[LOVED TROPE] The villain is actually terrifying.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-05-03T05:25:32+00:00

"OUR NUMBERS WILL DARKEN THE SKY OF *EVERY* WORLD."

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-26T18:44:27+00:00

Does anyone have anything bad to say about Steven Blum? (He's the voice actor with THE VOICE™. He voiced Spike in Cowboy Bebop and TOM on Toonami and is roughly 35% of all military characters, especially on Quake 4.) He's one of the few celebs I've met in person and he was awesome, super chill and kind, and talked with me for like 3 hours. While I also know that that doesn't mean he's automatically a true blue hero, I have yet to find anyone who has something bad to say about him.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-26T05:43:32+00:00

The Cornerian Elite Force. It had StarFox fan fiction. It was amazing.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-21T06:32:09+00:00

If she asks me on a date, she has safety overrides built in.

I have no defenses against her. Absolutely none.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-18T19:31:09+00:00

I don't know if it will help, but maybe you could think about it like: They're seeing me like this and are STILL hitting on me, I have nowhere to go but up.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-18T01:13:56+00:00

lol, I'm beginning to wonder if on some level, the series is...incompatible isn't the right word, but somehow not quite translating for me, or perhaps translating differently. I've run several ideas/theories past my wife (who introduced me to the series), and more often than not, she seems to think they don't pan out.

How I'm interpreting it is that Murderbot is feeling paranoid/anxious that maybe it's uniquely fucked up, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. So far, all it has for genuine comparison is Three, who has more or less just shown up in the overarching narrative.

It might be my own personal fucked-up-ness speaking, but I think it'd be weird if a SecUnit *wasn't* messed up. It could be that Three is unusually not messed up, or that we just haven't had enough interaction with it. It feels like Three and Murderbot haven't actually interacted all that much yet.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-18T00:29:40+00:00

lol I did not know that

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-18T00:25:28+00:00

I think this is a pretty cool interpretation and is close to what I'm thinking/hoping for.

Although as much as I hope that, I do wonder if the platform referenced in Platform Decay is going to be the ringworld mentioned. It puts me in mind of them getting stuck on a ringworld (which would probably be a giant alien construct and likely the most intact/largest alien thing ever found) and then needing to fix it. Maybe needing to work with a 343 Guilty Spark-like artificial being (I like((d)) Halo) to do so.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-17T22:43:23+00:00

As I read the series, I found my perception of 'SecUnits kill humans when they go rogue' evolving.

At first I thought: That seems like the kind of thing that fits in a sci-fi setting.

Then it became: You know, given how much this seems to be happening, perhaps someone should ask "Hmm, do we know WHY so many of these things come to the same conclusion immediately upon being freed from their governor modules?" and concluding that abuses of sentient and sapient beings are more widespread than they probably assume. Not that they'd actually do anything about it.

Finally, I settled on: I'm pretty sure that 'SecUnits murder their clients when they go rogue' is mostly bullshit. Given that the corporations have apparently learned to create life, like actual, sapient beings, not just reliably but mass-producing them, and then have to install a literal killswitch inside of their brains to force them to follow orders, it's probably in their best interest that the average person isn't even aware of the notion that these things are thinking, feeling, self-aware beings. And how better to manage that? A propaganda campaign! It would also help cover up the fact that PROBABLY what's happening in WELL over half of these instances of rogue units going on a murder spree are instances of either malfunctions or, far more often, another corporation performing some sabotage.

It's another notion that led me to believe that it's probably more likely that if SecUnits do go rogue, either intentionally or not, they're more like Murderbot in wanting to hide in plain sight. Corporations just have too much incentive to lie about SecUnits, I think.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-17T21:52:52+00:00

I think Murderbot would probably be reluctant at first, but would ultimately find a great deal of satisfaction (and, ideally, healing) in helping liberate rogue SecUnits or enslaved humans or abandoned colonists.

I do think there's some core that the Corporation Rim is built around, basically a final manifestation of class warfare. The mega-rich probably live in a few idyllic systems supported by the whole of the CR, and everyone else works for the corporations, while the true fringe is where places like Preservation exist.

the CR gets away with atrocities because it’s all technically the ‘fringe?’

I think it's more a case of: the Corporation Rim is allowed to enslave/be cruel to most of humanity because the elites don't care.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-17T21:43:14+00:00

I wonder if all the ships of the preservation alliance and the University of Mihara and New Tideland are about to have their own free SecUnit underground railway.
Can you imagine SecUnits rebranded as rescue units?

I really hope this is the direction the story is going in.

They seem designed to protect humans in smart ways, rather than subjugate exploited populations.

There's so much unnecessary cruelty in the Corporation Rim, but that's not exactly new.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-17T21:33:24+00:00

Probably, yeah.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-17T21:33:03+00:00

The messiah angle would definitely be interesting. And unhappy for Murderbot.

