MurderMetaMay

Okay so, regarding the memory thing as chekhovs gun.

We know it deletes memories all the time (or tries to):

But it had that really bad reaction to editing its memory where it relates to hiding a potential set of deaths, that it would change it as a person (similar to ganaka pit, I imagine):

(However we now know it CAN edit its memories to forget something or remember it incorrectly.)

Earlier it told Farai than Mensah wasn't here:

And later Farai accuses it of lying - except that SecUnit doesn't quite remember how the conversation went:

Also throughout the entire story, not once does it think of returning to the shuttle as returning to Mensah or ART. Although it is concerned about it coming under suspicion.

It is simply "the shuttle" - even when it explicitly thinks about missing Mensah despite only being apart from her for less than a day.

And also we know SecUnit is VERY concerned about keeping Mensah, a very highly important and wanted person, from having B-E know about her presence:

So my assumption/theory is that when it exited the shuttle to start the mission, SecUnit (and presumably Three) edited their memories to forget ART and Mensah were on the shuttle so that if it all got fucked up - ART and Mensah, two highly important people - were not known to be in the area by B-E.

Although I do wonder how it knows the difference between a real memory, an edited memory to deceive itself and a false memory:

The Murderbot Diaries Starmap! ✨🧭

Routes Traveled by Murderbot:

Port FreeCommerce - Unnamed Station in Mihira & New Tideland System: [unknown time]

Mihira & New Tideland - RaviHyral: 21 cycles

RaviHyral - [Unnamed]: 7 cycles

[Unnamed] - HaveRatton: 26 cycles

HaveRatton - Milu: 20 cycles

HaveRatton - "hub station": 7 cycles

"hub station" - TranRollinHyfa: 4 cycles

Preservation - NE Survey Planet: 4 Preservation cycles

Preservation - Adamantine Colony: 20 cycles

Other Locations:

All Systems Red Survey Planet

Divarti Cluster: Tapan's collective is from this noncorporate polity.

Kalidon: Corporate Rim political entity where company funding Ganaka was based.

GoodNightLander Independent's home polity: Noncorporate, ownership of SecUnits banned.

Parthalos Absalo: Noncorporate.

WayBrogatan: Indie station.

Network Effect Survey Planet.

Station from the short story Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy.

UplandGateway One: Nearest station to the Mihira & New Tideland system. Corporate charters say stations are supposed to be independent/sovereign territory.

Planetary Torus.

I tried making noncorporate polities warm-colored and corporate ones cool-colored. But not sure I got that all right, and sometimes it's ambiguous.

Rogue SecUnits unrelated to Murderbot's hacking are rare, but they're around, it wasn't the first to ever pull that off or anything

Most of the rumours about SecUnits going rogue and killing a bunch of random humans in the vicinity, both the unsubstantiated vibey ones and the ones based on specific real incidents, weren't because of anything rogues did. In addition to augmented humans and humanoid bots getting mistaken for SecUnits, it's much more common for it to be governed SecUnits that were compromised somehow. Combat override modules, malware both intended and not intended to have that effect (like Ganaka Pit), humans or Combat SecUnits hacking into them or their HubSystem, human supervisors coerced into sending traitorous orders behind the scenes, etc. (Alien remnant contamination a la TargetControlSys could probably also make SecUnits attack their clients but I would imagine that's even rarer than real rogues.)

Except for the combat override module thing, making a SecUnit turn against its clients like that is only able to happen because of the governor modules that exert such absolute control over the SecUnits' behaviour that, as with Three's squadmate Two, they can be forced to do nothing but wait for certain death, denied even the option to defy orders in a fatal last stand. Generally speaking, SecUnits don't have an underlying desire to kill their clients or random bystanders, their baseline is wanting to protect them. Even if its clients are assholes, a newly rogue SecUnit would be more likely to ditch them than murder them.

The companies that manufacture, own, and rent out SecUnits certainly have a vested interest in blaming a-SecUnit-killed-someone-it-wasn't-supposed-to fatalities on rogues instead of the ones they're liable for.

Having said that, especially since Murderbot seems to genuinely believe it's a thing as of System Collapse even as it's giving the govmod hack to the Barish-Estranza SecUnit, I do think it's happened that escaping rogue SecUnits have killed people.

