Murderbot TV is often compared to a fanfiction by its creators. This is part of my meta series examining it in the context of fanfiction tropes.
The series isn't shy in comparing the relationship between Murderbot and Mensah as a mirror to NavBot and Hossein.
We've had Murderbot hallucinate Mensah in Hossein's outfits and calling her captain, the awe with which it compares her to an intrepid galactic explorer, we've had the camera transitions and overlay of Navbot and Hossein to Murderbot and Mensah
And in episode 6 we get an investigation of their relationship that mirrors the trapped romance episode SecUnit has been watching while trapped with Mensah.
The 6th episode opens with episode 356 of the Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon featuring NavBot and Captain Hossein trapped on a planet.
The relationship between the two is explicitly a romance. Murderbot narrates this in a soft and gentle voice, one almost of longing, even as it says it is not possible for a bot to experience love due to their design.
It provides them with an opportunity to bond, to understand each other, to fall more in love with each other. Hossein lays out what this episode is about: constructs feel emotions, everyone deserves a bit of warmth.
Then the show itself opens up with Murderbot and Mensah trapped on a planet. Fanlore describes Trapped Together as a trope in which characters are trapped together. The characters involved could be friends, co-workers or even enemies.
One character can be injured and dependent on the other to help them. In this case, Murderbot is physically injured and Mensah is emotionally injured.
The forced intimacy of been trapped together, as with NavBot and Hossein, provides them an opportunity to understand each other, to bond with each other.
Not only are they trapped together, but if they don't find a way out of this situation, the rest of the survey team will die.
The longer the situation goes on, the more the stress of the situation gets to them. Physical health is degrading and the anxiety between the two of them is contagious. As their vulnerability to each other is shared, this is represented by an opening up of clothes (and eventually a removal of armour).
Murderbot asks Mensah to sit with it on the bunk where it shows her an episode of Sanctuary Moon of two lovers who are dying together. Not removing its armour yet, but showing Mensah something more intimate than that, Mensah who has seen in naked and on display is now being shown something it has never shown another person - it's love of this show:
Fanlore describes "the oh moment" as a way to demonstrate a pivotal moment of realisation, often of a character's own feelings for someone, or a moment of understanding on a character or a situation.
It is also, most often, used as a romance trope. When a character realises their own feelings about someone, when there is a shift inside them and they see the other person in a while new way.
Mensah experiences this when Murderbot opens up to her by showing her its anxieties, its vulnerabilities, and something incredibly important to it. She realises she has been wrong, and she accepts it. Nods to herself.
Fanlore states that Hurt/comfort is a fanwork genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character.
The injury, sickness or other kind of hurt allows an exploration of the characters and their relationship.
Mensah saves SecUnit by bandaging its wounds and inserting lubricant into its resupply ports. She tries to make it comfortable, creating it a pillow from her clothes and then sitting over the side of its "bed", waiting with clutched hands for it to wake. Her wedding rings prominently on display. And when it wakes, she greets it so gently, says hello, asks it how it is.
And during this moment, while between the two of them and this moment of hurt/comfort leading to a jointly developed solution, the camera confirms their compatibility.
However the situation has been getting more dire. Murderbot is leaking fluids and shutting down, the worries of who could be killing the survey team is getting to them. Now that they are in a compatible state, they know how to solve this.
Murderbot removes its armour, opens the back of its skinsuit in a visually evocative way, making itself as vulnerable physically in contrast to how it was emotionally. They are now both in a state of undress. Mensah is hesitant about the intimacy of the solution, of what they're going to have to do. This violates her personal morals.
Fuck or Die is a fanfiction trope in which the author puts two or more characters into a situation that forces sexual intimacy between them, or risk death. For episode 6, Murderbot TV requires that Murderbot and Mensah are intimate in a way far beyond typical sex.
Fuck or die often has a physiological reason why someone will die without sex, though it can also be combined with tropes such as Virginity Sacrifice to create external motivations. This is often to one, or both, character's reluctance.
Both Murderbot and Mensah want to save the PresAux Survey and so Mensah has to let go of her morals and enter into Murderbot, despite her frustrated reluctance. Its logic of the situation, and the act of taking control and instructing Mensah, wins out.
Of reassurances to Mensah that this won't hurt it, that she can enter it and take from it for the greater good. (And Mensah learns that it can feel pain, just before she starts to cause it pain)
Of the spinal surgery framed by the camera as an intimate encounter, of Murderbot's soft gentle voice guiding Mensah through the process of entering it, of visual and auditory sexual imagery, slow shots panning down skin, the sounds of Mensah's panting, the romantic mood lighting,
until she successfully penetrates it the first time.
