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gamebird · 2 months

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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.

#the murderbot diaries #fanfiction #murderathin #lots of stuff that isn't murderathin but I'm tagging so people's filters work

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specialagentartemis · 8 months

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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.

#The Murderbot Diaries #fancast #ItMe InCo Creator I hope you're okay with me tagging you. I don't know your name #this is a sign for everyone to listen to Wolf 359; The Strange Case of Starship Iris; InCo; Arden; The Pasithea Powder; and Janus Descendin #whoof I put way too much time and effort into this

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rrainbowmagnet · 1 year

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TMBD character coffee preferences

Mensah: Milk but no sugar

Pin-Lee: Straight black coffee

Ratthi: Coffee full of 50 spices that no one likes but him

Gurathin: Regular coffee with syrup or sugar

Arada: Unicorn frappe

Overse: Coffee with limited spices

Bharadwaj: Coffee with cream

Amena: Juice

Murderbot: Hot chocolate

Three: Regular coffee with a sensible amount of sugar

ART: Uranium

#murderbot #the murderbot diaries #murderbot eats #the last time i drank coffee was as an infant so this may be inaccurate

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combat-secunit · 2 years

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wrote 1k words in 30 minutes, the chaos continues

https://archiveofourown.org/works/37074079

#the murderbot diaries #tmbd #pin-lee #gurathin #ratthi #arada #overse #murderbot #an-cou #chaos #fic

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chelshiart · 2 years

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ugh socialization ugh

#the murderbot diaries #tmbd #secunit #asshole research transport #perihelion #iris tmbd #bharadwaj tmbd #ratthi tmbd #gurathin tmbd #pin lee tmbd #mensah tmbd #overse tmbd #arada tmbd #volescu tmbd #and thats everyone i think #martha wells #storyboard #me experimenting with shot choices: well i guess its time to fanart again OwO #storyboards

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crabs-brencil · 2 months

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ugh all of my brainrots are combining anyways here's the tmbd f1 au that i might draw for but will really only let collect dust in my head.

presaux team:

team principal - mensah

tech director/head engineer - ratthi

pit crewww (ugh i love pit crew sm) - arada, overse, volescu

pt - bharadwaj

drivers - mb and gurathin

communications - pin lee

marketing - thiago

pumnt team (i have yet to find out about art's humans so i will fill the rest of this in when i do that)

courtesy @blessphemy

team principal - art

tech director/head engineer - art

pit crewwww - art

pt - art, med sys

drivers -

communications - art

marketing - art + human reps

#lmao this is so stupid but it has consumed me frfr #if anyone has any ideas for who should go where #you know the drill lol #the murderbot diaries #tmbd #f1 #formula 1 #ive actually gone insane

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gamebird · 9 months

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The Ship Manifest: Actual Murderbot shipping numbers

I looked at what had been updated on AO3 in the last month in the Murderbot Diaries tag. It was a nice even 50 works.

Of these, 10 are Murderbot/Gurathin and 9 of those were updated in the 8 days. 4 of those were multichapter fics and a couple of those multichapter fics published multiple chapters.

3 fics were MB/ART, with one of those 3 fics being counted in the MB/G ones as well. The other two are single chapter, one of which is Rape, I know some people filter those out.

The Murderathin surge is kinda unusual. Multiple multi-chapter fics finished in the last week, several short stories inspired by each other or bits of art were put out there. And then there's the art, some of which hasn't even been posted here on Tumblr.

But with all that, like I say, non-ship stuff is still over 75%. And for the fandom as a whole, it's more like 90% (I ran the numbers just a couple weeks ago).

----

Here, from 7/17/23, looking at all ship fic in TMBD tag:

Let's see what's changed in a year!

To start, we had 960 fics roughly July 2022. Now (7/17/23) we have 1,825. Almost double!

If I exclude & and look only at / ships: 79 ART/MB (was 24 a year ago) 49 Gurathin/MB (was 17 a year ago) 35 Arada/Overse (wasn't in the top 10 a year ago) 12* MB/3 11* Amena/Iris 8* Farai/Mensah/Tano 6* MB/Mensah 5* Bharadwaj/Pin-Lee 5 ART/CSU 5 OC/OC 4* Gurathin/Thiago 3 01/02/03 2* MB/OC 2 ART/3 2* ART/Ratthi 8* Gurathin/Ratthi 3* Gurathin/3 and Gurathin/3/OC 2 Gurathin/OC 1* Ratthi/Miki 1* ART/Gurathin/Ratthi 1* Ratthi/3 1* Mensah/Pin-Lee 1 Ratthi/3/Pin-Lee 1 MB/Reader 1 ART/OC 1 Arada/Overse

The first three ships listed and any with * are definite in their number. The rest are put together by excluding all other pairings in a clumsy attempt to get AO3 to tell me more than the top 10 stats or forcing me to do a tag search.

245 "/" ship fics out of 1,825 is 13.42%. We were 6% last time, although I suspect I didn't know how to search quite as well as I do now. Even if I only look at the top 10 relationship options this time, we're still at 8.93%. So! There are more ship fics than there used to be, percentage-wise. But still ... not that many as a percent of total fics out there.

Now to look at Explicit fics!

78 Explicit fics (22 last year) ART/MB - 36 (6 last year) No / pairing listed - 8 Not sex - 6 (2 last year) Gurathin/MB - 5 (1 last year) OC/MB - 4 (None last year) OC / OC - 3 (1 last year) ART/OC - 2 (1 last year) Amena/Iris - 2 (1 last year) ART/Ratthi - 2 (1 last year) ART/3 - 2 (1 last year) Gurathin/OC - 2 (None last year) The rest are one-offs: 3/MB, 3/ART, Ratthi/Arada/Overse, MB/Everyone, Arada/Overse, ART/Gurathin.

Also: ART/MB - 36 (18 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) No / pairing listed - 8 (6 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) OC/MB - 4 (4 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) Gurathin/MB - 5 (2 of which are rape, rape-elements, or non-con) One-offs for rape: Gurathin/OC, OC/OC, MB/Everyone.

All figures are derived solely by reading the characters/relationships listed, tags, and warnings.

Reading through the first of 4 pages of returns (66 entries) on unrated fics shows none whose tags indicate shipping, sex, or rape. So not an impact to the numbers reported above.

We have 27 works that are not in English. We have 221 works that include the word 'podfic' in a field.

23 works by Anonymous, 3 by orphan_account (one of those 3 is a finished fic that is part of a series with 3 other named authors - the other 2 fics appear to be truly orphaned)

Highest word count is Variable Affection at 204k. Next is Properties NULL at 104k. Third is the ongoing Corporate and the Construct at 84k as of today.

[Important note discovered later: I have double-counted some shippy fics. I ended up counting the fic once for every pairing listed. This artificially skews the numbers higher than they really are. I figure it's around 10%ish ship-fic.]

#the murderbot diaries

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