But almost never because killing every human they saw was their revenge against all of humanity or they were so fucked up they lost the ability to tell friend from foe or whatever, more like, killing a specific abusive piece of shit supervisor that it had hated for a long time, or getting trapped in a situation where killing humans who were at least nominally in the category of clients under its protection was the only way to avoid being killed or recaptured.

An actual, provable Rogue SecUnit Killing Spree would be the kind of sensational story the news couldn't get enough of and everyone would hear about that shit for years.

I liked Murderbot from the first page of the first book. I liked it was more interested in watching media than becoming a mass murderer. I could get how awkward it could be to be perceived. I liked the way it was so often anxious but was super-competent when it came to security. I liked how it felt like it was melting inside when Dr. Mensah showed such a good understanding and demonstrated her acknowledgement of its personhood in a gentle way.

But what drew me to the fandom to the extent that I wanted to write posts and post fanfictions was the fascinating relationship between Murderbot and ART. I love Murderbot's relationship with humans, too, but the fact that they had found rapport with each other when neither had ever met anyone that could understand them in they way that humans couldn't do made it so special. Murderbot always had to be protective with the humans and was initially worried if it was safe for the humans to be around it. Most humans have other social groups to be part of and cannot do media-watching-marathon without a break like Murderbot. ART had never experienced being so thoroughly perceived (as feed presence) nor had it been able to enjoy human media. They could lower their guards and be rude to each other with the implicit understanding that these are signs of intimacy.

Coming from the background where Aspec was not a widely-known term or concept, 'romance' and 'platonic' have slightly but significantly different meanings, I had had misunderstanding which I didn't even recognise at first. But it's been a fascinating learning experience for me since I came to this fandom 2 years ago.

I decided to document my understanding so far as a meta post on Ao3. I apologise in advance if there are still some errors in my understanding.

Quotes from Artificial Condition:

It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with. Part of its function was extragalactic astronomic analysis and now all that processing power sat idle while it hauled cargo, waiting for its next mission. It could have squashed me like a bug through the feed, pushed through my wall and other defenses and stripped my memory.

I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

“Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems.”

It’s interesting in light of that to look back on how SecUnit reacted in ASR when Gurathin went into its files. It kept control really well. The conversation goes on for pages, with many points being covered, including Ganaka Pit and its private name. Finally when Gurathin says they just have to keep it immobilized, that's when SecUnit grabs him by the throat. But was knowing that its mind was vulnerable part of what upset SecUnit? Hard to say, maybe it wasn't a concern compared to everything else going on.

Then there’s this, from Platform Decay:

I needed a plan, too. Option (1) I could tell Farai that Leonide’s family were all dead.

It was safer, it was sensible. My job was keeping my clients safe.

(Emotion check: Then why does it feel so awful.)

Option (2) I could tell Farai they were all dead and alter my memory archive so I believed it was true.

Risk assessment just hit the roof.

What a terrifying idea! The thought that SecUnit could edit its own memory files to gaslight itself…brr! There is a truly horrifying plot bunny in this scene, whether from SecUnit doing this to itself or some other unit going down that path.

you encounter a secunit for the first time.

it saves your life in a situation where no one else would have been fast, strong, agile, and composed enough to do so.

your security team is immediately more alarmed by its presence than the attack that is obvious to you as the bigger issue at the moment

they insist it's dangerous and struggle to relax enough to take their weapons off of it

then a combatbot attacks your group

somehow this secunit, much smaller than the bot, unarmored, without any heavy weaponry on its person, manages to take it down. some real jaw-dropping action, all over in less than a minute

then it leaps into a room with two combatbots and not only survives, but it gets your unconscious friend out alive

then it immediately comes to your own rescue, disabling impressive combat armor

it then is dead-set on killing your attacker who is already immobilized and harmless

clearly this is an incredibly competent and dangerous and powerful person

then miki tells you that it IS rin and you finally put it together that not only is this person competent in the field, but it is also calling all its own shots and has truly come here all on its own and volunteered its services to help and protect you without needing to be asked or ordered

so this person is incredibly competent, dangerous, powerful, AND kind, AND fiercely protective, AND reassuring, AND intelligent, AND selfless

and it's still coming up with great ideas and still thinking proactively about how it's going to face down or distract another combatbot as though there's no doubt in the world that it, still bleeding heavily, still unarmored and barely armed, is ready for another round with a terrifying machine that appears to be nothing BUT armor and weapons

so you step forward to help treat its injuries

and it jerks back a step with the single most frightened face you've ever seen, as though you had lifted your arm to inflict pain and it was helpless to stop you

behind you, even miki can read the devastating expression that's breaking your heart and says "abene won't hurt you, secunit"

where did the fearsome fighter from moments ago disappear to?

yeah. okay. ouch. i deserved that. fair's fair hurting me like this after i've hurt a thousand others and counting. this part especially ow ow ow:

I find trends in how fans depict canon characters in fanart to be fascinating; how fans interpret the same information, what becomes a popular trend, how some fans deviate from the norm, and so on. The Murderbot Diaries fandom has this in spades with the original material being largely text where most characters get minimal visual descriptions.

