spencer struggles to stay focused during his FBI seminar after watching you accept another man's phone number
pairings: spencer reid x shy!reader
warnings: post prison spencer, fem reader, fluffy fluff, pre-relationship mutual pining, jealousy, hot people who don't know they're hot, reader is so oblivious
wc: 2.4k
request: here
His speech is going fine. Good even, by technical standards. Solid pacing, no detectable tremor in his voice, and the audience seems engaged, or at least polite enough to fake it.
No eyes have glazed into vacant stares of boredom, no one has made sudden exits conveniently coinciding with his most critical points. Someone even laughed at his heuristics joke. Sure, that laugh might have stemmed from social obligation rather than genuine amusement, but Spencer’s ego isn’t picky. Validation is validation, however pitiful its origins.
After a hundred (give or take, but who’s counting? Certainly not him anymore) FBI seminars, public speaking has downgraded itself from gut-twisting terror to something more akin to low-level tinnitus. Persistent, yes, but easily ignored if he doesn’t focus on it.
Today, though, there’s a blemish in his confidence, a nearly imperceptible fissure disrupting an otherwise flawless delivery, and annoyingly, he knows exactly what’s causing it.
Or rather, who.
It would be easy, tempting, even, to attribute it to jet lag or his questionable decision to skip breakfast, despite knowing precisely how much glucose his brain demands to function optimally.
It’s approximately 130 grams daily, for the record.
But under close examination, these excuses collapse.
His mouth dutifully churns out the familiar concepts — cognitive shortcuts, behavioral reinforcement, and a half-dozen other psychological principles he could probably recite even if heavily sedated.
His eyes, though, are less disciplined.
Spencer no longer pretends he isn’t looking for you. Plausible deniability lost its appeal around the hundredth time, so now he’s squarely planted in the acceptance stage, routinely scanning briefing rooms, glancing down the jet aisle, even sweeping through crowded streets that realistically hold zero probability of your sudden appearance.
Stranger things have happened though.
Your usual chair, predictably front and center, has been taken by someone else. The disruption alone unsettles him, an absurd reaction, he knows, considering the concept of assigned seating vanished after high school.
But worse, far worse, your new seat, slightly further back to the left, is paired closely with a stranger. A male. A male stranger.
Did he mention that?
From this distance, Spencer reads you the way he would scrutinize grainy case footage — frame by frame, microexpression after microexpression. You sit poised, shoulders relaxed in a way that seems sincere, fingers neatly intertwined in practiced, polite calm. The hesitant half-smile on your face is one he’s memorized by now, the kind you deploy when responses fail you but courtesy remains compulsory.
There’s nothing outwardly troubling. No anxious shifts, no rapid blinking patterns, no unconscious signals suggesting underlying distress. And the man beside you remains scrupulously neutral, displaying no signs of threat or territorial intent. No encroaching hand, no aggressive hand over your chair.
Textbook respectful. Harmless, even.
Spencer hates him, regardless.
Maybe hate is a strong word. Spencer is self-aware enough to admit that. He’s nothing if not precise with language, after all. But the irritation brewing in his chest feels warranted, even if it’s inconvenient and flagrantly unprofessional.
He should be paying attention to his own presentation, should be demonstrating at least a shred of respect for the material, and especially for the painstaking work you poured into it.
Last Thursday alone, you spent two entire hours rearranging his deck into a visual narrative.
He had fun watching as you tensed each time his hand brushed yours or whenever he leaned a fraction too close, your shoulders tightening in a way he mentally filed under adorably flustered.
He also (less fun) watched you agonize over font choices as though the fate of the world depended on serif or sans-serif, and the way you had gotten so worked up trying to pick between two indistinguishable shades of blue.
Eventually, he broke. Softly, half-laughing, he told you, it doesn’t matter which one, I’ll love it regardless because you picked it.
He could almost hear your internal plea for the earth to kindly intervene and swallow you whole. And as usual, Spencer pretended he saw nothing, politely glossing over the obvious.
It had, after all, become his speciality — noticing everything about you and pretending he didn’t.
His eyes focus back on you, in the present to see that there’s a napkin involved with the stranger, accompanied by a ballpoint pen scratching digits hastily onto the flimsy, coffee-stained paper, folded once before sliding across the table.
You accept it without hesitation, slipping it beneath your fingers. To any else, the exchange would seem mundane. And maybe it genuinely is mundane.
Maybe people pass you phone numbers all the time and Spencer’s just blind to it, trapped comfortably back in plausible deniability.
And honestly, why wouldn’t this be a regular occurrence? He should’ve considered this months ago. From a purely observational standpoint, you’ve practically designed to attract attention. Intelligent. Kind. Beautiful. Very beautiful in a soft, disarming way that defies simple categorization.
He expends enormous effort pretending your very existence doesn’t accelerate his heart-rate into concerning ranges. It’s possible that other, saner men don’t waste precious energy on such fruitless, exhausting self-deception.
Spencer blinks slowly, disoriented by the sudden wave of heat climbing uninvited from beneath his collar. The fabric feels restrictive, as though actively tightening, trying to suffocate him purely out of spite.
For the life of him, he can’t remember which slide he’s on, or even if the current slide bears any relation to the words he was previously speaking. His pointer hand hovers mid-gesture, awkwardly frozen.
There’s a distracting ringing in his ears — no, he corrects himself, not ringing.
Silence.
His own silence stretching across the room as he mentally scrambles to pinpoint exactly when he stopped talking. Judging from the expectant stares, probably mid-sentence.
Your eyes find his almost instantly, brows pinched the tiniest bit, like you’re puzzled but trying not to be disrespectful about it. Spencer can feel the sweat prickling beneath his shirt.
But then you smile and give him a thumbs up.
Big and bright and encouraging like you’re trying to telepathically remind him that he’s doing great, as if this is only a mild, forgivable stumble from a nervous academic tripped up by nothing more serious than transition slide number 42.
It’s not funny. He tells himself that with conviction. But there’s some part of him that wants to laugh anyway, if only to release the pressure building inside him.
Instead, he settles for a restrained nod, stretches a smile over clenched teeth, pretends it feels natural then regains his place in the presentation.
Guilt rushes in on the tail end of his anger (anger? jealousy? — the terminology feels suspiciously accurate, but labeling it as so feels premature and vaguely terrifying). He’s uncertain what specific transgression triggered this, but his nervous system apparently feels apologies are overdue, regardless.
Possibly because his thoughts are increasingly heading into Neanderthal territory with every look the man gives you.
Thankfully around halfway, maybe just past that mark, the nameless man beside you rises. It’s discreet, he simply leans in toward you, exchanges some hushed, unintelligible words, then slips away.
The second the chair beside you empties though, that pressure in his chest loosens like a long-held muscle finally unclenched. Like oxygen flooding back into a room that had been vacuum-sealed.
