#murderbot itself

[uneatenclient]

s01e01/02 | mb being bad at faking a gov mod

bonus:

[uneatenclient]

so in network effect mb is pretty insistent that art got got via the comms

and it seemed... not out of place, but oddly specific and persistent with this one possible cause of what happened to art. and then i realized — as ratthi so helpfully pointed out — that the last time something catastrophic had happened to mb, it had been a comm attack

it had lost its friend to something that was probably the thing that had almost killed it before, and then it'd gotten its friend back. of course it's gonna harp on this to try and keep art safe

noteably, the only time mb 2.0 (an mb with the trauma and neurosis shaved off — thank you tyrantosaurus-wrecks) mentions this possibility at all, it trusted art's judgement and was operating under the assumption that it wasn't a code attack

mix of mb and art much?

i do love that mb's response to bad things happening to it seems to be "protect my loved ones harder and from this thing specfically" (ratthi and being eaten by fauna — it had to watch and maybe attempt to save humans eaten by extremely hostile fauna, mensah and lack of security — it has seen countless humans underestimate danger and ignore mb's warnings and then get fucked up, and now art and comms getting hacked/killwared) even tho that almost certainly means it's not actually processing any of that trauma. but there are worse coping methods?

[uneatenclient]

s01e01/02 | mb's emotional support walls

[uneatenclient]

thank you @superdemon552 for the first idea, thank you my brain for going 👀👀👀

[uneatenclient]

very interesting (not bad!! unless misgendering. then very bad) to see people discussing murderbot's pronouns like it was hard for them to accept it/its for it. i didn't even question it while i was reading, and while that might have something to do with me also using that pronoun, my use of it did come a while after i read the books for the first time.

it's just that murderbot clearly considers itself a person, and a person that has wants and needs other than the company's or its friend's. even before it begins accepting basic kindness, it's doing what it wants and what makes its life tolerable as it tries to figure out what to do otherwise.

(big mood)

and while it obviously has some self-worth issues, they definitely don't seem of the personhood kind or the gender kind. more the "i've only ever been a weapon and a meatshield, so why would that change when the dangerous situations that need me to be both keep occurring" kind. which isn't ideal but is understandable and also has nothing to do with its concept of self-worth or gender.

tbh the same way it couldn't care less about sex or gender presentation in humans seems to be about the same way that it couldn't care less about its own gender — as long as you dont try to inflict one upon it.

also, if no one on the survey team, including dr "it IS a person!!" ratthi, even considered that treating it more like a person involved using different pronouns... then i feel like that's the right call. apart from mensah being a little heavy handed with the whole "you'll come back to preservation with us" thing and later apologizing, they've been really good at treating it right! and it clearly thinks so, too!

all of this to say, if it felt like martha wells was using those pronouns to imply it was lesser, then obviously we should be grumpy about that. but she very clearly isn't. she's so so noticeably thought this through and is treating everything murderbot goes through and experiences with the respect a person deserves, that i'm gonna keep using its preferred pronouns until it decides to go by something else

(it never will — god forbid it has to think about human gender for longer than absolutely necessary)