The constant background of Mensah's distress to do this to Murderbot, the repeated reminders that she has to do this to it, or the rest of PresAux will die.
Sexually Explicit Fanworks
According to Fanlore, the medium can impact a reader's response to sexually explicit material; for better or worse, visual or auditory sexual content is more immediate and visceral, whereas textual descriptions can provide more distance between the reader and the subject.
The entire scene is recorded and presented as a sex scene. The lighting is warm, the movements slow, the blood is minimal and adjacent to movie tropes in showing someone's sexual first time. There is no romantic music, instead the wet slaps of flesh and grunting of Mensah. What is happening here is not an act of violence but an act of coerced intimacy and trust.
The visuals showed Mensah slowly opening Murderbot up as she enters it for the first time. She claims first blood on it. The audio includes slick sounds of flesh being penetrated and the scalpels ongoing cutting. Mensah continues to alternate between whimpering, grunting and moaning.
Murderbot telling her to go deeper, to open it up more. To more noises and a camera that moves over its skin and her hands slowly and sensually move down its spine and leaves it gaping open.
(and while that is going on, the camera cuts to Pin-Lee and Arada being intimate in a similar position, with Ratthi joining them.)
There's a reference to cannibalism, a common horror trope that doubles as a metaphor for love and sex, to which Murderbot reminds her that while she is doing part of the actions (cutting it up, penetrating it) she does not have to eat it (see this to be sex.)
When she's done, carving it up like a slab of meat, there's an abstract representation of a vulva (yonic imagery) into its spine. For humans, the vulva includes the labias (the first and second layers Mensah breached), the clitoris (the dataport with all its electrical neural endings) the hymen (its spine), the vagina (inside the spine, where Mensah seeks to go).
But they've not yet reached climax - Murderbot telling her to keep going. They change positions, Mensah undresses more. The audio continues with the moaning and the sounds of tools on wet flesh. She cracks it open, breaks its hymen (spine) so she can enter its vagina (spinal channel).
The climax is reached when her hands are deep into its spine, her wedding rings visible again and the brightest part of the framing.
On the audio, she moans and whimpers, chasing the neural cord and source of electricity. The movement makes Murderbot's head involuntary twitch forward as she pushes/pulls it. This is the most reaction we've seen from it over something entering its body, that she's so deep into it that its making micromovements.
She places the bloodied scalpel into her mouth, an indirect form of cannibalism (as love) to fully commit herself to helping them both reach the climax.
And finally, panting in satisfaction at the success, she pulls her hands out of Murderbot with a bloody piece of itself to save Mensah's team with.
And while Mensah is panting in relief, wipes the sweat off her face from the exertion, Murderbot makes a joke about this being her first time.
A fic classified as a first time is one where the featured characters engage in an intimate or sexual relationship with each other for the first time.
And at first she finds this funny, forces a laugh the way Navbot did in the opening scene while holding the scalpel with its blood in her mouth. Perhaps some of the laugh is from her relief, to be done with carving its back open like meat so she can use it like a tool.
And then she looks at it walking away into the light.
Mensah realises she has unintentionally participated in a Virginity Sacrifice - which puts two characters into a situation where the outcome of a major event (e.g. PresAux survey team not dying) requires one virgin character (Murderbot), to have sex (penetration) with another character (Mensah).
That to save her friends in this fuck or die situation, Mensah has penetrated and used the SecUnit that is enslaved to them. That has sacrificed a part of itself. That even while verbally it seemed to have control of the situation, and is physically stronger than her, that its entire life has been to lay itself down and let others use and abuse it to get results. She has taken from it, in her role as its leader, its captain, the only human it trusts.
And this situation concludes with them both in a state of undress, covered in each others fluids, after Mensah has deeply penetrated Murderbot so that they may go save the human survey team that doesn't trust it, looking into each others eyes, and in the process of this situation Mensah has come to a deeper understanding of it in both emotional mind and physical body.
Murderbot TV episode 6's surgery scene is a sex scene, in terms of the imagery and tropes. But it is not sex. It's also not-not sex. But it is love and trust and care and intimacy and sacrifice and giving and receiving.
And much like episode 356 of Sanctuary Moon, this setting where they are trapped provides them with an intimate opportunity to bond, to understand each other, to fall more in love.
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