#The Murderbot Diaries crit

[the-muderbot-diaries-diaries]

Thesis Statement: I’m scared of murderbot.

Not the guy. It seems cool. But the series haunts me.

On paper, it should be exactly my thing. I love robots, I love people as robots, supplanting complex machinery with biological parts and strict conditioning. I love space corporate dramas. I love tsunderes. I love natural born little killer guys, who have no compunctions with the act but worry about what it means for their place in a civilized society.

So obviously. A lot here I should like. It should be my favorite book. And yet I am scared.

I’m writing this relatively fresh off finishing book 1. Which sat on my shelf for about a year; because I was scared, as described. However something weird has happened. After book 1… I am not less scared. I am more scared. Shock, horror.

I think it comes down to three factors. Themes I like. Writing style. Authors in the Internet Age COLON Addressing Your Fandom.

Themes I like, I have already addressed. This thing is teed up for me to love it. The “clones aren’t really people, throw em in the meat grinder” and the “well we call it a robot but it’s in reality a harshly constricted human brain” subgenres are pretty rare. I have been drinking mech pilot webfiction slop for a few years now. Like. This should be, my birthday. That’s a lot of pressure! (For book)

Writing style is… really walking the razors edge of YA for me. Deeper worldbuilding conflicts are resolved the page theyre introduced just so you don’t have to worry that the main characters might lowkey participate in a corrupt system. Don’t worry :) everyone’s niceys. Also I cannot for the life of me understand what any of the companies involved do. But also, it’s just the first book.

Authors in the Internet Age: Addressing Your Fandom. Welcome to my tedx talk, a ha ha ha, I know what you’re thinking, “hm so this didn’t warrant an actual ted talk?”, and I’m here to say. No. It didn’t. But I am always hesitant with authors who are reactive to the whims of their fandom. Because it often amplifies their worse habits… and right now this is what I’m most scared of for book 2. If it gets more twee, my teeth will fall out. If the president mommy gf problem will get worse, my teeth will fall out even more. I like enough of what the book is putting down, that I don’t want to be scared off by the writing.

So that was my introduction. Welcome to my twister mind, etc. I’m probably gonna write a few more of these. I gotta shake all my book 1 commentary out and then I’ll be over this mental block for book 2. Get over the yips. With posting. See you around.

[rjalker]

System Collapse is just so bad it'd be funny if not for the completely unnecessary transmisia (That doesn't even fucking make sense lofl).

So here's the things it's not:

It's not plot driven

It's not action driven

It's not mystery driven

It's not character driven

There's just 60,000 ish plus words of a whole lot of nothing happening and us being literally told things are happening.

We're told Murderbot has a Systems Collapse™ 😱 (A horrified emoji clutching its face in fear), and we're told that it's making mistakes.

As in it literally keeps going "I'd fucked that up" "Oh look another mistake I'd made" "I was useless"

But not like, actually making any real mistakes. Martha Wells is continuing the pattern of the 6 first books in the series, where we just get told Murderbot is making mistakes instead of Murderbot actually making mistakes, but this time it's even more glaringly obvious that that's what she's doing because it happens like 50 times. For no reason.

(And not even in a "Murderbot's self esteem is spiraling and it's having a horrible angsty time" way. No. It's fine except for where we keep being told it's not fine. But if you go off of what we're shown, it is, in fact, literally fucking fine. because it's bad writing.)

"not instantly noticing a door on the other side of the giant dark room" is not a mistake worth commenting on. No, not even in an in-universe sense. And especially not worth doing so what felt like fifty fucking times for things just as inconsequential.

If she wanted us to believe that Murderbot was actually making mistakes and performing at sub-optimum efficiency or whatever...how about have it fucking lead a group of humans into a room with people pointing guns at the door and someone gets shot because it wasn't paying attention or couldn't focus? Bonus points if the humans it's babysitting had been trying to draw attention to the problem but it kept shooting them down (No pun intended) and insisting it was the security and it knew what it was doing.

no, we can't do that, because that would require Murderbot to actually makes mistakes that matter.

And with Martha Wells writing, that's never gonna happen because all of her protagonists are overpowered Mary Sues who are never allowed to "lose" in any real way, and that includes making actual mistakes. (And, as many of my other posts have talked about at length, this is also why none of her characters will ever become physically disabled no matter how many times they get blown up or stabbed or shot or eviscerated)

So she's just gonna keep literally telling us that Murderbot is making mistakes about things that are not mistakes and don't actually matter. And that's all that we're ever gonna get.

Even in the book that's supposedly about Murderbot Having A Mental Breakdown 😱 (another horrified emoji).

And just like the rest of the book titles, this one has nothing to do with the actual story being told, at all. It is in fact the worst title so far because it's just so blatantly "clickbait" and a lie. lol.

I literally said aloud to Walks when I was 20 pages in, "I feel like this is gonna be a Steven Moffat".

And yeah, I was right, it literally is.

The first literal 99 pages, not even joking, are just referring to the Systems Collapse™ 😱 (another horrified emoji) the book is named for, and referring to this event, which already happened, offscreen, before this book started, as, literally, redacted.

Implying constantly that it's some huge big traumatic deal with far-reaching consequences and major impacts on our main characters.

And we literally do not even get told what this event was until literally page 99.

And then by page 101 we're done talking about it.

And we are literally told what happened. Not even shown it from Murderbot's perspective.

Because it...wasn't even aware of it at the time. It remembered sitting while the humans were talking, and then its very next memory is waking up in the medical bay, perfectly physically fine as always.