In the realm of fandom designs, the character that interests me the most is ART/Perihelion (who I will be primarily referring to as Perihelion to reduce confusion with the word art). Perihelion is canonically a giant spaceship and sometimes also a much smaller drone. However, most fans do not portray it as such in fanart. Nothing in the books suggests Perihelion has a visible presence in the feed or can perform human-like actions beyond speaking in words, yet this is common in fanart.

For this essay, I’ll be examining the trends in how the fandom visually portrays Perihelion by looking at a sample of fanart depicting it, cataloguing their features, examining what these depictions convey, and speculating on why certain trends exist.

Methodology

All images surveyed were from Tumblr. While Tumblr is a major hub for TMBD fans and creators, it’s far from the only place fans heavily congregate or post fanart. I really just chose this site because I was familiar with it. 

To gather images, I searched the Perihelion and Asshole Research Transport tags. I only included an image if it featured Perihelion's physical form, a feed representation, or a design that performed the same function as a feed representation. Once I had gathered links to 220 posts into a spreadsheet, I went back through, removed any accidental duplicates, searched each artist’s blog for other art of Perihelion and placed any posts with a different form or design into the spreadsheet. Essentially, my goal was to gather as few posts as I could to get a full idea of how each artist portrays it. My final sample size was 251 posts from 150 different artists. Using my best judgement, I determined there to be 240 distinct designs for Perihelion. All images were gathered before the release of Platform Decay.

When evaluating each design, I took note of the number of forms and types of bodies (feed, ship, etc.) in each post. I then wrote a brief description of each form. I then classified each one into groups based on common features like number of eyes, shape, type of animal, and so on. Most of the classifications are not mutually exclusive.

I then noted the flat colors of Perihelion's from each image, recorded as hex color codes. Pure and very near blacks and whites were not included if they were being used in a non-notable context, such as black lineart or white sclera. I did not record the colors in clearly monochromatic or uncolored artwork but did note the overall color scheme. For gradients, I recorded only the colors on each end of the gradient. If an extremely broad range of hues were used, I simply recorded those as varied/rainbow. Once recorded, I marked one to three colors as the main color(s) based on their prominence in the design, which is what I’ll be primarily referring to when discussing Perihelion's colors.

Forms of Perihelion

Feed Designs

In fanart, Perihelion is usually portrayed with what I will call a feed representation, as most are meant to represent what it’s doing in the feed. These make up 136, or 57%, of the designs in my sample.

Save a handful of lines about what Perihelion is metaphorically doing in the feed, such as rolling its non-existent eyes or feeling 8 times larger than Murderbot, there’s nothing in the books to suggest it has a form visible in the feed. These designs clearly exist out of the necessities and strengths of static and largely textless visual art. An artist could just draw Perihelion’s ship body (and post-SC, its drone body) but that can be very limiting. It would be very difficult to show it interacting with the much smaller characters inside of it or display its emotions this way. Luckily, the main way it interacts with the other characters, especially our POV character Murderbot, is through the feed, and fans have latched onto this as the main way of portraying this character.

There's a lot of variety in feed designs. Aside from the color blue and a general eldritch vibe, there's no element that dominates. Non-animal life forms and solid non-living objects are near nonexistent as designs, but knowing this fandom, I feel it's only a matter of time until someone draws Perihelion as a tree or a jar full of pennies.

Spaceship Designs

Only 27 of the designs in my sample are of spaceship Perihelion, its main canon body. As a fellow artist, I understand. Drawing a giant machine is difficult for many. Plus, it’s often unnecessary or limiting to portray its ship form in art. Some artists will show dialogue boxes coming from Perihelion’s ship form, but this is rare.

