Hatsune Three-ku
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JBB: An Artblog!

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if i look back, i am lost
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Product Placement
Stranger Things
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@ablueblur
Hatsune Three-ku
this platform sure is decayed
// comm
Sec-Unit/MurderBot and Mensah are so important to me. The trust and mutual affection between them is beautiful. MB has someone it can admire and rely on. Mensah doesn't have to mask around it. Two complex beings finding simplicity in each other. 🥰
The Murderbot Diaries Starmap! ✨🧭
Routes Traveled by Murderbot:
Port FreeCommerce - Unnamed Station in Mihira & New Tideland System: [unknown time]
Mihira & New Tideland - RaviHyral: 21 cycles
RaviHyral - [Unnamed]: 7 cycles
[Unnamed] - HaveRatton: 26 cycles
HaveRatton - Milu: 20 cycles
HaveRatton - "hub station": 7 cycles
"hub station" - TranRollinHyfa: 4 cycles
Preservation - NE Survey Planet: 4 Preservation cycles
Preservation - Adamantine Colony: 20 cycles
Other Locations:
All Systems Red Survey Planet
Divarti Cluster: Tapan's collective is from this noncorporate polity.
Kalidon: Corporate Rim political entity where company funding Ganaka was based.
GoodNightLander Independent's home polity: Noncorporate, ownership of SecUnits banned.
Parthalos Absalo: Noncorporate.
WayBrogatan: Indie station.
Network Effect Survey Planet.
Station from the short story Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy.
UplandGateway One: Nearest station to the Mihira & New Tideland system. Corporate charters say stations are supposed to be independent/sovereign territory.
Planetary Torus.
I tried making noncorporate polities warm-colored and corporate ones cool-colored. But not sure I got that all right, and sometimes it's ambiguous.
Thank you to mensah for sharing their transit time notes with me!
YAY FOR 500 FOLLOWERS THATS HUGE CONGRATS!!!!!! 🎉 maybe for doodle requests, mb in some colourful clothes? presaux or art gifted them to it perhaps? dealers choice if it actually likes them or not
It definitely likes them
What's he supposed to do, not jerk off for the rest of his life? Absolutely not
It is NOT escaping the third mom allegations 🚫
Thank you to @securityunit-ese for the excellent prompt and to @emily-e-draws for making me want to immediately draw mb at the rainforest cafe when I saw your art 💖
Abstracting ART: An Analysis of Fan Designs of Perihelion
I find trends in how fans depict canon characters in fanart to be fascinating; how fans interpret the same information, what becomes a popular trend, how some fans deviate from the norm, and so on. The Murderbot Diaries fandom has this in spades with the original material being largely text where most characters get minimal visual descriptions.
In the realm of fandom designs, the character that interests me the most is ART/Perihelion (who I will be primarily referring to as Perihelion to reduce confusion with the word art). Perihelion is canonically a giant spaceship and sometimes also a much smaller drone. However, most fans do not portray it as such in fanart. Nothing in the books suggests Perihelion has a visible presence in the feed or can perform human-like actions beyond speaking in words, yet this is common in fanart.
For this essay, I’ll be examining the trends in how the fandom visually portrays Perihelion by looking at a sample of fanart depicting it, cataloguing their features, examining what these depictions convey, and speculating on why certain trends exist.
Methodology
All images surveyed were from Tumblr. While Tumblr is a major hub for TMBD fans and creators, it’s far from the only place fans heavily congregate or post fanart. I really just chose this site because I was familiar with it.
To gather images, I searched the Perihelion and Asshole Research Transport tags. I only included an image if it featured Perihelion's physical form, a feed representation, or a design that performed the same function as a feed representation. Once I had gathered links to 220 posts into a spreadsheet, I went back through, removed any accidental duplicates, searched each artist’s blog for other art of Perihelion and placed any posts with a different form or design into the spreadsheet. Essentially, my goal was to gather as few posts as I could to get a full idea of how each artist portrays it. My final sample size was 251 posts from 150 different artists. Using my best judgement, I determined there to be 240 distinct designs for Perihelion. All images were gathered before the release of Platform Decay.
