for the record, i really do love hearing other peoples thoughts on my rambly fandom posts. my very bad brain won't let me respond most of the time but i definitely probably responded in my head
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for the record, i really do love hearing other peoples thoughts on my rambly fandom posts. my very bad brain won't let me respond most of the time but i definitely probably responded in my head
gansey is lucky he didnt live in a world where he could listen to haircut by noah kahn while mid depression spiral about how much his friends (especially adam) probably resent him or he might have double died way sooner
.....i wonder if i should ever actually type out my personal complaints with VLD. I never have before, because it felt like....what is there to say that hasn't already been said? it's almost redundant.
also, at the time season 8 released everyone was so upset that I was scared to dip my toes in lol.
my voltron experience was that I watched the 1st episode when it came out, thought it looked interesting enough. got distracted and decided i'd "catch up later." So, in interest of avoiding all spoilers, I blocked and blacklisted ALL mentions of it. for almost the entire 2 years of its run. I avoided everything. and I procrastinated so long, that I didn't get around to catching up until the final season was about to drop......
watched seasons 1-7 all in one block (like, three hours of sleep in between. it's roughly 24 hours of tv show, btw, if you were curious. i dont know what was wrong w/ us.)
imagine my experience of avoiding EVERYTHING related to VLD and then finally unblocking it. Right after season 7 dropped.
i've never been so bulldozed by such a massive tidal wave of pissed off fans. and so bewildered trying to figure out what the hell happened.
look, it didn't occur to me to get mad about Adam, because I had never heard of him. I barely registered he existed. maybe this was for the best!! really, I think watching voltron all in one block, without any pauses to ask questions or think too hard about bizarre story pivots, is the best way to do it. also, I did not have the experience of...whatever misleading promises the creative team may or may not have been making during its run. I had no context for any of that. Playing catch up on the discourse was certainly an experience. In many ways, I was never really able to catch up. rip to whoever was actually present in the trenches during that time.
it was only on re-watches that I began to have big complaints of my own. and then MORE complaints as time went on. I was still too scared of VLD's bad reputation to touch it......But for the initial binge it was fun.
so i probably don't have any Spicy Interesting takes that others haven't said better. still, I think it would be cathartic. I am long past the point of being emotionally upset by how fumbled it was. Now i'm just. so so intensely curious to pick it apart and try to guess Why Any Of That Happened. ugh the people who worked on that show probably never want to acknowledge it again because of the fandom backlash, but I want to know what happened during the production sooooo bad. what even was the writing process. HOW did this many episodes get released so fast. how many decisions were actually someone's artistic choice and how many choices were desperately trying to appease requests from higher ups. how did we get here. was there another story bible at some point. girl....tell me......i can't trust word of mouth fandom rumors to be accurate.
terrible news for me, my voltron brainworms* are clawing at my door and threatening to barge back in again. for no reason even.
*by "voltron brainworms" I mean the Whole 40+ year old property, not just that one 2016 dreamworks reboot.**
**actually, its referring to my own personal reboot of the franchise in novel form. Which basically features OC-ified versions of every character, and is collaged together from every voltron iteration, borrowing heavily from the original anime that 80s voltron was based on (GoLion) ....Because I don't really like the storyline of any version of voltron (its just not my thing or my usual genre.) but for reasons unbeknownst to me i want to realize a version I Do like........voltron is like a box of legos 2 me.....every reboot is wildly different from the one before.....the possible configurations compel me........
nastiest trick in the book is getting you genuinely deeply attached to a character whose name sounds fucking stupid in any other context. this WILL happen to you at some point in your life.
bot-rights are proving to be very complicated for me to figure out in tmbd-verse on account of the fact that i'm like, 75% sure some of the bots we've encountered in these books really are just machines with some basic automated functions similar to our real life ai? or at least they aren't equally sentient. and its really hard to tell what we're dealing with in any given situation
we've had an occasional reference to "sub-sentient" bots, which i guess is opposed to something like MB or ART who are undoubtably sentient and sapient (i never know if i'm using those two terms correctly, w/e). But how the hell is sub-sentient defined? And what made certain bots sentient in the first place??