Spencer rushes through his concluding remarks, murmuring a perfunctory thanks to the audience and moves swiftly off the stage.
No handshakes, no small talk, no waiting around to see if anyone has further questions. Frankly, he doesn’t have the bandwidth to pretend he cares.
His mind is fixated solely on you, his priority laser-focused on bridging the gap he’s spent the past hour actively trying not to acknowledge, intent on reaching you first before anyone else gets the chance.
You can’t help yourself from smiling the instant he comes into view, then immediately worry that it’s too much smile, a full wattage beam reserved for grander occasions than a simple post-presentation hello.
But then again, this is Spencer.
Spencer, who just minutes ago had half the room on the edge of their seats, eyes round with wonder, absorbing each detail like children watching a magic trick unfold.
You’re fairly certain he would appreciate that comparison.
“You were incredible,” you say, feeling a little winded by your own excitement. Hopefully, that accounts for the weird expression you’re pretty sure is plastered all over your face. “Seriously, you sounded so confident, and that one part, the twins with the shared delusion? You could hear everyone holding their breath.”
Spencer holds your gaze, expression carefully blank, as if he’s momentarily forgotten how to react. He finally swallows, glancing downward briefly before forcing his eyes back to yours.
“Thanks,” he says, “to tell you the truth, it felt a bit… off.”
“Really?” you blurt out. “It was probably the slides, honestly. I knew I should’ve picked the darker blue for the headers. The light blue looked fine on my laptop, but projected up there it looked way too… fluorescent. Sorry if it threw you off, or you know, temporarily damaged your retinas.”
His lips curve into something resembling a smile, but there’s a noticeable emptiness behind it, a shadow of the quietly affection grin he saves for Garcia when she insists on inventing some silly nickname for him, or that gently softened look he gives you when you ask him to double-check emails you’re irrationally convinced you wrote incorrectly.
This one feels different. More distant, maybe.
Was that too much? Did you overshoot the tone? Did you mistake his pause for an opening and trample right through it? Did the slides really throw him off? You don’t know, but your mouth is already moving again.
“I mean, no one probably even noticed the color thing. I just… I did. Not that it mattered. The content was what people were paying attention to. Your content, not mine, obviously. Just — sorry, I —”
“The slides were perfect,” he cuts in, shaking his head. “Really, thank you for putting them together.”
Warmth blooms aggressively across your cheeks, spreading upward to your ears until you’re positive they must be visibly burning.
You nod vigorously, maybe too much so, because words seem hazardous at this point. You’re 90% sure the only sound you would make is some kind of mouse-adjacent squeak.
He nods toward the row of now-empty chairs.
“Next time, would you mind sitting a bit closer?” he asks. “If there’s a technical glitch, having you close by could save me from another awkward pause.”
“I was planning to.” You let out a laugh, ducking your head. “But someone got there first and I thought it’d be weird if I challenged them to a duel or something.”
He laughs at that and your heart reacts accordingly.
“Tell you what,” he says, “next time I’ll reserve your seat myself. No need to resort to sword fights on my behalf.”
A chair scrapes violently a few feet away, loud enough to startle you mid-nod. You flinch, pivot slightly, and your purse, which was balanced precariously on the back of your chair, swings off and to the floor.
Lip balm tubes, scattered pens, mint wrappers, crumbled receipts, and a pitiful handful of coins erupt from the bag like tiny projectiles, landing messily at Spencer’s feet.
You’re halfway through an apology that’s shaping up to be spectacularly frantic when he crouches beside you.
“It’s fine —” he reassures, patiently herding your scattered belongings until his hand stops dead, hovering oddly over something.
A folded napkin. He picks it up gently, like he’s trying not to crumple it, and you immediately recognize it, the paper, the stupid casual tilt of the handwriting. The guy’s phone number paired with an invitation for coffee or drinks or something similarly forgettable.
Honestly, you barely registered it at the time, dismissed it entirely after a polite smile and obligatory nod. It meant nothing then. It means even less now.
Your brain lurches, caught in a panicked tug-of-war between explaining yourself, pretending nothing happened, or diving headfirst into an apology (your well-worn, anxiety-ridden default).
Because it all suddenly feels painfully amateurish, unbelievably unprofessional, especially in the relentless spotlight of being the newest face, the eager-to-please media liaison who occasionally gets mistaken for someone’s assistant or coffee-fetcher at least twice per conference.
You already feel like you’re playing catch-up to the rest of them, especially him.
And now, somehow, you’ve inadvertently become the girl who collects phone numbers at work functions. It’s not that you wanted it, but refusing just felt unnecessarily harsh.
And what were you supposed to say?
Sorry, but I’m secretly nursing a hopeless infatuation for the lanky genius on the stage with an alphabet soup of degrees, beautiful hands, and a voice you would happily let narrate even your most tedious existence?
Arguably even less professional.
You take the napkin from his hand quickly, tucking it deep into your bag like maybe that’ll erase the last thirty seconds.
“That wasn’t, um, supposed to be…”
“You don’t have to explain,” Spencer interjects, gaze lowered, “I imagine it happens often.”
You press your lips together. Nervously, you steal a glance at him, noting the clench of his jaw and the almost angry crease between his brows.
“It doesn’t, actually.”
Both of you straighten at once, shoulders grazing clumsily as he smooths down his sleeves.
You silently wish, not for the first time, you could translate his face into something tangible. Profiler by osmosis, apparently, isn’t a thing.
“Well,” he says, like he’s still thinking it over. “They’re clearly behind the curve.”
Your stomach dives into freefall, landing roughly somewhere near where your purse had just been. Still, you muster a breezy smile, hand flicking dismissively.
“Oh, um, you don’t need to say that,” you say lightly, even though your mind is already sprinting between seven — no, eight — different theories on what exactly he meant by that. “But thanks.”
“I think I kind of do. Because if anyone’s asking for your number, I think it should be at least someone who —”
“Dr. Reid?” Someone interrupts, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Do you have a second to talk about the regression data on slide 19?”
Spencer nods, starting to turn, but not before his eyes catch yours again. Just once.
His mouth curves into the slightest of smiles, teasing in a way you’ve never seen, as though he’s entirely aware of the words left unsaid and exactly how they’re going to occupy your thoughts in the meantime.
You despise this new smile. You adore this new smile. You’re doomed, either way.
Without a second glance, you fish the napkin from your purse, walking to the nearest trash can and dropping it inside.
You wonder if he’ll circle back. If he’ll finish the sentence.
And if he doesn’t, well, you’ll be thinking about it anyway.
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Abstracting ART: An Analysis of Fan Designs of Perihelion
I find trends in how fans depict canon characters in fanart to be fascinating; how fans interpret the same information, what becomes a popular trend, how some fans deviate from the norm, and so on. The Murderbot Diaries fandom has this in spades with the original material being largely text where most characters get minimal visual descriptions.