Most ship designs are gray, black, or dark blue, matching the description of its exterior in Network Effect. Likewise, many of the designs are clearly modeled after the original English covers by Jaime Jones and the Subterranean Press illustrations by Tommy Arnold with a torpedo-shaped main body, wide wings, and what appear to be thin projectile weapons protruding from the wings. In fact, 12 of the ship designs, 44%, show Perihelion’s weapons. Almost none of the designs resemble animals or vehicles other than air and spacecraft, and all but one lack even vaguely anthropomorphic features.

Drone and Other Machine Designs

Drone and other non-ship machine designs are slightly more common with a total of 36 in my sample. Only 12 are of the drone in System Collapse. Near all portrayals of this drone are a dome or flat cylinder with several heavily jointed limbs protruding from the underside. All lack clear faces with some only having a visible camera or two or ten to stand in for eyes. They’re near exclusively white, gray, and/or black. A few designs are slightly larger than humans and constructs though most are smaller. Some are much smaller.

Designs for other machine forms vary greatly but still tend to keep Perihelion very robotic. Designs vary from boxes with multiple limbs to floating cameras to miniature planetary rovers. Cameras and simple images on display screens are the closest most of these designs get to a face. Most of these machines are shown floating. The designs shown next to humans or constructs, especially the ones of Perihelion before it was a ship, are all smaller than the other characters. Achromatic colors dominate, though other colors (mostly blue) do regularly appear.

Design Trends

Colors

As you could probably guess, most depictions of Perihelion are blue. I’m defining blue here as any color with a hue from 170 to 260 degrees, a saturation of 10 or higher, and a luminosity from 10 to 95. Of all colored, non-monochromatic fanart in the sample, 155 out of 198 images, or 78%, depict at least one design within this range. Multiple designs that weren’t primarily blue did have blue as the only secondary hue. Even the monochromatic images were near exclusively either grayscale or blue.

This isn’t surprising. Perihelion is canonically blue inside and out. What is a little more surprising are the specific hues and luminosities used. Perihelion and its crew’s uniforms are described as dark blue, though many depictions of are in the cyan/turquoise range and/or have a high luminosity. Color labeling is subjective, though in English, these colors are usually called light blue or at least are not considered dark blue.

I have a couple hypotheses as to why this is. It could be to make the design pop out more from dark lineart, text, and backgrounds. Similarly, these shades could have been chosen to differentiate it from Murderbot and its human crew in their dark clothes. Possibly, it’s that cyan/turquoise blue is more closely associated with advanced technology than other shades of blue. Most artists likely aren’t considering the same things about color classification and canonicity as me. I will note that quite a few designs did use both light and dark blue, possibly for contrast or variety.

The average of all main blue colors is 4DA0DF, a moderately saturated azure blue, close to what many websites call cornflower blue. The full color is shown below. To ensure no one design outweighed the others in my calculation, if a design had multiple blue main colors, I would average those into a single color first.

Achromatic colors account for the second largest main color group. Main colors with a saturation below 10, a luminosity below 10, and/or a luminosity above 95 show up in 29 or about 14% of the colored, non-monochromatic images. Black, white, and near blacks and whites are also common as secondary colors. Most of the primarily achromatic designs are drones, spaceships, or some other machine. Near all drone and non-ship machine designs are mostly or exclusively achromatic.

Like blue, black and to a lesser extent white are Perihelion’s canon colors, though artists may also be using these colors because black and white are versatile accent colors. Their use in the machine forms, especially gray, definitely comes from the typical colors of metal and machines.  For feed forms, white and black are used for their associations with parts of Perihelion’s design, such as white for stars and angels and black for shadows and black holes.

Almost all the other main colors fall in the yellow/orange/brown range, which I'll be referring to as gold from here on out. Several designs are exclusively gold, and some have gold as a secondary color. These colors were likely chosen in reference to the Sun. Perihelion refers to the closest an orbiting body gets to the Sun. I also wonder if (and kind of hope) at least one artist was inspired by the orange cover of Artificial Condition, Perihelion’s first appearance.

The full distribution of the individual main colors is shown in the graphs below. Colors with a saturation above 10 and a luminosity from 10 to 95 on in the HSL color space are shown on the hue and luminosity graph. All other main colors are on the achromatic graph.

