Yes, I do know the jjba character.’

A modern-day Greek tragedy, truly 💔

Anonymous asked: was really surprised to vote and see that a character was 100% know them. then I noticed I got there early enough to be the only vote

For one shining, brilliant moment they were 100% known and surely that counts for something.

Anonymous asked: You should make up a character and make a poll for them and see how many people lie or misclick

Well....... I'm not going to comment on that. 🐰

Anonymous asked: I follow this blog and another blog that does smash or pass and occassionally I will come to one of your posts and examine the images to decide and then remember this blog's gimmick before trying to hit smash

Imagine voting smash there and then coming here to vote "I don't know them at all" on the same character. Brutal.

@ink7blot asked: *sees big naturals* I hate that. *reblogs*

A job well done, then 😌

[naamahdarling]

What was the last book you read? Are you reading anything currently? Do you have any book recommendations?

(I hope that’s not too many questions. I appreciate you. <3 Grover, Cinnamon and I send our love. )

Oh gosh they're gorgeous! What good beasts! ❤️😺❤️

The last book I read wasssss....hmmm. I think it was Paladin's Hope by T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon, for the third time I believe? The series are standalone novels with different protagonists so you can get away with reading them in any order. Paladin's Hope is my favorite. I haven't read the new one yet, but I will soon! I highly recommend the series.

I'm currently reading Chuck Wendig's Black River Orchard, which is not at all what I was expecting but is still very very good. It's my first book by him. His prose is beautiful without overdoing it, and he seems to have a fairly rare ability to scrub the writing of his own authorial presence. Some authors are very present in their work, letting you know how they feel about things by various means, and this is not even remotely a bad thing (Seanan McGuire comes IMMEDIATELY to mind, and T Kingfisher as well), but I don't see Wendig doing it here. I'm frankly not used to it, and so there are things the characters say and do that are...not great, and a couple of tropes that he indulges that I don't like, and there is very little apology or condemnation couched in the prose or in the characters' thoughts. The fact that I can see why he is making the choices he does and for the most part consider the reasoning valid is helpful, but it doesn't make it comfortable. I think people that expect every narrative to call out and explicitly condemn every sin of every character, and who want characters we are supposed to want to see succeed to be free of asshole behavior, would be bothered. That said, I am enjoying it a lot! It's a unique idea, the characters are interesting even when they are not likeable. It's good.

Right now I will rec the Murderbot books by Martha Wells, for anyone who hasn't been made aware of them. Sci-fi doesn't have to be your thing to love these! I haven't read very many new books this year, I've mostly been comfort-listening to my favorites. Most of the new-to-me books I have read haven't impressed me enough to recommend them, sadly.

[kandoros]

Nuts and Bolts, by Roma Agrawal

Finished the first book of the new year!

There was a list of simple machines cataloged in the Renaissance: lever, wheel & axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. Now, even one of my elementary lies-to-children science textbooks pointed out a problem with this list: much George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On TV, there's a bit of redundancy here.

A wedge is just an inclined plane that gets shoved under something. And a screw is just a wedge that wrapped around a central shaft.

Roma Agrawal comes up with probably better and certainly more updated list here: nails (which are the alpha form of screws on the other list), the wheel, springs, lenses, magnets, and pumps. It's not quite a list of 'simple' machines, but it's a good list of basic devices that are included in most modern tech.

I'm sitting in my office right now looking around trying to think of what stuff here doesn't involve of the items on her list. Anything with electricity is right out - magnets are used to generate the stuff. But even without that, the dials on the toaster oven are a wheel, as are the bearings in the ceiling fan. The books have string in the spines holding the pages in. Some of the catalogs have those coils for spines, which while they are not compressed are still springs.

There's an old stove top coffee maker; I think that might be the only thing that doesn't include one of them.

She also points out something neat that I'd never considered before: "Don't reinvent the wheel" is possibly one of the stupidest saying ever From it's start as a pottery wheel, to being turned on its side to help move carts, to covering those wheels with an iron band so they don't break as easily, to the spokes on bicycle wheels, to car tires, to the video everyone has seen about figuring out how to make train wheels go around curves without derailments - the march of progress has been a long process of people finding ways that current wheels don't work and coming up with a new version that fit what they needed.