When evaluating each design, I took note of the number of forms and types of bodies (feed, ship, etc.) in each post. I then wrote a brief description of each form. I then classified each one into groups based on common features like number of eyes, shape, type of animal, and so on. Most of the classifications are not mutually exclusive.
I then noted the flat colors of Perihelion's from each image, recorded as hex color codes. Pure and very near blacks and whites were not included if they were being used in a non-notable context, such as black lineart or white sclera. I did not record the colors in clearly monochromatic or uncolored artwork but did note the overall color scheme. For gradients, I recorded only the colors on each end of the gradient. If an extremely broad range of hues were used, I simply recorded those as varied/rainbow. Once recorded, I marked one to three colors as the main color(s) based on their prominence in the design, which is what I’ll be primarily referring to when discussing Perihelion's colors.
Forms of Perihelion
Feed Designs
In fanart, Perihelion is usually portrayed with what I will call a feed representation, as most are meant to represent what it’s doing in the feed. These make up 136, or 57%, of the designs in my sample.
Save a handful of lines about what Perihelion is metaphorically doing in the feed, such as rolling its non-existent eyes or feeling 8 times larger than Murderbot, there’s nothing in the books to suggest it has a form visible in the feed. These designs clearly exist out of the necessities and strengths of static and largely textless visual art. An artist could just draw Perihelion’s ship body (and post-SC, its drone body) but that can be very limiting. It would be very difficult to show it interacting with the much smaller characters inside of it or display its emotions this way. Luckily, the main way it interacts with the other characters, especially our POV character Murderbot, is through the feed, and fans have latched onto this as the main way of portraying this character.
There's a lot of variety in feed designs. Aside from the color blue and a general eldritch vibe, there's no element that dominates. Non-animal life forms and solid non-living objects are near nonexistent as designs, but knowing this fandom, I feel it's only a matter of time until someone draws Perihelion as a tree or a jar full of pennies.
Spaceship Designs
Only 27 of the designs in my sample are of spaceship Perihelion, its main canon body. As a fellow artist, I understand. Drawing a giant machine is difficult for many. Plus, it’s often unnecessary or limiting to portray its ship form in art. Some artists will show dialogue boxes coming from Perihelion’s ship form, but this is rare.
Most ship designs are gray, black, or dark blue, matching the description of its exterior in Network Effect. Likewise, many of the designs are clearly modeled after the original English covers by Jaime Jones and the Subterranean Press illustrations by Tommy Arnold with a torpedo-shaped main body, wide wings, and what appear to be thin projectile weapons protruding from the wings. In fact, 12 of the ship designs, 44%, show Perihelion’s weapons. Almost none of the designs resemble animals or vehicles other than air and spacecraft, and all but one lack even vaguely anthropomorphic features.
Drone and Other Machine Designs
Drone and other non-ship machine designs are slightly more common with a total of 36 in my sample. Only 12 are of the drone in System Collapse. Near all portrayals of this drone are a dome or flat cylinder with several heavily jointed limbs protruding from the underside. All lack clear faces with some only having a visible camera or two or ten to stand in for eyes. They’re near exclusively white, gray, and/or black. A few designs are slightly larger than humans and constructs though most are smaller. Some are much smaller.
Designs for other machine forms vary greatly but still tend to keep Perihelion very robotic. Designs vary from boxes with multiple limbs to floating cameras to miniature planetary rovers. Cameras and simple images on display screens are the closest most of these designs get to a face. Most of these machines are shown floating. The designs shown next to humans or constructs, especially the ones of Perihelion before it was a ship, are all smaller than the other characters. Achromatic colors dominate, though other colors (mostly blue) do regularly appear.
Design Trends
Colors
As you could probably guess, most depictions of Perihelion are blue. I’m defining blue here as any color with a hue from 170 to 260 degrees, a saturation of 10 or higher, and a luminosity from 10 to 95. Of all colored, non-monochromatic fanart in the sample, 155 out of 198 images, or 78%, depict at least one design within this range. Multiple designs that weren’t primarily blue did have blue as the only secondary hue. Even the monochromatic images were near exclusively either grayscale or blue.