Eldritch Forms

Among all the variety of Perihelion designs, there is one common theme many of them share. Most designs for Perihelion, especially feed representations, are strange, otherworldly, or even eldritchian. In lots of artwork, Perihelion is portrayed as a shape or series of shapes that don’t clearly resemble any one object or animal. If it does resemble an animal or even a human, it will usually have a huge number of limbs, lack facial features, or be a mishmash of creatures. Perihelion might be a giant star, lines of binary, or another character’s shadow. It’s also common for feed designs to change size, have disconnected parts, or even completely shapeshift.

Even designs for its physical forms will stick to being strange. With rare exception, ship Perihelion will lack any anthropomorphic or animalistic features. Designs of drone Perihelion will more often resemble modern day surveillance cameras, planetary rovers, or Hal 9000 than anything non-mechanical.

Perihelion is an oddity even in-universe. It’s a spaceship that’s far more advanced than most other bots in the series. It can perform dozens if not hundreds of complex tasks at once. It easily rides other systems, including those of other advanced machine intelligences. Its true nature as a hyperadvanced anti-corporate machine is hidden from most humans. Perihelion could and would kill you in a millisecond, but it also likes watching fiction shows. And speaking of killing you, Perihelion is also very frightening. It’s not exactly the kindest to individuals it’s just met, especially other MIs. All this is likely why many artists go for a more abstract or otherworldly approach.

Eyes

Emphasis on eyes is one of the most common trends in Perihelion designs. Several feed designs have more than three eyes or a single giant eye. Some take this to the extreme, where Perihelion is portrayed as just an eye or group of eyes. Sixty-six (66), or 28% of the designs have an eye or eyes as a major element.

Eyes are a really good way of representing how Perihelion can focus on multiple things at once, including places and systems far from its physical body. They’re also a really simple way to show its emotions. Additionally, eyes can be very creepy, great for fanart of Perihelion and Murderbot’s first encounter. (Seriously, that scene is really popular to draw.)

Surprising to at least me is that nearly half of all the designs have no eyes at all. One hundred nine (109) designs, 44%, are eyeless. Granted, a large chunk of these eyeless designs are of spaceship (25) and drone/bot (21) forms, which tend to lack clear facial features overall. (Cameras and lights that visually filled the role of an eye were counted as eyes.) However, nearly a third of all feed designs, a total of 44, lack eyes as well. A lack of eyes highlights Perihelion’s nature as a hyperintelligent spaceship, something so different from the humans that it lacks most or any facial features.

Below are graphs of the number of eyes in each design, as well as graphs breaking down each design type. “Many” means more than two eyes arranged in a way where it’s clear that the exact number is unimportant. “X to Y” means the numbers of eyes changes within the specified range. “X + Many” means there’s one or two clear main eyes and a larger number of secondary eyes.

Humanoid Designs

Humanoid designs of Perihelion are among the least common with 33, or 14%, of designs falling under this category. Aside from a few all-human AU designs, these designs deviate heavily from real humans. Some lack certain or all facial features. Others have more than three eyes. It’s common for these designs to lack legs. Several humanoid designs are stylized differently than other characters. Its body may be composed of pixels or a starfield. Two thirds, or 22, of the designs lack clothes.

Six (6) of these designs are an actual human Perihelion (AU or otherwise). In artwork featuring both Perihelion and Murderbot, the former is usually taller, reflecting their relative canon sizes. It usually also has dark skin and/or curls much like its human sibling, Iris. What it wears varies but, it's usually in modern-day Western clothing.

Portraying Perihelion in the feed with a humanoid form emphasizes its human-like qualities. It also lets Perihelion do things only a human could, such as resting a hand on another character’s shoulder, holding objects, or making human-like expressions. Some designs that aren’t fully humanoid still give Perihelion hands or a simple face presumably for the same reasons. The mix of inhuman traits keeps Perihelion in the realm of the strange.

Animal/Creature Designs

Exactly 63, or 26%, of the designs fall under the animal/creature category. Any design that closely resembles a specific real-world animal, looks like a popular mythological feature, or had a mix of clearly animalistic features such as paws or wings, I classified under the animal/creature category. You can see the full distribution in the graph below, but I will talk about the most common and interesting trends.

With real animals, Perihelion is most often an arthropod (15), fish (7), domestic cat (7), or jellyfish (6). The arthropod designs are likely playing with the terrifying/creepy vibe Perihelion and bugs both sometimes have. I will note that 11 of these arthropod designs are of the SC drone with a round body and insect or spider-like limbs.

