Aurelia Hammerlock fanclub president

ART is such a wonderful character. It's an asshole, it's sarcastic, it's arrogant, it frightens people because it can, its favorite words in the universe are, "I told you so," but when it actually gets dangerous—when it flies straight down the line between asshole and actual supervillain—it's doing it because of pure love. It adores its people so much it hurts. And if you're Murderbot's people, then it will also throw itself into the line of fire to save you, because that means you're sort of its people too.

i am absolutely obsessed with how you've described art here. 'its favorites words are "i told you so"' is so funny and somewhere out there murderbot is enthusiastically co-signing. and the bit about it going between being an asshole and a supervillain and doing so because it loves is just! you are so right and also your brain is so big! art is not cruel it is ruthless and there is a difference! you had just also better fucking hope you're on art's team when time runs out!

ART yelling at its crew to do their laundry because Murderbot's important person Dr Mensah is going to be onboard and it needs to make a good impression because it wants Mensah to approve of their 'relationship' and be okay with them 'moving in together', and then being so nice to Dr Mensah when it's been an overbearing, domineering, sarcastic nightmare the whole book is something that is so special to me

Really badly need fic of ART in a human-form bot body (in some situation where there's reduced feed capacity so it can't just ride along with MB) and hanging off of MB physically the way it always does in the feed and neither of them really notice or think it's remarkable because like. Duh. They're always huddled up next to each other. But their humans are losing their minds because what do you MEAN ART-bot is just shoving into MB's space like that and it doesn't care at all. At some point Ratthi is like wow you two seem like youve gotten so much closer since that whole debacle with the target planet! And MB just stares at him blankly like what do you mean. ART ignoring my personal space so it can watch what I'm doing is normal. And so Ratthi just has to sit there vibrating and not saying anything while ART-bot physically drags MB around by the arm and MB inexplicably allows this to happen.

I do think about this. Constantly. Because like.... What if MB had failed? If Holism had shown up as backup and defeated the Targets eventually. Even if it figures out the password is a feed address, it has no way of knowing what it is. If the Targets had killed MB I don't think there would have been a way to retrieve its feed address, and even then why tf would they assume this random dead secunit is the password? And sure, I think ART may have excluded MB failing from its decision tree the same way it excluded its crew having been spaced, but it also makes me crazy that to some degree ART was saying "if you're not there to wake me up, I don't want to wake up. If you go, I go."

underrated funny part of system collapse is murderbot repeatedly being like 'no one knows wtf three wants to do ever because three doesn't know how to want things yet' but most of three's narration in network effect was 'i want to rescue murderbot. i want to do a good job rescuing murderbot. i hope i get a good grade in rescuing murderbot. i want to rescue murderbot so bad that im going to attempt to talk a terrifying murderous spaceship out of its plan for a planetary bombardment' mb just consistently says the most blatantly wrong shit about everyone it's ever met lmao

Ok but for real, have you worked with state of the art proprietary tech? It's garbage built by the lowest bidder. I'm with Murderbot, gimme the refurbished reliable over new and shiny every time.

love love love the added perspective of MB and ART's relationship we get from rapport because now we know ART was definitely sitting there when it was taken over in network effect like "oh no! I have become a damsel transport in distress! surely my darling secunit in shining armor will rescue me from my tower and whisk me away on its noble steed!" and then murderbot effectively shows up, rescues it, and immediately dumps it off the back of the steed and says "bitch walk home."