This isn’t surprising. Perihelion is canonically blue inside and out. What is a little more surprising are the specific hues and luminosities used. Perihelion and its crew’s uniforms are described as dark blue, though many depictions of are in the cyan/turquoise range and/or have a high luminosity. Color labeling is subjective, though in English, these colors are usually called light blue or at least are not considered dark blue.
I have a couple hypotheses as to why this is. It could be to make the design pop out more from dark lineart, text, and backgrounds. Similarly, these shades could have been chosen to differentiate it from Murderbot and its human crew in their dark clothes. Possibly, it’s that cyan/turquoise blue is more closely associated with advanced technology than other shades of blue. Most artists likely aren’t considering the same things about color classification and canonicity as me. I will note that quite a few designs did use both light and dark blue, possibly for contrast or variety.
The average of all main blue colors is 4DA0DF, a moderately saturated azure blue, close to what many websites call cornflower blue. The full color is shown below. To ensure no one design outweighed the others in my calculation, if a design had multiple blue main colors, I would average those into a single color first.
Achromatic colors account for the second largest main color group. Main colors with a saturation below 10, a luminosity below 10, and/or a luminosity above 95 show up in 29 or about 14% of the colored, non-monochromatic images. Black, white, and near blacks and whites are also common as secondary colors. Most of the primarily achromatic designs are drones, spaceships, or some other machine. Near all drone and non-ship machine designs are mostly or exclusively achromatic.
Like blue, black and to a lesser extent white are Perihelion’s canon colors, though artists may also be using these colors because black and white are versatile accent colors. Their use in the machine forms, especially gray, definitely comes from the typical colors of metal and machines. For feed forms, white and black are used for their associations with parts of Perihelion’s design, such as white for stars and angels and black for shadows and black holes.
Almost all the other main colors fall in the yellow/orange/brown range, which I'll be referring to as gold from here on out. Several designs are exclusively gold, and some have gold as a secondary color. These colors were likely chosen in reference to the Sun. Perihelion refers to the closest an orbiting body gets to the Sun. I also wonder if (and kind of hope) at least one artist was inspired by the orange cover of Artificial Condition, Perihelion’s first appearance.
The full distribution of the individual main colors is shown in the graphs below. Colors with a saturation above 10 and a luminosity from 10 to 95 on in the HSL color space are shown on the hue and luminosity graph. All other main colors are on the achromatic graph.
Eldritch Forms
Among all the variety of Perihelion designs, there is one common theme many of them share. Most designs for Perihelion, especially feed representations, are strange, otherworldly, or even eldritchian. In lots of artwork, Perihelion is portrayed as a shape or series of shapes that don’t clearly resemble any one object or animal. If it does resemble an animal or even a human, it will usually have a huge number of limbs, lack facial features, or be a mishmash of creatures. Perihelion might be a giant star, lines of binary, or another character’s shadow. It’s also common for feed designs to change size, have disconnected parts, or even completely shapeshift.
Even designs for its physical forms will stick to being strange. With rare exception, ship Perihelion will lack any anthropomorphic or animalistic features. Designs of drone Perihelion will more often resemble modern day surveillance cameras, planetary rovers, or Hal 9000 than anything non-mechanical.
Perihelion is an oddity even in-universe. It’s a spaceship that’s far more advanced than most other bots in the series. It can perform dozens if not hundreds of complex tasks at once. It easily rides other systems, including those of other advanced machine intelligences. Its true nature as a hyperadvanced anti-corporate machine is hidden from most humans. Perihelion could and would kill you in a millisecond, but it also likes watching fiction shows. And speaking of killing you, Perihelion is also very frightening. It’s not exactly the kindest to individuals it’s just met, especially other MIs. All this is likely why many artists go for a more abstract or otherworldly approach.