In the realm of fandom designs, the character that interests me the most is ART/Perihelion (who I will be primarily referring to as Perihelion to reduce confusion with the word art). Perihelion is canonically a giant spaceship and sometimes also a much smaller drone. However, most fans do not portray it as such in fanart. Nothing in the books suggests Perihelion has a visible presence in the feed or can perform human-like actions beyond speaking in words, yet this is common in fanart.
For this essay, I’ll be examining the trends in how the fandom visually portrays Perihelion by looking at a sample of fanart depicting it, cataloguing their features, examining what these depictions convey, and speculating on why certain trends exist.
Methodology
All images surveyed were from Tumblr. While Tumblr is a major hub for TMBD fans and creators, it’s far from the only place fans heavily congregate or post fanart. I really just chose this site because I was familiar with it.
To gather images, I searched the Perihelion and Asshole Research Transport tags. I only included an image if it featured Perihelion's physical form, a feed representation, or a design that performed the same function as a feed representation. Once I had gathered links to 220 posts into a spreadsheet, I went back through, removed any accidental duplicates, searched each artist’s blog for other art of Perihelion and placed any posts with a different form or design into the spreadsheet. Essentially, my goal was to gather as few posts as I could to get a full idea of how each artist portrays it. My final sample size was 251 posts from 150 different artists. Using my best judgement, I determined there to be 240 distinct designs for Perihelion. All images were gathered before the release of Platform Decay.
When evaluating each design, I took note of the number of forms and types of bodies (feed, ship, etc.) in each post. I then wrote a brief description of each form. I then classified each one into groups based on common features like number of eyes, shape, type of animal, and so on. Most of the classifications are not mutually exclusive.
I then noted the flat colors of Perihelion's from each image, recorded as hex color codes. Pure and very near blacks and whites were not included if they were being used in a non-notable context, such as black lineart or white sclera. I did not record the colors in clearly monochromatic or uncolored artwork but did note the overall color scheme. For gradients, I recorded only the colors on each end of the gradient. If an extremely broad range of hues were used, I simply recorded those as varied/rainbow. Once recorded, I marked one to three colors as the main color(s) based on their prominence in the design, which is what I’ll be primarily referring to when discussing Perihelion's colors.
Forms of Perihelion
Feed Designs
In fanart, Perihelion is usually portrayed with what I will call a feed representation, as most are meant to represent what it’s doing in the feed. These make up 136, or 57%, of the designs in my sample.
Save a handful of lines about what Perihelion is metaphorically doing in the feed, such as rolling its non-existent eyes or feeling 8 times larger than Murderbot, there’s nothing in the books to suggest it has a form visible in the feed. These designs clearly exist out of the necessities and strengths of static and largely textless visual art. An artist could just draw Perihelion’s ship body (and post-SC, its drone body) but that can be very limiting. It would be very difficult to show it interacting with the much smaller characters inside of it or display its emotions this way. Luckily, the main way it interacts with the other characters, especially our POV character Murderbot, is through the feed, and fans have latched onto this as the main way of portraying this character.
There's a lot of variety in feed designs. Aside from the color blue and a general eldritch vibe, there's no element that dominates. Non-animal life forms and solid non-living objects are near nonexistent as designs, but knowing this fandom, I feel it's only a matter of time until someone draws Perihelion as a tree or a jar full of pennies.
Spaceship Designs
Only 27 of the designs in my sample are of spaceship Perihelion, its main canon body. As a fellow artist, I understand. Drawing a giant machine is difficult for many. Plus, it’s often unnecessary or limiting to portray its ship form in art. Some artists will show dialogue boxes coming from Perihelion’s ship form, but this is rare.
Most ship designs are gray, black, or dark blue, matching the description of its exterior in Network Effect. Likewise, many of the designs are clearly modeled after the original English covers by Jaime Jones and the Subterranean Press illustrations by Tommy Arnold with a torpedo-shaped main body, wide wings, and what appear to be thin projectile weapons protruding from the wings. In fact, 12 of the ship designs, 44%, show Perihelion’s weapons. Almost none of the designs resemble animals or vehicles other than air and spacecraft, and all but one lack even vaguely anthropomorphic features.
Drone and Other Machine Designs
Drone and other non-ship machine designs are slightly more common with a total of 36 in my sample. Only 12 are of the drone in System Collapse. Near all portrayals of this drone are a dome or flat cylinder with several heavily jointed limbs protruding from the underside. All lack clear faces with some only having a visible camera or two or ten to stand in for eyes. They’re near exclusively white, gray, and/or black. A few designs are slightly larger than humans and constructs though most are smaller. Some are much smaller.
Designs for other machine forms vary greatly but still tend to keep Perihelion very robotic. Designs vary from boxes with multiple limbs to floating cameras to miniature planetary rovers. Cameras and simple images on display screens are the closest most of these designs get to a face. Most of these machines are shown floating. The designs shown next to humans or constructs, especially the ones of Perihelion before it was a ship, are all smaller than the other characters. Achromatic colors dominate, though other colors (mostly blue) do regularly appear.
Design Trends
Colors
As you could probably guess, most depictions of Perihelion are blue. I’m defining blue here as any color with a hue from 170 to 260 degrees, a saturation of 10 or higher, and a luminosity from 10 to 95. Of all colored, non-monochromatic fanart in the sample, 155 out of 198 images, or 78%, depict at least one design within this range. Multiple designs that weren’t primarily blue did have blue as the only secondary hue. Even the monochromatic images were near exclusively either grayscale or blue.
This isn’t surprising. Perihelion is canonically blue inside and out. What is a little more surprising are the specific hues and luminosities used. Perihelion and its crew’s uniforms are described as dark blue, though many depictions of are in the cyan/turquoise range and/or have a high luminosity. Color labeling is subjective, though in English, these colors are usually called light blue or at least are not considered dark blue.
I have a couple hypotheses as to why this is. It could be to make the design pop out more from dark lineart, text, and backgrounds. Similarly, these shades could have been chosen to differentiate it from Murderbot and its human crew in their dark clothes. Possibly, it’s that cyan/turquoise blue is more closely associated with advanced technology than other shades of blue. Most artists likely aren’t considering the same things about color classification and canonicity as me. I will note that quite a few designs did use both light and dark blue, possibly for contrast or variety.
The average of all main blue colors is 4DA0DF, a moderately saturated azure blue, close to what many websites call cornflower blue. The full color is shown below. To ensure no one design outweighed the others in my calculation, if a design had multiple blue main colors, I would average those into a single color first.
Achromatic colors account for the second largest main color group. Main colors with a saturation below 10, a luminosity below 10, and/or a luminosity above 95 show up in 29 or about 14% of the colored, non-monochromatic images. Black, white, and near blacks and whites are also common as secondary colors. Most of the primarily achromatic designs are drones, spaceships, or some other machine. Near all drone and non-ship machine designs are mostly or exclusively achromatic.
