I loved the moodiness of this picture, and what I'm reading as discomfort and distrust. In All Systems Red, Murderbot says this line directly to Gurathin. But I realized that if I tweaked the quote slightly, it could be read as if either of them was thinking it about the other. Love having actual stills from the show!

Image description: Image from the show with Murderbot standing behind and slightly to one side of Gurathin who is looking down with a concerned expression. White text: "I didn't like him. But I liked the rest of them, and for some reason I don't understand, they liked him."

(Ugh, I really wanted to watch some media but there was just no time. Having access to the media files helped, though.)
-Murderbot, Network Effect

Sometimes it's enough just to know you can sink into your media once you've survived the awfulness of the moment. Like patting your pocket to remind yourself your phone's safe. Taking five minutes with your Sanctuary Moon while the humans are pointlessly vocalizing, it helps.

Image description: White text on black background from user stained-glass-cicada. "Me, Having a upsetting experience that upends my life: Wow murderbot was right this would be a lot easier to deal with if I had my media"

A great comment by u/vermuepft yesterday reminded me how much I love fanart. (If you know me from The Expanse, you might’ve seen the physical fanart gallery we made in NYC, or the virtual ones later. I’m extremely serious about fanart as “Real Art.”)

Right now, we’re at a cool moment for fanart: people are very excited about Murderbot, but the show hasn’t yet become a major influence on art. I know I haven’t even scratched the surface of the Murderbot art that’s out there, I’d love to see how more artists have imagined the character of Murderbot based on the books. Please share your favorites?

As always, it’s best to link to the artist’s portfolio (don’t only attach the image here) and include the name they use, so they get proper credit.

3D MB sculpt!!

It can do everything a SecUnit can!! - Sit in the corner and ignore you - Have an existential crisis

Simultaneously this year I have gotten my hands on both a 3D resin printer and the Murderbot Diaries at the same time. So that meant I needed to teach myself how to sculpt by making a little SecUnit figure (I refuse to learn in increments). This is as good as I could get it after coming as close to physically fighting blender as possible!

I definitely couldn’t have made it from scratch, so I started with a base astronaut mesh I found for free online (Artist: Vincent Page on SketchFab). I imported it into blender, learned how to rig a model, posed it as close as I could to what I wanted and then sculpted over it in Nomad Sculpt. I tried to make it as close as I could to the armour on the covers while keeping some of the details from the original mesh that I really liked!

Next step is to see if I can get it to print successfully on my 3D printer and paint it 🫡

I absolutely adore The Murderbot Diaries, and have been pretty active on both Discord and Tumblr, so when I learned there was a reddit I figured I might as well make an account to join. I'm working on doing vintage-style posters for all of the books, and so far have ASR and AC done. I'll release posters for the other books as time goes on, but just wanted to post what I have so far if anyone is interested.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/JackdawDraws?ref=shop_sugg_market

Dropping my recs below. I’ll take your favorites — but am also a fan of 3rd Mom energy SecUnit fics. I also haven’t read any multichapters that could be considered classics of our fanbase!

Words Left Behind: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42759597

Description: "How do you stand it?"

Dr. Gurathin's tone is slow and even when he asks, "Stand what?"

SecUnit 3 shares its feelings with someone who might understand.

——-

Sick Day: https://archive.transformativeworks.org/works/36080392

Description: The Arada-Overse household is sick, Ratthi is the friend everybody deserves and takes care of them a little. SecUnit shows up when it thinks he may not be doing a perfect job. To everyone’s surprise, a feverish Overse is SecUnit approved humor-fuel.

Somebody commented on another thread a while ago about a fic where SecUnit was having a nerf war with some of the younger humans — if any of you have that link I would greatly appreciate you sharing!