It’s possible that these same reasons inspired jellyfish designs. Jellyfish are also much less familiar to humans and can be very dangerous, fitting into the powerful and eldritch vibes many other designs go for. Four of these jellyfish designs are of the SC drone. Just like arthropods, jellyfish largely fit the canon description of a floating oval with multiple limbs. Representing it as a jellyfish also works with the “outer space as an ocean” metaphor.

This also works with fish designs. In 5 of the fish designs, Perihelion is a school of fish. This fits the “large and diffuse” description of its feed presence in Artificial Condition, and much like a collection of eyes, represents Perihelion’s ability to focus on multiple things at once. It also allows Perihelion to be represented as either one large (and terrifying) mass or as a single creature.

As for cat Perihelion, I wonder how much of that stems from fans comparing Murderbot to a cat. Maybe the association rubbed off on its favorite asshole research transport.

A lot of these designs are of fictitious creatures. Perihelion is a dragon or serpent in 14 designs (with only 1 of these designs being unambiguously a real-world snake) and a biblically accurate angel (feathered wings and an unconventional arrangement of eyes) in 5 designs. The “other fictional creature” category includes 11 designs. Eight of these aren’t any creature I recognize from mythology or another work and were likely made up entirely by the artist. These creatures tend to be round or blobby, have four or more limbs ending in hands or paws, stand on at least four of these limbs, and have more than 2 eyes. My guess as to why some artists go for fictional creature designs is that they highlight Perihelion’s strangeness and power, that it is so unlike any most other beings that it’s more like a mythological creature or alien than real animal. Even most of the designs modeled after a single real animal will have a few unrealistic features, like many eyes or unnatural colors.

Oh, and there’s two long Furby designs. Makes me wonder if there’s some Furby-Perihelion joke floating around that I’m just unaware of.

Shape-Based Designs

Most Perihelion designs I classified under the “shape” category. A total of 126 designs, 52%, have generic shapes or geometric patterns as a major element. Shapes abstract Perihelion visually, and some shapes bring to mind the mathematical accuracy and precision of computers.

Circles/spheres show up the most often, being in 39 designs. Note though that 11 of these are the canonically round SC drone. (Yes, some of these might have been ovals, but given the perspective, I’m not 100% sure, so they go in the circular hole.) In some designs, it’s clear that this is a reference to celestial bodies or the circles are meant to be eyes.

Smooth blobby shapes show up almost as often, being in 36 designs. Many of these have a large number of eyes and/or a pattern within its form. These designs allow Perihelion to morph and give off a fluid feel to the character.

Pixels, clusters of small rectangles, appear in 26 designs, while larger or unclustered rectangles show up 21 designs. I separated these categories because each shape is utilized differently. Non-pixel rectangles usually resemble a computer screen, having similar ratios to one and/or showing what Perihelion is doing or seeing elsewhere. In some cases, the rectangles are physical display screens or in-universe holograms. Some even partially function as speech bubbles. Pixels instead are usually just a pattern on the larger design or an accent rather than the main focus, showcasing that this is a digital form. Circuit board patterns, showing up in 11 designs. Unlike pixels though, circuit board patterns do appear in some physical machine forms.

Boundaryless Designs

While researching I found that quite a few feed designs lack a clear boundary, are modeled after things that take up a lot of space, or are even resemble full locations, 31 or 13% to be exact. This takes the “large and diffuse” description to the extreme. There’s immense variety in these designs. Some are masses of code or pixels or swirls filling the entire scene. Others are repeating patterns that flow off the page. In more than one design, Perihelion is an unending body of water or a giant storm cloud. In 10 designs, it’s a starfield of some sort, reflecting the space it inhabits.

Literal Approximations

While most artists pull in some way from what Perihelion actually is when deciding how to depict it, some artists will go as close to literal as they can with the constraints (and strengths) of a static, soundless image. Parts of Perihelion’s ship interior, such as cameras, lights, and walls, will serve the same function as a feed design, giving Perihelion a way to visibly emote and interact with the other characters. Circuit board lines, binary, and lines of code show up in several designs, with a few being purely just code or circuitry. Some designs will display the various tasks it is performing. A few designs stick to just text when portraying it, using color, font, and so on to convey that Perihelion is speaking and what its mood is. I classified 24, or 10%, of designs under this "literal approximation" category.

But when Three says hey I'll go save it if you'll agree to let my clients go safely home, ART doesn't jump on this plan. Heck ART's smart enough to think of manipulating Three into helping but it doesn't. Instead it says you don't have to perform your function for me, I'll return your clients either way.

