✨ Mensah just looked at me and said, “SecUnit.” In that voice. ✨
💖 The voice that’s the only reason I’m still here and alive and surrounded by … friends. 💖
(#1 TV Mensah fan and mensahbot fan and mensahbotcule fan)
(platonic, queerplatonic, romantic, sexual, beyond labelling, anything and everything - THEM!!!)
thank you martha wells for not being afraid to whump a woman
mensah has witnessed friends be eaten, been sabotaged, forced to murder a person, blown up, attacked by secunits, held captive, blown up more, thought her friend was dying, dealt with the corporate rim, forced to buy her friend and be its owner, kidnapped, held hostage, subjected to mind games at the least if not tortured, held for ransom, treated like an object, develops claustrophobia, shot at, witnessed her friend sacrifice itself for her twice in an hour, nearly died, subjected to anxiety and PTSD, assassination attempts, blackmailed, had her daughter and brother-in-law kidnapped, had her friends kidnapped...
truly I cannot wait to see what kind of horrors martha wells will subject her to next.
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Sec-Unit/MurderBot and Mensah are so important to me. The trust and mutual affection between them is beautiful. MB has someone it can admire and rely on. Mensah doesn't have to mask around it. Two complex beings finding simplicity in each other. 🥰
“I’ve fucked everything up,” I’d told ART. This was when I was in Medical after my “incident.” Mensah and I had called Amena so she wouldn’t worry (or at least so she would know that I was still alive, even I know that’s important for human children). I told Mensah I wanted to watch media and she had left, and I’d blocked the humans’ comm and feed access to the room.
ART had said, That’s nothing new.
I ignored that because it was just trying to reassure me. If it started being sympathetic it would be terrifying. “Your crew isn’t going to want me to do their security anymore.”
Why is that?
That question was obviously a trap and I should ignore it. It wasn’t as if I could put the answer into words. I was different. It wasn’t just the alien contamination.
These are the things SecUnit thinks of after its hallucination but before its emergency system comes online. When the GrayCris Unit 05 at DeltFall has it on the lab table.
Some flesh being cut
Some liquids on a tray, wobbling
A tendril connecting to another tendril through a wall of water with a red X and another stuff. I was thinking governor module connections maybe cause then everything goes red and we see that company logo.
Some machine with dials
And then carving into skin to reveal something. Gunport maybe?
I wonder how it has all these memories, as it was in pieces and offline. The body keeps score I guess?
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Murderbot being good with kids is so heart warming. Wdym it made the drone do a loop da loop over her head that’s so freakin cute. Not to mention it with all the mensah kids.
i'm rereading FT rn and it's apparently still wearing the clothes it bought after Milu (i guess the garments were repaired?) so i think the list is incredibly short until circa NE
update 1: so that was a fucking lie. it had a bunch of wardrobe changes in ASR, lmfao. but after that, things are pretty chill until NE
update 2: i lied. this took longer than i thought bc i decided i might as well add all the relevant quotes for anyone who needs this information for detailed reference.
update 3: oops accidentally a GNL EVAC suit. thanks @marry-and-mirthful
All Systems Red:
armor, not described much, but here's the scraps it give us, read point 4 for additional details. "protective skin that went under my armor" "I let my helmet seal and go opaque" "opaquing the faceplate" "The armor’s boots have magnetized climbing clamps" "had taken off my helmet and the upper part of my armor" "I started shedding armor, every piece that had a PreservationAux logo on it"
crew uniform, briefly. then back to armor "It was based on a standard research group’s uniforms, and meant to be comfortable inside the habitat: knit gray pants, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a jacket, like the exercise clothes humans and augmented humans wore, plus soft shoes. I put it on, tugged the sleeves down over the gunports on my forearms, and went out into the habitat."
suit skin. then back to armor. "I was lying on the procedure table, my armor gone, just wearing what was left of my suit skin"
partially stolen deltfall armor, decorated with mud and fluids. "We didn’t have time to switch all the armor. Moving fast, we replaced the arm and shoulder pieces on both sides, the leg pieces that had the armor’s inventory code, the chest and back piece with the logos. Mensah smeared my remaining armor pieces with dirt and blood and fluid from the dead unit, so if we had missed anything distinctive GrayCris might not notice." (describing deltfall secunit: "energy weapons unfolding out of its armor")
presaux survey uniform, unsure if identical to the one mentioned in point 2. "the station units that helped us out of processing when we had catastrophic injuries gave me the gray PreservationAux survey uniform instead"
stolen clothes from a human's locker as it leaves PresAux. "I broke into a human’s personal possessions locker and stole work boots, a protective jacket, and an enviro mask and attachments. I took a knapsack from another locker, rolled up the jacket with the survey logo and tucked it into the bag, and now I looked like an augmented human traveling somewhere"
Artificial Condition
same stolen clothes it ends ASR in, described in more detail. "wearing gray and black work clothes, the long sleeves of the T-shirt and jacket, the pants and boots covering all my inorganic parts, and I was carrying a knapsack."