Eyes
Emphasis on eyes is one of the most common trends in Perihelion designs. Several feed designs have more than three eyes or a single giant eye. Some take this to the extreme, where Perihelion is portrayed as just an eye or group of eyes. Sixty-six (66), or 28% of the designs have an eye or eyes as a major element.
Eyes are a really good way of representing how Perihelion can focus on multiple things at once, including places and systems far from its physical body. They’re also a really simple way to show its emotions. Additionally, eyes can be very creepy, great for fanart of Perihelion and Murderbot’s first encounter. (Seriously, that scene is really popular to draw.)
Surprising to at least me is that nearly half of all the designs have no eyes at all. One hundred nine (109) designs, 44%, are eyeless. Granted, a large chunk of these eyeless designs are of spaceship (25) and drone/bot (21) forms, which tend to lack clear facial features overall. (Cameras and lights that visually filled the role of an eye were counted as eyes.) However, nearly a third of all feed designs, a total of 44, lack eyes as well. A lack of eyes highlights Perihelion’s nature as a hyperintelligent spaceship, something so different from the humans that it lacks most or any facial features.
Below are graphs of the number of eyes in each design, as well as graphs breaking down each design type. “Many” means more than two eyes arranged in a way where it’s clear that the exact number is unimportant. “X to Y” means the numbers of eyes changes within the specified range. “X + Many” means there’s one or two clear main eyes and a larger number of secondary eyes.
Humanoid Designs
Humanoid designs of Perihelion are among the least common with 33, or 14%, of designs falling under this category. Aside from a few all-human AU designs, these designs deviate heavily from real humans. Some lack certain or all facial features. Others have more than three eyes. It’s common for these designs to lack legs. Several humanoid designs are stylized differently than other characters. Its body may be composed of pixels or a starfield. Two thirds, or 22, of the designs lack clothes.
Six (6) of these designs are an actual human Perihelion (AU or otherwise). In artwork featuring both Perihelion and Murderbot, the former is usually taller, reflecting their relative canon sizes. It usually also has dark skin and/or curls much like its human sibling, Iris. What it wears varies but, it's usually in modern-day Western clothing.
Portraying Perihelion in the feed with a humanoid form emphasizes its human-like qualities. It also lets Perihelion do things only a human could, such as resting a hand on another character’s shoulder, holding objects, or making human-like expressions. Some designs that aren’t fully humanoid still give Perihelion hands or a simple face presumably for the same reasons. The mix of inhuman traits keeps Perihelion in the realm of the strange.
Animal/Creature Designs
Exactly 63, or 26%, of the designs fall under the animal/creature category. Any design that closely resembles a specific real-world animal, looks like a popular mythological feature, or had a mix of clearly animalistic features such as paws or wings, I classified under the animal/creature category. You can see the full distribution in the graph below, but I will talk about the most common and interesting trends.
With real animals, Perihelion is most often an arthropod (15), fish (7), domestic cat (7), or jellyfish (6). The arthropod designs are likely playing with the terrifying/creepy vibe Perihelion and bugs both sometimes have. I will note that 11 of these arthropod designs are of the SC drone with a round body and insect or spider-like limbs.
It’s possible that these same reasons inspired jellyfish designs. Jellyfish are also much less familiar to humans and can be very dangerous, fitting into the powerful and eldritch vibes many other designs go for. Four of these jellyfish designs are of the SC drone. Just like arthropods, jellyfish largely fit the canon description of a floating oval with multiple limbs. Representing it as a jellyfish also works with the “outer space as an ocean” metaphor.
This also works with fish designs. In 5 of the fish designs, Perihelion is a school of fish. This fits the “large and diffuse” description of its feed presence in Artificial Condition, and much like a collection of eyes, represents Perihelion’s ability to focus on multiple things at once. It also allows Perihelion to be represented as either one large (and terrifying) mass or as a single creature.
As for cat Perihelion, I wonder how much of that stems from fans comparing Murderbot to a cat. Maybe the association rubbed off on its favorite asshole research transport.
