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anyway sound off. at what stage do ppl think Han figured out the Force was real. the boring answer is after seeing Obi-wan vanish but i think he could rationalise that away as his eyes playing tricks on him. what do we think.
that's so funny. that means he accepted Vader deflecting a blaster bolt with his hand as just something freaky government cyborgs can do, and stuck by Luke for multiple years as he tried to figure this Force stuff out, and just treated it like your friend getting really really into neopaganism to cope with a loss.
like yeah kid good job with the witching. i'm certain it will be more useful against your enemies than your sharpshooting. no i do not think your witchcraft is supplementing your aim but i'm not gonna argue about it.
yeah Luke was like 'I heard Ben Kenobi's voice in my head telling me how to blow up the Death Star :)' and Han was like 'kind of an unusual coping mechanism but I'm not gonna argue with him'
thanks to carbonite han not only misses learning about luke's training montage on dagobah, he's also half-blind during their whole escape on tatooine. luke's out there force-kicking henchmen with his gucci boots and doing flips and shit and han can't see a goddamn thing. now on endor luke's yeeting threepio with the power of his mind and han's just like 'the last time we hung out i had to stuff him in a tauntaun sleeping bag'.
This is so important though: "You're gonna get in trouble for that" reveals so much. He was planning on nobody doing anything, not because nobody stands up to him, or nobody objecting to what he says. He expects good people to be goody-two-shoes rules followers, and he expects the rules to protect him no matter what he does.
Important lesson to learn from this standing up to fascists means getting into good trouble. Get into trouble if it's worth it. Fascists will never expect it.
exactly - ICE kid was looking for trouble and expecting "the libs" to be nonviolent in response to his baiting them with vocal support of violence
plus hoodie kid gave him the opportunity to back down and apologize for being a dick, but instead ICE kid relied on the implied threat of legalistic tools as a shield against the consequences of violent rhetoric, further bringing on his FAFO moment
the legal concept of "fighting words" is why punching nazis is typically safe to do in a free democratic society
hoodie kid was in the right and acting heroically, and ICE kid was literally asking for violence
Her website is here: https://www.artofgeorgina.com/ and the prints are shockingly good value. She paints digitally but makes it look so much like oil it is incredible to me.
these are mostly fics that discuss the governor module, whether in action or as a retrospective on its effects, ex. shaping a construct's later behaviour.
please see the tags/warnings on each fic.
Regulations and Standards by @jottingprosaist
Bring Down Rain by @abeautifulblog/gremble
SecUnits and Special Agents by FlatApple
Protocol Error by @jottingprosaist
Procedural Learning series by Sunruner
MurderWars (x Star Wars) by @katachresiswriting/katachresis
The White Road by @greenjudy
All Systems Governed by @vulcan-highblood/vulcanhighblood
Emotional Context by Clare_Hope
IV series by @ii-thiscat-ii/ThisCat
Useful Facts About Grief by @lyricwritesprose
Neither Family Nor Property by PeniG
Structure Unstable by Killbothtwins
Our DiscomfortUnit by Sledgehammer_Girl
Missed Connection by @flipspring
Fauna One by Avonya
Closing Distance by torpidgilliver
Mutually Assured Discretion by torpidgilliver
Boiled Off Your Hate by torpidgilliver
Improper Use of Company Equipment by ArtemisTheHuntress
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Long answer: Not really, in my opinion, and I want to try and explain why.
Definitions
The term unreliable narrator has become somewhat watered down here on tumblr and in pop cultural discussions in general but I am working with what I learned at uni here. (Disclaimer: In academia too there are different definitions and approaches to unreliability but I'm going with the basics here)
For Wayne Booth, who first coined the term, "an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, omits or misrepresents important information, or presents inaccurate interpretations of events as objective truth." Peter J. Rabinowitz says "An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience." (emphasis mine)
In other words, an unreliable narrator deceives the narrative audience (that is the implied in-universe audience), knowingly or unknowingly, in a way that significantly changes their interpretation of the narrative.
According to Greta Olson, there is "a differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators" and "all fictional texts that employ the device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability."
That means: It is not a binary of reliable vs. unreliable narrator. It is a sliding scale, a spectrum, and I would argue that on that spectrum, Murderbot falls closer to the trustworthy side than the unreliable.
General Thoughts
By and large, Murderbot presents the facts of the story to us truthfully. It does not withhold information from us that impacts our understanding of the events (see below for exceptions).
Are there moments where Murderbot's narration is fallible? Sure. It makes mistakes, particularly with judging people's intentions and their opinion of it. It consistently assumes people (especially "its" humans) think worse of it and trust it less than they actually do. It considers itself not important, and therefore assumes it is also not important to others. It also often rates it competence as much lower than it actually is.
