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Murderbot fandom (and books)
I am having such a good time in Murderbot TV fandom! It's been a long while since I was in a bigger, more active fandom, and it's just such fun: loads of fic, WIPs updating daily, activity/meta/gifs on Tumblr. I haven't fallen out of love with everything else, but I am having a great time with my new shiny.
I've read all of the books except Network Effect and System Collapse, which tbh I .... probably won't? I did a little skimming for context, so I know what happens, at least.
It turns out that what I enjoy more than anything else, at least as far as the books are concerned, is Murderbot out on its own, meeting different groups of humans/bots/etc and learning about itself and the galaxy in more-or-less one-off adventures. I don't particularly care about ART (which I gather makes me an anomaly in the fandom) or ART's crew; in fact I actively disliked the deus-ex-bot factor of having ART around in Artificial Condition and guess what I don't want more of! (I also feel like, in a series that leans heavily into dealing with the consequences of unchecked power, it's definitely a choice to introduce an incredibly powerful character that can do almost anything, literally wipe out entire settlements or hack a whole planet if it wants to, that has no legal constraints whatsoever and the only reason why there are never bad consequences for anything it does are because The Narrative Says So. I like fanon ART well enough, but I'd like the narrative to be more critical of canon ART than it is.)
Anyway, my favorite book so far was Rogue Protocol, I think, because it was just so tense and fun - eerie abandoned terraforming platform, a traitor in the group, MB not knowing what to make of Miki, just deliciously tense and unpredictable and enjoyable with neat worldbuilding. And I enjoy Murderbot's narrator voice.
I find it very entertaining that part of the fandom is basically doing Avengers Tower circa 2012 fic, where it's just a kind of timeless "Murderbot + PresAux 4ever" sort of thing* with ART around for moral support, and then there's another camp that mainly only cares about Murderbot + ART and/or other constructs and bots, and isn't really interested in the humans at all.
*Pretty much what I want from fic, tbh. In canon I want one thing, but for fic, I just want domestic fluff and plotty missionfic with h/c, and the fandom is DELIVERING.
It is, however, kind of annoying that nobody in this fandom seems to know how to tag shippy fic. I have never seen a fandom so prone to putting both & and / tags on fic that is clearly shippy. The fandom in general is also existing in a state of perpetual ship war, as well as an ongoing and tiresome conflict between the shippers and the gen people (I have blocked a number of people on Tumblr...) so YOU'D THINK this would lead to more precise tagging, not worse tagging. But no.
I've read all of the books except Network Effect and System Collapse, which tbh I .... probably won't? I did a little skimming for context, so I know what happens, at least.
It turns out that what I enjoy more than anything else, at least as far as the books are concerned, is Murderbot out on its own, meeting different groups of humans/bots/etc and learning about itself and the galaxy in more-or-less one-off adventures. I don't particularly care about ART (which I gather makes me an anomaly in the fandom) or ART's crew; in fact I actively disliked the deus-ex-bot factor of having ART around in Artificial Condition and guess what I don't want more of! (I also feel like, in a series that leans heavily into dealing with the consequences of unchecked power, it's definitely a choice to introduce an incredibly powerful character that can do almost anything, literally wipe out entire settlements or hack a whole planet if it wants to, that has no legal constraints whatsoever and the only reason why there are never bad consequences for anything it does are because The Narrative Says So. I like fanon ART well enough, but I'd like the narrative to be more critical of canon ART than it is.)
Anyway, my favorite book so far was Rogue Protocol, I think, because it was just so tense and fun - eerie abandoned terraforming platform, a traitor in the group, MB not knowing what to make of Miki, just deliciously tense and unpredictable and enjoyable with neat worldbuilding. And I enjoy Murderbot's narrator voice.
I find it very entertaining that part of the fandom is basically doing Avengers Tower circa 2012 fic, where it's just a kind of timeless "Murderbot + PresAux 4ever" sort of thing* with ART around for moral support, and then there's another camp that mainly only cares about Murderbot + ART and/or other constructs and bots, and isn't really interested in the humans at all.
*Pretty much what I want from fic, tbh. In canon I want one thing, but for fic, I just want domestic fluff and plotty missionfic with h/c, and the fandom is DELIVERING.
It is, however, kind of annoying that nobody in this fandom seems to know how to tag shippy fic. I have never seen a fandom so prone to putting both & and / tags on fic that is clearly shippy. The fandom in general is also existing in a state of perpetual ship war, as well as an ongoing and tiresome conflict between the shippers and the gen people (I have blocked a number of people on Tumblr...) so YOU'D THINK this would lead to more precise tagging, not worse tagging. But no.
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That does sound good; I may give it a try. I don't think it's one of the novellas I was given and which in any case are in storage.
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I do like old-school space horror.
