“It’s joking.” Ratthi managed to sound like he completely believed that. “That’s how it looks when it’s joking.” He sent me on the feed, Stop joking. Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now.
[ID: a drawing in soft orange, yellow and green, showing three people. Dr Gurathin is closest to the viewer, facepalming, burying his entire face in his hand. He wears a button up shirt. Right in front of his right elbow is a drone that seems to be looking at him. In the middle is Murderbot, staring blankly ahead, standing around kind of awkwardly. It wears a hoodie and has a drone floating right beside its head. To its left and most in the background is Dr Ratthi, gesticulating strongly with a forced smile on his face. There’s another drone hovering just above his left hand. He wears a tunic with embroidery on the collar. They are in a corridor on Preservation Station. Behind them on the wall are three potted plants - a huge monstera (behind Ratthi, quite fancy looking), a cactus (behind Murderbot, rather tall and straight, but with the tiniest blossoms crowning the top) and a cypress (behind Gurathin, neat but fuzzy). /end ID]
2.
To the humans, I said, “I’m going after the others, just stay here—” I felt a hard thump from behind. It was low and to one side, where a fairly important part would be, if I was human. I turned. Human One had the armored hostile’s weapon, the one I had taken away and dropped down into the module. And she had shot me with it.
[ID: a drawing in bright pinkish-red, white and gray. We see over the heads of five refugees huddled together in the back of the room. They all wear worn down worker’s clothes. A scrawny child with short fluffy hair sits on the floor, someone young kneels beside them. Their hair is braided loosely and their worker overalls are slipping down their shoulder. Three adults stand protectively around them. In the middle of the room, in front of the group, Human One has a weapon still smoking from discharging aimed at Murderbot. Murderbot is standing with its back to the group, a fresh wound in its lower back, looking over its shoulder to Human One. Its face is not visible. A bright white light comes from the hatch of the room. /end ID]
Murderbot says it’s an asshole but it’s actually not that bad, like sure it’s a little brusque and swears sometimes but don’t we all, then I got to Fugitive Telemetry and was like. Oh. Okay. This is what MB looks like when it’s deliberately trying to piss people off
#uovoc im actually really deeply curious what stood out to you about MB’s behavior in FT #it trying to piss of Indah read to me as petty/at times like it behaved in ASR but I may be showing my whole ass with this question haha (via grammarpedant)
lol prepare to be underwhelmed it was just the scene where MB keeps calling the body a “dead human.” I think I was just surprised to see MB being so intentionally abrasive without provocation? I have this vague impression that when it’s been rude like that before, it’s been in high-stress situations, like when Gurathin was trying to make it mad in ASR. Or maybe it’s because this is the first time MB has had to work with people it doesn’t want to work with. Actually MB being rude to Gurathin makes sense when you think of it that way
To be fair to Murderbot, it did have provocation- it’s been clashing professionally with Indah over Mensah’s security before, and on a personal level the things Indah said about it in its first meeting on Preservation were hurtful at best. So like it is a high-stress situation for Murderbot lmao, just not a life-threatening high-stress situation.
I think the comparison to ASR Gurathin is a good one- this is Murderbot’s prickly way of trying to protect itself from people it thinks are likely to hurt it emotionally (see also: Murderbot feeling off-balance because it can’t tell whether Aylen doesn’t like that it’s here or not- i.e. whether it needs to protect itself from her rejection- and so is not sure how much of an asshole to be to her). Not unlike its use of minimum necessary force in security situations, it’s usually not an asshole first (see: shooting back with “It takes one to know one” when Pin-Lee says “I’ll protect your right to wander off like an asshole anytime you like”).
i thought some of the asshole behavior wasn’t even because it was under more or even as much strain from the actual situation, but because it didn’t have a role to play other than itself. and of course issues of ‘self’ and having that self judged and known and limited and so on are pretty hot-button.
everything becomes freighted with symbolic meaning when you’re in the process of trying to define a conceptual basis for your personhood within a social framework.
so exercising the right to make things difficult and uncomfortable for your coworkers out of personal resentment is very understandable but still jerk behavior.
another way its assholeness surfaced in Fugitive Telemetry: once it was allowed into the main investigation and wasn’t going around the main channels, it stopped paying attention to the ‘bot community. and when it did notice them up to the finale, it was always with resentment. actively seeking out things to be resentful about.
this is a reflection of some valid but not particularly attractive Issues it has about bots and bot-human relations and how they inform its identity, and the concept of community versus self-determination, and the way its personal and identity-based resentments and hangups are all interwoven, and like.
it wasn’t overt asshole behavior. it wasn’t especially obvious or hurtful, and the one person iirc we know for sure did pick up on it–JollyBaby–thought it was funny.
but this book gave us a situation that’s less survival-driven than most of the other books, where the primary source of tension is social, giving murderbot’s complicated internalized prejudices and the ways it can be a dick about them some space to breathe, which i thought was really interesting.
Ooh, I’m absolutely hooked now that you brought up my hot-button favorite-topic themes in general which I think are important to FT: what it means to be a person among people, or in FT’s case, professionalism and community.
I really want to finish a meta post on the themes of professionalism in FT, but I think broadly that FT is one of the first times Murderbot is working with security as a fellow professional and not as a tool, and most of its journey of personal growth over the course of the book is about learning how to work with others, have professional relationships, and adhere to professional standards (see: keeping to its agreement not to hack, “please refer to the victim as ‘the deceased’ or ‘the victim’ during the course of the investigation” and not as ‘the dead human’).