Like blue, black and to a lesser extent white are Perihelion’s canon colors, though artists may also be using these colors because black and white are versatile accent colors. Their use in the machine forms, especially gray, definitely comes from the typical colors of metal and machines. For feed forms, white and black are used for their associations with parts of Perihelion’s design, such as white for stars and angels and black for shadows and black holes.
Almost all the other main colors fall in the yellow/orange/brown range, which I'll be referring to as gold from here on out. Several designs are exclusively gold, and some have gold as a secondary color. These colors were likely chosen in reference to the Sun. Perihelion refers to the closest an orbiting body gets to the Sun. I also wonder if (and kind of hope) at least one artist was inspired by the orange cover of Artificial Condition, Perihelion’s first appearance.
The full distribution of the individual main colors is shown in the graphs below. Colors with a saturation above 10 and a luminosity from 10 to 95 on in the HSL color space are shown on the hue and luminosity graph. All other main colors are on the achromatic graph.
Eldritch Forms
Among all the variety of Perihelion designs, there is one common theme many of them share. Most designs for Perihelion, especially feed representations, are strange, otherworldly, or even eldritchian. In lots of artwork, Perihelion is portrayed as a shape or series of shapes that don’t clearly resemble any one object or animal. If it does resemble an animal or even a human, it will usually have a huge number of limbs, lack facial features, or be a mishmash of creatures. Perihelion might be a giant star, lines of binary, or another character’s shadow. It’s also common for feed designs to change size, have disconnected parts, or even completely shapeshift.
Even designs for its physical forms will stick to being strange. With rare exception, ship Perihelion will lack any anthropomorphic or animalistic features. Designs of drone Perihelion will more often resemble modern day surveillance cameras, planetary rovers, or Hal 9000 than anything non-mechanical.
Perihelion is an oddity even in-universe. It’s a spaceship that’s far more advanced than most other bots in the series. It can perform dozens if not hundreds of complex tasks at once. It easily rides other systems, including those of other advanced machine intelligences. Its true nature as a hyperadvanced anti-corporate machine is hidden from most humans. Perihelion could and would kill you in a millisecond, but it also likes watching fiction shows. And speaking of killing you, Perihelion is also very frightening. It’s not exactly the kindest to individuals it’s just met, especially other MIs. All this is likely why many artists go for a more abstract or otherworldly approach.
Eyes
Emphasis on eyes is one of the most common trends in Perihelion designs. Several feed designs have more than three eyes or a single giant eye. Some take this to the extreme, where Perihelion is portrayed as just an eye or group of eyes. Sixty-six (66), or 28% of the designs have an eye or eyes as a major element.
Eyes are a really good way of representing how Perihelion can focus on multiple things at once, including places and systems far from its physical body. They’re also a really simple way to show its emotions. Additionally, eyes can be very creepy, great for fanart of Perihelion and Murderbot’s first encounter. (Seriously, that scene is really popular to draw.)
Surprising to at least me is that nearly half of all the designs have no eyes at all. One hundred nine (109) designs, 44%, are eyeless. Granted, a large chunk of these eyeless designs are of spaceship (26) and drone/bot (21) forms, which tend to lack clear facial features overall. (Cameras and lights that visually filled the role of an eye were counted as eyes.) However, nearly a third of all feed designs, a total of 44, lack eyes as well. A lack of eyes highlights Perihelion’s nature as a hyperintelligent spaceship, something so different from the humans that it lacks most or any facial features.
Below are graphs of the number of eyes in each design, as well as graphs breaking down each design type. “Many” means more than two eyes arranged in a way where it’s clear that the exact number is unimportant. “X to Y” means the numbers of eyes changes within the specified range. “X + Many” means there’s one or two clear main eyes and a larger number of secondary eyes.
Humanoid Designs
Humanoid designs of Perihelion are among the least common with 33, or 14%, of designs falling under this category. Aside from a few all-human AU designs, these designs deviate heavily from real humans. Some lack certain or all facial features. Others have more than three eyes. It’s common for these designs to lack legs. Several humanoid designs are stylized differently than other characters. Its body may be composed of pixels or a starfield. Two thirds, or 22, of the designs lack clothes.
Six (6) of these designs are an actual human Perihelion (AU or otherwise). In artwork featuring both Perihelion and Murderbot, the former is usually taller, reflecting their relative canon sizes. It usually also has dark skin and/or curls much like its human sibling, Iris. What it wears varies but, it's usually in modern-day Western clothing.
Portraying Perihelion in the feed with a humanoid form emphasizes its human-like qualities. It also lets Perihelion do things only a human could, such as resting a hand on another character’s shoulder, holding objects, or making human-like expressions. Some designs that aren’t fully humanoid still give Perihelion hands or a simple face presumably for the same reasons. The mix of inhuman traits keeps Perihelion in the realm of the strange.
Animal/Creature Designs
Exactly 63, or 26%, of the designs fall under the animal/creature category. Any design that closely resembles a specific real-world animal, looks like a popular mythological feature, or had a mix of clearly animalistic features such as paws or wings, I classified under the animal/creature category. You can see the full distribution in the graph below, but I will talk about the most common and interesting trends.
With real animals, Perihelion is most often an arthropod (15), fish (7), domestic cat (7), or jellyfish (6). The arthropod designs are likely playing with the terrifying/creepy vibe Perihelion and bugs both sometimes have. I will note that 11 of these arthropod designs are of the SC drone with a round body and insect or spider-like limbs.
It’s possible that these same reasons inspired jellyfish designs. Jellyfish are also much less familiar to humans and can be very dangerous, fitting into the powerful and eldritch vibes many other designs go for. Four of these jellyfish designs are of the SC drone. Just like arthropods, jellyfish largely fit the canon description of a floating oval with multiple limbs. Representing it as a jellyfish also works with the “outer space as an ocean” metaphor.
This also works with fish designs. In 5 of the fish designs, Perihelion is a school of fish. This fits the “large and diffuse” description of its feed presence in Artificial Condition, and much like a collection of eyes, represents Perihelion’s ability to focus on multiple things at once. It also allows Perihelion to be represented as either one large (and terrifying) mass or as a single creature.
As for cat Perihelion, I wonder how much of that stems from fans comparing Murderbot to a cat. Maybe the association rubbed off on its favorite asshole research transport.
A lot of these designs are of fictitious creatures. Perihelion is a dragon or serpent in 14 designs (with only 1 of these designs being unambiguously a real-world snake) and a biblically accurate angel (feathered wings and an unconventional arrangement of eyes) in 5 designs. The “other fictional creature” category includes 11 designs. Eight of these aren’t any creature I recognize from mythology or another work and were likely made up entirely by the artist. These creatures tend to be round or blobby, have four or more limbs ending in hands or paws, stand on at least four of these limbs, and have more than 2 eyes. My guess as to why some artists go for fictional creature designs is that they highlight Perihelion’s strangeness and power, that it is so unlike any most other beings that it’s more like a mythological creature or alien than real animal. Even most of the designs modeled after a single real animal will have a few unrealistic features, like many eyes or unnatural colors.
