Okay, the plot of PlatformDecay (which I spell without a space, because it's a synonym for enshittification and I don't want to contribute to spam in that tag more than necessry) is that Murderbot is rescuing 3 random members of Mensah's family, who have been kidnapped and taken prisoner by Barish Estranza, the company from Network Effect, that wanted to enslave and colonize the people on that whole planet.
They were defeated at the end of Network Effect, then somehow weren't actually defeated because System Collapse was dedicated to the exact same problem despite us being told it was fixed.
So then they were defeated again at the end of System Collapse.
Now an indeterminable amount of time has, apparently, passed, and Barish Estranza has decided to expend ungodly amounts of resources to kidnap three random members of Mensah's family, and hold them prisoner, and then expend *even more* ungodly amounts of resources trying to kill them when Murderbot comes to rescue them.
And there is absolutely no motivation for them to do this, in any capacity.
Barish Estranza is an entire corporation, which in this setting is an entire *country*.
Mensah didn't do jack shit to harm them in any way. They shouldn't know her name, let alone care so much about getting "revenge" on her that they're going to spend *this many* absurd resources to....kidnap random family members of hers.
She's not even the president of Preservation anymore, and hasn't been presumably for years. And again, she didn't actually, at any point, do anything that would in any way warrent this level of attention being on her at all, let alone enough attention that this *country* is going to go to the effort of kidnapping her wife, a random kid, and an old lady that's not even related to her by blood.
And not only putting in all the absurd amounts of money to do that, but now they're wasting even more time and money trying to....kill them. While they're escaping. For no reason.
It's not like they stole any kind of secret technology, or documents, or literally anything.
The actions of the Bad Guys™ in this story are completely and utterly nonsensical, beyond anything suspension of dlsbelief can save.
It was already enough work to accept that GreyCris cared enough to keep trying to get revenge on Mensah with assasins that would have taken years to get to that state of brainwashing, and now we're being expected to just accept even more ridiculous behavior from Barish Estranza, with even less flimsy justification available—
And Martha Wells is literally lampshading this within the story.
She's literally having Murderbot say in the narration that it doesn't make sense for this company to be spending this much money chasing down 3 random nobodies.
She knows the plot doesn't make sense. She knows *we* know that. But she's not going to do us the basic service of *writing a story that makes sense*, even though it's being sold for the price you can get a full length novel for.
She's telling us that she knows the plot is broken from the start, but she doesn't care, she's not going to fix it, she's not going to put in any effort at all, while still demanding our money, and still expecting to win rewards and praise for *a story she admits literally does not make any sense at all*.
There's also the matter of the torus itself, which is so beyond the scope of any technology that we have *ever* even been given a hint of in this universe that it defies comprehension, but it's just introduced like it's nothing, out of nowhere, nine years into the series existing, and there's apparently more than one.
There is no coherent setting in this series even thought we have 13 stories so far, spread out over 9 years. The antagonists have no actual motivations, and neither do the protagonists.
We still don't know what they were doing on that "survery" planet in book 1, besides casual colonization that we're supposed to think is totally fine and politically neutral!
Murderbot's hacking does and does not do whatever the plot requires in the scene its in, with no actual limitations or continuity whatsoever.
The characters have no personalities outside of What The Plot Requires, even when Martha Wells herself admits, in the story itself, that the plot doesn't even make sense.
She is writing badly, on purpose, and broadcasting the fact that it's on purpose.
But she still wants to get paid like a professional author, and get praised like one, despite refusing to put in any of the actual effort, and *slapping the audience in the face with this fact*.
We still don't even have a basic description of what Murderbot, let alone the 8 other characters we were introduced to in book 1, look like.
Even though this book tells us that Murderbot has "changed the color and texture of its hair". From what? To what?
Martha Wells is simply not going to tell us. Because she doesn't want to put any actual effort or care into the story. She's not interested in telling a serious story, she just wants money, but she wants the *praise* of being a serious author anyways.
It would have been so simple to pick a plot for this book that just makes sense. But she chose not to do that. And she's *telling us* she couldn't be bothered to do that, and expects us to laugh along like she hasn't alienated at this point 90% of the original fandom by refusing to actually take the story in any serious direction whatsoever, depsite promising to do exactly that 6 years ago now.
