The Murderbot Body Diversity Project

A blog celebrating the many and varied fan depictions of Murderbot.

[murderbot-diversity]

TMBD: The Murderbot Diversity Project

This blog exists to celebrate the many, varied, wonderful visual interpretations of Murderbot that currently exist in the fandom zeitgeist.

Blog icon art by Tommy Arnold, header art by @broken-risk-assessment-module for the Murderbot Fanimation.

Murderbot, as it appears on the page, is a character that has resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers as though it speaks to each of us personally. Its story is that of a person who is not respected by wider society as a person: systemically disenfranchised, marginalized, stripped of autonomy and self-determination and traumatized by a lifetime of it all, Murderbot nevertheless comes into its own understanding of itself and its place in the world, gaining a network of people who support it in the process. Murderbot becomes a character in whom the marginalized find resonance, representation, and hope.

The backdrop of Murderbot's world is rich with diversity, too: nonbinary humans with they/them or neopronouns, culture clash between CR and non-CR cultures, and names (Mensah, Pin-Lee, Bharadwaj, Ratthi, Thiago) that speak to diverse non-Western, real-world cultures, represented unremarkably but undeniably on the page.

And so, whether simply because we love its dry sarcasm and heart of gold, because we too are miserable and alienated under capitalism, or because it has spoken to our neurodivergent experiences, our aromantic and asexual experiences, our trans and genderqueer experiences, or our experiences as cultural or racial minorities, Murderbot has inspired a wide array of interpretations.

Murderbot has been any and all of what its fans need to see, a full spectrum of diversity beyond any one image set by institutional power. Masculine, feminine, and androgynous builds; tall and skinny, short and stacked, petite and dangerous; brown-skinned, Black, Asian, a variety of ethnicities; with and without a range of visible inorganic parts and joints; the power of its fans to imagine and reimagine Murderbot is unbounded.

Our goal is to support and encourage the Murderbot Diaries and its fandom in all its extant diversity.

[remnantglow]

i think this scene from Network Effect is fun. love it when mb just goes ham a little

[chelshiart]

Happy TMBD New Years Gift Exchange @non-plutonian-druid !!! Featuring: some people of Team MB hanging out, as well as MB going undercover as a human (with varying levels of success). This was super fun!!

[thecojsz]

murderbot doodles from the other day

[herasushi]

never gonna be let go by martha wells at this point

[westealtoys]

Murderbot having an emotion. or whole bunch of them.

[broken-risk-assessment-module]

Human One

Threat Assessment and Risk Assessment react to Murderbot taking unexpected damage.

[ID: A short comic drawn digitally in shades of red. At the top is an alert banner that reads “ALERT. PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY DROP. MINOR DAMAGE SUSTAINED. !!UNPREDICTED!!” Panel 1 shows the humanoid feedsonas of Threat Assessment (TA) and Risk Assessment (RA) looking slightly upwards in surprise. TA looks confused. Right of that panel is a red panel showing an outline of a humanoid with a red dot on the left side of their torso. Panel 2 shows TA and RA from a different angle, with RA in profile and TA glancing down at it. TA says, “What was that?”. RA replies, “She shot us.” Left of that panel is another red panel, showing a woman with short dreadlocks in a ponytail and a determined expression pointing a recently-fired gun slightly to the left of the POV. Panel 3 shows TA holding a feed panel in each hand, glancing at one with one eyebrow raised. It asks, “The human?”. RA is looking to the left over a spread of four feed panels, its hands drawn up to its chest, looking worried. It replies, “I didn’t see that coming.” Panel 4 has RA looking forwards again, one hand on its arm. It says, “I didn’t account for -” Panel 5 shows TA asking “For what?” The bottom of the image depicts Murderbot standing, its back to Human One, who is pointing a smoking gun at it. They are in bright red against the black background, unbound by a panel box. A white streak slashes across the image from Human One’s gun, through Murderbot’s back. Red text underneath them reads “For us still being the monster.” /end ID]

[alex-van-gore]

I need to hurt this construct or else I start feeling bad and getting sick

[ID: digital drawing of Murderbot sitting on a couch in a cozy living room. Yellow light shines into the room through large windows, outside the windows is a lot of green, pleasant foliage. Mb is bruised, with open wounds and cuts on its face and legs. It’s wearing a tank top and shorts, its right arm is in a sling, its left leg splinted. It wears a see through cone around its neck. /end ID]

[chaoticats3]

Could I have worked on this longer? Yes. Was it just supposed to be a character design practice that went out of hand? Yes. Did I struggle with the lighting for for too long? Yes. But done is better than perfect and I am done. ART's design I kinda copied from @riseandfallofsecunit 's post. I totally see ART being a bunch of ever shifting mathematical shapes that kinda hurt to look at, like a biblically accurate geometry book.

[riseandfallofsecunit]

Secunit meets Iris

[nyktomorphia]

I admit this is mostly based on how I would redesign a human body to run on batteries, but I did try to keep certain things I remembered in mind. (e.g. Murderbot is obviously bionic, it has to pretend to eat, it can't visually distinguish a combat-grade SecUnit at a glance.)

Additional senses are stored in the face. It's conveniently close to the brain (which is why humans put augments there too), and there are a lot of spare nerve endings there since a SecUnit doesn't need nearly so many in its tongue.

Murderbot's ears (and voice, partially) are electronic, which requires another organ to provide a sense of balance - hence, gyroscopes. Mounting the gyroscopes close to the centre of mass would allow SecUnits to reorient themselves in microgravity without having to push off against another object. That would be one of the recalibrations necessary after its height adjustment.

Murderbot explicitly has to section off part of its lung in order to pretend to eat, which implies a diaphragm as well as a circulatory system (which is an elegant solution for many other things), but its organic components need nutrients for normal function. I'm not sure if it's been said where those come from but I'm assuming some kind of non-digestive injection, which frees up a lot of space for more computers. Murderbot's organic memory seems to be closely linked to its cognition, so it'll probably still die from decapitation, but another processor closer to the physical core would offload subconscious background programmes and greatly improve reaction time by physically shortening the neural pathways. Murderbot also uses it to store its massive media library.

It's hard to improve on a complex appendage like an opposable thumb without making it obviously artificial. The other fingers are less obvious - independently-articulating joints are useful for things like delicate technical work or dismantling firearms one-handed, but even classical musicians rarely do more than have their tendons separated.

SecUnit forearms have only one 'bone', which looks slightly uncanny when twisted but isn't especially distracting unless it draws attention to them by using its energy weapons. The number of humans who have prosthetic forearms and combat enhancements is vanishingly small. Who loses a limb and then plans to keep putting themselves in violent situations anyway? That's what SecUnits are for. (The weapons are mounted in a way to minimise the risk of putting fingers in the path of the beam, as well as cushion against impacts that might otherwise damage the rest of the limb.)

[iris-of-the-lambs]

I read the Murderbot diaries and was immediately moved to draw gross cyborg gunk again

[auriidae]

last night i had the strangest dream that you knew me too.

[tableofshrooms]

More Murderbot from my sketchbook

[soulstuffjunkie]

Murderbot’s appearance evolution over the books.

Okay, now stop looking at it, it hates eye contact!

[trashmancer]

Realized I hadn't posted any art on my Tumblr in a while. Here's the PresAux crew redone in a new painting style I've been working on.

From Top Left to Bottom Right: SecUnit (who has glitched itself out of the photo), Pin-Lee, Gurathin, Ratthi, Mensah, and Bharadwaj. (Arada, Overse, and Volescu will come later at some point).

[perihelion-with-hat]

ART can be trusted with guns