Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
Acquired Stardust
sheepfilms
occasionally subtle

Kaledo Art

@theartofmadeline
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Show & Tell

Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies

tannertan36
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Peter Solarz

Kiana Khansmith
todays bird

shark vs the universe
Sade Olutola
RMH

ellievsbear

seen from Germany
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seen from Netherlands

seen from Serbia
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seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia
seen from Serbia
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seen from Germany

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seen from United States
@garvet
yeah it's possible I bit off more than I could chew with this one
something something it's called "Away Mission"
The dance shows so much about you, No not that you are clumsy or not used to such entertaiments as dancing. Not that.
1 You stay away from everybody, And that is not only because you do not belong enough. You know crowds are dangerous and the best place in a dance hall is at the wall closer to the exit. Also your job required you to be quiet, unnoticed.
2 You do not make the wide movements? you keep your elbows pressed to your body. You are not used to free spaces. Again - corporate parties always mean big crown in small premises. You can not move free there. The same is valid when it goes about your life.
Our RP team: Heartless killing machine Itric, Brainless Norman, Cass, brave deer Soil Samples and a friendly drone Fauna Wrangler
My OC Itric from Disposable
https://archiveofourown.org/works/80372396
Complimentary species (Happy Valentine)
https://i.ibb.co/G3fYvXjX/IMG-20260130-223226-333.jpg
I am fine
Another redraw. This time Jaime Jones =)
Let’s talk about THAT SCENE, shall we? The big scene of episode 8, when both Alexander Skarsgard and David Dastmalchian acted their fucking asses off in a mess of mutual vulnerability, mutual aggression and betrayal, and mutual destruction.
First off, I have to acknowledge the double-entendres absolutely littering this scene. The mutual vulnerability! The physical link-up, plugging into one another. Digging into their most private (mental) places. The request for fucking restraint followed by an electronic blindfolding. Shit, man, if there aren’t 18000 buck-wild Murderathin fics coming out of this one episode, the fandom is seriously dropping the very kinky ball that is this absolute shit-show of a relationship.
Anyway! Onto more serious discussions.
First off, we learn so much in such a short time. This show has been a masterclass at utilizing a limited run-time well, demanding that everything on screen pull double or triple duty, layered with meanings and implications, and this scene is no different. Through their mutual accusations, we get mutual confessions. Murderbot uses an instance of mutual vulnerability to dig into Gurathin’s mind to try to find dirt on him, only to get lost in his thoughts. It exposes Gurathin’s most closely-guarded secret—his unrequited love for Mensah—but also Gurathin’s belief that he is fundamentally unloveable. And the accusation is read out in first-person, transforming it into a confession. Because Murderbot very much sees itself as unloveable too.
And Gurathin has simultaneously dug into Murderbot, uncovering the fragmented memories of the massacre, and its actual name. And much like Murderbot, what we see is equal parts accusation and a horrified confession. Gurathin is in tears as he watches through the massacre footage (and kudos to the special effects folks for playing the footage over both Dastmalchian’s and Skarsgard’s eyes during the scene, showing both of them trapped in the same instant together), blurting out the revelation in third person rather than first, but following it up immediately with his accusations about being defective. A danger to everyone around him. One thought from something terrible.
Sounds a lot like self-loathing, doesn’t it? And that’s what this scene is all about. Two people who can’t help but dig and pry and hurt one another because they see themselves in the other. And they hate themselves. They are both terrified of being defective, of being somehow involved in terrible acts that led to deaths. We don’t know if Gurathin killed people directly, but he almost certainly had the information he gathered used to kill people. He was responsible, maybe. Just like Murderbot.
And they are both terrified of falling back into that place. It’s why they’re both terrified, more than anything, of being controlled. Murderbot broke free of its governor module, but still works for the Company. It still isn’t a fully independent being and never will be so long as it’s a part of this organization. Its small pieces of full independence are its thoughts and its name, and Gurathin exposed both of those.
Gurathin is terrified of falling back into substance abuse. Realizing that it was medical painkillers that were the first step to getting him thoroughly addicted and compliant was awful, because it implies either a past physical trauma or—I think more likely—pain medications as part of the augmenting procedures. You have to imagine having cybernetics laced into your brain and replacing your eyes has to be incredibly painful. And from there it was a slide downward into addiction, likely deliberately by Gurathin’s employers.
