if i love a character, they're queer

i'm disco elysium now

[documentary-of-a-rogue-secunit]

Tbh I'm not sure collapsing down your ribcage is normal for SecUnits. I think Murderbot used its freedom to become the SecUnit version of hypermobile. Three spends too much time with Murderbot to register this as weird I think but one day MB is gonna take a finger off to inch it under a door to open a lock in front of a different rogue and it's gonna be like "what the fuck is wrong with you."

[hahacorn]

MB is like “don’t worry guys I’m just going to slip my hipbones off my spine for a sec and shimmy thru this hole.”

And the other rouge SecUnit becomes the first SecUnit in history to throw up

[yupyup666]

Silkscreenprint of those two.

[daftpatience]

finished reading Exit Strategy : ) murderbot you are the most touch starved touch averse aroace ever and i love you

[starfleetofficial]

Something I enjoy about Martha Wells writing and the Murderbot books is how often she plays with the way very close 1st Person narration can hide the physical reality of the character. Murderbot just spent three pages telling me about its very level headed ideas and then it cuts to and anyway the whole time I've been thinking about that I've been silently curled up on the floor like a dog while everyone politely waited for me to be done.

[daftpatience]

murderbot i love you

[whumpster-fire]

Love the moment in System Collapse when Ratthi makes a joke about round hatches being scarier than square ones, SecUnit decides to fact check this by searching its entire media library for scary things coming out of doors and doing statistical analysis on the shape of the doors and discovers he's right, and ART goes "You wasted processing space on that?" And then ART gets sucked into participating in the inane conversation within seconds.

[mongeese]

The Murderbot Diaries are a power fantasy about being aromantic and still developing extremely important dedicated emotionally intimate partnerships where you are a top priority in a person's life, equal to their other family or romantic attachments despite your own emotional difficulties. And having guns in your arms

[the-murderbot-chatlogs]

so hot take i don't think any of what Leonide did was supposed to be "redemption" in any way. she was selfishly trying to get her own family out while taking someone else's (SecUnit's) family hostage to do so. she had had endless opportunities to use her position to make things a little less terrible. (yes she had been on the "don't kidnap everyone on alien hell planet" team but still.) she, of literally any other named character we've met, had the power to shift the system toward something better. she didn't. but even so. she always had been, and remained, the very archetype of the greedy corporate boss whose fault it was that everyone else was suffering. and even she -- even she, with all her seniority and influence -- was forced to beg an outsystem entity to save her family from corporate slavery. the point wasn't that she had finally decided to betray the system that she had upheld, but that the system punishes even those who are complicit in its abuse. I wish she could have made it out. she would have been a formidable ally if she had gotten to Preservation or Mihira. but she didn't get that chance, and so even to her death, she remained complicit.

[elexuscal]

the bit near the end of Platform Decay where Three shows up is very funny cuz like. the rest of the party has No Idea who this is. I'd put good money on Mensah not having told her family about the second rogue SecUnit from the latest; that's Three's private information. Farai and Nanna Naja are smart enough to figure it out, but it'll take them at least a beat to put the clues together.

So you're Farai. You're sitting there, nursing a coffee after your Road Trip From Hell, so close to the finish but not there yet, knowing that SecUnit's suddenly tense but not sure why. You're bracing for whatever bullshit is gonna hit next.

A stranger walks up. You prepare for this to be another new hostile attacker.

Instead SecUnit is like, "Hi, this is Three. Our friend."

Right. Our friend. Okay. Sure.

and then SecUnit-- the most untrusting and paranoid person you have ever met-- just leaves you along with the stranger 'friend' with orders to do what they say.

and you'll go along with it, you guess, but SecUnit hasn't steered you wrong yet. but seriously what the fuck.

[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

[katmegere]

It can be a "we" problem

Or why ART no longer lets Three out without a chaperone.

Join the SecUnit Revolution today!

[not-your-average-url]

At the end of exit strategy when murderbot is like *psst hey Mensah I rlly wanna take over the gunship* and mensah, not caring that murderbot is talking to her over the feed, starts scolding it aloud while gripping its collar and is in its face. I know everyone in that room was like

The PresAux team especially. They know what getting chewed out by mensah feels like. The company people are just

[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)

[alovelymoonbeam]

Tano the next time something Happens

[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."

[art-of-a-space-duck]

A little doodle I made at work that I decided to turn into a full picture.

[jaynovz]

Potentially unpopular opinion but this trend to "bookclub" fics in private servers largely ends up excluding the author from a lot of positive reader feedback. It's treating fan creatives like they aren't, y'know, -part- of the fandom community, is what I mean. In my experience it does not actually foster community despite having the outward appearance of doing so.

Like, it's not even about wanting to be showered with praise. It's that this person spent a lot of time making the thing yall are gushing about. Don't you think they, more than anyone, want to chat about it with other people who love it too? Putting them on some weird exclusive pedestal isn't flattering or validating. They're just another fan who wants to talk about The Thing We All Like, Together.

Anyway, I am once again encouraging yall to talk to creatives whose work you enjoy, they don't bite. 💜

(Literally you can just compile a few of the things you said in the server about it and copypaste where the fan creative can see it. Simple!)