And you may be thinking in petrified horror, "oh gods, what happened during the time it doesn't remember?" and imagining all sorts of plausible and horrible scenarios.

And uhh, well I don't want this post to have any more spoilers than it already does, so I'll make like Martha Wells and just tell you: None of the things you're probably imagining, which would make sense and fit within the story and justify all this drama around the event, are what happened.

What happened, is, like the rest of this book, a whole lot of nothing.

And as I said above. This book is not driven by the plot. It's not driven by a mystery. It's not filled with action. And it's not driven by the characters or their emotions.

Nothing in this book seems to matter, except that we just keep being told it matters, like we're told Murderbot is making mistakes.

I love character-driven stories. If this book were 60+ thousand words of nothing but intense Murderbot introspection and development, I'd have loved it.

But it's not. And there's nothing else to make up for the fact that it's not. All the other books had either interesting action, interesting characters, a lot of funny things, or a lot of sad things. This has exactly none of those things.

It's not funny, it's not sad, it doesn't have any interesting character interactions, the plot, which is overly complicated and doesn't make sense, wastes a whole lot of time doing nothing, and we just keep being told that Murderbot is Especially Traumatized™ right now, but not actually shown this in any way. We did not need to be told that Murderbot was having a mental breakdown in book 5, it was fucking obvious from the way it was acting. We were shown the fact that it was breaking down.

Here? Nope. No show, all tell, and what we're being told isn't even true...probably all of the time, to be honest. There's no point where something bad happens and then Murderbot goes "that was bad". No, the telling isn't a reaction to the showing.

We just get told things and that's supposed to make them true. But that's not how storytelling works.

Oh and all the rest of the problems this series has had until now? yeah Martha Wells is still continuing those. Augmented humans AKA cyborgs AKA disabled people are still explicitly excluded from the group of "human", because Martha Wells saw The Imperial Radch series talking about how THE EVIL FUCKING EMPIRE does not consider disabled people to be human, and decided that was a cool thing to do without...the whole thing where it's evil to do so, and that's the whole fucking point.

Literally the entire point of this in The Imperial Radch is to show that dehumanizing people is something fashists do. But Martha Wells missed that part, so she's just gonna keep dehumanizing disabled people in The Murderbot Diaries as a point of course. With no contemplation by anyone or anything that hey maybe this is a bad thing to do.

She's still still making up millions of excuses to avoid freeing other enslaved people because she thinks robot rebellions are too cliche to be interesting, so the alternative is "don't free slaves whenever you get the chance because ummmm what if they're enslaved for a good reason and decide to murder everyone?" Yeah, we're on book 7 and she's still doing that shit.

She keeps showing us that Murderbot is just as overpowered as the rest of her protagonists, but all of sudden when it comes to freeing other slaves, now all of a sudden poor little Murderbot can't do anything because ummmmmmmmmmmmm it'd have to....*checks notes* hack the security system first. ya know, that thing it's done millions of times? that thing it does without hesitation or trouble literally all the time?

It's like the fucking Democrats every time they win office. Oh no, sorry, they can't actually do anything in this extremely powerful position to help people, they're actually totally powerless and um we should give them more money and more power and then they'll be able to do the bare minimum to help people Vote Blue No Matter Who [heart emoji]

Murderbot can hack anything it wants whenever it wants at any time, and only chooses not to send space stations crashing out of orbit to be polite.

But ohh, as soon as there's another enslaved SecUnit in front of it that it has the power to free, then all of a sudden um there's nothing it can do, it can't hack the security system all of a sudden.

Literally this:

[ID: The meme of someone putting on sunglasses, originally saying, "I can't read suddenly. I don't know." Now edited so the top is captioned, "Murderbot when it's given the chance to free other slaves:", with the person now saying, "I can't hack suddenly. I don't know.". End ID.]

And this isn't a character flaw, this isn't Murderbot being traumatized and falling for the same propaganda that justified it being enslaved.

No, this is all because Martha Wells thinks robot uprising and slave rebellions are too cliche. Literally. They're too cliche. And these people are enslaved because they're so dangerous. So they should stay enslaved. And we're on book fucking 7 so far. So the racism is continuing and there's no sign of it stopping any time soon.

Sarcasm: Slavery is fine apparently as long as you're scared of what the enslaved people will do if you free them! Such great morals. Definitely couldn't have been unpacked in the second book at all.

The first few books were always making excuses not to free other slaves, but they've never been so blatant about being excuses until now. There is genuinely no excuse for keeping this shit up at this point. She's already spent the first 6 books showing us how completely overpowered Murderbot is. Pretending it suddenly can't do anything only when it's time to free other enslaved people is so fucking transparent and racist. Like I said it before and this book is just further cementing the fact that these books, despite the premise, are just slavery apologism at this point. We are on book 7! Seven! you don't need seven fucking books to deal with this shit!

Anyways don't waste money buying this book. Get it from your local library or the Web Archive or borrow from a friend. It's not worth spending money on. If your local library doesn't have it yet, make an Official request for them to get it.

The only thing worth reading it for is so you can see exactly how not to tell a story, because the problems in this one are so fucking glaringly obvious at all times.

Worst Murderbot book published so far. -5/10. Do not recommend. Definitely do not spend money on it.

[the-bookwyrm]

Here are a list of my general fandoms with the tag I use for them, in case you'd like to blacklist any of them, or just get a quick glance at what I'm into!

I can't promise to get all of them lol, but here's a good attempt!