Oh, and there’s two long Furby designs. Makes me wonder if there’s some Furby-Perihelion joke floating around that I’m just unaware of.
Shape-Based Designs
Most Perihelion designs I classified under the “shape” category. A total of 126 designs, 52%, have generic shapes or geometric patterns as a major element. Shapes abstract Perihelion visually, and some shapes bring to mind the mathematical accuracy and precision of computers.
Circles/spheres show up the most often, being in 39 designs. Note though that 11 of these are the canonically round SC drone. (Yes, some of these might have been ovals, but given the perspective, I’m not 100% sure, so they go in the circular hole.) In some designs, it’s clear that this is a reference to celestial bodies or the circles are meant to be eyes.
Smooth blobby shapes show up almost as often, being in 36 designs. Many of these have a large number of eyes and/or a pattern within its form. These designs allow Perihelion to morph and give off a fluid feel to the character.
Pixels, clusters of small rectangles, appear in 26 designs, while larger or unclustered rectangles show up 21 designs. I separated these categories because each shape is utilized differently. Non-pixel rectangles usually resemble a computer screen, having similar ratios to one and/or showing what Perihelion is doing or seeing elsewhere. In some cases, the rectangles are physical display screens or in-universe holograms. Some even partially function as speech bubbles. Pixels instead are usually just a pattern on the larger design or an accent rather than the main focus, showcasing that this is a digital form. Circuit board patterns, showing up in 11 designs. Unlike pixels though, circuit board patterns do appear in some physical machine forms.
Boundaryless Designs
While researching I found that quite a few feed designs lack a clear boundary, are modeled after things that take up a lot of space, or are even resemble full locations, 31 or 13% to be exact. This takes the “large and diffuse” description to the extreme. There’s immense variety in these designs. Some are masses of code or pixels or swirls filling the entire scene. Others are repeating patterns that flow off the page. In more than one design, Perihelion is an unending body of water or a giant storm cloud. In 10 designs, it’s a starfield of some sort, reflecting the space it inhabits.
Literal Approximations
While most artists pull in some way from what Perihelion actually is when deciding how to depict it, some artists will go as close to literal as they can with the constraints (and strengths) of a static, soundless image. Parts of Perihelion’s ship interior, such as cameras, lights, and walls, will serve the same function as a feed design, giving Perihelion a way to visibly emote and interact with the other characters. Circuit board lines, binary, and lines of code show up in several designs, with a few being purely just code or circuitry. Some designs will display the various tasks it is performing. A few designs stick to just text when portraying it, using color, font, and so on to convey that Perihelion is speaking and what its mood is. I classified 24, or 10%, of designs under this "literal approximation" category.
In conclusion, the average Perihelion is a spaceship ripped straight from the Artificial Condition cover that occasionally is also a tiny floating gray dome with thin limbs and camera for a face. Its feed presence is a cluster of cornflower blue and grayscale pixels that shapeshift between a human with no shirt, no shoes, and no face, a biblically accurate dragon with a million eyes, and an endless starry ocean. Or at least that’s what it is based on the images I gathered and my own judgement.
Contemplations on Ardra Nakshatra and the Cruelty Inherent to Existence
"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted."
"Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one."
— Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Ardra Moon
Today, we’re going to contemplate Ardra, the nakshatra through which we may understand the exact nature and cause of universal suffering. This understanding of the universe forms the basis of my spiritual philosophy and why I am constantly screaming for our collective liberation.
When we think about what makes us suffer in life, we tend to point the finger at economic systems and societal flaws, describing them as the root causes of all suffering. Money, as we know, is said to be the “root of all evil.” But we must collectively understand that it goes much deeper than that.
All suffering comes from the foundational nature and structure of the universe. Its duality and therefore its inherent division are what causes us to continuously struggle with little to no returns for our efforts. To elucidate this, I came up with a way to easily visualize the concept through examining that which is the basis of life as we know it: DNA.
DNA is a molecule that not just humanity, but all life forms, strive to maintain the structural integrity of. To do this, life forms need energy. They need energy to carry out basic cellular functions, to protect themselves, and to reproduce—all of which serve to maintain the integrity and continuity of DNA. Energy is a resource that is finite, since all matter and energy in the universe is finite, as far as we know, and as far as what we have access to. Therefore, there is a finite amount of resources, which means that this process of structural maintenance cannot go on forever, because finite resources will run out.
On top of this, the universe is expanding and accelerating in its expansion. This causes an increase in entropy, where the universe becomes increasingly disorderly and it becomes increasingly impossible for things to maintain their structural integrity or “orderliness.” This universal phenomenon of destruction directly threatens the integrity of DNA. It thus becomes clear that life is fighting a fool’s battle against the very forces of the universe, with a finite amount of resources to maintain its own existence. It is a zero sum game.
This constant battle for resources is everywhere. This is what causes violence in all forms of life. It even causes violence (which I define as the destruction of structural integrity) to that which is not alive. And so, violence and oppression are not unique to human beings. In order for creatures to maintain their own structural integrity, they need to absorb resources, which necessarily entails the destruction of the structural integrity of other entities to gain the resources they either contain or possess.
This is why lions kill wildebeest, why cows kill grass, why humans kill non-humans and each other, why plants kill insects, why insects kill each other, and so on, and so on, and so on. Even when there is no direct killing involved, in the case of, for example, non-carnivorous plants, there is, in fact, a destruction of structural integrity. Plants photosynthesize by obtaining light from the Sun, which emits light due to a process in its core called nuclear fusion, where elements are fused together in a process that releases energy. This process is what essentially destroys the structural integrity of the Sun, which will eventually die. And so the destruction of the structural integrity of the Sun maintains the structural integrity of terrestrial plant life. And hell, even plants are incredibly violent to one another, and I know this thanks to this post I read the other day.
My point here, if I haven’t reiterated it enough, is that the process of maintaining one’s structural integrity necessarily entails the destruction of another’s, and this is precisely the violence that is inherent to the universe and that causes suffering for all. Therefore, the very nature of existence is suffering. The desire to exist in this universe is in itself the root of all evil, of all the violence that is enacted in the name of existing on one side of the [exists / does not exist] dichotomy.
In Ardra nakshatra, we are forced to confront this harsh reality head-on. Biblical scripture has referred to this universe as the Valley of Tears, reminiscent of Ardra’s teardrop symbol. This tikshna nakshatra shows exactly how the dualistic foundation of the universe is the cause of all violence. The very nature of conflict requires at least 2 entities, with one causing the destruction of the other or both causing the destruction of each other. An axe cannot cut itself. It must first be divided into axehead and axe handle, at which point the axehead can be used to cut i.e. destroy the handle. And so the very reason that violence, conflict, and suffering can occur is because of the very existence of division and duality. A schism, a rift, a crack, it may be called. Ardra with its core essence allows us to see this violent realm for what it is.
