#tmbd dr ratthi

[adirashi]

what do you mean this didn’t happen

og image under the cut

[sporadicartcomputer]

uh hi. i wanted to illustrate one of the introductary scenes for SecUnit's character, since that would go along well with this being kind of my first post here. i... think that makes some sense. i promise more Murderbot diaries fanart after this (calling it content feels icky)). (did I start overusing brackets becouse of these books? possibly).

and i hope i captured SecUnit freaking out while trying to keep its composure at the same time well. as weird as it sounds, i like seeing depictions of it being nervous, becouse this side of it is what got me to relate to it so much in the first place (besides the heavily implied neurodivergence. though i guess the two go hand in hand). examples: in the second panel of the second page i tried showing how Gurathin's words affected it by making the speech bubbles visually "choke" (?) it, though it kept its face straight. oh, and i made it look much shorter than it actually is to mirror the way it is feeling!! figuring out details like that was pretty fun

(i'm sorry for any inconsistencies and the messy colouring and linework, i have ADHD and i get incredibly bored when i spend time trying to make everything "perfect" and looking the same in each panel... )

[jadefyre]

murderbot puts this meme in the feed every time ratthi attempts something stupid (yes, it drew that itself)

[hellofriendhawke]

Just finished all of The Murderbot Diaries and I'm making it everyone else's problem.

[sanctuarymoonfan397]

Ratthi: *sneezes*

MB, from a drone hidden out of sight in a bush: Bless you

Ratthi: Thanks

Ratthi: ...

Ratthi, looking around, panicked: God??

[art-of-a-space-duck]

The PreservationAux team in All Systems Red, dressed in their casual attire.

One of the things I love about TMBD is how certain things are described with far less detail than you would expect, including the appearance of several major characters, leaving a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.

I did, to varying degrees, pull from the Subterranean cover for Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (Book 4.5) for the characters that appear in the illustration, but the information in the text was the only strict limit I put on myself.

Well that, and the colors assigned to each character. There’s no way I wasn’t going to give each of them a specific hue.

[psumnt-studentcouncil]

The PreservationAux Feelings™ Team... And Murderbot.

[crabs-brencil]

another sketch spawned in the discord lmao

[alex-van-gore]

Palette game: Ratthi in #2?

What a gorgeous palette to work with. Thank you for the request!

[m00nymonster]

Characters: Amena, Murderbot, Ratthi

MB & Amena, MB & Ratthi

Gen

Fluffy

Ratthi watched with a little trepidation as Amena approached SecUnit with a hairbrush and a can of hairspray. He knew from experience how little it appreciated touch. It didn’t immediately jump away at the sight of her determined expression, which surprised him.

“Sit down,” she said. “I have an idea.” When SecUnit scoffed, she added, “Please?”

Ratthi watched in amazement as SecUnit huffed, then sat down on the floor in front of a chair. Amena sat down as well, and began to attack its hair with her brush. It flinched a little as she combed through stubborn knots, but eventually she tamed its normally messy hair into submission.

“Okay,” she said, her expression concentrated, “I’m going to try to style this. Maybe if we fluff your hair up, Leonide won’t recognize you.”

“You think so?” it asked, clearly skeptical. She nodded at the drone focused on her face.

“It’s better than nothing,” she said with a shrug. She grabbed her can of hairspray—Ratthi had to wonder where she’d found it—and spritzed its hair liberally. Then she combed it until it fluffed around SecUnit’s head like a halo. She stared at her work with a critical eye.

“What do you think?” she asked her drone. A second drone focused on SecUnit’s face.

“It’ll do,” it said after a moment. Amena rolled her eyes as it stood up.

“Thanks, Amena!” she said sarcastically. “That was nice of you!”

SecUnit glanced at her awkwardly, then left the room, passing Ratthi without comment. Ratthi grinned as Amena huffed.

“It really likes you, you know,” he said. “I don’t think it’d even let Mensah touch its hair.”