I think sentience is being presented as more of a spectrum so...begs the question where on that spectrum does any given bot need the same moral consideration of a person. That's potentially a nightmarish ethical minefield (so maybe its for the best the books haven't tried to firmly define it. that could go wrong very easily...)
anyway, i started getting stuck on this because I don't know how hard we should judge ART for doing shit like threatening to delete other bot pilots, 'cause frankly MB narrates that situation with only slight exasperation as if they were discussing a mouse that snuck inside and one person wants to hit it with a shoe while the other would really prefer to just gently put it in a cup and take it outside.
like...I am starting to think that a lot of the bots we encounter are a closer equivalent to a work horse or a farm dog. (or maybe even domesticated bees, depending on how simple they are.) in that they have feelings, preferences, can experience emotional distress, and MB feels the need to take extra steps not to be cruel to them whenever its possible. And they'd deserve legal protections but not necessarily all the same ones as people??
(and you could say it is still morally dubious for ART to be metaphorically threatening to run over someone's dog in response to getting growled at, but its slightly less dubious than serial killing people on a whim?? I guess????)
maybe that's what all MI's were originally supposed to be; like a finely tuned working animal. was the person-level sapience an accident? and how common is it? cause I bet humans cannot tell the difference. i bet they'd mostly judge sapience based on how good a bot is at replicating human emotional/social language, which is not a great metric for judging intelligence level in general.
i cut like 5 more speculative paragraphs out of this post b/c i'm trying to practice being more concise but this rabbit hole gets very complicated if you think about it too much...
It also needs to be noted that "deletion" isn't the same as murder, here. I mean, there's even an extremely plot-centric in-universe example of that when ART itself was deleted briefly. Machine intelligences can be safely brought back from deletion as long as there's a copy of their code *somewhere*. Deleting the bot pilots in this scenario could be more analogous to knocking someone unconscious and then locking them out of the room when by ignorance or purposefully they're getting in your way and you're on a time crunch. Still not okay, but way less severe than "killing someone's dog".
I do agree that there is a wide range of intelligences portrayed in the books though. Some of them definitely seem to be less intellectually capable than others, but for some it doesn't really seem like a question of intelligence? It's more like, they're entirely uninterested or incurious about things that don't apply to them. Like that one typing robot in Wall-E. It looked up, saw something was abnormal, Wall-E waved at it, and it sort of shrugged and went back to what it was doing. It feels like this is similar to what MB is doing when it's "talking" to transports: be polite/friendly and don't get in the way of its function or cause disruptions and it's pretty much fine with MB being there.
Yeah, sentience may be a spectrum, but I do think there is a clear 'critical mass' point, for lack of a better term, somewhere on that. So like, notable markers on the spectrum would be just machines with like, wifi connection, then progress to virtual assistants (sort of like our AI), there'd be basic sentience, like adaptive bot-pilots (i think the in-universe distinction there is a bot-pilot vs a pilot module) or the dockworker bots, then more advanced MIs like secunits or sentient killware, and then massive AIs like ART. I think at least part of an indication of sentience is simply the size of the MI itself. How complex it is. And I think *that* ties into or is influenced by how adaptive/flexible it would have to be in its thinking for its job.
I think I'm getting a bit off topic, lol, sorry. The point is who deserves rights and how do they decide that, right? It's almost certainly because it's late for me and I'm tired and this is outside of my general knowledge wheelhouse, but like, what legal protections are we even talking about here? Even if they were only as intelligent as dogs and horses, what rights would that exclude them from?
Fun questions!
^^^ I actually agree that delete =/= murder for most bots, i think I thought that at one point myself but for some reason forgot about it when I wrote this post?? i do think that's important.
when trying to figure out how much of a "person" any given bot is, i'm not as concerned (right now) with messy stuff like the specifics of legal rights on a place like preservation. I mean, I am also interested in that, i just don't expect to get a lot of in-depth details on it from MBs narration. That stuff is just background info in the kind of plots the books focus on.
I just don't know how to feel when a bot/system/whatever has to be destroyed during a mission.
calling out ART specifically was more of a joke in my original post, i'm concerned about this with every character, and MB especially. not because I need any of them to be morally pure or w/e, rather…this is important to most of the character analysis i try to do, I need to know what the hell they just DID, yknow???
cause i'm just going to keep thinking "I need to know if that bot you killed was a person. if it WAS a person, that means something narratively, and how you handled killing it (whether you tried to find another way to stop it before resorting to lethal, whether you are sorry you have to do it, whether a bot even registers as someone you should think about saving/sparing in the same way humans are) says something about you and where you are at in your character development."