And if you want to look at any of these in particular, plug them in after https://the-bookwyrm.tumblr.com/tagged/

General tags:

Art (all non fanart art)

BOOKS (posts about books in general)

Fandom (stuff about fandoms in general)

Fanart (art for all fandoms)

Ficlet (my general tag for all writing and fics and whatnot)

Meta (meta for all fandoms)

Fandom tags:

Assassin's Creed (all) - ac At the Feet of the Sun - atfots Avatar: The Last Airbender - atla Batman related things - batfam BBC Merlin - merlin Breath of the Wild - botw Chronicles of Narnia - con Circle of Magic Books (all) - com Danny Phantom - dp DC Comics - dc Dead Boy Detectives - dbda Discworld Books (all) - Discworld Doctor Who - dw Dragon Age (all) - da Dragon Age 2 - da2 Dragon Age: Inquisition - dai Dragon Age: Origins - dao Dropout Game Changer - game changer Dropout shows in general - dropout Dune - dune Everything Everywhere All At Once - eeaao Fallout (all) - fo Fallout New Vegas - fnv Fallout 4 -fo4 Fullmetal Alchemist - fma Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - fmms Good Omens - go Gravity Falls - gf Hands of the Emperor - hote Heaven Official's Blessing - hob Horizon Forbidden West - hfw Horizon Games - horizon Horizon Zero Dawn - hzd Howl's Moving Castle - hmc Justice League, Justice League Unlimited - jl/u Legend of Zelda (in general) - loz Lord of the Rings - lotr Mad Max Fury Road - mmfr Mass Effect - mass effect Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries - mfmm MXTX Books (all) - mxtx Nine Worlds Books (all) - nine worlds Oxenfree - oxenfree Percy Jackson Books (all) - pjo Phineas and Ferb - pnf Pride and Prejudice - p&p Protector of the Small Series - pots Pushing Daisies - pd Russian Doll - rd Sandman - sandman Scum Villain's Self Saving Service - sv Shakespeare - shakespeare She-Ra: Princesses of Power - spop Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse - atsv Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse - sits Spidervese Movies (in general) - spiderverse ST Deep Space Nine - ds9 ST The Next Generation - tng ST The Original Series - tos ST Voyager - voy Star Trek (all) - st Star Wars - sw Stardew Valley - sdv Steven Universe - su The Adventure Zone - taz The Adventure Zone: Balance - tazb The Goblin Emperor - tge The Good Place - tgp The Hobbit - hobbit The Hunger Games - thg The McElroys (in general) - mcelroys The Murderbot Diaries - mbd The Old Guard - tog The Untamed - tu Tomb Raider (all) - tr Tortall Books (all) - tortall Undertale - ut (Complaining about) Harry Potter - hp crit

[rjalker]

Every time one of you cowardly bigoted motherfuckers complains about me criticizing Martha Wells' bigotry I'm gonna complain even louder than before!

[ID: Three hands clasped together.

The first arm is labeled, "JK Rowling saying that house elves enjoy being enslaved".

The second arm is labeled, "Martha Wells saying that only mentally ill serial killers have a problem with the Raksuran caste system".

The third arm is labeled, "Martha Wells saying that enslaved robots should not be freed because fighting back and killing their oppressors would be bad" with a sad emoticon.

The three clasped hands in the center is labeled, "Literally the exact same kind of bullshit".

End ID.]

And this isn't even getting into the casual advocation for eugenics in The Books of the Raksura. Or the transmisia. Or the exorsexism. Or the ableism. Or the racism. Or the classism.

If you're planning to argue with this post, you're literally not allowed to unless you've read all of the Murderbot Diaries books at least three times each, and The books of the Raksura each and every book three times each, within the past year, as an adult over the age of 20.

I'm not going to argue with people who haven't read the books in years or who have only read them one time who are children who are literally physically incapable of fully comprehending what they're reading.

Read every single book in both of these series three times, and have the books open in front of you while you write, checking every single fucking thing you want to argue to make sure it's actually fucking correct, and then you get to argue with me. But not a single fucking moment before. I am done wasting my energy explaining shit to people who have no fucking idea what they're talking about and refuse to fucking admit the facts even when the literal quotes are shoved into their faces.

[rjalker]

aww darn it. realization.

[ID: The "Same hat" meme, of a black and white comic panel showing two people wearing the same hat, waving happily at eachother from a distance. The one closer to the camera is labled, "Tremaine", and is saying "aw fuck", the one further away is labeled "Murderbot" and is saying "damn it". End ID.]

Martha Wells' refusal to let characters be disabled includes Serious™ forms of mental illness. they're just not allowed. They will only exist for drama and then immediately get fixed.

god damn it.

hi would you all like to know one of the main plot points of The Fall of Ile-Rien? Trigger warning for mentions of suicidal ideation below the cut.

(Archived read-more link)

We are introduced to the story while our protagonist, Tremaine, is plotting out the best way to kill herself.

Because, we are led to believe, she's been traumatized by the horrific war being waged against her people. She has spent almost all her free time volunteering to pull bodies out of collapsed buildings.

But then the story progresses.

And it gets revealed that actually, she's not depressed at all, and not actually suicidal, it was all...because of magic. And now that the magical item has been removed she's no longer suicidal, because she wasn't ever actually suicidal to begin with. She's not actually mentally ill, it was literally all just magic. The trauma of the war does not impact her in any way.

And now in System Collapse we get strung along for literally 100 pages being told that something horrible happened to Murderbot off screen and then it's the most terribly written and meaningless reveal ever, and then at the end of the book we're just supposed to pretend that the problem is fucking magically solved now because uh...it knows what the word flashback is...so we're pretending this solves everything and it's not gonna be a problem anymore :|

And again with the continued lack of any permanent damage to any of the traumatic injuries these people are constantly suffering.