And more importantly, you may have heard it said that Ardra is the fall from the “Garden of Eden”, a supposedly paradisiacal place where everything is sunshine and rainbows in which Adam and Eve are living with all the little birdies and monkeys like it’s some kind of fucking Disney movie. Ardra is supposedly the “Fall” where we are thrust into a world of division and chaos. But it’s not. Now, I will state the most important teaching of Ardra, which is that:
We already exist in Hell.
Ardra is where our eyes are opened to the true horror of existence in this universe where everything is constantly eating each other in an incessant process of destruction and consumption. There are people being bombed, shot, and burned alive in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza right now. There is a wildebeest somewhere in Kenya being eaten alive by hyenas. There are thousands dying of terminal cancer. Some are dying of the Ebola virus. A lioness has just killed a wild dog cub. A pack of wild dogs is eating a pregnant impala alive, devouring her fawn too. A polar bear has just killed a seal and her pup. An orca has just eaten the liver of a great white shark and left the rest of the corpse to rot in bacteria that will feast on it. A neutron star is tearing a planet apart. A black hole is ripping a star apart. A baby crocodile has just killed a baby rabbit. There are people being tortured and murdered. There are non-human animals being tortured and murdered, by humans… Hell, even the fucking trees are killing each other. I could go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
And so in Ardra, there is no “Fall”. In Ardra, we simply realize that the “Garden of Eden” that we still exist and languish in has been the Hell we’ve been so scared of all along. Hell isn’t some distant subterranean place of fire and brimstone and suffering and torment.
So we’ve finally met Blonde Lady in the series (her name is LeeBeeBee), and I think she’s filling a really interesting and important role plot-wise and worldbuilding-wise, and doing so in unexpected ways that are surprising even book-readers. She’s wholly original to the show, so no one knows what precisely the writers have planned for her.
But I certainly have thoughts and predictions.
I figured I’d break my thoughts on her up into two sections. The first section is for all the folks who are show-only, and I’ll only be examining her role in S1E5, without any additional speculation pulling from book knowledge and what I think the writers are doing with her in the longer term. The second part will speculate on the upcoming episode, and how I think it could play out. No idea if I’m right about everything (or anything!), but it’s always fun to speculate!
FUNCTION IN S1E5 (SPOILERS FOR E1-5)
Let’s kick it off by talking about LeeBeeBee in isolation in this episode, what her function in this particular episode was, what she does for the plot, the larger world, and what she does for the storytelling format.
Let’s start with her plot function, the most obvious part of her role in this episode. She appears at the beginning as the sole survivor of DeltFall, makeup smeared and uniform dirty. This immediately sets her apart from the PresAux gang. She’s apparently the indentured cleaner that DeltFall rented for the hab along with the SecUnits, and this cleaner is wearing makeup despite having a physically laborious job in a field unit on a mostly-uninhabited planet.
This small bit of visual storytelling sets DeltFall up as a very different society to PresAux. PresAux deliberately only took one (cheap) SecUnit, which is understandable given their objections to using constructs as slave labor. None of them wear makeup in the field, and they certainly don’t have a cleaner.
But DeltFall not only had multiple constructs, but also an indentured servant to do housekeeping, and there is either an expectation or a cultural norm that she be made up while she do her indentured job. They feel, from this introduction, very Corporation Rim.
LeeBeeBee herself acts as a personification of the Corporation Rim on a level we haven’t been able to dig into with the limited screentime of the Company Tech Bro sales reps. From her first scene on the hopper, she feels like she’s from a completely different world to the empathetic and sweet Preservationers. She almost immediately objectifies SecUnit in a way that is openly offputting to both the audience and clearly to the Preservation crew, who likely don’t say anything both out of shock and out of some belief that this woman has to have some sort of brain damage to say something like that.
But this level of objectification, I think, lies at the heart of the Corporation Rim. It’s not that constructs are objects, but their workers are valued. LeeBeeBee is an indentured servant. She has no more free will than SecUnit. She objectifies it because she sees herself as a step above a construct, and in the CR hierarchy, you’re likely encouraged to objectify anyone beneath you. And that comes around to something equally uncomfortable when she finds out it’s got a hacked governor module and is a rogue. She views it as a person now, but what does that mean?
She objectifies herself for it.
And doesn’t that make the worst sort of sense on a survival level for a person in her position? She’s fully adapted to doing what she has to do to survive. She views sex in an incredibly transactional and exploitative way. When she thinks SecUnit is an object, she has the power and she immediately speculates about using it as a sex toy. When she shifts into thinking of it as a person, she also knows how dangerous it is, and reverses their power dynamic, offering sex as a transactional way to protect herself.
It’s awful, deliberately so. But I think it’s a great and visceral way to get into the Corporation Rim mindset: constructs aren’t special; everyone who isn’t wealthy or powerful is an object. You don’t get to be a person with fully autonomous choices until you’re one of the elite. Until then, sex is just another way of trying to get a slight advantage in an endless rat race.
Having LeeBeeBee represent this deeply uncomfortable aspect of an end-stage capitalist hellscape like the CR also does something on a storytelling level. This addition of an outsider character fully shifts the POV in the show. Up until her introduction, the PresAux crew felt like the strange outsiders that MB was judging, but by introducing the worst possible representation of the CR, our alignment completely shifts. We are not only on Preservation’s side, but we are insiders with them. They now feel normal and lived in, and she feels like the outsider. And this reflects the shift going on in Murderbot. Even before it’s willing to acknowledge it, through the framing of LeeBeeBee we subconsciously know it has realigned itself with the PresAux crew.
So that’s why I think she was an effective addition in this episode. If you’re interested in some book spoilers and speculation for the next episode, jump below the cut.
FUNCTION IN S1E6 AND BEYOND (SPECULATION, SPOILERS FOR ‘ALL SYSTEMS RED’)
Are they gone?
Groovy. Let’s get under the hood and talk about all the ways she’s working on multiple levels, not just embodying all the worst parts of the CR as I previously mentioned, but playing it up as a means of camoflage. Because LeeBeeBee is almost certainly a GrayCris plant, precisely what SecUnit and Mensah were worried about, and the crew absolutely did take her in despite the danger because they are good people. And they would do the right thing, even if Murderbot objected.
It’s so nice to get to see exactly how DeltFall might have been infiltrated, which we didn’t get to see in the book. And so many of her lines read differently when you think of her as a plant. Did DeltFall call PresAux ‘the Amateurs,’ or was that GrayCris? Did DeltFall actually have an indentured servant, or is that GrayCris?
