Abstracting ART: An Analysis of Fan Designs of Perihelion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In conclusion, the average Perihelion is a spaceship ripped straight from the Artificial Condition cover that occasionally is also a tiny floating gray dome with thin limbs and camera for a face. Its feed presence is a cluster of cornflower blue and grayscale pixels that shapeshift between a human with no shirt, no shoes, and no face, a biblically accurate dragon with a million eyes, and an endless starry ocean. Or at least that’s what it is based on the images I gathered and my own judgement.
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