Perihelion crew uniform, printed sans logos. "It was basically ART’s crew uniform without the logos: pants with lots of sealable pockets, a long-sleeved shirt with a collar just high enough to cover my data port, and a soft hooded jacket, all of it either dark blue or black"
Rogue Protocol
same Perihelion clothes it ends AC in, presumably. no further detail.
GoodNightLander EVAC suit, to escape from the shuttle to Ship.
Exit Strategy
GoodNightLander EVAC suit, same one, this time to escape from Ship to HaveRatton.
newly printed clothes it buys from a vending booth immediately after arriving on HaveRatton. "I picked workboots not much different from the ones I’d stolen back on Port FreeCommerce, self-sizing and with some shielding to protect against heavy things dropping on them, not as important for me as a human. Then pants with lots of sealable pockets, a long-sleeved shirt with a collar to cover my data port, and another soft hooded jacket. Okay, so it was extremely similar to what I had been wearing, just in a different arrangement of black and dark blue" "I got a replacement knapsack, too, a better one with more sealable pockets"
same printed clothes, presumably, after it experiences catastrophic failure and bricks its memory (it's still wearing that in FT, so...) "I was wearing human clothes and not a suit skin and armor"
Fugitive Telemetry
same printed clothes, and it doesn't change clothes after being shot. "I knew this because my dark-colored pants, shirt, jacket, and boots had come from a place like that and I’d found it really annoying that the Preservation Station mall didn’t have one" "I told the MedUnit to stop and pulled my shirt back down"
Network Effect
Preservation survey uniform, including the "Preservation survey logo, which was just a variation on the planetary seal." "drone view showed me what I looked like, water dripping from my clothes, my jacket with the Preservation survey logo and shirt showing projectile weapon holes, stained with fluid and a little blood"
clothes it likes; unclear if this is still the same outfit from HaveRatton. "I’d changed out of the survey uniform before we’d entered the wormhole and back into the clothes I liked (human work boots, pants with lots of pockets (good for storing my small intel drones), T-shirt, and soft hooded jacket, all dark colors."
adds a deflection vest right after they are attacked by Perihelion. "I had a deflection vest from Station Security Operations designed to provide some protection from inert blades, slow projectiles, fire, acidic gas, low energy pulses, and so on. I hadn’t been wearing it because it was a) worthless for the kind of firepower usually deployed against me and b) it had a logo on it. (I know, I need to get over that.) I made myself put it on under my jacket"
Preservation EVAC suit. "These were a different model than I’d used before, more expensive, where you could step into them and pull them up with an assist from the suit’s own power supply." "My suit’s imaging went down and the helmet plate went dark, protecting my eyes against a flash." "In gravity they made movement cumbersome"
deflective security uniform Perihelion prints, plus hair products, for the parlay with Leonide. "It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones, plus stability-fabric boots so tough I could probably use them to jam a closing hatchway open. It looked like what a human security person would wear" "lubricant-like substance that when I followed the instructions flattened my hair down so it looked shorter"
Perihelion EVAC suit, on top of new security uniform, to get to Leonide's supply ship. "We used ART’s EVAC suits, which were better than the ones the Preservation survey owned. (They had secondary internal protective suits for planetary exploration, not that we’d need them on the transport.)" "The EVAC suits had their own lights and vision filters" "The patches were throwing a localized broadcast into the feed in multiple languages, readable by interfaces and our EVAC suits even while ART’s feed was inaccessible, the same way marker paints worked. Amena said aloud, “Perihelion. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”"
Enviro suit, to explore the dock, plus a Perihelion EVAC suit to get to the dock. "This time we were wearing the environmental suits under the EVAC units. The material felt thin, but it protected against a lot of toxic substances and had a closed breathing system attached"
deflective security uniform, electric boogaloo, heavily damaged after getting its shit wrecked by the ag-bot and colonists (unless Perihelion had printed more new clothes for it). "felt the projectiles going through the enviro suit but not the deflection fabric of the uniform ART had made for me" "my environmental suit was gone, though I still had the shirt, pants, and boots I’d been wearing under it"
