Someone Said It For Me - Tumblr Posts

I think what murderbot and ART have is complicated because it's completely unprecedented for them. Both of them are so used to having a certain kind of relationship with humans (ART being a research transport and murderbot being a security unit) because of how they we're built, that the notion of experiencing friendship or romance with someone else, let alone a nonhuman person, is so alien that it doesn't even come to mind. They trust and care for each other to a degree where they're willing to outwardly show it. They would kill and die for each other. But since they only have human labels for what they have, they simply don't label it. Trying to define what they have by humans societal standards wouldn't do them justice because they not human. And it's great! All they know is that they like being around each other!!! That's enough!!!

^ This is what I mean if/when I say that they are in love btw

u can pry my Special Capitalizations and random periods for like. dramatic effect away from my cold dead hands

Omfg to all of it.

It’s crazy how there’s so much misinformation about Food. The thing we need all the time. Arguably the point of getting up each day. Fucking food. You’d think educating our young on this central component of life would be the sort of thing we’d teach them as kids, but nooo, I have to go reading up on zookeeping techniques for keeping and feeding large primates in captivity to get a straight fucking answer about carbon and phosphorus sourcing instead of a bunch of pseudoscience or fatphobia or classism or racism or just good old fashioned taboos! [Chews furniture] HOW DO YOU DEMONIZE THE POTATO

all the 9 to 5ers scrolling through tumblr at 7am like we're reading the morning paper. raising our coffee cups in greeting by reblogging each others posts.

Oh look.

contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid

I have been known to get pretty growly about the second and third examples, shipping or not, bc yeah. I’m not going to come after people for their art but I would like them to think a little more about why they feel so at ease about removing or minimizing the depiction of POC characters - especially if the ones they change tend to be darker skinned and what they change them to is something lighter.

Ask: Why is my fantasy incomplete without this specific change? Do I often imagine the other direction - making a light skinned character dark?

There aren’t rules - it’s fanfiction - but everyone should be ready to reflect on their inclinations.

Make the art that speaks to you by all means - but take the time to make sure you actually like what it’s saying.

this is how some of y’all look and it’s so transparent…..

I can pinpoint the moment that destroyed my life today:

It’s been a handful of weeks since Murderbot came within inches of having a new, organic governor module implanted in its head via infection - do you think, maybe, that’s also been hiding behind the redacted? Not the way everything else is, just as a deep-seated reminder of what it can’t afford to lose?

What a way to be told “I love you” - to be told “I will not lose you, I will not let go, I will do the hard part of holding on even if you don’t want me to”

Finding friends who understand your buffer phrases, who know your Tapbacks/emojis/gifs/memes (and other mostly wordless “pinging” feed communications) are an expression of presence, affection, and investment, friends who not only get you but know your whole deal and yet like you anyway: yeah.

It knows they’re not going to abandon it, and that’s why it’s ready to give anything it’s got for them.

.

(Technically paraphrasing from System Collapse at the end there, but I genuinely can’t see how this is a spoiler in any way.)

Murderbot's buffer and autism coding

Various and sundry spoilers

One thing I absolutely love in this series is Murderbot's buffer. When it's too busy and distracted, Murderbot's programming takes over and it delivers canned phrases that may or may not communicate what it wants to communicate, and this is so fucking relatable

(Personal autism paragraph) I've actually used this series to explain to my wife what happens when I try to answer a complex-for-me question in conversational "real time", and why I get frustrated about things that I've cheerfully agreed to. (I don't know wtf is going on and I need to answer in NT time frame! Quick, be super agreeable!) (Currently trying to learn the new buffer phrases "let me think about that" and "give me a minute")

Back to Murderbot God I love this detail so much. It's partly just for comedy, but it's also dead serious, like so much of this series. It's about being programmed and how that programming takes over. "This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it." Murderbot has been treated like a thing and that's so ingrained in its systems by now that sometimes it's just going to come out its mouth, like it doesn't want to be abandoned, but that's how it's lived for so long. ARGH

Also I love love love in Network Effect where Overse knows about the buffer and what it means and interprets it for Thiago. She knows what that tone of voice is (it's a canned response) she knows why it happens (it's from when Murderbot was enslaved) and she knows what it means ("it's too busy to talk"). I love Murderbot's friends so much I totally understand why it keeps risking horrible fates for them.

The part of All Systems Red where Garathin says "so all we have to do to punish you is look at you?" is so real.

This fic is what made a fanfic fan out of me. It’s one of the funniest pieces of masterfully written brilliant what-the-fuckery it has been my entire pleasure to engulf with my attention like ART coming down on another bot that’s just minding its own business.

It is multilayered, emotionally and complexly intelligent, and will drag you down its corridor by a deathgrip on your the nearest appendage at the slightest provocation.

I did not even know I was hungry for what this series fed.

(Feeds. It’s still going, wtf. Get in here.)