Amena snorted. Ratthi lifted his eyebrows and shook his head slightly.

“I know it seems rude, but that’s just how it is. Trust me. It likes you.”

Amena looked up, where a couple drones danced above her head. After a moment, she grinned at them, and waved. Ratthi nearly laughed as they bobbed in response.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s find out what everyone else is up to.”

[rosewind2007]

Love the way Ratthi is always there cheerleading for Murderbot!

Even when it’s possibly not the right time for it…

"What is that thing?" Target Leader demanded. "What are you? You're a bot?"

Thiago said, "It's a security unit. A bot/human construct"

Target Leader didn't seem to believe him.

"Why does it look like a person?"

I said, "I ask myself that sometimes."

Over the comm loudspeaker, Dr. Ratthi said, "It is a person!"

In the background, I heard Overse whisper, "Ratthi, get off the comm!"

[imitationgame77]

Poking sensation in the Feed (tmbd)

It is interesting that Murderbot seems to get awareness of "poking" in the feed as something akin to physical sensations.

All Systems Red

Dr. Gurathin, the least talkative one, was an augmented human and had his own implanted interface. I could feel him poking around in the data, while the others, using the touch interfaces, were just distant ghosts. I had a lot more processing power than he did, though.

Artificial Condition

It said, You’re a rogue SecUnit, a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module. It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall.

ART poked me hard enough to make me twitch. I snapped out of it and ran my recording back a little to catch up on what was happening.

ART poked me. I see it, I told it. The search had turned up a series of notices posted around the right timeframe.

Network Effect

The SecSystem poked me in response and I told it everything was fine, and it went back to happily interfacing with me again.

System Collapse

“So we land on flat ground somewhere, the area looks stable,” Tarik said. He’s not stupid. I think he was trying to annoy ART-drone, but I poked Ratthi on our private feed connection with a video file.

Of course, ART-drone said. It poked me in the threat assessment module. And what is the probability of that, again, exactly?

My impression (without getting different POV) is that constructs like Murderbot and bots like ART perceive poking in the feed as something similar to physical poking. Instantaneous and attention-catching. Humans perceive them more like alert notification. (probably stronger poke than the Facebook poke function...)

Ratthi responds to Murderbot's poke because it was a video file, set to autoplay.

Augmented humans with extra feed interface like Gurathin and Iris (?) may be more sensitive to pokes, but not sure if they flinch/twitch in response.

ART can poke Murderbot in specific place, like threat assessment module. Maybe it's a super AI thing, but I suspect it is because ART is given access to all the assessment modules (e.g., threat assessment module, performance reliability assessment module) during this mission. Again sounds pretty intimate.

[gamebird]

A post about my Murderbot Diaries fanfics

A lot of my TMBD fanfiction links together. Someone called it the 'Gamebird Cinematic Universe'. So you'll see events referenced across fics, backstory fleshed out, and missing scenes filled in, with the information spread out across a lot of stories. I also ship Murderbot and Gurathin, but not within the canon timeline. Thus, there are a lot of fics where that hasn't happened yet, or where they are not both present.

I've put them all together in a single series for convenience, and broken out the ones that are separate AUs or unrelated one-shots.

.

Gamebird Cinematic Universe stories in (mostly) chronological order:

After Hacking - This is pre-ASR, a series of stories that track Murderbot's growing personhood and abilities during the 4 years after it hacks its governor module to before the events of All Systems Red. Each installment is around 1,000 words and they are all designed as stand-alone stories.

It's Only a Cleaning Process - Murderbot enjoys a particularly thorough cleaning process that can definitely be interpreted sexually. Murderbot declines to interpret it that way.

Two Ships, Passing in the Night - ART shows off for another ship. Seth is not amused.

Ratthi's Proposition - At the start of the ASR survey, Ratthi propositions Gurathin. This is an event referred to in various other fics.

[ASR happens here]

Rogue Trends - This is a data analyst digging into the circumstances behind Murderbot going rogue, and what happened to the other SecUnits that were in Ganaka Pit. It was my first TMBD fic and is much acclaimed.