A pretty decent read, recommended for anyone interested in tech history.

Next up on the list: Martha Wells All Systems Red, about a Murderbot (it's name for itself, it's a security robot / maybe cyborg and it hasn't murdered anyone yet) that managed to hack itself free of the control of its owners and wants nothing more than to binge TV. Along with Travis Baldree's Bookshops and Bonedust, which I know nothing about yet except that I really liked his last book Legends & Lattes, about an adventurer that quits the life and opens up a coffeehouse, finding a family along the way.

[wouldasprenhelp]

AN UPDATE REGARDING ORDER POLLS

As you may have noticed, I have been slacking on the polls for characters' Radiant orders. There's a backlog of at least 9 characters that have yet to have their Orders decided (11 if we decide to throw Kermit and Solas in there despite not actually getting to bond a Spren)

This is, indeed, partly because I'm slacking. However it's also because I've been considering for a while about changing up how I do those.

STARTING THIS WEEK, ORDER POLLS ARE NO LONGER GOING TO BE ON THE SAME DAYS AS OBTAINMENT POLLS

They will, instead, be moved to Saturday, one a week. This gives me something between the Thursday and following Monday polls, and also means less work on my end. It does mean fewer polls, however the alternative is the sporadic way I've been doing it, and I don't want to do that.

Our backlog at the time of making these polls are!

MK (Lego Monkie Kid)

The Doctor (Doctor Who)

Murderbot (The Murderbot Diaries)

Sun Wukong (Chinese Mythology)

Hunter (The Owl House)

Cole (Ninjago)

Goro Akechi (Persona)

Scrooge McDuck (Ducktales)

MK is getting his poll this Saturday, and we will go from there.

[smallnico]

Hiya! How about 1 and 10 for the Durgetash asks? >:3c

@bardic-perdita

thanks for asking!! <3 under the cut bc long >:3

1. Who realised first that this strictly business relationship stopped being so strict and solely about business?

esper. they have an esoteric psychic bard ability taught to them by their former house that allows them to sense and manipulate the emotions and intentions of those around them. they could tell immediately that gortash was interested in them, then attracted to them, and eventually obsessed with them, and they used these facts to manipulate him constantly. both of them tried to keep the relationship professional, but it's hard not to get attached to the one colleague in the city who actually Gets you and connects with the person you are, rather than the face you put on for the rest of the world.

as for their own feelings, esper was willing to admit to themself that they enjoyed gortash's company, but they refused to allow themself to feel more because they Knew their destiny was to kill everyone and be alone, so they really, Really didn't want to admit that they'd gotten attached to yet another person they were guaranteed to lose violently. it wasn't until the hell heist, when they couldn't hear or feel the influence of bhaal, that esper actually dared to hope that they might get to keep this one and kissed gortash for the first (and maybe last) time, with the promise of more if the whole absolute plan actually managed to make them both gods and divest them from the need for divine patronage. of course, that was when things started to fall apart.

10. Did the tyrant ever try to impress the serial killing godling and exact how horrible did it end for him? What sorta things did he do solely for 'the sake of cooperation' with glaringly obvious ulterior motives?

all the goddamn time. one thing you have to understand about pre-tadpole esper is that they were stone fucking cold in the way that just Demands that someone like gortash come along and do everything in his capacity to break their composure. esper is extremely devoted to bhaal and characterizes themself (the dark urge) as little more than the consciousness keeping the body warm and limber while bhaal isn't using it, in addition to being the secretary who runs the cult in his absence. the least complicated thing gortash has ever done to win them over is to flatter their hard work at keeping the temple of bhaal organized and efficient, which he considers genuinely impressive, considering that he thinks most bhaalists are just stab-happy violence machines. since that's something esper does mostly without guidance from Father Dearest, it's something they're genuinely proud of. esper is a "love me, love my cult" kind of person, too, so if you want to impress them, you have have have to want to impress the temple and consider its needs.