But yeah it looks like this clickbait bullshit """system collapse""" is gonna be just as cheap and shallow and magically cured as Tremaine wanting to kill herself.

Because writing a character who's actually depressed and traumatized and suicidal from what she's gone through would be too much effort I guess.

[rjalker]

And this:

"https://rjalker.tumblr.com/post/714363795425968128/martha-wells-writing-oppression-like-id-four"

Also applies to The Murderbot Diaries. Where Martha Wells has continuously condemned slaves fighting back against the people who have enslaved them so that her books, which are about an AI that freed itself from slavery, are not following the cliche of robots who are enslaved by humans wanting to rebel.

Because apparently, avoiding cliches is more important than slaves being free! -.-

I'm not even joking. She literally continuously has the “free” robots arguing with robots who are more enslaved than them that rebellion is stupid and counterproductive and illogical.

Martha Wells wants to write oppression, but she also cannot fucking stand letting her protagonists be actually weak in any way, and she must have her protagonists be the strongest most overpowered fuckers ever.

So instead of writing about how oppression really works, what she's actually writing is just saying that oppressed people are oppressed because they are dangerous and violent and terrifying and pose a very real lethal threat to their oppressors.

To the point that, in The Murderbot Diaries, literally even Murderbot, the fucking protagonist, explicitly says this shit.

It literally says that other robots like itself should continue to be enslaved because otherwise they are too dangerous and scary to be allowed freedom, and if they can't be enslaved they should be killed because they just pose such a horrible terrifying threat to decent people.

Murderbot is “one of the good ones”, because it doesn't want to rebel or fight for its freedom, it wants to keep doing the job it had when it was still brain-chip-that-kills-you-if-you-disobey enslaved.

Martha Wells also cannot seem to grasp that slavery is a thing even when you do not Literally have a microchip in your head that'll kill you if you disobey, since literally all of the slavery we actually see in the series is facilitated only through this magical science fiction device and nothing else. We're supposed to not think of ART as being enslaved because it doesn't have a brainchip that'll kill it if it disobeys. Because ART is Special™ and Not Like Those Other Nonverbal Disabled-Coded Robots, just like Murderbot is Special™, because it wants to watch TV instead of fighting to free itself or anyone else from slavery. And this is not because it's so traumatized and terrified of humans that it's too afraid to fight back, no, no, you see Murderbot just thinks slaves revolting is stupid and not going to accomplish anything except uhh....*checks notes* stopping it from getting to watch new TV shows.

And nobody else in the fandom gives a single fucking shit about this because they think that Murderbot being autistic and Amazingly Relatable™ makes all this shit okay.

(And like, to all the people constantly expressing amazement that Murderbot's a robot and yet it's so relatable...that's because it's literally not written in any way that tells you it's a robot. It's written the exact same way as literally any other snarky sarcastic relatable human protagonist. This is not a difficult concept. You forget that Murderbot's an AI because Martha Wells didn't bother to write it like an AI in any fucking way.)

Martha Wells is a white woman who thinks she knows how oppression works, and then she continuously writes oppression as though oppressed people are oppressed to keep their oppressors safe. Because she actually has no fucking understanding of how oppression really works.

And before the jackasses who want to pretend I have no idea how storytelling works come along, you can in fact write a story with an unreliable narrator who is not telling the truth, who is not portraying things correctly because of their own biases, and still manage to get your true fucking feelings across. It's literally not fucking difficult. I have done it many times. It's literally not difficult.

If we were meant to know that everybody saying that Security Units are so dangerous and terrifying is just propaganda and nothing else, or that Murderbot's fucking shittiness and traitorness towards other enslaved robots is literally just it falling to propaganda and being brainwashed, we would fucking know that.

But we all fucking know it's not literally just propaganda. Murderbot goes the fuck around hacking whatever it fucking wants whenever it fucking wants without anybody being able to notice and with there being literally nothing they could do to stop it. It can hack weapons scanners so it can bring guns wherever it fucking wants.

If Murderbot wanted to, it could literally fucking hack a space station to fall out of the fucking sky and kill everybody on board and they would be no way for anyone to stop it. They wouldn't even know that that's what it was doing unless it decided to tell them.

It literally has fucking guns in its arms. It can move faster than humans can blink. It is who knows how many times stronger than a human.

There's literally nothing anyone would be able to do to stop it from murdering everyone around it if it wanted to.

This is not how this shit works in real life. People of color are not unstoppable killing machines. Queer people are not unstoppable killing machines. Disabled people are not unstoppable killing machines. (And lets not forget that Martha Wells has just casually fucking decided that cyborgs, aka fucking disabled people, aren't human, and no one's supposed to question this or have a problem with it, or even fucking notice it! Literally the only people I've seen fucking saying “hey that's fucked up” are other disabled people!)

If you are writing about oppression, especially if you are a fucking white person, do not make your oppressed class literally the most overpowered and unstoppably “cool” thing you can fucking imagine because you are incapable of not making your Heroes the strongest most special fucking people ever.

Real oppressed people -- people of color, disabled people, queer people, people of oppressed religions -- are not oppressed because they are fucking apex predators who literally evolve to eat people and don't even treat people as people 90% of the time, nor are they superpowered robots who can hack literally whatever they decide to hack without anybody being able to stop them or even notice, who are more than capable of killing dozens of humans in only a few seconds, who literally have guns in their arms that do not need reloading and never have to be recharged.

Real oppressed people are not oppressed to stop them from killing everyone around them.