medical gown, after repair and decontam. "I was wearing the kind of soft smock thing that injured humans wear"
regular clothes, after leaving medical. likely its "favorite" clothes not the security uniform, but not explicitly stated. "my drones spotted my clothes, cleaned and recycler-repaired, folded on a gurney"
System Collapse
enviro suit, over unspecified clothes; i've included all the suit's features that are mentioned. "while wearing an environmental suit instead of armor" "ART had altered an environmental suit for me so the sleeves locked in to my weapon ports and I could fire without burning holes through the fabric" "even through the environmental suit mask. (Yes, I was wearing it despite the fact that we were in an air bubble so I didn’t need it" "backup drone in the pocket of my environmental suit" "enviro suit camera" "had let the helmets fold back" "I pulled up the hood of my environmental suit and let it secure the face mask." "I still had the projectile weapon, clamped to my environmental suit’s harness in the back" "soft-drop pack’s instructional feed told me how to fasten it to my environmental suit" "I grabbed the safety harness of Iris’s environmental suit" "Amena had made my hair fluffy" "the environmental suits weren’t designed for stealth" "pulled out the little suit-repair kit she had attached to her belt. She patched the projectile hole in the back," "It got a hand on my environmental suit helmet (which was not meant for this kind of pressure and was already creaking)"
unspecified clothes after returning to Perihelion; it doesn't mention anything
Platform Decay
Three. is Three clothing? it wore Three at the start of the book. and three was wearing a suit, i guess. "we had needed a suit" "We had ended up with an armored suit designed to look like one that Wilken and Gerth had used back on Milu" "with a little help from a set of removable EVAC suit-maneuvering thrusters"
worker suit. "I was wearing the same type of safety suit and helmet as the legitimate human workers and the fake worker security" "They were all in protective suits that looked bulky enough to hide security armor."
fashionable clothes to blend in throughout the exec area. "I pulled off my worker suit, rolled it up and stuffed it in my bag, and quickly put on the spare clothes I’d brought. They were a different style from what I would have picked for myself: a longer jacket, wide pants, and a shirt with a loose rolled collar that covered my data port, all in light browns and whites"
Preservation handmade wrap over its same clothes that were damaged after the explosions, "But I still had a burned sleeve, needle holes, and blood and fluid stains on my jacket and shirt." "It was a patterned wrap thing with loose sleeves, handmade on Preservation. I don’t like patterns, but this covered my bloodstains and exposed gunport. It also made me look less like a corporate and more like I belonged with the group"
shirt Farai bought it replaces the damaged shirt; it is careful not to damage this one, adjusting sleeves as needed. it regularly removes Naja's wrap to protect it from stains and damage. "I got you a new shirt, I hope it’s the right size." "I was wearing the new pullover shirt Farai had bought me, which was a dark red-brown and matched the colors in the jacket Naja had loaned me" "rolled up my sleeves so I could use the energy weapons in my arms without wrecking my shirt" "I stood up and took off the jacket Naja had loaned me; I didn’t want to get blood or brain fluid or anything on it." "I took my borrowed jacket off and stuffed it in my bag, left the bag on the floor, and rolled up my sleeves so I could use the energy weapons in my arms without wrecking my shirt." "Farai handed me my jacket, and as I pulled it on" "rolled my sleeves down over my gunports under my jacket"
Tula, a tentacled parasite in a horror show. "she immediately clamped on to me like a tentacled parasite in a horror show."
Ping me if I missed anything!
+ Bonus shenanigans/ignore this part if you're not down to be silly here.
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Idk much about cinematography, but this is such an interesting shot to me. The way the ultrawide lens makes the sides of its skull disappear from view, leaving its face taking up most of its head. The face itself is flattened by the lens, and further flattened by the relatively diffuse lighting.
To me, that flatness really puts me as the viewer into its shoes. It's the flatness of having just woken up. It's the flatness of not feeling anything. Perhaps even the flatness of expecting the worst — the flatness of lifting your eyelids with the same hard effort that it takes to drag your feet to the gallows. Bc of the presence of its narration and half-open eyes, the show does make it seem like it was half-awake all the time that they were repairing it, but we know it couldn't have been.