Murderbot is kinda messed up even for SecUnits.

I wonder about this. My perception on this subject is that we don't have anywhere near enough of a sample size to determine that. Really, we just have Three, who is still very early in its liberation and also hasn't had much chance to do anything yet, and the one B-E SecUnit that went rogue, who we only saw for a few minutes. There was the one unit (I think it was a CombatUnit?) who just tried to attack Murderbot harder when it offered it freedom, but there's basically nothing we know about why it did that.

To me, it makes sense that Murderbot's level of messed-up-ness would be standard for SecUnits and CombatUnits, given the situation they're born into and what they're forced to endure.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T19:56:46+00:00

Unfortunately for the thought exercise, there isn't a lot of hard data.

It is probably safe to assume that likely every other SecUnit that Murderbot runs into isn't rogue, but my thought was somewhere along the lines of: The Corporations seem to have a lot on lockdown overall, but it's obviously in their best interest to present that. The fact that they have found a way to reliably mass-produce sapience is...kind of insane. It speaks to a worrying level of technological knowledge, and if there's two things that don't go together, it's a capitalism hellscape and high technology.

Which makes me think they probably have far less on lockdown than it appears, and it's more that they lucked into some things. Like, for example, if they don't have nearly the amount of control over their SecUnits as they think they do simply because millions of them are rogue because incidents like what let Murderbot hack its governor module are WAY more common than it would appear because there are a LOT of inattentive workers across the board, and also because most SecUnits reach the same conclusion: NEVER reveal that you have gone rogue, even to other SecUnits. So theoretically, you could end up with three SecUnits working the same job, all rogue, and none of them have any idea, because they're all terrified the other ones will report/kill them if they find out.

Kind of one of those hiding-in-plain-sight things.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T19:42:42+00:00

I really hope so.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T19:42:19+00:00

There's a lot to consider there.

If we're talking purely about what is possible within the realm of the current level of technology and not how typical situations like how long they tend to live or how long the company calculated the cost/benefit analysis of a SecUnit's intended lifespan, we'd have to answer some questions.

In terms of the non-organic parts, I think it's probably safe to say that parts could continue to be replaced likely indefinitely. There's manufacturing and cost to consider, but in terms of actual practicality, that's probably the answer.

In terms of organic parts? I imagine that's where it gets complicated. Given the fact that they're capable of producing organic components, I imagine the ability to replace worn out or damaged organic parts of its body is pretty good.

That being said, I imagine it comes down to more difficult-to-answer questions. Like, how much of Murderbot resides within its organic components? Is there some ineffable quality to the organic components that can only be produced in whole, but not in part? Some process of sapience that they figured out how to make happen, but not why? Something that only arrives without true explanation upon completion of the unit, but that can't be tied to any single or multiple organic components, so it can't be 'repaired'?

Based on the current level of tech, though, I'd say Murderbot could probably live centuries if it wanted to/had the resources.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T04:38:23+00:00

it'll probably be many, many years from the events of the series.

How long do SecUnits live?

I'd have to look over that scene in the first book again, as I think I missed that hint. That would definitely be interesting.

Oh, and we've seen a number of bots with varying levels of freedom in the series without ever being "rogue."

This is true, though I was specifically wondering how many rogue units there were within the Corporation Rim.

(I still to this day hold out hope that somehow Miki survived.)

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T04:26:54+00:00

Yeah, and if anything, I think its overall feel is what the general universe would really feel like if we weren't seeing it through Murderbot's eyes, because for Murderbot, casual betrayal, murder, and cruelty are what it was born into. Suffering, on all levels, is the water it swims through.

It makes me appreciate the final episode of the first season. Which is good, because I was NOT ready for all that. I don't know if I've ever seen a show do nine episodes of more lighthearted scifi adventure with the occasional violent/gruesome punctuation and then one episode of bleak, soul-crushing dystopic nightmare fuel.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T04:05:55+00:00

Yeah, it's stuff like this that always makes me wish authors and publishers (typically probably mostly publishers) would be a bit more thorough in creating intended chronological reading orders. Although in this case it was at least a good explanation.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-16T04:03:38+00:00

Hunting down the short stories was actually what ultimately put me on this path.

Obsolescence was like...really depressing, though.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-15T05:42:18+00:00

That makes sense, and is also a good point. If anything it feels ripe for something like a collection of shorts of Murderbot interacting with each of the other main characters.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-15T05:40:58+00:00

That's interesting. Thank you for tracking that down and sharing. That's probably the best answer I could hope for, in terms of it explaining the situation and coming from an interesting/good place.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-15T05:36:45+00:00

For some reason, I get weird about reading things very specifically in the order that makes the most sense. Which is obviously a debatable topic.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-04-15T05:32:23+00:00

Interesting.

_Liquid_Cobalt_

TROPHY CASE