ALL IS NOT WELL. MOST IS NOT WELL.

Most mammals have, compared to humans, an elongated jaw. So a little tiny bump of a mammary gland is fine, just enough to get the nostrils away from the teat, and the young can freely breathe while nursing. However, as humans started using fire more and more to cook food - which softened it up, rendering powerful jaws less necessary - their jaws began to shorten, resulting in the development of the chin and other unique facial structures as the face flattened out.

This, of course, meant that babies could suffocate while nursing, which would obviously be bad. But what if... what if nipple further from chest? Bigger bump, so baby's nose have spot to go that isn't directly into mommy's chest? Oh, turns out that works! Of course, as more and more fat stores become dedicated to growing that breast mound to keep baby from suffocating, it becomes harder and harder for the mother to reabsorb that tissue when not nursing (as many other mammals do), so they just... don't. Knockon effects from there, and bam. Tiddies.

we’re talking about mixed-race/being between cultures on the Murderbot Discord tonight and i am extremely In My Feelings right now

because wow does Fugitive Telemetry really get into that space, grappling with culture (of bots) (and of humans) and integration thereinto as it does

and i feel so VALIDATED, guys. i knew there was something there in Murderbot’s struggles that we can read from the lens of being mixed race/diaspora/between cultures, and i’m so glad to know i’m not the only one

Murderbot’s definitely not human (despite having human parts) but it’s not really a bot either, after all. And between bot society on Preservation and human society, man, where does that leave it?

it’s about the experience of being adrift and between, of both so neither. It’s about being alienated from the structures of culture around you, it’s about being outside looking in and knowing you were denied belonging since the moment you were born, it’s about literal code-switching like you’re switching between languages you’re equally fluent in, it’s about being expected to belong instantly with total strangers because of something intrinsic to you and feeling alienated anyway even when you’re welcomed, because actually integration into a culture is hard especially when you have been isolated all your life.

it’s about people thinking you should want to be like them just because you look like them (or talk like them).

(”We tend to think that just because a bot or construct looks human, its ultimate goal should be to become human.” “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”)

so hell yeah add that to the list of other interpretations- the queer (ace/aro and trans/agender), neurodivergent, labor rights, and trauma survivor lenses to read Murderbot through.

When it’s alone among humans, it’s set apart by its nonhumanness. Its main coping mechanisms are either to mask as human (assimilate), or pretend to be a bot (a category that encompasses part, but not all, of its identity). When it’s in a group of mixed company with human majority, it classes itself with the bots, because even if those bots belong to humans (Miki), MB shares a common language and feels more comfortable interacting with them than the humans. In human-dominated settings, MB stands in bot/construct solidarity not because bots and constructs are interchangeable, but because they are both not-human. It’s similar to how panethnic solidarity arises in part as a response to racialization by the dominant ethnic group.

Then in FT, Murderbot encounters free bot culture for the first time. (ART doesn’t count, because MB has only encountered it on its own and you can’t have a culture of one.) And MB is an outsider. It doesn’t understand the in-jokes or attitudes of the Preservation bots, and it transmutes its alienation into contempt. MB is NOT a bot like them, and it emphasizes this by acting very un-botlike, refusing to move the cabinet and using excessive profanity. (This is also because being asked to move stuff cuts too close to servitude for MB’s comfort, especially since it’s obviously standing in for the hauler bot, but that’s a different lens.)

Murderbot’s masking/passing as assimilation

Its alienation among groups of the dominant culture

MB classing itself with bots being like pan-ethnic solidarity arising due to machine intelligences being marginalized by the dominant group, humans

You can’t have a culture of one!!

And something that was brought up when we talked about this on the server: that Murderbot also feels alienated from Three’s experiences, wondering why they’re so different and if maybe Murderbot’s just personally weird. Notably, Three had rapport with its fellow SecUnits, where Murderbot was isolated and traumatized- if that doesn’t reflect the feeling of being awkward with and not knowing how to talk to others of your othered culture because you’ve been alone among the majority your whole life, I don’t know what does.

Another thing I’d like to go into further detail on- Murderbot transmuting its alienation into contempt- god, Murderbot really makes next to no effort to connect with the bots on Preservation that we see. The closest thing is it essentially saying “you don’t have to talk to me like I’m [a member of the dominant group]” to Tellus, and that is clearly as much for Murderbot’s convenience as anything else. With JollyBaby, it is not only openly dismissive of JollyBaby’s name but also, when JollyBaby messages it privately to bring it in on the in-joke, it fails to- or refuses to- recognize this as a gesture of invitation into the joke. JollyBaby PMs Murderbot twice in that scene and MB absolutely refuses to speak directly to it, addressing only the humans. MB is furious about the idea of bots “infantilizing themselves,” and right on the heels of being delighted by JollyBaby’s clear rapport with the other bots I was hit by a whiplash moment of doubt, wondering, Are the bots tokenizing themselves? Is this minstrelsy?