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Oh dear, I could name a fandom that's awful at every kind of tagging. (And might do, access-locked.) Completely random / and & tagging, which means a lot of wasted time thinking you're going to get one and finding you'll get the other. Posting under one incarnation of the fandom while clearly writing about another. And also, random untagged het in gen, major character death and torture in G-rated "no warnings apply"... the list goes on. It's something of a nightmare. :(
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I agree! Well, mostly. I don't think I'm quite as anti-ART as you, but it's not my primary interest, and I am actively disinterested in some of the ways Murderbot and ART's relationship shifted in Network Effect. What I really want is, indeed, Murderbot having relatively episodic adventures interacting with groups and new places. Our various known characters can show up occasionally! I like it having to deal with continuity of relationships, too! But I don't want deus-ex-enormously-powerful-research-vessel and I do want variety.
I haven't read much of the fic because what I really want from fic is that, too, except that I'm picky about the execution, and "I want something other than what most people seem interested in writing and if I do get it I'm gonna be picky about it" is not a recipe for satisfaction, lol. Ah well!
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What I really want is, indeed, Murderbot having relatively episodic adventures interacting with groups and new places. Our various known characters can show up occasionally! I like it having to deal with continuity of relationships, too!
Yeah, that! I would be completely happy with MB's life weaving in and out of its established relationships, checking in on those and watching them grow. I also really liked the standalone adventures with PresAux, and I don't want to never see any of those people again! I just don't really want it to settle down anywhere, at least not yet; I like the serial-adventure nature of the early novellas, with MB as an underdog having to rely primarily on its own wits and resourcefulness, and unsure who it can trust; and I wish it had continued like that.
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MIKI 4EVER, that was such an excellent subplot! I would love to see any of the humans from books 2 and 3 followed up on, too, with MB running into them somewhere else now that it's in a very different place than it was when it met them.
(Part of what makes ART less interesting to me, I think, is because it loves its humans and its humans love it in a very straightforward way that Murderbot also seems to accept at face value ... idk.)
OHHHHH, I think you have a really good point here! I feel like ART just .... breaks some of my immersion, and now that you've pointed this out, I think this is part of why (along with the "overpowered for the themes of the books" aspect). ART and its humans get along unproblematically, so do ART and Murderbot, and Murderbot and ART's humans, and it's just kind of ... out of step with the rest of the series, considering how much of that involves the uneasy jockeying between humans, bots, and constructs (or humans and humans, for that matter!).
While I'm on that topic, another character I think I would like better with more conflictedness is Iris - admittedly I've more skimmed than read the Iris parts of the books, but she's basically raised as part of her parents' science experiment (including augmenting her at an age when she wouldn't have been able to say no to it) and so it's very convenient that she's completely fine with all of that, and all she wants out of life is what her parents and ART want for her! Can only contemplate ART's reaction if she decides that she wants to get married and settle on a planet, or move to a different polity, or go into an occupation that doesn't mesh well with traveling around on a starship.
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100% same! That would be very cool. And not just the humans, I'd also love to see the ComfortUnit from book 2 again!
and it's just kind of ... out of step with the rest of the series, considering how much of that involves the uneasy jockeying between humans, bots, and constructs (or humans and humans, for that matter!).
Yes, this! All of it is so fraught everywhere EXCEPT with ART, and the fraughtness is what makes it fun for me. *g*
That's a great point about Iris, too - I really like the concept of Iris and ART as siblings in theory, both in different ways their parents' science experiment, but in practice it just does nothing for me because where's the tension? The complicated relationships they might have with themselves, with each other, with their parents? There's so much potential for it, so much you could dig into that might resonate with the series's themes elsewhere, but the books just don't seem interested in that at all.
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re: Iris - yes, exactly! Actually, I was thinking about this some more, and I agree that, although I do like that ART and Iris are essentially siblings, that ought to make things MORE complicated, not less! (How many siblings IRL have completely uncomplicated relationships with each other and their parents?)
I was thinking that probably the closest IRL equivalent to Iris and ART is a special needs sibling/non-special-needs sibling pair, in which the non-special-need sibling has always had the expectation that their life would be wrapped around their sibling's needs, and a lot of their choices would be made from that perspective, even in Iris's case including her adult choices. (Of course you'll want to continue to be your sibling's caregiver in adulthood, and you'll choose a career consistent with that!) And you can have all the love for your sibling in the world, and you can even like and appreciate having that role in their lives, and still probably have a lot of understandably complicated emotions about it. Which, as you say, the series does not seem interested in exploring at all.
(And like. Valid. Not my decision! But also not really what I want to read about.)
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But also not really what I want to read about.
My thoughts exactly. Out of all the Murderbot books, Network Effect is easily my least favourite.
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Murderbot for me, is the one fandom, where I am notoriously and strictly gen. It's a bit of a relief, actually, to not have to wait for another fandom going down into all fluff and clichee sex fic. Avengers Tower 2012-fic pretty much nails it (with a bit of Avengers Tower post-2014-fic strewn in).
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And yeah, I'd say my reading interests are about 90% gen in this fandom - I tend to nope out hard on anything explicit, but I enjoy some of the more experimental things that people are doing within the ship space. That said, I absolutely love the wealth of gen fic that's available here! Friendship gen with h/c is my first and best fannish love, and it's been a long while since I was in a fandom with as high a proportion of gen - well-written, too! - as this one has. (I think the last time might have been Guardians of the Galaxy back in the late-middle-2010s.) So I am being well catered to.