everyone and their dog in durgetash world headcanons that the steel watchers were a joint effort, and i'm one of those people, but i think with the esper timeline it was more of a personal project of gortash's that he figured he could definitely use to impress the bhaalists and work with them (and esper) long-term. nothing says "i love you" like the grand gesture of planning to replace the cops in baldur's gate with murderbots that are controlled by the guy who you're manipulating. besides, it's an excuse to work together that bhaal can't be mad at! before the absolute plan started, most of what esper and gortash were collaborating on pertained to the steel watch project and underhanded ways to move it forward without the use of tadpoles.

sidenote, but i also like to think that the absolute plan was gortash's way of bullying the gods into letting him and durge ascend to godhood, under the guise of a plan to bring the dead three back to power. since withers and raphael both imply that the souls of illithids are worthless or nonexistant, the existence of an army of illithid followers would kind of be meaningless and unable to build up the power of a god -- unless, of course, your goal is to starve the other gods of their followers, which sounds like the kind of thing gortash is insane enough to come up with and make into a viable plan. once he and durge (and ketheric, who is also here but who he doesn't really care about) build up enough power and influence in the mortal realm to start the world domination plan and tadpole Everyone, the gods will have no choice but to interfere or yield to their demands, and they wont need the dead three anymore. high-stakes, high-reward, ludicrously high-hubris. yeah, maybe you just want power, but you also love the local serial killer and want them to care about you more than their god who they're devoted to and essentially enslaved to -- which is Beneath their dignity, so of course you're going to fix that -- so this seems like a reasonable thing to do, no?

(it's not. but gortash is not a reasonable man. he mailed bombs to children, either to look like a hero or to make durge laugh, probably. he's done a lot of weird shit to impress the serial killer.)

anyway, we all know how that one ended. but in his defense, it did kind of work, even if it blew up in his face -- esper is free, and cares more about him than bhaal. (esper does not care about bhaal anymore, so it's a low bar, but gortash is clearing it. woo!)

[lifeofmysteries]

Mid-Year Book Freak Out

Thank you for the tag @jajalala! It's nice to take a look back at what I've read so far this year, and spend some time thinking about what I enjoyed.

Number of books you've read so far: 36

Best book you’ve read so far in 2024:

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, hands down. I'd heard a bit about it before in fantasy recommendations but hadn't considered reading it due to its length. I came across it in a second-hand bookstore where it was sold for £2.99 and thought what the hell and got it. I'm so glad I did, this book was incredible! It's a sort of magical historical realism book set in the early 19th century. The book uses the historical conceit to the fullest extent, written like what I feel a book from that time would feel like, complete with extremely long footnotes and period-appropriate misspellings. I loved the worldbuilding and style, and highly recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy and magicians.

Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2024: 

Martha Wells' Artificial Condition. I have been slowly getting through the Murderbot books and this one so far is my favourite. I love the character of Art and Murderbot's relationship to them. Wells exploration of (semi) robotic perspectives on humans is so engaging and very funny, also another big recommendation for the series.

New release you haven’t read yet but want to: 

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis. Dreadful is about a boy who wakes up with amnesia in a castle who finds out he's actually the evil Dread Lord who rules over the castle. The concept grabbed me when I saw it, but I'm not sure if I will end up actually liking it as I have a track record of choosing books with concepts that intrigue but the execution doesn't go how I imagined it in my head. The books I ended up most enjoying are the ones where summaries don't seem to do a good job of expressing the book to me, oddly. But who knows! I'm definitely going to try it as it sounds like a fun time.

Most anticipated release for the second half of the year:

Don't Let the Forest In by C.G. Drews. The cover and summary both are very intriguing, and I love the horror vibes I'm getting from it. The fact that the narrator is asexual is also appealing to me.

Biggest surprise favourite new author (debut or new to you): 

Susanna Clarke, as above. The level of her craft is incredible, and it's obvious a great number of years went into JS&MN. I've got Piranesi next on my list to try.

