i'm a shut up or get your head smashed

it's lucky we get to hear murderbot's internal monologue because otherwise we might be deluded into thinking it's a cool badass action hero. fuckin swooping in at the last second and whisking people out of the jaws of monsters. unlocking doors with a thought. cloud of drones sweeping past in formation. it caught an assassin a yard away from Mensah's face after chasing them all the way across the station. nobody else knows it's constantly going oh shit oh fuck oh SHIT I DONT KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IM DOING

I love book Murderbot and Gurathins dynamic. Murderbot is like “he was mean to me once so I’ll hate him forever 😡” wile Gurathin is like “oh the ominous killing machine in the corner? That’s my friend secunit ☺️ we hang out sometimes” and both of them are correct.

so the whole irony of murderbot and gurathin's dynamic over the course of the season is that gura thinks he doesn't know what secunit is like, he thinks it's an unknown risk factor and therefore he can't trust it, "what's it like to be you" and all, when, obviously, he knows exactly what the inside of its head is like, it's the same as his. the second layer is that this is also a reflection of how he feels about the inside of his own head, because he doesn't trust himself and thinks that others shouldn't, either. it's why the bitter side of his story about mensah is that she's naive; it's not a random critique, it's still about the same thing, he is expressing that somewhere deep down he thinks she made a fundamentally unsafe choice in forgiving him and taking him in. he's so intense about rejecting offered drugs because he sees himself as being "one thought away" from losing control and hurting everyone around him. he's existing in a kind of paradox where he's staying "here" out of what he ascribes to his own naivety (two specific references are made to him being "here" and it's not entirely clear whether this means "the survey" or "the land of the living") but he also knows that he wouldn't have made the same call she did, then or now. so, his rescue of secunit is a two-way display of trust where he shows both that he believes secunit is safe enough that he'll go to extreme lengths to actively bring it back to everyone he holds dear, and that he believes he's safe enough to go alone into this highly triggering situation without becoming the liability he so obviously fears.

#I like to think they were discussing how they'd present themselves like #Mb: even while I'm going to be 'evil' I don't want to be seen as a mindless killing machine #ART: I do 😙 #So now ART gets to be the Rabid Animal Bot Pilot Warship that doesn't speak #Just shows up and bombs things until the scary rogue SecUnit tells it to stop