A lot of these designs are of fictitious creatures. Perihelion is a dragon or serpent in 14 designs (with only 1 of these designs being unambiguously a real-world snake) and a biblically accurate angel (feathered wings and an unconventional arrangement of eyes) in 5 designs. The “other fictional creature” category includes 11 designs. Eight of these aren’t any creature I recognize from mythology or another work and were likely made up entirely by the artist. These creatures tend to be round or blobby, have four or more limbs ending in hands or paws, stand on at least four of these limbs, and have more than 2 eyes. My guess as to why some artists go for fictional creature designs is that they highlight Perihelion’s strangeness and power, that it is so unlike any most other beings that it’s more like a mythological creature or alien than real animal. Even most of the designs modeled after a single real animal will have a few unrealistic features, like many eyes or unnatural colors.
Oh, and there’s two long Furby designs. Makes me wonder if there’s some Furby-Perihelion joke floating around that I’m just unaware of.
Shape-Based Designs
Most Perihelion designs I classified under the “shape” category. A total of 126 designs, 52%, have generic shapes or geometric patterns as a major element. Shapes abstract Perihelion visually, and some shapes bring to mind the mathematical accuracy and precision of computers.
Circles/spheres show up the most often, being in 39 designs. Note though that 11 of these are the canonically round SC drone. (Yes, some of these might have been ovals, but given the perspective, I’m not 100% sure, so they go in the circular hole.) In some designs, it’s clear that this is a reference to celestial bodies or the circles are meant to be eyes.
Smooth blobby shapes show up almost as often, being in 36 designs. Many of these have a large number of eyes and/or a pattern within its form. These designs allow Perihelion to morph and give off a fluid feel to the character.
Pixels, clusters of small rectangles, appear in 26 designs, while larger or unclustered rectangles show up 21 designs. I separated these categories because each shape is utilized differently. Non-pixel rectangles usually resemble a computer screen, having similar ratios to one and/or showing what Perihelion is doing or seeing elsewhere. In some cases, the rectangles are physical display screens or in-universe holograms. Some even partially function as speech bubbles. Pixels instead are usually just a pattern on the larger design or an accent rather than the main focus, showcasing that this is a digital form. Circuit board patterns, showing up in 11 designs. Unlike pixels though, circuit board patterns do appear in some physical machine forms.
Boundaryless Designs
While researching I found that quite a few feed designs lack a clear boundary, are modeled after things that take up a lot of space, or are even resemble full locations, 31 or 13% to be exact. This takes the “large and diffuse” description to the extreme. There’s immense variety in these designs. Some are masses of code or pixels or swirls filling the entire scene. Others are repeating patterns that flow off the page. In more than one design, Perihelion is an unending body of water or a giant storm cloud. In 10 designs, it’s a starfield of some sort, reflecting the space it inhabits.
Literal Approximations
While most artists pull in some way from what Perihelion actually is when deciding how to depict it, some artists will go as close to literal as they can with the constraints (and strengths) of a static, soundless image. Parts of Perihelion’s ship interior, such as cameras, lights, and walls, will serve the same function as a feed design, giving Perihelion a way to visibly emote and interact with the other characters. Circuit board lines, binary, and lines of code show up in several designs, with a few being purely just code or circuitry. Some designs will display the various tasks it is performing. A few designs stick to just text when portraying it, using color, font, and so on to convey that Perihelion is speaking and what its mood is. I classified 24, or 10%, of designs under this "literal approximation" category.
In conclusion, the average Perihelion is a spaceship ripped straight from the Artificial Condition cover that occasionally is also a tiny floating gray dome with thin limbs and camera for a face. Its feed presence is a cluster of cornflower blue and grayscale pixels that shapeshift between a human with no shirt, no shoes, and no face, a biblically accurate dragon with a million eyes, and an endless starry ocean. Or at least that’s what it is based on the images I gathered and my own judgement.
Long Furby ART hmm
Finished reading Platform Decay and drew some.
⚠️Spoiler alert⚠️
This is when MB and Farai first met (every time I read this scene, it feels like Farai is interrogating her spouse's affair partner🥹)
And i'm happy to see the two of them building trust in each other in the latest series.
