#making friends is hard also. in general

[samaspic31]

My irl social circle became so so trans dominated while dropping out i had forgor how bad it feels being in cis dominated institutions

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[scintillyyy]

hm. tbh i do think that one of current bernard's "problems" as a character isn't the oft claimed he's just boring & there's nothing you can do with him (like, actually, on a purely hypothetical level, i do think that he has the potential for some pretty interesting conflict hooks with tim, or as much as tim's other friends that could have been brought back), it's that he's actually a surprisingly tricky character canon logisticswise to bring back & i don't think fitzmartin necessarily cared about canon logistics so much as she cared more about the emotional parallels she wanted tim to have with the era bernard was created in. and, like, the emotional connection is a good hook for the coming out story, but for bernard to be a long term love interest that people get invested in (especially as a character who was *brought back to be a love interest* versus just creating an OC), you need to be able to hook him into his past canon and explore and expound upon the past canon connection. and bernard is actually a pretty hard character to do that with.

bc the unfortunate reality is that he's intrinsically entirely tied to war drums/war games by virtue of his origin and to be able to bring him back & explore his & tim's shared past you have to....dig into war games. which no one is ever going to want to do. sp you have fitzmartin, who brings him back based on the emotional connection of the uncertainty of identity war games era tim with the feelings of uncertainty of his sexuality & it's not a bad choice give the parallels, it's just very fanficcy by nature. and fitzmartin, who has bridged the gap of original bernard & her current bernard in her head for probably a long time and wants to focus on the coming out vs how we even met bernard to begin with, brushes past the canon logistics of bringing him back. bringing him back explicitly re-canonizes war games, which is a huge thing that would create a lot of conflict hooks for his character given everything that happened there. however, no one at dc is going to touch the implications of re-canonizing that event & all that entails to bring depth or focus on conflict hooks or the shared past tim & bernard have based on war games. hell, even fitzmartin prefers instead to create new trauma for bernard (the chaos monster, his evil homophobic parents) rather than significantly delve into and tie their reunion into their shared past.

and fitzmartin, when it comes to bernard as a character, has the benefit of having his journey in her head & is able to tie him emotionally to tim & wants him to be tim's perfect boyfriend & a really meaningful choice for emotional thematic reasons, but other writers don't and won't have that of him & because she tied so much of bernard into her personal perception of how she thinks he should have grown (hence the. bernard is basically her oc), she writes him as the kind, supporting, loving boyfriend without any conflict because it's about the now emotional stability of tim having fully accepted himself. which is nice! but doesn't particularly lend to long-form storytelling outside of maybe one arc or to storytelling by other writers when he is so ill-established and the relationship.

bc other writers don't have that basis or personal investment. they have war games & fitzmartin's finished product to go off of when it comes to the relationship & what there actually is to dig into between them. they are probably fairly uninterested in her finished product because so much of it is implied about him so it's hard to nail down--who is bernard really, they'd just once again be making him into a basically new character. and it's hard to use war games when 1) it's war games and nobody is ever going to ever write it because the complexities involve the girlfriend people are made tim broke up with starting a gang war that got bernard's best friend murdered and 2) fitzmartin already established their stable relationship completely bypassing the complexities of the canon logistics and conflict hooks of their shared past. their main option is to continue to keep making bernard have either no conflicts or newly engineered conflicts that have nothing to really do with his history and the oc-ification where he becomes far removed from his origin to the point where people do generally wonder why you bothered to bring someone back when he's basically just a new character with no real connection to his or his & tim's shared past outside of vague references.

so it's not that he's a bad choice or anything to have been brought back, it's that there's actually a lot of tricky complications surrounding him being the one to be brought back that makes it a bit harder to work with him and be able to meaningfully connect him to his post-crisis self which is generally what you want when you're bringing back a character with shared history specifically to become a love interest. and so you're forced into a bit of a box & he ends up becoming more generic/this story could have probably been told with anyone there's nothing particularly unique to him.

[alienglowgarden]

There is no needle and thread that will mend you, so

Don't you break, I will not let you

[lady-harrowhark]

lol not me crying because someone from my program texted me to ask how i was doing and that they hadn't seen me around in a while

[musubiki]

lately ive been thinking about the contrast going on in Early Lime where hes like "tbh im pretty sure i could have any girl i wanted including mochi i mean i guess if she wanted we could give it a shot one day but i dont really care lol" and then very easily becoming completely unhinged for her the second he gets a tinge of romantic affection

[lunalikestowriteanddraw]

You’d think that, between Gideon and Kremy, Gideon would be the easier one to get a read on (in terms of feelings towards certain situations and party members), but no. I can read Kremy like a motherfucking book. The way he spins lies and half-truths like a spiderweb; the way his tone will shift subtly depending on who he’s talking to, what they’re talking about, his feelings on the situation/subject/towards the person, etc; all of it. Kremy is so fucking easy to read for someone who’s supposed to be a silver-tongued conman.

