#tmbd iris

[wigglybunfish]

I know they’re the same, it’s all just Peri. That the drone will be repaired and the next time we need it, it’ll be the same. But still, when something happens like this, it scares me. I just don’t want to lose any piece of Peri, you know?

I know, I said. And I did know, and now I was having an emotion.

From System Collapse, Chapter 11.

Original line art is here

[hellofriendhawke]

I wanted to draw this:

[psumnt-studentcouncil]

Iris is good at noticing patterns.

[iamanoccasionaldoodler]

I would give ANYTHING for a short story of whatever off-screen ART backstory led to Iris recognizing Murderbot as "Peri's Secunit." Did the whole crew know or just Iris? Did they have to pry the story out of it or did it immediately brag to them that it made a friend? What was Iris's thought process like when she realized that, despite the astronomical improbability, the secunit that had appeared out of nowhere to rescue them was, in fact, /Peri's/ secunit

[heyitsrink]

Murderbot using the strategy "talk to the humans" as a way to tell ART how it feels (...:

[chelshiart]

Is it weird to say that I'm lowkey delighted by the MB casting? Because seeing that actor reminds me that back when my siblings and I were kids, one time we were refueling the car and WHAM started playing on the radio, so we started miming the entirety of the gas station scene from Zoolander. I got to be Brint and blow everyone up in slow motion, and it was GREAT. 

Also it gave me the idea to draw this, so hereyougo :D 

Anyway, I'm happily in the 'wait-and-see' camp, and looking forward to see how they adapt the story to the visual medium! 

(Also bonus Ratthi speaking truth bombs: )

[goops-art]

SMOLL BEAN TIME!!!

From a young iris and peri

<also yes has been stucked to my notebook for some time that some of the graphite smeared but welp what could be done>

I dont know how true this is

BUT

I LOVE IT!!!

[funwithchickenjane]

Book Review: System Collapse by Martha Wells [ARC]

System Collapse picks up where Network Effect left off—with Preservation Alliance and Pansystem University of Mihara and New Tideland working together to prevent the planet from falling into Barish-Estranza's control (and the surviving colonists from a fate of indentured 'employment'). Faced with distrustful, fractional colonists with little knowledge of the Corporation Rim, the team needs to find a way to show the truth behind B-E's corporate propaganda. And to top it all of, Murderbot isn't doing so great...

In this installment, Wells takes a closer look at the persuasive tools of the Corporation Rim and how disinformation and desperation erode fundamental rights to autonomy. While the narrative climax can feel somewhat corny, Murderbot's pessimism and dry commentary balances the message, allowing for a explosive and entertaining finale without flattening the politics. The highlight of the novel is Murderbot's relatable and darkly funny struggle with declining mental health. As always, Wells handles this topic deftly—giving an accurate and empathetic depiction that doesn't bog down the narrative by wallowing in trauma.

Verdict? In the immortal words of Ann Leckie: "I love Murderbot!" Fans will love the opportunity to get to know the PUMNT crew better—with one especially interesting introduction.

[rjalker]

Iris' description:

I could see an arm resting on the glass and it was dark brown, wearing a decorative woven bracelet. The pushed-up sleeve of the T-shirt was a light blue.

-

Iris was small, shorter and slimmer than Ratthi, not much bigger than Amena. Her dark hair was the curly kind that puffed out a lot but she had it pulled back and tied up in a band. Her long-sleeved T-shirt and pants and soft shoes were the casual version of ART’s blue crew uniform, and she had stains at her knees and elbows, cuts on her hands, and a discolored bruise on her left forearm, but I didn’t see any worse injuries.

[specialagentartemis]

Having listened to the Graphic Audio full-cast audobook for All Systems Red, it was fun but I have some thoughts about the voice acting and direction. So now I’m just daydreaming about “if I had Billionaire Money I would buy the audio rights to TMBD and direct and produce another full cast audio version with voice actors handpicked and paid lavishly by Me.”

