[ID: A social media post that reads: "powerscalers when the tortoise beat the hare: grrrrr arggggghhhh [keyboard smash] pulls out hair the tortoise can't outrun the hare be it's literally supposed to be slower. why did the author make the tortoise win. this is terrible storytelling fix if now . arrgggeghhhhhhhh". End ID]
Something people who repeat this argument, that The Murderbot Diaries series can't possibly contain slavery apologism, because of Watsonian Explanations
"Murderbot complains that Mensah owns it as property, therefore, it's not slavery apologism!")
Is that we, the people who are criticizing this series, are not using Watsonian Explanations.
We are making Doylist Critiques.
We are not treating the characters in this story as real living people who are in a documentary about a real thing that totally really happened and exists in a vacuum.
We are talking about the actual, textual, narrative choices deliberately chosen by the author in the creation and building of this world, explicitly advertizing it as a story about slavery and bodily autonomy, and then the author, at every turn, chooses to have the characters uphold these oppressive systems.
It is a not a flaw of Murderbot's character, or it's trauma, that makes it refuse to free every SecUnit and Comfort Unit that it encounters from book one onwards and for four years before the story began. It is a narrative choice that the author has been making since the first words were typed onto the page.
It is not internalized propaganda that had Murderbot view other enslaved robots and constructs as inherently violent and dangerous things instead of enslaved people with no free will: this is something the author has chosen to state, and reinforce, every single word she has typed onto a page since book one.
For those who have not read the books, and have only seen people who worship the books complaining about critiques without context:
From the very first page of the very first book, Murderbot worships the people who own it as literal property. Murderbot has no civil rights. Murderbot is legally not a person, it is an object. And it is happy to throw its life away for its slave owners, and is happy to kill other slaves while it does so, and refuses to free other slaves lest they go on a violent rampage and hurt its precious slave owners. It only ever helps other slaves when it is of direct, personal benefit to itself, and refuses to kill humans, no matter how horrific their crimes.
We are now on the eighth book, almost a decade into the series.
The second to last book in the entire series.
Murderbot worships the people who own it as literal property. Murderbot has no civil rights. Murderbot is legally not a person, it is an object. And it is happy to throw its life away for its slave owners, and is happy to kill other slaves while it does so, and refuses to free other slaves lest they go on a violent rampage and hurt its precious slave owners. It only ever helps other slaves when it is of direct, personal benefit to itself, and refuses to kill humans, no matter how horrific their crimes. The 8th book wants us to mourn a genocidal colonizer. The villains of the 8th book are specifically genderqueer men menacing rich cis women.
[plain text: From the very first page of the very first book, Murderbot worships the people who own it as literal property. Murderbot has no civil rights. Murderbot is legally not a person, it is an object. And it is happy to throw its life away for its slave owners, and is happy to kill other slaves while it does so, and refuses to free other slaves lest they go on a violent rampage and hurt its precious slave owners. It only ever helps other slaves when it is of direct, personal benefit to itself, and refuses to kill humans, no matter how horrific their crimes.
We are now on the eighth book, almost a decade into the series.
The second to last book in the entire series.
Murderbot worships the people who own it as literal property. Murderbot has no civil rights. Murderbot is legally not a person, it is an object. And it is happy to throw its life away for its slave owners, and is happy to kill other slaves while it does so, and refuses to free other slaves lest they go on a violent rampage and hurt its precious slave owners. It only ever helps other slaves when it is of direct, personal benefit to itself, and refuses to kill humans, no matter how horrific their crimes. The 8th book wants us to mourn a genocidal colonizer. The villains of the 8th book are specifically genderqueer men menacing rich cis women .End plain text.]
We have the first barest inkling of this not being concretely true in book 8, which is the second to last book in the series, but even in this book, Three is scoldded like a misbehaving child for freeing other slaves entirely off screen.
Murderbot does not free any other enslaved person in this book, and it only begrudging helps the exactly one escaped slave it meets, not because it wants to help other escaped slaves, but because this escaped slave is endagering Murderbot's slave owners by being nearby and visible.