But Gideon? His tone doesn’t shift all that much. He generally has a happy, confused, or entertained tone in his voice, with the exception of when he’s angry, frustrated, or upset.

Idk, maybe it’s harder for me to read Gideon because I listen to the podcast (it’s just easier for me since I can listen while driving or working), so I have to rely on tone shifts and other verbal cues. That, or maybe it’s because all of my past blorbos have been emotionally constipated men, who would only express their actual feelings about a situation based on tonal shifts, body language, and reading into what they’re saying.

[mutopians]

do you ever think about how NONE of the gangsey really had friends before they met each other besides henry? the only people we know gansey interacted with before meeting adam and ronan are people like mallory, who i wouldn't really count as super close friends. we know blue was the odd girl at school. that the only people adam seems to really interact with are gansey, ronan, and noah at the start of the raven boys. we know ronan was close with his brothers, but never mentions any close friends growing up. even noah is only really described as having one close friend (whelk) in high school, and we all know how that one ended up.

i think a lot about how messy the friendships are in that group, but it wasn't until today that i realized that part of the reason might be because none of them have really had friends before. it makes sense that henry, the ONE person who actually seems to have friends besides the gangsey, is also the one who is the most upfront with getting friends, and the one who seems to be really good at picking up his new friends' strengths. he's already been there before, so he knows how to interact within groups like that. everyone else is still figuring out that dynamic all throughout the series.

[captaindeinony]

Pokemas canon but

[thevioletcaptain]

if you as a fic reader ever become possessed by the urge to do a popularity bracket with the fics other people wrote and shared for fun and for free, consider:

don't ❤️ 

[cathalbravecog]

veep dad comfort art

[nearestend]

sorry but i'm going to need everyone to stop writing autistic / "gifted" (in quotes because i hate that term) characters who were little baby geniuses that skipped grades and graduated as valedictorian and were every teacher's pet because it's the most unrealistic shit ever and kind of just perpetuates this ableist misconception when in reality most autistic / gifted kids are more likely to be abused and exploited and bullied (both by peers and teachers), especially if they are not rich and especially if they are not white

[icewindandboringhorror]

recent lounging babey images

[yellowocaballero]

in love with both the roleswap ficlet you have as well as Utopia. im curious, what are your thoughts/hopes with rin? i feel like she always gets the short end of the stick when it comes to fics and id love to hear anything about her from you

I do have a soft spot for characters who haunt the narrative - who create an empty space so tangible that the void is its own character. When Obito and Kakashi stood in the same room in Utopia, I always considered the imprint she left on them as a third character. Not Rin herself - just how she damaged them. I think it's heartwarmingly toxic yaoi how Kakashi stole Obito's personality, so I decided that Kakashi actually stole the erotic novels from Rin. She was a superfan of bodice ripper steamy romance novels, as it turns out.

You have to make up your own personality for Rin. So I made decisions as an author about writing her for the roleswap. I wanted her to be the Naruto figure - the leader, the glue who held everybody together, the one who was very smart about people. She was just as stubborn and fiercely smart as the boys, but because her genius was in noncombat arts it was overlooked. The idealist and optimist, who hoped so genuinely for a better world. One where she could protect the people she loved. I think Rin loved far, far too much. She and the boys were thrown into insanely traumatic situations far too young, and as a result I think they developed a codependent trauma bond that resulted in over-emotional reliance and falling in desperate teenage love with each other.

As we all know, in Naruto these traits are the recipe for either the greatest hero or the most insane supervillain in the series. The most dangerous person in Naruto is the person who loves too much, who believes in a better world where peace and love and happiness can reign, and who has the power to make it a reality. The person who's lost everything, and as such has nothing to lose.

I don't think one little sword and seal can kill a jinchuuriki.

Yeah, Rin plays a major role in the AU lmfao. Personally, I support women's wrongs. As does Kakashi. #feminisminnaruto

[calicoartie]

I HATE MY ROOMMATEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[nomairuins]

i like overthink everything now it makes me feel so dumb. i used 2 be able to just talk 2 ppl but nowadays every single thing im like Is that actually going to make them hate me. Yes probably. and then i just dont respond which makes ppl hate me. this is how it is