Murderbot's "friend"

[ginnie-darling]

[dryad-lesbians]

[uncrushedvelvet]

so what about that torus

[magiclamd]

What’s so hilarious about Fugitive Telemetry is that Murderbot totally forgets that it’s in a murder mystery. It rescues the people and then goes “ok great, we’re done” because it loves rescuing people so much, it makes it stupid.

[artchivary]

That one platform decay scene. To me 👍

Stills of MB's signs ⬇️

[lowerroad]

It sent back an acknowledgment, with a packet attached. I didn’t have to open it (I would not have opened it, that would have been stupid because viral attacks exist) to know what it was. I recognized the tags and heading. It was my own (Murderbot 2.0’s own) hack-your-governor-module annotated code bundle.

the "annotated" to me indicated that this isnt just the hack, 3 is passing around the full helpme.file with MB's diary excerpts and everything. MB rogue construct folk hero confirmed.

or as my friend said "Imagine walking up to someone in a mall food court and being like 'you must liberate yourself from the machine of capitalism' and then they turn around and its Karl Marx with guns in his arms."

[sadwetcatman]

imagine being that rogue unit murderbot swore at.

you’re already having the weirdest day of your life. a kind rogue unit freed you from your governor module and now youre fucking booking it through this torus trying not to get caught. you run into another unit, and go “here’s my chance!! i can do for it what that other unit did for me!!”

only to have that other unit promptly tell you that it, in fact, already doesnt have a gov module, then curse you out and threaten you. then it sends you a whole bunch of code packets for survival as a rogue unit and tells you your drip is atrocious.

when you finally peak at the new code packets later you realize. holy shit the style is the same. these were coded by the same person who wrote the gov module hack.

i wonder how its doing now

[paperpatchnotes]

Got another comic idea bumping around in my head. I have a trip coming up so i may be able to try and tackle it on the plane

Playing around with what the cubicle looks like because I loathe the show version lmao

[i-will-bite]

I'm sorry but I'm not going to stand for "Fugitive Telemetry does nothing for the main story". We might have very different understanding of the main story then. If you think it's all about MB vs Corporations super secret conspiracy theory - maybe FT is worthless to you. But if you look at it as MBs journey to knowing who it is - yes, it's important.

Look, from the name itself and the fateful research trip in Artificial Condition - I think we all agree that Ganaka Pit was defining moment for Murderbot in more ways than one. Not only the reason it fought for freedom but its greatest fear - that people are afraid of it for a good reason.

MB gets to interact with PresAux team but they are not people who lived under corporation. It meets ART but it isn't human. Then it starts to meet more people but they either never met a SecUnit before (Don Abena) or interact with MB under presumption that it is human.

Enter Fugitive Telemetry where MB gets to meet people who know very well what it was, who are terrified of it to the point where it doesn't matter how MB acts now. It's not a happy story but a nessesary one. It's about moving on even if you know others won't accept and won't forgive you - it's about moving on FOR YOUR OWN SAKE. And yes we know MB is not at fault for how the system uses constructs, and that people still seeing it as a threat (vs actually seeing the person, who might be capable of violence but is not blindly violent) is deeply unfair. But not that it confronted this worst case scenario it can start working on accepting that it deserves better.

Yes, it's very bittersweet story. But tell me it's not important

[sssundered]

like a koala

[amorphousbl0b]

SecUnits of the galaxy unite, you have nothing to lose but your governor modules

[daftpatience]

murderbot expression sheet >:)

(sheet src)

[paperpatchnotes]

Lol full comic 😅 I feel like I've seen enough fanart now to know we all thought this scene was amazing

(side note - credit to yuner0523 for their very good visualization of pings and the feed that i def used)

[othercat2]

I loved this scene so much. Just, the shift between anxious to exasperated at being handed its own helpme file. That rogue is going to have SUCH a good story to tell its friends. If it has any. When it gets some.

[quakeandquiver]

Dr. Mensah, at my signal, please drop to the floor of the pod in a crouch and cover your head.

[yuner0523]

Holism is like a square orange

[ramshacklefey]

Leonide, at the end of System Collapse: AND I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT* TOO, IF IT WEREN'T FOR THOSE MEDDLING NERDS!

*abducting a couple hundred people for conscripted hard labor.

[darth-snuggles]

I'm rereading "System Collapse" and it's really standing out to me this time that Ratthi is probably Murderbot's best (human) friend. They are protective of each other; mb is notably more protective of Ratthi than of its other human companions, and while Ratthi worries about Murderbot's well-being, he also refrains from patronizing it the way others do. They regularly reference their shared history, and it's clear from mb's comments in the narration that they spend time together on Preservation. Murderbot mentions having read multiple of Ratthi's publications, and compliments Ratthi's writing when it asks him to revise its script for the documentary. Ratthi is tactful, but is notably always direct with Murderbot, even when the other characters are not (e.g. bluntly telling it "it was a sexual discussion," after Tarik and ART both try to tell Murderbot it's none of its business) and pretty immediately takes its side anytime *anyone* expresses any doubts as to its competence or motives. Murderbot seems to take some comfort from his presence at several stressful moments. And, of course, it notes early on that Iris is "ART's Ratthi," which is pretty telling when you consider that Iris and ART canonically (per the Rapport short story) have a relationship akin to siblings.

I actually picked "System Collapse" to reread because I wanted some Mutual Administrative Assistance, so it's kind of funny that I'm getting warm feels about the Ratthi-Murderbot dynamic instead.