absolutely not

“All magical girls are clumsy and personality-less”

like, the most unrealistic part of The Murderbot Diaries isn't the space travel or the rogue AIs.

Society: "You can be anything you want!"

Murderbot: "I want to be perceived by absolutely no one while Sanctuary Moon plays in the background."

it’s the fact that Murderbot gets freedom from its corporate corporate overlords, looks at the vast, infinite universe of possibilities, and immediately chooses to use its newfound liberty to just... sit in a corner and binge-watch 35,000 hours of space soap operas.

worsties from this fic // this post

So, something I realized while listening to Platform Decay again (the murderbot series are my emotional support audiobooks to fall asleep to - nobody tell it):

Murderbot still does not fucking read it's client¹ files!

At first I thought it might be sort of waiting for Janity to introduce herself, like Tula had, for it to call her by her name, but no, it updates the tags as soon as it learns her name. From Farai.

Now, how does Farai know Janity's name? Farai and Janity are only ever physically together in spaces where Murderbot's drones can listen, so we know Janity didn't tell Farai herself. She also couldn't have told Farai via the Feed, because -see above- Janity didn't have an interface at this point.

Hypothetically Farai and Leonide could have had a talk about their respective children at some point before Murderbot came for the rescue, but I don't feel like that is something Leonide would have done. The whole interaction between Leonide and her captives seemed very pragmatic and Leonide has taken great care to keep her children out of the dangerous bits of her life.

The much more straightforward explanation is that Farai knows the children's names from Leonide's file. And why wouldn't their names be in the file? There's a codeword for potential rescuers to identify themselves to her family, not also giving the rescuers the names of the rescuees seems... unlikely. So, conclusion, if Farai does know the names and Murderbot doesn't:

Murderbot. did not read. the file. in it's entirety. Again!

This is one of the few times that Murderbot actually refers to itself as a SecUnit positively. It's not SecUnits are terrifying killing machines and "fucking dangerous," it's hey I was designed to do something important. Murderbot, for a moment, forgets all the internalized stigma, the trauma and the self-loathing. It realizes that being a SecUnit is a good thing.

When ART asks why Murderbot claimed constructs and bots couldn't trust each other, Murderbot says:

“Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems.”

ART doesn't deny it, and instead it simply says, "There are no humans here now"

Which was a powerful statement that MB couldn't really argue against.

But realistically, ART could probably say no to an order from its humans, if, for example, it thought that the human who gave it the order might have been compromised in anyway. Also, we all know how manipulative ART could be.

But putting super-MIs like ART or its class of ships aside, do you think bots (not those whom Murderbot considers barely sentient) generally have enough self awareness to want to do decision-making themselves?

#throwback to that one time a platonic friend invited me to a swinger club#and his earnest reasoning was#'the buffet there is the best I have ever been to and it's so cheap we need to eat our way through the buffet together'#I didn't go but I have reliable sources that the buffet really is that good (via @notgreengardens)

1. Really annoyed when people say that aces aren't automatically prudes or against the rest of the queer community by saying "and the aces can hand out the water bottles at the orgy" because it gives us the role of being the help just there to support allosexuals in their goals.

and

2. Under the impression that the main attraction of orgies is... the orgy.

Given this new data, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. The people saying that annoying phrase had no idea what happens at sex parties

and

(aside from, you know Murderbot who I love and cherish)

It that it’s a very grim-dark distopian corporate hellscape setting, told through the perspective of someone who has seen some of the worst that world has to offer, who’s existence is part of the worst that world has to offer, and yet-

And yet it’s so full of hope.

Everywhere you look, there’s underground shipping routes to get refugees out from contract labour, there’s universities forging documents to get abandoned colonies out from corporate ownership, there’s people buying a secunit so the company don’t realise it’s hacked itself and has free will. A Tlacy employee smuggles out copies of the files to give them back to their owners, a human officer on HaveRatton station opens the security barrier to let Ayda Mensah escape. There’s a planet that took the promise of somewhere safe to live, of food and medical care, and kept that promise for generations.

And for all it can’t even see the hope yet, can’t even really believe it might be there yet (because trauma will fuck you up), Secunit keeps being that hope for other people.

Not just the lives it saves, not just all the times it shows up out of nowhere like a social anxious guardian angel with energy weapons in it’s arms and several lifetimes worth of soap operas in it’s storage.