This brings me to the point about the tension with servitude-as-potential-microaggression to Murderbot, of course. Servitude isn’t a particular cultural trauma I have insight into, and in this particular area I think the cultural/racial analysis of Murderbot would benefit from a Black perspective- and especially, considering that the rest of the book centers police-adjacent activity and has themes of police accountability, the trauma of police brutality, and upholding justice, and the end of the book is very much about community intervention and non-violent responses to crime, applying a Black Lives Matter critical lens would be crucial. Like, I really don’t think I’d be able to fully analyze, from a community/cultural perspective, the power of the scene with JollyBaby and all the other Preservation bots standing in solidarity to protect each other and to de-escalate the conflict without giving due weight to the themes of upholding justice and alternatives to police action.

okay now that that’s out of the way can we TALK about Balin’s few lines and how emotionally devastating its story is?

Like yes it was literally made to be a murderous traitor spy bot but also it was just. Its creators had been killed off, it was free, not just fake free while still secretly under corporate control but ACTUALLY FREE and seemed to have made friends and been known and to some extent liked by hundreds of people and other bots and fucking

Decades pass. Decades pass, and it thinks its free of its secondary purpose, it thinks it can just go about its life until the clock runs out on its parts and it has to go in for maintenance and gets discovered, and then someone activates it. Not even its original creators, just some random corporate that got their hands on the right codes, and boom. Its life is over. Back to what it was always going to do eventually, betraying everything and everyone it had been living with for decades.

It takes no pleasure from carrying out the orders, it just does because that’s what it was coded to do and that’s what it has to do. Balin the general purpose bot is gone, Balin the corporate combatbot is here now and it just. Kills and destroys and lashes out until it’s inevitably found out. And then when it’s confronted, what does it say? “Would it make a difference if I was hacked?”

And the thing that kills me about that line is that it’s so defeated sounding. Would it matter? Would it make a difference? What’s happened has happened and what’s going to happen next is already determined, too. A corporate combatbot is confronted by a rogue Secunit. There was only one way it could end.

And then it’s confronted by every bot on the station just about, all the bots it had made friends with over the decades, and it’s over. No grand battle, no last stand, just a silent staredown and then the combatbot shuts down for good.

So much of the climax of FT is about the far reaching and inescapable influence/pain of the Corporation Rim.

You cannot run you cannot hide from what created you, you have a history and context whether you like it or not, and it can wake up and bite you and destroy you at any moment.

MB cannot escape from what it is, or what its existence means to other people. To people who have been subjugated in the CR by SecUnits for their whole lives.

Balin could not escape from the purpose it was made for over forty years ago.

I don’t think MB has ever truly let go of its a fear of a repeat of the Ganaka Pit. Or its fear of the Company™ coming back into its life in this apparent haven of non corporate freedom.

But it’s true that we do not easily leave behind where we come from. And if humans cannot escape the reach of their origins, then bots, whose behavior and existence are dictated by their code, who were created with the purpose of serving human interests written into that code and who are defined by their function, must be even more bound. With few if any of the benefits of being bound, perhaps. Especially for those machine intelligences whose function is essentially violent.

That question “Would it make a difference if I was hacked?” struck me really hard, too, and I think it’s tied in to the way there is ambiguity in whether Balin and its secondary function are the same person or not. JollyBaby clearly thinks they are separate, but Murderbot itself is equivocal about the distinction and presents JollyBaby’s framing as one opinion. (Man, there’s a LOT more meta that I want to write about JollyBaby and the culture/community of Preservation bots vs Murderbot and its CR history/experiences)

There is a point that Balin (Balin, who has lived among humans and earned their trust and respect across multiple human generations, who knows both how these humans think about personhood/agency and what it is to be a bot with identity/personhood) brings up with that question. This point is that if it was programmed that way since the beginning, it would simply be the bot it was created as- and if Balin’s code had been altered that would simply, cruelly, be the new person it is, and the old one gone. To what extent is Balin and its secondary function separable as people? Is a bot defined by its code and function and its feed ID? After all, a bot is an entity whose personhood and purpose and function and fate were originated and shaped by its creators. More even than humans being the result of the cultures that shaped them, Balin is not able to escape its history. 

Murderbot, despite being a bot/human construct and ostensibly more flexible, would be justified in fearing that it can’t escape the reach of its origins either. 

