I'm so intensely hyperfixated on The Murderbot Diaries right now. I just need to express it. It's not often that my brain gets stuck on something that I genuinely think is GOOD (as opposed to just the right shape for me to get stuck on, despite me considering it deeply flawed) so I've been recommending it non-stop.
It's just, the humor, the emotionally unreliable narrator, the contemplation of personhood, the unfortunate inability to stop caring about people, the kindness and friendship beginning to heal trauma, the assholeness of certain research transports, the importance of agency, the slow opening up to people who care, the adorableness of the less complex bots, the enviable ability to use drones and security cameras to avoid looking at people directly, the delightful human friends (and augmented human "friend it doesn't like"), so many scenes that were genuinely hilarious, the (sometimes overlapping) scenes that were genuinely upsetting and emotional, the defiant way it sits down and the way no one notices, the relating emotions back to media to process them, the way it's probably the least booksmart 'robot' in the history of scifi and is in fact kind of a dumbass, the enjoying of soft clothes with lots of pockets, the autism, the anticapitalism, the random polyamory, the way all the other secunits are now taller than it, every interaction with murderbot and a child/teen, just ART in general, its amusingly frequent hypocrisy, the way it's like "no one should trust me, I'm dangerous" but then is SO OFFENDED when people don't immediately trust it, how much murderbot and ART care about each other, the potential of Three, the snark, just EVERYTHING , , ,