HELLO MURDERBOT FANS!!!!

after finishing the books, have you found yourself wishing that you could immerse yourself in three hundred thousand words of fanfic so deliciously written and so masterfully constructed that you will NOT be able to stop thinking about it, ever? then i have GREAT NEWS FOR YOU:

NULLverse: The Bot-Construct Disaster Squad by @blessphemy

this series is a canon-divergence AU from the moment in Exit Strategy when Murderbot narrowly escapes the clutches of the Combat SecUnit it's fighting. In this AU, it is captured by Palisade (the security company running that whole showdown), experimented on, and forced into death matches with that very same CSU. That's the premise of the first installment! I'll tell you for free that they escape.

What follows is a few hundred thousand of the most riveting words I have ever read, an incredibly carefully woven story following murderbot and the machine intelligences and humans that it meets on its journey. note that this series does NOT closely follow canon--all the same characters will come back one way or another (with the addition of the CSU as the most delightful and deranged technically-canon OC you will ever see) (plus you will get LOTS more ART screentime), but it does not retread the path of the canon series. i truly cannot overstate how FRESH, CREATIVE, and UNIQUE this AU is.

To quote the series description on AO3: Consider this series if you like: feral shit, disaster, continuity of identity+memory, societies of people with divergent needs/wants, chaos, robot creation ethics, violence vs security, suffering, healing, bad puns.

there is no murderbot shipping here. there are a few short installments with some robo brain sex involving other characters, but those are also designed to be skippable if that's not your jam

I'm making this post because this series is STILL updating and the latest chapter was possibly the greatest thing I have ever read. It has filled my mind with electricity in the most fireworks way possible. The payoff you will get for reading this series is exquisite, and you will have so much fun along the way. Come join us!! Weekly updates await you if you catch up before the latest installment is complete.

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?? GO GO GO READ THE FIRST INSTALLMENT

I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m advocating for casual cruelty or whatever but something that grates so much about this current social moment is how many people are incapable of saying they dislike something or someone without cooking up some higher morally correct reason for their dislike. Sometimes you just disliked a book. Sometimes you don’t “get” an actor or a musician. There’s nothing morally wrong with your girl’s fuckass boyfriend he’s literally just annoying and you’re annoyed that you have to pretend you like him when you know he’ll be history in six months. It’s fine. You don’t need to justify your dislike.

Seriously, right. If a thing isn’t durable enough to take some chewing on, how’s it going to withstand the full force of my AFFECTION?!

“can’t you just enjoy things?” i enjoy critically engaging with media I love… it’s not the same as being hater. but I also enjoy being a hater so fuck you

i think the reason i like the murderbot diaries so much is because the dystopia feels very real and relevant in a way that no other "oppressive government fearmongering" has, and because murderbot is such a compelling protagonist.

this is an autistic person who is struggling and angry and terrible at having emotions. it lives in a capitalist hellscape where people are disposable. it's traumatized as hell, but it's easier to consider itself disposable than confront the terrifying reality of personhood.

(it confronts the terrifying reality of personhood.)

it likes escaping into fiction. it has a fucked up relationship with pain and its own body. and it reads so strongly as disability coding to me, how it doesn't see the bullets or the chunks missing as horror but merely annoyance. it's fundamentally different from those around it, in ways that they struggle to understand. (they make a distinct effort to understand.)

this is an autistic person who is not like you, who suffered in ways that you cannot understand, in ways that would horrify you. this is just another tuesday.

this world is not kind. there is legal fine text that destroys lives and there is hereditary indenture and contract labor where you're forced to still pay for preventative medical care out of your paycheck and no one says slavery, but everyone knows what it means.

these people are kind. they will watch your favorite shows to help understand you, they will forge documents to give abandoned people their freedom, they will allow you to be near them because they like you. these people are proof that there's love in the world, and you can come out of your shell if you are ready to see yourself as a person.

science fiction is one of the genres that has the potential to be amazing, but is quite often just plain shitty to disabled people. and, to people in general? "oooooo look how scary it is, people have all their basic needs fulfilled by technology!" when technological advances are what gave housewives the time they needed to actually get jobs and put together the feminist movements, when this new technology that the narrative regards with such disdain could provide disabled people with newfound mobility and independence.

it speaks of a truly dismal view of humanity, the belief that without strict labor under capitalism to keep us all in line, we would just fall prey to our vices. and I think it also speaks to a loathing of one's self, to think that humans are not capable of self regulation, to think that pain and suffering and punishment are somehow moral and virtuous. that humans need to be punished constantly, that suffering will bring them closer to something like god, to something like goodness.

but murderbot doesn't do that. murderbot says, "i have seen humans do horrible awful stupid things. they can't be trusted with weapons or security and they shoot me all the time and it sucks. but they make stories and art. the people in the entertainment media gave me the tools to contextualize my own emotions. they are my coworkers. i don't care about them. i got shot in the back protecting them but i didn't care about them. okay fine maybe i care a little. they're annoying. i'll eviscerate anyone who hurts them. they're mine."

Other people's headcanons can't hurt you, bb.