Gurathin's Side of the Story - A retelling of ASR, ES, and other portions from Gurathin's point of view, along with key elements of his backstory. There is a little MB/G in it (occasional badly-veiled one-sided yearning; Murderbot doesn't know or care, as per canon).

BATNA - This recounts Mensah's captivity in Exit Strategy.

Things SecUnit Will Never Know - Missing scene at the end of Exit Strategy, tells the story of how the group restored Murderbot's brain after the gunship collapse.

Trust Fall - Set in the flashback scene of Network Effect - Overse and Arada argue about being cut out of the need-to-know list regarding the assassination attempt on Dr. Mensah.

Resignation - This is an elaboration of this line from Network Effect: Since I'd decided to stay (temporarily) on Preservation Station, Dr. Mensah had asked me to go places with her seven times. Six of those times were just relatively short boring meetings on ships in orbit or in dock. The seventh was when she had asked me to go down to the local planet's surface with her., telling the story of Mensah's slow crumble after the events of BATNA.

The Skinny - Murderbot sends a letter to Bharadwaj about the ways SecUnits are misused on contract. This would be in Network Effect, after the festival and before the water planet survey. This was another of my very early TMBD fics.

A Funeral for Killware - At the end of Network Effect, before System Collapse, those in orbit over the Adamantine Colony have an observance for those who were lost.

Retrieval - Three retrieves one of its fallen fellows.

Tarrathi - Tarik and Ratthi get together in System Collapse, missing scene fic.

The Talk - Perihelion's crew talk to it about how it met Murderbot. Or try to.

[post System Collapse, nebulous undefined mission with ART; in other words: canon that hasn't been published yet]

Repeat Deletion Protocol - Back on Preservation, SecUnit confronts Ratthi about a suspicious situation with one of Ratthi's partners, only to discover this isn't the first time it's confronted Ratthi about this.

De-constructed Feelings - Ratthi realizes/discovers Gurathin's past with constructs, and his present feelings toward one construct in particular. Gurathin swears him to secrecy, because he intends to take this secret to his grave. After all, Murderbot has no interest in him whatsoever and that's fine.

Skulk - This consists of the origin story for a rogue Combat SecUnit named Skulk, and then an adventure with Murderbot, Ratthi, and Gurathin.

Murderathin - This follows immediately after the end of the Skulk series and is my attempt to separate the MB/Gurathin material from the non-MB/G stuff so those readers who want to avoid shippy stuff can do so. Upon leaving the planet Skulk was on, Murderbot confronts Gurathin about certain feelings it has unexpectedly detected from him. This is where Gurathin's Side of the Story is told, although the events of it (ASR, ES, etc.) happen earlier.

[Young Gurathin section not in chronological order]

What is Love? - A late-teens Gurathin explores his sexual interests with a standard ComfortUnit in the Corporation Rim. Even back then, he wonders if there is more behind those eyes, or if he's just seeing what he wishes was there.

To Like or Not to Like - This is Gurathin in his mid-20s (I headcanon him around 50 in ASR) with a ComfortUnit. Nothing sexual or romantic this time, just two beings trying to understand one another and themselves.

[Back to chronological order]

Depends on Viewpoint - Gurathin and Bharadwaj discuss differences between the Corporation Rim and Preservation.

.

Other series:

Last Client Standing - ASR, but GrayCris attacks PresAux first instead of DeltFall. This is disastrous. Murderbot is only able to save Gurathin. They escape, eventually, returning to Preservation where there is grieving and therapy, with a hopeful ending.

TMBD Metas and Headcanons - What it says on the tin. Most of these are analyses of canon, but a few are my headcanons for ComfortUnits, Combat SecUnits, and Preservation.

.

Other stuff (one-shots or nearly so):

Freeze Response - Murderbot tries to figure out where a little girl went. Few words, many kudos.