I think that a lot of what she’s saying is truthful, or is just a slight twist on the truth. I do think she’s likely indentured. I do think she views others and herself as objects to be used and exploited and discarded. She’s suffering under one of the cruelest practices in the Corporation Rim, but she’s still fully bought into the CR propaganda and mindset. Rather than defecting and embracing freedom the way Gurathin likely did, she’s almost certainly looking at getting years shaved off her indenture by acting as an infiltrator and assassin
That’s so perfectly horrid. She would rather still be indentured but get in better with her bosses than accept real freedom. It’s a cowardice I think we can all see in our world, that she would take the safe misery and be willing to hurt others to do it, rather than take a major risk and step outside the system.
She’s also dialing up her inherent objectification of others to a level that makes her deliberately off-putting, so the PresAux crew want to look away from her rather than examining her too closely. If they just want to sort of ignore her, then they’re not going to dig too far into her actions. If she runs off to communicate back to GrayCris regarding a rogue SecUnit they’re not going to follow her, and are going to be glad to get a break from her.
Her distraction tactics work particularly well against Murderbot, who she makes wildly uncomfortable to the point it’s very glad to get away from her, and is likely deliberately trying not to think of her. If you watch who she’s targeting with this barrage of unpleasantness, she does it first as a blanket with the crew to gauge reaction, then targets it at SecUnit once she realizes that it’s not being controlled by the combat override, and that it’s fully rogue. There’s no easy way for her to control it (as I suspect she was controlling the DeltFall SecUnits), so she had to improvise, because as far as she’s concerned, this independent SecUnit is the #1 threat to her plan to kill the PresAux crew. She must have been so relieved when it went with Mensah to trigger the beacon, because she knew the beacon was rigged to explode, and she had a good chance of getting rid of both the biggest threat and the team leader, and she didn’t even have to do anything!
Which, to her mind, only leaves the rest of the PresAux team to deal with. After SecUnit, she almost certainly considers Gurathin the next biggest threat, because she would certainly underestimate the Preservationers, but he’s ex-corporate, so she would respect the threat he posed. So after Mensah and SecUnit are gone, she zeroes in on Gurathin.
I think she almost certainly has a dossier or some other large amount of personal and professional information about him from his days in the CR. What did she do when she first talked to him after Mensah and Murderbot were gone? She offered him a stimulant. I’m now convinced that his therapy modules were—in addition to being for generalized trauma (why did you learn to be quiet, Gurathin??)—meant to treat a stimulant addiction he struggled with after using them to work whatever insane hours he was required to work when he was in the CR.
I think this next episode is going to be Gurathin-heavy. The writers are setting up deliberate contrasts between the die-hard-to-a-horrific-level Corpo LeeBeeBee and Defector-with-Trauma ex-Corpo Gurathin. I wonder if he won’t try to sort of reach out to her in the next episode (was he indentured too?), convince her to defect too, only to have her turn it all around on him and use his backstory against him. If he was indentured, did he break contract to run to Preservation? Is there a bounty on him? Is there a bounty on his AUGMENTS, body not needed in return?
I sort of have an image of the next episode playing out like a horror film, where we realize that LeeBeeBee is the exact infiltrator that took out DeltFall, that GrayCris SecUnits are incoming, MB and Mensah may already be dead, and the person who was responsible for the DeltFall massacre is inside the hab right now.
Especially if we don’t know what happened to MB and Mensah for the majority of the episode, instead focusing on the rest of the group. Without the snarky voiceover, the terror of the situation could really get hammered home. Again, this is fully speculation of how it might play out next episode, but my guess is that the big cliffhanger next episode is going to be LeeBeeBee attacking Gurathin. Previews have shown him with a bandage on his leg, and holding a cane, which some people have pointed out looks like a blind walking cane. That makes me wonder if she manages to not only disable him with a shot to the leg, but damage visual augments he might have, rendering him partially blind.
I think we’ve also been getting a lot of background work with Gurathin being terrified of rejection and abandonment throughout this season. He and MB parallel one another in not wanting to share Mensah, because they both are afraid the other will manage to take her from them (completely ignoring that Mensah has two fucking hands, and more than enough love in her to love her family, and both of these idiots too). If LeeBeeBee really wants to twist the knife in him, she’s going to tell him that if the others are going to survive, they have to abandon him.
And Pin-Lee, Arada, Bharadwaj, and Ratthi are almost certainly going to refuse. Much like Mensah refused to abandon MB when it was damaged, they’re going to refuse to leave their friend behind. Because they can disagree with him, they can think he’s wrong about SecUnit, but they still love him and won’t leave him.
This sets up E7 to be the big turning point between the nadir of act 2 (MB and Mensah may be dead, Gurathin is injured, and the others are in direct danger because they won’t leave him behind), and the start of act 3 (MB and Mensah return and save everyone! They can all come together, defeat GrayCris and escape alive!).
And all of this gets facilitated because of the introduction of LeeBeeBee, who acts as a face for GrayCris (and likely a way to give us information about them) and for the whole vicious corporate people-as-objects theme that consumes the Corporation Rim. It’s so much easier to loath GrayCris when we can see the sorts of people it creates, and she is such a great example of that.
I really wonder what your opinion is on the reason Mike didn’t say “I love you” to El. For some people, it’s because he didn’t want to lose her and shes gonna commit suicide, so it doesn’t make sense 🧐 I don’t know about this, so I’m confused.
honestly, the reason mike doesn’t say “i love you” to el becomes incredibly clear once you look at the writing with even basic narrative literacy. the suicide prevention explanation people throw around collapses the second you examine the actual text, blocking, and emotional architecture of the moment. if the writers wanted mike to say “i love you,” he would have said it. instead, they built an entire sequence around the absence of that line, which tells you the omission is intentional, not accidental.
and the “he didn’t want to lose her” argument misunderstands how tension works. if a character is terrified of losing someone, that’s exactly when writers let them confess their love. it’s a classic cinematic beat: fear → confession → emotional payoff. stranger things deliberately withholds that payoff. the tension isn’t “will he say it,” it’s “why can’t he say it.”
and then there’s the part people conveniently ignore: the void scene is allegedly in mike’s head. el never drags him into the void. that entire “goodbye” moment could be his own imagined scenario, his own fear, his own projection, his own internal crisis. It’s not real. It’s not shared. It’s not a psychic connection. It’s mike’s subconscious staging a worst case scenario, and even in a fantasy he controls, where he could say anything without consequence, he still cannot say “i love you” back. that alone tells you everything.
mike still cannot say “i love you” to her. at that point, it stops being ambiguity and becomes textual clarity. if he loved her romantically, the writers would have resolved it. the fact that he still can’t say it, not in a crisis, not in safety, not in private, not in public, is the clearest proof that he doesn’t feel it. the story isn’t hiding that; it’s highlighting it. he can and only force out “i love you” when she’s unconscious and can’t respond. that’s not a confession; that’s panic. and the fact that he still can’t say it to her face later is the writers underlining the point in neon.
thematically, and based on what i was literally taught about the craft, the show was setting up byler whether someone ships it or not. mike’s romantic uncertainty isn’t just a character quirk, it’s a narrative beat that’s been framed, lit, and paced with intention. will’s unspoken love is allowed to sit in the negative space of scenes, shaping tone even when he isn’t speaking. the emotional parallels are constructed through blocking and visual callbacks, not coincidence.
and the camera work makes it even harder to deny. the way the lens lingers on mike’s reactions to will, not el, will, is doing deliberate emotional labour. it was guiding the audience’s gaze, telling you where the story’s centre of gravity actually is. even the pink sky in the field scene, which is brilliant cinematography, functions as a visual metaphor for a moment of emotional clarity that mike can’t articulate yet. all of it collectively undermines the idea that mike’s feelings for el were ever meant to be the romantic endgame the text kept insisting on.
