because the world's not as bad as you think

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity

by Comicname

Neutral Good: writes fic in response to prompts or community discussion. beloved by those who follow and interact with them. potential ouroboros relationship with fanon, where they both contribute to the development of fanon conventions and perpetuate them.

Chaotic Good: “I know no one asked for this but the idea wouldn’t leave me alone so HERE, HAVE THIS THING THAT I POURED AN UNREASONABLE AMOUNT OF MY LIFEFORCE INTO. FREE ME FROM THE GRIP OF THIS FEVERED MUSE”

Lawful Neutral: scrupulously researched, impeccably canon-compliant fic. author may go out of their way to mimic the canon narrative style as closely as possible. readers’ comments are likely to include “wow, this feels like it could have been an actual episode of [source media]!” high proportion of missing scenes, alternate POV scenes, and character interactions that should have been given screentime in canon but were tragically underutilised.

True Neutral: had an idea, wrote it, and posted it. may not be aware of the fandom zeitgeist or may simply not care. doing their own thing and feeling the fulfillment of an idea properly manifested. lower average hitcount than many other alignments due to lack of engagement with fandom or fanon and potential redundancy to already-existing fanwork. may be dabbling in a fandom they have no specific intention to revisit.

Chaotic Neutral: AUs, expies, self-inserts, reader-inserts, reader-directed/choose-your-own-adventure fic, crack, etc. We’re all mad here! Mad and having so much fun.

Lawful Evil: “I have no justification and no excuse, but enjoy this exhaustively-tagged, morally unconscionable character torture! I sure did :)”

Neutral Evil: fic would not have existed if not for the motivating power of spite and frustration with the fandom (or, in certain end-of-the-bellcurve cases, the source media, but in general spite/frustration toward the source media is common in any alignment). whatever other motivations there may be, the fic is an express Take That of greater or lesser subtlety. this author is so mad. why is everyone doing this wrong? WHY MUST THEY BE THE ONE TO RIGHT THIS WRONG? THEY’LL SHOW YOU WHAT THIS CONTENT SHOULD BE. THEY’LL SHOW YOU ALL!!!

black hair? check. bad parent(s)? check. trauma? double check.

bruce: how’d you get your scar?

zuko: my dad got mad at me for saying that killing people is wrong so he lit my face on fire and banished me.

J: "wan na kno w h ow i go t thes e sc ar s"

Consider

Iroh: you too must learn patience. Boiling the water ruins the delicate flavor of the white jade

Alfred: oh I'm dreadfully sorry - for some reason I expected this tea to have TEA in it

(later)

Alfred: *aggressively laying out full tea service with milk, lemon, sugar, and, just to drive his point in, jam*

while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar

(and I am not exempting myself from this! there are definitely periods in my past media engagement which would have been less negative for my mental health if I’d been able to do this, rather than banging my head in increasing frustration as the story veered further and further away from what I had always thought its arc was supposed to be.)

you gotta marie kondo this shit. if the story no longer sparks joy for you, then let it go. and you can grieve for that! that loss of potential, that happiness you might once have had with it. you can be frustrated and sad and bitch about it in your group chat. but you have to let it go.

because the alternative is trying to force the creator to change course to comply with your  vision and historically? the success rate of that is very, very low, and far more statistically likely to result in the destruction of the thing entirely. which might sound tempting and satisfying in those moments of frustration but in the end, honestly, is not going to make you any happier. (and is definitely  going to make other people  unhappier.)

So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it's not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.

But that's a human thing, those are human categories, and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.

But then also there's the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, 'cop' and 'prostitute,' as distinguished at construction per Murderbot's own account by genital configuration, in this case 'having' or 'not having' 'sex parts.'

Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I'm sure was an intentional writing move--Murderbot's assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, 'SecUnit.'

And what's neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!

