#socraticcryptid

Currently there are 1847 works, of which Ryland Grace is tagged in 1724 (93%), Rocky in 1225 (66%), and Eva Stratt in 568 (31%). 805 (43%) are rated G and 467 (25%) are rated Teen and Up, and the most popular categories are Gen (900, 49%), Other (323, 17%), F/M (290, 16%), and M/M (251, 14%).

For relationships, there's 887 tagged Ryland Grace & Rocky (48%), 282 tagged Ryland Grace/Rocky (15%), 257 tagged Ryland Grace & Eva Stratt (14%), 168 tagged Adrian/Rocky (9%), and 143 tagged Ryland Grace/Eva Stratt (8%). That means that we have one canon romantic pairing in the top five (Adrian/Rocky), and then two important relationships which are interpreted as platonic much more often than romantic. On top of that, 76 of the Ryland Grace/Eva Stratt fics (53%) and 112 of the Ryland Grace/Rocky fics (40%) are given the platonic tag too, which is often done to indicate an ambiguous or queerplatonic relationship. Either way, I see this as a big win for the aro community!

What about things I've seen on Tumblr being reflected on ao3? Well, there's only 7 fics that come up when I search 'trolley problem' [3], although hopefully that will continue to go up. I can find 109 fics (6% of all fics) explicitly tagged with 'Aromantic Asexual Ryland Grace', which I find absolutely delightful, especially given that it is not explicitly canon. And 49 of the fics tagged with Eva Stratt are also tagged with 'Character Study' (9%), most of which do seem to focus on her, which is also promising because I love her.

For crossovers, obviously a lot of fics are tagged for both the book and the movie (1416, 77%), but the next most popular fandom is Iron Lung (2026), presumably given its overlapping themes [4]. After that it's The Fall Guy (2024), which also features Ryan Gosling; the Iron Lung video game; and the book and movie fandoms for The Martian.

The canon focuses on a white guy and his alien best friend, so it makes sense that the fandom does too. I appreciate Eva Stratt having a reasonably significant presence - it's great to see a woman character being appreciated, especially when she's so ruthless and complicated and interesting. The characters of colour are more in the background (although Carl from the movie is tagged in 122 (6%) of the movie fics), which is possibly in part because none of them have much in the way of character development in canon. Ilyukhina does appear in slightly more fics than Yao for both book and movie fandoms, which may be a coincidence, or may be because writers are projecting onto the woman, but could also be because of a tendency to focus more on the white characters. Something to keep in mind.

Overall, this superficial and not-too-serious analysis supports my intuitions: a fandom that enjoys and values aroace characters and platonic/queerplatonic relationships, that focuses more on characters and plots than shipping [5], and that (mostly) gives Eva Stratt the attention and respect that I think she deserves [6].

Also - if you agree with me on these, and you haven't yet read The Murderbot Diaries, I'd recommend you do so! A lot of the things I enjoy about this fandom are also present in that one.

[1] Just looking at the book fandom currently, but the movie fandom is very similar, especially given that there are 1416 fics tagged with both fandoms.

[2] At least four additional works were posted between the time I started gathering data and the time I posted this (only an hour or two!), so consider all the statistics to be approximate. There's now 1851 for the book fandom, for example, but if I kept going back and updating the stats, I'd get stuck in an endless loop, and it's really not that deep anyway.

[3] Which I shall have to add to my to-read list!

[4] 105 (6%) for the book fandom, and 187 (10%) for the movie fandom.

[5] There's nothing wrong with shipping, obviously, it's just not as common in this fandom as in some others I've been in.

I'm rereading most of the Discworld novels (in the order that they become available at my library, which is, of course, the only correct order) and, if asked, I couldn't have told you anything about Unseen Academicals. If I'd read the blurb, I would've probably said, 'Oh, it's the football one' and skipped it - but I would've been wrong to do so.

[Spoilers ahead.]

I've been trying to work out a word for something that I really struggle with, which is the way that lots of people seem to be able to shift the way they speak to match their setting/context. I've been told I'm really good at professional writing, like formal emails and interviews and whatever, but I think it's because that's just how I talk all the time, whereas the people around me seem to be much more able to switch their parlance to match others' expectations. Like the way that Tumblr has a 'dialect', which I can (to some extent) recognize, but I utterly fail to replicate. I could study it and use all lower case and refer to 'the devil's sacrament' etc etc, but it just feels unnatural. I've never really mastered slang in other contexts either.

*polls like these have to make decisions about what counts as a country or not, what names to accept for a country, and what counts as being in a particular continent or not. I have just chosen to use the same quiz site as others have used for the other quizzes.

**by Asian I simply mean 'from Asia'.

I'm enjoying it!

I'd read a few of the news articles about it in advance, which I think helped prepare me for the fact that it's clearly an adaptation. A lot of things are different to the books, some of which obviously make sense because it's a show rather than a book, and some of which are more confusing.

Murderbot doesn't seem to be anywhere near as competent as in the books so far. It's an impressive physical fighter, sure, but its hacking and analytical skills are downplayed. That might change - I'm keeping an open mind, and if it suits the modified plot of the show, then I guess it's okay.

I do still wish that they'd cast someone other than a cis white man as Murderbot, but Skarsgård is quite convincing, and I expect that his star power will help the show. I'm glad that all the other characters are racially diverse (and often queer) like in the books.

I will admit that I often struggled to tell the characters apart in the books personality-wise (apart from Mensah, Pin-Lee, and Gurathin). Having a slightly smaller main cast here helps, plus each person seems to have a more clearly defined personality, even within the two episodes so far.

Visually it is very nice. I like the set design, I like the monster (sorry, animal), I love the little clips of Sanctuary Moon. It looks like there will be lots of fun little details in set and costuming that we can discover over the course of the show.

I'm undecided about the way that the PresAux crew are portrayed as hippies. It makes sense that people from the Corporation Rim would see them as hippies (or the equivalent), but I think it also kind of invalidates them in a way I don't like? I guess we'll see whether that's because we're seeing it through Murderbot's gaze and it is biased, or whether they're actually like that.