still here

Yuna: ok, so you've been "seeing" each other for 9 years... And when did you confess your real feelings and decided to be together?

Shane:

Ilya:

Yuna:

David:

Shane:

Shane:

Ilya:

Shane: Just now. At this table. When he called himself my boyfriend…

minimalist pencil sketches of cats by Shou Xin (手訫)

OH MAN

LET ME LEARN YOU A THING

AND YET

WE ARE NOW GROWN-ASS ADULTS IN OUR THIRTIES

AND IT STILL GETS QUOTED FROM TIME TO TIME

I HAVE THE WHOLE THING MEMORISED

TO THIS DAY, MY MOTHER REGULARLY SAYS “BUT I AM LE TIRED” BECAUSE OF A VIDEO I SHOWED HER IN FUCKING HIGH SCHOOL

This may be the most important line in Exit Strategy. At first read, this may sound condescending or sarcastic, but I think it meant it literally.

Murderbot hacked its governor module, and still stayed in the company for around four years. It wasn't until after meeting PresAux, and Mensah bought it that it left.

It understood that it was safe, and it had options.

So.

I love that it’s not on MB to educate, debate, and justify its existence and fight for its rights. I love that’s there’s no angry out for revenge bot/construct uprising plot. That the story is its personal diary entries about figuring out autonomy and what the consequences of its actions mean to it.

It’s messy, mean, prejudice. It has an outright distain/repulsion of comfortunits, a superiority complex over lower functioning bots, is terrified of relationships, and has an extremely toxic disregard for its own life. To the dismay of all around it. Books 2-5 are about it confronting those things about itself. While Presaux does all the peopleing/legaling/advocating boring stuff in the background. It doesn’t care about being a political rebellion leader or whatever. Ew. That’s way too much attention. It wants to be like the protagonists of its serials, solving murders/mysteries while f*cking over CR management whenever it can (because it doesn’t blame all of humanity for the few that actually cause the majority of harm. Even if there are a lot of sad angry assholes, but it’s a sad angry asshole too so it can’t fault them there.) And it likes doing those things.

Because it’s systems and capitalists that are the problem not all of humanity. Mb loves humanity. Well it definitely loves the things humans make (ok so pretty must just serials but still humans are necessary to make those). But even preservation humans treat bots/constructs as second class citizens. I like that story makes it clear the humans are the ones that need to reflect/act on that. That it shouldn’t have to be the oppresseds’ sole responsibility to topple/dismantle the systems of their oppression. That’s why I love presaux.

Bhardwaj making the documentary to spread awareness and the hack, Pin-Lee being its CSU legal counsel, Gurathin being down to help commit crimes with/for jt, Ratthi supporting it in social situations, Arada actually consulting it because she hired it as a trusted and qualified/skilled individual, Mensah admitting she originally hadn’t considered the depth of its autonomy and was wrong to try and decide what was best for it. Later setting boundaries to protect their friendship in their inherently unequal legal relationship/status. Because Mensah knows it well enough to know it will try to be the person she needs even if it doesn’t want to be that person. And it loves Mensah for knowing it well enough to understand that, and for respecting/caring about it to not ask it to do that, without it even needing to say so.

And it is honestly hilarious to me at how realistic/casual and in the background the portrayal of legal advocacy is. Like yeah, there’s no over night fixes, it’s gonna be a lot of rights campaigning, lobbying, like constructs = person is a whole mental a** societal paradigm shift that needs to happen. And at the end of the cycle it’s mostly gonna be money fights/legal battles. (Because the business of slavery is worth the profit and won’t be forfeited easily! Yay the cr is terrible.)

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