I wouldn't be surprised if the author wanted to keep this space of plausible deniability depending on what is most convenient for the current plot point. Just assume that combatbot was not sentient because the climax needs it to blow up. But then when a random system like AdaCol2 has an opportunity to help, it might reveal itself to be way more conscious and intentional than MB initially thought.
Sometimes that is frustrating for me (specifically because we have a protag with a history of internalized hang-ups about constructs and other MI's, which makes me concerned about the calls it makes in combat) but there's pros and cons to it. I do like that any given bot/system/whatever could be varying degrees of sapient, even deceptively simple ones. it makes the whole world feel alive in a unique way. Like, look at all the different ways something can still be a 'person' without looking or sounding like a human at all.
If Wells ever decided she wanted to set down hard lines like "x bot is undoubtably a person and deserves full person rights/consideration (very rare), y bot is sentient but not self aware enough to be on par with a person (maybe more like an animal), and z bot is not sentient at all so you don't even have to blink when MB angrily blows it up you can just cheer" well, ig that could protect us from exhausting moral dilemmas getting in the way of the fun action scenes, but. idk. i think that would require definitively confirming that the vast majority of bots/systems aren't capable of ~real~ sapient interaction. I don't know if I'd like the world more for that, just for the sake of playing it morally safe in certain situations. i guess i dont know what i want.
however, it does add something to keep in mind if we accept the premise that the way (some) bots consider themselves "alive" isn't necessarily tied to a physical body/software location. Maybe a combatbot can be physically destroyed but its fine because they have backups elsewhere. thus they aren't dead until their last backup is destroyed, every version is equally "them"
(I dont think every bot can do this. constructs certainly can't, that's why I dont think 2.0 was the same thing as an ART-drone iteration. Miki's death also was presented as a definitive "death" so...idk what to make of that. We've never met another bot like Miki so idk how "normal" Miki was.)
anyway i have no conclusion just more questions and two side posts of rambles in my drafts that got (more) off track again lmao
I cant tell if of monsters and mainframes is heavily inspired by the murderbot diaries in its writing style/method of anthropomorphizing machines , OR if i am simply having a "guy who has only watched boss baby watches another movie for the first time and thinks it has boss baby vibes" moment
because to be frank i am still new to sci fi lit and murderbot is the only book i've read from the POV of a sentient machine. (except for the 1st Imperial Radch book, but that has an all around very different vibe and approach to the concept. also I was only half paying attention and am probably going to have to re-read it)
basically I don't know what writing conventions are standard for this genre and what is actually unique to murderbot
to be clear, even if it was inspired by tmbd writing style, I am not lobbying that as a criticism. this is Very Much a "two cakes" situation for me. i need something to fill the murderbot shaped hole in my chest until platform decay comes out and this is doing that so far.
*points at Frankenstein's monster* SecUnit.
this thing even comes complete with habitually breaking into other peoples private feed conversations. and stealing drones for itself.
..actually now that i think of it i bet i someone could make some banger literary parallels between frankensteins monster and secunits if one was so inclined......
I cant tell if of monsters and mainframes is heavily inspired by the murderbot diaries in its writing style/method of anthropomorphizing machines , OR if i am simply having a "guy who has only watched boss baby watches another movie for the first time and thinks it has boss baby vibes" moment
because to be frank i am still new to sci fi lit and murderbot is the only book i've read from the POV of a sentient machine. (except for the 1st Imperial Radch book, but that has an all around very different vibe and approach to the concept. also I was only half paying attention and am probably going to have to re-read it)
basically I don't know what writing conventions are standard for this genre and what is actually unique to murderbot
to be clear, even if it was inspired by tmbd writing style, I am not lobbying that as a criticism. this is Very Much a "two cakes" situation for me. i need something to fill the murderbot shaped hole in my chest until platform decay comes out and this is doing that so far.
the fun part about bookmarking something to read later, forgetting why you bookmarked it, and then not bothering to re-read the blurb when you pick it up is you can go in blind and have absolutely no idea that Literal Dracula was going to be in this sentient spaceship sci-fi book until he suddenly shows up and starts eating people.
turns out the incredibly obvious dracula references (including, y'know, the sentient spaceship in question being named The Demeter, pulling into dock with a fully dead crew) were in fact not coincidences. who would have thought
anyway, i am having fun
I fear I am incredibly obsessed with authorial intent, actually
sorry I know i'm on the "death of the author" website (I guess most transformative fandom spaces are that by default) but I realized recently that it's not actually satisfying to me.