+The cutest part
If time permits, I’d like to illustrate an episode where MB is afraid of small children (because they’re so tiny), as well as an episode where Three and ART happen to strike up a conversation about MB’s drastic change in appearance—which is surprisingly radical for a SecUnit.
Farai looks so cool!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries) Characters: Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries) Additional Tags: Meta, MurderMetaMay 2026 (Murderbot Diaries), Pre-Book 1: All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries), Book 2: Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries), Book 3: Rogue Protocol (Murderbot Diaries), Book 4: Exit Strategy (Murderbot Diaries), Post-Book 5: Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries) Series: Part 4 of Murderbot Meta Summary:
An essay in a somewhat casual tone and with many citations about why Mensah & Murderbot are the best. 😤💛
They say it's still out there, roaming the unaffiliated zone, waiting to sideswipe the unwary traveler…
#i hope that haulerbot makes friends with that OTHER rogue secunit (via frenchy-and-the-sea)
dhsjshhdsk other rogue SecUnit and its noble friend/steed the feral hauler roaming the unaffiliated Wild West like off-brand edition MB-ART...
Mensahbot September Prompts so far: 2/?
From the person who didn't bring you Mensah Murderbot March.
64.media.tumblr.com
Artwork from Portuguese cover of Exit Strategy by Pedro Fracchetta
💥 Rules 💥 FAQ 💥 AO3 Collection 💥 Submit Prompts 💥 Discord💥
Mensahbot September is a casual laidback prompt event about having fun with the undefinable relationship that is Mensah and Murderbot.
💥 Prompts so far:💥
It has been 22 days since the event launched and we currently have 75 prompts up for creators to check out! We have a pretty large variety of options and if you don't see something you like, feel free to submit your own!
I won't list all 75 so far, best to click the link and check yourself, and here's some taste tester samples:
Alternate Exit Strategy by Anonymous
PresAux were unable to buy Murderbot and it has no idea they tried. A few months later, on a new assignment, it hears news that Preservation Aux's planet admin had been kidnapped! That's its favorite human! Murderbot escapes and travels to save her. (Maybe on the way it meets a self-piloting transport bot named Perihelion who agrees to help it?) How does it, or they, save her? (Any rating and any relationship between Mensah and Murderbot, with optional ART)
Is that a gun in your arm or are you just happy to see me? by Poots
Murderbot canonically pays close attention to Mensah's physical appearance. But as they become more comfortable around each other, Murderbot starts to reflexively unfold its energy weapon in reaction to seeing pleasing aspects of Mensah, a behavior that looks quite threatening to Preservation residents. To train Murderbot out of this new quirk, Mensah ties something delicate and personal around Murderbot and challenges it to keep it intact while it goes to work with her.
third mom reporting for pickup by Arten
Mensah, tano and farai are all conveniently too busy to pickup one of their kids from school, so its upto mb to pick up the little one in their stead. Has mensah listed mb on school forms as an emergency contact? How awkward is the hand-off when the mini-mensah's teachers realise that a rogue secunit has come to pick them up? Bonus: How have the events of PD affected the kid? Just a cute and utterly mundane way mb offers itself as a reliable and supportive (if awkward) presence to mensah when she's overwhelmed with too many plates to juggle, that isnt a life-or-death situation. A look into how mb has become a part of the mensah family. Any interpretation of their relationship welcome <3
Mensah/Murderbot/Farai by teuthis
Murderbot deals with what Mensah realizes is a crush on Farai some amount of time after the events of PD. Mensah finds Murderbot talking about her wife to be kind of hot, but doesn't want to startle it away.
SecUnit goes to Preservation after ASR au by majorcharacterundeath
Wells has said that if SecUnit had stayed and gone to Preservation after ASR, it and Mensah wouldve had something much more toxic. i dont care if its SFW, NSFW, whatever type of relationship you want to give them. i just want them even more toxic and co-dependant. maybe something with it preventing GrayCris from kidnapping Mensah and / or the fallout of it being over protective. her accidentally pressuring it into choices.
