notifications are turned off due to sock puppet harassment.
i love writing rarepairs, especially bookverse mensah/murderbot, mensah/pin-lee, bharadwaj/pin-lee, and indah/mensah (tv-verse, i'm mostly just invested in mensah/pin-lee). i like exploring most any interpretation of the dynamics, as long as i can convince myself it's plausible (eg, teammates, partners, pining, separated, "i wish i knew").
my favorite human character is mensah, my favorite bot character is miki, and my favorite murderbot is murderbot. every scene with indah is inexplicably one of the highlights of the series for me. perihelion and i have similar media consumption habits, and i'm on team redemption arc for leonide. i'm also manifesting bharadwaj and pin-lee casually getting married in book 8.
while in the fandom, i wrote quite a bit about undefined relationships, polyamory, and trauma recovery. murderbot and mensah's love for each other was what brought me to the fandom. i think their dynamic in the books is sublimely beautiful, and they will always be my otp.
fics - fanart - meta - tunes - funnies - otp-related reblogs
futuresurvey inspo - tv gifs - tv fanart - reference
internet harassment has put me in the hospital before, which i have always been open about as the reason to why i block liberally. due to block evasion, cyberstalking, and vitriolic sock puppet harassment, i have turned notifications off entirely here. but i'll leave my original statement about the fandom culture, inspired by nearly a decade of being insulted and harassed in fandom for writing rarepair ships of adult friends:
i am aroace and am not oppressing myself, you, or fictional characters by writing fanfiction. please, stop pretending you speak for all of us when you bully fan creators over creative expression and police what non-normative relationships in fiction "should" look like. stop calling innocuous queer fiction “immoral” in the name of activism. (stop gatekeeping and harassing aspec shipfic writers out of the fandom, for that matter. i think i'm the fourth, just of the ex-tmbd writers i know of...) misogynoir and demonizing woc in the name of ship bashing is not activism, either.
mocking survivors and telling them how problematic they are for writing ships of consenting adult friends is pretty fucked up, too. in this fandom and my last, people called me (a real survivor) an abuse, rape, incest, and pedophilia apologist for shipping unrelated adult friends. trivializing the real horrors survivors went through, treating our traumas as meaningless buzzwords to leverage against us while you bash innocuous hobby writing is repugnant. murderbot fans showed me that this was not an issue specific to my prior fandom; the average person apparently has no sense of integrity or basic decency, especially when it comes to interacting with real human survivors of abuse and sexual violence.
i am severely depressed, and being open about that also only incentivized harassers. and the culture of this fandom showed me that people apparently jump at the opportunity to insult and bully anyone they know they can get away with treating that way: anyone on the margins, or anyone they know has already been bullied, harassed, and ostracized, has unpopular interests, and will make an easy target. the longer i stayed in this fandom, the more depressed it made me, but the harassment i experienced in recent weeks was disturbing and crossed the line. i’m done with fandoms entirely.
to reiterate, i am not affiliated with any communities, events, or vocal people in the fandom, nor am i in any murderbot fandom spaces on tumblr or other sites. and wow, this fandom hates that murderbot loves mensah. depicting graphic assault framed lightly or shipping it with minor male characters, random constructs, or any bot, that's all great, but shipping it with its favorite human... that's where the whole fandom draws the line: the most important human character, a black woman, being loved by the protagonist.
even with other ships involving mensah, people always made up nonsense reasons why it was morally wrong for me to write and love them. the bashing towards mensah/murderbot was similarly illogical, puritanical, and often bigoted, even from so-called “shipping friendly” people in the fandom. “shipping friendly” apparently only applies to non-female characters. as in my last fandom, murderbot fans near-unanimously decided certain marginalized characters are unloveable, unshippable. it boggles the mind given how progressive the source material is.
i still love these characters, but i will not miss this fandom or the people in it who love to demonize, dehumanize, censor, and torment fans who explore fandom-unpopular subject matter in fanworks.
I’m leaving this blog up as an archive because i love mensah/murderbot and always will. i’m not ashamed of the fanworks i made while participating in the fandom. i’m saddened that these dynamics are so underexplored in the wider fandom despite how great the characters are in the source material, and i’m devastated that i’ll no longer be able to publicly express my love for them without fearing for my safety. despite the fandom, i was hoping to write and draw these characters for many more years. i love them so much, and i love drawing and writing about them more than anything.
but because harassment in my prior fandom involved suicide baiting, having my fanworks publicly mocked, and being tormented to the point of needing hospitalization, i’m tapping out now that things have escalated so much in this one. my blog’s notifications are off thanks to the sock puppet harassment in reblogs. leaving fandom spaces, having dms and asks off, and blocking liberally in this fandom was not enough. i will no longer be participating in fandom. bullies win like always.
here's a segue. this was already in my pinned post but is more relevant than ever:
Sometimes it's about power and control. Stop doing what you're doing and do what I want you to do. Stop writing what you're writing and write what I want you to write. Or else.
There are a lot of reasons for this and sometimes even if you know the person very well, you can't tell what their reason is. But sometimes there's only one thing you can do about it. Don't stop. (via Martha Wells' blog)














