NOONE MY BELOVED (shes gonna die horribly watch)

Self indulgent drawing of Murderbot <3 It and ART are cruising through space, just the two of them, and Murderbot is relaxed and comfortable. ART has more than a few feelings about this and saves an image to its archive -- unfortunately Murderbot is aware of ART watching it and it flips off one of the drones.

(it doesn't dislike the attention ART is giving it... it just makes it a bit flustered!)

See some bonus images (including ones without text) below the cut, along with an explanation of some of the design choices!

I am 100% in the camp of Murderbot having a much more expressive face than it realizes, especially when it's alone and/or comfortable.

All text in the images with a color block behind it is essentially metadata that ART has attached to any tag it makes for Murderbot.

The blue inorganics are purely because @hazelek found a post with early 2000s vibrant, semi-transparent tech and we were joking around about MB getting aesthetic upgrades lmao.

About half the tags in the last image are courtesy of @scificrows alkdjfl;kj thank you dearly for those additions!

So every now and then I’ll come up on a post showing off posters and drawings and other things that they have casually in their room of TCC stuff and that got me curious

How do “normal” people react to those things? Like does your parents and family members see those and don’t give it another thought? Or do they ask questions about it, if they do how did you answer? How do you explain that “oh yeah I have a guy who killed 12 children framed” without getting locked up in the loony bin? Did you have to lie about who that is? Do most people hide that stuff usually and bring it out for photos? Or are some people just so loud and proud about being TCC that you don’t care about what others think about it?

Sorry if this seems like I’m trying to be shameful on you but I’m just so confused on how people can just have it out without social repercussions

When will it be Green's turn to be happy

dance practice ✨ (cr. namuspromised)

some mb doodles lol

honestly i have no idea if these interactions are accurate since my library auto-returned the last three books before i could get to them but oh well

Maya Bishop || Station 19 (4.03 We Are Family)

But now I was going to have to explain the governor module to a system with no experience connecting to or interacting with SecUnits, except for me, just in the past hour. Here goes. ID: B-E-SecUnit not autonomous. AdaCol2 responded, query? Explaining the existential horror of the governor module in LanguageBasic took me through until the end of the corridor, which was at least long enough to circumvent what had to be a large installation. [...] We had gotten through the governor module conversation, which had ended this way: AdaCol2: query? (translation: why? = why is this necessary and/or why is this considered functional and/or why is this permitted and/or why is this allowed) Me: answer null (translation: I don't know and/or unknown and/or I don't want to talk about it)

loving this conversation from system collapse (chapter six) between murderbot and the system it just met who is going through a bit of a toddler "why" phase about something that is very personal and traumatic for murderbot but mb is just. so incredibly patient with it

Just ... Thinking about Murderbot getting chronic pain because its pain sensors get fucked in a way it can't fix.

And sometimes it's ok, the pain can be compartmentalized and shunted to the background behind all its active scripts and tasks and streaming media files. Some cycles it could even pretend that it doesn't have a problem at all -- if it weren't for the fact that ignoring it actually caused a dip in its central processing capabilities.

And sometimes it just wants a break and it can't help but withdraw from others and shy away from physical contact even more than it usually does. It seeks out softer, looser clothing that doesn't rub up against its organic bits which caused firey shocks to zip down its nerves. and sometimes its performance reliability will drop for seemingly no reason and it'll use preprogrammed responses from its buffer in a detached, automatic tone.

The pain makes it feel incredibly vulnerable and broken and it gets angry and defensive (or shuts down -- almost literally) when anyone tries to ask it what's wrong. It even threatens to leave the Perihelion if ART even so much as considers poking around its diagnostics to find answers.

oh did you not like sys tem coll apse? why not if you don’t mind me asking

Spoilers for system collapse below!

- felt very much like publishers/editors or whoever else were like hey Mwells this series is a smash hit you got anything else in the tank? And mwells scraped together a bunch of discarded scenes and concepts from the prev books and mushed that together into a minimum viable product

- no growth - all character arcs are either rehashes of what already happens in prev books or have no impact whatsoever. MB already learns that it cares about its friends and its friends care about it, that it can rely on them (hello Network Effect aka the most SLAMMIN AWESOME scifi action story i’ve read all DECADE); Tarik being a former corporate death squad trooper or whatever has absolutely no effect or consequence on anything; MB has even already crafted its own narrative & shared it, hello the documentary with bharadwaj??? the files it cut together for 3? THE WHOLE CONCEIT OF THE SERIES WHICH ARE THE MURDERBOT DIARIES WHICH ARE FRAMED EXPLICITLY AS NARRATIVES MB DELIBERATELY CRAFTS & SHARES WITH OTHERS???

