some murderbot designs ^^

Anyways since I still have free will, here's murderbot as a cockroach

(context)

reading murderbot at the beach feels sacrilegious. like ah yes i'm at a location on a planet where there are moderately-sized airborne fauna and large noisy groups of people and the ground is made of small granules that get everywhere and inhibit perambulation. oh and there's also a large body of turbulent water that has an indeterminate amount of unknown fauna in it at any given time. and also boats. i will relax and read a book here, thus largely ignoring my surroundings. what a safe situation. risk assessment 0. threat assessment 0. this is great.

ive had murderbot for less than two weeks and its already entered the dress up doll stage of blorboism

secpony.....

Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

That is the problem.

I still think pregnancy and childbirth should be degendered. we stopped talking about that and I need us to pick it back up pls

You can't claim that transmascs and trans men (a group that was OFTEN raised as girls/women, often SEEN as girls/women, and who often have to go through the same experiences as cis women) who often experience misogyny don't experience misogyny, and then claim that you love transmasculine individuals.

Gotta pick a lane.

Transandrophobia is not stored in the transfemininity.

And on the inverse, transmisogyny isn't stored in the transmasculinity.

anyone who tells you trans men are the enemy is a fucking cop

i'm so tired of this shit

Is Murderbot an Unreliable Narrator?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Not really, in my opinion, and I want to try and explain why.

Definitions

The term unreliable narrator has become somewhat watered down here on tumblr and in pop cultural discussions in general but I am working with what I learned at uni here. (Disclaimer: In academia too there are different definitions and approaches to unreliability but I'm going with the basics here)

For Wayne Booth, who first coined the term, "an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, omits or misrepresents important information, or presents inaccurate interpretations of events as objective truth." Peter J. Rabinowitz says "An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience." (emphasis mine)

In other words, an unreliable narrator deceives the narrative audience (that is the implied in-universe audience), knowingly or unknowingly, in a way that significantly changes their interpretation of the narrative.

According to Greta Olson, there is "a differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators" and "all fictional texts that employ the device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability."

That means: It is not a binary of reliable vs. unreliable narrator. It is a sliding scale, a spectrum, and I would argue that on that spectrum, Murderbot falls closer to the trustworthy side than the unreliable.

General Thoughts

By and large, Murderbot presents the facts of the story to us truthfully. It does not withhold information from us that impacts our understanding of the events (see below for exceptions).

Are there moments where Murderbot's narration is fallible? Sure. It makes mistakes, particularly with judging people's intentions and their opinion of it. It consistently assumes people (especially "its" humans) think worse of it and trust it less than they actually do. It considers itself not important, and therefore assumes it is also not important to others. It also often rates it competence as much lower than it actually is.

But, and this is crucial: It does also tell us when it makes mistakes and often tells us the objective events in addition to its subjective assumptions or interpretations. By that I mean: It tells us its assumptions about the humans not thinking much of it and considering it expendable. But it also tells us the humans' words and actions that prove the opposite is true. It tells us about how incompetent and useless it is (especially in System Collapse) and then also tells us the sequence of events showing it actually is still capable of doing its job. It learns alongside us that its negative thoughts about itself aren't always true.

That's not unreliable narration.

Now, Murderbot's refusal to admit/discuss its emotions is the most common argument I've seen for MB being unreliable, and that is the one that probably bothers me the most.

Because a) A narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. MB refusing to discuss its feelings is a characterisation choice, but it's not keeping any vital information from us that we need to understand the story. There's gonna be narrators that focus more on outside descriptions and some that focus more on internal thoughts and perceptions and neither is inherently more unreliable than the other.

b) that being said imo MB's narration actually focuses A Lot on internal perceptions and feeling, in spite of it being so reluctant to talk about them. I think MB gives us a lot more emotion than we give it credit for. I would argue it doesn't actually hide all that much. It may often not be able to state its feelings outright, but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell us about them

As an example, let's look at the moment when Gurathin reveals its name to the PresAux group because that's always one that sticks in my mind with regard to MB and how it communicates its feelings

Murderbot doesn't actually tell us anything about what it's feeling here. It only tells us it's feeling something intense, and that it shows in its face, that the others can perceive it and react to it, and that it hates it. We can extrapolate what it's feeling of course: it's feeling betrayed and exposed and embarrassed and vulnerable (and angry but that's a given for MB). But I would argue it's not hiding that from us. It's given us the context we need to extrapolate what it's feeling because a) it doesn't want to talk about it directly so it does it indirectly and/or b) it wouldn't even know how to name the emotions it's feeling in that moment.

So I would say that MB does the best it can given its limitations (in experience and willingness to talk about feelings) to give us the most accurate view of its emotional state without having to talk about it. After all, we almost always know how it feels, or can at the very least guess at it. If it really was trying to hide its feelings from us (not from the other characters, it probably is actually pretty opaque to them most of the time) the narration would be reading very differently.

Looking at it from a Doylist perspective for a second: This is also stylistic choice on the part of Martha Wells, it's basic "show, don't tell": She doesn't simply tell us what Murderbot is feeling, she is showing us through its thoughts, actions and reactions and the reactions of other characters. That doesn't make Murderbot untrustworthy.

Now, I want to look at a few other passages and examples that are often brought up in this debate.

"this person's a pedophile!"

cool, i'm glad they feel safe enough to be so open about their identity and attraction, especially since being a MAP is so unfairly stigmatised. i hope they have good, para-friendly support IRL if they're disordered, wether that be family or professionals. it's always so nice seeing people accept their attractions and grow-out of their shame :)

…why are you looking at me like that? you expected me to dogpile an innocent person with you? you're using "pedophile" as an insult? what are you, five?

You don’t get to decide whether someone is transmasc, transfem, or something else. EVER. And especially not based on what you think their genitals looked like when they were born.

I think trans women should be allowed to win competitions without being used as proof that trans women are “dominating” women’s sports and I think trans men should be allowed to have big roles in media without being used as proof that trans men benefit from male privilege. I think trans people should be allowed to succeed in life without being used as a way to claim that cis women are inherently the most disadvantaged, when usually those trans people fought just as hard (if not harder) to get where they are than their cisgendered peers. I don’t like how trans people have to fail in order to convince two-bit feminists not to attack us for a privilege that we don’t have.