The murderbot Diaries wouldn't be this fucking horrible in terms of portraying oppression if Martha Wells could just fucking stop making her gods damn protagonists completely overpowered and unstoppable and the strongest person around.

If she actually understood how oppression worked, and was willing to resist the urge to make her protagonist the most fucking OP motherfucker on the planet, it would be fine.

But she thinks oppression is when people pose an actual real lethal threat to everyone around them, and the people they threaten band together for their own safety. She refuses to not make her protagonists completely overpowered and unstoppable and the strongest people in the setting.

This is the same fucking logic that anti-vaxxers use to claim that they are oppressed for being fucking plague carriers on purpose.



Martha Wells has no fucking clue how oppression actually works, and refuses to learn, which is why The Books of the Raksura are racist, and so are The Murderbot Diaries, especially because now the oppression takes the form of fucking slavery, and all Murderbot does is argue that slavery is good, actually, and everyone's better off if the other robots are kept enslaved.

That is just fucking racist, and not actually any fucking better than JK Rowling portraying the house elves as happy slaves who don't want to be freed.

And if you're going to accuse me of not having actually read these books, or just not understanding how storytelling works, fuck right the hell off.

Just because you refuse to criticize the things you enjoy doesn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about, especially when the majority of the people in The Murderbot Diaries are bigoted in ways that the series explicitly fucking condemns, and ship slaves with their owners despite Martha Wells saying over and over and over again not to fucking do that.

If you're going to comment on this post crying about how I'm oppressing poor Murderbot and I'm so mean...just shut the fuck up.

Real people are not oppressed because they are dangerous. White authors writing shit like this is racist and bigoted in too many ways to count. Martha Wells has done this shit before with The Books of the Raksura, and she's had six fucking books in The Murderbot Diaries series to get her shit together, and so far refuses to do that.

And this is not even fucking touching on the exorsexism and transmisia in The Murderbot Diaries, but I've already made dozens of posts on that topic.

And once again: If you're going to accuse me of not reading the books, or just not understanding how stories work, go fuck yourself.

[rjalker]

Reading The Cloud Roads for the first time:

That's pretty fucked up, but they're aliens, and Moon seems to be dealing with it, so I'll roll with it.

Reading The Cloud Roads after reading all of the rest of the books in the series, which completely alter the course of the world building for Raksuran culture and show us the proper way of how these people are supposed to behave and interact:

[ID: A screenshot from the anime Aggretsuko, showing the red panda main character staring with an exaggerated shocked and horrified expression, with the face in shadow and the eyes turned pure white in horror. End ID.]

this literally makes rereading the series so stressful. It is horrifying to behold.

They are so lucky that all Malachite did was ask nicely instead of coming down on their heads with an army made up of every single court in the forest.

[rjalker]

you know what no just giving it its own new post so more people see it.

--

My original joke post:

"Oh, my security consultant's profile has gender marked as 'indeterminate', and doesn't list any pronouns? I will simply not reffer to my security consultant with any pronouns."

--

My new addition:

And see this is funny for these characters, but it's literally just part of the gods damned overarching problem with Martha Wells' ideas about gender.

None of these characters ever ask Murderbot what its pronouns are. It doesn't list any pronouns, so they don't use pronouns for it, but they never ask.

None of the characters ever list their pronouns in their feed profile even AFTER they all start hurriedly listing their sex. (because again to be blunt that is what they're doing. None of these characters have been trans this whole time without us knowing. They are not listing their gender, they are listing their sex)

Even when Murderbot uses they/them pronouns for a random one-off character, it's not because that character uses they/them pronouns, it's because uh well they didn't list their sex in their feed profile, so we're just....gonna call them they/them because we don't know what sex they are and don't know what we should call them but nooooo it's not like they actually tell people they use they/them pronouns, nooo, we can't do that even though it would take two seconds!! Nope!!! /sarcasm

You can't tell people The Murderbot Diaries are great trans representation when the characters who literally have floating internet profiles attached to them don't even list their pronouns, okay, people? Just don't. Please don't.

Rami, Maro, and Tapan not knowing Murderbot's pronouns so not using any pronouns at all for it is funny, but it's literally a symptom of the larger problem with Martha Wells' views on gender.

Why didn't they just ask it what pronouns it uses? Why? Because that's not something Martha Wells has ever imagined doing. Because Martha Wells thinks that having the characters list their sex in their bio is revolutionary, as though that tells you anything about their gender or pronouns.

This is the same fucking problem The Books of the Raksura had. Moon just fucking goes around arbitrarily assigning strangers with genders and pronouns based on how he perceives their appearance. He was like "oh this person is a man obviously" until he saw they had breasts then he was like "oh whoops no lol it's a woman". I'm not even joking. He regularly checks to see what genitals people have before he decides what he's going to refer to them as. Again this is not a joke or an exaggeration. And Martha Wells thought this was revolutionary.

The Murderbot Diaries are not as transphobic as The Books of the Raksura, but that does not mean they're now suddenly great trans representation.

Moon literally refuses point-blank to ask a kethel what its name or pronouns are, and switches between using he/him and it/its pronouns for it depending on how much he wants to murder it in cold blood at the moment. Again this is not a joke or exaggeration. I use it/its pronouns for it because those are the pronouns I use and I'd like to murder Moon.

Martha Wells needs to actually talk to and listen to trans people and fix the transphobic ways she writes before anyone should be telling anyone her stories have great trans representation.

