#in book 5 the kethel is there just being murderbot. and everyone around him is struggling to adjust to him | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

coquelicoq · 5 months ago

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you reread raksura after reading murderbot and you realize that the kethel in the last book is murderbot from an outside POV. like they don't have the same personality obviously, but if the murderbot books were told from the perspective of, say, eletra from the corporation rim, she'd be talking about secunits the way that all the protagonists of the raksura books talk about the fell. which i feel really conflicted about. you write a five-book series (plus two books of short stories) with a biologically evil race and in the later books start deconstructing it and being like "hey maybe our narrators aren't exactly reliable on this point" but by then it's kind of too late imo. idk. she's doing something interesting here but i don't know if it works.

#the first two books don't have as far as i can tell ANY hint that the raksuran beliefs about fell aren't supported by the narrative #that's too many books to spend doing that #in book three you meet some raksuran-fell crossbreeds but it's all still very conservative #the crossbreeds are okay because they're part raksura. <-doesn't actually make it better #book 4 we meet consolation but we don't really get much about her #in book 5 the kethel is there just being murderbot. and everyone around him is struggling to adjust to him #struggling to trust him even though he's helping them. being pretty clearly (to the audience) unfair and prejudiced towards him #moon keeps deliberately unpersoning him in a way that tells us that 1) he's doing it on purpose but 2) it's hard to do #because the kethel is a person and moon on some level knows that #idk because like. setting up the audience with biases about this fantasy world that they've picked up from the (unreliable) narrator(s)#that they're depending on to give them information about how the fantasy world works #and then disproving the biases is a really interesting thing for a story to do!#and to some extent i think you could say that is what she's trying to do here #but not really until book 5! that's four books' worth of the narrative basically supporting those biases #and even book 5 doesn't totally deconstruct them #books of the raksura #the murderbot diaries #unreliable narrators #storytelling #my posts

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