But that passion only comes out as it's able to choose to 'do its job.' As long as security was defined on Company terms, within the Company's shitty boundaries and for the Company's shittier goals, when it meant being a blunt instrument and surveillance device and living bullet sponge for and against shitty people with no say in the matter, Murderbot hated it, didn't care about it, narrated detachment from it and performed whenever possible to the absolute minimum standard. And rightly so.

It performs SecUnit-ness half-heartedly and under a mixture of implicit and overt coercion.

But given something to protect, something it both wants to and is free to, Murderbot vastly exceeds all expectations in its design function. Murderbot is a fantastic SecUnit precisely when it gets to decide what that means.

Security work wasn't something it chose for itself, it was built for it and forced to it, but reclaiming that and remaking it into something better, something it believes in, is a fundamental part of its growth and healing process. And I think that's really cool. And just as much part of the 'gender' elements of the story as it is of like, the 'labor' and 'liberation' parts.

Wow- this approach to the text resonates so strongly with my understanding of both the character and of the queerness of gender that my breath is absolutely taken away. It puts this passage, where Murderbot reworks its rescue plan in Fugitive Telemetry, into stunning context:

That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery. And I liked it better.

Huh. I liked it better because it wasn’t a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.

This passage has always been about redefining itself and its function, of course, but looking at it solely from an in-universe perspective, it almost seems self-delusional. What a machine intelligence is designed for and used for, how its body is designed, is in literal terms a matter of its creators’ intentions, and cannot be changed post facto. But applying the lens of queering gender to the passage gives the passage a powerful resonance.

"Function” (i.e. what a bot is “for”) is a matter of narrative as much as gender is, after all. It’s not only a matter of physical traits- A machine may be made to help with the retail process at a bakery, but turn out to be wildly well-suited to the medical field looking for cancer, for instance; superglue originally failed in its design as a gun sight; bubble wrap was intended as wallpaper; and of course, when you have a nail that needs hammering, a lot of things look like hammers. If you have a lot of workers to suppress, your construct built for security looks like a tool for suppressing labor. And that is to say nothing of the ways that a design might be so deeply flawed despite its creators’ best intentions that it can’t do what it’s supposed to do. Intention, use, and the reality of a machine’s form are not the same!

In the same way, gender as “intended” or conceptualized by society, the oft-contradictory ways in which even the least queer of us express it, and the reality of our physical existence when our narrative of gender is stripped from the facts are often totally different. Murderbot is talking about a kind of denial of reality, yes... but in the same way that a feminine person might find self-actualization in their identity when she is free to decide which parts of femininity to opt into, to say I don’t want to shave but getting to wear a dress is part of my self-expression or My softness and compassion are a choice separate from my identity, or the ways in which a masc person might say Being gentle doesn’t make me less of a man or My masculinity is about being strong enough to protect others- I’m less of myself if I use that strength to hurt. By denying the intentions of its creators and the ways in which it has been used to to hurt people, Murderbot denies, changes, rewrites the narrative imposed upon it and thus its reality; it redefines itself as a class of being whose primary purpose is to protect, whose function is security. In the same way that we queer our relationship to gender, Murderbot queers the definition of ‘SecUnit’- in order to make it something it can be proud to identify itself as.

That is, of course, also why it’s such a tragedy that Human One shoots it despite its best intentions to save her and her fellow refugees, despite everything it has done to redefine itself. A SecUnit’s function as an oppressor’s tool is not a physical mandate upon reality, in the same way that gender is a rough categorization of identity and not a physical mandate, but they are both real in the ways that social constructs are dangerously real, have powerful impacts upon our lives through the way we view and interact with each other.

And yet despite everything, with all the freedom to self-actualize that it has in its power, Murderbot chooses to continue to perform its function and redefine it/itself as “keeping others safe.” It continues to try to be a SecUnit in a way that it can be proud to be, and I think that that’s a deeply inspiring narrative of queerness for us as queer readers, trans or cis, binary and nonbinary.