#murderbot itself

s01e01/02 | mb being bad at faking a gov mod

bonus:

and it seemed... not out of place, but oddly specific and persistent with this one possible cause of what happened to art. and then i realized — as ratthi so helpfully pointed out — that the last time something catastrophic had happened to mb, it had been a comm attack

it had lost its friend to something that was probably the thing that had almost killed it before, and then it'd gotten its friend back. of course it's gonna harp on this to try and keep art safe

noteably, the only time mb 2.0 (an mb with the trauma and neurosis shaved off — thank you tyrantosaurus-wrecks) mentions this possibility at all, it trusted art's judgement and was operating under the assumption that it wasn't a code attack

mix of mb and art much?

it's just that murderbot clearly considers itself a person, and a person that has wants and needs other than the company's or its friend's. even before it begins accepting basic kindness, it's doing what it wants and what makes its life tolerable as it tries to figure out what to do otherwise.

(big mood)

and while it obviously has some self-worth issues, they definitely don't seem of the personhood kind or the gender kind. more the "i've only ever been a weapon and a meatshield, so why would that change when the dangerous situations that need me to be both keep occurring" kind. which isn't ideal but is understandable and also has nothing to do with its concept of self-worth or gender.

tbh the same way it couldn't care less about sex or gender presentation in humans seems to be about the same way that it couldn't care less about its own gender — as long as you dont try to inflict one upon it.

also, if no one on the survey team, including dr "it IS a person!!" ratthi, even considered that treating it more like a person involved using different pronouns... then i feel like that's the right call. apart from mensah being a little heavy handed with the whole "you'll come back to preservation with us" thing and later apologizing, they've been really good at treating it right! and it clearly thinks so, too!

all of this to say, if it felt like martha wells was using those pronouns to imply it was lesser, then obviously we should be grumpy about that. but she very clearly isn't. she's so so noticeably thought this through and is treating everything murderbot goes through and experiences with the respect a person deserves, that i'm gonna keep using its preferred pronouns until it decides to go by something else