heavyshadows
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Gender is a Construct But This Construct is Not Gendered by heavyshadows
Fandoms: Murderbot (TV), The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
14 Jul 2025
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Summary
We had (somehow) survived GrayCris. There was just one problem. My humans kept calling me he now.
I didn’t know what to make of this. It made me feel like they weren’t quite seeing me. Like at the beginning of the survey, when I first saved Bharadwaj and they started acting all team-y around me. But from the way they had talked, it was clear they didn’t understand what a SecUnit was. Instead, it was like I was their pet bot. It wasn’t until I blew LeeBeeBee’s head off that they realized they had been trying to befriend a murderbot. They saw me for what I was; a killing machine.
When they said he, I hated it. It made my organics flinch. My performance reliability dropped a percentage each time. And it felt like the pet bot incident all over again; like they weren’t seeing me, but what they wanted to see. I didn’t want to be their pet bot, but I didn’t want to have to act like I was human either. Especially not some human man. Is that how they saw me? Is that what I would have to be now on Preservation?
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In which Murderbot struggles with stupid human assumptions about gender, has a heart-to-heart with its favorite human, and submits to the mortifying ordeal of being known. -
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Summary
A year after Maruki's palace, Akechi crashed back into Akira's life. Now Akira's former rival has turned into a permanent guest in his apartment. But living with Akechi was hard. The worst part was how Akechi had been brought down to something normal and incredibly real. He left his jacket slung over the kitchen chair and fell asleep on the couch in the middle of reading some important book he insisted wasn’t boring. He put knives in the dishwasher with the blades pointing up and got huffy when Akira beat him at fighting games.
He was kind of a disaster.
That hadn’t helped the pathetic crush Akira had been nursing. If anything, it had somehow made it worse. When Akechi asked him how long it took to microwave ramen, Akira had to call on all his willpower to not kiss him right there in their tiny, shitty kitchen.
(In which Akira is terrified of second chances and Akechi never expected to live past twenty. Somehow they make it work.)