The cast being:

All Systems Red:

Murderbot: Kevin R. Free is the voice of Murderbot to a lot of people. I would think very hard about this but it would be a foundational return to form. However I feel like I want to reach out and find a non-binary VA because it's a niche that's been tragically underrepresented in Murderbot VAs. I joked before about Vico Ortiz playing live-action Murderbot but do they want to try their hand at voice acting?

Mensah: Cecilia Lynn-Jacobs. Voices Captain Lovelace on Wolf 359. Has incredible talent and range and does the Intrepid Galactic Explorer so well.

Pin-Lee: Emily Woo Zeller. An audiobook narrator I've consistently liked.

Ratthi: Stephen Dookie. He plays the part of Polites in Epic: The Musical and he's excellent in a very sweet, upbeat, friendly way.

Gurathin: Sungwon "ProZD" Cho. I'm picturing somewhere in the range of his Miles Edgeworth voice for this.

Arada: Michelle "Vixy" Dockrey. She's a singer not a VA but her voice sounds so nice.

Overse: Tanja Milojevic. Her range is incredible.

Bharadwaj: Rukhmani Desai (Captain Tripathi, The Strange Case of Starship Iris. She has that calm, reasonable, rational, desperately kind character voice she plays well in Starship Iris that I think would go well for Bharadwaj)

Volescu: Zach Valenti. The vibes are right.

Additional voices by Tanja Milojevic and Zach Valenti. Yes all of them.

Artificial Condition:

ART: Janelle Monáe and I mean it

Tapan: ItMe of InCo Podcast

The ComfortUnit: also ItMe because an important part of listening to faer acting is realizing in awe how fae voices so many characters at once and make them all sound distinct.

Tlacey: kinda thinking Ariela Rotenberg. she does smugly confidently evil very well. However we cannot discount casting ItMe for this role also

Additional voices by Tanja Milojevic and Zach Valenti.

Rogue Protocol:

Don Abene: Emma Sherr-Ziarko. She also deserves to be an intrepid space leader again.

Miki: ItMe again in InCo Season 2 Updated SAWA mode

Wilken: me. I want a part. I could totally be a badass evil space assassin

Gerth: does Gerth even have any lines.

Additional voices by Tanja Milojevic and Zach Valenti.

Exit Strategy:

Serrat: Zach Libresco. this casting + Janelle Monáe as ART were what drove me to make this post in the first place.

The Combat SecUnit: Ellen McLain in GLaDOS mode. All 2 lines it has.

Network Effect:

Amena: Ishani Kanetkar (The Strange Case of Starship Iris, The Godshead Incidental, excellent VA for a proud and curious but scared young person)

Iris: Jordan Cobb (Janus Descending, Primordial Deep, excellent VA for a gritted-teeth calm scientist in a strange and dangerous place)

Seth: Avery Brooks (I know it is not the 90s anymore. but. Captain Sisko. I can imagine <3 )

Martyn: Alexander Siddig / Siddig El-Fadil (Dr. Bashir). They're TV actors but! I want them as the Ship Captain Husbands

The rest of ART's crew: other podcast VAs I love who I haven't come up with a role for yet. Kristen DiMercurio, Beth Eyre, James Oliva.

Supervisor Leonide: Claudia Christian (Commander Ivanova on Babylon 5 <333 )

Eletra: Michaela Swee who is very busy working at An Actual Hospital but I have a billion dollars in this dream scenario so I can pay her to take a day and record like 4 lines

Ras: Zach Valenti. This is very important.

Three: Jackie Andrews who plays R. J. McCabe on Starship Iris and Elinor Lopez on The Pasithea Powder has the right Vibes For This

Zach Valenti as the Additional Voice of every goon and target who gets the shit scared out of them and/or dies.

Fugitive Telemetry:

Indah: Molly Olguin maybe. she could Be Indah. Absolutely means we need Jackie Hedeman to have a role in FT too.

Tifany: Michelle Agresti (Wolf 359, Arden)

Aylen: Tracey Sayed (also Arden)

Jollybaby, Tellus, Balin: I would open the floor to the delightful Murderbot fandom. Who wants to voice a Preservation bot

Additional voices by--well you know the drill.

[gamebird]

The Ship Manifest: Actual Murderbot shipping numbers

I looked at what had been updated on AO3 in the last month in the Murderbot Diaries tag. It was a nice even 50 works.