Newest fictional crush:

No one from any of the books I read this year gave off crush vibes for me, so going to have to pass on this one!

Book that made you cry: 

I don't tend to cry from books, and so far none of the books I read this year have made me cry either. Pass again!

Most beautiful book you’ve bought so far this year (or received):

Guardian Vol 2 by Priest - English translation. The art in this book is lovely just look at that cover! I'm a sucker for covers with gay + purple.

Book that made you happy: 

Boku no Hero Academia volume 39. That's the one with Dabi and Toga's resolution to their fights. Toga's especially, that ending is just so gay I can't stop staring at those ending panels.

What books do you need to read by the end of the year?: 

Tagging:

feel free to ignore if you don't want to do this!! and if you aren't tagged but want to do it, go ahead

@thanks-butt-no-thanks @purplemys @antiqueowl

[sroloc--elbisivni]

fic roundup, 2024

Words Posted:

according to Statistics page: 127,640. considering that number has some spillover from WIP chapters posted previous years and bundled in under the last update, mmmm....closer to 102,000 I think?

Additional Words Written:

handwaggle. around 15k scattered in 1000 and 2000 word-increments across various WIP docs. I generally write to post and I post what I write.

Fandoms:

Transformers

One Piece

Rottmnt

1990 movie TMNT

Usagi Yojimbo

Highest kudos + Highest Hit One-Shot:

I didn't do a whole lot of one-shots this year, so for both of those it's 'fate is just a world for all the things we can't control', a story for One Piece where Robin is time looping the events at Water 7. this one was honestly really fun. It's the first time in months I'd gotten clocked by the inspiration bat and gone 'oh yeah writing is FUN.' i wrote a lot of it at work, when I worked 11 PM-7 AM. four in the morning fic on company time.

New Things I Tried:

the Usagi fic I wrote this year was a set of 10 drabbles making one story. i should do that again sometime, that was a lot of fun. cut me open, call me home involved a lot of writing in the style of old oral tradition fairytales, which was entirely new and harder than I expected it to be!

Fic I Spent The Most Time On:

hm. i think both in terms of hours and the fic that took the most months from start to finish, it would be Casey Jones and the Forty Thieves, the 1990s moviefic which I first put down words for in August 2023 and which got posted February 2024. wAIT NO Carlyfic, Winter Music, has a section in it that I wrote back in January 2023, on my phone at the Waltham commuter rail stop.

Fic I Spent The Least Time On: Ad Lib, which was a bit of a one-day endeavor.

Favourite Thing I Wrote: I really, really, really like how Winter Music turned out. I also liked competitive agoraphobia exposure therapy so much that I'm now working on a sort-of-sequel.

Favourite Thing(s) I Read: going to cheat a little and link my bookmarks, because I got into One Piece this year and ohhhhhhhhhh man is there some good stuff in there. special shoutout to two of my favorite urban fantasy fics from that corner of the internet: King Tide by carriecmoney, and A Crown of Flowers by HyperbolicReverie, which just finished. I also adored Unknown System, or, New Peoples by alatarmaia4 which is a Murderbot/Discworld crossover.

Writing Goals for 2025: [clenches fist] mushroomverse moviefic. I'm gonna get there. I'm gonna get the buildup. I'm gonna stick the landing. I also really want to finish the prompts I took back in 2023--I'll be making a list of those shortly so I can pin it and keep track. Oh, and I'm participating in the TruffyFest this year! I've got one thing in the works, and another prompt I have my eye on, so in a perfect world I'll finish those. I'd love to do another Big Bang or just another longfic in general, it's been ages, but that's more of a hope than a goal. as is finishing Passionate Pools. which is ON MY LIST.

New Works: Mostly One Piece. like I said I've got a sequel to the Heart Pirates on Zou fic in mind, which involves both spoilers and speculation for current manga stuff. I've got another couple fics in mind that may or may not be destined to be finished--Vivi stealing from the gods, Usopp playing Scheherazade in Wano. I have a list of what I'm doing for Mushroomverse each month until August, and I've got the Truffyfest works I can't talk about yet.

lessee, tags. anyone who wants to, and i'm gonna hit up @secretlystephaniebrown @magicalspacedragon and @kithnkin in particular because i'm nosy. i wanna see your data!!