But I also find it interesting that, despite the compulsive need to dig at one another and hurt one another, there is also another impulse at play in this scene: some degree of caregiving and weird trust. Murderbot did NOT have to consent to plugging itself into Gurathin to try to bypass his pain receptors and act as a non-drug alternative to pain management during the surgery. It may say that it did this because it would find Gurathin screaming to be irritating, but that seems flimsy. And Gurathin DEFINITELY didn’t have to ask Murderbot to restrain him, or accept when it blanked out his vision as well.
There is a weird, almost unconscious trust and care there. I feel like this is something that is going to be more explored, and is the basis for something less destructive between them. I also think it speaks to the impulse on both their parts to want forgiveness, care, trust, and love. They don’t forgive themselves. They don’t care about themselves as they should. They don’t trust or love themselves.
But deep down, they both still want that for themselves, even if they are both completely incapable of articulating that outside of accusations at the moment.
This whole scene was just working on so many levels, and they weren’t pleasant or comfortable levels. And I love how the show digs into that through these characters, their dumpster-fire relationship, and all the cracks in their psyches they keep exposing because of one another.
What this scene is really exposing is this mutual desperation for connection. They are afraid of loss of control, they are deeply self-loathing, but the seed of their personal growth lies in this craving for connection.
Target Five staggered and swayed but he pointed his weapon at Arada. Then ART’s voice, ART’s real voice, filled the feed. It said, Drop the weapon. …… Target Five shouted something incoherent, then dropped his weapon and lurched sideways, clutching his head. Oh wow, ART must have been able to access Target Five’s helmet, via the code used by TargetControlSystem. Target Five fell over and convulsed once on the deck, then went limp.
This is step by step what happened to Leebeebee. Except this time it was more messy. It is paralleled even in fact that before ART starts talking it was concidered dead. Everybody think MB is dead when it says its "Drop the gun"
I won't say it's, like, the series' best feature, but on a personally relatable level my favourite thing about The Murderbot Diaries is the repeated implication that most of SecUnit's success as a hacker stems from the fact that it keeps bumping into mission-critical systems where nobody's bothered to change the factory default wi-fi password.
#true
I'm conflicted about Murderbot because on the one hand. I use it/its, and I see first hand how many hoops people will jump through to justify using literally any other pronoun. But on the other hand... Murderbot's isn't precisely a nonbinary story.
It lives in a world where gender doesn't matter. Like, obviously people have assigned genders so there must be some kind of sex-gender system still going on, but people opting out of it is commonplace. Sexism isn't a real thing there, so transphobia can't be real either. Nobody cares about gender. There's no discovery, no hidden truth, no sense of self tied up in it. Murderbot isn't being defiant by not having a gender; it just doesn't.
The use of it is tied to the current assumption of anglophones that this should be a dehumanizing term, because humans have to have genders, of course. But in Murderbot's world there's no assumption that people have to conform to manhood or womanhood to be human. That's just a lens for us to see it by; to know that people see it as an object and so assign it no social role.
But that's juicy for people who have grappled with their gender. People who've been pushed aside because they don't fit the role they've been assigned, or because they've been refused an assigned role for not meeting some other metric. People who do fit their role in some ways, but not in others. People who can never meet the standards with their psyche intact. People who don't want to try because that pressure to try is what hurts them. There's a lot relatable in being seen as an object first, and a person second or not at all. About trying to discover gender through that wall.
And what Murderbot's story is about is learning how to be a person. How to figure out your feelings, and acknowledge them, and figure out what to do about them. How to learn to exist around other people, and figure out what you want from them, and figure out how to give and take in a way that's fulfilling to everyone. How to have goals. How to have preferences. How to have purpose. So why not how to have gender?
So I do think there's a lot of room to tell a story about Murderbot, who was never allowed to have any traits, finally learning that she's allowed to be a woman, just because she wants to. (Or a man because he wants to.) I do think there's a lot of room to talk about moving towards a more normalized they, or some combination of pronouns. I do think there's a lot to explore in the constructed self represented by the constructed pronoun.
I don't like it when people misgender Murderbot just because they're uncomfortable with its pronouns. But at the same time, when people see themselves in a character, and then gift that character with their own gendered experiences... there's something that feels off about denying that, too. Even if seeing people call it it gives me euphoria. Because you can pack a hell of a lot of experiences into this construct, you know?
It is so strange that in PHM they never went to save other suns. You know red line among other things means there is a viable planet in that system and maybe the sentient life or just a life too. And it can perish if help does not come. But no one wants to save those worlds!