WHY DO PEOPLE THINK YOU LOOK LIKE SAM REICH WHATEVER THE HELL HIS NAME IS YOU TWO LOOK NOTHING ALIKE. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT VIBES. (also you two's facial features aren't that similar you both are white guys with completely different styles)
It's very frustrating, but I am learning that a lot of people abstract "suit" to mean "jacket + shirt & tie + pants" and don't see any other differences.
These two looks are effectively identical to a lot of people. Even though the personas these outfits evoke are very different:
All of the other visual language of these garments has been compressed to the point of being rendered meaningless. (Thanks to the folks who have admitted in followups that they truly could not distinguish between these outfits, much less know their physical and cultural functions are for a modern gameshow host style vs a vintage country gentleman.).
It's also why people think I am dressed "Victorian" (or even older) here. They see the "suit" (I am wearing low rise jeans and a casual button up, mostly J. Crew stuff) and the color brown, as those are quickly becoming the only meaningful indicators of "Victorian".
So, these fits are likewise identical to a lot of people (the third is less because of the look of the outfit and more that people are bad at assigning century to fashion. But some will insist I am 18th century nonetheless):
Same thing with beards. A full beard on a man is a full beard, brain shut off. People cannot articulate how the beard changes face shape and I wonder if they can even *see* the differences (For example, Reich has a very bottom-heavy triangle shape with his beard and I have a more diamond shape).
The uptick in this phenomenon makes me wonder if it's fallout from the sheer amount of content people consume, and the speed at which they do so -- instead of broadening their palette, everything get flattened into an increasingly narrow slot.
Capitalism ruthlessly mines aesthetics to sell products, instead of caring about how design communicates culture and other meaning. Context, form, and function are becoming increasingly detatched. Non-verbal and non-written communication is rapidly becoming forgotten, while even the spoken and written word degrade.
And AI, of course, continues to make this all worse. We're losing a lot of cultural language very, very quickly as fashion, music, *everything* is treated as interchangeable and exploitable.
I do not expect people to be able to define what makes *my* aesthetic my own, but I am getting increasingly frustrated at how detatched folks are getting from culture - to understand that art and even the look of functional objects have *meaning* - to the point where people don't even realize how detached they have become.
And what really sticks in my craw is the absolute, arrogant confidence at which some people say all of this stuff is the same, and that any differences are superficial/meaningless and that I should bow to their ignorant, content-rich blandness.
I am at a loss at how to combat this at scale, as an individual. Other than shunning AI and the tech bro mindset, I can only encourage people to be curious about what they consume. And to think critically about what their own tastes mean to them -- being able to articulate what you like and do not like about something (a fashion trend, song, painting, whatever) and be able to learn more about it and its influences.
And above all, create your own art, examine it in the same deliberate way. And if it's art you like just because it "looks cool", I desperately urge you to unpack that, to ask yourself what "cool" even means to you -- does it actually resonate with you, or is it some commercial shorthand you have been spoonfed?
This is an excerpt from my work-in-progress large meta examination on thet qunari from DAO through to DATV. But since that is taking a long time, I thought it might be worth it to post this piece alone now, since it works on its own as well.
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The Qunari Design
In Dragon Age: Origins (DAO) the qunari all had the same brown metallic skin. This is because the developers only bothered to make one skin tint for the use of Sten, the qunari companion. They gave this skin tint to every other qunari NPC as well. This is also why there is only the one hairstyle that Sten uses for qunari, with the few NPCs either being bald or using his same hair. Essentially, Sten was the blueprint for all qunari, originally.
No qunari have horns in DAO like they do in the rest of the franchise. According to developer David Gaider, the qunari were always meant to have horns, but did not in DAO because it would have meant Sten couldn’t wear a helmet. This led to the lore decision that some qunari are born hornless as a rare genetic quirk, to account for the later change in design.
Dragon Age II (DA2) saw a drastic change in how the qunari look. Unlike the elves, humans, and dwarves in DA2, the qunari do not use head morphs allowing for individual designs; they have standardized creature models. (The only exception in the base game is the Arishok, who has his own special model.) The qunari moved from having Sten’s brown skin to grey metallic skin, their eye sclera was changed to black, and they were given the horns the developers originally wanted.
It is a well-known fact that DA2 was under immense development restrictions that led to all kinds of cut corners. However, it is worth pointing out the negative impact of choosing an entire race’s design functionality as one of those cut corners. The qunari in DA2 are, for the most part, treated like nothing but unthinking monsters for Hawke to squish, no different than giant spiders or darkspawn. Making them all look the same adds to this effect; they are stripped of any sense of personable traits.
A medium between DAO and DA2 was reached in Dragon Age: Inquisition (DAI), through introducing the player’s ability to make a qunari protagonist. DAI allows the player to choose between few brownish and a few greyish skin colours for their qunari character. The black sclera was changed to white again, as the qunari use the same eye texture and colouring functionality as all the other races. The character creation works just the same for qunari as it does for any other race, allowing for individual appearances left to the player’s imagination.
However, as far as NPCs go, there are no qunari in the base game of DAI, making Iron Bull as a companion the only qunari presence until the Trespasser DLC. This does not leave much room to judge the appearance of other qunari characters.
DATV is just like DAI in its character creation capabilities, with the one expansion being the player can make their character have black sclera like in DA2 if they so choose. For all DATV’s faults with the qunari, at least we can say that the character creation is great. Taash and their mother Shathann also have lovely, unique designs. Where things become uncomfortable with the qunari designs… is in the Reavers.
It is established lore from the previous franchise installments that Reavers gain their special powers through drinking draconic blood, though these Antaam Reavers have been altered by Ghilan’nain. My personal assumption is that blighted dragon blood was used. Regardless of how these Reavers came to be, they are unprecedented, horrific monsters, and it is only ever qunari that we see subjected to this kind of disfigurement. This really doubles down on turning them into standardised monsters like in DA2.
Going through all these qunari design changes can make a player’s head spin. But I believe it is an important, visual example of an overarching theme with the qunari: the developers have never really cemented what they want them to be. The writing throughout the years suggests the same.
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Stay tuned for the full piece sometime in the future, where I will get into the writing!