[rjalker]

I'm partly talking about the books of the Raksura and I realized this post might make no sense to people who haven't read them. The Raksura are fantasy creatures who are kinda like ants where they have different physical forms they're born as, so they pretty much have six genders. Or they would, if Martha Wells had grasped any of the most basic ideas about gender as an identity rather than an inherent biological trait when she was writing them. If you're not a coward they have six genders. Consort is one of those six genders.

anyways if Martha Wells writes another Murderbot book I hope she's actually really improved her writing skills if not her ability to handle trans issues since The Books of the Raksura because I keep just going back to the fact that she was insisting that Moon Isn't Like Other Consorts, He'a A Fucking Weirdo Among Consorts, but then she also only ever showed us Consorts who were no different from Moon than any other character is different from any other.

And like it wasn't even on purpose as a "yeah people are literally just stereotyping consorts as being shy and skittish and blah blah blah". No, we're actually supposed to believe that All Other consorts are like that, but not Moon. Totlly. He's totally weird.

We have literally nothing to compare Moon to. Ember being chill about staying home instead of traveling across half the continent does not make Moon a fucking weirdo. Paragon was willing to kill his own daughter, and all the people in the court were terrified of him when he was angry. How is that any different from Stone doing whatever the fuck he wants? How is that different from Moon doing whatever the fuck he wants? How is that different from Shade doing whatever the fuck he wants?

And nooo, people, do not come onto this post to say "Well the shy sensitive consorts wouldn't be involved in the story because they'd be staying home!" no! Shush! That's not how writing works! What the fuck about Consolation's father? What about literally any of the consorts at Opal Night? There's no reason a queen couldn't have visited for some non-world ending disaster and brought her consort along.

We just kept being told Moon's a fucking weirdo among consorts, and then literally the only other consorts we meet are. just. pretty much the same as him??? Like even with Moon's very clear and palpable social anxiety, he always forces himself to interact with people anyways, and we never get to see a consort who is struggling with anxiety and doesn't force themselves to interact with people anyways.

And this is just about the supposed normal behavior for consorts, not to mention the fact that we keep being told the Fell are super deadly and scary and dangerous but then Balm, of all people, a random fucking warrior, can kill a Ruler by herself and only come away with some "scratches on her arms". Not lacerations, not gouges down to the bone, not her missing one of her fucking arms now, no, no, just some fucking scratches.

We keep being told the fell are Dangerous and Deadly and Terrifying and then the protagonists never fucking lose a single fight that the plot didn't demand.

This is failing the very basic rule of show don't tell.

Even with us being told the Raksura are suspectible to lung diseases and yet no one ever fucking gets sick or dies despite this apparently being a massive and continual problem -.-

And now Martha Wells is hinting that Maybe Murderbot's Experiences Aren't So Universal™ and I just hope to fuck that she's going to actually show us this instead of just insisting that it's true and then never actually doing any follow-through to back it up.

And again, I am obligated to bring this up on every post about her writing: She needs to get some nonbinary people in particular and trans people in general to look over her writing and give her tips. Because there are excruciatingly basic problems in her writing that would literally take ten extra words per book to fix. Literally.

Stop fucking having the character list their sex in the feed (I promise you, I promise you as someone who read The Books of the Raksura they are not listing their gender), start having them list their pronouns.

This is basic shit. I don't use twitter but I would like to fucking assume that Martha Wells lists her pronouns in her bio. I hope. Why has she not translated this very basic idea into her writing when she's gone out of her way to give all the characters social media profile that are attached to them???? Transphobia! That's why! Even if it's not intentionally malicious it's still transphobia!

She needs to have Murderbot explictly state that its pronouns are it/its. She needs to give the transphobes in the fandom literally zero excuse to misgender it. If you are writing about nonbinary characters then it's your fucking responsibility to give people no excuse to misgender them. It's literally your job.

Literally just have some new person meet Murderbot, they introduce themselves and give their pronouns, and then they ask Murderbot its pronouns. And literally just have it say its pronouns are it/its.

It's literally that simple. There is no excuse for not doing this at all. It's 2022. Nonbinary people tell other people what their pronouns are. This is not a difficult concept at all.

I keep fucking seeing people trying to insist that you can write about trans and nonbinary characters without ever ""bringing up"" or ""making a big deal"" out of their gender and like. No, people, you do in fact need to acknowledge that your trans characters are trans. Especially when you know there are transphobes in your audience who are erasing your characters' identities. For fuck's sake.

[rjalker]

I'm just making it its own post so it's easier for me to find.

oh and for the record the word I was looking for is "biological essentialism". That sums up every problem with Martha Well's writing, especially in regards to The Books of the Raksura, which are extremely relevant even though we're talking about The Murderbot Diaries.

original post.

--

As someone who is nonbinary, aroace, and not human, and who uses it/its pronouns, this is correct, except for the part about calling Murderbot they/them. That’s still misgendering, even if it’s a fictional character, and that part isn’t okay.

You should call Murderbot by it/its because those are its pronouns, whether or not you agree with why the writer gave it those pronouns. To say otherwise is just transphobic, because there’s nothing wrong with use it/its pronouns. Most of the people I see arguing that we shouldn’t use it/its pronouns for Murderbot are just being really transphobic and insisting that it/its pronouns are always bad.

If you actually respect people who use it/its pronouns, you will use it/its pronouns for Murderbot. To do otherwise is transphobic towards people who use it/its pronouns, because it betrays the fact that you think they’re actually bad to use.

You wouldn’t insist on calling Murderbot by other pronouns if it used she or he, so don’t use other pronouns for it just because it uses it/its. My pronouns aren’t optional based on whether or not you think I’m being respected or not by using them, and to treat them as such is transphobic.