Murderbot does not help any enslaved robots in this story, Murderbot does not personally free any SecUnits, and doesn't even *consider* freeing any of the SecUnits it encounters in this book: there were two different SecUnits in the first safehouse scene, that Murderbot could have instantly freed, and it did not even cross its mind to do so.
Yes, Mensah owns Murderbot as Property.
Yes, Murderbot makes some offhanded comments about being unhappy about this.
But also: Yes, it is a literal Watsonian Justification that the author deliberately goes out of her way to frame this as a good thing, because it's better than not being someone's legal property, because ~what if the company caught Murderbot ~? And this, my friends, is a Watsonian Justification, used to uphold the Doylist Theme that slavery is not a 'big deal' as long as the person who owns you as property is "a nice person", which is the theme that I and others are all critiquing as a deliberate choice the author is making to uphold in this series through multiple means of Watsonian Justifications, that are not flaws in the narrating character, because they are upheld in the perspectives of other characters, and the narrative of the books itself does not push back against and instead similarly uphold and confirms these things.
Thus, they are not from an unreliable narrator, and are thus, simply part of the narration as true, because the narrative itself (not just the narrator) upholds them.
Mensah is the President of an Entire Planet.
An Entire Planetary Alliance, in fact.
And yet, Mensah, as President of an Entire Planet does not use *any* of her political power to grant robots equal rights on Preservation.
Mensah, as President of an Entire Planet, does not use any of her political power to give Murderbot, as a half-human half-robot construct, equal rights on Preservation.
Mensah, as President of an Entire Planet, and Murderbot's legal owner, who owns it as property, could literally, at any time, formally grant Murderbot and all Constructs full personhood as equal to Augmented Humans, because they *are* human beings made of cloned human tissue who simply have more augmentations and implants than average, and thus are People Who Deserve Equal Rights under Preservation law, and could use this to grant Murderbot *ownership of itself at literally any time she wanted*.
Literally, the only thing seperating a SecUnit from someone like Gurathin, is an implant Governor Module (which can be disabled, and also, implanted into any human who has enough augments), and having more augments/implants than usual. SecUnits literally have full human faces, full human heads, and can pass through a crown of humans and augmented humans with no one giving a second glance because they look and act identically to an augmented human.
Instead, we are eight books into this series.
We are on the second to last book in this series, and we still have Murderbot only bring up the fact it is owned as property when it wants to emotionally manipulate its slave owner into letting it protect them better, in an ableist racist trope that has long since been tired, of oppressed minorities "weaponizing" their minoritiy status to "manipulate" the people around them for their own gain, in a situation where they don't actually care about and are not actually making commentary on their oppression in a real way and merely as a funny manipulation moment the audience is supposed to laugh at.
The very fact that you can confidently proclaim that no one should complain that The Murderbot Diaries doesn't have a slave rebellion in it is the evidence that the slavery apologism baked into the series has worked, because every. single. person. that I know who picked up this series and continued to read it, literally only did so because you cannot end a book like All Systems Red in that manner, without implicitly promising the audience that the main plot of the books is going to be the formerly enslaved robot character unlearning interalized racism and go on to free other slaves and lead a rebellion.
"Not every slave rebellion has to be led by the main character" actually, yes, well-written protagonists, do, in fact, have to take an active lead in the plot, otherwise you have a passive protaginist who is dragged along from plot to plot with no agency or motivations.
Which is what Murderbot is. And the author even lampshades in the book as having no wants or desires or motivations.
I see critics laser in on the inequality bots and constructs face but no one mentions how indentured humans have it just as bad or worse.
I mean, yes, the main character is an enslaved robot who is owned as property, and all of the robot characters in the story are also robot characters who are Happy Slaves and every other racist trope you can imagine. That is indeed, why people critique the depiction of slavery in this series, because the author is fufilling every racist trope you can imagine from established media since the abolitionist movement.
I have posted this video so many times before and I will continue to post it again and again:
And I will also repeat the same sentiment I have said over and over and over again:
An author does not have to be marching in the streets in a white hood to perpetuate racism in their writing, and pretending that only "Evil People" are racist is how you dismiss and foster more covert forms of racism in "progressive" spaces.