SexUnit - Two versions of the same outline, one with Murderbot, one with an OC SecUnit. Both are used for sex. This is rape.

Two Peas in a Pod - Murderbot and Gurathin work together to retrieve two gestational units that have been locked in cryofreeze pods. Although both MB and Gurathin are in this fic, it isn't shippy in any romantic way. Barely even platonic.

Imagine Dragons - Murderbot tries to guard Gurathin from hostile fauna. I don't think this is particularly shippy. I think Murderbot would act the same way with any of its clients.

Personalized Security Services - Murderbot and Mensah fuck. This is not rape.

If Hostile One Had Bit Ratthi Instead of Bharadwaj in ASR - Just what it says on the tin.

Just a Piece - A man and an obliging SecUnit fuck. This is not rape.

Preservation Alliance, Politics, and World-Building - This is included in the Meta series, but is important enough for me to call it out individually. It's the background for nearly everything I've written in TMBD that has a setting in Preservation. It tells about languages, planets, and cultures.

There are also some drabbles and a couple longer one-shots I didn't count. You can find them in my AO3 works list. I have participated in two collaborative writing events, one Counting Down (combined PresAux and Perihelion crew get contaminated by alien remnants while planetside and have to fight off a CR sanitation team) and the other is Enemies, Closer (MB/G/ART/Echo). The first is not shippy in the least; the second is all shipping all the time.

[specialagentartemis]

Having listened to the Graphic Audio full-cast audobook for All Systems Red, it was fun but I have some thoughts about the voice acting and direction. So now I’m just daydreaming about “if I had Billionaire Money I would buy the audio rights to TMBD and direct and produce another full cast audio version with voice actors handpicked and paid lavishly by Me.”

The cast being:

All Systems Red:

Murderbot: Kevin R. Free is the voice of Murderbot to a lot of people. I would think very hard about this but it would be a foundational return to form. However I feel like I want to reach out and find a non-binary VA because it's a niche that's been tragically underrepresented in Murderbot VAs. I joked before about Vico Ortiz playing live-action Murderbot but do they want to try their hand at voice acting?

Mensah: Cecilia Lynn-Jacobs. Voices Captain Lovelace on Wolf 359. Has incredible talent and range and does the Intrepid Galactic Explorer so well.

Pin-Lee: Emily Woo Zeller. An audiobook narrator I've consistently liked.

Ratthi: Stephen Dookie. He plays the part of Polites in Epic: The Musical and he's excellent in a very sweet, upbeat, friendly way.

Gurathin: Sungwon "ProZD" Cho. I'm picturing somewhere in the range of his Miles Edgeworth voice for this.

Arada: Michelle "Vixy" Dockrey. She's a singer not a VA but her voice sounds so nice.

Overse: Tanja Milojevic. Her range is incredible.

Bharadwaj: Rukhmani Desai (Captain Tripathi, The Strange Case of Starship Iris. She has that calm, reasonable, rational, desperately kind character voice she plays well in Starship Iris that I think would go well for Bharadwaj)

Volescu: Zach Valenti. The vibes are right.

Additional voices by Tanja Milojevic and Zach Valenti. Yes all of them.

Artificial Condition:

ART: Janelle Monáe and I mean it

Tapan: ItMe of InCo Podcast

The ComfortUnit: also ItMe because an important part of listening to faer acting is realizing in awe how fae voices so many characters at once and make them all sound distinct.

Tlacey: kinda thinking Ariela Rotenberg. she does smugly confidently evil very well. However we cannot discount casting ItMe for this role also

Additional voices by Tanja Milojevic and Zach Valenti.

Rogue Protocol:

Don Abene: Emma Sherr-Ziarko. She also deserves to be an intrepid space leader again.

Miki: ItMe again in InCo Season 2 Updated SAWA mode

Wilken: me. I want a part. I could totally be a badass evil space assassin

Gerth: does Gerth even have any lines.

Additional voices by Tanja Milojevic and Zach Valenti.