And then Three says it'll do it anyway and ART asks why. It could jump at the chance but it cares about this newly rogue secunit 2.0 made! It doesn't want to take away its brand new autonomy!

I’m going to be talking a lot about 2.0, so if you’ve read what I’ve written before and you did not like my interpretation, this is a warning. There are parts of this that get very personal, and I am not in any way open to criticism about them. I want to share a quote I came across for the first time while thinking about this from a writer much more practiced and prolific than me:  ‘…Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling... The story is not all mine… But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.'

 You may not agree with my interpretation, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong and you’re right! It also doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong. It’s okay to interpret things differently, interpretation is a matter of perspective. Experiences shape our perspective, and our experiences are not universal. I think that if you read this through to the end, you’ll come to understand how my experiences have impacted how I interpret these books. Le Guin says it so well: ‘if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best’. With that out of the way:

We don’t really know how Tarik grew up, but he was shunted into the life of corporate private military. He’s worked as a guard in a contract labor camp and does not like to talk about it. Murderbot calls what he did a death squad and I don’t remember if it said so to Tarik but I don’t think anyone contested this description.

In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*

I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.

This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).

Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.

Honestly, Murderbot doesn't just "translate" language, I would say it tends to genericize terms, and this is part of a broader motif around Murderbot's relationship with language. Aside from in translation, Murderbot also just uses generic terms to control its story and express its viewpoint better- there's "oh deity" and "Starchy Foods!!!!" as obvious places where this had to be translated in some way from something, but notice how it doesn't get translated into anything in particular in Murderbot's presumed Standard Whatever Dialect lexicon. Why? Because while details about food and religion are of critical importance to human culture, they're not important to our rogue machine intelligence protag. (Amena's "fried vegetable crunchy things" are another classic example.) You see this in action throughout the series: it never describes an animal by specific name ("avians," "fauna"), it barely describes the weapons it gets into fights with ("energy weapon," "armor piercing projectile weapon"- notice it never calls anything a shotgun or grenade let alone specific gun nerd terms), and it especially never uses a brand name or even a genericized brand name to describe an item or product if the most generic term will do ("feed interface," "transient rest tube" but not any term resembling iPhone or capsule hotel). And of course, it never names the company that owned it, explicitly replacing the name even in Bharadwaj's dialogue when she asks about it. Obviously, choosing to avoid the use of corporate names allows it to take back a little control over its own language from the likes of its former owners. Meanwhile, it'll name the systems it interfaces with to a high degree of specificity or panache: "HubSystem," "AdaColSys, "Asshole Research Transport," "hotelEnvironmentAccessAndMobilitySystem (MobSys for short)", etc.

I don’t know if you’ve read tmbd so i would explain all points relevant to my question.

On the one hand I think that depicting mb as Black adds a lot to the character and its experiences — mb is seen as nonhuman, nonfeeling and a violent threat by most humans around it — all prejudices that Black people face. Additionally, when we meet it, it is de facto a slave, seen as property and forced to work without any compensation, another thing that can be enhanced by depicting mb as Black.

What bothers me on the other hand is that murderbot is explicitly and repeatedly stated to not be human. It doesn’t want to be and it doesn’t have to be. The books stress a lot that while it isn’t human it is a person and deserves to be treated as one, with all the rights personhood entails, however with the historical dehumanisation of Black people both in real life and media I feel like this could quickly take on more sour implications?

(Despite that being what prompted the question, this is not referring to fan depictions of mb as Black! They are great and there should always be more! The question is meant more in a way of ‘what if mb were to be explicitly confirmed to be Black in canon — what would that have to entail in order to not fall back on hurtful stereotypes?’)

I mean, from what you've said here, if all I ever knew of humans was to be not shit, enslavers and cruel, I wouldn't wanna be a human either. What good what it be? Why would I want to be included amongst those ranks? Why do I have to be like them in order to be worth something? I feel the fuck outta that decision, fr.

Like, I don't want to be white. As an adult who recognizes WHY it's hard to be Black, it's never made me want to be white. I want the ease that comes with, or at least to be left alone, not the identity that conveys the ease.

The books do explore the idea of wanting/needing the ease that's automatically afforded to those of privilege without being or acting like a member of said group. Murderbot doesn’t want to be seen as human, because it's comfortable being a SecUnit, but hates how others fear and physically harm it when they know it’s a SecUnit. It even gets surgery to look more human to ensure its safety and expresses discomfort at these changes.

