Punitive Cuddles.

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

An enemy is just a friend I haven't worn down

It's MB and ART and ART and MB and it is everything.

one of the most ship dynamics of all time

!!! Mostly responded to the top of this (thoroughly excellent) thread, but!!! This is very close to the exact reason I think ART *also* has little sib energy. Some of its pushiness is no doubt a function of well, it's function, but there's an element of "this is how I understand affection bc my role models for it showed it to me by being bossy and overly accomodating/helpful/nosy, so (as younger sib destined to Surpass) Imma blow the Lid off bossy/helpful/nosy now that I'm Big and Know Everything."

There is a Bigger Sibling in the vicinity of Perihelion somewhere, I KNOW it. That might not be coherent, but I think about this all the time - with ART - so it's really interesting to consider in terms of Thiago!

Thinking about Network Effect in terms of family structure and familial relationships made me realize that Thiago has such younger sibling energy lmao. Like my impression is that for a lot of readers he reminds them of people they don't like but, as eldest of three, my strongest familial association is with my younger sister, lmao. Huffy little junior of the household who thinks that caring deeply about her family means she can tell us what to do. We're adults now, so the vibe is no longer so acrimoniously "but that's not right"/"shut up, I'm older than you"/"I'll tell mom on you!!"- our concerns are much bigger and more complex, and we're much more capable of talking them out as reasonable people with valid concerns- but a certain pushiness remains in our dynamic. I mean, legitimately, everything about Thiago's introduction, from needing to be told by Farai to quit nagging Mensah to flouncing to Arada about the raiders SCREAMS pissy younger sibling to me. An annoying type of character, and hard to take seriously, younger siblings are, but I love them like I love my sister.

Anyway this was mostly a joke post but genuinely, I suspect that if you swapped out his pronouns with she/her and changed nothing else about the text, readers' reaction to Thiago as a female character would be totally different. I didn't use gendered, "bitchy" terms like "nagging" and "flouncing" by accident in that previous paragraph- I did so to call into question how much our gendered perceptions of power and aggression, especially in a brown man character, affect our reading of the text. Did those terms fit with your impression of Thiago's character? How seriously do you take the "threat" of his dislike of Murderbot in light of that?

Thiago's mostly just not listened to except in his professional expertise as linguist (as with the archetypical younger sibling, that's probably where a big part of his pissiness comes from: no one likes feeling unheard by their family). He has a voice in the proceedings and he uses it, but he's not a character who is actually in a position of authority- Murderbot's reaction to him as such is partially rejection sensitivity and partially the long-standing habit of the traumatized in the face of assertive people- and I wonder if readers would be able to see that more clearly if he were a female character. But that's a trite approach to gender, and as usual Martha Wells is doing something more interesting with the series: positions of authority are for women characters; it's her men who are emotionally sensitive and concerned with relationship issues. Ratthi and Thiago are fascinating faces of the same coin in this regard.