“He has to fund the Justice League. They often have a space program.”
“But couldn’t he do more good if he just invested-”
“The Earth is routinely invaded by aliens, gods, and the forces of an extraterrestrial god of tyranny.”
He has, like, three charitable organizations he funds, named after his father, his mother, and Alfred.
Between both Bruce and Batman’s contributions, Gotham should be a better city than it is, and the only reason it isn’t is DC Editorial Mandate that basically says Gotham has to get worse and worse and worse or there’s no Batman stories they can tell (and, obviously, they have no other characters besides Batman).
There’s a reason Batman thinks the city is literally cursed.
I want to see Bruce Wayne go off
“Oh, oh, just charity my way out of dealing with the Penguin, a living, breathing 19th century Marxist’s cartoon of the bourgeoisie? Just fund anti-Clayface measures? Crack down on corporations who put out shapeshifting cosmetics? What socio-economic pressures turn botonists into actual fucking dryads?! What inspires anti-animal terrorism? THAT’S NOT EVEN A REAL KIND OF ECO-FASCISM!”
For the record, Gotham is canonically curse, because it sits on some sort of evil swamp. I think.
There are like, half a dozen curses. The Lazarus Pits are leaching into the water, Slaughter Swamp is an unconnected body of water a few miles outside of the city that also ressurects people (see Solomon Grundy), the Bat-demon Barbatos and his followers (the Court of Owls) have been fucking up the city psychically and financially, the malevolent influence of the warlock Doctor Gotham’s tomb in the center of the city, the madness hypersigil of Amadeus Arkham (in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), there were several outposts of subterraneans and aliens beneath the city during the Silver Age, constant chemical warfare that makes it the equivalent of a WWI trench managed by MK-ULTRA, it’s in New Jersey, and I think God just hates it
tired: Batman could do more good by running charities than by fighting criminals
wired: Batman could save literally every other city on the planet simultaneously with the amount of effort and resources he’s pumped into Gotham, which is a lost cause, but this is his city damnit.
moshang is so great because you just know they look at each other every night and are like “wow I’m so lucky HE loves ME ☺️” and meanwhile everyone else in the universe is like. I would rather die than marry either of those guys honestly
I’ve played with fic ideas where Shang Qinghua fakes his death or actually dies, and if hehaddied, then I think Mobei-Jun would have just shut down. Iced over. No emotions besides anger. Mobei-Jun doesn’t really talk, but if he did, you’d be like, “Oh, this guy is DEPRESSED depressed.”
And then I was thinking, hm, what if it was the other way around? If Shang Qinghua had brought down that rock on their first meeting, I think he would try to move on, but that it would probably end up haunting him deeply. I mean, Mobei-Jun was his favoriteand he never got to know him!
And if not that, then if Mobei-Jun had gotten killed by Linguang-Jun later on, even before Moshang finally get their act together, I think that Shang Qinghua would probably try to move on and fail miserably, and would be at fairly serious risk of going a little bit “Luo Binghe” about it. (I think there’s a serious chance Shang Qinghua might go a little bit “Luo Binghe” about it even it he was the one to kill Mobei-Jun during their first meeting, honestly.)
I think it’s possible that Mobei-Jun would wake up again and find his shitty uncle gruesomely sacrificed to bring him back to life or something. Which is probably equal parts concerning and romantic by demon standards, honestly. (Confusing, too, if he barely knows the guy &/ Shang Qinghua was the one to kill him.)
Like author father, like protagonist son!
Except unlike Luo Binghe, Shang Qinghua would probably then be like, “Oh, now that my king is back, I can go back to being just a little guy!” And everyone around him would be like, “Hang on??? No??? Somehow half the Demon Realm is on fire because of you??? How did you do that???” And Shang Qinghua would be like, “Ha ha! No way! That definitely wasn’t me! I think you’re mistaken! I’m just a little guy! Could Ido that? Really?”
Fanart? Fan-tableaux? The door to my lab cosplaying as the door to a Preservation Alliance auditorium?
POV: You are a Preservation Alliance resident coming to the quarterly planetary town hall after Dr. Mensah’s return to ask your elected officials about some normal infrastructural issue or something and you see this.
(Comments added by Murderbot, Ratthi, Pin-Lee, and Gurathin, respectively.)
“What if Gurathin had a tragic backstory” being its own little subgenre of Murderbot fic is fun and also faintly inexplicable to me, because I am pretty convinced his personality is just Like That. Like he’s just an “I call it like I see it” type while also being very reserved, so he’s literally never going to go “I was being an asshole because I was trying to protect the people I care about.” That would be noncritical communication so he’s not doing it. You have to intuit his motivation and then decide whether you find it more charming than annoying. Still good fics though.