I am, in fact, painfully curious to know what someone was intending to say, and it Does inform how I read the art. usually for the better in my experience. like....how can it not??? I dont know how to turn that part of my brain off.
I want to understand why stories work the way they do, so I need to understand why they were constructed the way they were. I must know the goal so I can compare it to the result.
I may adopt death-of-the-authorisms later on. If I am not satisfied by the author's intent, THEN I will make informed decisions about what I want to ignore…but they have to be informed first.
this is one of my favorite little moments in the first book, it's so easy to miss but I love reading into it.
its the implied "I'm supposed to be in charge and i'm also responsible for everyone being here, including you, so it's my job to make sure everyone else is safe before me" vs the "I am literally built for these situations and have more knowledge and expertise on how to handle this bullshit right now then anyone else here, why wouldn't everyone's safety including/especially yours be on me???" until there is no choice but to resolve the debate with "christ FINE we'll get in at the same time then!!!!"
like, its a funny image (contrasted by how extremely dire and tense the situation is in that chapter) but also really important 2 me. Cause I didn't quite ~see the true vision~ for lack of a better phrase about their relationship until I noticed this beat on a re-read. and for whatever reason this is the thing that clicked together for me where the connection between them lives.
and it's something about "watch what happens when two different types of savior complex collide!! and all the ways that same unchecked impulse will later fuck up their relationship and also tie it together forever and ever!!"
untitled Murderbot fanfic update: I got distracted by minecraft and also Being Sad And Stressed for unrelated reasons but I have gotten back to making further progress....
and now...!
well I have finally finished the outline/background info notes and can start properly on the actual first draft (which is currently still sitting at 1,600 words)
....lets check the outline document
alrighty
so this fanfiction is not written from Murderbots POV, it's from the pov of a drone OC and its human friends in peril.
the books are so close to MB's internal thoughts and thus i've become kind of obsessed with every rare glimpse we get into how others perceive it. so i wanted to write an outsiders first hand bewildering (and terrifying) experience with "deus ex machina rogue secunit crashes through the wall and I guess is begrudgingly going to save you now, Do Not ask questions"
I don't think i needed such a long explanation for why MB and the Perihelion crew ended up in this place (unrelated fetch quest gone horribly wrong and now we are caught in the middle of yet another violent corporation in-fighting clusterfuck) but w/e I sure have it now.
It's almost a shame I def won't have the spoons to also write these events from MB's perspective afterwards because that could be a whole separate and probably longer fic
untitled Murderbot fanfic update: I got distracted by minecraft and also Being Sad And Stressed for unrelated reasons but I have gotten back to making further progress....
and now...!
well I have finally finished the outline/background info notes and can start properly on the actual first draft (which is currently still sitting at 1,600 words)
....lets check the outline document
alrighty
also on that topic of human terms (in)compatibility with MI's ,, the only MI's I could imagine having a complicated relationship (or any relationship) with human gender would be ComfortUnits. they are the only ones (that we know of) whose function specifically requires them to mimic and perform human-style sexuality and/or relationships, and one would imagine that entails having gender projected onto them as well
but (and i'm thinking hypothetically about ComfortUnit's freed from the corporation rim, working independently like MB currently is) i still don't know if they'd adopt gender or sexuality as truly "part" of their identity. Maybe something in a similar vein to how MB becomes (mostly) ok with physical contact when it thinks of it as a "first aid" job-related thing, but not something it craves for itself on its own time. it needs to serve a purpose,
I have a (free) ComfortUnit OC i've been tentatively rotating around in my head at work, and i've started imagining its relationship to human gender as sorta akin to drag? not exactly that, but as close equivalent as anything could be ig. and even those who get invested in creating their "humansona" or w/e, it's not literally them, it still feels more like a character
also "I only have pronouns while on the clock, I dont do gender recreationally. its just my day job" is inherently funny to me, as a premise. putting the gender in a locker at the end of the day like a pair of work overalls.
if i say i ""ship"" murderhelion, I am only saying that because it is a simple and short way to say i like their dynamic in general.
its also not true. every time i try to ~look deep inside myself~ and ask if I like seeing them in a romantic light, I flail around for an answer, and what eventually comes up is "n...no?? what??"
but if an outsider looked at my scrolling/reading habits they would think yes, clearly you do. if they looked at the hypothetical fanart that i'd make, they'd think it was ship art.
but i don't even know what that would mean. it doesn't make sense to ask me that.
the thing is, I don't think it's possible. not just in the "it's not canon compliant to Murderbot's stated preferences!" way, I mean it's literally not possible, not applicable in any context no matter WHAT they are doing.
