my father just found out about the murderbot casting and sent me like a dozen angry texts about it back to back, and his take is that for thematic reasons murderbot needs to not be a white man because it is constantly misjudged based on its appearance and assumed to have no real inner life or personhood, which is (1) very insightful, (2) not actually a take i have seen elsewhere in The Discourse so far (though i have not gone out of my way to look for The Discourse tbf), and (3) not remotely what i expected a not-very-online 60something cishet white guy not ordinarily given to literary analysis to say about it??? really caught me off-guard and now i’m also annoyed i didn’t think of it. like, i, the litcrit queer am over here going “idk i just think it’s the least interesting choice you could make” and he’s thinking about the subtextual resonances and/or ways of communicating the marginalized status of a secunit to the audience on a visceral level. goddammit.