But, and this is crucial: It does also tell us when it makes mistakes and often tells us the objective events in addition to its subjective assumptions or interpretations. By that I mean: It tells us its assumptions about the humans not thinking much of it and considering it expendable. But it also tells us the humans' words and actions that prove the opposite is true. It tells us about how incompetent and useless it is (especially in System Collapse) and then also tells us the sequence of events showing it actually is still capable of doing its job. It learns alongside us that its negative thoughts about itself aren't always true.
That's not unreliable narration.
Now, Murderbot's refusal to admit/discuss its emotions is the most common argument I've seen for MB being unreliable, and that is the one that probably bothers me the most.
Because
a) A narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. MB refusing to discuss its feelings is a characterisation choice, but it's not keeping any vital information from us that we need to understand the story. There's gonna be narrators that focus more on outside descriptions and some that focus more on internal thoughts and perceptions and neither is inherently more unreliable than the other.
b) that being said imo MB's narration actually focuses A Lot on internal perceptions and feeling, in spite of it being so reluctant to talk about them. I think MB gives us a lot more emotion than we give it credit for. I would argue it doesn't actually hide all that much. It may often not be able to state its feelings outright, but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell us about them
As an example, let's look at the moment when Gurathin reveals its name to the PresAux group because that's always one that sticks in my mind with regard to MB and how it communicates its feelings
I opened my eyes and looked at him; I couldn’t stop myself. From their expressions I knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, “That was private.”
Murderbot doesn't actually tell us anything about what it's feeling here. It only tells us it's feeling something intense, and that it shows in its face, that the others can perceive it and react to it, and that it hates it. We can extrapolate what it's feeling of course: it's feeling betrayed and exposed and embarrassed and vulnerable (and angry but that's a given for MB). But I would argue it's not hiding that from us. It's given us the context we need to extrapolate what it's feeling because a) it doesn't want to talk about it directly so it does it indirectly and/or b) it wouldn't even know how to name the emotions it's feeling in that moment.
So I would say that MB does the best it can given its limitations (in experience and willingness to talk about feelings) to give us the most accurate view of its emotional state without having to talk about it. After all, we almost always know how it feels, or can at the very least guess at it. If it really was trying to hide its feelings from us (not from the other characters, it probably is actually pretty opaque to them most of the time) the narration would be reading very differently.
Looking at it from a Doylist perspective for a second: This is also stylistic choice on the part of Martha Wells, it's basic "show, don't tell": She doesn't simply tell us what Murderbot is feeling, she is showing us through its thoughts, actions and reactions and the reactions of other characters. That doesn't make Murderbot untrustworthy.
Now, I want to look at a few other passages and examples that are often brought up in this debate.
"the company"
Murderbot censoring the company name is not unreliable. Once we know that it does this, through Dr. Bharadwaj's mention of it, it is quite a telling characterisation choice imo, it tells us so much about MB's feelings towards the company and itself in relation to it. But, crucially: knowing the company's name would not at all change our understanding of this story. The company's name is completely irrelevant, UNLESS it suddenly turned out that the company was GrayCris or Barish-Estranza or some other corp we already know all along. We can say with some certainty that's not gonna happen, so: substituting the company for its actual name would change absolutely nothing about the story except to give us one less piece of characterisation for Murderbot. Therefore: not unreliable.
[redacted] in System Collapse
Here is another example of Murderbot deliberately concealing information from the audience, but I would still argue it doesn't make it unreliable because a) it doesn't hide from us the fact that it's concealing something. We know something has been redacted. It's the equivalent of a narrator saying "I can't talk about that right now." b) While the information is redacted, we are given enough context clues to have an idea of what [redacted] is. We know it's an incident that occurred recently that is likely trauma-related and that has caused Murderbot to lose confidence in itself and trust in its system/mind. c) Murderbot reveals the information to us voluntarily fairly early on in the book (exactly 40% in, thanks ebooks), when it becomes relevant for us to understand what's happening going forward. It does not in any significant way change our understanding of the events of the book up to that point, since we could already see the effects the incident had on MB all along. Therefore: not unreliable.
Murderbot refusing to admit it and ART are friends
What are you even talking about?
In Exit strategy it tells us "my friend ART had changed my configuration". In Network Effect is says to Amena "my friend is dead" and it thinks to itself "It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could."
So it later objects to the term friend when ART uses it after reinitialising and when Ratthi tries to talk to MB about their "friendship", and gave us "mutual administrative assistance" why? Because it's angry at ART. It feels betrayed and used and it's rightfully pissed off, so it can't think of ART as a friend in that moment. That's genuinely how it feels right then, and even if not: it's not uttering that refusal to us as the audience but to the characters in the story (ART and Ratthi). A character lying to other characters is not the same as the narrator lying to the audience. Therefore: not unreliable
MB not talking about/refusing to notice the relationships of the humans around it
I don't even know where to start with this one. Murderbot also routinely skips over descriptions of survery work and other things it finds boring because it simply does not care about them. As I said above, a narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. In fact, a narration by necessity needs to limit a narrator's perception to what is relevant and important, because it is simply not possible to describe absolutely everything in equal measure. If Murderbot paid a lot of attention to human relationships, this would be a different kind of story. Therefore: not unreliable.