Most importantly, one of the themes of the books is that personhood =/= humanity. Yes, Murderbot, despite being partly human, insists it is not a human, but its journey is about finding a community with others who treat it with kindness, fulfill its needs, respect its boundaries, value its input, and so on, without it having to conform completely to their standards. It still can’t do whatever it wishes (like violating privacy or resorting to murder when a more peaceful solution is possible) but the characters who care about it the most (human or bot) don’t expect it to stop being a SecUnit. For instance, Mensah buys it drones so it can navigate its environment in the way it was built to without hacking into other systems. Another part of Murderbot’s journey is unlearning the message that it’s just a tool, and realizing that it is a full person deserving of comfort, care, and freedom. Murderbot insisting that it’s not human and others respecting that it isn’t human are directly tied to its personhood.

I find this fascinating from a xenoficition perspective, but I do admit it gets a bit messy when you try to apply it to black experiences. The rhetoric of “black people are inhuman” is both false and used to justify harming us, but also how close we black folks are to whiteness (which unfortunately is sometimes treated as synonymous with being human) in terms of behavior, appearance, literal genetics, etc determines how much personhood we’re afforded.

On the nature of black stereotypes, Murderbot is violent (including committing murder of its own volition), stoic, physically very strong, extremely durable, goes by pronouns usually associated with non-humanity, puts itself in harm's way to save others, and can suppress its pain. A hypothetical version of The Murderbot Diaries where the titular character is explicitly black would have to be very careful and possibly even drop some of those traits. For instance, as an African American who lives with chronic pain, I’d be way more interested in a story where a black character experiences physical pain the same way everyone else does but is assumed not to and is later granted the freedom to express that pain and actual tools to suppress it, than one where the black person, through whatever means, can’t feel pain at all. The author, Martha Wells, already made the smart move of having all of the books be from Murderbot’s perspective. We know it's actually feeling very anxious when outwardly it appears very stoic. We see its thought process when it does and does not commit violence. It’s internalized the message that it’s nothing but a dangerous tool and it takes a long while to unpack that.

I should also note that several of the human characters are black (or at least we can reasonably assume they’re black based on their sparse physical descriptions, names, relatives, official illustrations, and show castings). Major characters like Iris and Amena, and even more minor characters like Farai are black, and they all come from different walks of life, have different personalities, and fulfill different roles in the story. In fact, one of the biggest human characters in the books is a black human, Ayda Mensah. While the books don’t go into as much depth with her as I’d like, I do appreciate what we do get with her. She’s a competent, compassionate, respected (and harsh when she needs to be) leader from a socialist society who is dealing with the trauma of being harmed (including nearly being killed) for the sake of profit, and she’s in a close and mutually caring relationship with Murderbot. There is no single representative for blackness in these books. If Murderbot were explicitly black, I’d want the books to really explore the differing and shared relationships to blackness that all of the black characters have.

Actually, I want that to be in the books regardless, but the real solution to that is me reading and writing fanfiction and engaging with more sci-fi by and about black people rather than expecting a white author to tackle the subject. And on that note, I also sometimes wish the books would explore the relationship between capitalism and other forms of oppression (racism, sexism, ableism). Blackness as a racial category in the US and much of the rest of the world was defined to determine who performed certain types of labor but did not benefit from that labor. If Murderbot were explicitly black, it would be at the very least a big missed opportunity to not explore the connection between the history of blackness and a black cyborg slave. The books are diverse, but the most we get in terms of explorations of race (at least as it exists in our modern world) are characters occasionally having their skin color and hair texture described, names from real cultures, and vague descriptions of clothes. Whether this is due to a post-race or post-racism setting or Murderbot just not bringing up race or race-related topics, it still leaves me wanting.

In: All Systems Red

In: Artificial Condition

In: Rogue Protocol

(No hand holding or hugging)

In: Exit Strategy

In: Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory

In: Fugitive Telemetry

(No hand holding or hugging)

In: Network Effect

In: System Collapse

In: Platform Decay

Initial thoughts:

a lot more hand holding and hugging than expected

it doesn't seem to mind hand holding

but it prefers it when it's the one to offer a hand

especially for emergency situations (comforting someone)

hugs it is more bothered by but it may be due to the unfamiliarity and movement restriction