Whumpster Fire

When they're waiting to board the boat and the crowd is all listening in on Murderbot telling the humans its going back to help the militia hold off the corporates

The crowd all parting to let it through and Mb thinks it must be its angry face and not the fact that everyone just heard its going off to protect them

When passengers spot it in the water and work together to pull it aboard

Yes, it started as a term coined by Black people for just being done with someone, especially after they wronged you.

No, it did not stay meaning that, nor is its origin a reason to withhold warranted criticism of the phenomenon being described by it.

By and large, when people say they are canceling someone, the actions that are taken against that person as part of their cancellation are aimed at their removal from public life, if not society as a whole. Whether this is the conscious or stated aim of every individual in the group trying to “hold them accountable”, it is very clear that, in practice, nothing will satiate the collective anger until that goal is accomplished.

The volume, intensity, and duration of these informal campaigns, even when they derive from legitimate grievances, are routinely disproportionate to the grievances, and in many cases far more extreme than the human mind and emotions are even capable of experiencing without causing immense psychological distress, trauma, and other health problems.

Tactics often include stalking, harassment, public shaming, death threats, sui bait.

Parasocial dynamics create a disproportionate amount of investment in seeing the cancelee suffer. Even in cases where the anger of the individual cancelers is not necessarily excessive in a vacuum, taken together and at volume, it is.

Are there people who will call any pushback “cancellation” and claim they are being “silenced” from the biggest stages available; absolutely, and they’re often grifters, and they suck.

That said, the existence of bad faith claims does not necessarily reduce the validity of criticisms of this fundamentally destructive model of supposed “justice”.

One does not have to be totally & completely “silenced” to have been the subject of a cancellation campaign and suffer the intense psychological & social damage of public shaming, social ostracism, mass harassment, & stalking from it, or to deserve to be heard about that issue. Nor is a “canceled” figure having a comeback proof that “cancel culture isn’t real”, anymore than someone having a comeback after being blacklisted for coming forward about sexual abuse proof that “blacklisting isn’t real”*

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

I mean it's played for laughs but the humor is in the incongruity of the stereotypical medieval torture dungeon, imposing hooded executioner figure, etc. and then the victim turns out to be the literal Gingerbread Man. Getting dunked in a glass of milk and put on a cookie sheet, on a table with eggbeaters among the "normal" torture instruments. It's basically an extended Far Side gag. With bonus nursery rhyme quotes. But it's narrative purpose is also to demonstrate that Lord Farquad is completely fucking evil, and also an immature, vain idiot who only wants to be told what he wants to hear (threatens the Magic Mirror when told he's not technically a king).

Anyway, because there's only a small number of G-rated movies on the list I decided to see which ones they are. The list is:

Horton Hears a Who (2008): no torture

Wall-E (2008): no torture

Toy Story 3 (2010): 3 torture scenes

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked: no torture

Rio (2011): 2 torture scenes

Cars 2 (2011): 4 torture scenes

Monsters University (2011): no torture

The G-rated sample may be skewed by the fact that Cars 2, specifically, is unhinged, and the rating board may or may not have been asleep / only given the movie a G rating because everyone is a car. Toy Story 3 is also pretty dark IIRC. Anyway, 8 of the 9 scenes in G rated movies have a non-human perpetrator and 8 of 9 also have a non-human victim, which is expected since the sample is Toy Story 3 (movie about toys), Cars 2 (movie about cars), and Rio (movie about birds).

It's also worth noting that in PG-rated movies the torturer is significantly less likely to be a protagonist and more likely to be an antagonist, and the victim significantly more likely to be a protagonist and less likely to be an antagonist, than any of the other rating categories, so the kids' movies do at least do a better job of portraying torture as bad.

But the implicit belief MB is operating on in both cases is that Mensah’s stated explanation for giving it the drones is not true. What was that explanation again?

And in a society no less!

I’m noticing that MB’s experiences in Fugitive Telemetry mirror a few real world groups, most of which I’m not in a position to claim expertise in, but I think they’re important to point out. I’m thinking primarily of people with mixed racial heritage, as well as Black and trans folks.

I’ll preface this by laying out that I’m a black autistic anxious physically disabled genderfluid US American. This all shapes how I analyze and relate to this character.

