inkedinserendipity:
also i think it’s another testament to the phenomenal and immersive narration in the murderbot diaries that creating murderbot 2.0 did not strike me as a bad thing at all on reading. i was like huh yeah infinite replicating code copy. cool! because murderbot was just. so chill about it. (red flag on its own honestly.) and with the narration not pointing out anything wrong, because what could be wrong with cloning yourself and sending the clone in to die, i just kinda passed over it.
and then i took a step back, and thought about it from anyone else’s pov, and doing that—which is always a gut-punch, in this freaking series—was heartbreaking. because imagine you’re art, or you’re pres aux, right? and you have this friend who is unflinchingly and fiercely loyal to you. and this friend does not think it is worth any loyalty in return. in fact its self esteem is, medically speaking, kinda shit. and then it wants to make a copy of itself as a bomb and send it on a suicide mission.
and that’s. oh boy. that’s a completely different perspective. that took me out at the fucking knees. of course murderbot’s friends are gonna be upset! this is one more example of it being overly self-sacrificing and way too okay with getting hurt!
(also, pour one out for art, who asked murderbot to help it recover its crew, who okayed the plan, who had to listen to the reports that 2.0 didn’t come back, that 2.0 saved another secunit on the way…. oof. that’s rough.)
anyway, that just occurred to me and it’s haunting. very excited for a murderbot reread because i think it’ll be very funny to go back through the series while remembering things like no, murderbot doesn’t really talk to the humans it’s guarding, and yes, the goddamn narration—the fabric of this story—is interwoven with so many layers of self-sacrifice and self-loathing that it’s inextricable from the actual text.