SecUnit voyeurism by ESE (SecurityUnit)
Secunit watching Mensah masturbate or have sex with her partners. Saving to permanent memory. NSFW and ideally including its thoughts/interest. Up to you if Mensah knows or not.
Roleswap by Raberba girl
(SFW, platonic) Any kind of roleswap, like Mensah as a construct and MB as a human; or constructs as the privileged class instead of humans; or Mensah being a corporate (but still not evil) and MB being a space hippie; or Mensah being the security expert and MB being the amateur intrepid intergalactic explorer, etc. (There was already a great entry with this premise for Mensah & Murderbot March, but I want another cake. XD)
Do you have an idea you hope someone might fill? 💥 Submit Prompts 💥! You don't have to be participating in the event to submit a prompt :)
Want to have more Mensahbot+ in the meantime? Join us in The Mensahbot Diaries discord
Hey, hey… Fullmetal Alchemist AU where Nina grows up to be an alchemist and has a long happy life despite her condition
PATREON | KO-FI
posting this for murderbot meta may from an old conversation in DMs, unedited except for paragraph breaks. these were 1am thoughts that I woke up with and had to get out of my head before I could get back to sleep but I stand by them:
sometimes. I think. people look at one version of a simplified thought form that's prevalent in fandom. and they write a post pushing back on that simplified thought form in an equal but opposite direction, y'know? like. sure the common fandom thought is Too Simplified but you have committed the cardinal sin of Simplifying Too Hard In Reverse, and you're both wrong
FOR EXAMPLE. recently I saw a post that was like "I think the fandom takes Mutual Administrative Assistants too seriously" (a correct take) "because Murderbot was clearly just doing a silly thesaurus pull to avoid calling ART its friend" (incorrect buzzer noise)
wrong! simplified too far in the opposite direction! no, mutual administrative assistants isn't meant to be taken seriously but it's not just MB being allergic to feelings, it's a direct result of MB being freshly betrayed, traumatized, still desperately trying to process grief for the first time in its life (mourning for Miki notwithstanding but it's hard to call that true grief); and now it is ANGRY. it is so, so angry, in perhaps also the first situation where it's ever felt safe to express that anger openly and defiantly in front of the person it's angry with (Gurathin absolutely does NOT count, MB didn't feel safe with him until long after it was past its anger at that betrayal and violation).
so yeah, it denies being friends with ART in that moment. but we know, and crucially Amena also knows, that that is bullshit, because ART is its friend, it's spent the past 3 entire books (4 if you count FT, 4.5 if you count the first half of NE) referring to ART as its friend, it told Amena out loud that ART was its friend and explained exactly who & what it was referring to when it called "this ship" its friend so there was absolutely no ambiguity, then had an entire emotional meltdown even moreso than the spiralling grief-rage it had already been dealing with.
ART is its friend and it's been perfectly capable of admitting that throughout nearly the entirety of canon! it's not a case of being allergic to feelings, it's a case of being so hurt and betrayed and angry that it's choosing to distance itself from that friendship. Ratthi asks if they're friends and it says "not anymore". ART tries to talk to it in the feed and it says "fuck you you're not my client and you're not my friend".
it's feeling some big fucking feelings! and it does a disservice to their relationship to assume that it's defined by the definition MB comes up with in that moment which even it knows and acknowledges is a reach, but it also does a disservice to their relationship to go in the other direction and claim this is just a silly meaningless moment because MB is just being bad at feelings again. like, this doesn't define their relationship at all, that is true, but it's also a rare (at this point) instance of MB addressing its own emotions and needs out loud and setting boundaries in regard to how it's currently feeling. it can't be flattened in either direction. it's nuanced. these books are nuanced!
