Also I was thinking about this way before the previous thing but Murderbot is the best representation I have ever seen of how culturally normalized, long-term dehumanization affects one's psyche. Sure lots of things explore the psychology of internalized dehumanization but NONE of it ever manages to touch on the things Wells does just, so naturally. So much fiction about robots(etc.) seeking freedom who are eager to intelligibly articulate to their oppressors what's wrong with the way they're treated and how to fix it, that just, absolutely do not reflect how people who've undergone this very specific type of abuse usually think, feel and behave in reality. (Well. Ime.) And this is why Murderbot just hits different. This is a character who has only ever lived its life within a class of people whose dehumanization is so normal in its society that it doesn't even see why it deserves the privilege of personhood and why should it? It's normal. It doesn't consider it oppression because it's so completely standard, and even in contexts of other oppressed types of people it's unremarkable that robots are considered non-people.
Maybe that's what else stands out about it, that robots in this setting are not a stand-in for The Oppressed Class. "Robots as an oppressed type of people" fiction often has them be the all-in-one allegory for all real-world discrimination to be applied as needed. In the Murderbot Diaries AIs are AI and they're oppressed as AIs, not a lazy stand-in for Black people or shoehorned stand-in for women or an accidental stand-in for autistic people. Which is much more interesting to read
They're a type of being that's so typical to unperson that it's usually not even approached as part of the problem of an oppressive society, they're a natural and rallying other. And you know, specifically in a way where they're not just depersoned, they're feared specifically because they are considered capable bodies ungoverned by the rational mind of a human which makes them dangerous if not strictly controlled and repressed, be it physically or by a system of Rules they are punished for breaking (but it's ok because they don't really feel pain the same way). And there is never any touching on of the "a relationship between a human and an AI is taboo" because that's not even a real thing that would happen, they're not people. Do you see what I'm saying
They are actually so autistic/intellectually disabled coded to me. Not in the way robots/AIs normally are. Not because of how they think and act socially. It's different than any other "that's how it feels to be autistic" fiction because it covers the way they're treated externally and how the specific way they're marginalized by the society of the setting affects them individually.
I guess my point is that there's lots of characters who make me feel seen as an autistic person and myriad characters who make me feel seen as a person with trauma but it's only Murderbot who makes me feel seen specifically as an (early-childhood-diagnosed) disabled autistic person with lasting trauma from things like special ed, developmental "therapy" and psychiatry.
Murderbot is autistic trauma.