Of these, 10 are Murderbot/Gurathin and 9 of those were updated in the 8 days. 4 of those were multichapter fics and a couple of those multichapter fics published multiple chapters.

3 fics were MB/ART, with one of those 3 fics being counted in the MB/G ones as well. The other two are single chapter, one of which is Rape, I know some people filter those out.

The Murderathin surge is kinda unusual. Multiple multi-chapter fics finished in the last week, several short stories inspired by each other or bits of art were put out there. And then there's the art, some of which hasn't even been posted here on Tumblr.

But with all that, like I say, non-ship stuff is still over 75%. And for the fandom as a whole, it's more like 90% (I ran the numbers just a couple weeks ago).

----

Here, from 7/17/23, looking at all ship fic in TMBD tag:

Let's see what's changed in a year!

To start, we had 960 fics roughly July 2022. Now (7/17/23) we have 1,825. Almost double!

If I exclude & and look only at / ships: 79 ART/MB (was 24 a year ago) 49 Gurathin/MB (was 17 a year ago) 35 Arada/Overse (wasn't in the top 10 a year ago) 12* MB/3 11* Amena/Iris 8* Farai/Mensah/Tano 6* MB/Mensah 5* Bharadwaj/Pin-Lee 5 ART/CSU 5 OC/OC 4* Gurathin/Thiago 3 01/02/03 2* MB/OC 2 ART/3 2* ART/Ratthi 8* Gurathin/Ratthi 3* Gurathin/3 and Gurathin/3/OC 2 Gurathin/OC 1* Ratthi/Miki 1* ART/Gurathin/Ratthi 1* Ratthi/3 1* Mensah/Pin-Lee 1 Ratthi/3/Pin-Lee 1 MB/Reader 1 ART/OC 1 Arada/Overse

The first three ships listed and any with * are definite in their number. The rest are put together by excluding all other pairings in a clumsy attempt to get AO3 to tell me more than the top 10 stats or forcing me to do a tag search.

245 "/" ship fics out of 1,825 is 13.42%. We were 6% last time, although I suspect I didn't know how to search quite as well as I do now. Even if I only look at the top 10 relationship options this time, we're still at 8.93%. So! There are more ship fics than there used to be, percentage-wise. But still ... not that many as a percent of total fics out there.

Now to look at Explicit fics!

78 Explicit fics (22 last year) ART/MB - 36 (6 last year) No / pairing listed - 8 Not sex - 6 (2 last year) Gurathin/MB - 5 (1 last year) OC/MB - 4 (None last year) OC / OC - 3 (1 last year) ART/OC - 2 (1 last year) Amena/Iris - 2 (1 last year) ART/Ratthi - 2 (1 last year) ART/3 - 2 (1 last year) Gurathin/OC - 2 (None last year) The rest are one-offs: 3/MB, 3/ART, Ratthi/Arada/Overse, MB/Everyone, Arada/Overse, ART/Gurathin.

Also: ART/MB - 36 (18 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) No / pairing listed - 8 (6 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) OC/MB - 4 (4 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) Gurathin/MB - 5 (2 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) One-offs for rape: Gurathin/OC, OC/OC, MB/Everyone.

All figures are derived solely by reading the characters/relationships listed, tags, and warnings.

Reading through the first of 4 pages of returns (66 entries) on unrated fics shows none whose tags indicate shipping, sex, or rape. So not an impact to the numbers reported above.

We have 27 works that are not in English. We have 221 works that include the word 'podfic' in a field.

23 works by Anonymous, 3 by orphan_account (one of those 3 is a finished fic that is part of a series with 3 other named authors - the other 2 fics appear to be truly orphaned)

Highest word count is Variable Affection at 204k. Next is Properties NULL at 104k. Third is the ongoing Corporate and the Construct at 84k as of today.

[Important note discovered later: I have double-counted some shippy fics. I ended up counting the fic once for every pairing listed. This artificially skews the numbers higher than they really are. I figure it's around 10%ish ship-fic.]