But also, the other part of the story that feels almost like a natural extension of this type of overarching story beat (i.e. character escapes a terrible environment and goes to the figurative promised land) is the character integrating, however easily or with difficulty, into the new environment, and we get almost none of that! Deliberately, I have to assume. I think even from the beginning Murderbot is not interested in connecting with the bot community, but I think the point you raise about not being sure what its role to play is there- aside from being itself, and all the fraughtness that implies- definitely plays into it. And, of course, because its coping mechanisms were developed in a hostile environment and its new environment does not warrant the returned hostility and that’s a hard adjustment to make, and also because integrating into a new culture as someone between cultural experiences is always hard and bittersweet (I will never shut the fuck up about murderbot-as-bicultural-allegory).
I’m not sure how much sense I’m making here (I’m mostly vibrating with excitement at the tanatalizing concepts being presented here). For sure I would love to ask you to go into further depth about this section though, if you’re so inclined:
“this is a reflection of some valid but not particularly attractive Issues it has about bots and bot-human relations and how they inform its identity, and the concept of community versus self-determination, and the way its personal and identity-based resentments and hangups are all interwoven…”
Because OOH community versus self-determination is such a juicy concept, one which I’m not sure Murderbot- either the character or the series- grapples with to the degree I want.
That’s actually a great point! @grammarpedant. And my feeling is that the tension between community obligation and self-determination is extremely present in the books, it’s just–not grappled with, because Murderbot has for the most part made the preemptive call that it does not recognize obligations to society.
It’s not struggling to balance those two things because it will always, as a condition of who it is as a person, prioritize self-determination.
And honestly I think that’s where a lot of the ‘asshole’ is. It acknowledges certain obligations to individuals, especially ‘to protect’ and other compassion-driven impulses, but anything broader is automaticallyunwelcome and not respected.
Which makes sense! The civilization that created it designed it to be nothing but obligation to conform, and it consequently receives every piece of pressure to conform its identity or its behavior to a social norm as a small redux of enslavement–doing it of its own volition as part of a deception is better, but it’s still survival-driven conformity, and anyone trying to push conformity then is naturally an enemy.
Even when it knows rationally that the expectation is reasonable and the person isn’t actually wielding the threat of death, that’s how it lands emotionally.
And since Murderbot is not actually very in touch with its emotions, this routinely manifests in being an antisocial, provocative jerk for what seems even to it like no real reason. And avoiding socially integrating because, even as far as it’s come since the end of All Systems Red, forming bonds of obligation to something as large and alien as Preservation society continues to feel fundamentally unsafe.
Especiallybecause it’s been made so clear that Preservation does not, in fact, have a place for it on its own terms and doeswant it to conform to some more easily handled set of categories. Even if this wish is much less destructive than the Corporation Rim’s version, it doesn’t admit it’s destructive at all, and that’s rightfully infuriating.
Except it’s also just. A society having fairly reasonable norms like ‘have a name people can call you by,’ and MB’s rebellion against these feels petty and assholish, even though it’s important in the same way leaving at the end of the first book was–and it felt like a dick about that too lol.
Its relationship with the bot community is so many more layers, because it’s got so many levels of ambivalence getting tapped at once. So I’m not going to even try to unpack it. Just, a list of points:
1) its deep resentment of 'bots that are content being under 'guardianship,’ both Miki and the ones on Preservation (jealousy that they can trust like that, frustration that they do and on some level it has to worry about them because it doesn’t, frustration that maybe they don’t trust but are simply making do, anger at the way their trust makes its distaste for the practice look like paranoia or childishness, alienation because if they really can trust humans like that under these conditions it can’t relate–)
2) the way it’s always been more comfortable getting 'bots and constructs killed than humans; internalized prejudices
3) the low value it places on construct lives and particularly the loathing it had for the ComfortUnit, who hadn’t actually done anything to deserve that. Which is pretty clearly the same self-hate that gave it its name; it doesn’t react with the compassion you’d expect of it toward other units and their status as victims because it isn’t willing/able to feel compassion toward itself for what it did under compulsion.
4) i think the thing with Balin now retroactively set up some of the growth on this point we see in Network Effect.
Oh tumblr user @whetstonefires this is exactly the kind of analysis I hoped for when I asked you for this
It’s really not grappled with! But the tension between self and community is still there- I’ve been wondering so much why there isn’t more of the bot community in Fugitive Telemetry, why it feels like that entire part of something that could be important to MB’s identity is left dangling like a participle, gesturing at something that should exist, and I think you hit that out of the ballpark!
But at the same time yeah, it’s understandable why it refuses to engage like that. Maybe it’s possible that one day it’ll be in a place where it can grapple fully
I’m honestly kind of vibing with your tentative analysis in-roads, I think with the addition that the way Murderbot interacts with Three must also be really important to its relationship to community/other bots, and the way it’s evolved. Mm, it’s something that came up when the discord was talking about the bicultural reading, but the way Murderbot is both easily able to read Three’s body language (while it was collapsed in ART’s bay at the end of NE, reading Three as “like it had absolutely no idea what to do”) and yet also feels alienated from it (“maybe I’m the weird SecUnit”), having been isolated from other SecUnits (i.e. others straddling the line between bot and human in this specific way) and unwilling to get close or really even think about the kind of help that MB itself might’ve needed at that time that it could now offer.
