this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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I feel like the changes to characters are really large. The feelings I have from each character in the books and the show are not close enough to be the same character. Mensa is so much more emotional and reactive in the show than she was in the books, but I like both. Murderbot is much more human than in the books, there is way less internal monologue, so it feels very different, but I still love the character in both. Same for all the rest.
As for the story changes, so far it seems good in terms of changing just enough to make it fit for TV rather than doing something insanely different with only a passing resemblance to the books. I like how the violence is shocking, sudden, and really limited. In the books it is not the whole story, one gory moment after another, and I was worried they would get sucked into the trap of violence being attention getting and shocking and therefore needed in huge quantity.
The visuals are excellent. From a purely technical perspective they have done a great job with making something easy to look at, enjoyable to experience, and mostly visually consistent. There have been very few moments where the colour balance is skewed weirdly, where the lighting requires adjusting the screen, or where the volume levelling was terrible. Great production quality.
I agree. Subtly different but overall and surprisingly very similar.
PresAux are more hippy like and a little less like the academics in the book which I find just a little annoying but it’s OK (I’m an academic).
One of the things I’m really curious about is how they flesh out the contrast between the capitalist dystopia of the Corporation Rim and the clearly socialist Preservation Aux. I feel like it’s a politically charged topic in the current capitalist dystopia American context (at least that’s how it looks to me from outside America). I keep waiting for them to water it down but they haven’t done it so far. Good on em.
I hope they stick to their guns and keep it fully anticapitalist like the books. Right now is the time for that kind of media, there is a massive appetite for it, so if they fail to do it they are shooting themselves in the foot.
yea, i feel like the 'humanized' all the characters, including Dr Mensah and Murderbot, and added more relationship drama... but the changes feel solid, not changes for the sake of change.
Yeah, exactly, like the idea of Mensa is there but she is shown in a more TV friendly way without completely wiping out what makes her Mensa. Also, the relationship drama from the single perspective of Murderbot is uninteresting, even a little gross, so it is described from a distance. They did not have the internal monologue stuff in the show so they did a lot more showing rather than telling. That makes it much more detailed and clear compared to the distant vantage of Murderbot describing "a sexual relationship". Different, not worse, not better, but different. Honestly I am surprised how different it is without putting me off.