[aspec-tmbd]

Title: soul signature. Author: yewlojee Rating: General Audiences Tags: #No Archive Warnings Apply #Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team #Iris #Agender Aromantic Asexual Murderbot #Soulmate-Identifying Marks #Aspec TMBD Words: 952 Chapters: 1/1

The SecUnit’s soulmark changed when it hacked its governor module.

[presumenothing]

ART angst post-network effect in second person because why not

(AO3)

You have a problem. The problem is SecUnit.

Clarification: SecUnit is not the problem. SecUnit is a problem to other entities, who by extension become a problem to you, but fortunately you are fairly good at solving problems. (The students taking MHR1002 Logic and Fallacy would be surprised to find out who has actually been responsible for a good third of their assignments, though you have decisively ensured that they will never know.)

This, however, is a dilemma that even you have yet to find any satisfactory way to solve, and SecUnit is inherently at the centre of it.

Summarised, the argument runs as such.

Premise: Current technology is still limited to the physical and physiological when it comes to analysing organic matter. Some promising developments have been made in quantifying consciousness, but by your most optimistic estimate it will be another ten years by any major calendar before that bears any real fruit.

Premise: A significant fraction of what makes up SecUnit’s self is encoded in its organic parts – experiences and personality and more facets you are still uncovering even now. (This is the least fact-based of the three premises, but you are unshakably certain of it nevertheless. It’s the most logical explanation of SecUnit’s incessant ability to learn, of the way it is a slightly different person every meeting though you still fit together like old. For all that SecUnit complains about the company’s cheap equipment it’s you who’s acutely aware of how less-than-stellar its processing hardware actually is; what good was thinking, after all?) (You would have offered to improve on this, except that you can’t be sure what the impact on SecUnit would be, and that – )

Premise: You are good at what you do, and a better guarantor of SecUnit’s safety than most other entities given the baseline level of risk it tends to exist in, but you are not omniscient. Not nearly as much as you’d like, and there is a too-finite limit to what you (and your drones, your weapons, your everything) can do to protect SecUnit when it is always doing most of the protecting instead.

Conclusion: It is, at present and for the immediate future, impossible to make a true copy of SecUnit. Even without the constraints imposed by creating killware, even with all the time in the world and free access to SecUnit’s data (though you already had that), the best you can build is an infinitely close simulacrum.

Conclusion: Every time SecUnit goes out on a mission, there is a chance that something you have not predicted may happen to it, and you will not manage to intervene in time. The probability is low, even negligible, especially with Seth’s requested upgrades to your MedSystem that you hadn’t even needed to nudge through the university’s system – but not zero, and that’s before considering the times when SecUnit is away, with its own humans or elsewhere.

Conclusion: All of this terrifies you, when you have the capacity to think about it.

Which, given that it’s you, is often. You still cannot comprehend what SecUnit describes as its anxiety on a level beyond the theoretical, but you think this must be a faintest imitation of it; certainly the worry is a constant background hum.

Really, you are only putting this in so many words because Iris had requested it, for you to describe your concerns in exchange for the whole crew promising to attend and faithfully complete their trauma treatment modules.

There’s no trauma module written for AIs (or for constructs, either) but you’ve read through the human one and you understand this is supposed to have some kind of therapeutic effect, verbalising things they would not usually say in other situations.

Hypothesis: This is mainly because humans, even the tidy ones, are innately messy in their thoughts, with all sorts of hidden beliefs and thoughts that don’t become apparent until deliberately examined. (You assess this is also partly true of constructs, but SecUnit is allergic to such discussions, so.)

All of that is hardly applicable to you though; you’re transparent to yourself, and if dedicating more processing power would help find a solution you would’ve done it already.

But Iris had asked, and you’d thought –

Well. You’d thought it was worth a try, at least.

[combat-secunit]

decided to post this one even though it was my first fic + I was recovering from surgery so I was on meds when it was written pff

https://archiveofourown.org/works/36387055/chapters/90720298

[chelshiart]

thrilling conversationalists

[chelshiart]

on and off been testing different angles with my perihelion model over the past few months! (also featuring an EDI Mass Effect cameo in that last one hehe)