#murderbot critical

[novella-november]

If I have to read the term "hot liquid" again I am going to mcfreakin lose it, friends.

[catsark]

I really enjoyed the Murderbot TV series but now that I'm reading the novella it just doesn't really connect with me as much.

It feels like MB is just happy to go along with humans, doesn't even resent them unless they act annoying.

But my main issue is the humans. They seem to be completely OK treating MB just like a slave. Not even a robot just kind of a regular slave.

In the show the characters are horrified to learn they will have to be complicit in slavery if they want to go on their expedition and tell MB from the start it can do whatever it wants and doesn't have to listen to them (although the show has its own problems).

In the book they went out of their way to get MB (aren't forced) and then they dont seem to really care if they treat it like a slave except for when they feel uncomfortable with it.

I just kinda feel bad for MB. In the book its depicted as completely loyal to people who literally enslaved it. Its constantly just saying "wow most slavers would be reckless stupid and abusive but MY slavers are so smart so nice I love them :))))".

Maybe it was just easier to ignore some things when it was confident and self assured and happy to kill any human (justified cuz THEY ENSLAVED IT).

Its very "house elf" coded.

[marypenelope]

I am, at best, conflicted about the Murderbot series thus far.

There's plenty to be said about how the queer aspects (the polyamory and MB's pronouns especially) are being handled awkwardly at best, not to mention how the eye contact scene was extremely ableist.

I could also complain about how they took the boring route of making Sanctuary Moon a Star Trek rip off when the actual show as described in the books is about a colony, not a ship of explorers or whatever. There's plenty of little details I could nitpick about

But I think, representation issues aside, there are 2 things that really bother me

First is the way PresAux is treating Murderbot. In the books, despite not always knowing how to behave around it or interact with it, the team nevertheless always respected it as a person. For them to go so far as to have Gurathin (who never liked Murderbot, but still never treated it as an object) to openly and blatantly state his intention to have it melted down for scraps after the mission, and no one to call him out on him literally planning the death of a sentient being??? That's insane. I don't care if we've added in some CorpRim backstory for the guy, that is not something he would say or that PresAux would let him get away with saying.

The second issue I have is about the shows composition/presentation/whatever its called. I think they had a great way to push things being from Murderbot's POV by explicitly using the security cameras and drones to frame how the show was shot overall. I think it would have been more interesting visually, and I think it would have better fit the narrative. I mean, with the drones especially you could have basically all the regular ass shots that are already in the show, just throw in that bit of worldbuilding about where the video is coming from! Yeah, it'd mean they have to get a bit more creative about it in later episodes/seasons, such as when MB doesn't have a ton of access to security cameras or when it's drones are destroyed, but at least that's interesting!

Sigh.

I did actually mostly like Skarsgård's performance, though. It was a bit over the top, but really conveyed just how awkward Murderbot is in basically any situation where it has to interact with others. I also like that the show blatantly displays MB lifting social scripts from Sanctuary Moon.

I don't know. I'm going to keep watching for now, but so far I'm honestly disappointed

[hollow-keys]

So the Murderbot trailer is out and not only do they still have a white cis perisex man playing a brown androgynous agender character and Martha Wells is still 100% positive on it with no sign of any disagreement or lack of enthusiasm, but in new news Murderbot continually shows its face and Skarsgård's voice is entirely wrong so you can't even hope for a good adaptation of its character.