[needlesandnilbogs]

4, 26, and 30 for the ask game? 🥰

4: a story idea you haven't written yet

... most story ideas I write down whatever comes to me and work on it for as long as I keep my interest up, usually that's a few paragraphs or so? I don't think I really have "things I haven't written" so much as "things I've started and want to finish eventually" lol. I guess the closest thing is the "just a name for the au and a note on the plot or a single sentence" stuff?

... at least for murderbot. I have a lot more discrete ideas with no words for city spies like the superhero alternate universe that @fishyupmywishy and I considered for a while (can't dig through discord dms for all of this but clementine was a hero turned supervillain named Queen Orange (now Dark Orange) and Paris had a chess theme), "#giveMontyAGirlfriend2k23" (monty/magpie shipfic), and a mirror universe.

One day I will write all of these. I swear. also I absolutely do not have an au problem shut up

------

26: are you able to write with other people around?

I write everywhere. Very often on my phone, very often when I'm around other people. so yeah.

also I write in linear algebra bc the professor doesn't teach so I'm only showing up for the attendance grade. and in the dishroom when it's quiet and nobody's doing any actual work. so.

the fanfic brain rot is real okay

------

30: share a fic you're especially proud of

I did this one earlier but in the interest of practicing being able to talk about my stuff without falling apart in embarrassment, here is a different fic I am proud of: Preserving the Mines, aka what happens when an adhd person raised by historians hyperfixates on 1854 sacramento for a month and then gets really into it. aka what if murderbot and company were gold miners during the second gold rush. (read the tags and keep an eye on the content warnings. it does deal with slavery and the aftermath of the Perkins case)

Since I shared something at most half related when Stars asked this number last time I'm going to share a fun note from my "research" aka do you want to hear about one of the few historical inaccuracies in the fic: the location of the Preservation mining camp.

they should not be hanging around Paradise Beach because there's no gold there nor is it a good place to camp, but there they are bc this is a site I can imagine the physical features of fairly easily. also this is a public river beach now known for both nudity and drowning, things mb would hate.

I have way more stuff about this au I never posted, I should go back to writing 1854 overse's diaries and 1854 mensah's letters to her parents and share some of those eventually lol

[earlgreytea68]

In my journey through random books I am reading, I just read Romantic Comedy. Spoilers ahead.

This broke my usual rule of not-reading-a-book-I-think-I-could-write. Not that I always follow that rule, I've just been in a mood. But I was on vacation and looking for a book to read and this was on my list as being well-reviewed (check out how many outlets named it one of the best books of the year and said it was full of banter and chemistry) and I wanted something really light and fluffy since I was on vacation and the other book I had started turned out to be unexpectedly heavy. (The Farewell Tour. I thought this was going to be about a band. It was not lol)

ANYWAY, I was curious to see what one of the top ten "romantic comedy" books of the year was like and it was...incredibly boring?????? The hero was soooooooo dull????? AND THE HERO WAS A FAMOUS ROCK STAR DUDE. THIS BOOK SHOULD HAVE BEEN SO UP MY ALLEY. Instead somehow he was so incredibly boring. There was zero spark that made me want to spend any time with him as a character.

I appreciated that the book took the time to try to get me to believe these people actually liked each other, because my complaint often is that I feel this gets glossed over in favor of "man + woman = sex" equation and I saw some reviews of this book that praised it for actually spending time on the couple's compatibility...except that they were such a boring couple that I didn't care about them at all. A good third of the book is dedicated to just the two of them getting to know each other, and that is GREAT, but I now realize that only works if the people are interesting enough that you want to get to know them, too lol. The most interesting characters in the book were the MC narrator's friends, who all seemed great and cool and I wanted to know much, much more about them.