When it talks to Dr Volescu all the way up the side of the crater, to keep him moving. When it sticks with the scientists on RaviHyral. When Tapan sneaks onto it’s sleeping mat, because she’s scared, and it ups it’s body temperature to keep her warm. When it keeps Amena safe from a predatory partner, when it tells her to go rest. When it hacks the Comfort Unit’s governor module. When it-version-2.0 gives Three the codes to hack itself.

In addition to the instances of human characters acting selflessly that were already mentioned here, I enjoy that it’s not just the human characters that choose to act with kindness/compassion and a desire to help others, which also imbues the otherwise bleak setting with a sense of hope

(spoilers for all the books including System Collapse ahead) a sentient spaceship helps SecUnit disguise itself as an augmented human and makes sure its and its clients get out of RaviHyral safely, for no reason other than its own desire to help. Miki the robot wants to befriend SecUnit immediately upon meeting it, and ultimately sacrifices itself to save SecUnit even though SecUnit was mad at it. the FIRST thing Three does with its own free will is risk its life to rescue SecUnit, who it has never even met before. all the bots on Preservation Station that are nearby jump in to help in the final fight scene in Fugitive Telemetry. AdaCol2 helping SecUnit in System Collapse is mostly a means to the end of its own desire to help the resident human colonists, but hey, it’s still choosing to help people other than itself (and it kind of befriends SecUnit along the way too).

like, is it realistic to have all these artificial/machine intelligences make choices to act unselfishly, or even self-sacrificially, and against their designed functions, in order to help others? maybe not. but, considering the fact that bots, constructs, and humans are all mistreated in this universe in the endless pursual of corporate greed (which is the true enemy at every point in this series), I think there’s something to be said here about how it can never hurt to treat others with kindness and generosity, because despite the appearances, we’re all in this together.

You have a child who is an extremely powerful (somewhat illegal) machine intelligence. It's a good kid, mostly, except it doesn't play well with others. Your kid periodically goes on short trips by itself, and this has always been fine.

One time, it comes back and it's acting... weird. It keeps bringing up things it has no reason to know about and then dodging questions about it. Finally, you get it to admit that it picked up a hitchhiker on this on this trip, even though you have very strict rules about never picking up hitchhikers. This hitchhiker is obviously it's new favorite person. They watched soap operas together. Your kid loves soap operas now. Your kid shows you a bunch of pictures of this hitchhiker, but won't tell you details because the hitchhiker in question is a wanted criminal on the run and also an escaped slave. This is probably fine (you sure hope it's fine).

Then, you and the rest of your family/friends get fucking kidnapped and used as hostages to make your kid behave. You know that your kid 1) will do anything to protect you, and 2) pretty much always goes for violence first, so you have your doubts about any of this going well.

Then, the hitchhiker your kid will not shut up about appears out of thin air in the middle of a firefight on a planet pretty much no one has any reason to be near and says your kid sent it. It proves this by telling you your kid is a dickhead (this is true and works, but still).

After a lot of mutual rescuing, you're back on board the ship that is also your kid, and find out that your kid kidnapped it's wanted-criminal-hitchhiker-friend and all of it's friends, and has been telling them all of your top secret confidential spy information. The hitchhiker is responsible for 90% of the top news stories you've seen in the last six months. Three different governments want this person dead or alive.

Love "Rapport" so much, it's so funny. The pacing and structure are great as the crew try to figure out what's going on with Perihelion. Peri excitedly picking up hacking and drone tips from Murderbot and then when it's family catches on and asks where it learned all this it looks away and gets evasive like a kid getting caught with a r18 dvd (illegal drones). Imagine a kid coming in from the yard covered in mud holding the scrungliest wet cat "Dad! Can we keep it?"

One of my favorite tropes is "I'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me" which often goes hand in hand with another favorite trope "horror movie scene from the pov of the horror"

So unsurprisingly one of my favorite scenes in PD is when Murderbot intimidates the shit out of the wannabe space pirates, locking them in their own ship and playing evidence of their crimes on their own TV

But my absolute favorite part is that it works too well and they all instantly surrender, leaving Murderbot standing there like 'um actually I was kinda planning on killing you guys but it feels weird now that you're like crying and shit'