- the climax of the book is. A montage.

Of our heroes making a powerpoint presentation.

I WISH this had been cool. It would’ve been hysterical to have a Final Battle be a pptx fight. Except.

It was. A montage. And then all the actual defining decisions happen offscreen. We don’t even get to see our heroes DO the actual thing - MB’s hacking gets a lot more detail than the construction of the pptx. Furthermore, how is this any different from what the corporate side is doing? Literally they’re both presenting competing propaganda pitch decks to a skeptical investor board that has what they want. It doesn’t actually matter that One Of These Powerpoints Is Always True And The Other Always Lies - how is it meaningfully different from a narrative & character standpoint? Right from the start of the series, PresAux are markedly different to all prior humans MB has had experience with - they are non-corporates! In this story about corporations/capitalism ruining everything! And then our other main heroes we meet, ART’s crew, are aggressively ANTI-corporate! So to have the climax of this latest book be “well both sides did the same action but one of them was objectively cooler bc it was Righteous - no dw it’s all happening offscreen anyway. Who cares.”

Well. Idk man, i was fucking bummed! It was boring!

Not to mention that the entire stakes of this whole… thing… are so lacking, as a reader? The rehash of prior arcs is especially poignant here, because none of the central concerns of the book feel like they matter. MB has already spent 5 books dealing with emotional disregulation, chronic issues caused by interactions of its organic + nonorganic parts, its attempts to navigate freedom, personhood and relationships in societies of bots and humans as a construct that is neither bot nor human but its own third thing, and learning to rely and trust itself and others. The first five books do this masterfully. System Collapse introduced nothing new, didn’t develop any relationships or plot arcs, regressed MB’s own main arc for no reason and ignored the entire symphony of a thesis of the entire damn series previous. Wish it wasn’t so :/

soul with his little buddy, darrel!

theyre so silly! :3 (im very normal)

not a fan of the bg but it felt so empty with just the color

the 106 pod going on about the problematic 17/24 age gap with ryan/gabrielle and how you couldn't do that today is just 😵‍💫 when that irl age gap was happening on set and 2/3 of the people on that pod ep fully knew

fms fandom is crazy because it's either people who r so strict to canon and what they theorize that they need other people to believe it too or people who are weirdly freaky over the characters or people who will fight you if you say tss was objectively very not good or the people who are weirdly freaky over the characters and write it and then theres like. the normal artists theyre chill shoutout 2 artists

It's always "Link overuses the FD mask and it takes over his body" or "Link overuses the FD mask and gets free tattoos" and never "Link overuses the other three transformation masks and slowly starts to take on traits from each of them"

Bro it bothers me sm when ppl are like “Debbie turned out like her mother” or “lip turned out like Frank” or saying that any of the kids turned out like their parents bc they didn’t??? They each have their own struggles and faults, but none of them turned out like their parents as they all broke the cycle??? Idk ppl are just dumb and don’t understand the story 😭😭😭

ok so bee, i saw this ask and i was about to give a normal response to this but then i was like, yk what- fuck it, so here’s a whole ass meta post about generational trauma in shameless and why i also hate this.

(i’m so sorry in advance i’m just crazy)

generational trauma in shameless

shameless is a show that portrays a lot of serious topics, especially topics regarding dysfunctional families, substance abuse, and mental illness. one of those topics portrayed is generational trauma. as someone who comes from a dysfunctional family with a lot of generational trauma, i feel like shameless portrayed this so well.

the first generation to start this (that we really got information about) is frank and monica’s parents. we learned the most about frank’s parents, so i’ll start off there. we learned the most about peggy gallagher, frank’s mother (who- fyi, debbie was kind of named after since peggy’s real name is margaret and that’s debbie’s middle name, so that adds to the whole generational trauma thing but whatever), peggy was an abusive monster. she had four sons, and her least favorite was frank. this was very apparent. she treats frank (and monica, we know she hated monica even though we never saw them together) like shit, and in 4x11, we learn that she raped frank as a child. in season 2, she gets out after being in prison for around eleven years and found joy in humiliating frank + could’ve killed carl with their meth lab. she sucked. her husband was also bad. we didn’t learn much about frank’s father, but we know that much like his son, he was an abusive drunk. he used to make frank wear a dress and would beat him. frank had a very traumatic childhood, which definitely played into the way he parented his children and decided to spend his adulthood. we don’t know a lot about monica’s parents, but we know that frank says that monica’s parents ruined her. monica’s mother is mentioned once in 3x06, where she’s calling fiona and forgets who monica is. one can infer she had dementia or something like it, and it’s implied she died by season 7. speaking of season 7, that’s where we meet her father, bill. bill is a crude man who criticizes everything. we know that he had little involvement in his daughter’s life, and was a army man, making monica a military brat.