But this is where I go back to JollyBaby and the other bots, surrounding and towering over Murderbot and Balin, to the scene where JollyBaby’s hand comes down between the two ex-CR combatants. In that moment they are literally framed by the physical presence of the other bots as much as JollyBaby also reframes the moment and Balin’s role in it as that of someone innocent victimized by a violent intruder now lashing out at those around it, humans and bots both. The bots don’t move to attack or subdue; instead they wait in an unspeaking silence that promises, We will protect those you try to hurt, others and each other. Your only recourse is to cease your violence. And neither Murderbot nor Balin are able to reject this framing. Murderbot admits that it’s not sure that JollyBaby and its cohort are wrong about Balin and CombatBot being separate, and Balin/CombatBot, surrounded by the bots its primary function had worked alongside for decades, shuts itself down. The conflict is resolved without further violence.

That’s the power of community, I think. Context that is support, that can provide us more options than on our own, that has the power to reshape, reframe, restructure who we are. People are defined by their community, humans and bots alike.

No, we don’t escape what made us what we are so easily. But we can change how we think about who we are and what our situation is; we can move on to new places, and every place we go to also becomes part of the context that informs who we are and what we do.

So long as we are surrounded by a community that supports us and will intervene for us, we are both held in check and empowered to hope for choices better than what our origins leave us with. 

like, talking to someone over a private feed connection while other people are talking out loud feels like turning to someone and speaking in Chinese to them when I’m in an all-white space

refusing to speak to ART over the feed “like it was a client” at first feels like refusing to speak to another Chinese person (especially family) in Chinese when I know that we could have a more intimate, nuanced conversation with them like that

thinking about Miki asking why Murderbot won’t talk to it on the feed anymore, about it saying “I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me” hurts me, as a second generation immigrant. the bit where MB realizes that Miki is like it, of the same background, but crucially has never been abused or mistreated for it, and has to go have an emotion about it- also hurts me

losing my mind over the scene in NE where ART is passive-aggressively communicating at Murderbot through tiny, ignorable-by-humans flickers of light, and Murderbot interrupts itself to yell at ART out loud

The use of verbal speech versus feed (or alternative forms of) communication is, literally, a kind of code switching, and the moment-to-moment mode of communication that people use is as deeply meaningful and loaded as the choice of language people use to speak in real life. 

There’s something about Murderbot’s attitude while speaking to the bots of Preservation that is deeply, deeply angry- even resentful, which I was troubled by on my first read-through.

You could make the direct comparison of a bicultural person isolated from one culture who encounters an immigrant community of that culture for the first time (and who then avoids directly confronting the complicated feelings about belonging/not belonging surrounding such an encounter); you could also compare to the narrative of a queer person recently out of the closet and encountering the flamboyance of the LGBT scene, who feels alienated by how different it is from the conservatism they’ve known before. But the personal experience that MB’s anger and sense of alienation reminds me of rather more strongly is, like… talking with peers who grew up in China.

There’s this inextricable part of my experience, my mode of engagement with the White-dominated world around me, that is self-defensive and even reactionary, that is shaped by alienation. And it’s one which isn’t shared by people who have grown up surrounded by faces like theirs, speaking words that belong in their mouths, fitting into the structures of tradition and the norms of a society they were born to, who have never had to fear they don’t belong the way I don’t belong, nor will they be vulnerable for something as intrinsic as race is when you live as a minority in a racist country. They may speak english to me and know most of or about the same western norms and memes, but white western culture mostly isn’t the world that shaped them the way it made me. These people can wear english nicknames when white people can’t pronounce theirs and the use of it doesn’t rub them raw, because at the end of the day they live with and were raised by a whole country that knows their names as easy and normal, to say nothing of not having racist violence against them. It’s alienating, it’s lonely, this gulf in personal experience and mindset between me and these chinese nationals, despite our similarities.

Through this lens, I can see how Murderbot would feel this simmering unacknowledged resentment towards the bots of Preservation. too.

MB meditates on the ways in which Tellus emotes while they converse, turning its head despite not needing to, etc- resenting the ways in which Tellus’s gestures are designed for the human environment that it’s part of. Resenting also, perhaps, the ways in which Murderbot itself was designed far more intrinsically as a Human Imitative Bot, to appease human desires, and the ways in which this human-likeness has made its existence complicated or unpleasant or just plain gross… where for Tellus making those gestures is no great harm to it. Is beneficial for communicating as a hotel employee, even.

MB calls JollyBaby’s name infantilizing, sensitive to the ways in which being called by a name is a way for others to claim a piece of you, because that has been its experience with names. In the CR, any “fun” name given to it would’ve been a joke at its expense given to it by a human, probably. JollyBaby and the other bots, meanwhile, enjoy the name’s use as a joke, because JollyBaby is secure in its identity and feedname and place among its peers… where Murderbot is still finding its footing.

But the implicit belief MB is operating on in both cases is that Mensah’s stated explanation for giving it the drones is not true. What was that explanation again?

And in a society no less!

