Murderbot Adjacent If Ive Ever Seen It.

Murderbot adjacent if ive ever seen it.

You work in a factory that builds intelligent war machines, built and forced to fight in a constant war. Out of either sympathy or habit, you head-pat every machine after every inspection. A seemingly harmless gesture… until men in suits pulled you from work and interrogated you about it.

"future is what we make of it" was probably meant as encouragement but it sounds like a threat.

Punitive cuddles.

sees cat being naughty and scoops him up: This is a disciplinary hug. Do not derive joy from it.

naughty cat: purrs loudly

One thing I really like about how Murderbot relates to gender is how like--no wait, two things, in order.

So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it's not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.

But that's a human thing, those are human categories, and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.

But then also there's the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, 'cop' and 'prostitute,' as distinguished at construction per Murderbot's own account by genital configuration, in this case 'having' or 'not having' 'sex parts.'

Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I'm sure was an intentional writing move--Murderbot's assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, 'SecUnit.'

And what's neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!

But in a deeply queer way, that only gains a sense of meaning as it's able to detach the performance from service to the oppressive power structures that created it, and redefine the identity on its own terms.

Saw a reddit post today about a girl who was upset that her childhood best friend replaced a photo of the two of them in his wallet with one of him and his girlfriend. And while yeah, she was being unreasonable with a lot of what she was saying, I totally understand the sadness of a friend "replacing" you with someone they have romantic feelings for. Makes it worse when the top comment is this

Every single comment on this post is about how family and romantic relationships always take precedence over friendships. I don't have anything more to say to this aside from the fact that... this is why it's hard for aroaces to imagine futures for themselves. Society drills it into your head that you're going to live in a world where you are no one's priority if you don't have romantic relationships and it fucking sucks