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Oh, please do. I'd like to know where to start.
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And that's a good view of ART, I think!
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However, I think it's actually sort of - the opposite of that, maybe? I feel like a lot of people writing shippy fic in this fandom are writing something they've never written before and don't quite know how to tag. There's a lot of nonsexual kink, one-sided unrequited feelings, ships who never intend to have sex and cuddle a lot, or have a kind of virtual sex in which bodies aren't involved. I mean, there's definitely typical shipping/shipfic as well, but I get the feeling that for some people it's Baby's First Ship that isn't typically romantic/sexual.
However, what this means is that if I want gen (which is usually the main thing I want in this fandom) and I search on the gen tags, a bunch of what comes up is ship and has to be filtered out. In a fandom where shipping at all is already a touchy subject, I feel like they're really just making things harder for themselves!
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Phew, glad you were able to block!
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(And there's also the problem with some of the gen people hearing about any hint of shipping and losing their minds because People Are Making Murderbot Have Sex, when in fact at least some of them are writing about it, say, discovering that it finds it relaxing to be squished in the feed until it can't move and has no intention of trying to analyze that feeling any further.)
Luckily MOST of the fandom seems to be willing to just stay in their own corners and have fun, which is all I want to do! Sorry to hear meme has been an absolute shitshow about it.
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This didn't bother me that much in the books, perhaps because ART is still confronted with problems it can't solve on its own despite its power, or that I didn't get the impression that it wasn't supposed to be questioned and the series is still ongoing. I like it a lot less in a bunch of fic I've read and I'm surprised I haven't seen more fics confronting the issue (though to be fair I haven't read that much in the fandom.)
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I think I am still one book behind (I'd like to catch up in the fall, possibly after a full reread). And IIRC I only read one MB fic ever, on a whim. I do like that there's a lot of gen, but I go in not knowing what I'm looking for, so without specific recs, I'm unlikely to read fic.
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As for fic, I do plan on writing some recs soon!
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I feel like tv Gurathin is kind of a mix of book Gurathin and one of ART's humans, who comes from a Corporation Rim job and a shipload of regrets, and that combination works really well for me.
Most of all, though, I'm here for Murderbot! It keeps making friends even while it's still trying to figure out what a "friend" really is, and it's not sure how it keeps acquiring them.
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Tarik, right? (I sort of know of him, even if I haven't read much of the book(s) he's in.) I wonder if the show might be setting them up to be combined as characters, too, in the way it combined some of PresAux to keep from having an unmanageably huge cast. Though it's hard to say if they'll get enough seasons to get that far, or go a completely different way, who knows ...
It keeps making friends even while it's still trying to figure out what a "friend" really is, and it's not sure how it keeps acquiring them.
Yes! I think my very favorite thing about Murderbot's "wandering the galaxy" period is how it's incapable of interacting with anyone for more than 10 minutes without bonding with them, and it has no idea it's doing it. You can see other people reacting to this too - most people who interact with it find it intimidating at first and, the longer they're around it, the more attached they get. And it has NO IDEA this is happening. It can be a prickly, antisocial jerk but it's generally a really sweet person, and to know it is to love it, apparently.
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I think my very favorite thing about Murderbot's "wandering the galaxy" period is how it's incapable of interacting with anyone for more than 10 minutes without bonding with them, and it has no idea it's doing it. You can see other people reacting to this too - most people who interact with it find it intimidating at first and, the longer they're around it, the more attached they get.
Yes! It's surprised over and over when people care about it, and it tries to deny that it cares about them, and I find that very appealing and frankly adorable.
Related, I love how Gurathin is just that bit more in touch with his feelings than Murderbot: MB can insist it doesn't care about people, but Gurathin grudgingly realizes that he cares, even about MB. They're not foils but they are contrasts, with Gurathin a bit further along the axes of "connected with other people" and "connected with own feelings." The adapters have done a fantastic job with that relationship in particular.
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Yes!! I spent so much of the 2nd and 3rd books in particular just wanting to hug it (which of course it would have hated) because it has NO idea that it's either lovable or adorable but IT TOTALLY IS. (Also terrifying, but only if you get between it and the people it's trying to protect.) I love how often you see its empathy come out, empathy that it would deny unto its dying day that it feels at all, but it's clearly a very empathic and kind person underneath all the trauma and violent reactions to things. As much as it claims it doesn't care, other people being distressed is terribly distressing for it, even if it's something like ART being sad watching bad things happen to a ship's crew on a show!
Related, I love how Gurathin is just that bit more in touch with his feelings than Murderbot: MB can insist it doesn't care about people, but Gurathin grudgingly realizes that he cares, even about MB. They're not foils but they are contrasts, with Gurathin a bit further along the axes of "connected with other people" and "connected with own feelings." The adapters have done a fantastic job with that relationship in particular.
Oh yeah, those are good points too! They really are very similar people on different stages of the "learning to be loved" journey. And I also really enjoyed the show contrasting them so strongly as foils.