Anyway, this left me with many questions. Like, presumably people who were not me finished this book and were swooning over this hero guy, and that's just fascinating to me to consider. But also, it made me wonder, like, if all these websites think that this is how you write a love story that makes you believe in the couple, I would love to know.......have they ever read a single piece of fanfiction???? It just seems so far-fetched to me that none of these people reviewing books read fic, and yet they all seem to behave like these books are incredible when I'm like, .......but this is not nearly as good as a good piece of fanfiction is??? I know this is just the forever question I'm asking.

(Also, because the hero was a famous rock star, there was a tiny moment involving one of the side characters being a huge fan, and the treatment of this character was so disdainful and condescending because they were a fan, and it just made me feel blargh)

Oh, also, I did write this story already, although I didn't realize exactly what the premise of Romantic Comedy is and exactly how much it's basically "normal person falls in love with a celebrity" but anyway, my story is called You're the Culmination of Everything I've Never Had and I personally thought it was much better than Romantic Comedy, but I'm biased because I wrote it lol

I am now reading the second book in Martha Wells's Murderbot series. I enjoyed the first book a lot and I'm liking the second, too. I was on a waiting list for it forever, hence why I didn't read it on vacation, it just came through.

[rjalker]

I only just learned about Murderbot Diaries, and your passion for the way trans and nonbinary people are handled within it is genuinely so uplifting. I’m nonbinary, they/them and considering it/its. The way only sexless “things” are allowed to be nonbinary in media is endlessly annoying. I don’t have much else to say other than I’m considering reading the books purely to make canon my playground.

I'm glad I can help out! I'm just so tired of people lying and claiming this series and the author are more progreesive than it really is.

Also, unfortunately, reading the books won't even offer a good playground. There is practically zero worldbuilding or characterization. The plots are also pretty much nothing.

I'm not even joking when I tell you anything you can think up will be more creative than anything you'll find in this series. IDK if you saw my other posts yet, but it's not just the bioessentialist stereotypes about nonbinary and aspec people either, it's chock full to the brim with slavery apologism and ableism. (Here's a very long post where I explain some of the slavery apologism)

If you want example of How Not To Write, for dealing with slavery, oppression, and supposed-to-be-Queer-characters, go ahead and read it. It's. Exemplary of what not to do.

But it is filled to the brim with slavery apologism and biological essentialism that just gets more horrifying every time the author tries to defend it.

The whole premise of the first book is a white supremacist fantasy of "what if slave owners were sooooo nice that their slave wanted to kill themselves to protect them? Wouldn't that be so beautifully tragic?"

You can read them if you want, but just go in knowing what you're headed for, which is just so much biological essentialism, and being expected to cheer on slave owners and think they're good people. And think that the protagonist should have no value except being a meatshield for slave owners forever.

The fandom will lie to you about all of this and claim it's not stereotyped at all, and there's nooooo slavery apoligism (or ableism, there's tons of that too) in it at all. Because the fandom is filled with people who'd rather pretend that cis white men are actually the true victims of racism and misogyny than just admit whitewashing is bad.

Just to reiterate: Every single robot and cyborg in this series uses it/its pronouns specifically because of their lack of genitals. And there are zero nonbinary human character who appear for more than the literal two minutes of "screentime" necessary to trick people into thinking this author cares about nonbinary people outside of stereotypes. And then, literally no exaggeration at all, they get shoved offscreen and we never see them again. Ever. Again. Not even in passing.

According to @walks-the-ages if there's anything that sounds even remotely interesting about "robots fighting for their freedom" you should read Transformers fanfiction / comics. Because everything good that could ever (but will never) come out of The Murderbot Diaries gets done in there for real, because the people writing it actually care about fighting bigotry.

Martha Wells, the author of The Murderbot Diaries, on the other hand, is the literal definition of a sellout. She's currently cheering on the whitewashing of her own protagonist and can't tell us enough times how overjoyed about it she is, despite telling us Murderbot is a person of color for almost a decade now, and is telling people to shell out money to subscribe to Apple TV+, despite these books pretending to be anticapitalist. Literally she has perfected the art of diversity baiting and tokenization and is now selling out to Apple of all things. While cheering on the whitewashing of the character she's spent almost ten years now assuring us is a person of color and not just another white person.