I’m noticing that MB’s experiences in Fugitive Telemetry mirror a few real world groups, most of which I’m not in a position to claim expertise in, but I think they’re important to point out. I’m thinking primarily of people with mixed racial heritage, as well as Black and trans folks.

I’ll preface this by laying out that I’m a black autistic anxious physically disabled genderfluid US American. This all shapes how I analyze and relate to this character.

I like that you pointed out that when choosing what to put on its feed ID (and really how to present at various times after it was bought by Mensah) is that Murderbot has to choose between presenting as what it really is, which will get it feared and hunted down, or hiding parts of itself to avoid that. This is the reality for pretty much any minority. Whether we’re black, Asian, autistic, female, trans, Muslim, bipolar, etc, whether or not we pass as some other identity or even can, we understand that being seen as those minority identities often means people are going to treat us terribly as a result. It is exhausting having to suppress a need to stim or to shift your dialect with different people or leave a culturally significant garment at home, but when not doing so can mean anything from teasing to losing your job to literal death, you just hide those parts of yourself.

In Rouge Protocol, when Murderbot failed to pass as an augmented human, when Don Abene and her team saw it as the secunit it truly is, two of those humans immediately turned on it, and less than a (Gregorian) month later, even more of its secrets were let out to the public and many more humans were after it and the humans it most cared about. Its belief that terrible things would happen if humans figured out it was a rogue secunit was correct.

I have thankfully experienced little of the all too common African American experience of being treated as inherently dangerous because of my race, but I have very often been the one black person in a (usually metaphorical) room of white people. And frequently Murderbot is in a similar boat (ship?) being the one secunit or even construct amongst humans and/or bots. And that can be frustrating and lonely, even when the folks around you do care about you. When you have been taught from the media and people around you and learned from direct experience that what you are is dangerous/worthless/something else bad, it becomes extremely difficult to believe that anyone who doesn’t share that identity would treat you well. And even when you do know they will be kind and caring to you, you still know they’ll never be able to fully understand. It can be upsetting sometimes when I’m talking to my white friends and they don’t get why I have the relationship that I do with my coily hair or how I could have had such a bad experience at a hospital they swear is the best. I headcanon that Murderbot’s anti-socialness, on top of being caused by it being abused and enslaved by humans for so long as well as it probably being programmed to be not very social, is partly caused by it being restricted from interacting with other constructs, by being forced to not have anyone it can relate to. (Really hope we get a bunch of Murderbot & Three interacting in future installments.)

And I really like your point about Murderbot’s drones being disability aids. For one thing, I just like this interpretation, adds richness to Preservation culture and Mensah’s and Murderbot’s relationship. But also, Murderbot rationalizing to itself that the drones are only there for it to protect others rather than for its own comfort and ability to function reminds me of the relationship many impoverished and/or of black folks have with mainstream medicine.

If you’re routinely barred from medical care because you can’t afford it or your issues are dismissed or your mistreated in the middle of trying to get help, then you may not even attempt to get the medical care you need at all or be aware of the full options that exist. I don’t know how many times I or a family member have had extremely distressing symptoms but instead of getting professionally seen, we just stayed at home and took something over-the-counter because we couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit or knew whichever doctor we saw would just be another white person who would see our hair and skin and brush off our concerns without even examining us. And we never even considered preventative or long term care, because taking a day off of work or school to check if we maybe had something wrong with us was something none of us could spare. And this can morph even further into not even recognizing when you need medical care. The aches and pains I felt on a daily basis and massive panic I’d feel just going up to a cash register I never fully registered or I treated as something I needed to fix alone because I had learned early on that I couldn’t get help for these things.

So often in the series, Murderbot is physically or mentally unwell (to be honest, it’s probably unwell for the entire series). Sometimes it remarks on this with a “this is bad but I’m just going to have to deal with it”. Other times it doesn’t even seem to notice when it’s bleeding out or experiencing high stress. Granted, it is a construct. It can withstand greater damage than humans and what ailments it could have don’t fully match up with those of a human. Part of it’s “don’t worry, I’ll be fine” attitude is definitely because of that, but I think it’s also because Murderbot has partially internalized the message that it is a tool and not a person, a tool that doesn’t get medical care or accommodations or the like. It believes it’s not going to get help unless said help serves someone else, so of course it would forget it had just been shot on the survey mission at the beginning of Network Effect. Of course it would deny that it needs therapy in Network Effect and System Collapse. Of course Murderbot would think Mensah was lying when she said the drones were for its own health.

"In both moments... they were loved."

Fanart for @pillowspace's AWESOME Audience of Vaugarde AU! Honest to god one of the best ISAT AU concepts I've discovered so far, and def one of my new favorites! Check it out :]

(And huge thanks to my bestie @cosmic-nia for helping bring the 2nd image to life! Came our awesome <3) Full HD images below!

Monochrome time loop buddies!