she'll give this performative outrage lip service and then continue doing the exact same exorsexist bullshit she's been doing since book 1, despite literally everyone misgendering Murderbot immediately, and her continuing to double down on plausible denability so she can keep getting money from the very people she'll claim she hates, but is actually directly pandering to.
[ID: A screenshtot of twitter posts by Martha Wells from March 26, 2025, on a post with comments restricted, saying, "I keep eeing people say that Murderbot refers to itself as "she/her" in the books (you know, the ones I wrote). Could someone comment with a quote (from the books I wrote) or point me (the writer) to where that is? Maybe I can clear up the confusion. In the books. Which I wrote." She continues, "I also think people always have different interpretations of what they read and like to explore AUs; that's one of the most fun parts of reading and discussing books. But declaring that your head canon is fact and everyone else's is wrong in the author's mentions? That's not a good hill to die on." The post has 415 reposts, 56 quotes, and 4k likes. End ID.]
So immediately following her performative outrage, she then immediately follows up by expressly giving people permission to continue misgendering Murderbot.
[sarcasm] what a true nonbinary ally she is!! let's all clap and cheer and share this to the very same fandom spaces that ban it/its users for politely correcting misgendering!!!!! [end sarcasm]
She has literally admitted she's known people not knowing what Murderbot's pronouns are since book 1 came out. And she has doubled down every single fucking time never to actually fix that problem by having Murderbot state its pronouns in any way, explicitly because she wants to continue courting the exact people she's pretending to be mad at here.
It's all plausible fucking deniability and always has been. She gets praise from people who think stereotypes are the height of representation, and doesn't scare off the majority of the fandom, which is cis people who misgender Murderbot with he/him pronouns. She gets money from both crowds without ever actually having to make it clear which way she actually leans.
This is the definition of Queerbaiting.
This is the definition of tokenization and performative "allyship".
And if you think it's not Queerbaiting, "Cuz Murderbot *is* nonbinary!" She's literally stated in interviews that it's not, because *she doesn't fucking know what the word nonbinary means because she hates us to the point she can't even be assed to look up the most basic definition in almost a decade of writing and 60 fucking years of her being alive and claiming to be ~So Queer Trump Would Hunt Her For Sport!!!~*
And in the literall ast 5 pages of PlatformDecay, we finally got a single character who actually shares their pronouns in their feed bio, and it's a fucking serial killer Nazi misogynist who murdered his wives and wants to murder his half daughter and kidnap his full daughter.
Because that's what Martha Wells thinks of nonbinary people like me in her audience, who have been asking her to do the *bare fucking minimum* for years now.