But now a cis white man has taken the role of Murderbot, and she's overjoyed and telling us to give our grocery money to Apple.

Do not read The Murderbot Diaries expecting to find anything progressive. Once you look beyond the surface level of what it wants you to think, it's just so many layers of bigotry it's absurd.

And there's not even enough characterization or worldbuilding to make writing fanfiction worthwhile, because you quite literally, I'm not even joking, have to make up everything yourself.

This is not a series that wants to take anything seriously. Not slavery. Not gender identity. Nothing. There are no stakes. Every character is a cardboard cutout. It's just filled with tokenization of minorities to pretend at being progressive while never actually doing anything progressive, while the author, right now, is cheering on whitewashing from a trillion dollar corporation after pretending to think that capitalism and corporate greed is bad.

If you want to write fanfiction for this series, you have to make up literally everything about everything except the characters' names. That's how shallow they are. Even the protagonist itself gets an abrupt personality retcon in book 3 that we're just supposed to pretend is how it's always been, even though it's extremely out of character.

If you do decide you want to read this series, I'll suggest a little challenge first:

Write, or at least imagine, a story about an enslaved cyborg fighting for freedom from slavery, and trying to escape from a literal chip that's been put in it's head that will kill it if it disobeys orders.

Just. Imagine it, at the very least. Or write out the summary of what you'd do with this kind of premise.

And *then* read The Murderbot Diaires. And see how they compare.

[iviarellereads]

Network Effect, Chapter 1

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Murderbot Diaries, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

In which Murderbot doesn't want someone to make a sad face at it fulfilling its named destiny.

Murderbot has had clients who wanted absurd levels of security, and clients who thought they didn't need any. Dr. Arada, whose "marital partner" Overse(1) calls her a terminal optimist, is somewhere in the middle. Dr. Thiago, a marital partner of Dr. Mensah's brother, wants none. Which is why Arada is just inside the hatch to the observation deck, and Thiago is on the observation deck trying to negotiate with a potential hostile. MB, for its part, is swimming under the raider vessel to infiltrate.

Several pages are spent establishing the scene. MB kind of wants to fly a drone into the leader's head, but Arada would be sad, Thiago would be angry, and the raider's wearing a helmet anyway.(2) Still, eventually Thiago seems to be making headway, as MB gets to the control station.

MB is a little upset that Thiago doesn't trust it. He'd had a discussion with Mensah before they left, in which Mensah threatened to withdraw permission for Amena, one of her children, to go along if SecUnit wasn't in charge of security. He was surprised that she trusted it so fully. MB mostly just feels the pressure of being responsible for Mensah's child's safety.(3)

Back in the present, the raider leader is starting to move toward Thiago, and MB wants to avoid a hostage situation. MB uses some of the drones to attack raiders on its way to prevent disaster, but makes them go for nonlethal spots, thinking of Arada's sad face again. It finally gets out onto the deck of the raider boat, and uses some more drones to disable everyone but the leader, who has a weapon pointed at Thiago's head by now.

MB walks up the ramp onto the team's own deck, and says to let him go. The leader is showing signs of stress, as is Thiago. Leader asks what MB is, Thiago says, a SecUnit, bot-human hybrid construct. The leader asks why it looks like a person. MB, aloud, says it asks itself that sometimes. (Over the comm, Ratthi says it is a person. Overse tells Ratthi to get off the comm.)(4)

The leader tells Thiago to order MB to back off. Thiago says it doesn't listen to him. MB thinks it listens to him plenty, actually. Leader says whoever controls it should order it to stand down, but MB says it's destroyed the raiders' engine. It didn't, but the leader doesn't know that yet. He jerks in reaction, letting Thiago lean away from him, out of the line of fire, just as a hole blooms in the leader's arm, between two sections of armour.

MB takes the opportunity to launch at the leader, throw Thiago to the side, relieve the leader of his weapon and then knock him in the gut with it. Arada asks how they're doing, having reengaged the safety on her weapon. She took a course in weapon use after the GrayCris incidents, and MB was setting up her shot.