Murderbot has no emotional intelligence
Again, this isn't really a question of being unreliable at all, but I've seen it brought up in this context and it pissed me off so I wanna discuss it.
Literally one of the first things that happens in the series is MB talking to a terrified and in shock Volescu with gentleness and empathy and understanding, knowing exactly what it needs to say in order to keep him calm and get him out of danger, to the point that everyone in the survey is amazed at how well it handled this very emotionally fraught situation... only for some people to turn around and say Murderbot has no emotional intelligence?? the gall tbh
Having a negative self image (and a shitton of trauma) does not equal having no emotional intelligence. And let's not forget that Murderbot's bad opinion of itself and SecUnits it completely justified by its experiences and informed by a lifetime of being enslaved, objectified, abused and de"human"ised/having its personhood denied. Pretty much everyone it's ever met up until ASR has been either afraid of it or treated it as an appliance/toy, or both. It has limited education, very restricted life experiences and almost no actual interaction with other people, outside of receiving orders. Given all of that, I actually think it's shockingly sensitive and emotionally intelligent and regulated.
Murderbot didn't tell us about Ganaka Pit
Now this is the one instance where I can see the argument about Murderbot being unreliable applying.
With the very first sentence of ASR ("I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module ...") it at least implies that it hadn't done any mass murdering. It never tries to hide the fact that it and SecUnits in general are dangerous and murderous (see: murderbots), but iirc it doesn't give us any hint of Ganaka Pit until Gurathin brings it up about halfway through the first book (unlike the TV show where I think there are indistinct flashbacks from the start).
It does admit to the narrative audience at that point that it hasn't been entirely truthful and gives more context/information. It also admits that its memory of the incidence is unreliable and its conclusions about what happened are largely conjecture ("I think that’s what happened. ... And it makes a better story that way.")
I wouldn't say that this information significantly changes the story as we experienced it thus far, but it does change the way we perceive Murderbot. Personally I would call it more of a backstory reveal than an instance of unreliable narration, but an argument can definitely be made. You could say that Murderbot represented itself as safer than it was for the first half of the book (although I don't think it represents itself as very safe at all; it does keep emphasising how dangerous and horrifying it is.)
Therefore: Possibly unreliable.
Conclusion:
Murderbot is a fallible but mostly trustworthy narrator. It may underreport and misevaluate some things, but mostly those that are subject to subjective interpretation anyway (emotions, internal and external perceptions). When its assumptions or interpretations are incorrect, the audience is often made aware of that. As far as we can tell (i.e. unless there is a major plot twist coming up in the next book) there is no narrative or authorial intent of deceit or obfuscation.
Interpretation of narrative texts is not an exact science, and there are scholars who would say that narrative and authorial intent matters less than generic readers' assumptions, but this is what I, as a reader, believe given the information we receive from the text.
If you believe that Murderbot is an unreliable narrator, I likely won't change your mind. But I think what I and others are wary of in this debate is people using the "unreliable narrator" label as an excuse to pick and choose which parts of canon to believe and which to dismiss in order to reinforce their own ideas/preferences, rather than engaging with what the text actually gives us.
Take this as food for thought, if you want, and maybe sit with it for a while.
Or not, I can't make you.
Sources:
Here and here for a general refresher on Unreliability
For the direct quotes
And credit where credit is due: All of this is built around my contributions to a discussion on the topic on the MB 2.0 discord. I only used my own words for this essay but of course my analysis was partially informed by thoughts and arguments brought up by others involved in that conversation.
I think that part of what irks me about AI being used even for "small" stuff like meme graphics (aside from all the larger problems obviously) is like.... the time spent on it was part of the humor. "this is a silly inconsequential joke but I had to stop everything and spend 5 minutes making it" was, at least for me, part of the joke. Someone really took time out of their day to make me look at something silly they took time out of their day to make. Now it's like someone took time out of my day to make me look at something no one even made. Stop wasting my time if you aren't wasting yours too.
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After the hell of the past two days, this reminded me of what America could and should be about. It’s a little pocket of hope when our administration is trying to extinguish diversity and community and basic human decency and replace them with fear and hate and division.
okay okay listen okay listen. i finished reading fugitive telemetry and i had to draw my favourite part SO BAD. skip this if u dont want kinda spoilers for that idk
(rocky voice) human atmosphere too cold even through xenonite insulated suit! let rocky in grace skin! does grace want rocky to almost freeze to death again, question
pov: grace tries to explore outside the biodome, only to find himself in a first person horror game in a foggy pitch dark hellscape with many alien rock spiders, scuttling in and out of the darkness. at least they're all friendly!
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