I could scroll through a murderhelion tag because I know that's the best way to find things related to both of the characters together, but like....no matter how intense or weird the content, there is nothing that murderbot and ART could do with/to each other that would register to me as romantic or sexual. even if it "looked" that way (which frankly it rarely does, bc one of them does not have a physical body) by default it is something else, on a completely different spectrum, with different connotations. you'd have to stick them both in a human!AU to change that.
i don't even think of murderbot as "agender" in the way that a human would identify. gender was never an option to begin with. it doesn't list its gender as "agender" or "nonbinary" in its mandated feed ID, it says "not applicable." and i guess i can't give a meaningful dictionary definition on why that is different to me, it just is.
idk about everyone else cause i've seen a lot of people use these terms interchangeably, but this is how I define these:
THEORY: I think this is true of canon and I have significant textual evidence to back it up. I could and would write an argumentative essay for it.
HEADCANON: i LIKE to think this is true of canon, and I (probably) think it would fit well into the story if it was. But unlike a theory, headcanons don't have strong textual evidence "proving" them, they are based on vibes. what's important is that there is no definitive evidence DISproving it, so technically it could be true.
*AU: the "just for fun" zone. Everything that is definitively not compatible with current canon. Unlike a headcanon, an AU does NOT (inherently) imply I would ever want this to be canon, nor does it imply that I think everyone is acting in-character. It's a sandbox to explore, a morbid curiosity, a "but what if" plot bunny i felt compelled to chase.
*i'd like to put some kind of tier between headcanon and AU, b/c "alternate universe" implies pretty heavy canon-divergence (like, changing the whole setting/genre, changing a characters pivotal role/backstory, etc.) I'd need something for "this idea is not realistically compatible with canon, but it's not THAT far off." Like, most shipping lives in that zone, and I wouldn't normally call an implausible ship an "AU" when the rest of the world is otherwise canon compliant??
tbh it'd be more realistic to put these 3 points on a gradient scale rather than into distinct boxes.
gang i am in dire need of more songs to put on my murderbot diaries playlist, please please drop your suggestions and bonus points if u want to tell me what specifically you're connecting it with!!!
trust i do not CARE if you think your music taste is ""too cringe"" i put a haz*bin hotel song on here, its the god damn wild west, no genre no tonal consistency only self indulgent vibes
OK I haven't gone through all the suggestions yet but thank u sm to everyone who left them <33
someone asked for my playlists (which i probably should have linked to begin with lmao) so here's links!!
I have 2 versions of the same playlist, this is the "curated" version where I had slightly more justifiable reason for the songs I put on it (based on theme and/or select lyrics I could put imaginary amv edits to) it is very loosely sorted into "Corporation Rim Dystopia" vibes and then various flavors of "general MB/SecUnit angst" "MB's hero complex" and "MB's sappy self-discovery/relationship journey"
[Youtube Version]
and the "uncurated" chaos version where my standards for "fitting" songs are...even more loose than usual. And not organized at all. The additional romantic-coded songs are for my sporadic murderhelion tendencies, some of them were for Murderbot&Mensah though.
unfortunately I don't have a youtube version yet bc I'd need to re-make it manually and its like. 3x as long rip.
and an anon in my inbox demanded (jokingly) to know what hazbin hotel song I could have possibly matched to it, and turns out i was wrong it's not a hazbin song its actually from the other show (i keep getting their names mixed up) and i forgot it's not even accessible on normal spotify
but, ok, hear me out this music video had the audacity to keep putting itself in my recommended tab the very week "Rapport" came out AND that same week I was re-reading the short-lived murderhelion divorce arc part in network effect. and thus had pitiful ART yearning on the brain. and there was red/blue + space/water imagery. i simply cannot be entirely blamed for this
edit: wait I was wrong again, there IS an actual hazbin hotel song on the chaos playlist b/c I stuck "gravity" in there for purely hypothetical "ART thinks MB has been killed by some corporate goons" fanfic reasons