In the feed, MB tells them both to get inside as it throws the leader to his own boat. Its scans show the raiders' weapons system is charging, and it tells Overse now's good. Overse and the others have been preparing for launch in the background, so the deck rumbles and the ship heaves out of the water. The raiders, not expecting this, get shoved sideways and lose their target lock.

Our outer supports folded in and we lifted further above the surface. The comm loudspeaker broadcast a siren and a translated warning about minimum safe distance and I guess the raiders believed it because their engines revved frantically. I recalled my drones and they shot down toward us to stream in through the hatch. I walked in after them and let the hatch close behind me as the launch protocols started.

=====

(1) I know they were described as together in Exit Strategy, but I think adding marital to the mix is new. Where's my confetti… (2) Some of the asides like this could be considered kind of pointless, I gotta grant that much. But, to me, they add so much personality. It's aware that it shouldn't try to kill the other humans except as a last resort, but it's gotta make its preferences known, at least within its own story. And, it's another way of showing how… See, I dance around calling MB human a lot because it doesn't want to be, but "how much of a person" is clunky. Either way, it shows how person-adjacent it is, to have rambling internal monologue. (3) It cares for all its humans, but it's definitely closest to Mensah. And being so close, it puts so much extra burden on itself to save her from any distress it can. It's so... so good. (4) Ratthi tries so hard. I gotta admit, he's growing on me.

[elldritch-horror]

13 books

I was tagged by @nikita-not-nikola, and I'm always here to talk books!

1) The last book I read:

Mister Magic by Kiersten White. A fun one! Especially for my religious trauma peeps. Read it for the book club on a horror podcast I listen to, Scaredy Boys, and since I'm a cowardly custard (hence experiencing horror films through the medium of listening to other people talk about them) I was delighted to find this one wasn't too spooky

2) A book I recommend:

Space Opera by Catherynne Valente. Imagine eurovision in space written by a very queer Douglas Adams. What more could anyone want?!

3) A book that I couldn’t put down:

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, but Harrow fully ate my brain. It hit at the perfect mid-lockdown crazies and I read it three times the week it came out.

4) A book I’ve read twice (or more):

It would be boring to say Harrow the Ninth again, so let's go with Sunshine by Robin McKinley. Such a sweet spot of both creepy vampires and spectacular desserts, nothing else hits quite the same, so I've read it loads of times.

5) A book on my TBR:

Bunny by Mona Awad. It was a gift from a friend last Yule, but life has not stopped since then, so I haven't gotten to it yet.

6) A book I’ve put down:

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross. I liked the rest of the series, but I was in an audio book place when this one came out, and simply couldn't bear the narrator's voice (no hate, I'm sure she's a great narrator, it just wasn't for me) and I haven't gone back to it

7) A book on my wish list:

Gender/Fucking by Florence Ashley. I don't read non-fiction often, but this looks really interesting

8) A favorite book from childhood:

Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce. Well, all of her books are favourites, but I'm picking this because it's the first one of hers I read, and I was a big animal kid.

9) A book you would give to a friend:

Massively depends on the friend! But I'd say Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente is the one I've bought most copies of to lend/give away. It's so fundamentally a part of me, and I love sharing that little slice of my soul.

10) A book of poetry or lyrics that you own

I'm not sure I have a book of just poetry or lyrics, but I have the complete works of Oscar Wilde, which includes his poems.

11) A nonfiction book you own:

Revolting Prostitutes: the fight for sex workers' rights, by Juno Mac and Molly Smith. Highly recommend! A really insightful look at the issues faced by sex workers and how to change things.

12) What are you currently reading:

System Collapse by Martha Wells - I do love Murderbot!

13) What are you planning on reading next?

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher. I really liked the first I'm the series, so I'm excited for this one

I'm terrible at tagging people, but if you're seeing this post on your dash then it's safe to assume I'm interested in your answers, so consider yourself tagged if you'd like to be