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s0cks_nz t1_ivubcnk wrote

Reply to comment by Snowman123456789 in All Systems Red by Martha Wells by angryscout2

Interesting you identify MurderBot as male.

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saltwaterterrapin t1_ivudi6f wrote

Yeah, it’s fascinating and a little disquieting how easily we assign genders to people. Even though I know Murderbot has no gender, sometimes I can’t help but think of them as a ‘she.’ And I have no idea where that gendering came from!

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phcampbell t1_ivupjxj wrote

I’ve envisioned Murderbot as “she” from the beginning; I don’t know why.

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s0cks_nz t1_ivuqo4t wrote

Yup, I thought of it as a "she" too tbh. I figure because it was written by a woman that the writer's female undertones came through in MurderBot. I can't help but find that books written by women do have something about them that makes them feel different to those books written by men. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is though.

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PM_ME_UR_NAN t1_ivvc0r4 wrote

I listened to the audiobook and Kevin R. Free does an amazing job. The voice did bias me towards thinking of Murderbot as male until they made their deep disgust with the idea of having sex related parts clear. Between the role as a security guard, which scans male to me, and the narrator I can at least understand how I jumped to my conclusion.

I kind of think of those big egg shaped security robots that are around today as male. If they had the capacity, they probably would not appreciate that.

Murderbot would probably prefer we didn't talk about it, though. At all.

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alohadave t1_ivv631q wrote

Same. Mostly non-gendered, but sometimes thought of it as a 'she'.

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BadAtNamesWasTaken t1_ivumjlz wrote

Not OP, and a non-native English speaker, even though English has been my first/primary language for a while now.

I also referred to Murderbot as "he" in my first review (before I realized what its preferred pronoun is). I did not assign a gender to Murderbot though - I thought of it as a genderless entity, if I thought about its gender at all. I just tend to use "he" as the default pronoun without thinking. My mother tongue doesn't have gendered pronouns, and I have never really gotten used to thinking of gender identity before using a pronoun. In my mother tongue masculine words also generally double as neutral gender words (similar to old English where man = human of any gender, and wif-men = wife-men/women/men of the female gender). So I just tend to default to male words in English too, unless I'm consciously making an effort.

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BlueInFlorida t1_ivv7jq5 wrote

I listened to the audiobooks, and it's a male narrator (Kevin R. Free, fantastic), so I do lean toward the main character being male. But the chosen pronoun is "it" and it makes clear that it has no gender, and really gender is disgusting (LOL).

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bicyclecat t1_ivuvoxv wrote

I identified Murderbot as agender but leaning feminine in presentation and voice. I listened to the audiobook after reading the first two and the male reader was a bit jarring.

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BitPoet t1_ivv458a wrote

I read the audiobook, which was narrated by a guy, even in as agender as he could, you could still tell. It was easy to think of Murderbot's gender as male, rather than Murderbot.

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[deleted] t1_ivujfad wrote

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s0cks_nz t1_ivuq38l wrote

It was programmed to be a weapon so I'm not sure that logic applies.

Interestingly, I thought of MurderBot as being more female than male. I'm not sure why tbh. I assumed because it was written by a woman, so MurderBot had female undertones come through in the writing.

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[deleted] t1_ivuwzwn wrote

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PM_ME_UR_NAN t1_ivvcbwu wrote

Maybe a Combat SecUnit. I imagine that the company would not want the ones that guard many very annoying clients to be "really murderous". Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

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Snowman123456789 t1_ivvh88p wrote

I listened to the book as an audiobook and the narrator was male, so I guess I identified with the voice. I didn't even think about it.

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