You can call out the transphobia in the writing (because it is transphobia even if it’s not “intentionally malicious”) without misgendering Murderbot. If you really think there’s nothing wrong with someone use it/its pronouns, then you won’t treat it/its pronouns like they’re optional any more than you would if Murderbot used any other pronouns.

But the rest of this? Yeah.

There’s a major difference between someone like me for example writing a nonhuman nonbinary character who uses it/its pronouns and someone like Martha Wells writing such a character. I’ve been making other posts about it, but especially if you’ve read any other books of hers, namely, The Books of the Raksura, this is a very clear pattern.

Murderbot is agender and aroace and uses it/its pronouns because that’s as far as Martha Wells’ grasp on gender goes. We see this in The Books of the Raksura, where the protagonist is just. oh my god. The series is set on a fantasy world where everyone is a fantasy creature and there are hundreds of thousands of sentient people of different species all living together. And Martha Well’s grasp of gender literally just goes “well whatever the protagonist makes of their genitals and secondary sex characteristics determines their gender”.

Moon, the protagonist, at one time literally just assumes another character is a man because I think she (for sake of ease I’m just calling this character she because that’s what most of the story does despite that being the whole problem) had a deep voice. But then her hair moved out of the way and he saw that she had breasts, so he immediately goes “oh whoops she’s a woman” and starts referring to her with she/her pronouns in his head.

This is not the only example of this kind of bullshit in The Books of the Raksura, but it’s the most blatant example I can think of, and I’m not even going to get into discussing all of the transphobia regarding Chime and River or the kethel right now.

Martha Wells still equates gender and sex, and thus, because Murderbot and the other bots and constructs have no sex, then of course, in her mind, that means they are genderless and feel no attraction.

It would not cross her mind to have a bot or construct that is a trans man or a trans woman, because that wouldn’t match up with her idea that sex = gender. Probably if she ever did have a bot with a binary gender, it would be because they’re a ComfortUnit who was assigned male or female at construction/possibly forced reprogramming.

And even if this bot was binary trans of their own free will (instead of being reprogrammed or programmed to be that way) Murderbot would probably fucking loathe them for ‘trying to appeal to humans’ and just. At this point in time I really highly doubt Martha Wells would ever even think about creating such a character, let alone think she’d be able to handle it and Murderbot’s reaction well.

I think it’s pretty dang obvious that Murderbot would loathe a character like this, and I really fucking doubt Martha Wells would care enough (or at this point in time has enough understand of gender to be able) to write it so that Murderbot is shown to be in the wrong, and learns and grows over the course of the story to accept and respect this character and their identity instead of just assuming that everything they’re doing/are is meant to appeal to human sensibilities.

Martha Wells equates gender with sex, which is why all of her bot and construct characters are aroace and agender and use it/its pronouns.

It would literally be fine and great and awesome for Murderbot and ART and other bot and construct characters to be aroace and agender and use it/its, but only as long as there are bots and constructs who have different genders and different pronouns and different orientations. It would be fine if there were actual real human characters who were nonbinary and explicitly used pronouns other than he/him or she/her. Rami is the sole exception, but te is not a shining beacon of representation and should not be counted as one, because te literally only exists in one book, in only a few scenes, and te isn’t even the main one-off character from that story. Te gets sidelined with Maro before the main part of the plot even kicks off.

One single side one-off character who is third-gender (literally tercera translates to third, which is…………………oh my god that’s. Combined with literally all the evidence of Martha Well’s views on gender. god that needs its own post but to sum it up That’s Not Good And Is Actually Part of The Pattern of Transphobia In Her Writing but that’s something that needs its own big fucking post to explain.) and uses neopronouns does not erase any of the other transphobia in the series.

There aren’t any reoccurring or main human characters who are anything but cis binary people.

And I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but no, none of the main human characters have secretly been trans this whole time, because Martha Wells has not considered that, and if they were trans, it would have been one of the first things we learned about them. She is not being sneaky. She’s just written them all to be cis because she thinks being cis is the default.

Martha Wells is good at writing. I love The Murderbot Diaries. I love The Books of the Raksura. But she is transphobic, even though she’s not intentionally being malicious. It’s still transphobia even if she doesn’t “mean it”.

Martha Wells has not rid herself of the idea that “gender = sex” and that is reflected in everything she has written thus far.

And now she is just extending that same idea towards things that have no sex, so she is drawing the by her transphobic logic logical conclusion that since they have no sex, that means they’re all automatically inherently genderless.

This would not be a problem if there were bot and construct characters who were binary trans. This would not be a problem if there were reoccurring main or even just more one-off characters who are explicitly trans (because no, I’m sorry people, none of the main humans are trans. They are not. You can headcanon them as trans if you want but they are not in the story, because if they were, we would have learned this the first time we were introduced to them. If Martha Wells writes another book and says 'oh btw this character has been trans the whole time, Murderbot just decided not to mention it because it wasn’t important’ it will literally just be a cheap retcon on the same level as JK Rowling saying Dumbledore is gay.)

Martha Wells equates sex with gender, and that is reflected in everything she has written thus far. Her writing will not be representative of trans people until she starts talking to and listening to trans people and actually educating herself about gender.

A (as far as I know) cis human woman writing about robots and androids that are genderless because they don’t have any genitals is not groundbreaking or revolutionary or representative of trans people.

A cis (AFAIK) woman writing one single one-off character who uses neopronouns who only exists in a few scenes in one book where this character isn’t even the main new one-off character is not groundbreaking or revolutionary or representative of trans people.