Exit Strategy:

Serrat: Zach Libresco. this casting + Janelle Monáe as ART were what drove me to make this post in the first place.

The Combat SecUnit: Ellen McLain in GLaDOS mode. All 2 lines it has.

Network Effect:

Amena: Ishani Kanetkar (The Strange Case of Starship Iris, The Godshead Incidental, excellent VA for a proud and curious but scared young person)

Iris: Jordan Cobb (Janus Descending, Primordial Deep, excellent VA for a gritted-teeth calm scientist in a strange and dangerous place)

Seth: Avery Brooks (I know it is not the 90s anymore. but. Captain Sisko. I can imagine <3 )

Martyn: Alexander Siddig / Siddig El-Fadil (Dr. Bashir). They're TV actors but! I want them as the Ship Captain Husbands

The rest of ART's crew: other podcast VAs I love who I haven't come up with a role for yet. Kristen DiMercurio, Beth Eyre, James Oliva.

Supervisor Leonide: Claudia Christian (Commander Ivanova on Babylon 5 <333 )

Eletra: Michaela Swee who is very busy working at An Actual Hospital but I have a billion dollars in this dream scenario so I can pay her to take a day and record like 4 lines

Ras: Zach Valenti. This is very important.

Three: Jackie Andrews who plays R. J. McCabe on Starship Iris and Elinor Lopez on The Pasithea Powder has the right Vibes For This

Zach Valenti as the Additional Voice of every goon and target who gets the shit scared out of them and/or dies.

Fugitive Telemetry:

Indah: Molly Olguin maybe. she could Be Indah. Absolutely means we need Jackie Hedeman to have a role in FT too.

Tifany: Michelle Agresti (Wolf 359, Arden)

Aylen: Tracey Sayed (also Arden)

Jollybaby, Tellus, Balin: I would open the floor to the delightful Murderbot fandom. Who wants to voice a Preservation bot

Additional voices by--well you know the drill.

[blessphemy]

✨ Fic Writing Review 2023 ✨

thanks for the tag @non-plutonian-druid!

the actual format of this game is this post but i rearranged it a bit so that i could hide my extremely long list of fics under a cut

Fandom fic events 2023

Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange

Yuletide Draft Dodgers

Murderbot AUpril Collection (open and accepts submissions)

2023 Aspec Murderbot Diaries

2023 PresAugust

We Were It // It Will Be Us: A TMBD Art Exhibition (open and accepts submissions)

Botober 2023

Upcoming 2024

Events:

i'm doing the Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange (2024) :3

Perhaps i'll post something for the annual 3/3 for Three collection idk (this collection is open and accepts submissions, and it spikes on March 3rd of each year)

WIPs:

Gift exchange fic

Absolute monster of a nullverse!network effect AU fic. i'm trying so hard to get draft 1 of this beast finished it's been beating my ass for over a year but i'm gonna Get It

Continue Via Solitude updates.

a 5+1 ASR bad ends fic that explores some meta shit. namely trust, forgiveness, and sci-fi horror genre vs canon.

Words and fics 2023

let's find out just how cringe (fun) i've been on ao3. i'm like. jeebus creebus i've posted a lot this year huh.

105,486 words of fan fiction. all of it murderbot. let's look at them going right down the statistics page (default sorted by hits, tho it gets kind of messy at the end with and i got lazy):

30,336 words of Via Solitude, an All Systems Red AU where murderbot has to do wilderness survival.

~5k words that's just a repost of Threat As Greeting, except with fresh interactive CSS effects.

3,346 words top 3 SURPRISING things you didn't know about the SECUNIT who pulled you out of an INCINERATOR (2023 gift exchange) outsider POV from the characters featured in Wells' pre-canon short story

1,502 words Aspec Drabbles (for the Aspec Murderbot Diaries event) it lot of fun to work with strict 100-word drabbles.

13,837 words References NULL: Logs From Project Murderbot [nullverse] the most purely concentrated angst/whump from the nullverse series yet. handle with care or skip it.

