TMBD: The Murderbot Diversity Project
This blog exists to celebrate the many, varied, wonderful visual interpretations of Murderbot that currently exist in the fandom zeitgeist.
Blog icon art by Tommy Arnold, header art by @broken-risk-assessment-module for the Murderbot Fanimation.
Murderbot, as it appears on the page, is a character that has resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers as though it speaks to each of us personally. Its story is that of a person who is not respected by wider society as a person: systemically disenfranchised, marginalized, stripped of autonomy and self-determination and traumatized by a lifetime of it all, Murderbot nevertheless comes into its own understanding of itself and its place in the world, gaining a network of people who support it in the process. Murderbot becomes a character in whom the marginalized find resonance, representation, and hope.
The backdrop of Murderbot's world is rich with diversity, too: nonbinary humans with they/them or neopronouns, culture clash between CR and non-CR cultures, and names (Mensah, Pin-Lee, Bharadwaj, Ratthi, Thiago) that speak to diverse non-Western, real-world cultures, represented unremarkably but undeniably on the page.
And so, whether simply because we love its dry sarcasm and heart of gold, because we too are miserable and alienated under capitalism, or because it has spoken to our neurodivergent experiences, our aromantic and asexual experiences, our trans and genderqueer experiences, or our experiences as cultural or racial minorities, Murderbot has inspired a wide array of interpretations.
Murderbot has been any and all of what its fans need to see, a full spectrum of diversity beyond any one image set by institutional power. Masculine, feminine, and androgynous builds; tall and skinny, short and stacked, petite and dangerous; brown-skinned, Black, Asian, a variety of ethnicities; with and without a range of visible inorganic parts and joints; the power of its fans to imagine and reimagine Murderbot is unbounded.
Our goal is to support and encourage the Murderbot Diaries and its fandom in all its extant diversity.
