(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* I am caught up in Murderbot! I can look at tumblr tags and have discussions without worrying about spoilers! Time to look and see... *drumroll* .... pronoun discourse? What is there to even discuss? No one's talking about the upcoming show? No pics of the actor in the armor?

* I need to pick a new audiobook. I am liking having one book as audio and one book as text. I love David Cui Cui's performance as Murderbot on the full cast version of the audio. It looks like someone else does it on the regular audiobook. Also, I think those books just adapt really well to audio. I do have a few audiobooks to check out and hopefully they are good. What I am looking for is things like Murderbot and Neil Gaiman's stuff that just works really well in that format and have really good productions.

* I had to take a Lyft somewhere and the car was a Tesla and the driver was playing music by Drake. What the fuck did I do to deserve that? It was so weird I was tempted to take a short video as proof, but decided to just stick headphones in and wait it out. Actually, the amount of Teslas in town I've seen used for rideshares is surprising. I've needed to use Lyft a bit recently and I almost know how to operate those weird doors.

* I need to pull data from my cameras this weekend. It's been so long I don't even know what's on there. That hasn't happened in years. I don't remember every picture I take on my walks, but between editing sessions I typically have a sense of what walks I went on and what possible keepers are going to be in my next import. I usually I have a list in my head of pictures I am excited to see how they turn out.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

Congrats on getting caught up on Murderbot! I hate the pronoun discourse (though it also made me rage both times I came across "the conclusion to murderbot's character arc should be it finally picking a gender" so). I am not sure how I feel about how little anyone seems to care about the show.

Oof. I have had a couple weird Lyfts (the most recent being the dude from Texas who spent most of the ride talking about driving in Texas mud, but his car was covered in Forks, Washington stickers. I eventually couldn't NOT ask about it, and then he launched into "have you ever heard of Twilight?")
But that wasn't a Tesla! Playing Drake! Aaaah!

[olivermoss]

Sometimes when characters don't feel a gender or sexuality it's them needing to unpack stuff, but that's not what this is doing. I don't care if people write fic for their own gender feels or whatever, but the canon could not be clearer.

Did you admit to having heard of Twilight?

[mistressofmuses]

I am certainly all for fans doing whatever they want fandom-wise, and I can understand that there's a lot of ways people could identify with it and want to map their own experiences onto it.
...But the canon seems pretty clear to me, and it feels like painful misreading to insist on either gendering Murderbot - I've seen a lot of people just refer to it as "he" - or insisting that accepting that it's human and needs to have a gender is the "happily ever after" that it needs.

I *did* admit to having heard of Twilight, and I guess his wife is an absolute superfan. I missed my opportunity to be MUCH funnier and claim that I had NOT ever heard of it, haha.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, the canon is so clear I don't see how there can even be a discussion on it. Especially since we are 7 novels deep now. I know people who haven't unpacked their gender stuff tend to project hard onto media, but c'mon, this is beyond silly. If there was a gender arc, it'd be clearly arcing by now.

[mistressofmuses]

Lol, that's the perfect way to say it: "If this was the intended arc, it would be arcing by now!"

The series has a lot of overarching themes, and it isn't terribly shy about them. I try not to be a dick about people reading something and coming away with different impressions than I did... but come on.

I do wonder how the TV series will handle it, and how the TV audience will view it.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, some things are clearly just projection and people need to realize that. People who don't ever unpack their own gender baggage are very weird about things at time.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with projecting on your blorbo of choice. Hell, *that's* at least adjacent to a theme of the series! But there are some people who would really do well to take a step back far enough to recognize that it *is* projection, not actual canon.

I also certainly get the whole "having gender baggage" thing, but it's very true: the people who haven't really unpacked that tend to get very weird about certain things and characters.