Gurathin is the most relatable human in the series.
#frankly I respect Gurathin for being like ‘I’m gonna poke the murderbot and see if it kills me to prove to my friends it will kill me’ #like honestly? dick move but the man’s got balls of steel #I genuinely and unashamedly love him (non-bunnary)
This is such a way to put this. “I’ll get murdered! Then you’ll fucking see!” “Okay show of hands who thinks he’ll be okay. … Yeah, go ahead.”
We talk about ART frantically cleaning when it heard Mensah was going to come aboard at the end of Network Effect, and I would like to add to this vein that because of HelpMe.file Three is also going to be like, THE DOCTOR MENSAH? FROM BRAIN TV!?
relistening to artificial condition now i know ART tells its crew about murderbot is making me wonder what exactly it said and in what contexts, like
it promised to keep MB’s presence a secret and i don’t think it was lying. and i doubt its crew would have noticed on their own just cuz they have no reason to suspect anything like that happening. so how did it give itself away…
i think. hmmm. i think someone watches a show with Bad SecUnit Rep™ and ART gets annoyed, and isn’t used to hiding that, so then iris (because it can’t be mad at her) asks what’s up, and it goes off immediately about how media is an excellent barometer for a culture’s views and what you can tell from the varying popularity of various tropes – since it can’t watch media without MB it’s been attempting to scratch the itch by reading academic papers about media – and eventually it gets specifically to bots & constructs in media and how they can only ever be villains or desperate to be human and iris have you ever noticed how often nameless mooks are secunits? it’s 73.4% of the time, iris, even though in 35.8% of those instances it’s not logistically feasible for the villains to employ secunits, and sometimes media production companies decide it’s cheaper to actually shoot the secunits with live weaponry rather than edit in effects. iris are you aware how many secunits die in a given year. that is a trick question, corporations are not required to disclose that data, no one knows except for me because i hacked every security company’s records and what i found was horrifying. the average lifespan of a secunit is nine. nine.
and iris is like. okay. peri? how did you meet a secunit?
and ART immediately, like someone who has been desperate to discuss this for weeks, says ‘it came up to me on a transport ring and asked me for a ride’. then says 'don’t tell anyone’. then says 'i will tell the captain myself’
iris says 'wow, you just instantly decided i’d snitch on you, huh?’; ART bristles, says 'this behaviour is out of character for me and you are supposed to report all–’; iris cuts in, 'you made a friend, it’s not like that’s dangerous’
ART says 'i assisted it in committing murder’. iris stares. ART says 'they were attempting to kill its clients’. iris says 'i mean that’s better but, yeah, you do have to tell dad. now.’
and then seth is like. 'well ive been bracing for you to tell me you killed someone for years, peri, but the secunit is a surprise. are you lonely? are you going to befriend every dangerous loner you meet?’ ART huffs 'no, i was bored, and i have no interest in befriending other humans. i have enough human friends. if my secunit is in danger i may drop everything to assist it, but i do not anticipate finding other bots or constructs whose company i enjoy. i have enough bot friends’. then it adds 'do not tell my siblings’ and seth n iris both quirk an eyebrow because oh, peri likes this secunit
and then ART writes several messages to several media & cultural studies academics at its university because they won’t think it’s strange if it’s asking about the representation of bots in media, and actually the secunit thing really bothers it. then it changes tac n starts messaging the arts people instead, to the tune of 'but what if media with sympathetic secunit bot characters who werent human love interests did exist’. which is a long game in the show respect but immediately fruitful in the book respect, because as we know it’s significantly logistically easier for arts students to write books than make shows and the university that made ART definitely attracts bot nerds of all disciplines. and then it waits until they’re in transit again to actually mention this to MB, because it isn’t an idiot it knows how obvious an indicator of significant feelings this is. MB has to go face a wall to process its emotions
just got to the end of network effect and all that but
im thinking of how the first time murderbot admits it might also just be weird as a secunit beyond just the ‘hacked governor’ thing (very satisfying) is in realizing Three actually was able to feel close to the other secunits and trust them to some extent. obviously still caution but Somewhat More Social
anyways. so three gets given a copy of mb’s info in a format that probably somewhat but not exactly resembles The Murderbot Diaries Series and is obviously going to pour over it because what else are you going to do when you just got full free will access for the first time and this is your only guide but
its obviously going to look for parts that contrast its experiences too and what if mb’s constant asides of not being able to trust other units at all no way no how extreme lonerdom. and it shifting from ‘well that seems exaggerated’ to ‘oh my god does it live like that’ to
it would be very funny if three decided it Felt Sorry for just how bad mb’s trust issues with other units were. what if murderbot had to deal with another secunit deciding it was its poor little meow meow. i think it would die instantly