[dykesville]

i think i finally put to words what rubs me the wrong way about system collapse

crit incoming, so if you don't want to engage with critiques of the series, no hard feelings, fare thee well

this statement is not true ☝🏾  and in-universe it is never challenged.  it's actually reinforced.

art believes mb should be stepping up to take hits instead of the humans

and everyone else supports that

and they make statements about its having other choices which do not function as dissuasion.

and while it all reads as sincere – that is, i'm sure everyone would agree that secunit resting would be ideal – the characters are still talking out of both sides of their mouths, encouraging secunit to both work and rest in one breath.

in-fiction, this is realistic; the work is urgent and someone needs to do it and all of the characters are outside their comfort zones, not just secunit.  they're all working straight out of a traumatic experience, not just secunit.  but on the other hand, while most of the cast have had a rough few days, secunit's trauma is compounding over its entire life, and unlike art's crew it never signed up for the kinds of trauma it has just experienced (being kidnapped into a hostile situation, waking up alone on a foreign planet, being infected with alien malware).  the argument exists that this mission should go ahead without secunit on it.  and in response to the fact that its presence makes the humans safer, remember that the team would probably still be doing this work if secunit and three weren't with them.  they'd have to go at a slower, more cautious pace, but protocols just definitely exist for the augmented/humans to visit the colony on their own.

fundamentally, secunit believes that the purpose of its life is to be of service.  and no one in the story challenges that belief.  they reinforce it.

in the fiction, we're told that bots have functions, and there's an idea (mb speculates on some bots being coded as "adversarial" or "childlike") that bots are coded to want to perform their function.  but even in the text there's confutation of that.  the preservation bots choose their own jobs.  and mb says:

secunit doesn't need to do security to be worth the space it takes up in the world.  secunit doesn't need to do security just because it's good at it.  and the idea that secunit might not need to do security to be happy is something i think we can broach a little more seriously.  and i wish system collapse had gotten there.

(idk.  it's just a small gripe, and i did still like the book, especially the end of the book.  i know i'm far from the first person to point out that wells kind of writes by the seat of her pants.  and i don't know that this is necessarily a productive criticism bc ultimately i'm asking for something i am probably never going to get (from canon) but i definitely would love to start a conversation/hear others' thoughts)

[what-the-dragon-said]

While we’re on the subject, in the original story the group murderbot defends aren’t hippies, they’re scientists. They were called hippies once (if I remember right) as an insult because they live in a commune. It seems in incredibly bad faith to downplay the heroes role as scientists when we are in the middle of a major attack on science and scientists.

[novella-november]

Watching the original robocop.

These guys are not playing around when it comes to gore and gunshot injuries.

It's actually astonishing how the main character's injuries perfectly match the injuries Murderbot receives every other scene in every single novella-- but unlike Murderbot, Robocop *actually understands the horror and devastation of these things* and even *with* the premise of "Cop almost dies, gets rebuilt as a cyborg"--

we're still here, lingering, for minutes and minutes and minutes over the protagonists' horrific injuries and the fact that he is actively dying in agony, seeing his entire life flash before his eyes, as doctors and nurses run around trying to save him...

.... In Murderbot, this level of injury exists for scant sentences, paragraphs, perhaps pages at a time, before being instantly cured off screen, and don't actually impact the titular character's actions in any meaningful except to give the author an excuse to knock the character unconscious for a convenient timeskip while the rest of the plot happens off screen.

Like.

If you can handle gore (1980s practical gore), and you were a Murderbot fan / wanted to like the series and couldn't get into it, watch the 1987 Robocop.

Everyone who described Murderbot as a watered down rip off of Robocop was calling it hook line and sinker and I'm only 30 minutes in.

There's still over an hour left in this movie and there are so many plotlines, character arcs, and social commentary being set up.

Is it probably going to end up being some flavor of copaganda? Most likely. But at minimum, its staunchly, violently opposing the militarization of police and privatized police

[novella-november]

If the point of a work is to inspire conversations critiquing oppressive systems, then why do so many stans (and authors) get so up in arms when people start conversations *critiquing the oppressive systems upheld in the work?*

If a book is marketed as a Dystopia, that means it is *inherently* trying to speak directly to the audience as critiquing an unjust political or social structure; you can't write a dystopia and then never actually have the characters or narrative have any kind of reckoning with the oppressive systems they are helping to uphold, willingly or not? Consciously or not?