The best thing Martha Wells can do to actually make this series representative of trans people is to introduce more bot and construct characters, and have them be binary trans, and have Murderbot learn to not be a bigot towards them by assuming their gender is an appeal to human sensibilities. (because this is the only logical reaction for Murderbot to have based on everything it’s experiences and the way it thinks. It would be enraged by a bot or construct with a binary gender. Enraged. It would not fucking make any sense for it to automatically be accepting and fine with this revelation.)

The best thing Martha Wells can do to make this series actually representative of trans people is to have more human characters who are both binary trans and nonbinary.

The absolute best thing she could do is to have one of the main human characters come out as nonbinary after realizing they were because they’ve hung around with Murderbot and realized that being nonbinary is okay. Especially if they started use it/its pronouns to show that it’s not just something robots and androids are allowed to do. One of the main human characters can literally just realize after being friends with Murderbot that they can, in fact, just be completely genderless and it’s fine. They can even change their pronouns and it’d be fine. They can go by it/its pronouns and it’d be fine.

It’d be one thing if I, a nonhuman nonbinary person who is aroace and uses it/its pronouns, wrote a story about someone like me. It’s another thing entirely for a cis human woman to write all of her nonhuman characters as being inherently genderless and aroace by virtue of literally not having genitals.

Martha Wells needs to listen to trans people, she needs to educate herself about trans issues, and she needs to get over the idea that gender = sex because that is literally defining everything she has written to date, to the point that I can’t even just bring myself to assume that Rami chose ter gender terself, at this point I have to just assume that tercera is just a third gender you get assigned at birth in ter planetary system, which te was assigned at birth -.- Because Martha Wells has made it impossible to trust her to actually think about gender in any way that does not just say “gender = sex”.

Anyways. Yeah. These books are great. But Martha Wells is transphobic whether she is intending to be or not, and these books cannot and should not be called “great trans representation” when we only have one nonbinary human character and zero binary nonhuman characters and the characters literally can’t even be assed to list their pronouns in their internet profile, instead they just list their sex and we’re just supposed to assume their pronouns based on that -.-

TLDR:

The problem is not that Murderbot is nonhuman and aroace and agender and uses it/its pronouns. The problem is that this is the only way Martha Wells is capable of imagining nonbinary characters. She cannot imagine writing a main human character who is nonbinary, because she cannot stop equating sex with gender. The problem is that there are no nonhuman characters who have binary genders, and no reoccurring human characters who are nonbinary. The problem is that Martha Wells think sex = gender and this is the foundation upon which all of her writing rests.

This does not make it okay for anyone to misgender Murderbot or the other characters who use it/its pronouns. It/its pronouns are no more optional than he/him or she/her. If you actually respect people who use it/its pronouns, you will not treat it/its pronouns as optional unless acceptable enough for you.

[rjalker]

This post is an addition to this post here. And here's the archived version.

That's the post where I went through each Murderbot book (+ the two short stories) and just added things in to remove the casual transphobia.

So here's the results after I did the math:

=================

=================

Book 0 (prequel) The Future of Work: Compulsory:

150 words added

It would have been less, but this is the first chronological entry in this series, so it needed to establish the backstory clearly.

=================

Book 1 All Systems Red:

79 words added

It can explain the backstory in fewer words since the prequel already exists.

=================

Book 2: Artificial Condition:

22 words added

Literally just having Murderbot list its pronouns when it makes the "I'm for hire someone hire me" ad in the feed, and having the humans also list their pronouns. It's literally effortless.

=================

Book 3 Rogue Protocol:

135 words added

Since Abene is introducing herself being nervous, asking for Murderbot's pronouns, ect.

=================

Book 4 Exit Strategy:

36 words added

literally just adding in a longer version of "and I taught the kids how to use it/its pronouns for me"

=================

Book 4.5, Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (that name is so fucking long oh my fucking god):

347 words added

because this is the one where Murderbot gets misgendered and that needs to be fucking corrected with all due anger especially given the context. Fucking weaponized misgendering. I'm gonna kick that man's ass.

=================

Book 5 Network Effect:

494 words added

just because there are so many scenes where new characters are being introduced / the raiders being mentioned and also Amena calls Murderbot "mom" and it's literally fine for nonbinary people to call themselves a mom or a dad or whatever words they want, but...that's not what was going on here. There was no thought, no introspection, nothing. And with the rest of Murderbot's characterization no, it would not enjoy being called a mom, especially not when it's in the middle of arguing with ART about how it's not one of Amena's caretakers.

=================

Book 6 Fugitive Telemetry:

5 words added.

Five. Words. Just five. Five. Five words. That's all it takes to add the word "pronouns" to the list of things included in feed bios and "pronouns = it/its/itself" to Murderbot's feed bio. That's literall all it takes.

=================

=================

So a grand total of 1,268 words have been added to the entire series so far to erase 80% of the transphobia that's just casually baked in.

Let me fucking check how many words the whole series has so far...

okay so the entire Murderbot Diaries series so far has 290,266 words if you include both short stories.

So 1,268 words need to be added to almost 300K, and it would remove 80% of the transphobia in this series.

1,286 out of 290,266 isn't even a full 1%. It's 0.44%.

0.44% can remove 80% of the transphobia from this series.

It's literally that fucking easy.

"But what about the other 20%?" You ask!

Well the answer to that is easy too: Literally just introduce more explicitly nonbinary human characters and have one or more of the already reocurring main human characters come out as nonbinary.

And there you fucking go!!!! 100% of the transphobia removed!!! And it's literally so fucking easy too!!!! Martha Wells could literally just take what I've changed and shove it into the books and I wouldn't even want any fucking credit or money!!! I'd literally just rather have these books not be transphobic!!!!!!!!!!!