so, one abusive addict parent and one uninvolved parent. sound familiar?

i don’t think i need to explain much about frank and monica, but i will anyways. frank and monica made fiona on accident and monica didn’t want her, not long after lip was born, frank went to rehab and monica and clayton made ian. when debbie was born, frank wanted to sell her. when carl was born, monica left not long after. when liam was born, monica, yet again, left weeks later. monica is uninvolved, and frank isn’t necessarily uninvolved, but he isn’t really involved either. frank was the black sheep of the family and the least favorite. his father hit him (we’re lead to believe he was the only one who was hit) and he seemed to have had it pretty rough, maybe it’s just me, but when i hear that, i think of ian. monica and frank are both victims of their environment. being a military brat, monica most likely moved around a lot and felt very lonely. so, she found comfort in the lifestyle that was moving constantly, and didn’t really grasp the concept of two parents being there constantly. that, her addiction, and her disorder played parts in her parenting style. frank grew up humiliated and was smart, but became an addict and a drop out. he tried to improve his life on multiple occasions but failed each time. i will die on the hill that both frank and monica loved their kids, but not enough, not in the right way. something i feel very strongly about due to my own experiences is that you must heal before becoming a parent. growing up with unhealed parents puts you into a position nobody should be put it.

on the topic of growing up with unhealed parents, we have lip and debbie. lip and debbie both have hero complexes, and also both have always wanted nothing more than to have children. lip is an alcoholic, and one of the ways he copes with this and keeps his sobriety is by putting other people’s problems before his own. debbie is troubled, to say the least (it’s implied that she struggles with borderline personality disorder), and to cope with her crippling loneliness she self sabotages and prostitutes herself. in season 2, the possibility of lip being a teen dad was there and lip was willing to ruin his entire life for a kid that he wasn’t even sure was his. in season 3, he takes in mandy’s half-sister to save her from foster care. in season 8/9, he rescues xan and tries to become her guardian. ian describes him as the closest thing to a dad all of the gallagher siblings have ever had. in debbie’s case, from season 1 we learn about her caring nature. we see her care for her father, aunt ginger, and her babydoll. in the next season, she starts her own daycare and cares for those babies. she has wanted nothing more than her own family since her first appearance. she gets pregnant at fourteen and by fifteen, destroys a lot of her life for her baby. she likes feeling wanted and having a family and she loves caring for her daughter. (it’s also worth mentioning the similarities between frank and fiona and monica and ian, but that’s for another day).

so now, here’s the question: are lip and debbie frank and monica?

i’d say no. lip is still struggling with active addiction, by season 11, he is not recovered, he relapsed and the ending is so ambiguous (purposefully, every character’s ending was left up to interpretation) that we don’t really know what’s going on with him pre-11x12. but there is that scene where lip gives fred this speech about how frank was an addict, and gave lip alcohol as a kid, and now lip’s an addict. and lip tells freddie that he would never do that to him. i feel like that alone gives us the assurance that lip isn’t like frank (in that way). but is debbie monica? also no. many fans are inlove with the idea of debbie abandoning franny, it seems to be all they talk about, but as a self-proclaimed debbie expert (lol) i’d say that that’s blasphemy. debbie would go through hell for franny, and in 11x08 delivers a monologue about why she will never leave franny. that doesn’t mean she’s a flawless mother, she isn’t, but she’s also twenty. i think that the most confirmation we have that debbie isn’t like her mother is in season 7 when she loses franny. she goes through absolute hell over losing her child. monica gets franny back and claims to relate, but debbie (and viewers) can tell that it’s different. we know that the gallagher’s were taken away on multiple occasions, and we know that when monica found out her kids were taken from her, instead of coming home, she willingly signed the rights to them away.

anyways. i completely agree that they are not like their parents; are they like them in certain ways? absolutely. but i also fully believe that the two of them are breaking the cycle. fred and franny will grow up and never have to worry about having a roof over their heads, they will never worry about not having food in their stomachs, they will never find themselves without a parent for a year or two. they will, hopefully, grow up with no substance abuse issues and no mental health issues. hopefully.