[ID: The handshake meme, with one arm labeled:
"Murderbot is aroace and everything repulsed, and nonbinary and uses it/its pronouns, and it is important to respect this and respect the real people it represents by not erasing these parts of its identity to make it more palatable to allos and binary people. There is never a good reason to erase representation for nonbinary and aroace people."
"Martha Wells has a serious problem with biological essentialism in her writings, and it is very clear that this is the only reason she chose to make Murderbot aroace and nonbinary, because she equates genitals with sex with gender with orientation. This needs to be aknowledged and addressed if others are going to learn from her mistakes rather than repeating them."
And the center hands labeled:
"Being true statements that do not cancel eachother out at all and do in fact strengthen and support eachother"
And if these concepts are just too difficult for you to grasp right now, then just be quiet until you figure it out.
Refusing to acknowledge bigotry in something does not make it go away, and if you can't even bring yourself to admit the basic fact that Murderbot is indeed the combination of multiple harmful stereotypes, then can you really claim you enjoy the series?
If you lie to people to get them to read these books by not telling them that all of the representation is literally just founded on stereotypes that show no fucking signs of being anything more than stereotypes any time soon (Which would require Martha Wells introducing multiple, reoccurring, important human characters who are nonbinary and aroace, and robot characters that are literally anything else, (and no!!! introducing fucking robots built to have sex who would then have sexual orientations does not fucking count! That's just more biological fucking essentialism!)), then all you're accomplishing by literally tricking people into reading these books is making people feel betrayed and resentful when they get to the series and find out,,wow, it's literally just the nonbinary and aroace robot stereotype again, but now we're pretending that's progressive and groundbreaking in 2023.
I've seen so many people who were lied to to get them to read these books and they're now rightfully pissd off about being lied to and having the representation in the series be completely overblown and hyped up beyond all reason.
Martha Wells, who has a history of biological essentialism in her writing, (including casually supporting eugenics in The Books of the Raksura!) making Murderbot aroace and nonbinary just beacuse it literally does not have genitals is not progressive. It's not groundbreaking.
It's literally just exorsexism, aroacemisia, and biological essentialism.
You have to fucking aknowledge this if you want to be less of a bigot towards aroace and nonbinary people. You cannot just keep telling people this series is awesome amazing representation that does nothing wrong when it's literally just stereotypes because Martha Wells thinks genitals = sex = gender = orientation.
It's 2023. Stop lying to people to get them to read books they're going to end up hating because they won't live up to the grand lies you've told them.
Start thinking critically about the media you consume, or at least stop fucking lying to people about the content of the media to get them to read it. Literally all you're doing is making people resentful.
and to repeat for the thousandth time: Yes you must aknowledge that it's exorsexist and aroacemisic stereotypes that the only characters in this series who are aroace and nonbinary are only so because they literally do not have genitals.
No, this does not mean you get a free pass to erase the fact that these characers are aroace and nonbinary!
This is also not telling you you have to feel bad about liking Murderbot or that Murderbot is now a bad charater forever.
The problem is NOT that Murderbot is aroace and nonbinary.
The problem IS that there are no humans who are, and no robots who arent'.
And if you fucking nitpick this post to go "well actually Murderbot's not a robot" just shut up. It literally is. Just because Martha Wells decided to use "construct" rather than "android" does not mean it's not literally a robot. She also calls people "Augmented humans" rather than "cyborgs" but that doesn't change the fact that they're cyborgs.
You cannot nitpick your way out of acknowledging and confronting harmful stereotypes and the biological essentialist biases that create them in the first place.
You want to help combat this?
Then create more diverse characters for your setting.
None of this would be a problem at all if Martha Wells had just decided to include human aroace and nonbinary characters in this series in any real way, and no, Rami does not count, because te was shoved offscreen literally as soon as possible, which honestly makes it seem like like Martha Wells was fucking embarrassed by ter. So no, Rami appearing for what ammounts two 2 minutes of screentime and then never being heard from again while also being the only confirmed nonbinary human character is not the rebuttle you think it is!