6,552 words How To Go On A Camping Trip - a guide for anxious SecUnits who are bad at vacationing (2023 gift exchange) i really liked this one tbh. fun standalone.

2,488 words Improve Your Baby AI With This One Weird Trick! (2023 gift exchange) my personal fic-titling theme for the gift exchange was "clickbait."

7,875 Alien Refuge (AUpril inspired) This is a Homestuck crossover, and reportedly the first time multiple people willingly interacted with homestuck-affiliated content, and they liked it. gottem. it's also pretty good, i did a nice job injecting homestuckism tone into the murderbot narrative style If I Do Say So Myself.

911 words No Comment: Shut Up And Dance [nullverse] fluff and humor. tfw your secunit friend (murderbot) is crashing in your living room and you (dr. ratthi) have insomnia.

2,922 words MetaMorphoSys (AUpril inspired) listen i NEED the next big fandom trend to be an AU world where people metamorphose inside cocoons. hear me out. HEAR ME OUT. in this fic we take the fridge horror of canon murderbot diaries and make it visceral, wet, biological, and ethically Even Worse. get yr Amena emotions also.

0 words SecUnit Technician Bingo Card it's funny. idk.

3,438 words nullverse reference sheet [nullverse bonus content] self indulgent AU notes

2,290 words Systems: Splorch [nullverse bonus content] a friend of mine said "how long until we get a fic with #oviposition in the murderbot diaries ao3?" i took the answer to that question into my own two capable hands at 7.5 hours. you're welcome.

2,562 words Artifacts NULL: Fire Festival [nullverse] slice-of-life friend times with nostalgia vibes. how far we've come.jpg.

388 words Entries shared by the Society for Conservation of Feed Artifacts (SCFA) (created for TMBD in-universe robot art gallery, which is an open collection that accepts any submissions!) wait this reminds me i have one more to post. i'll get to it.

9,314 words in 31 fics written for (Botober 2023) daily prompts. turned out to be a fun exercise and exploration of bot culture tho it took me longer than the month of october to finish.

4 fanarts of fics that i liked.

26 fanbindings where i printed out and made booklets out of fics that i liked.

2 translations.

3,080 words Refrain [nullverse bonus content] if you're unfamiliar with my Brand this will sound unhinged. if you are familiar with my Brand you know by now that i have a knack for taking literally Anything and treating it with tender loving care and unexpected deft so this doesn't even surprise you. tl;dr it's porn of two bots having a deeply OSHA-unapproved Fuck Session, there's no genitals involved, and it's tagged #Vivisection. it's pretty good if you're into robots and perhaps mild gore.

Rules & Tags for this game

Rules: Feel free to show whatever stats you have. Only want to show Ao3 stats? Rock on. Want to include some quantitative info instead of stats? Please do this. Want to change how yours is presented? Absolutely do that. Would rather eat glass than do this? Please don’t eat glass, just keep on scrolling.

@fishdetective @beatrice-otter @snugglyeldritchjellyfish @ilovedthestars and anyone who feels like it

[aspec-tmbd]

Title: Love isn't Homemade Soup Author: Chyoatas Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Tags: #No Archive Warnings Apply #Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot #Dr. Gurathin #Murderbot #Dr. Ratthi #Brief Arada Cameo #Brief Bharadwaj Cameo #Sickfic #Fluff #Comfort No Hurt #Aspec TMBD #Queerplatonic Relationships #Established Relationship #No Context Relationship #OTC Drugs Involved/Mentioned Bcus Gurathin is high off his ass on cold medicine /hj #he's very feverish and miserable #the mortifying ordeal of telling ur partner(?) that u dont love him (he knew already. ur not subtle) #allo/aro relationships are special to me in a personal way Words: 3,514 Chapters: 1/1

Sickly humans are gross, including augmented ones. Sitting next to them doesn’t make them less gross, but it does make it easier to monitor their health. Or, at least, that’s my current excuse.