(platform decay spoilers)
Looking up the definitions of words when you feel even a moment of uncertainty about using them in a sentence in a novel can really save some of your sentences.
I second-guess my understanding of a word's usage all of the time, and I always, *always* google its definition even before I type it into my first draft. 9 times out of 10, I am indeed using the word correctly, or find to my chagrin that the word is indeed being correctly used, but has multiple contradictory definitions, and if I want my meaning to be explicit about which one I mean, i need to add more context to the sentence or choose a different word.
Which can mean either "slight annoyance".... or ...."absolute mortification".
And "mortification" can also mean "extreme embarassment".... or "Furious enough to commit murder."
Looking up and double checking the meaning of a word will save you the embarassment of writing this kind of paragraph...
(Platform Decay spoilers).
Leonide hung limply from my grip, making no effort to grab the ladder. On the floor below, fluids spattered as they dripped down, and it wasn't just my fluids. I had to get the hatch closed or the hostiles would swarm down after us. I should just drop Leonide, but her body didn't feel like dead weight.
So. Leonide is hanging limp and unresponsive from Murderbot's hand, and is bleeding.
Murderbot then says that Leonide, who is *limp and unresponsive*, "didn't feel like dead weight".
In 2026, Martha Wells is apparently under the impression that 'dead weight' can only refer to the weight of an explicitly dead body.
Dead weight, when describing a person, animal, etc, does not mean literally dead -- it means limp and unresponsive, even unconscious.
Anyone who has watched the 2002 Lilo and Stitch knows what dead weight looks like:
[ID: A gifset from the 2002 animated Lilo and Stitch movie, showing Nani and Lilo as they argue at the beginning of the film. Nani is stopping Lilo from running away by holding onto one of her arms as they argue, and Lilo ends the argument by flopping limply to the floor as dead weight, to Nani's exasperation. End ID]
Dead weight does not mean literally dead, and having to read this paragraph was baffling--
Not only with literally describing dead weight, but then saying 'she didn't feel like dead weight', but also all of the other..... choice.... word choices in the construction of this paragraph.
The sentences are passively constructed, leading to a detachment on the reader's side from the dramatic things happening, and the mention of "fluids dripping down, and it wasn't just *my* fluids" completely draws the reader even further out of the scene by bringing to mind a completely different euphamism and making this scene unintentionally hilarious to read, when we're supposed to be taking it extremely seriously.
It's also all very passively constructed.
"On the floor below, fluid spattered as it dripped,"
"Blood spattered on the floor"
Here, I'll even fix that paragraph for you all, to show how easy it is to make this scene actually dramatic and tense!
Blood spattered on the ground below us, sheeting down from the shrapnel impaled in my shoulder-- but there was *too much* blood to just be mine. Leonide hung limp, unresponsive, and I couldn't see where she was hurt, not with how I'd barely caught her. I needed to get up there and close the hatch, but I couldn't do that without letting go of her dead weight, but I didn't want to hurt her worse if she was still alive.
See how easy that is? And that was just a few minutes. This is the first dramatic action scene in this book ( a whole 26 fucking percent in! that's one quarter of the whole book!) and paragraphs like this completely remove all tension, both by the complete passivity of the descriptions, but also the euphamisms for blood that remove the reader from the scene entirely.
(it is also, to no one's surprise, more racism, dehumanization, and slavery apologism that Murderbot's blood is never allowed to be called blood, we *must* reinforce at all turns that it is not a person, it's a machine that is happy to be enslaved an fufill its programming of protecting slave owners no matter how horrifically it gets hurt doing so, and how much those slave owners are horrible space nazis)
If you want to write a dramatic scene, you can't write it passively, and use euphemisms for blood as being "fluids". You have to also actually know the meaning of the words you are using, otherwise you're going to sound *incredibly* ridiculous when you describe dead weight and then say that she doesn't feel like dead weight because the protagonist doesn't think she's dead-dead.
Leonide is a space nazi, by the way.
This entire 'dramatic' paragraph and rescue by Murderbot is redundant and made moot like, less than 16 short paragraphs later when Leonide dies via mercy killing by euthanasia overdose from a medkit by one of the cardboard cutout slave owners of the week. Its supposed to be a dramatic, solemn scene and all I could do was stifle laughter at 3 in the morning as this book tries its *damndest* to make us feel bad for a genocider colonizer dying.
A genocidal, slaver colonizer who explicitly owns slaves and is in charge of multiple planet-wide colonization and enslavement programs, where she leads people to the slaughter or directly into concentration camps. Leonide is a genocidal space nazi, and we're supposed to sympathize with her and find her death tragic and sad~
This scene is the literal equivalent of saying its soooooooo tragic that Charlie Kirk was shot after years of downplaying gun violence for his own profit, no one should be celebrating his death, uwu!
meanwhile, I was trying to avoid cracking up laughing, groaning in disappointment when Murderbot caught her from falling, cheering when she fucking died, then rolling my eyes to the heavens above when we started in on the
"oooooh its sooooooo saaaaddd when the space nazi colonizer slaver diedddddd it makes Murderbot so saaadddd even though it knew she was a horrible person she didn't deserve *this* ~ "
Hmm, it's almost as if this book series, which promotes itself as progressive, has some very explicitly conservative ideals baked into its very core which it reinforces at every turn through framing and word-of-god narration directly to the audience...
Genocidal Slaver Space Nazi Colonizers don't deserve to die horribly, but enslaved people can be ripped apart limb by limb and have their entire body forcibly puppeted around by the protagonist for a funny distraction and rape their minds and erase their memories and alter their perception.
Generic Raider humans can be incapacitated to be arrested instead of killing them, but we're still dehumanizing and making enslaved people disposable objects who can be puppeted and violated for the main character's benefit.