Murderbot doesn't know what it is waking up to.
Before it has a chance to get its eyesight or other visual input back online, before it is able to review security footage, it thinks it "knows" that if it's coming back online, then it had either already killed its humans and was about to find a recording of that horrible memory... or it was about to kill them. Either way, it was about to watch them die.
The actor barely even looks like himself here. The flatness makes him seem dead. This is both the least like "a person" Murderbot has ever looked throughout the season because it looks dead; and the most it's looked like "a person" bc the flatness functions like a mask, allowing the audience to project all the wealth of complex emotion onto it that an actor could never convey.
Compare to this other shot of Murderbot lying immobile:
No flatness to be found! The form of its skull which had looked flattened to almost a cube in the previous image is naturally rounded here. This is a person awash with life and emotion, fully present in the horror of its situation.
The lighting here is stark and direct (there's not even a discernible fill-light!) which creates black shadows and emphasizes every worried groove in its skin; this expression is animated with fear. There's no borrowed grief here, no dull dread. It's all sharp adrenaline and helplessness, and so the face is shot to appear smaller within the head — the sides of the skull are actually visible here due to using a greater focal length.
It, the face, and it, Murderbot, are protectively shrinking in on themselves. They're trying to escape right off our screen, and the effect on the viewer is visceral.
It's not just a show that did a "decent job of adapting a book" and "cast great actors."
It's also got great cinematography that's really firing on all cylinders to communicate Murderbot's interior state to the viewer.
Anddddd...
unrelated...
while I'm on this scene, I'm just gonna toss in one of my favorite shots for to trigger pain and heartbreak:
Brightened, color adjusted, and touched up, for my own "nefarious purposes" (see: crying on the floor):
The way it... lingers... on her face as the last image flashing before its eyes...
I promise you things will get so much better when you start processing people’s behavior as information rather than a verdict on your self-worth. If someone doesn’t text back, suddenly pulls away, whatever it may be, the solution isn’t to put on a tap dance for them and try to regain their approval. It’s not to crash out on them and try to force them to react a certain way. It’s just to take a step back, take a deep breath, and assess what this tells you. What’s this saying about them? What’s this saying about you??
Like people’s actions are data points rather than death sentences. It could even be a data point about you. It could be that you’re not being a great friend, it could be that there’s something you guys miscommunication. Or it could be that they themselves don’t have the means to be consistent, aren’t in the headspace to meet you where you are, whatever. But this is always data rather than a judgment. Even if you’re the problem, behavior can change. Also, in the context of someone pulling back without explaining away, and assuming they didn’t give you a reasonable explanation in the first place, it’s also a data point that they’d react that way rather than communicate. Situations are always very context dependent, but they’re also always data.
Thank you to @securityunit-ese for the excellent prompt and to @emily-e-draws for making me want to immediately draw mb at the rainforest cafe when I saw your art 💖
they don't tell you this but if ur really lonely for a long time, a hole starts forming in ur heart and the longer u feel lonely the bigger the hole gets and it doesn't matter if u feel less lonely when ur older bc the hole stays forever and ur life just grows around it. But the hole is always there.
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Relationship Manifesto: Why Dr. Mensah is the most complex and literarily important relationship in Murderbot’s life (4379 words) by FlipSpring, mensah
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Meta, MurderMetaMay 2026 (Murderbot Diaries), Pre-Book 1: All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries), Book 2: Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries), Book 3: Rogue Protocol (Murderbot Diaries), Book 4: Exit Strategy (Murderbot Diaries), Post-Book 5: Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries)
Series: Part 4 of Murderbot Meta
Summary:
An essay in a somewhat casual tone and with many citations about why Mensah & Murderbot are the best. 😤💛
changing my mindset from “if I don’t keep my home clean i’m a useless horrible failure” to “i deserve to live in a comfortable, clean environment, so i will do my best to provide myself with that” has been fairly life changing
and it applies to so much!!!! i try to take whatever i’m beating myself up over, like “i haven’t been eating enough veggies lately so i suck as a human,” and instead reframe it as “my body deserves all the important nutrients found in vegetables” and suddenly i’m ten billion times more inclined to actually prioritize eating more veggies
shame is a paralytic!!!!! self compassion is an actual motivator!!!!!
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