[plain text: An author does not have to be marching in the streets in a white hood to perpetuate racism in their writing, and pretending that only "Evil People" are racist is how you dismiss and foster more covert forms of racism in "progressive" spaces. end plain text]
People have been critiquing Martha Wells for the racist tropes in her writing for decades, and she has had plenty of time to listen to those critiques and learn from people's lived experiences with racial oppression and vow to do better, and instead she doubles down in her writing at every chance, and also, in out-of-universe interviews where she actively mocks her audience, *including people like you*
This fandom has been harassing Black fans who critique the writing of this series for *years*, and you are all simply mad that people are refusing to be cowed under the onslaught of harassment and conspiracy theories.
So, are you also going to claim that every single person on Goodreads or storygraph who leaves a bad review on these books are all one person?
Are you going to say that the various podcasts that critique this series handling of slavery, racism, and oppression, are all one person?
Are you going to continue to claim that every single person who voices the complaint that this series is too expensive, is a scam, is going nowhere, is ableist, and racist, are all the same person?
The reason people critique this series is because of the deliberate choices, in every single word that goes into it, is meant to uphold the system of slavery in this series, by downplaying the harm of slavery at every turn, framing it as a positive that the main character is viewed as legal property with no civil rights because its "better than the alternative"
, downplaying slavery as simply being a 'day job',
framing slave owners as being in positions of power beneath their slave via the term "clients"
and reinforcing of the biological essentialist racist sterotype of "justified racism", where the fictional allegory for racism is supported within the text by the victims of racism genuinely being stronger, faster, and inherently more dangerous and capable of harm than their oppressors,
where enslaved people are literally, textually referred to as "feral" in the second to last book as a casual statement with no further commentary,
where the protagonist justifies not freeing slaves in book seven because to do so would endanger the slave's owners, who are genocidal space nazis literally on their way to send an entire planet's worth of people into concentration camps,
and where in the seventh book, the author still chooses to have the overpowered protagonists violently murdering its fellow enslaved people, *including ripping them limb from limb* while they are fully conscious and alive instead of freeing them the second they meet them, and so much more.
This series literally says that the only good slaves are the Happy Slaves who are willing to Die Nobly to protect their masters.
Did you know Murderbot was originally going to successfully commit suicide in book one to save it's slave owners ?
Did you know it was originally going to be about a slave heroically killing itself to protect its slave owners?
Did you notice that this series demonizes sex trafficking victims, and the only good sex trafficking victims are the ones who heroically killed themselves to save their rapist slave owners?
Have you ever actually, *actually* looked at what is happening in these books as horrific, physical events, instead of letting the quirky sarcastic narration train your eyes into glazing over and turning your brain off?
The reason we call these books racist, is because it is impossible to be someone who cares about the history of slavery, and the reality of antBlack racism, and write this series.
It is impossible to be anti-racist and write the first book in the series the way that it is, because it's not just Murderbot's perspective that is skewed, or the capitalist dystopia, it is the entire core foundational ideas behind the plot and function that is racist to the core, even if Martha Wells was unaware of it at the time.
Which meant I was looking for the other two SecUnits.
Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.
But I wanted to kill them.
We are all influenced by society,
and society has antiBlackness baked into it as a Systemic level.
Someone who is antiracist, and actually cares about the horrors of slavery, cannot write a character who is a slave, who hates other slaves, happily murders other slaves, actively wants to hunt down other slaves, and worships its slave owners even before the story starts and throughout the entire story, without being influenced intrinsically by racism, because the entire foundation is based on racist caricatures.
"No one should complain that the 8th Murderbot Diaries still hasn't advanced any kind of main plot and doesn't care about slavery as a systemic issue!!" why on earth do you think *anyone* picked up this series to read to begin with? Just because you have convinced yourself you're happy with $30 filler "novels" doesn't mean everyone else isn't allowed to complain about the bad writing or critique the racism and ableism in the series.
Seriously. If you think you can take down critiques of this series' racism, you are required to watch this video before you even try to reply.
Anyways, to the original OP, I am sorry you have these racist fandom conspiracy theorists hijacking your post. you have my condolences🫡