I like that you pointed out that when choosing what to put on its feed ID (and really how to present at various times after it was bought by Mensah) is that Murderbot has to choose between presenting as what it really is, which will get it feared and hunted down, or hiding parts of itself to avoid that. This is the reality for pretty much any minority. Whether we’re black, Asian, autistic, female, trans, Muslim, bipolar, etc, whether or not we pass as some other identity or even can, we understand that being seen as those minority identities often means people are going to treat us terribly as a result. It is exhausting having to suppress a need to stim or to shift your dialect with different people or leave a culturally significant garment at home, but when not doing so can mean anything from teasing to losing your job to literal death, you just hide those parts of yourself.

In Rouge Protocol, when Murderbot failed to pass as an augmented human, when Don Abene and her team saw it as the secunit it truly is, two of those humans immediately turned on it, and less than a (Gregorian) month later, even more of its secrets were let out to the public and many more humans were after it and the humans it most cared about. Its belief that terrible things would happen if humans figured out it was a rogue secunit was correct.

I have thankfully experienced little of the all too common African American experience of being treated as inherently dangerous because of my race, but I have very often been the one black person in a (usually metaphorical) room of white people. And frequently Murderbot is in a similar boat (ship?) being the one secunit or even construct amongst humans and/or bots. And that can be frustrating and lonely, even when the folks around you do care about you. When you have been taught from the media and people around you and learned from direct experience that what you are is dangerous/worthless/something else bad, it becomes extremely difficult to believe that anyone who doesn’t share that identity would treat you well. And even when you do know they will be kind and caring to you, you still know they’ll never be able to fully understand. It can be upsetting sometimes when I’m talking to my white friends and they don’t get why I have the relationship that I do with my coily hair or how I could have had such a bad experience at a hospital they swear is the best. I headcanon that Murderbot’s anti-socialness, on top of being caused by it being abused and enslaved by humans for so long as well as it probably being programmed to be not very social, is partly caused by it being restricted from interacting with other constructs, by being forced to not have anyone it can relate to. (Really hope we get a bunch of Murderbot & Three interacting in future installments.)

And I really like your point about Murderbot’s drones being disability aids. For one thing, I just like this interpretation, adds richness to Preservation culture and Mensah’s and Murderbot’s relationship. But also, Murderbot rationalizing to itself that the drones are only there for it to protect others rather than for its own comfort and ability to function reminds me of the relationship many impoverished and/or of black folks have with mainstream medicine.

If you’re routinely barred from medical care because you can’t afford it or your issues are dismissed or your mistreated in the middle of trying to get help, then you may not even attempt to get the medical care you need at all or be aware of the full options that exist. I don’t know how many times I or a family member have had extremely distressing symptoms but instead of getting professionally seen, we just stayed at home and took something over-the-counter because we couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit or knew whichever doctor we saw would just be another white person who would see our hair and skin and brush off our concerns without even examining us. And we never even considered preventative or long term care, because taking a day off of work or school to check if we maybe had something wrong with us was something none of us could spare. And this can morph even further into not even recognizing when you need medical care. The aches and pains I felt on a daily basis and massive panic I’d feel just going up to a cash register I never fully registered or I treated as something I needed to fix alone because I had learned early on that I couldn’t get help for these things.

So often in the series, Murderbot is physically or mentally unwell (to be honest, it’s probably unwell for the entire series). Sometimes it remarks on this with a “this is bad but I’m just going to have to deal with it”. Other times it doesn’t even seem to notice when it’s bleeding out or experiencing high stress. Granted, it is a construct. It can withstand greater damage than humans and what ailments it could have don’t fully match up with those of a human. Part of it’s “don’t worry, I’ll be fine” attitude is definitely because of that, but I think it’s also because Murderbot has partially internalized the message that it is a tool and not a person, a tool that doesn’t get medical care or accommodations or the like. It believes it’s not going to get help unless said help serves someone else, so of course it would forget it had just been shot on the survey mission at the beginning of Network Effect. Of course it would deny that it needs therapy in Network Effect and System Collapse. Of course Murderbot would think Mensah was lying when she said the drones were for its own health.

Well fuck Balin

This is one of my favorite lines! It makes me smile every time

thoughts with spoilers for murderbot 6