and this. is all a long lead up. to say that the same thing has been going on wrt 2.0, where a common fandom take on it is that 2.0 is something analogous to ART and MB's offspring, and a day or two ago I saw an honestly pretty well written and persuasive meta post arguing that not only is 2.0 not MB and ART's offspring (fair and true), it is MB in the same way that every iteration of targetControlSystem infecting various systems is still targetControlSystem and every iteration of ART uploaded to various shuttles or drones is still ART (interesting theory but also flattening too far in the opposite direction, explicitly unsupported by the text)
genuinely was a good post that had me taking a step back and reconsidering how I conceptualize who & what MB 2.0 is both as a person and in relation to MB but my ultimate conclusion is… no the fuck it is not just MB in the same way that ART-drone and ART-shuttle and ART-prime are all just ART.
because ART can spin off an iteration of itself on its own, without assistance. (and at this point in the books we don't even know that that's a regular thing it can do. the only indication we have that it can do this is the way it packed up its kernel for MB to find, which is part of what gave MB the inspiration for 2.0, but only by letting it know that ART has the processing power to help it do the thing the CSU did on TranRollinHyfa)
like. augh. they had already written a viral codebase together! explicitly there was a shared coding project that they had stalled on because they hadn't hit on a way to make it properly useful to them yet. and explicitly MB is incapable of copying over its own kernel to add the sentience factor that they need, so ART's help is required to do that. and explicitly, 2.0 is not the same person as MB because it doesn't have MB's complete memory archive or its organic neural tissue, which is a big part of what makes it who it is.
that person pointed to ART's initial rejection of the idea ("I didn't mean you!") and its snarky commentary on MB not understanding how its own coding works as evidence that 2.0 really is just a new iteration the same way ART does it, which I think…. is leaning too far in the "MB is an unreliable narrator and ART's responses are more indicative of reality" direction because….. there's a lot to be read into ART's actions and responses in NE but it's also not infallible. pretty explicitly, despite how highly MB thinks of it, ART is capable of being wrong and making mistakes.
and I think that what those responses from ART are actually indicative of is that ART also did not understand, at the outset, that this process was going to create an entire new person, because when it copies itself into an iteration it is just itself, and that's the context it has for this.
but. the argument in that post started with "i wish we hadn't got that part where Amena makes the baby comparison" and…. respectfully…… Amena is the only one who's actually clearly seeing what's happening here and she needed to say it to bring the reader's attention to the fact that both MB and ART are wrong about what 2.0 is going to be after they create it. MB thinks it's just going to be a self-directed piece of software, analogous to any of the systems it regularly interfaces with. ART thinks it's going to be a straight up and down copy of MB. and neither of them is correct, because no they're not making a human baby… but between them they are creating an entire brand new person that is a mix of both of them, that neither of them would be capable of creating on their own.
so that's my take on that. mutual administrative assistants is a meaningless phrase that is also wrought with meaning, and 2.0 is neither a child/offspring nor a clone of MB but a secret third thing. like MB says in the book, It wasn't like a baby, but it was a person.
i love truck stops in winter bc i love a little good old fashioned reconnaissance. i’m at a wyoming truck stop eating taco bell with a bunch of random truckers discussing road conditions like we’re in a high fantasy tavern & inn and we’re warning each other about monsters and highway men. everyone talking about where we’re coming from and going to and how bad it’ll be getting there.
THE tallest man i’ve ever seen in real life just stopped me in the hallway by the coin operated laundry apropos of nothing and asked “which direction are you going?” i said east and he said “good” and walked away.
i caught up with him and asked why and he said “west’s no good right now. i just came from there.”
apparently a truck jackknifed and has traffic backed up ten miles but he sounded for all the world like he just found his village raised to the ground by an evil mage’s army
...it's super cool in a 'historian with goosebumps' kind of way that this whole experience is essentially timeless.
As long as we've had ROADS or even game trails this
very scene
has played out in brush shelters, shrines, taverns, inns, post stations, and hotel lobbies.
Humans, out upon the Ways, where danger may be, sharing information because we live when we cooperate and share and we all know it out there.
Inspired by this post
Amena takes advantage of always having a camera on her , methinks
(click for better resolution)
After reading Platform Decay I was suddenly struck with the intense urge to draw Murderbot in a grandma sweater just having The Worst™ time.